Peak Prosperity - Off The Cuff With Quoth The Raven (Chris Irons)

Episode Date: June 8, 2024

When shall the US government return to sanity? “Nevermore!” our guest Chris Irons might say. Without necessary guardrails and consequences the failed leadership of DC and the Fed have taken us down a paths that had a binary outcome; bad and worse.Click Here for Part 2

If I put $100 on my desk here, I can wake up every day and look at $100 and I can tell myself I still have $100 when in fact the purchasing power of that $100 is eroding. I just can't see it. You know, if we had some giant visual indicator of how our purchasing power is being zapped on a daily basis, it would be way more evident to people. Hey, everyone. So good to be back with you. Chris Martinson, Peak Prosperity.

Big, big, big interview today. This is going to be awesome. Really looking forward to this. It's been too long in the coming, too long in the making. I have no good excuse for why it's taken this long. But today we're talking with Chris Irons of Hoth the Raven. Great, great individual. Great writer. Hopefully you've been following on twitter on substack other places but man we are going to burn the bridges down today we're going to talk about covid and we're going to talk about

monetary policy and if you don't understand how those two things come together you really should because everything connects everything else chris so good to be talking with you today how are you i better take a sip of my coffee. Sounds like we've got a lot to do. We do. Yes. No, get a smooth throat. So, COVID.

So, at the time of this recording, where are we here? We're in June, early June of 2024. Well, the Congress has just started to rip Fauci and Morens, a couple of new ones. I haven't seen anybody taking down the other cast of odious characters, the FDA person, the CDC lady. There's a lot of people that could be taken down in this. Trump, too, by the way, running his Operation Warp Speed and locking us all down. But but I'm just wondering what your take is on this, because we saw Fauci cry tears because his own family had received his death threats and that made him quiet i also saw him sitting in his office at one point with painted pictures of himself on all three walls that were surrounding him so you know bit of a narcissist good with the bad right if you're going to be a public figure he is so this is the thing you know the press gave him this free pass because i thought we

were all about rainbow flags on crosswalks and it was all about that and fauci is the guy who was personally responsible for blocking the use of bactrim to save aids patients instead you wanted this azt thing from one of his pharma buddies and they killed at least tens of thousands but maybe hundreds of thousands of people by withholding appropriate treatment. It's just a perfect echo for ivermectin and what happened to COVID. How did the press completely 100% avoid talking about his horrifying history? That's very easy. I mean, the press was a wholly owned subsidiary of the drug manufacturers throughout the course of the pandemic. And so I wrote an article on my sub stack called the unforgivable ivermectin swindle and if you look in that article there's a youtube compilation probably taken down at this point but a compilation of all of the different mainstream media shows with all of

their bumpers before they go to commercial saying this program being brought to you by Pfizer. They were everywhere. The pharmaceutical companies not only sponsored everything in the mainstream media, they were sponsoring tennis tournaments. They were sponsoring. I mean, the Pfizer logo was stamped everywhere. And I think they knew that, you know, they had this opportunity for a giant, massive, ungodly cash grab. And so in order to do that, they were certain entities that you have to buy off. And the mainstream media was one of those. That's not to say that the media probably wasn't also taking their cues from the White House or from, you know, in the government as well, because both parties, Trump at the onset of the vaccine and then the Biden administration had their had their feet in the vaccination camp. And it was just kind of funny because you remember when Trump was president, Kamala Harris went on stage and said, I'd never take a Trump vaccine, you know, and then Biden got elected and it was everybody needs to get vaccinated right now

and it was interesting to watch it kind of as a be used as a political football but whoa hey hi everybody i just want to bust in here real quick just to let uh everybody know because this is a different format than we've been following for the past several months so i've got this great interview going with ch Irons of Quote the Raven. And part two of this is going to be very different. And I'm going to be talking about this for my subscribers back at Peak Prosperity. This is really important. I just need to make sure everybody's aware of that because these topics right now, not getting enough coverage, we have to talk about them and why they're coming. So I just want to make sure everybody's clear on that. And all of that leads to potentially this.

I'm back to the Twizabin language here because there's certain things that you can't discuss out here on certain platforms without getting the things all angry at you there. I don't know. You tell me why this would be such a sensitive topic. I think we all know. So this is a very real possibility. I need everybody to know about it. For anybody who is not a subscriber at Peak Prosperity, we're going to make it easy. Of course, we have a 30 day no questions asked money back guarantee. And today and for this rest of this weekend, we'll be doing a 20% off. So you can try us out for 20% off. Use the code peak20 to get 20% off. And we're so confident that you're going to love it and find so much value in this kind of reporting

that you'll stick around. So with that, now we go back to our regular programming. Thank you. Even back when the vaccination campaigns first started, before we even had any serious skepticism, at least I didn't, you know, you were ahead of the curve as far as I'm concerned on COVID. I remember coming to the COVID thing early and raising a lot of questions very early before the stock market crashed, before we had more than a dozen cases in the US. And you were one of the only people

out there that had already kind of taken on talking about it. When you go back that far, I remember there was uncertainty as to what the nature of the virus was exactly. You know, we had questioned a lot of the data that came out of China. Certainly I did, being somebody that had experience working with Chinese nationals, that felt like I had my finger on the pulse of the Chinese Communist Party a little bit better than most people. I knew not to trust their data. It was only after we started getting data out of South Korea, Italy, and our allies that you could start to see the infection mortality rates start to kind of level off. And you knew we were getting some objective data that we could trust a little bit further. vaccination campaign, to me, even at a point where I wasn't, you know, now, obviously,

I'm far more skeptical than I am accepting. But even then, you know, the, the style of the campaign that was launched onto the American public, which started as a very innocuous sounding, we have new vaccines to stop this novel virus. And, you know, people that are immunocompromised and the elderly, you know, this will be a way to stop transmissibility. And this is really going to be, the clouds are going to kind of part ways here and this is going to be the path back to a normal life to go from that to fucking bill de blasio you know bribing people with cheeseburgers which in and of itself is insane because nobody was

making the case that natural immunity or just being healthy in general would probably give you a fighting chance against the virus. The campaign was just such a Soviet-style propaganda campaign that even at a point when I was relieved that we had vaccines, things very quickly, the gates started to swing very quickly in the other direction to becoming very skeptical about how obsessive the government was in trying to get everybody vaccinated and immediately you know i started to notice little things the first thing was out in the neighborhood where i used to go jog you know somebody had put up a billboard and it was a picture of a young kid with his grandmother and it was saying the kid can finally get back to his normal life now in hockey practice because he's gotten vaccinated. And when I spoke to my own doctor about getting vaccinated, the one thing he said to me is, look, we don't have long term safety data yet.

You're 37 years old. You know, you go running, you go to jujitsu, you're in great shape, you're decent shape, you know, you probably don't have to worry about it. Then we got the information that we started to get some real trustworthy objective data that children were disproportionately less affected by COVID than they were by the flu. Not as much, you know, it wasn't as dangerous as the flu is. In fact, the data that we received was that children were disproportionately less affected than they were with the flu. Rounding to the nearest thousandth of a percent, it was zero. Right. And so to watch the vaccine campaign then start to encompass people that really it didn't make sense. And then I started, you know, pregnant women was another group, right?

Young children tested on them. Correct. Then you start to think about I think about what my doctor told me. OK, well, we don't have long term safety data and we're not going to have it for a while for as long as long term you want it to be post the vaccine being released so even now we could only have three years worth of safety data whatever which isn't good and you think about that and you think about okay why would they be pushing this on children when it doesn't need to be pushed on children flu vaccines aren't pushed on children you know you're not taking your kid your two-year-old to CVS to get a flu shot,

I mean, unless you're one of these insane people. But most people with common sense aren't doing that. So then you start thinking, like, all right, well, who's calling the shots here? How could this possibly be a good idea? And that was a huge wake-up call. And early on, it's easy to say now, but early on in 2021, when really you had basically everybody had taken this deck of cards of information and kind of just spread it out over the table, and your job was to heredity kind of turn over pieces of

data and assemble what type of hand we were holding in real time it was difficult in 2021 but even then it seemed stunning so to to put it to be frank with you it just didn't feel right it just didn't feel right the way it went down so now you make this analog to return back to your point here you make this analog about you know well why was there such a campaign against ivermectin and against hydroxychloroquine? Another thing, two seconds of research on ivermectin, and you knew immediately it was on the World Health Organization list of essential medicines. It was essentially as safe or safer than like amoxicillin. I mean, things that we've been using ubiquitously. I mean, the safety data on ivermectin is unrivaled, basically, for, you know, no matter what cause you're taking it for.

They said, well, it may not be safe to take it for COVID. What that sounds like is if you take it, you might die from the drug. What they're saying in lawyer speak is we're not sure about the efficacy for this particular indication. However, you could probably take this every day for the rest of your life and be fine. That's how safe it is. So there were a lot of carefully worded lawyer speak when it came to that stuff to try to discourage people from taking it. Then you had the media like CNN who came out and just lied. They just purposely lied.

They never. Now we know something hold on let me let me back up here because we just found out that that the nih i don't even understand how it is that you take public scientists pay them public my money and then they get royalties for anything that they discover inside of that so they just got paid 728 million dollars 2021 2022 a big chunk of that's pfizer and moderna money we can be sure okay so now it's all the way back to that really grubby thing there's this eua the emergency use authorization right which required that there be no other available treatments and now we know that you know when when my when i first started talking my youtube channel went from like i didn't put a lot of effort into it went from like 5 5,000 subs or whatever, 50, whatever it was, and skyrocketed. And then it just got

slammed. And I can point on the chart to the day, that was the first day I talked about chloroquine phosphate. I didn't know about hydroxychloroquine, but there was an early report out of China, March 2020, that they were having success with chloroquine phosphate. I was like, okay, so I reported it. It's just data. And then I found that there was a 2005 study done by the NIH showing that chloroquine phosphate i was like okay so i reported it's just data right and then i found that there was a 2005 study done by the nih showing that chloroquine phosphate works against sars classic sars right that's when i got slammed right so it wasn't even that trump had said something about it and the media got its trump derangement syndrome booties on and anything somebody was ready to take that story out instantly because that's the moment my channel got just smashed it just got like a ceiling put on it that was a no-no so that means somebody

somewhere within the entire ecosystem of youtube and pharma and nih already knew that they were sensitive about you have to shut it down immediately if people shut it down immediately right what what do we what are we dealing with when it's at that level like what we're not dealing with like some pharma money and you know youtube's worried about something for advertisers that was the conspiracy theory back in 2021 was they need to shut you up about hydroxychloroquine and they need to shut you up about ivermectin so that they could utilize the eau uh and now looking back it's not a conspiracy theory it's the leading cause of reason i mean it would be the you know applying occam's razor 99 times out of 100 that's the uh answer you're gonna arrive at not that you know anybody on your channel doesn't need to know

this you know you're a grown adult you probably know to some degree the answer is pretty much always follow the money. But that was a and I remember piecing it together in 2021. And I remember Rogan talking about it and a couple other places talking about it where it was widely accepted that that was kind of still the conspiracy theory but i remember a bunch of people saying that hey well if you want to circle the square here and explain why they would be potentially suppressing uh ivermectin which again if you had done two seconds worth of research it was was inconceivable. Even if it worked on one out of every 500 people, it would be more than what we had on the table at that point. But it was inconceivable at that point that that would be the answer.

There's some big, grand conspiracy, but now, oh boy, three or four years removed, looking back, it's very easy to see. The mainstream media was captured you know that the pharmaceutical companies were paying who they needed to pay to get their programs sponsored you know sponsored programs aren't going to push any other line than the one that their sponsors want i mean this is just basic blocking and tackling of like how money gets shit done to be honest with you. Let me let me ask you your take on this, because this is really like, how does this happen?

So does the editor of Rolling Stone wake up one day and say, hey, I'm going to task a journalist with making up a completely false story about ivermectin? Remember, gunshot victims in Oklahoma can't get care because the halls were packed with ivermectin overdose victims. Right. It was a fake photograph. Fake photograph. Right. How does that actually happen? Like, how does that happen? Because the journalist notion, I think it's a combination of capture. Like I'm talking about, the pharmaceutical industry is putting money at work and i also think that there are a far larger

group of people out there than we would care to recognize who are generally scared shitless as human beings who want their talking points from somebody else they want somebody to do their critical thinking for them they're malleable they're chicken shit they They're you know, they're afraid to draw their own conclusions and they just do better listening to the powers that be. There's a whole group of them out there. I see them in finance. They're all over the world. People that happily take their talking point, people that if you say, you know, if you're out on a paddleboard in the middle of the ocean you need to wear a mask people that say that makes sense they would rather just listen to it and do it than do a half of a second of critical thinking and say this makes absolutely no sense at all and then you get this giant kind of mass psychosis like which we saw where you know people are getting beaten and shot and tased and arrested and

you know tackled while they're jogging in the park for not wearing a mask outdoors. It was fucking lunacy. It was absolute lunacy. but a willingness to surrender their sovereignty over their own mind and their their liberty and their freedom and kind of hand that to the powers that be for whatever reason. And a lack of critical thinking combined with a lot of powerful people putting a lot of money to work. Otherwise, it's very difficult to explain i mean when you talk about something like what happened on cnn where they covered ivermectin as though it was a veterinary drug and nothing else all right when you watch that coverage that is appalling i was writing this article i wrote this article last September, the unforgivable ivermectin swindle. And, you know, I try to give people the benefit of the doubt, but that's just lying.

It's just outright, bold-faced lying. And that's why nobody trusts the media anymore. That's why your YouTube channel has half a million subscribers. That's why people are listening to me. You know, look, I a 400 square foot studio apartment okay i have a car that is badly in need of a rear bumper i am not the you know mr sign of like wealth and great decisions you know i'm better suited to be crushing beer cans on my head for the most part but the point is people are so desperate for a molecule of truth and actual reason that they've come to people like you. I mean, you have a medical degree, which I don't have. Here's how bad this is.

This is where I can't understand this except to say it's not organic. We must be in the grips of some mind virus that's installed by some weaponized cognitive warfare machinery that the deep state's been working on since MKUltra. I don't know. My organizing philosophy for this has always been, I trust Charlie Munger. One thing, you show me the incentive, I will show you the outcome. When people's paychecks are on the line, they always straighten up and fly right. They always do except except for now right yeah well that's washington post i mean like the washington post sounds alarm over dwindling audience and heated staff meeting people are not reading your stuff let's not sugarcoat it we're losing large amounts of money they are about to lose their jobs and cnn who you just talked about same thing how are they

not going wow we are producing something people don't want or don't want to pay for. Well, because we should do something different. They're sitting around congratulating themselves about how smart they are, handing out Nobel Prizes and other such awards, you know, with Pulitzer's all the way down to the Grammys and the Tony Awards. Oh, Sean Penn made a statement, isn't he? So bold. Fuck off. You know what I mean? Sean Penn's going to tell me how to fucking manage my penn made a statement isn't he so bold fuck off you know what i mean sean penn's gonna tell me how to fucking manage my own body i don't think so

the point is like you know they're just sitting around and and the train has left the station and this i wrote another article some years back called the mainstream media is losing the fight of its life all thanks to joe rogan and the point point was that the Internet and podcasting has enabled people to have a voice. It has enabled a much freer market when it comes to where you want to choose to get your information and choose to get your news that has ever been available. You know, back in the day when I was a kid, when you were a kid, there were three television stations or there were 20 television stations and you had ABC, NBC, CBS, you had ESPN for sports and you had the fucking Weather Channel. And that was it. And if you wanted your news, you had to go to CNN because they were one of the only ones out there. You had to go to ABC. You had to try to find the lesser of, you know, three or four evils. I also don't think that the media institutions were as corrupted back then. But nowadays, I think that the media has become far more left leaning or they've or they've maintained their leftist stance and the left in general has moved further to the left uh and so the talking points that they're defending and the nonsense and

bullshit that they are uh standing for has just become far more bizarre i was talking to matt taibbi about this on my podcast trying to ask him hey matt like did we just get old and turn into old miserable fucks or question i have right or are things really different now? You know, has the calibration of the right and left really changed? And he agrees with me that that it has. But back then, we only had those choices. Right. So now you have the Internet, which even if Google and YouTube want to censor people and take down your podcast and whatever, you know, you have these free market like I write on Substack. OK okay i chose to move my stuff to substack because i knew that they were gonna you know allow more than what other people would allow

in terms of free speech and to me that's really important i'm not out there saying bold ridiculous insane shit i'm not spreading uh you know hate filled uh you know vile vitriol at all i'm just dancing around the fringe of issues because I think it's important because oftentimes that's where the truth lies. And there's nobody in power who has an interest in delivering the truth to us when it fits outside of their narrative. So this has somewhat leveled the playing field, very similar to kind of what Bitcoin is doing in finance and what gold, I think, can also do in finance. Returning some power back to the people, giving them a choice of who they want to listen to, enabling people like myself, who would never in a million years have a platform on an ABC or a CNN or a Fox News,

you know, to go on and offer my opinion or somebody like yourself. And so it has kind of democratized this. And meanwhile, this new offshoot of the media machine, alternative media and internet-based media, is in the left lane and has just blown past the legacy media who did us a favor because they were fucked either way but what they've done over the last four years has accelerated the process when you look at the hunter biden laptop story that was just entered into evidence in a federal court today or yesterday as his.

And that was, you know, 50 former intelligence agencies told Politico was bullshit. The New York Post, New York Post, you want to you want to give somebody a Pulitzer? They should have gotten the Pulitzer for that story. That was a massive story revealing not just Hunter Biden's personal life, which I could care less about, to be honest with you. But the fact that Biden was on the dole from China. You know, I mean, everything that he had been accusing. And the FBI had sat on that information and had no interest in investigating that laptop from hell in all of its 185 crimes or whatever was sort of revealed on there which they should have an interest in including some federal felonies and all that but yeah

down the door like this was this was absolutely critical vital information that the nation needed to have from a security standpoint from an election standpoint and the fbi hit it and back in the day back in the day if you had a g Gulf of Tonkin incident or you had an Operation Northwoods or whatever, you know, it would be 10 years later. There would be a limited hangout. 15 years later, there would be a little bit more. And 20 years later, eventually it will have, you know, it will have kind of homogenized itself in the zeitgeist of everything and everybody one day just kind of walks around and accepts the fact that you know oh the golf of tonkin was made up but now the internet has sped that whole process up you know and alternative media has has sped that up so the the lies from

2020 you know that check has come due right now. You know, the Hunter Biden lies, that check has come due now. The Ivermectin lies, that check has come due now with Dave Smith, you know, just neutering Chris Cuomo on the PBD podcast the other day. Absolutely demolished and pulverized him. And in my opinion, still didn't give him as much shit as he should have or whatever. Brian Stelter is out of a job. Big fucking surprise there, right? CNN's ratings are in the toilet the washington post is bleeding subscribers so the the time in between bullshitting everybody and the consequences you have to pay for it has gotten much shorter

and uh and the internet and alternative media has kind of catalyzed that and that's why you know people like jeffrey tucker um oh that's not his name i'm sorry what's the guy's name from cnn the uh the guy who heads up it doesn't matter that's why you have one day where everything appears to be going fine and don lemon and chris cuomo and brian stelter are leading you know the integrity in the news and literally they wake up the next day and those guys are all fired and the ratings are the lowest they've ever been because people are tired of it they are tired of it and you know I think that is that is merging with this kind of populist movement that we're seeing around the world and and I think here in the United States too and I think people want real

answers and they want real accountability and they're gonna make that herd with their votes because like Joe Rogan said the other day at the end of the day the government is just people the government's just people and the people are just people and there's there's you know many hundred million more average common citizens than there are people calling the shots at the top of government and in the media and so yeah yeah i'm i'm old school chris i i believe propaganda should be free right they should just like put that poster up on the on the wall and i shouldn't have to pay for that right so the idea that you're gonna have propaganda as a subscription model sorry wapo that's why

your your rag is failing right people we were tired of we've been gaslit. Look, look what we've just had to endure. First off, four years of enduring this so-called Biden presidency, which, again, the one question I've never been able to get answered to my satisfaction is who is actually running the White House. Right. Nobody really seems to know. Right. It's a big mystery. I can tell you who it isn't right so let's start there we know it's not this guy and so just today the wall street journal finally does their own limited hangout saying you know behind closed doors there's some concerns that biden's showing signs of slipping i'm like oh no honey we've seen that out in public in front of the doors right on the podiums when he falls down the stairs when he falls up the stairs when he shakes hands with invisible people talks to dead people in the room says she, Right? We've seen it all.

It's been out there, and we're supposed to pretend in this simulacrum of democracy that there's an our democracy that's worth defending, right? What a bizarre thing. Like, this is like, how are we even here? I'm really... Who are you going to believe, Rachel Maddow or your lion eyes, you know? She's telling you he's 100% competent and lucid or your lion eyes you know she's telling you she's telling you he's uh 100 competent and lucid and with it you know and meanwhile you know he can't put a sentence

together he can't walk off or on a stage he can't walk up but he can't do stairs but you and i both know that if you said hey rachel rachel your private plane the pilot is joe biden he walks on you know she's getting off that plane right away we all know that right the latest absolute insult to everybody's intelligence whether you're on the right or the left the left may not notice it they may just bend over and say thank you sir may i have another but it should be an insult to their intelligence is this idea that you know oh well biden's just going to step in and close the border now. Shit's getting real now, Chris. He's got he's going to sign these executive orders. And Mayorkas is on TV saying, well, yeah, well, we've spent three years trying to secure

the border when it was only three years ago that they were bragging about undoing over, you know, a hundred different. They issued over a hundred around a hundred different executive orders that Trump had put in place to secure the border. I don't care if you're on the left or on the right. If you can't see that there's a border crisis in this country, you're blind as a bat. Even if it helps you, even if they're importing immigrants to employ them as voters or whatever the plan is here behind the scenes that you know

these idiots are using to justify letting millions of people undocumented people into the country every year even if you want to support that say you're a democrat and you're like all right yeah we need more democratic votes whatever you have to at least objectively um admit to the fact that border crossings have gone completely out of control the day since Joe Biden took office. It was a premeditated, purposeful strike down of the border policies that Trump had when he was in office. And now and even going so far as to take down the wall and like, you know, to go to war with the state of texas over whether or not they can they can uh protect their border you know to do nothing is one thing they flew them in on planes

then to employ employ government resources specifically to be counterintuitive why would either side of the aisle want to tell texas that they can't protect their border why would either side want to take down the wall and sell it for pennies on the dollar once it's already up you know sometimes the idea of being counterintuitive not just doing nothing not sitting on their hands but actively coming in and and funding which means we're paying for it, funding regression is baffling. And now you have Biden, five months before the election, is, oh, I'm going to sign executive orders. You know, we got to do something about the border. And fucking Mayorkas, who is a reprehensible human being, in my opinion, I've watched him at best congressional testimony, absolutely reprehensible, sit there and duck and weave and Bob and, you know, try to deflect responsibility for three years to come out and say, oh, yeah, well, we've been working on it.

We've been working on it for three years. It's just sickening. And to go back to what we're saying about truth and consequences and the window of those closing as a result of alternative media, similar things here, right? You see kind of what you're being told versus what the action was three years ago. And what's happening is not only is it bankrupting legacy media because people have had enough, but in the same vein,

you know, people that were centrists and independents, you know, look, you have the people that are always going to be left, the people that are always going to be right. So the war is fought in the middle. The war is fought in between the centrists and the people that are on the left of the right side and on the right of the left side. know those are the viewers that cnn needs and they don't have anymore and those are the votes that both sides of the aisle needs that you know i'm predicting is

what they're not going to get short of some type of other you know nonsense but that's another discussion for another day so those are the votes that they need and uh and they're not going to get them because it they have no finesse that the liberals have no finesse it's like this thing with the 34 counts of falsifying business records you know if they had charged him with one count and they had talked about it for a second and said all right well you know some justice has been done here and whatever you you know, all right. It's, it's insane that it happened anyways, but like, if you're a strategist, you know, beating it senselessly and mercilessly, he's a convicted felon and 34 counts, we're talking about a hundred thousand dollars. Okay. Which is an immaterial amount of money,

something that happened over a decade ago you know something that bill clinton did essentially paid somebody for their silence it's so obvious to everybody that they're just going after him for political purposes it's so blindingly obvious that they're losing the votes that they were hoping to get from it and so it just shows a total lack of finesse on their part it's it's more than that it's this inability so they live in a world of ideology that's more important to them than the reality so i'm doing an us them story and it's kind of a this that and i don't think that's totally true because i can point to a lot of republicans who some of whom have high patches come from texas who i think are

complete asshats okay so um but but leaving that aside this isn't a left right thing but i have noticed there's a strain of people who can't connect back to reality so it's like oh we're gonna make the shoplifting limit 950 what could happen well more shoplifting well what should we do raise it higher right they can't like connect cause and effect which is why i was so immune to the idea of them saying cause a correlation doesn't prove causation man i'm like oh god from you of all people right so they do this stuff against trump it makes him stronger like obi-wan kenobi they've struck him down and he's stronger than ever right 200 billion dollars fundraise so and again all

they're going to think to do though is do more of the same because i've that's what i've been watching them do more of the same as how they get where they think they want to go and they never seem to notice they're getting further from where they want to go. So San Francisco now is an unlivable city, right? It's over. It's over. They have overanalyzed and intellectualized their way back to the fucking Stone Age. It's abstractions, not reality.

We need reality. So that's what I think you and I represent. We're over here going, hey, can we wave a flag for reality and get a little something going? Well, I just wrote about this, right? And I wrote this article. I'll send you the link. Maybe you can put it in the podcast description. It's just called Lacking Finesse, Lacking Mindfulness.

It's from June 2nd. It's free to read. It's on my sub stack. It's called Fringe Finance. I'll send you the link. We're going to post that. That's posted on you the link but the good we're gonna post that that's gonna that's posted on my site too we're gonna we're gonna post that up that's a great article let's talk about that yeah so the the point of the article is that basically goes to

exactly what you're saying which is they've they know where they want to get and they don't care how they get there you know so they've adopted the ideology first right which is whatever double mastectomies for 14 year old girls are normal or you know we should be wearing three masks when we're outside jogging through central park or you know whatever other lunacy is coming from the left they've and they've tethered themselves to the ends and the means with which they get there it doesn't matter and that's where they're losing people you know they are academia now has turned into this machine that over intellectualizes and over jargonizes things that sometimes have very simple solutions and presents them back as some type of like

you know faux intellectual uh line of reasoning that the normal people would never be able to understand it's like the shoplifting thing right you know if you want people to stop shoplifting fucking arrest them that's the answer you don't need some over i don't need a focus group i don't need a phd i don't need a study i don't need fucking a thing on race. You don't need some over... I don't need a focus group. I don't need a PhD. I don't need a study. I don't need fucking a thing on race relations. I don't need a thing on socioeconomic stuff. If you don't want people to break the law, put consequences in place. You don't do things that encourage more breaking the law.

Think of what kind of a mental pretzel you need to have twisted yourself in. Think of how long you have to sit around and whack off other intellectuals right and have everybody tell each other that you're all right and you're all geniuses think of how much of that you have to do to arrive at an idea like segregating college campuses is a way to fight racism just what what what needs to happen mentally how much you know how much post-modern anti-patriarchy uh you know colonization fucking whatever you know how much Jacques Derrida do you have to read in order to twist yourself back in that pretzel. If it's okay with you, I would like to read you this little thing that I wrote here. Is that okay?

It sure is. know why i think people on the left have arrived at this idea that um over analyzation and over intellectualization of things uh you know is it empowers them it allows them to say oh i'm smart you know because i've looked at this at an angle that you haven't basically the point is not every problem needs to be looked at through a microscope again you know it's like the voter id issue right like you know if you want to make sure every vote's accounted for, you just have everybody bring their ID and then you know who's voted and who hasn't. That's it. Full story and to stop. I mean, there's nothing there need to be anything complicated there. There doesn't need to be anything about, you know, whether it's

racist or whether it's socioeconomic. Here you go. So I just wrote, while I've always thought the term Trump derangement syndrome was idiotic and the left isn't doing themselves any favor, the hyperbolic term alludes to a level of cognitive distortion where all bearings and calibrations of what is right and wrong fall by the wayside of an obsession

to basically fix the problem of Donald Trump, meaning the moral compass, you know, the basic fundamentals, they're gone because it's tunnel vision on get Trump right. Taking a criminal charge that would otherwise not have been prosecuted and then turning it into a legal circus act that could see the leading candidate for president theoretically serve prison time. It not only shows an unhealthy pattern of obsession with fixing the problem uh the left erroneously believes they have the solution to it shows a complete and total lack of finesse and mindfulness that would i think in my opinion would work well to revive the democratic party and so like him or not donald trump brings with him a host of simple policy solutions that aren't overthought. And as an aside, you can say what you want. You can call him an idiot. You know, you can say Trump's a moron. He's a hardheaded businessman. He doesn't pay vendors, you know, want that build that this good that bad, you know, but my point here is sometimes it really is that simple. It's right or wrong. It's good versus evil.

And so I write, he brings with him a simple policy, many simple policy solutions that aren't overthought at a point where we don't have the luxury of any more time for intellectual masturbation or unnecessary complexity. Complexity. Close the border to stop illegal immigration. Put more police on the street and remove lingley, lenient D.A.'s to tackle petty crime and drill fucking holes in the ground to bring oil prices down. The left wants to argue the fact that Trump is a caveman with caveman ideologies. But the truth is they have overthought us so far off the path of reason that sometimes the solutions our nations require really are that simple so easy a caveman can do it thank you very much i will take it thank you all right i think this is i think you got your finger on something which is at least part of the left i won't put them all under this umbrella but some of them they've attached their identity to being smart they're intellectuals and of course they love the idea that the trumpies are toothless wonders they're deplorables they're they're basically subhuman. So they've categorized themselves and their sense of belonging and inclusion is all around having this intelligence. And Trump just comes in like a wrecking ball and speaks in non-intelligent sounding sorts of ways, although there is a wisdom to what he does that I think eludes them because they can't get past the veneer of the exterior of it. I think they're just defended that he basically exposes that you don't need a Harvard Ph.D. to get ahead in life.

That, in fact, there's too many of them right now. Like, dude, so here's the thing. I actually had a Harvard recent grad wanted to intern with with my shop here, Peak Prosperity. And I didn't even think twice. I turned him down. There's not a chance in the world I could take the risk of trying to figure out if this was a good person or a bad person. But I just knew that the level of programming he'd gone through in that program was not something that I wanted to wrestle with because I just don't have time. We're moving too fast here and we got a good team but it i've gotten to the point now where i actually see a college degree is an impediment

for a lot of folks depending on where they went when did that happen that's just like three years ago i'd have been like oh a harvard grad wanted to come be part of my operation now i'm like ew yeah it's funny and you can't have that looking, you know, I was a lit major in college. I graduated college in 2000. I got my undergrad in 2005. And just looking back on some of the things that we were reading, which I never, you know, you're going through college and you don't really think about, you just think, all right, I'm getting a wide breadth of knowledge here.

And you don't really think about really how crazy it is. But I remember reading Derrida and taking a course on deconstruction, deconstructionism, which was essentially we would take a narrative from some Native American in the 18th century, right, which would basically be like, I ate a shot and killed a buffalo, ate him for dinner and lit a fire and I went to bed. And that's what it would say. And then there was like this second tier of analysis that we would have in certain classes where we were reading narratives where we'd say, okay, well, like, what was the context? Was he in a teepee or a wigwam? Or like, you know, what was important to Native Americans in the 18th century and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And then I remember going into this Derrida course and him analyzing things by saying like, well, you know, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And then I remember going into this Derrida course and him analyzing things by saying like, well, you know, why did this person choose to use the letter T next to the letter O?

It's a phallic symbol next to a vaginal symbol. And why use a semicolon here? And why do you think he, you know, used papyrus instead of this or that? And I was just like, I was like, look, man, sometimes people just want to write down that they fucking ate dinner and went to bed and that's it that's the point of the story you know like you can analyze your way backwards which is what we're seeing from the left and hiding it under the veneer of being an intellectual really plays to

their narcissism and if there's one common element i think i see among these psychopaths on the left is that it's this narcissistic you know i know better and i have you know i want to paint with a broad brush not only do i know what's best for me chris i know what's best for you i know what's best for the nation things that i would never say i don't know what's best for anybody other than myself. And even that, I'm trying to figure that out. Even worse, I'm going to make you responsible for my reactions to your words. And you don't know me. You don't know what childhood I had or what my mom was like. You know none of that, but you're still responsible for that.

If I get triggered... That's like this making misgendering somebody a hate crime thing. That was why Jordan Peterson took such an exception to that decades ago, because he realized that if Ontario was going to legislate that, you know, that basically you become you become submissive to somebody else. You you're someone else is getting taking your freedom of speech from you you know and so everybody has to have their own god-given rights and their freedom of speech together it's not you know it's not my job to make your life happy it's my job to pursue my own life liberty and happiness just like it's

your job to pursue your own life liberty and happiness so they've got everything backwards like that and and hiding everything in jargon and under, you know, Ivy League degrees and under Pulitzer Prizes and Nobel Prizes. It just gives them a false sense of gravitas as though, you know, when at the end of the day, the ideas are just as idiotic as they sound. You know, not prosecuting crime to fight crime. That's not a solution. That's a non sequitur. It's it's the. Go ahead. They're getting desperate now, though, is how I feel, because they've they've had their little world. They've been able to sort of construct their narratives and their abstractions, and they've been able to push stuff pretty far.

They've even gotten, you know, drag drag queen story hour for five year olds. They've done some things right. And they've gotten there. Now people are pushing back. And I'm really worried that we're getting into what the Saul Alinsky phase of this, which is the reaction is the target. They're going to goad people until they do something and then say, oh, we had to respond. Right. They don't care when it's Antifa BLM burning down Kenosha, Wisconsin, and taking out beauty parlors that belong to minorities.

That doesn't bother them in the slightest, right? But if you walked between the velvet ropes in the Capitol building, well, now that's 20 years in prison, right? So, yeah, we're watching this whole thing really begin to break down, but now they're wielding the lawfare in an open way against not just Trump. He's the big visible thing. But after the Trump convictions, we didn't see I saw no cities burned down. I didn't see any cop cars flipped over.

Right. I didn't see any of that. Right. None of that. Right. So there's a very different sort of a response to that. But even with that, you know, they there's at least 400 separate prosecutions of conservative people ongoing right now that i'm aware of i know so that's and it makes you think you know like it's something that i think about

when i when i write or when i speak like and i and i know that you know it's disappointing to to admit to but it's done to set a tone and and that's what it does like like it or not. You know what I mean? It sets a tone. It's like I thought Marjorie Taylor Greene actually made a very good point the other day when somebody asked her about Trump. And he said, you know, why are you worshiping a convicted felon? And she turned around and said, you know, George Floyd was a convicted felon. And I was just like, yeah, well, there's just a perfect example of the double standard. Right. And I'm not making a commentary about what happened to George Floyd. But, you know, look, if we're going to talk about worshiping convicted felons, I mean, they're building him statues. They are. I mean, Joe Biden was just tweeting about him the other day. You know, George Floyd ushered in a new era of equality in the country or whatever.

You know, look, putting aside whether or not you think Derek Chauvin was guilty or innocent and whether or not, you know, what your opinion on the death of George Floyd was, the fact of the matter is if you're going to call out the right for worshipping a convicted felon, you know, people on the left are doing the same thing. And so it's there's double standards and there's hypocrisy all over the place. I'm sure, you know, it's it's it's everywhere. You know, it's with covid. Right. Gavin Newsom was telling everybody to stay home and was dining at a four starstar michelin restaurant called french laundry while the rest of

us laundry rest of us were at home doing laundry surviving off of french dressing you know we we didn't have anything and he's out hobnobbing with the uh with the social elites i mean the hypocrisy is and if you ever notice like with the autonomous zone in seattle none of these things become problems until these protesters show up on the front lawn of the mayor that's when that stopped that's when the autonomous so forget about the businesses and the residents on that two or three block area that were negatively affected by them basically creating camps. In the middle of Seattle. They shut down businesses. They made it difficult for people to get to their homes.

Nobody did anything. Until those people showed up. On the front lawn of the mayor. And then all of a sudden. It's like wow. Things are really getting out of order here. Nobody wants to fund the police. Until they're on the phone saying i need

the police at my house and it's just it's just such a silly and stupid way to think about things you know to to it goes to this idea that people don't want to be inconvenienced i'm gonna read you this thing ge George Carlin said, he's talking about people saving the planet. And he said, you know, environmentalists don't give a shit about the planet. You know what they're interested in? A clean place to live, their own habitat.

They're worried that someday in the future, they might be personally inconvenienced. Narrow, unenlightened self-interest doesn't impress me. And that's what it is. It's narrow, unenlightened self-interest doesn't impress me. And that's what it is. It's narrow, unenlightened self-interest. This mayor, it wasn't a problem until it became a problem. For Harvard, for Penn, you know, it was, hey, let these people run free on campus until all of a sudden they were called to task. And they saw, well, Claudine Gay has been accused of plagiarism and everybody humiliated themselves in front of Congress. Well, now all of a sudden a sudden it's our problem so now we're going to come out and make a statement oh you know we're against anti-semitism on campus whatever and so and that's just how it is it's it's not a

problem until uh until it affects them personally and that's just it's sad and it's a it's an extraordinarily ineffective and dangerous way to think about things if you're legislating i i have um so we've been doing problem definition i have an organizing theory to all of this which is that we are biological creatures and biological creatures are finely tuned to their environments and so when the serengeti dries up the wildebeest have this instinct that says we better get out of dodge because we're running out of food we better better go to the next valley, right? So humans, well, there's no next valley in this story. And so here we are, and we're at the tail end of an exponential fiat debt-based money system. And it is every, whether we know it intellectually or we know it

in our hearts, that story is breaking down. And it came with some fat, easy times, dude. There's nothing an organism likes better than a free lunch we've been having our free lunch pushing it all off to the future kicking the can this is why i've been screaming about every fed chairman since alan greenspan because when you look at the system you see that they're just driving us towards a really bad outcome right and they've been doing it because of that narrow unenlightened self-interest right and and and so they don't want to be inconvenienced personally, and they don't want the shit to hit the fan on their watch. They don't care.

That's it. They don't care if the system doesn't work in 100 years. They just don't want it to fail while they're there, and that's what they're doing. So they take a one-day, one-week, one-month, one-year outlook instead of looking what's going to be the best for the country in 100 years or 200 years yeah and what's going to be best for people as yet unborn who i've never met and never will meet and because i i have a duty and an honor as as a member of my tribe

to think that way it's not it so we don't have that so we got all these narcissistic gaslighting all this and that so maybe this is just the tail end roman empire nero we're in the nero caligula phase you know that's just how things go all right um how bad in your mind is is our fiscal monetary situation right now you know look it's certainly unprecedented if you try to take my subjective opinion out of the uh equation which really is you, I really feel like we're stuck between a pretty big rock and a hard place here. And you just try to look historically for some type of precedent. There really isn't one. You know, our debt to GDP is, you know, at record levels,

something like 34 out of 35 countries that have had debt to GDP as high as we've had it have not made it out. The one that did, I think, without either default or hyperinflation, the one that did, I think, was Japan, who basically has stood stagnant. Their market has done nothing over the last 30 years. And so I think that the check is finally coming due here. And, you know, let's just go to let's just go to instinct like you're talking about. Three hundred and twenty million dollars over the grand course of our, you know, three or four trillion dollars in tax receipts is not a lot of money. But when you see something like this pier out in Gaza that cost the Biden administration three hundred and twenty20 million to build.

So ostensibly they could bring aid to the Middle East. And it's constructed hastily and was never meant to withstand three-foot waves, which are, from my reading, the norm there. Do you find those in the ocean? Three-foot waves, ask any surfer. You can pretty much get a three foot wave anywhere. But to see something like that built and then drift out to sea, break and drift out to sea in the span of 12 days. And it's just $320 million that has just, it's just gone.

Like it disappeared like that. It's like the money we're sending to Ukraine. It's unaudited. We have no idea where it's going. It's tens of billions of dollars. And when you think about the juxtaposition between the excruciating amount of energy that is spent managing tax receipts from the citizens of the country, right? I mean, tax season basically gives me a panic attack every year because I'm wondering if there's some $600 thing that I forgot about

that is like, you know, because everything's tracked now, right? So there's no point in being a tax cheat now. The government knows where all your money is. It knows what you're spending it on. It knows, you know, where you're moving it to. But, like, to think that they are relentlessly kind of fixated on the excruciating minutiae of the income of the middle and lower class and what people are making, what cab drivers are making, what waiters and waitresses were making, you know, back in the day when I was a bartender, you know, we used to love cash tips because we didn't declare taxes on cash tips like many people in the, in the industry

didn't do, you know, like it was just, uh, it's the norm in the restaurant industry. Now I would be scared shitless to do that. You know, the, the excruciating amount of energy that is spent managing on these tiny minuscule sums of money, you know, say you're paying 30% on $600. Okay. Whatever, you know, like we talking about, you're talking about $180 in, in, in tax receipts. Okay, versus the complete lack of visibility on where billions and trillions of dollars, trillions of dollars in assets missing from the Pentagon, hundreds of billions of dollars being sent overseas without audit in the form of foreign aid, $320 million floating out in the fucking Mediterranean Sea over the last couple of weeks. So when you look at that juxtaposition, it's very difficult to make any case other than we really are kind of, it's almost the equivalent of like looking through the couch cushions for change while running up, you know, all of your credit cards at the same

time. It's like one isn't going to justify the other. And it shows how it shows how twisted our focus is right now. But, you know, the country has a spending problem and setting monetary policy aside. If you just want to look at fiscal policy and if the country has any hope to returning to any type of, you know, fiscal normalcy or not running this thing off the cliff, which ostensibly would result in either the death of the dollar or a sovereign debt crisis, they have to get spending under control. They have to stop spending. And they are not even telegraphing that. If I was the Biden administration, you know, at least I would be jawboning about maybe cutting back spending,

which is a precursor to actually doing it, which takes balls, so I don't expect either party to do it. But at least telegraph that we're going to be responsible about it in the future, and they haven't even done that. To the best of my observation, our country's fiscal policy appears to be, fuck it, we've come this far, we're going to YOLO the rest of the credit card regardless because we can.

And we're going to hope that it's just one more straw on the back of the dollar being the nation's, the world's reserve currency that is not going to make it break. And so I'm frightened, really, by, you know, if, if the nation was a country, I mean, I'm sorry, if the nation was a company, and you were looking, you were a financial analyst, and you were looking at, you know, whether or not to invest in it. And you saw, you know, that the leverage continued to, you know, increase, and the country's net profit, ostensibly their tax receipts minus their spending, the deficit continues to widen, it would be trading as an equity stub, meaning it would be trading as essentially a call option.

Yeah, maybe they'll get it together, but it's really not looking that good. And so the fact that anybody can look at our nation's financial situation now and think otherwise to me is baffling and it's it's worrisome i you know i i don't i'm at it's not in my control so i don't think it's recoverable it might not be dude it might not be i don't think there's any combination of tightening our belt or any i think it's i think it's it's too far gone so um if you go to the federal reserve website fred uh st louis right and uh you type in tcmdo total credit market debt outstanding for the united states that's its acronym tcmdo we're over 100 trillion now the world last i saw which was 2018 i don't know how

often they added up at the bis but at that point it was $315 trillion of debt, not underfunded liabilities, none of that crap, just straight up debt. So rounding, the United States has 30% of the world's debt. We have 5% of the world's population. So now the question is, well, what sort of industrial powerhouse super move are we going to be pulling to judo our way out of that particular leverage cycle? And we don't have a plan. Well, you know what we're doing? We're racking up more and more and more debt on a year over year basis and shrugging our shoulders and calling it a day. That's our plan. We don't have the productive capacity to do that. It's our plan. Our plan is no plan. That's it. There is no plan.

Correct. Yeah. I don't even care if you got an RFK in there or or, you know, some superhuman. I don't I think I think we have a math problem. And I think it's just a question of when we have a wounded elephant that's walking, but it's dead. Right. a path because I think once you start to change the trajectory of things that, you know, because markets are forward-looking indicators, I mean, a lot of things would break. You'd have, you know, foreign currency markets break. You'd have some commodities break. I don't know what would happen. It would be unprecedented, but I don't think it's impossible. I think that if me and you took an hour or two, we could sit down and probably figure out how to cut the nation's spending by 25% in a way that is not going to make a material difference to anybody who walks out their front door

at the end of the day. There is so much. Well, we're deficit spending 6.8% of GDP right now. So first up, you'd have to accept a fairly punishing recession, right? Right. That would be part of just to get to a zero balance. Second of all, you mentioned taxes. I am now, I didn't, I don't know when this happened, but over the past year, I've been like, screw the taxes. Like, I'm really against taxes.

I really think I'm, I want to go back to the original thing. Government, you get some excise taxes and that's it, right? Just to tend to a couple of things and we'll call it no you shouldn't be in education housing all the rest forget about it not yours um so but even with that you know our our whole cycle of it's the it's the it's the money system itself so i this is where i've defaulted you want to know before i did the crash course chris i i the title of my whole series was called the end of money and the reason was i had analyzed way back after reading g edward griffin's you know creature from jekyll island understanding the exponential function i just puzzled it through and i said wow this money system is destined to fail that's all it's nothing

personal it's destined to fail but i've since matured that and i'm sure i've i'm going to really enjoy my next reading of of hayek and all because I'm sure it's all wrapped in there. It is impossible to have an honest, non-corrupt society built on top of a corrupt money system. That's my ultimate conclusion. For sure, that's why we had— We have a corrupt money system. Well, that's why, you know, the dollar used to be backed by silver and gold, and that's why we had things like the debt ceiling. You know, the point of those things were guardrails to prevent us from doing exactly what we're doing now.

I mean, can you imagine if, you know, Mike Johnson says, you know, it's really important. I personally think we should send another hundred billion to get evaporated in Ukraine. We're going to need two ounces of gold from every household. Mail them in by next Friday.iday right it's a very different conversation very different it's a very different conversation and it doesn't happen you know and that's it and so you have you have unchecked power uh in the hands of very very few people and even more nefarious is the idea that the consequences of their irresponsible behavior are not obvious to people i mean it's become obvious now because inflation even the

government's rigged inflation number has gotten out of control and so it's kind of made its way into the public discourse which is nice because it's creating some accountability it's also raising a lot of awareness um with people that otherwise wouldn't understand it um and the other nice thing is you know you have the advent of bitcoin and regardless of whether you like bitcoin or not or you believe in it or you don't it started a conversation about monetary policy that I think is going to benefit the nation. But yeah, the consequences of money printing show up in the form of a loss of purchasing power, which the everyday individual doesn't see right in front of their faces. I write on my blog that inflation kind of works in the dark machinery of the night. You have your money. If I put $100 on my blog that inflation kind of works in the dark machinery of the night.

You know, like you have your money. If I put $100 on my desk here, I can wake up every day and look at $100. And I can tell myself I still have $100. When in fact, the purchasing power of that $100 is eroding. I just can't see it. You know, if we had some giant visual indicator of how our purchasing power is being zapped on a daily basis, it would be way more evident to people. But that is kind of what has enabled, you know, this policy to continue is the fact that most people don't understand that it's widening the inequality gap. You know, that quantitative easing widens the inequality gap and that it zaps your purchasing power at the same time.

And and that's what makes the whole thing, you whole thing really kind of nefarious on its face. It gives unchecked power to very few people, and this is as it relates to our monetary policy, to our money supply, like you're saying, broken money, with consequences that homogenize kind of over a longer period of time and a larger group of people, meaning if the government prints $5 billion to give to whatever, you know, the bagel industry, that the consequence of that $5 billion that goes to benefit bagel manufacturers gets homogenized over 350 million people that are dealing in U.S. currency. So, you know, I pay point oh one percent of that in my purchasing power and the giant liquid pool of purchasing power gets diluted a little bit and and recalibrated in a certain way that I'll never feel in any kind of meaningful way. And that's kind of

that's what makes the whole system really ugly and really nefarious. Well, it's very regressive. Of course, it hurts people. And I think people have started to have that direct visceral experience with it, right? Because you go to the grocery store, you can put 500 bucks in a grocery cart now without really breaking a sweat, right? You can do that with off-brand name stuff. Your auto insurance mysteriously goes up 19%. Remember how hard that shit was on Supermarket Sweep? Remember how Supermarket Sweep, if they wanted to ring up 500 on Supermarket Sweep, they had

to take the cart directly to the expensive meats and cheeses, and they loaded the whole cart with meats and cheeses. And even then, they brought it back, maybe they got $200. Now it's like, you walk in, you buy one cookie, one roll of toilet paper, and it's $1,000. I know. No, it's really bad walk in you buy one cookie one roll of toilet paper it's a thousand dollars i know it's no it's really bad it's really bad and and so here's the thing i i feel i feel bad about um is this new crop of youngsters right gen whatever we're up to z or z plus you know they're

on tiktok and they're just crying right they're like how is this supposed to work because they're fed this bill of goods right i feel really bad about this? Think of the narrative they're supposed to ingest. Hey, permanent record. You got to do all this stuff. You got to get perfect grades. You got to go to college. You got to do all this stuff. And then you get to join the game.

And they're like, but the game's rigged against me. I'll never own a house, right? I don't need, like, these people are like, I'm earning more than my dad ever did, right? And I still can't afford a place. Right. You know, it's just like they were like the whole game was rigged against them. And I bring this back to Ben Bernanke said, you know what? It would be a real shame if all the people who already had homes and were living in them, if they saw the price of those homes go down.

So tell you what, let's just buy mortgage backed securities. Let's cram mortgages down. Every percent we bring mortgages down. Every percent we bring mortgages down puts an extra 10% on the price of houses. And that's good because it creates this thing called the wealth effect. Like we were talking, Ben Bernanke and his bunch of egghead PhDs at the Federal Reserve had this idea, this abstraction, that there was this thing called a wealth effect in a house, but they never stopped or thought or even talked to somebody to say, and what's the effect of pricing out the next generation?

Right, what about the people that want to buy a house? What about them? What about them? It's not about them. It was never about them. So I actually think that amongst the many wars we could see, which is left to right and rich-poor, the other one is a generational war.

That's the other axis on this, where I think young people are perfectly entitled to say to boomers, what the F were you doing, and why didn't you put any thought into me? Well, yeah, hopefully there'll be some people in the younger generation that have the wherewithal to understand it, you know, because it also becomes,

when you remove the incentive from the system, which I think is, like, happening now, that the incentive to go to college is less and less, the incentive to, you know, the incentive to sit at home and wait for a handout has become bigger and bigger. And so when you do that, when you remove the incentive to, to earn a living, or people just surrender to the fact that, all right, I'm never going to own, I'm always going to rent, you know, this kind of slippery slope of quality of life getting worse and worse as the generations move forward. It's, it's, it becomes extremely regressive. It's, it's, it's like a slip towards,

you know, socialism. And, you know, we're still very, very early on. So I walk outside my apartment here in Philadelphia. I mean, the world seems to be functioning pretty normally, you know, you got cafes, there's no bread lines you know there's businesses booming people are working and uh you know i got doctors walking around in scrubs and uh you know uber drivers and you know the world is functioning on this you know crony capitalist system that we have here but we're not moving in the right direction we're not moving to a freer market and a more vibrant economy. We're moving towards having less diminishing quality of life. You know, Michael Saylor just said this on my podcast, you know, the talking about the difference between pre-war homes, which were built like, you know, brick shithouses with bricks and concrete and big old lumber and two by four. And, you know, now how new homes are made, which is all right, you staple a couple of pieces of drywall together and you tell people they're living in a home. But what's the quality of that home versus the quality of a home, you know, 50 years ago? And that's happening with everything. It's happening and we're seeing it with shrinkflation, too.

You know, it used to be a dollar for whatever, a 20 ounce box of cereal. Now it's 8.99 for an 8 ounce box of cereal and then the then the packaging changes i buy a lot of uh i buy a lot of hershey's products because i like to eat chocolate and uh i've noticed the difference over the years and i buy a lot of m&ms too i like them too you notice the difference over the years where like you have one size of a package that maybe it's like 20 ounces and it's 4.99 and then that goes to 20 ounces and it becomes 5.99 and then they don't want to raise the price anymore so it goes to 18 ounces and it stays at 5.99 then it goes to 16 ounces and it stays at 599. Then it goes to 14 ounces and $6.29 and they got to put something on

the bag like share size or carry-on size. They come up with some marketing bullshit to make you think that this is, we've invented a new size here for your convenience that you're paying a lot more to. Then they get to this breaking point, whether it's 10 ounces

for $6.99 where they have to reset and go back to like this breaking point whether it's you know 10 ounces for 6.99 where they have to reset and go back to the the larger package which they then label as like the party size so they got to hike that all the way up to 13.99 which was essentially the same thing that you had to begin with and so that's just it's the shrinkflation as it as it relates to prices but also you see it in diminishing quality of life, too. It's the same exact thing. What I have here, this 400 square foot palace that I live in, this is going to be considered living in fucking opulence and luxury probably 20 or 30 years from now. And so you make a good point there.

Yeah. So, well, let's remarket your 400 square foot. We call this the Philadelphia estate. You know, it's party size. Charming. One of the few with actual brick divider walls, whereas everybody else just has brick wallpaper. Now, those are actual bricks.

You can go and smack them, and that's it. Shit will crumble off of them, you know. But you don't have to listen to your neighbors every word. You have to, you know, maybe shouts get through, but not the whole conversation. Yes. So that's a good thing. And the leaks that I get down the adjoining wall are part of the charm of the building. You know, you just wish that new school buildings leaked like mine does.

Yeah. So in terms of the organizing principle, so we talk about all these things with the Rubik's Cube facing us where we're looking at it as rational people. I can also rotate this cube, Chris, and I say, oh, if I assume if I don't try and make sense of what these people are up to, but instead I assume that their intention is to attack my country and intentionally wreck it it all fits right the borders the attacks on the children the monetary so like everything like if you have a paradigm it means that you can predict things right and so the paradigm i have is whenever they have a choice between doing something i would consider the right thing or the wrong thing it's invariable They'll take the wrong thing every time. Well, it does. It has certainly moved me in ways over the last few years that I didn't have never been moved in before. I mean, if you had talked to me 10 years ago, I would not. The

last thing on earth I would tell you is we're in the midst of a giant existential struggle between good and evil you know i'd be like well that sounds like a bunch of bullshit yeah i gotta say you know i kind of i think about those things now i think all right are there like good forces and bad forces like because there's been too many instances it's like the eua thing with the ivermectin it's like all right well here's the solution we plug in that makes everything that just happened make sense and that's like what you're talking. And you don't want to admit it. And you don't want to think that way. But it's just, you know, look, we're having Pride Month here in Philadelphia.

And I think we are all over the, although it feels like every month is Pride Month. But apparently this is the official, official Pride Month right now. And as far as I'm concerned, I want people to live however they want to live. So if you are into men, women, whatever you're into, I'm fine with it. You know, like I have a lot of gay friends. I have transgender, you know, customers that I used to wait on that I'm friendly with. You know, I want everybody to do what makes them happy. Having said that, when I walk down the street and I see, you know, people waving rainbow

flags, like, OK, fine. They're, you know, having pride in their sexuality. There's nothing wrong with that. But then when I see like a 50 year old guy waving his dong in front of like walking in front of, you know, nine year old children, to me, that's very different. You know, to me, that's it's very there's a big difference between having pride in your sexuality and exposing yourself to minors. And I feel like, why is it difficult for people to see that line?

Like, you know, if Drag Queen Story Hour, fine. It's not something that I would be anxious to have my children participate in. No problem. Everybody's got their own standards, you know, whatever they hold acceptable for their family. I don't care. That's fine. No problem. standards, you know, whatever they hold acceptable for their family. I don't care. You know, that's fine. No problem. Having kids put dollar bills into the garter bell of a drag queen who's stripping, that's a little bit different. You know, there's a reason that I couldn't get into a strip club

when I was 18 years old. And trust me, you know, I tried when I was younger, but like, there's a reason I couldn't get into, I was 18 years old because it was, you know, it's a strip club, you know? And so those lines are getting blurred now. And it does kind of like make me, make me think, Hey, like how do people like not see this? And you can, you can do this with anything. You can do it with ivermectin. You can do it with, you know, our monetary policy, you know, how do people not see that, you know, decriminalizing crime is going to increase? How do people not see that handing out needles is going to increase. How do people not see that handing out needles is going to increase drug use? And you do kind of start to wonder,

you start to ask bigger questions and, uh, ones that I just, I can't obsess over because I want to enjoy what little time I have left here. I mean, I can observe about it, but I mean, after our interview today, I'll go running and I won't think about it for the rest of the day because it becomes very bothersome to think about it in the way that you're talking about. And at some point you have to make a choice.

And I hope I don't sound like a coward and I hope I don't sound like, you know, a coward. And I hope I don't sound like somebody that's part of the problem or like just another useless, uh, uh, automaton lobotomized automaton. But like, um, you know, at some point I can't, I can't obsess over it any longer because it'll just, it would just drive me mad. And the fact of the matter is I'm 41. And you know, if I've got 25 good years left, that's great. And I want to spend them in some type of peace of mind. If I had children, that would be a different story. I think I would be I would be beside myself. But but I don't. And so, you know, sadly, sadly, to some degree, I throw my hands up in the air and say, well, you know,

this is going to be somebody else's problem. And and, you know, maybe I'll finally get some good sleep once I'm dead. Well, you know, Matthias Desmet says that this is, we're in a part of a mass formation or a mass psychosis, right? And it ends in atrocities usually unless you're careful, right? And you gotta, and if you don't want atrocities, you're going to have to fight, right? In some way, but resist in some meaningful way way and so i think that's what a lot of the people will call our side of the truth movement or whatever they stood up and said this is crazy this doesn't make sense this you know you just ask the unanswerable question and that's how you break the psychosis right you know this guy's like giving you all this stuff oh man i've joined this

amazing group and it's awesome and it's got this guru you know and um like dude i think you might be in a cult like no no no it's just you know we took vows of celibacy and and poverty right i'm like yeah but why is the guru riding off in his rolls royce with your girlfriend always yeah you ask the question that has no good answer right like why are you as an ob-GYN recommending this untested shot for pregnant women who we never did this before this moment in time? And what would your culpability be if that outcome was a stillbirth or a malformed child or somebody with a lifetime of disability as a consequence of that? Are you picking up the tab? Who's picking up that tab, right? There's questions you can, but that, it takes bravery to ask those questions, right? Yeah, it does. You know, same thing.

I am all about, like, I'm such a libertarian. I don't even care, Chris, if people want to do drugs. I just don't. I don't either. Until you say, you insist that my kid needs to do drugs with you, now I have a problem, right? Until you drag the kids into it, I'm usually pretty cool with stuff. Or we're funding it. Or we're funding it, you're funding it you know or in some

way you know it crosses over and touches my nose in some way and then but i think that's just normal stuff right inside your own home you be you i don't care i don't care right so yeah same way that's not where we're at right no it doesn't seem like it they want you to fund it they want you to be okay with it and they want you to to repeat their little mantra of okayness with it because you have to participate in this. And I'm like, some of that looks healthy and some of that looks like mental illness. And I'm not going to participate in the mental illness part. And I'm not going to pretend I am. And they're running out of ways to, like, fund these idiotic ideas.

I mean, we're not really funding them. We're printing money and running up a huge tab, but they're grasping. I just wrote a couple of weeks ago about Biden now wants to tax unrealized gains, which would be a surefire way to torpedo our economy. I mean, the people that would be so taxing unrealized gains means that they're going to tax gains on capital gains that haven't been realized yet meaning if your house appreciates in value your stock portfolio appreciates in value but you don't sell them you're still getting taxed on that appreciation and then if they come down after that you know you can't write that off so

you're set or you can only write now you can write off capital gains to $3,000 big deal. But um, that is such a terrible idea. Because it will take the people that that will hit the hardest are the ultra wealthy, the job creators. And those people will leave the country immediately. They're the people with the means to leave the country as quickly as they want to, many of whom probably already hold dual passports. And so we would see, first off, not only is it brutalizing on the middle class or anybody that is trying to save money

or anybody that has a 401k. I mean, not only is it just absolutely, it's burdensome and it's just, it's overbearing and it's just, it's just overbearing, and it's just terrible. It's a boot on the neck of everybody. But everybody that it affects the most, the people that the government says they got to pay their fair share, they're out. They are out if that happens. And if they leave, they're taking their jobs, and they they're taking their companies and they're taking their wealth with them.

And it's just a surefire way. So we're scraping the bottom of the barrel in terms of not just ideologies to subscribe to, but ways to to implement them. And we really does feel like it does feel like the left has overplayed their hand quite a bit and it feels like we're getting to a point now where a lot of people are just i mean i just don't know people look at joe biden say something like if you don't vote for me you ain't black and they don't understand that that's like a racist thing to say i mean it's just becoming so obvious that they were they're really just kind of rubbing everybody's nose in it at this point and i think that that is going to beget uh an awakening that is uh probably long overdue that's coming to like a fever pitch that it will be reflected in in the vote in november it's very well said because you know uh full confession i didn't really do the whole pro

vax or anti-vaxing i was kind of like yeah you know i didn't really pay a lot of attention to it until this whole covid jab thing came along and then i it unpeeled and now i've gone full down into all of the studies right and i'm like okay well now let me look into the mmr and the and the this and that it's a horrifying it's just as bad as you would imagine right and you peel down in there and you're like, this is all built on sand. There are no studies that prove anything anywhere that you can sort of, they build fraud on fraud on fraud. And then they work double overtime to hide any of the bad side effects.

And they push it off into this victim's compensation fund, which never pays anything out. Right. And then you bring Geert Vandenbosch on to, to talk about vaccination and how you know vaccinating through the variants could actually make things worse and you're the asshole you know like you're the conspiracy theorist although i listened to that interview it was exceptionally eye-opening you know and you look at his track record and you look at his pedigree and the fact that somebody like him just gets written off is it's stunning yeah

no that's that's the age we're in but then at the same time they're saying oh follow the science i am the science right says fauci right all that stuff you know uh so it's just it's insulting and degrading but i i do think that when we rotate that cube and say okay we're just under attack part of my paradigm chris is that when they do things it's intentionally demoralizing not depressing demoralizing demoralizing is when your cognitive map and your reality aren't lining up in one shape or another so you heard it here first we saw that they started to throw biden under the bus with oh he might be slipping a little behind closed doors right that's the limited hangout he's gone by august right and the question is who's the most

demoralizing person you could think of for them to hot swap him with and that's the answer for who they're going to come up with at their at the dnc convention i don't know i mean they're going to lose if they keep them in there so i'm hoping they keep them in but um i can't imagine being a democratic strategist and not focusing every day on how i'm hoping they keep him in but um i can't imagine being a democratic strategist and not focusing every day on how i'm going to get him the fuck out of there i mean he is a nightmare he is an absolute nightmare the only worst candidate that i can think of than him would be kamala harris because she is also clinically insane first off she's a bimbo i mean she's just an idiot uh you know, not for nothing.

She can't put a sentence together. She can't put a thought together. I have no idea how she made her way. I love her. I actually love her because she reminds me of being in college about four bong hits deep into a conversation where you're trying to talk about a subject you don't have a grasp of yet. You know?

Astrophysics, freshman year, fourth bong hit. that's what we're talking about we need to be unburdened we need to what does she always say we need to be unburdened by unburdened by the past but her past she says the same shit at every time the time was then and the time then is not the time now and the time now is not the future time that time is then you know whatever she says. That's great. What is he saying? No, not her either.

So to me, the most. When they're like when they're stoned, he's like, dude, maybe we're just all salt on God's pretzels or something. You know, it's like, wow. If the Democrats were actually still Democrats at all. Right. Obviously, they've got RFK right there. He's a solid candidate. He espouses everything that they traditionally used to stand for. but he has integrity, which means he's a no.

So they got to go with somebody else. I thought Dean Phillips was good, too. I didn't mind him. I don't know about anything. I don't know. I haven't tracked Dean Phillips on that at all. Just seemed like a centrist. Some things I agree with, some things I don't, but I can take that. I just want't. I just want a normal person. No, they'll give us Gavin Newsom, Michelle Obama and Hillary Clinton. You know, this kind of our, our, our holy trifecta of choices. I think saying Michelle Obama is not going to do it. Gavin Newsom, uh, you know, his track record in California is going to be a big Achilles

heel for him. And, uh, I think, I think Hillary Clinton would just be... I couldn't script it better. They put Hillary Clinton in, I think that would be great. I think she would get demolished. And so I'm trying to think, if I was a Democrat, who I would run. Probably Michelle Obama probably has the best chance

against Trump, I would say. Mm-hmm. Yeah, something like that. But I think it would just at any rate, crazy times. But at the same time, you know, I'm of the mind that some of most of that's actually still a distraction. I know it's important and a lot of people take it for I don't because I think there's this deep state that my entire adult life, Chris, nothing has changed, right? Same foreign policy, same not putting the bankers in jail, same, you know, increasing encroachment on the rights and freedoms of the little people, same failing to hold themselves to the same standards of accountability across both parties.

Like, none of that is, none of that, that's actually completely independent so far in my adult life of presidential candidate. I think you'd have to have somebody in there with complete stones and who really knows how the game is run and i think rfk could potentially be that person maybe right but he's got a weird israel policy as far as i'm concerned uh you know and he's got anyway he's got his scritchy moments but at least he understands what he's up against right i mean isn mean, isn't it funny you say the same policy with regard to the bankers? Isn't it funny that nobody went to jail over 2008? Bear Stearns blows up.

Lehman Brothers blows up. You have all these people shuffling around these toxic assets, lying about it, talking about potentially trillions of dollars. That got me. Potentially trillions of dollars in wealth destruction globally and nobody goes to jail for that and trump goes to you know trump gets found guilty on 34 counts over a hundred thousand dollars and a totally legal nda that he has his lawyer signed for him like 10 years ago i mean like that just tells you everything you need to know you don't

even need to like this you don't even need to like trump you know like it just shows you what the double standard is. Yeah. No, they spent $34 million investigating the blue dress and $15 million, pinky to mouth, investigating 9-11. It's like all you need to know right there. It's just one of those things. All right. Well, this is the end of our things. So, all right, well, um, uh, this is the end of our time. Thank you so much for being here today. I'm looking forward to many more

conversations. Uh, where can people follow you? I know you mentioned it, but let's do it again. Uh, just I'm most active on my sub stack. It's called QTR French finance, quote the Raven dot sub stack.com. Sure. You can put the link in the, uh, description, you know, there's a paid option but you don't have to pay there's a free option too and i publish a bunch of free stuff so more than welcome to sign up there and uh that's it man just great to talk to you i can't wait to have you on my show i can't wait either i can't wait either it took this long for us to talk to each other and let me just say before we hang up real quick, you know, hand to God, you know,

anytime I've written about COVID over the last three, four years, I've always acknowledged that you were on the forefront of calling out what was going on. I'm not talking about like vaccine skepticism. I'm just talking about the fact that COVID was pretty much a foregone conclusion that it was going to affect the United States. It was just a China thing for a while. And it was on the news, you know, every day. First, it started on the crawl on the bottom. You know, first, actually, it was coming up on the Bloomberg terminal.

You know, 10 cases in Wuhan, 20 cases in Wuhan. That was in late 2019. Then, you know, a couple people started to get sick in Milan. There was, you know, weird pneumonia spread. And, and then around the holidays, uh, you know, there was a lot of air travel, but you know, it was all, we had one case in the U S and whatever. And there was nobody back then that was pointing out what I thought was the obvious, uh, trajectory for this, which is, Hey, everybody's traveling here. And if it's in China, it's already in the United States and it's going to spread. And I just remember you as being one of the few people at the beginning of 2020, late 2019, when I was going to Sherwin-Williams stores and buying masks because we didn't know what the hell it was.

Could have been a bioweapon. Could have been anything. And I remember going to my local food store, buying up all the hand sanitizer. I remember just being people looking at me like I was absolutely crazy. Nobody had heard of it yet. Nobody knew what it was. I remember tweeting out a pandemic preparedness checklist that people were calling me a fear monger.

I had one guy whose wife was a nurse in Queens find my phone number and call me and scream at me on the phone like randomly. You were one of the only people back then that that understood the potential trajectory that we were on and you know my thought process is always it's better to be safe than sorry and what happened two three four months later people are in food stores they're fighting over toilet paper they're you know all the shit that like so i just want to let you know that like you know between that and you always hosting Dave columns year in review, which I read every year. Also, you know, I've followed along with peak prosperity and I'm on your site and I love your Twitter feed.

And so, you know, the truth is, like, you you earned my my attention from, you know, from having the foresight on that issue. And I just want to let you know that, you know, I appreciate it. I appreciate being on and i'm really glad that we got a chance to talk to each other you deserve a lot of credit is what i'm trying to say thanks thank you for that and as you know um credit is hard to come by from the center of the system right but you know i get a lot of credit from the people i care about most such as yourself people who are able to listen to it and listen it's a real labor of love you know creating content so for beginning covid starting on the 23rd of january for six months straight i did daily content

saturday sunday daily it was just daily and it was like 30 45 each one of those things could have been a college course right i would research i would stay up all night i would read papers i tried to understand what's important what's not. So that's my superpower is making sense of lots of incomplete information in real time. That's where I live. It's wild that people like ourselves can hash out and look, I work in finance. So my job as an investor is to get all the facts on the table and try to objectively understand if it's a good or a bad investment. If I think it's a good one, I want to hear the worst argument against it. And if I think it's a bad one, I want to hear the best argument against it. And it's not until we have all of the objective data that we can arrive at what the best practice is for us, for our

family, for our community, for our nation, for our state, for all the people that we care about. And that's all we want. We want peak prosperity. We want to protect ourselves, protect the ones that we love. And we want to have best practices just in life in general. We want to be patriots. We want to be responsible citizens. We want to be good members of our community. And the only way to do that is to fearlessly look at the objective facts as they come in and try to make decisions with critical thinking in real time, which sometimes means having the courage to press against whatever the narrative is that we're told. And I was doing the same thing as you in December of 2019 and January 2020, which is just scrambling for data to try to put together how I felt,

which being ahead of the curve had its benefits. When the market crashed in March, 2020, I was already thinking this isn't that this isn't going to be that big of a deal because I already seen the data out of South Korea and Italy. And I was saying, Hey, it's probably a spot to buy the banks, buy, you know, whatever stocks here, there, and the other. So, um, you get a lot of credit for having that foresight and for kind of fearlessly, uh, uh, approaching that. And that's what makes your content valuable and and like you said it's a labor of love for me too i joke on my blog all the time that i should be paying my subscribers they shouldn't be paying me because i feel cathartic i feel like i'm having a therapy session when i get on there and write this stuff so

you know as much as i appreciate you and appreciate your audience, I appreciate that people also kind of gravitate towards alternative media like ourselves to get their information. I think it's just going to, you know, everybody wants the same thing. Peace, love, security, community. That's it. You know what? That's very well said. And you know what we should do this year for Christmas? We should chip in together and we'll send fruit baskets to The Washington Post and CNN for being so terrible.

But giving us the opportunity. Like, thank you so much for being so lame at your jobs because it's meant a lot to me. And I mean that. I'd rather donate to St. Jude's or Children's Hospital Philadelphia. And maybe you can match me on my minuscule donation that I make during Christmas. Absolutely. I'd love to do that.

Beautiful. So thanks again, and looking forward to the repeat of this on the other end. Absolutely, brother. Thanks so much, Chris. All right. Take care. Thank you.