TFTC: A Bitcoin Podcast - #164: Dave Collum

Episode Date: May 29, 2020

Join Marty as he sits down with Dave Collum to discuss everything under the sun. Shoutout to this week's sponsors. Cash App. Start #stackingsats today. Use the promo code: "stackingsats" to receive $10 and contribute $10 to OWLS Lacrosse when you download the app.

What's up freaks, it's your boy Marty here to introduce this episode of Tales from the Crypt. I had the immense pleasure of sitting down with our good friend Dave Collum again. We last sat down on February 4th of this year. Right as the coronavirus was becoming a hot topic on Twitter, it still wasn't in the mainstream yet. And we had some theories about it back then. We promised each other in February that we would congregate again at some point in the future to look back on uh what actually played out with the virus and the reactions to it and so we sat down last week and had a great three-hour conversation obviously with dave you tend to uh

tend to veer onto many tangents and we definitely did that in this episode and uh yeah we talked a lot about the lockdowns the economic effects um second waves and the uncertainty that lies ahead as it pertains to the coronavirus and among other things we talked about lacrosse family and a bunch of interesting topics bitcoin obviously as well came up uh this episode of tales from the crypt is brought to you by our good friends at the cash app you freaks already know all about them and if you don't know about them let me tell you about them all right they're helping you stack sats they're helping you stack slivers of stocks if you want to via cash app investing they have their boost program it allows you to get a personalized debit card that's

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Al's Lacrosse. All right. Enjoy this episode with Dave. Long rip. Meandering rip. Always a great time to sit down with a man who can rant better than anybody I've ever met. Enjoy. Take care.

what is up freaks welcome back to tales from the crypt it's marty bent here reconvening with our good friend dave column uh we last met on february 4th right before all this lockdown madness happened we said we would hop back on uh the airwaves to to recalibrate and see where we are a few months after that episode so here we are Dave, how are you? I'm good. I'm good. Gaining some weight, eating too well. You know, the idea that we could all starve in our houses

seems to have gone the other direction. Right. I'm taking a detox this week. I've been drinking too much in quarantine. Right. With all the kids there. All the kids and a bunch of parents that love wine. So we've been indulging in wine a little too much. i'm not a liquor guy so i uh so i don't you know i i'd probably drink two beers a year

hate the taste of wine um and uh so so if i was drinking beer i'd be goddamn walrus yeah it's um it's hard we were just saying you don't even get outside especially when the weather is weather so shitty it's been shitty where i am and shitty where you are yeah yeah surprisingly It just caught me off guard. I've never spent so much time at home and realized that the weather's mediocre throughout April and a chunk of May. I just didn't realize how bad it was. Yeah, it's been, hopefully it turns around as we roll into Memorial Day. But that's interesting how much things have changed since we last talked.

I've had a child and I have a completely different view of what's going on with this virus in a macroeconomic sense. A bunch of different views now. liberty in the digital age only three four months later it's crazy i guess to rehash for you freaks who haven't heard the episode recorded in february but around then it was like it was still up in the air what was going on we were just getting weird news out of china via twitter uh nobody was really taking it seriously here in the states and we were trying to uh basically decide whether or not this was something we should take seriously and obviously uh since then we've rolled in the lockdowns there's been uh models that have come out that said millions and millions of people

were going to die that proved to be false a lot of people have gotten the virus and have succumbed to it mainly older people and people were out of shape what has it been like for you to watch all this unfold over the last three or four months dave um i have i changed my opinion every day for for for about two months and i would swear i finally got a beat on it and then all of a sudden someone would send me something i go no i don't and so i think it was not a big deal and then someone would send me something holy shit it's a big deal and then and then i flipped back and i drove my wife nuts and she says we always declare it and i go yeah well that's what i'm declaring that day but the next day i'll declare something else so uh so i kept going back and forth on me

and i just couldn't figure it out and um i still don't know what the outcome is going to be but it certainly doesn't look like the worst case scenario to me that that that could could become it right could be this was just the tip of the iceberg we just hit it we don't guys we're sinking i don't know nah it's really highlighted the fact that you really can't trust the media at all they're they're wrong in both directions media are the institutions that we trust right like the cdc world health organization seems like everybody probably underreacted in the beginning and now is overreacting to an extent potentially um and it showed how people like bad let me talk about bad models and economics all the time and this has been applied to epidemiology as well with

that nile ferguson model that everybody ran with and and sort of based their their decisions about lockdowns on and it was written in fortran for it's that old it was fortran antiquated you know i think the first fortran code was written on cave walls and uh and so that and you know as everyone probably knows he was just trying to get laid and he was trying to impress his girlfriend and and uh he wasn't social distancing and like the model was old and then not only came in the numbers start coming in way whacked out but also they started revising him lower and lower and lower too so um so he he's he's been uh one of the big douchebags of the year maybe the biggest the the hypocrisy of throwing this out there telling everybody the shelter in place i think

so um there's a few out there but yeah most of them you know there's a few things like the you know people who locked down their towns and then got caught in hair salons and stuff like that but the he's probably the biggest douchebag yeah that could be yeah it was the mayor of chicago right she wants to go get a little hair color couple there's one small town mayor in a small town you don't live it down and so um so yeah the mayor of chicago got got got caught uh cheeseballing the rules and uh and uh you know i don't know i don't know there's a lot of things we blew it's we don't know yet whether we blew them in a big way or if it was just in detail right yeah that's the hardest thing to tell like should should i be worried is because when we were

talking in in february you were referencing was the date was the date again that'll help me february 4th oh so it's pretty early because i started tweeting about it i think one of my my earliest tweets was around january late january maybe even as late as the 30th and i was just watching it go and this is getting a little weird over there yeah and And I think by the 4th, I was starting to get anxious. I think by around the 15th, I was tweeting about broken supply chains and stuff, and the markets were not responding. So I saw just truly an enormous economic risk.

And every day I'd go out and I'd go, the markets don't care. These forward-looking things are looking backwards. I don't get it. and uh then all of a sudden they uh they started looking forwards again yeah they corrected what around the middle of march beginning of march yeah now they're back nasa within two and a half percent of the all-time high i may have hit it for all i know while we're talking um that makes no sense to me i mean it makes sense if you say okay it's it's a casino and you're jamming we're jamming vast quantities of dollars into it um it's a little like uh years ago i came up with

a great metaphor which i think was original where i i uh i noted the game monopoly where um you start out and everyone has a credible amount of money and and you get the only way you increase the money supply is by going past go by the end of the game the only thing that's worth a damn is a 500 dollar bill uh most of the players end up destitute from speculating on real estate and and uh and i i speculated that maybe they should have named the game inflation not monopoly and uh because it's a great illustration of inflation because you just kept pumping those 200 hours into the game board and by the end by the end no one's keeping track of their 20s or 50s or even hundreds it's just 500s hey well that's like the most perplexing for me i mean

the response to this has been a combination of 9-11 and the 2008 financial crisis right you have the the cares act sort of enacting uh what i would argue draconian tracing laws like the cdc has to make an app that traces everybody uh it seems like they the this is being used as an opportunity to infringe even further on civil liberties and then on top of that obviously the economic response from the fed and treasury uh has been awe-inspiring with the the new loans that have been handed out the uh new debt facilities that have been created at the federal reserve they're buying high yield debt and high yield debt etfs at that um it is interesting to see how far this will go and and and then if they do end the lockdowns like how is that v-shape recovery gonna gonna happen i don't

believe so no i don't think there's a snowball's jets in hell actually um because i just don't think you can get people to do stuff that they used to do right why why would you go to a movie theater and if you do decide to go it's going to be an empty one and therefore they're going to go bankrupt anyways um and it's almost like now where when you see people in crowds you're now sensitive to it you notice it and i that somehow it's going to stiffen up society and and also i've learned that you don't need much right we need shelter we need medicine we need food and after that you know a couple of game boards goes a long ways you know playing a game monopoly or risk or something like that and uh and and you don't need all that extra crap

and so uh you got the municipalities they're all bankrupt i have no idea how they get out of that the states are all bankrupt and the revenues are all gonna suck and so so yeah there's there's huge damage done huge damage done what does it what does it look like on the other side do you i mean obviously people stop going to the movies they start staying home more um like do any like are we going to get that ubi that people talk a lot about a lot like is that going to be necessary um i mean if you think about if you think about how many mom and pop operations around the country that um they earn enough money to put food on the table and pay pay their health care maybe and and and pay their insurance and pay their rent and and and and so

they basically are are functioning on very thin margins and then the question is how much thinner can those margins become where it just fails and you know they talk about restaurants opening up at 50% capacity. Restaurants working at full capacity fail with a huge probability. So if all of a sudden they're all at 50%, I don't see any restaurant survives. Someone will have to invent a very new business model for the restaurants to survive. And then all the little mom and pop shops and stuff, they just need a slight decrease in traffic. And they'll get that because all the waitresses and stuff weren't working at the restaurants anymore will not be shopping right so there's a cascading failure effect here and um so i i don't i don't i don't

know for sure um exactly how it's going to play out but it seems like we're going to be in a very stagnant period at some point you know equity markets will correct and then all of a sudden people will feel broke even people who are doing okay who have savings and stuff like that they will all of a sudden feel broke but i've been predicting a market downturn for 10 years now so oh well there's any situation where it's going to be highly likely it seems like like it's it like the except for if you watch the markets it's not happening on the market the markets are completely disconnected from reality like did you see that meme i would argue they've been that way for 10 years i would too but but certainly so now yes it's getting to a point of parity where

You have Jim Cramer with NASDAQ has the best point rally in one day, and the ticker is 15 million Americans are unemployed or filed for unemployment. Someone grabbed a screen grab of that, and I saved it, yes. And so it was unemployment hit something like all-time highs while the NASDAQ was hitting all-time highs. It was all on the same screen. It was a remarkable image, actually. and so yeah it's it's and you know um i don't know a single macro economist who's

who thinks the v bounce is coming i i don't i don't know any and the ones i guess some must be predicting it but um there's certainly none that i respect well that's like what leads me to believe like if this v-shape recovery doesn't happen and the next six months to eight months are going to tell a lot especially if they're depending on how severe the second wave is of the coronavirus or if there even is one um it's it's going to make a lot of people angry i would imagine a lot of the common folk angry well how severe is it going to be waiting for it right so if if you're not going to go build an addition on your restaurant you're not going to expand your business you're not going to do anything remotely aggressive which capitalism kind of needs right

they need people you know they capitalism needs people going on on the risk curve to make they don't they don't need people capitalism does not people need people going out on the risk curve to speculate that that's that's that's just the idiots at the fed who who think that's good and the people who speculate they think that's good um but uh but we do need people to try to start new companies and try to start new businesses and they're not going to do that they're not going to do that wondering if in the fall it's just going to get shut down you put everything on hold i don't see how we don't put a lot on hold people go out to the beach and they'll say oh great now i get to go outside that's that's you know unless you're

going to count you know toes like we're counting eyeballs or something that doesn't seem very um um gdp rich oh so can the fed just keep this alive for for the extent of this virus like are they just going to keep printing money handing it out to people like you mentioned supply chains earlier maybe i don't know what i do know is you don't replace lost wealth creation with money it just you just you wealth creation is about you know it's about creating things that make the human existence better and if we're not creating anything handing out money is just wealth redistribution and and it may be time to redistribute it because you've got the people down the food chain who need redistribution maybe it's

but um but but the net uh gdp of the country or gnp which is the gdp minus depreciation that's not going up right we're not we're not creating more we're not creating we're not making the human existence better we're making it less intolerable and so i i just i think the fed has completely lost sight of that sort of phenomenon that idea i think they've completely lost sight of the idea that, you know, corrections are important. They've lost the idea that they're wedded to this idea that asset inflation is the most important inflation of them all. And I know, I know to the bottom of my soul, I know that if you pull the appreciation forward by creating a bubble, at some point you got to give it back. You have to give it back.

Unless you want to say that we are just going to exist in an overvalued situation for the rest of eternity since we're not there's going to be some period where you give it back yeah i mean i could definitely see that especially considering how angry people will get people may demand it and then it's actually had an interesting conversation with a man named jeff booth who wrote a book the price of tomorrow which really focuses on the price deflation in the tech sector and just in in the world in general. We've become extremely more efficient and this has driven down prices for a lot of goods,

yet we still live under this inflationary monetary system. And he really drove home the point that this monetary policy really doesn't make sense in an era in which price deflation is rampant throughout the economy. And so you have a monetary policy that needs to print more and more debt to grow, and it's fighting these natural forces of price deflation

that they're really not going to be able to win out against in the long run. Well, I think the monetary policy is also part of it's a social program, right? It's not as much an economic program as it's a social program. So I think the authorities are smart enough to know that if people start having to line up at soup kitchens, which I think not only has occurred, but I think it's in our future too. And people get madder and madder that we'll call them the elite, the guys who make money off the system the best.

They're not going to win either. So I think Powell's trying to find some way to get people to not lose their shit. And I'm not convinced he's going to succeed. I mean, just look around. people are already restless only two months into this you have people hitting the streets and it's fucked up people have fought decades to build their small businesses and they're going to watch it sort of fall fall down in a couple months because they're forced to stay home and so i just don't know many small businesses that can work at anything but full full throttle right we

lose tons of small businesses when we just get a business cycle downturn and this is we just slammed everything to the floor in this one this is nothing has ever been like it right during wars and stuff you get you get problems that break out but they break out regionally right it's along some border it's a long it's in some faraway place it's even at home but not in every city but this thing we we we put the hammer on absolutely every shred of the global economy and i i i i think that the analogy i use is like sticking a dynamite in the turkey blowing it up and now saying put it back together i don't see how you do it right easily so let me get like would you have rather everything not be locked down in the beginning oh you know i don't i know

because um what i'd rather have done is had society go into this thing not already in a sorry state of affairs in my opinion so i think you know kevin war said um uh it it would have been better if the fed didn't treat every single day of the last decade as an emergency so it would have been better if we didn't hit this covid thing with the world's biggest corporate debt bubble and and it would have been better if we didn't hit this covid thing right when it's easy to say but i believe it to be true where it looked like maybe we're already starting a downturn a real downturn the the upturn in the last 10 years has been actually been pretty pathetic So they've been, it's been, it's been a kind of a pump and dump scheme for the last 10 years.

They've, they've got, they've got, I've been laboring over the question of, can you have, can you have a recession without unemployment? And, and it sounds impossible on the surface, but then you go, well, okay, the Russians and the Chinese and the, and, you know, there's a lot of places in the world where no one has ever declared unemployed. and they could still go through business cycles where no one's producing crap, right? And things are not working very well. And in Weimar, Germany, where society was ripping apart, people had jobs. It's just the currency was going to hell.

And so their jobs weren't, the system wasn't working. It was broken. I think we had a, I think we may have had a recession in 2015, 16. I thought we were starting one, and then I was really amazed. I said, somehow, I don't know how we missed that recession. And this year, I've been collecting data up until the COVID, which then just dominated absolutely everything, right? People think when I write my annual review, this year is going to be rich with material.

I actually don't think so. Nothing interesting is happening when everyone in the world is sitting in their house. There's just nothing interesting about that. But I thought I was collecting data retrospectively that I think was making a pretty good case that in 2015, 16, we did have a recession. And you can find claims of a trucking recession and a rail recession and a manufacturing recession.

I go, what the fuck is left? How is that not a recession? They keep putting adjectives in front of the damn thing. And I think we had one, and I think Powell's, the Fed's goal seems to be to keep the asset markets and other metrics elevated to sort of cross, to bridge the recession. I think it's sort of maybe even a new way of thinking about it. I think it's a flawed model. I think that recession served the purpose of blowing out stupid businesses and blowing out stupid jobs and blowing out excess employment that was being used inefficiently because life was good and there was gigantic, you know, stimulus and you name it, causing businesses to overhire, overbuild, overproduce. And so at some point you got to purge that.

And that's what a recession is. And I think the Fed is trying to stop. It'd be like if you could suppress a fever. You know, fevers are the result of a positive thing, right? It's a consequence of a positive thing. When I get intestinal stress, I don't take Imodium right away, right? My wife always says, take Imodium. I said, no.

I got to let Mother Nature run for a while on this one before I do. because Mother Nature's saying, get this shit out of there, quite literally, actually. And I don't want to preempt that. So this is a Nassim Taleb sort of thing, an anti-fragile sort of thing. What, you know, Taleb actually makes the argument that, you know, when you split up a sprain or something,

you're making a big mistake. He said, Mother Nature will handle it better if you don't put the artificial support. years ago i wrote about how how respirators ironically when someone goes on a respirator it's hard to get them off after some number of weeks because their lungs atrophy and pretty soon they're too dependent so we've become dependent on you know fed fed crack we've become dependent on um um on stimulus government stimulus right there's there's no way government stimulus is good it's it's government is inherently inefficient it's inherently bad

actually except yeah there's stuff you have to have government for so you say okay it's a necessary evil yeah so i'm not an anarchist but i am a i am a ron paul minimum government guy i think i would fall in that category as well and i mean when the airlines went down and the cruise ships went down and in the oil industry which is extremely over levered and you want to talk about a misallocation of capital the oil industry is probably one of the main uh examples of that i think the fracking was intentional i think i think maybe you know i i'm always torn between whether someone's a complete incompetent or whether there's competence there we're we're being there's once this snl skit where reagan was acting like an idiot because the

left used to like to paint him as an idiot and he'd be acting like a boob and then the then they close the door and all of a sudden he'd be barking out orders and you know commander-in-chief and then some outside would walk in he'd go back to being a bobblehead and they were trying to portray reagan as the hidden genius right which some of us actually think might have been true um and uh and uh you know maybe got maybe there's people in government are really sharp but but for the most part they seem pretty stupid and uh i don't know i just don't think you give government wads and wads of authority and wads of money to spend and say spend it for us it's just i just my dad taught me that he says don't don't give money government money to spend they'll do a

terrible job now they don't they don't wait for it that was he told me that back in the days when you know tax receipts were the source of money now it's a farce now it really is mmt which you probably know my opinion on that so um yeah we're already into a big sort of mmt world where we just we just create the the money from thin air yeah i mean the externalities of this this most recent bout of stimulus like people are making more money on unemployment than they were at their jobs and you want to talk about terrible skewed incentives like and you know the problem one guy made the rationalization that that's because they want the people to not feel the need to go to work and the urge to go to work and so they set this thing up to draw people out of the workplace

and and in some superficial way it had a sort of a ring to it but the problem was a 39 months or something yeah last time you sent us they kind of set us by setting a date on it on a 39 month recession yeah that's that's ridiculous it was at 39 months that sounds too long to me 39 weeks maybe 39 weeks 39 weeks probably better but now you got all these guys who say i'm not going back to work why would i go back to work i think some would because they like the knowledge that they have a job rather than security of knowing they won't always have that check so i think it won't do it to everyone but i think there's plenty of people who say i'm not going back to work and and and the the small businesses they're not going to hire the same way as before

this is what recessions do they say you know we can live with less we already have we just we're doing it right now yeah i mean commercial real estate it's going to be shifted on on its head uh you're going to flip the table there like people are realizing that we can communicate via zoom there's no reason for us to pay expensive rents in big cities like i think you're going to see more a lot more work from home and distributed teams and then you know it's really weird as i consult for pfizer and i was told at the end of last year that they were going to go to a uh a virtual consulting which i knew was the beginning of the end at some level because because because i i saw how they were going to structure and i said there's there's nowhere near the amount of

profit in it for me based on this new structure so what i used to do is go there a couple times a year and they'd pay me a set amount. And then they were setting it up to be sort of on an as needed basis. And I just knew that I wouldn't rack up the billable hours as they would say in some other business. And that, you know, out of sight, out of mind, they wouldn't even use me potentially. So it was the scheduled visits that were good for me. Now, one could argue Pfizer's making it more efficient and so one could argue that that's the net plus just not for dave um some of us benefit from inefficiencies yeah and so um but i don't you know pharma's hiring now i'm told i'm told they're hiring they're not just not firing they're hiring they got to make a

vaccine for this coronavirus yeah but but more than that yeah they uh i that that whole vaccine story i'm i'm i'm at most 50 50 on whether i think they can come up with a vaccine because some serious virologists i know say there has never been a coronavirus vaccine date yeah the the common cold is a coronavirus right like that that's why i've been highly skeptical uh like if we don't have something for the common cold why would this be any different and it seems to be yeah it makes jokes on star trek about how that finding the cure for the common cold on star trek which gives you some idea of what gene roddenberry thought about you know the odds of coming up with a cure for the common cold so yeah so the it's conceivable they come up with something that

boosts the immune system in some way but yeah even the flu vaccine is not a vaccine it it triggers immune response but the flu can still get you yeah my i mean my sister got the flu shot this year and she got the worst flu of her life type right and then there's the odd things like i've read articles claiming that the correlation of seriously bad covid cases with flu shots yeah wouldn't that be ironic of getting a flu shot which i got this year what an idiot right it makes you much more likely to get whacked by covid but but i'm i'm still disbelieving in some of the numbers i'm the whole the whole story has got potholes all over it it's just all over it that i don't understand right right it seems like and it's the other thing the media

and big tech sort of muddying the water of like who we can believe who we can't believe there's that plandemic movie and a little documentary that came out yeah i didn't like that actually i didn't find it very credible uh yeah i didn't put much credence in that either there's two doctors in california they took that video off youtube um and they were probably more credible plandemic was the one with that woman yeah she she just seemed dim to me i'm on an email chain with her i someone someone's sending the two of us emails oh really yeah it's i can't say i'm connected with her i think he i think it was like let's see we'd get these two whack jobs talking to each other um but i i watch her and i think she's not she's not completely wacky in the sense

i think she does have have scientific skills but uh but you can really go down rabbit holes not be able to come back and she she could be on in one of those yeah yeah no but just going down the list like the like rumors that doctors are being incentivized to to write covid as the cause of death well i don't think that's just a rumor that one's real yeah that one so so hospitals are getting covid support for for treating covid patients and and one could argue maybe it's that you know, the bailouts approach to bailing out hospitals implicitly. So if you can give hospitals assistance in doing COVID, then you can pump money into them. I've heard that if you get a diagnosis, you get something like 13,000 bucks. And if you, if someone's an inpatient or ends up

in the ICU with COVID, it's something like 38,000 bucks. Who's not going to check COVID on the box, right yeah so how much is that skew the numbers yeah and then i don't know the numbers look like shit and shit out to me right and then so there's there's over 90 90 covid tests i mean there's covid tests coming out of laboratories all over the place there's no so so any statistical analysis any even the most remedial tabulation even is not valid right so there's antibody tests but they don't even know if they're picking up coronavirus antibodies from some other unrelated source and biochemistry former student of mine who's a biochemist said that they don't have a good test yet that was about three weeks ago but you know we've been collecting a lot of data

claiming that you know keeping track of it and i don't think we're keeping track of it i had a covid test done and it was done incorrectly really and what well so what happened was i um i'd felt crummy since the fall actually but with this voice in my head saying you know it's conceivable that this thing has been banging around since the fall one of the theories as to why the west coast didn't get it bad like new york is they've already had it that's one of the theories. And so my son and I went and I felt crummy one day. So I went and got, we both got COVID tests and they stick the swab up your nose and the mechanism by which they're supposed to do it, they're supposed to jam it to the back of your throat. There are crevices and nooks and crannies,

they're supposed to push through those and get to the back. It is a nasty experience. It's not pleasant and with me they just wiped it around the inside of my nose like this went 10 times in my nostril and i walked out i go that's not gonna get a hit so i don't know if i've had covid this is not an antibody test either i don't think i think it was just a who knows what yeah i mean that's that's the thing the antibodies are vague yeah i mean that's the thing that's always sort of perplexed me with the fear-mongering around is like we don't know the true denominator everybody's like yeah the denominator story is a huge one we don't we don't know how many people die we don't know how many people have been exposed to it and the biochemists i know have

been pretty nervous i will confess that i'm not i'm personally not finding biochemists who who are dismissive um but they're open-minded and so i i in our discussions i rattle their cage and they'll say okay but what about this and you know one guy's wife is french and she was getting sort of feedback from what was going on inside france of course how was she in hospital no she was getting information finding what she was reading in the french newspapers i had a doctor tell me there was a big problem in rochester and i went i googled i couldn't find a single local story in Rochester about a COVID problem and so I've attempted to do independent analysis by by trying to identify sample sizes samples that would tell me something so for

example Ithaca is a town of 40,000 um it's a complicated town because of the students but uh but Ithaca could have been nuked because we got enough Chinese kids who came through here and then went back or some of them stayed and so so there's nothing about Ithaca that's isolated compared to other farm towns right we got a lot of foreign kids here and we have um we have no COVID deaths so zero out of 40,000 um then I I noticed the NBA I think the NBA, maybe NFL, but one of the major sports franchises tested every single employee all the way down to the secretaries and the trainers and everything. It has to have been thousands representing dozens of cities and they did an antibody test supposedly and got 0.7%.

So how is that possible? If this thing's such a raging inferno of a disease, how is that possible? yeah i mean i think you're i think the utah jazz was the team that did that and i think the whole league did it yeah i think all league did it and then the other one this is the one that really bugs me is i've thought about famous people and as i've said before famous people are famous positions so i don't know congressman i would notice if maxine waters headed to the light i might have a beer that day but there's 535 congress people congress folks who if one of them died we'd know it and there are um there are uh 100 senators 50 mayors you know there's there's there's there's diplomats there's sovereign leaders there's famous people made ceos of

companies uh sports stars you name headline making people jamie diamond died of covid we would hear about it all day long on cnbc right so there are thousands upon thousands upon thousands of people who would be making headlines if they died and i ask you can you name one no the closest i can think of is boris johnson people really wanted that guy to die yeah but he pulled through yeah we don't know how sick he was yeah he said he was in the icu well guess what when the head of your country gets sick he goes to the icu period i agree so didn't die madonna hasn't died right there's a lot of people who haven't died tom hanks or or or uh or chris cuomo or whatever they're not dying and so the question is how is it this thing can be such a truly awful thing

yet i can't identify in that sample size someone who died yeah it's it's weird and if you google it what you do is i'll tell you what you find it's really interesting you find um if you google famous people died of covid some google search like that you find lists of people who first and foremost they're not famous they are almost all in the entertainment world and you wonder if it's because the entertainment world has a sort of a lock on the media so so they will tend to keep track you know it's not like famous construction workers are going to keep track of each other right um and and and they're always like the producer of such and such a tv show and there's just no famous people no famous famous actors no famous anyone no steven spielberg no nothing

and you find these people and i go i i can identify one of the people one of the guys is is that one of the two lion tamers of sigfried and roy i can't remember which one and he was something like 87 years old so how do you know what he died of you know that he died and you know that presumably they test them for COVID, although they might've just taken their 38,000 bucks and run with it. I can't name people who died. I know they're out there,

but it shows you it's not, right now it's not yet reached the point where you go, you know, during the Black Death, which I finished a book on the Black Death around October, ironically. It's not that weird because I read books on the Middle Ages a lot. And I started watching YouTubes on immunology in October, and that was very prophetic.

And I started talking to, I started looking at vaccine videos, and I'm a vaxxer. I think these anti-vaxxers are a little out of their minds. But I also believe that vaccinations may not be optimized, and that we might be screwing things up. and uh and and and one of the things that comes out of this is that there are some nightmarish vaccination problems out in the world so bill gates has taken a beating out there and part of it's because he seemed to foreshadow covid with the gates foundation mock-up of a pandemic that was too close to home right too close for comfort um but but you can find write-ups that say gates has become obsessive compulsive over vaccinations right and so he went i i kept looking for a

metaphor and i realized it's the bridge over the river kawaii you ever see that movie no well it's about the pows who have to build this bridge for the japanese and and and they build it and the the guy in charge the chief engineer takes great pride in building this bridge to the point when it finally comes time where they have a chance of destroying it, he tries to stop them. And I realized that could be Bill Gates. He's just so obsessed over vaccinations. And there's stories out there of Gates's vaccinations in Africa causing paralysis and massive deaths and stuff. And I don't know how serious to take him. Yeah. It's like Robert F. Kennedy went after him, right?

and yes robert f kennedy has made it a full-time job to go after gates and there was another didn't he like or he's claiming that he uh reintroduced polio to india via vaccinations as well yeah well kennedy could be a whack job there could be a lot of inbreeding going on there too but um but yeah just because he's kennedy doesn't mean he's not as nuts as me um but it it does give you pause when you see something like that. And, and the question is one of mass hysteria is, is it possible that we really have had a mass hysteria where we all just sort of lost our minds? And, and the closest example I have personally,

that is I happen to be a climate denier, not that climate change isn't occurring, but I'm doubtful enough of the narrative that I, that I, that i'm clearly the denier camp we probably talked about that and uh and if let's say we're right let's say that's correct that then that's a global hysteria yeah and there's opportunists who are exploiting it happy to keep the hysteria going if you're selling solar panels if you're you're going to trade carbon credits to goldman sachs we've got uh we've got two stories uh intertwining here do you see greta was on a coronavirus uh i did that's that just shows

you how stupid the people of cnn are just truly extraordinarily mindlessly boneheaded idiots just just beyond and then they actually had a story where they were trying to downplay like oh all we did was this and there was so much brouhaha and i'm going you put a 17 year old who has no knowledge of covid on your goddamn new show you deserve to get you know a dirty swirly out of that one they're just so fucking stupid they're just beyond stupid right that it's credit credit credit and that's the silver lining is gretta's been off radar it's like thank you please take her send her off to high school get her out of here i think she's ready for college now at this point go to harvard yeah what the fuck is going on at harvard i've been

asking that question a lot recently they've got a they got a vendetta against homeschooling it might be just the tip of the iceberg there's a lot of chinese intervention in u.s science and uh every all the major schools have money flowing from china and i've never understood it personally partially because i think i'm too lazy but but i think if i'd wanted to play that game i could have set up relationships in china and they would have given me money to run research groups in China. A lot of people do this, and I can't see why, but China, if you take it all the way back, when China started sending students here around 1980, 81, I remember when the plan was set up, and it was presented to us at a faculty meeting that Cornell and about five other schools

were going to accept Chinese students, right? This was so surreal. And they were going to hand select them for their ability to speak English and for being smarter than mothers and stuff like that. So China, that began the process of sending Chinese science over here. Now, I was always troubled by the fact that these kids, after they got their degree here, stayed. I said, what is China getting out of this? And over time, it became clear to me that one possibility is that they have infiltrated the U.S. with people who are sensitive to China. Now, it doesn't mean that they're spies, but it does mean that they're happy. For example, I've got several Chinese colleagues.

They're happy to take Chinese postdocs. They're happy to take Chinese grad students. So they were opening pipelines to the United States. So every time a kid, instead of going back to China and building China's chemical industry, they stayed here. They were opening up a pipeline. if we ever ended up in a a real hot war with china this would be you know you know pearl harbor 2.0 this would be we'd be sitting going what do we do with all these these chinese nationals who are

hanging around here and and all these people so anyway so china set up all these arrangements and again egomaniacal people love the idea of having this horde of workers and the numbers the size of China is so big, it's hard to imagine. So you set up a group in China, 35 co-workers or something. If it's paid for by China, you get all, but I don't want to have to worry about 35 more people. I got enough to worry about here. I don't need to worry about something going on on the other side of the globe. And I'm just not egomaniacal enough to want to do that, I guess. But I think there's a lot of these. I think a lot of them are conflicted, just like the Harvard guys, like Charlie Lieber, who I don't personally know, but is a chemist, and he was

chairman of the chemistry department, and people I know know Charlie well, and he's apparently a dickweed, and then another guy that's got no press, but I've been told this is true. If this turns out not to be true, then, you know, I'm sorry, but a guy named Sonny G, who we actually looked at hiring once. He was working in a national lab years ago, and we decided against it, and then Harvard took him. He supposedly hightailed it back to China. He didn't wait around for the feds to indict him. And so Harvard, which is a very small, strong chemistry department, you can imagine, lost two of their 20-ish faculty to this scandal. And I don't know what's going to happen to Lieber, but I don't think it's going to be pleasant.

I don't think it's going to work well. And at one point, Texas said there was something like 100 research groups in the state of Texas that were getting money from China. And I read this article and it said that five of them had divulged all their conflicts. Now, I have to file a conflict of interest form. And I'm telling you, the one I fill out, I'd have to divulge all that shit or lie.

The one I fill out, it's a proctological exam. So if they're lying about it, then, well, you know, the feds are not going to like it. Cornell's not going to like it. And so I think there's all these Confucius institutes running around here, which I don't understand at all. It's almost like, you know, like, you know, a religious cult or something. I don't know what they are, but they're dotted around the country

on campuses, supposedly. i'm gonna have to read about them i guess and they're starting to get vaporized so i think they're becoming politically too hot yeah i had kyle bass on a couple months ago and he mentioned those as well as sort of a way to inundate the u.s with was chinese propaganda you had kyle bass on your your interview yeah yeah that's that's a big score so that sort of pump as we were talking before the show he he had bass too these you guys are boating big fish right got to water down with column types but but but bass is the problem is bass who i like a lot um he's also conflicted right i think he's got big bets against china but you know he says i don't know if he said

maybe i should be careful but he's he says that the chinese come at him like crazy so he says that He gets all sorts of hacking attacks on the phones and on the internet services within his organization daily, just absolutely relentless. And I have no trouble picturing it. He's out there ringing the alarm against China every day. Yeah, he's not shy about calling them out. If I were him, I would not fly to Asia if I were him. and then there was that crazy story of where he interviewed guo that expat billionaire guo was talking about how wuhan had a we're running 24 crematoria 24 7

and we to this day don't know who was full of shit on that story right well that's believed it bass believed it well that's like that's the thing that confuses me right it was in the beginning when we originally when we recorded last of february like it seemed like the numbers out of china are being heavily underreported like hundreds of thousands more dying than than they were telling us and then it could be it could be how come it's like how come it wasn't that bad here did we just get a a weaker strain that made it over here or there's several possibilities again i'm we almost can't win now is the problem so i think we're going to have a long-term economic problem. The social problems are going to show up in different

ways depending on the outcome. So I've talked to a lot of biochemists and say, please correct me on this if I'm wrong. If this thing is as virulent as they say, we have to get herd immunity. Now, herd immunity is a vague number because it depends on the virulence and what we do. And it will, eventually it's like diluting it right so the solution to pollution is dilution so if you get to the point where there's just not enough people running around to transmit it it just dies out and so that depends on all these different physical properties of this virus and and i've seen numbers that say it could be as low as 20 population getting it but when the nba has got 0.7 antibodies if the numbers if the test is correct which gets us back to

shitty numbers but if those tests are correct then we don't have herd immunity so here's the deal i think we come out we come out we start doing what we want to do anyways and it's going to flare up again which means we're going to lose right we're again or not but but quite likely it seems and and it's going to become protracted and and and people are not going to know how long it's going to last and so no one's going to start businesses back to the stuff we're talking about um or um or it's it's not going come back and people are going to go, why the fuck did I lose my job then? We don't have herd immunity. We never needed herd immunity. We don't know what happened. I don't have a job. I'm mad.

And meanwhile, they're telling us just get back to work. And so I think there's an optimum in the curve. And the optimum in the curve, if everyone dies, that's a problem. And if nothing happens, that's a problem because people are going to be pissed. I said, Jesus, was that just a hoax? So somewhere in the middle there, we have to come to terms with the idea that we all sacrificed. And I say we all collectively, because I haven't sacrificed that much. Right now, things are good.

But if Joe Sixpack lost his job, he better be able to say, I get it. um i think it's like you know if if parents send their young boys over to fight a foreign war um world war ii if their kid gets killed they're gonna they're gonna hurt like hell but they're gonna be able to say you know he fought for his country i'm proud of him blah blah blah blah blah you lose a kid to afghanistan you might say you know i'm not with it i'm not getting it i'm not feeling the love on this one and so i i think we need to somehow come out of this believing that the pain that we went through was necessary and then the question is what outcome would produce that awareness that that that claim of of of of coming to terms with it and it's

i think we got to get some more deaths well what about this like i think we're at a point right now a juncture where we have enough data on the people who are dying mainly older people people with vitamin d deficiencies people with comorbidities that we can sort of try and quarantine those people like most most of the deaths in america have been in nursing homes now well i was told that the average age of the covid death is higher than the average age of of all deaths yeah the the average mortality fact that that the nurses the death toll on nurses is is one-tenth the death toll of the population at large now they're not all struggling with covid patients but but there are a lot of them who are struggling supposedly with covid patients

and and and yet they have a 10 fatality rate the 10 of the normal fatality rate from covid so why aren't they why aren't the people in grocery stores keeling over dying i don't know yeah no it's it's and then again like what we do know it seems that people with vitamin d deficiency so if you were to open it back up that's something nobody wants to focus on is preventative health like try to bulk up your immune system and then you get something like trump taking chloro hydro chloroquine and he gets holy hell but you know they're saying you know the scientists have not you know authorized i'm going well the scientists did authorize taking it

and it's taken prophylactically for malaria my cousin has lupus and she takes it for that right and so it's not like trump's taking you know taking something really stupid he's not guzzling you know liquid mercury or something well and and again i've been painted as a conspiracy theorist a couple times in the past but that's what makes me take pause and question like why are they so vehemently against like looking at the incentives like bill gates incentive if he gets his vaccine uh to market and forces via the world health organization which he donates a lot of money to to uh sort of persuade governments that they should vaccinate all their citizens he's going to make a lot of money uh hydrochloroquine the money for him though it's

hard to argue he's in it for the money right he would have just stayed at microsoft if money was it um but that's where it becomes the obsession right becomes a dr mangalay or whatever you know that's that's a little too harsh but um you know i think he might mean well but he he might be blinded by his his desire to save the world yeah well then on the other end like hydrochloroquine is it's not it's a generic drug you're not going to make a lot of money from it everybody's screaming bloody murder that you should be staying away from it like the plague yeah what and the chinese have tested it now i think the reason that they're saying there's no evidence that it works is because it's chinese and we're when convenient we call them liars

um i think the chinese government certainly is not averse to lying but i it's my understanding ours isn't either right well that's again and whitney webb's done some great journalism on this too i talk about a combination of 9-11 and 2008 it seems that the u.s government the nsa and the intelligence apparatus if they had their way would try to get it use this to get us on par with the chinese surveillance state they think we're some people in these agencies think we're we're behind and the fact that we can't track and trace and surveil as well as the chinese right they can right you saw that you saw the tracking where they looked at at fort lauderdale beach we talked about that on this podcast claim that they can't track this is crazy they're talking about developing

tracking mechanisms they already have them they're just trying to find a way to make it sound like they didn't have them they developed them and you should all you know move in lockstep with each other and follow them but but i don't think they want to admit they already can do it but they can they show that in that video where they for those who have not seen this they they haven't they someone has an app where you can see all the cell phones they show up as little you know lit up specs on a map you zoom in and zoom in and then you get the you got the fort lauderdale beach during spring break and the kids were not taking it seriously and then they circled all the cell phones that were on the beach and then and then they followed it day by day and watch them scatter

across the country and it was showing the the potential transmission of a disease across the country and and did they actually transmit a disease i don't know i'm not seeing it i don't know and i it's yeah i believe it's real but i do worry that it's it's real and it's nasty but we went from dealing something that's real and nasty to exploiting the crap out of it for all sorts of crappy reasons right and one of the things that drives me completely batshit are the fact that there are politicians i'm sure there are it's possible i'm just wrong but i think there are plenty of politicians and certainly people who think that the beauty of the sheltering is that it decreases the chance of a trump re-election now i think you're a sick fuck

if you think that i i i think that's a bit of twisted reasoning you're throwing joe sixpack under the bus because of some cockeyed fucking idea that the orange man is it's worth throwing all these people under the bus to stop the orange man from getting re-elected when he's going against a demented drooling idiot some geriatric old man geriatric old man who looks like he's losing his marbles although again i think he's going to go against cuomo not biden but you know, and before that same group of idiots, sorry, I think you're an idiot if you think that way. These same idiots, you know, voted for Hillary when I think she's way more despicable than Trump. Trump's way more idiosyncratic on the outside, but I think Hillary's a way more

despicable person than Trump. It's not even close for me. And they all voted for Hillary and somehow they don't see the hypocrisy in that. I understand when I voted for Trump, which I spent a lot of time pondering i knew i was voting for a highly flawed person i knew that and and and it just i i decided i thought he would be uh a deal maker and i thought he would be not militaristic and he's kind of lived up to those expectations he made a good deal last week um getting a tsmc or ts tc or yes tsmc the semiconductor producer uh to come build a factory in in arizona which is huge like we need that from a bitcoin perspective is something as somebody's into bitcoin mining all the asics that make the bitcoin mining world go around are produced in

two foundries in taiwan and samsung and a bit and it's not only bitcoin it's other asic chips as well that go into all of our military equipment i think you said we're halfway to bitcoin we're at the halfway mark we the uh the subsidy halving we were approaching that um which happened two weeks ago or last week on the 11th um yeah i'm getting more podcasters from the bitcoin community than from from the normal community i think it's because you guys are more comfortably outside the box yeah i think that's safe to say yeah or the other phrase is nuts ever since i did the first podcast with you my twitter feed is filled up with bitcoiners they're a very benign bunch i should add so hi i want to say hi to you guys um they keep trying

they keep taunting me in very friendly ways to get me to to go to the dark side and i keep saying you know keep trying um and uh and uh but they they know that that that uh they know i don't hate them right because you guys eat a lot of buckets of shit too the gold bugs do too so we're we're in the same you know sort of somewhere between um below pet we're above pedophiles below clintons you know that sort of thing yeah yeah i i would like to think so hopefully we're above pedophiles i'd like to think we are of clinton's too yes i would imagine so yeah in fact i'd put i'm not sure who wins the pedophile versus clinton category um right yeah um yeah you got to take the orange pill dave it's uh see there you go there you know i can your uh

your uh your your listeners just soiled their thongs again right there they're going oh yeah yeah yeah marty lean on him i keep telling him if i buy bitcoin that's it it's curtains hey hey if that's what it takes uh for you just not to be uh buy bitcoin for it to succeed i will i will that's right you know that's right i i am i am the last i'm the person who when he buys it they'll throw the toaster oven in the pool and out y'all go i should just tell your kids to buy then that's uh that's a nice yeah yeah i wish my kids had enough money to ponder ideas like that um hey you can stack a little bit of a bitcoin buy as little as a dollar on the cash app but that wouldn't do any good huh token gesture that would be like if i said okay so if i want

the equity markets to tank so i can buy them at a discount i can go buy one share apple or something right so what right now whatever you do it has to be consequential so i have to really sort of push my chips into the middle of the table for bitcoin before it became a karmic thing for bitcoin to to uh to tank and so i have a little calculator up here if you bought ten dollars of bitcoin every week for three years total amount invested would be one thousand five hundred seventy dollars The value of that Bitcoin today would be $2,583, 65% gain, slow growth. I was telling people why I wasn't buying Bitcoin when it was $10.

So I was foundation level stupid. If you consider outcomes stupid, I don't, but some people do. we don't have to stay on bitcoin but i do imagine we would make uh we could potentially make a similar order of magnitude moves up uh like we have from ten dollars to around ten thousand right now i think you think we another three orders four orders of magnitude three three or four over the next 20 30 years yeah i wouldn't be surprised okay in today's dollars um but going going back to the deal trump made like yeah i agree like i get accused as like a huge trump supporter i don't vote i think voting's for assholes i really don't think many people

uh i don't think we're going to change our world via the federal government here in the u.s um but i do like to concede when when good deals are made and like you said it seems that trump has made okay deals i think that deal he made last week with the semiconductor producer was a very good deal for national security and not even taking bitcoin out the question making deals and he he i saw an interview of him i i never can remember the date so i'll invent one but i'm gonna guess was around 91 he's certainly much younger talking about the problems we had with china what had to get done and it's exactly what he's doing so trump trump has been self consistent on his views on how to handle china for for almost 30 years now and he's not wrong

i mean this crisis has proved it right like the supply chain concentration is is very unnerving it's this huge flow of dollars from from west to east and and you just can't keep doing that now we're addicted to being able to buy you know a six pack of tube socks for target for eight bucks and and and that's a problem so we've this is this is what's gotten us to the edge of the precipice was is this idea that the chinese you know sent us crack pipes and plenty of crack to get hooked and then and now now now they own us well yeah and it's at the same time like the last 15 years particularly like they've blown up their economy and raised their middle class we're now you know some u.s entities like disney and the nba who were beholden to a huge market over

there the nba or the yeah yeah yeah the nba right exactly when lebron stepped in to try to smooth it over that didn't work for old lebron very well did it yeah the houston uh uh houston rockets gm i think came out and stood up for the rights of the hong kong people and got yelled at by the ccp well you know who else did something just like that so you say oh those chinese those bastards right um when jeff bezos was shopping around his corporate headquarters and and he was basically getting um every governor and every mayor to to bend over and grab their ankles and begged for it um and then he finally came out i think one was north carolina one was new york right yeah and then yeah queens and i knew the new york one was going to be right next to cornell's

tech tech facility that we set up there and stuff like that so we would be big winners i think and then there was some pushback aoc opened her mouth um a few things but it was trivial right Jeff Bezos is not going to to to react to AOC no chance and next thing you know he pulls out and says uh says we're out of here and I am convinced that that his motto where he's going to have two corporate headquarters was stupid from the get-go you don't have two corporate headquarters it's not a headquarter if you have two and I am convinced that he decided that one was going to become a sacrificial lamb. And the question is why? And the answer is because next time he wants to do something, he's going to say, look, did you happen to remember what happened the last time

someone gave me guff? Don't give me any guff. So he used New York as a, it's like, was it Genghis Attila the Hun. Attila the Hun had some pretty rough ways about convincing his followers that I don't know how to get my phone to not react. Here's what I've got to do, though. I've got to get some of the drink because I'm getting dry mouth, so I'm going to walk over there anyways. So Attila the Hun had ways of getting his followers to behave. and one of the things he did is he'd impale one of them and when you impale it's kind of a funny story when you i use the word impale in class on danix i explained it and impaling is where you take this log and you you shit you you you taper it to a razor sharp point and the master impaler can tap that sucker up some poor slob's ass and have it come out his collarbone without killing

Got to know how to miss the organs. And then they'd prop the poor bastard up because it's a tapered log. And so it was, you know, one of the world's worst butt plugs. And they'd leave him there to die. And the message was, don't get on my wrong side, right? So I tell that story in class. This guy named Josh, a wonderful kid, overtly gay male, really flamboyant, flaunting it, gay male.

And he says, he says, I don't believe you could do that without killing the guy. I said, well, that's because you're not a master of power, Josh. He says, well, I like to think I am. I was laughing my ass off, but I was, I just had no comeback. I just couldn't think of a comeback. And then the other thing he did is he said, he told his soldiers, when I shoot at something, you shoot at something. and so he uh picks he just one day shot at some guy and and uh some fairly innocuous character and uh and uh and a bunch of the guys shot him but but they're ones who didn't and he he he he killed

them all the ones who didn't follow and then one day he shot at his favorite horse and a pile shot the horse but one guy did and he killed him and then one day he shot his wife and they all shot his wife you know that's what bezos was doing in my opinion you say when i shoot you know when i say jump you say how high don't make new york's mistake that'd be a great strategic play because what what how how is it possible that a little guff from a few second tier second year fifth year politicians could get bezos to pull out of new york i mean mcdonald's puts up with more guff just putting in one one drive-through window one one one franchise in one goddamn place right walmart puts up with much more guff just for one walmart yeah we're gonna lose that battle

in new york no chance yeah what was the uh we're not gonna lose three billion dollars in taxes or something like that was her uh oh she was an idiot right oh there's a there's a newsflash no she she she said well she said something about spending that money on better stuff and and of course the press point out uh uh oc um that's not money we currently have that's money we were we in theory might have could have gotten but aren't going to get now anyways and so she somehow thought that we were giving him a billion dollars out of our coffers and um yeah she's a rocket scientist um so uh we've gotten off the track here but um yeah no it's like bring it back on track here like the 2020 election and where we are now with

economy shut down and the precariousness with which it may or may not open at some point in the future and what will happen if it does and if the coronavirus doesn't come back like where the the state of the fed and their policy like it just seems like we're hitting ahead like we have joe biden versus trump right now yeah i think it's gonna be cuomo so i don't think it's gonna be biden i wouldn't be surprised either i mean well biden's nowhere in sight he's awol Yeah, could you imagine them putting him on a debate stage? Maybe that's another reason they want the lockdown to go. Let's say he's nuts, right?

That seems like a reasonable hypothesis. His campaign managers, you know, during Trump's fuck-ups, his team should be out there beating Trump like there's no tomorrow. They should be saying, look at our candidate, how good he is compared to Trump. No, what we're seeing is how good Cuomo is relative to Trump. Right, and when are we? I'll be shocked if Cuomo's not the nominee.

i'll be shocked oh it is crazy this time around or less than six months out and like the the media blitz around the election is nowhere near where it was in 2016 and and by the way if if if you know sort of loose marbles biden or pedophile biden or whatever you want to call him there's got to be some cool nicknames i'm sure trump has thought of a few hundred um if if it's not him then who is it? And they don't want Bernie, right? I think they put this marble deficient pedophile in there to keep Bernie out. It's possible they're just trying to throw the election because it's like, look, we can't let Bernie in there. It will destroy the party by moving it so far left, we'll never recover. And so I said, okay, we'll put the loose cannon in there. He

won't get elected. Sort of like George Will when he supported Hillary. He said, look, I'd rather have hillary than trump and it's it's one for the party right he took it i i billy crystal same thing you know not the comedian the other one and um oh times he sounds like a comedian um and and i think that they were saying operationally it's more important to to to keep it from getting completely nuts than to win the election and so maybe biden is a way to throw the election that wouldn't surprise me you think cuomo would have any chance if they did throw him in the ring i think so i don't know how it would go but put it this way he's kind of well matched because you don't sense he's a wuss right you sense he's sort of new york tough also um and he certainly

got so much face time way more than he should have gotten right right new york's not a story anymore he's still he's still getting time yeah and he just babbles for hours at a time about doing things rationally he sounds rational right he hasn't made any major faux pas like trump has quite a few times yeah yeah i didn't realize he was brothers with chris cuomo until this whole thing started unraveling i get the feeling chris cuomo's a bigger dick than andrew i would say chris quam i would say uh and we should vote andrew quam on the proviso that his brother can't be in the media some conflict of interest argument get him out of there all right no it was weird and creepy like the one first interview i saw with them i forget i think

i was watching for like oh they go at each other yeah they like talk about their mom and growing up that's funny that that's that's that's new york or new jersey street talk right yeah yeah that's that's not just uh that's not just two brothers one time i rode in the cab with one of these guys you know these guys who just talk and insults and it was non-stop nothing that came out of his mouth was anything but a wisecrack it was just non-stop wisecrack and i would say something to him and he'd say oh so we got a comedian here right and i'm going yeah whatever never dickhead it's but uh going to college in the midwest coming from philadelphia people really don't get the northeast sarcasm in different parts of the country yeah and it's big time and this guy this

guy was world class this guy was top shopper so i think the cuomos have an healthy dose of that yeah what do you think about uh the power of the states throughout all this that's actually probably another silver lining that i've taken out of it seems that even though some governors have made pretty terrible decisions that the autonomy of the state is really being highlighted throughout all this as well. You know, I'd love to see that continue. That's a Ron Paul idea, states' rights. The silver linings I'm seeing in this, besides the fact that it's taking some stupid ideas off the front page, include we seem to be going more local, whether it's state, whether it's actually local. I think small communities have come together well,

and they've recognized um they've recognized that uh that uh that it's we don't do it as a community no one's gonna do it for us and so i'm kind of hoping that maybe um people will will take community more more seriously uh i wrote about community the importance of community about a year ago where I said that you know when you do things like urban renewal you build nice new buildings but you flush people out of their neighborhoods and it's not just out of cheap housing it's out of their neighborhoods so you really tear the fabric of society department to us the society you see you go well that's the Bowery or that's the South Bronx whatever but it's still a community it's still a society in there and when you you throw them all out make

them scattered to the wind and find new cheap you know dilapidated housing you you destroy the social structure within that community and and so um yeah i don't know no i'm hoping for that too we've talked i had uh chuck marone on from the strong towns podcast and the author of strong towns and that's one it's actually another thing i had in my mind to ask you about earlier because we talked about the weimar republic um number one i i think this could i agree i think this could be uh another silver lining is that people realize they need to have more resilient communities and talk to their neighbors more which i've definitely been noticing at least where i am um and back to that conversation with chuck happy to say hi right yeah uh yeah i had noticed over the last

couple years i'm kind of one of these spontaneous talkers you know where i'll i'll be standing there in line or something i'll just say something to the person in front of me and i uh i thought i'd picked up over the last couple years that people were much more um aloof and that they much less willing to just strike up a conversation about you know the weather yeah and i think we i think a lot of that sort of has come back i know we're trying not to breathe on each other but i still think there's a there's we're all in this together attitude which is which is good i see it every friday night um we'll get pizza from our local pizza shop and i'm tasked with going to pick it up and everybody's sort of forced to stay socially distant but there's always conversations that are

strung up just you have that first awkward five seconds where everybody's like rocking on their heels like waiting for their pizza and then like you i'm usually the one to break the ice like what the hell's going on and all right you know we're probably the guys you don't want to sit with in an airplane. But I've always had this belief that everybody has a story. If you can get them to tell you their story, you can learn a lot. So one time I picked up a hitchhiker. Really? Oh, I used to pick up every hitchhiker, every hitchhiker. What year is this? Oh, until I got married. Then my wife leaned on me and said, you can't do that anymore. But I was hitchhiking at 12 and with sanctioned by my parents. And I met people. And so I would pick up hitchhikers no

matter what until I was probably 30. And then I got married and it's like, you've got a family, dude you can't do that so 30 would have been 1985 and um and everyone had a story and the hitchhikers had gotten seedier because it used to be you know kids just hitchhiking around and then it became uh people more destitute type so i pick up this guy and he's one guy i picked up he just gotten out of prison. And I said, you dangerous? And he said, no. I said, that's good. But he was talking about being in there for armed robbery and stuff. And then one day I pick up this hitchhiker and he's smelly. He looks older than he is. And he's telling me about his life. And he says he wanted to learn how to fix motors. He got through third grade. He's going to pick beans. He's going

to find agriculture work he had a suitcase no handle he he hadn't had a shower in a long time and he said he wanted to join the navy or the army or something and but he couldn't he was flat-footed and then he got drafted but then he didn't get to choose what he wanted to do so he never got to figure out how to fix the motors and um i'm chatting with him and the first thing i notices use this phrase per se. Well, that's not exactly bean picker jargon. And then at one point, he asked me what I do. And I said, I teach, right? This is going to be need to know basis, right? And I said, I teach. He says, where do you teach? I said, in Ithaca. He says, what do you teach? I said, I teach chemistry. And he says, the high school. And I said, no, I teach at Cornell

University. He says, oh, Cornell is very good in chemistry. And then he proceeds to rattle off the top 10 chemistry departments, and if he had said Harvard and Yale, I'd say, well, fuck, even bean pickers know this, right? He was listing Chicago, Caltech, Stanford, you know, he was listing the good ones that a bean picker might not know, right? And I literally, you know, teed out him and said, how do you know this and he said uh he said i i i read a lot and i said what do you mean he said well when i pull into a strange time the first thing i do is go to the library and i read for a couple days and then i get a job and uh and he i said what do you read and he starts telling me he's talking about thoreau and walden pond and the influence on his peers and i'm pretending like i

know what the fuck he's talking about and and then i started thinking okay he's duping me so i start steering him and i say what do you like poetry and he goes no i don't really like poetry and then he's go well i do like this guy blah blah blah blah blah he goes on for like 20 minutes talking about poems and poets and stuff like that and and he talks about roman history and he goes on and on and he said you know i realized i could teach myself how to fix motors so i got this book on physics and i started to learn about heat transfer and stuff and it was really interesting stuff right this guy got through third grade and i realized that i had picked up a genius a true genius who who had fallen off the planet and afterwards i felt bad that i didn't try to

get him a job pushing a broom in in in the the library or something right like goodwill hunting or something and uh and then years later i realized dave you're naive he he didn't fall off the planet just because opportunity didn't knock he fell off the planet for some much more fundamental reason and it wasn't like oh just give me a job i'll be fine right that was stupid thinking um and uh he had a brother he got separated from and and you realize how do you find someone you've been separated from we have cell phones now but so he never saw him again um but i've picked up all sorts and one day i picked up another old man hitchhiker and i said where are you going he says new york i said what are you doing there he says i'm writing a book

i go what i want to have his population theory he explained it to me i didn't understand it um i never did get out of him why the fuck are you hitchhiking i thought you know i'm thinking maybe he lost his license due to a dui or something maybe you don't want to talk about it but i speak up hitchhikers all the time every single one and i i still will occasionally without telling my wife they're still hitchhikers these days i have to deal with them someone puts a gun to my head is we're gonna hit a tree fast yeah well uber's like the organized hitchhiker these days i couldn't stop thinking about like conversations i've had with uber drivers oh yeah it turns out one when the first day i ever

rode uber some chick she's talking about shit and she's she's kind of like this hot 50 year old chick she's this black woman and and i somehow asked about her boyfriend or something he died and he killed himself and it just it just got so this yarn wound it was on an hour ride so yeah the uber drivers have have a story they all have stories i had a fascinating uber driver in sonoma last year my wife and i went right before we found out she was pregnant with her son hopped around a couple vineyards before a conference and one of our uber drivers was an ex-buddhist monk like white man mid-30s unsuspecting buddhist monk and he had uh left the monastery he was just completely uh sort of jaded by the the monk

You know, you're going to believe who supposedly seriously considered moving to Ithaca, the Dalai Lama. Really? Yeah. He apparently has strong ties with Ithaca for some goddamn reason. And he pondered hanging a shingle out in Ithaca. It's like, holy shit, Whoopi Goldberg had a house across the lake, right? So it's a little cow tower, but there's some weird shit happening here. what uh i wonder what the the dalai lama saw in ithaca i don't know you know tibetan chicks i

don't know you get you can imagine you get a few in nepal or wherever he is but um i don't know yeah what did whoopee see in ithaca i don't know it seems pretty beautiful you showed me the uh oh it is but you know these are globe-trotting people so yeah pretty quiet place all things considered i think places like this are going to become more popular after this the exodus out of new york city's material i know i'm leaving right um now my life is phenomenal here my life is truly phenomenal my house is sits on the lake 100 foot cliff i can you know if i rotten fruit i can throw throw it off this cliff it says i can hit the water i'm that close i'm literally hanging off the lake looking west i didn't realize how important that was till the first sunset i go

oh by chance we got the right side of the lake that's good um and you know we sit out on the deck i have a whirlpool out on the deck so we can sit in the whirlpool if we want watch the sunsets and um 12 minute drive to campus eight minute drive to the airport um how do you beat this right i don't know people i know people particularly the last couple decades have really really honed in on cities and as somebody who has been living in a 750 square foot apartment i don't understand why yeah i'm stunned when people turn us down for a job i'm just staggered i go you're gonna walk from this i mean i get it when they've got a spouse who's a wall street banker right we're gonna have trouble with that one but but occasionally we lose someone that

they could have come here and i go how can you turn this place down i i don't get it it's just miraculous about the number one college town three years in a row by probably some cornell sponsored magazine but what's what's going on cornell you guys opening up the doors in in the fall So we're about to find out, I think. We're about to find out. Ithaca College said they were going to open in October. And it seems like such an odd thing. And what I'm thinking is, they're going to be online until October, then they're going to open. I'm thinking is you got to get the kids back here. You do not want to become online University of Phoenix, right? You just don't want that role. So the mayor of Ithaca was on CNBC the other day, and he said, we're going to have five times the amount of debt than when he took office, which was a record debt at the time. And he said, we burned it all down on my watch, but now we're going to have five times as much. He says, that's assuming Cornell students come back.

They said, what if they don't come back? He said, it's going to be a cataclysm. and this is why the v-bounce makes no sense because we're screwed if the students come back and we're totally royally humped if the students don't come back yeah and it's i mean all these well it's become very apparent that like university education via zoom is is a lot of people are my alma mater to paul a lot of students And so I'm just noticing following the threads and some Twitter accounts that follow DePaul culture.

And the kids do not think the Zoom calls are worth $35,000 a year. Right. So that's the problem. So the good news is it says you need a college. The bad news is it says you can't charge for that shit. Right. And so if we go online in the fall, I think the kids will come because it's one of eight semesters.

But I also could imagine saying, look, I'm going to take a gap year. I'm going to take a gap semester. And if Cornell tries to do something to stop that, the optics will be terrible. So I just don't know how we'll handle it. For me, I just crack this sucker open. but i do understand why if we open it up and then everyone starts getting sick we're pumped again we're going to be sending them home again and it's just then you've got a real problem now you're starting to anneal a system into place it's not a good one yeah weird times weird times

we're living in like yes are we is it like the darkest moment before the dawn right now or potentially. Not yet. No, I think it's a false dawn, actually. I think people are glad to get out. The weather's nice and stuff, but they still don't have jobs. We still don't know who is going to have jobs. And, you know, Bianco said on Twitter, and he's been calling the macro really aggressively. He said, you know, 90% recovery is a disaster. And some people jumped on him and said, you know, why is that a disaster? And I jumped in and said, because that means we got a 10% drop in GDP. And that's a disaster. And so, you know, maybe you could say a less of a drop, depending on what the 90% means, but we need to have all systems firing.

We can't have a bunch of unemployed people, especially angry ones, right? Especially people who, you know, the recession in 2000, no one blamed the authorities, right? They bought dot-coms. They lost their money. They felt stupid, you know, go, God, I'm not doing that again. They went and bought Bitcoin. I'm just picking on you.

But they blame the South. In 2009, they blamed the banks. This time, they're going to blame the government. They're going to blame someone. If they lose their jobs, especially if it turns out to be for no fucking reason, right? Well, I completely agree. And then bring it back to the Weimar Republic and what Chuck and I were talking about. Like, isn't this a similar situation where the Weimar Republic didn't really, it had inflation leading up to their hyperinflationary event.

But what led to their hyperinflationary event was the fact that France came, sort of occupied the territory. The Ruhr Valley. The Ruhr Valley. Yeah. And then, so the leaders of the Weimar Republic just told the factory workers not to work and they would print money and give them money to assist off of. One of the claims is that the Weimar inflation was also when the government took on private debt. And I was never able to piece together exactly why that would be. And I'm increasingly of the mind that Colin Roach recently stated that we don't understand inflation.

And what it also means, I one time had an old economist I was playing golf with many years ago say inflation comes without warning. and so we can sit there and the metaphor i like is in the movie pearl harbor where the the the torpedo goes bouncing along the runway not blowing up and then red red the the red-headed guy um um sticks his head up and says hey guys it's a dud and then he gets his ass blown to bits so um so i think people could say hey you know this whole inflation thing's a dud and they get our ass blown to bits yeah that's what i imagine a profound deflation i'm much more of a deflationist than i ever used to be i'm much more of a believer that a determined fed may have no capacity whatsoever to stop it well yeah i mean i would agree there unless you have the government

helicopter dropping money into people's bank accounts like they are now. I'm not sure the politics of that would work. We're not Weimar Germany. But it could happen. Certainly, we're pretending to do it. You mentioned

that they're buying junk bonds, which I agree, but it turns out they've bought very, very few, some like 300 million. Yeah, they just started buying them last week, I believe. So the question is, was that just because it took them a while to get their their shit together or was that because they don't actually want to do it what do you think it is i think it's the latter i think they don't want to

do it but they created the term facility and just because they created it they like had to save face like all right we created it we have to to buy some right but i think i think you have a problem when you're fed appears to be a bunch of liars exactly so jeff um jeff schneider of alhambra alhambra i hope i'm saying that right investments wrote an article went through powell's speech and and talked about all the lies in his speech and they were not big grotesque lies they were fibs but there were a lot of fibs and uh and i think it's he says that that's the sign of a desperate person and maybe i just i i think that um powell looks like a very weak fed chair to me i feel bad i feel for pal i feel bad for him he's been handed you don't know he looked like a

defeated man on 60 minutes this week well that's a problem that's what we call a weak fed chair um you know someone like volker could have looked defeated and he had ball put it this way volker's feet are were both on the ground because his balls weighed so much well i mean volker's the only good fed chair in my opinion that's ever existed the only one with actual balls because like chesney martin i guess was probably okay and you've had others but um gotta go pretty far back before volker started okay

i think arthur burns was a wuss um the guy in that uh william harding was the fed chair in the 1920s and he seemed to understand how fucked up they they had gone he seemed to understand that that they had really screwed the pooch and a speech he gave in 1928 and uh which i read the whole transcript. That's light reading. I think they have sold us this bill of goods that they should have no restraints on them. And if we give them no restraints, that they will fix it. And I think they're full of shit. I think they're terrified of having the problems appear on their watch. So they want to put it off, make someone else suck it up. And that's why I think Jaypo is a weak Fed chair, because he has flinched every time the market has shaken a little bit.

And I think his moral hazard is a horrible problem. And what's the problem with taking on huge amounts of debt if you're going to get bailed out every single goddamn time? so someone has to blow their face off people have to get their faces ripped off when they do bad things why couldn't we let the airlines fail and let other capitalists buy those assets like that's the the weird misconception out there is that if these companies fail that their assets just disappear and they can't be used again in some level and maybe it shows the corruption of the system right maybe it shows how corrupt it is right we even inadvertently bailed inadvertently or inadvertently, I'm not sure which, we bailed out the cruise

lines. We had nothing to do with the cruise lines. Nothing. That's an industry that should be wiped off the earth, even before this virus. Not only that, but I don't know if the cruise lines won by some sort of proximity effect, or if we actually bailed them. I haven't

been able to figure that out, but they sure as hell all of a sudden got real cheap money because of Powell and his band of idiots. And that's problem. I'm so despondent that the bad politicians and bad CEOs and bad companies and bad management are all going to get bailed out by the fact that everyone's going to be able to say, don't blame me. It's the virus. Don't blame me. I'm blaming you. You assholes who ran all the

airlines into the ground. You bought back shares that you couldn't afford to do. You took on debt and bought back shares. You did all sorts of bad stuff. I've been writing about since 2012. and now all of a sudden it's the virus that makes your organization a complete sack of garbage, and it's not the virus. You're just a sack of garbage. That's the, again, not saying I believe this, but that's the other thing that makes you like, huh, is this a controlled demolition?

Just cop out? Someone called it that. Who was it who called it a controlled demolition? Where else did I hear that? Yeah, controlled demolition of the U.S. economy. Was that Elon? I don't know who it might have been. I got it from someone more obscure. It's hard to be less obscure than him. And, you know, the other funny thing is the Fed's actions.

There are so, so many smart people who are screaming at the top of their lungs how bad they are. and how can they keep doing it when this is not just joe six-pack screaming in pain that takes balls to ignore but when real smart people are saying this is a terrible idea guys don't do this you know and you've got former fed governors saying don't do it you've got you've got macro economists in the big big houses saying don't do it um and then they go do it because they think they're so smart when in fact i think they're really incredibly stupid yeah and then again bring it back to mmt and the inability just the overarching idea that these very few people can micromanage this complex system is acidine and then you see the ways in which it's bastardized

this these bailouts and these handouts you have black rock uh sort of deciding where a lot of This money goes, you had- And you can't see where it's going, can you? There's something like six trillion and you have no idea where it's all going. No. They're hiding it from us. And transparency was taken off the table.

So you got Mnookin who was handed 500 billion that he could use at his own discretion and not have to fess up to anyone what he did with it. How is that? God damn it. Bring Putin back for Christ's sakes, right? that's just oligarchy well that's an another small detail actually pretty big detail that's been missed throughout all this or uh pasted over is the fed and the treasury have basically merged

right so the fed is is somehow avoiding breaking the law maybe by doing screwball things they think here's what they're saying they're saying we're gonna we're gonna have sex with sheep, but it's not unnatural because we're wearing a condom. We've got protection. We've got a thin, thin lamb, lamb skin protection. So it's not us screwing the sheep. It's the condom. And so, so no, they, no, the Fed, wretched policy. It's, it's, there's not a shred of evidence this will ever work there's tons of evidence that won't work japan has been a great example of that's how japan is different i go yeah they're ahead of us that's it well this is actually something i wrote about today because did you see the headline the wall street journal

birth rates in the u.s have fallen to all-time lows since they've been keeping the the data i believe started 1909 really why do you think what did they say was the cause lack of money well see i couldn't i didn't i didn't uh i didn't get past the paywall but and oh i can get past the paywall yeah corno gets me past paywalls but i do surmise that is the cause because i wrote about this last year around this time the japan times came out the study japan is obviously a couple decades ahead of us with all this and their birth rate is famously but i'm not a big fan of a system that requires growing the population to be healthy. Then I sort of sat with the global warming crowd

saying this is not sustainable. So I do think that when my brother was in, when I was in high school, my brother was in college and he said to me something about the economy has to keep growing. He says, and I said, well, I can't keep growing every year.

He says, well, it has to, to be healthy. And I knew that the math of an exponential function says you can't just keep compounding. I agree. That claim that the most amazing invention of all time is compound interest is bullshit. That's a fallacy. Negative interest rates have proved that right.

Well, not just that, but if you do the math to say, okay, probably 10 years ago I wrote about this, where if your ancestor at the time of Christ had said, okay, fuck it, I'm not going to buy two pairs of sandals. I'm going to put it in an interest-bearing account. and a hundred bucks in modern dollars and and i'm going to compound it and i'm going to leave it for for my 20th century ancestors right and so so this would be in there it'd be during the growth of civilization right and just be compounding away and the question is what kind of a growth rate

could you expect and i think the average joker thinks it'd be like three percent three percent gets you something like 10 to the 28th dollars which is which is which is you know more more than the grains of sand on the earth or something it's it's it's 28 zeros i don't know where to go with that so you start backing off the assumption and then you come to a truism that you realize you go duh and that is that essentially there is no growth rate it's so close to zero because you create wealth at the same rate that you consume it or destroy it. And the compounding of the wealth from the time of Christ, which by the way, real estate already existed. There were some pretty big fancy buildings already, but you get to the present, the actual growth rate to get to

the present level of wealth is micro smidgens annualized. I'm not, yeah, I'm not going to argue that right so and if you ever stopped compounding everything would go into the foundations yeah i agree and i'm not trying to make a point with that low birth rates mean right so so we we got to be able to find a way to not grow all the time we should get smarter our knowledge should grow but you know we can't keep compounding the consumption of energy at three percent a year and well back to chuck maroon and what we said on that podcast he has a great analogy where we're currently we have an economy on the bike where the success of us staying stable dictates that we need to keep moving the pedals and moving forward you can't there's no brakes on it on

this bike you can't stop or else you'll tip over and fall the question is would it be possible to have if you have no growth in population to have no growth in the economy is that a sustainable model what what what what fails in that model i don't know the point i'm trying to make about birth rates though is that the data in japan the surveys that came out 89 of respondents said they didn't have children because of their economic situation you know that's right so it's an indicator it's not a cause exactly yeah um and and i think people should be able to have kids if they want to and if the economy is hindering that i think that's a bad sign a very bad sign and um by the way i'll warn you your kids how much how old three months

three months in about a year and a half that kid will be so adorable you the terrible twos is a complete and utter fiction another fallacy the twos are extraordinary they're so much fun the kid you have now who you think is fun is just a fucking blob of shit i already want to i already want an irish twin i would have an irish twin if my wife would let me right and and and and so what'll happen is when that kid's around two that kid's going to be screaming at you in subtle ways to have another because you're going to go i got to get me another one of these these things are so fucking cute and then what happens is you have some number of kids and then they get to the

teens and by their actions they will be screaming at you what the fuck did you do the teens are to get you to to stop it's mother nature's way of saying don't have any more of those things they're wretched souls when i was walking through the airport some guy was walking there with his whole family and there's his daughter she looked about 12 to 14 somewhere in that range uh sort of joe biden age and um and she had this facial expression just total permanent bitch face and i said to the guy total stranger this is me you know talking to total stranger said your daughter's at that age isn't she and he looks at me with this total like beaten look at his face he says she hasn't smiled in two years yeah it's the and then then he turns

to her and he tells her he says that complete stranger could see how gnarly you are that's the uh second time the freaks have heard that story he told that on that one before obviously it's a deeply important story to me it is i mean it is i mean i'm in a house with three three little humans on under the earth my nephew just turned four so four and under and it is uh yeah i mean it is it is funny to see them grow up and they're oh it's wildly interesting especially having a three month old a year and a half year old and a four year old like the different personalities you know at this age but but what you'll discover is you you never get to the point where you don't have kids and that is to say you have this image that you sort of like

send them off to college keep writing checks you're done checks you're done and it's so not that simple they will bring their problems home to you until you're goddamn dead it's what makes death acceptable yeah well and that's another thing this crisis is really driving home is I do like being cooped up with my family, even though it's chaotic at times. And the whole nursing home thing, it's such a sad thing to see play out. And I hope that one day I can bring my parents back into my house. I think this is going to facilitate dramatically something that I predicted was going to show up. And it would start out as a failure.

That is, it would be declared a failure, and that is multi-generational housing. It would be considered a failure because you know the metaphor. the kid who doesn't have a job sleeping on his parents' couch, right? That's what we've been hearing about for a number of years now. At some point, it's going to get normalized. And then it's going to be the kid and his wife are going to raise a kid in some annex of the house. And the parents and the efficiency is going to be so patently obvious where the grandparents get rid the need for the daycare and the after school programs, all that crap. And the parents can get rid of the need to send grandparents off to nursing homes and shit. So by having all the

generations living in one house, you save so much money. We got all these McMansions, which are way over equipped for just one generation. And I think we're going to go to multi-generational. I think we're going to discover that there's real merit in it. I know a lot of people who said this has been great living with the family yeah we have my in-laws here right now uh saying this because you're it blink three times if you fear for your life right do that right right right save me on your island my father-in-law's in the bathroom behind listening no do this do this if if your father-in-law scares you to death and you just there's this great meme on on youtube or something where the guy says the guy's talking about how wonderful it is living with his family

he's got these posters he's he's turning over it says help me i'm going to die here it was really fun here than now there's been more humor about being sheltered about being locked up with a family right the first one i saw was the guy who said uh day seven uh getting work done his kids have been duct taped to the floor you know i saw i saw a good video of a guy who had a like a poster of the he took like a picture of the corner of his couch and he had a big poster so that when his kids came in the room he had like had it on a stick and it looked like he wasn't on his couch yeah you know the collective humor of the internet never ceases to amaze me and so uh so yeah yeah i i put one i said uh i said day 47 of of of uh of of sheltering i said

I said it's 1 30 in the morning all four people and all six dogs are awake my son and wife are baked on pot that is of unimaginable potency I said I've got them almost throwing up with the goofs imitating a Boston Terrier barking with a cleft palate and i said save us it's over mayday mayday is that a true story yeah i post that on twitter my name and mayday on twitter you'll find it oh man and it is a true story it is a true story i i was doing that my son my son is coughing up blood almost laughing so hard and this is at 1.30, no one knew it was 1.30 in the morning. You lose all sense of time.

Well, that is another weird thing that comes out of this. We all have this common, is it a struggle? Or this common experience where we're locked up. It's not common for everybody. Some are locked up by themselves in New York apartments, others. I feel terrible for the singles. Yeah. There are people who are literally just staring at the four walls.

Yeah. And that's just awful to me. and um and so yeah that's one of the reasons we brought my son and his his his love muffin to to the house and then they brought two dogs and then we bought a fourth dog so we have six dogs you bought a dog during the lockdown yep yep we bought a boss my wife decided she wanted a boston terrier we've got three labs and she wants a boston terrier so we got like 80 pound dogs and we got this five pound thing that's just so

small and cute but she wanted a lap dog and I understood it I understood it so now we have six dogs house two of which are going to go back to Boston at some point and yeah it's going to be weird when I think this summer

things will go back to somewhat normal yeah I just don't know how much yeah and if Cornell doesn't open up this place ain't coming back to normal fast so i guess we can end on this if it doesn't come back fast it doesn't come back to normal how how extended is this quote-unquote recovery do we have this you can start doing damage is the problem right you get an atrophy of various functions of society so so once you're once

you've been unemployed for a long time your skill sets tend to tail off and and you know you're not going to reopen a store that you had right you've you've you've one shot right you put all your capital into starting some small diner or something and if that thing goes belly up you're not going to do that again it's like the uh it's like the guy who's his knees have been fried and now he sells shit at home depot right the kind of the carpenter who now no longer can do carpentry sell shit at home depot and so um yeah i think there's i think there's going to be a lot of people who are who are going to get their their their previous hopes and dreams dashed by this it's fucking terrible yeah it is and and that's why i don't want to find out that it was also

unnecessary so i think at some level we have to believe it's necessary i'm trending towards it's not as necessary as well i that's where i'm trending too but um and i'm not hoping for people to die i just i'm hoping that we'll find a way to get to a it was necessary level because um well that's like you know when china stopped reporting new covid cases it's like oh those lying bastards but then i started wondering what what if they're just aren't anymore what if china's done at 80 000 that's it 25 million people were supposed to die a couple months ago yeah well they're not well they might have we don't know you know that remember that whole sulfur dioxide cloud over who buy yeah they're tracking sulfur dioxide because of the crematoria

heaven only knows maybe it was maybe it was co2 and they didn't know what they're looking at who knows um well could this be an opportunity for people to finally call all the bullshit in our society i'm hoping you know i'd like to get rid of the social justice shit i'd like to get rid of uh i i always thought that this generation this generation being a fairly broadly based one would in some level almost includes the boomers um that the era had gotten pretty frivolous and and and certainly um you know we we have students who are sending emails to the university president because because some professor's not cutting them enough of a break this cornell what's going on in arizona state i don't know i i did but these are kids are complaining that

one professor canceled the final and another one didn't it's not fair that their final didn't get canceled and i'm thinking holy shit you know you know what you need you need to get drafted and sent to some rice paddy for a couple years and then say okay i've gotten perspective what sucks and this isn't the part that sucks no that's another thing that worries me like if things really do hit the fan of the economy and things don't come back usually that leads to to conflicts physical conflicts wars to try to stoke that growth and i don't know if it causes them or if it's a coincident indicator or if it's leaders get us into wars because they want to hide something i it's i've never quite known what the why there is a correlation of armed conflict with

economic downturns and and uh but we could do it i mean you know angry mobs can do it yeah yeah and it could happen in china could come from china because even if let's say we're morally sound enough to not get in a war because people are grumpy. China might not be, right? If their banking system goes kaplooey, you know, I have no idea, but they've shown an ability to be pretty ruthless. And so if they decide, well, you know, we got all these excess males, remember all that, we drowned all those young girls. We got this sexually deprived group of males that are angry and they're all in their roughly 20s now or 30s maybe we've got a standing army

let's go pick a fight right i've worried about that for a long time because i thought you can't just have 20 more males than females you just can't do that no that imbalance is real i actually heard an interesting theory about that i saw a twitter thread about it the other week about why uh there's so much entrepreneurial spirit in china even though it's a communist regime like the the citizens hate it yeah the citizens are like the males are trying to just innovate and become big businessmen because that's the way you get the chicks and right i think that's true here too yeah i look at manukin's wife and i'm thinking she didn't she didn't marry him for his looks munching butts yeah yeah yeah she's got that look in her eye there's nothing about her that doesn't

have have you know prenup you know should have signed a prenup um somehow i don't know he probably did though i mean that one picture of them like holding up the dollars it's just oh yeah she's got this look in her eye it's like holy shit oh my god she looks she looks like she's she's it's like some injector full of hormones or something yeah yeah she's not she's not bad looking I'll tell you yeah she's better than those dollars

to me yeah about the climate stuff though is it the sun is it true that we've had like a very low level sun spots in the last two years is that article that's been going on that is true

I think we are um the sun is is supposedly you should take everything i say about climate with a grain of salt what i did is i tried to figure out if the climate was really changing what i what i became convinced was is that there's enough bullshit in the story that it's very hard to know what's true and what's not and the climate science is so polluted with conflict that that i could no longer separate the good good from the bad i could no longer resolve it and there was so much bad in it so here's here's something i want to tell you that what do you what do you call your crazies the uh freaks freaks right the freaks the freaks should watch the movie

planet of the humans i got taken off youtube got taken off youtube i'm pretty positive i watched it, and I'm pretty sure it got taken off YouTube. In any event, I don't see how you can watch Planet of the Humans without getting freaked out. And I read a number of critiques that suggest, I know

they wanted to take it off. If YouTube actually took it off, that's just appalling, just truly appalling. That shows that authoritarian regimes were under. And there were some criticisms of it that were probably valid. But the bottom line is it beat the limits not out of the climate industrial complex all right it's still up

there i just checked i think they wanted to take it down i was gonna say they wanted to take it down i don't think they have the balls to take it down on michael moore because that would be his next movie right no so he'd be doing a youtube movie um so i've urged people to watch it and i don't care if it's 80 right not 100 right um it's just a truly awful story and michael Moore being a super lefty, intending to write a very lefty movie, came to the conclusion that there were so many financial conflicts in the climate world, in the biomass and in the wind and in the solar stuff, that it was a scam. There's a great quote from Eric Hoffer or something where he says, every movement becomes a business and ends up being a racket. And the

climate change world became a racket i think it's about political control i think it's about money i think it's all these bad things so i don't know what the story is now we could have climate change climate change could be real i'm never going to believe it at the level that they want me to believe it there's no chance i'm coming back from where i've gotten to yeah no i mean kudos to michael moore for doing that had to take a lot of balls he had guts it was mostly his partner i I think who's, who he's done a lot of movies with. So he's like, you know, sort of, you know, Elton John and the songwriter. So, so climate planet of the humans is a very,

very important flick. And I read the critiques and the critiques fell flat, my opinion there, but most of them were, they could have mentioned this and this and this. They didn't, I go, well, that's not what the fucking movie was about you douchebags. Of course he could He could have done a 70-hour documentary series on it, but he didn't. He did an hour and a half, and he beat the shit out of you guys. And so, yeah, that was an important movie.

That was a very important movie. And so where are we at on the climate? I don't care about it anymore. I stopped reading about it. Yeah. I probably side with you. There's so much bullshit in it that it's, like, hard. hard to believe that a narrative is not being pushed on people uh and an agenda but i like and

i do question how many people discount the sun's effect on all this and so like right oh back to the sun you mentioned the sun yeah so the sun the solar cycles apparently are unbelievably rhythmic you'd never believe how rhythmic they were um unless unless you you'll look at this stuff, you go, my God, this is just pulsing away. And there's these Monder minima and stuff like that. And we're apparently heading into one. And there would cause super cold periods. So this same crew of loonies are going to be arguing that we should be pumping CO2 into the atmosphere before this thing's over, best I can tell. And I'm not seeing solar physicists who are climate changers. The solar physicists do not sign off on climate

change at all they seem to you know that the chairman of hebrew university's physics department is a solar physicist he says there's not a shred of evidence that it's anything but the sun and so yeah i think the the lack of sunspots supposedly tells us we're going to freeze our asses off you know we'll be doing we'll be using huge amounts of fossil fuel to keep them freezing to death yeah and hey bitcoin will make us more efficient at doing that ah we're going to cut you guys off so it'll actually not even grow at all all because of the the costs of mining we'll say no the bitcoiners don't get their energy anymore sorry well you'd be surprised you should see what we're doing at great american mining i actually work for a company and we're using waste gas and

oil fields to mine bitcoin i'm aware of that you should set up you probably have mining operations in iceland using geothermal too right there yeah 73 of bitcoin mining operations are renewables geothermal or hydroelectric mainly that's a good call yeah yeah yeah so so you guys should be proud that you're consuming vast amounts of energy at least in the right places yeah wait stranded wasted energy we're uh moving us moving us towards a type one civilization dave well you could you know i can make the argument that agriculture was our big mistake inventing agriculture um and that is that the hunter-gatherers it's estimated that that they they work about 30 hours a week and they don't suffer from famine and starvation what they do

is they adjust their hunting and their gathering depending on how the seasons and how the the various animals traveled around and so they you know fruit when it was available and they they kill mastodon when they could and then we invented farming and it was the sedate locking you down on a plot of land existence that actually created the fat famines because all of a sudden the crop would fail and these guys didn't know what to do with a failed crop because they lived off their crops and so i think what agriculture did is it allowed us to stay still which gave us the ability to develop all sorts of cool things like pornography and then um and bitcoin i put those two together they both need energy and um bit porn and then um and at the same time though

it produced it allows us to pack too many people into small spaces and so is it really a big win for the planet or a big win for humans that we can now ram was a 50 million people into tokyo is is that a win it's not obvious to me you know we've got you know we've got microchips and stuff like that we've done cool stuff but we can also just be all flopping around indonesia eating fruits from the trees and stuff like that dying young would you prefer that no i'm not one of those guys but i can make the case i'm also a big believer the earth heals itself you know remember when the gates of hell opened up when saddam lit all the oil fields and we were going to get nuclear winter and nothing happened and then the gulf spill of oil coming in the gulf

was going to we opened the gates of hell and the gulf would become a a dead zone and that didn't happen and so i you know and supposedly now that we're we're in shelter mode that that mother nature's taken back a lot of shit there's beaches in florida where where people used to you know swim and supposedly alligators are now sunning on the beaches again and so you know um so the earth is healing pretty fast you know the pollution in china plummeted you know you can see the sky on a good day yeah it was a weird stat and not a stat like a hypothetical out there like hypothetically if lockdowns persist in china specifically for an extended period of time they could actually probably net save more lives from less people dying of the air pollution over

there. Oh, there's all sorts of knockoff, knock-on, knock-off effects. The one that got everyone's attention is the deaths of despair, people who die directly and indirectly from things that ultimately correlate high with poverty. So like the opioid epidemic tracks along the impoverished coal mine towns and steel towns up through Appalachian and into the typical deaths in the hood where the poverty is and places like that. And so the question is, are we going to produce more poverty and as a consequence, more deaths from the lock, the shutdown, the sheltering than from the COVID? That's a legitimate question. that's one thing yeah i've been talking a lot about on this podcast too that's a very very

it could happen may actually happen which is scary to think yeah yeah i'm i'm if i lost my job i don't think i'd be very profitable as a a streetwalker i think i don't think i'd bring in a lot of bucks and you have doctors coming out seeing there's increased domestic abuse addiction right right i gotta figure that there's there's women who are so unhappy that their husbands are home 24 7 because of the domestic abuse problem and and these guys to the extent that you know it's one of these you know drink two six packs then get angry and beat your wife moments um that's got to be happening a lot the guy's sitting around the house moping about not having a job drinking beer screaming at his wife next thing you know she's gonna shit knocked out

um we've destroyed our medical system not permanently but um um but if you go to the hospital now with a problem you don't get shit you don't get the treatment it's just truly horrific the hospital shutting down because people are afraid to go to them yeah my wife i thought she had broken her neck actually she has a problem with her neck and she had cracked it before i I got her to the hospital, and they gave her a CT, and she never saw a doctor. So they said it was negative, and they released her. And she never saw a doctor. Even up in Ithaca?

Even up in Ithaca. They've shut down the hospitals. And so she never saw a doctor. And the first time when she did crack two vertebrae in her neck, she also has a couple of fusions. It's a complex thing up there. um they missed that on the ct and the doc who was evaluating her saw some funny body mechanics and he checked the ct again and he found them and so so she got a she got a negative on the ct that had

all the all the fanfare of a negative sign on a pregnancy test i mean it was really just nothing and i didn't even get to talk to him so he wouldn't let me in because of this whole covid fuck up and so the next morning i called my gp and i said i said lloyd i said this this is fucked up candace may have a broken neck and uh and uh and she didn't see a doctor and so by noon we're in a doctor's office and she didn't she did not have a broken neck um yeah um well the first one i didn't know she had a broken neck either i drove her to the hospital for that one and then part way there the vibrations were driving her crazy and i got the by the time i got the hospital. I said, I think this chick has a fucking break in her neck. And she did. She had

a 40% fatality rate break in her neck. And I wouldn't have known it. She was walking. What she did is the doc noticed she was holding her head with her hand. He said, every time I've ever seen that, there's a break. And I was at dinner with her the day after she did a face plant this time. It was a couple of weeks ago. And I saw her put her hand on her head like that. I said, we're going we're going to hospital dear and uh and uh she said oh we'll go tomorrow i said no no we're not going tomorrow we're going now and don't change your clothes and don't you know just we're going we have neck braces for wrapping around but um but i was appalled by the complete utter lack of care and i i couldn't even convey the complexity of her case to get someone to look

careful we just got an answer i tell is like a stick with a negative sign on it and and she got discharged by a nurse who knew nothing she handed her a wad of papers and our hospital is a good hospital in my opinion but it had just been taken down to the studs and so you know what would she could have died from that thank god she's okay but okay yeah i'd have to get a trophy wife that's hard you know mnookin's wife you know i get it there's merit in there with it how fragile is this whole system though across the whole landscape that was totally self-inflicted so we didn't have to shut down our fucking hospital we could have said look here's the deal we're gonna do that elective surgery this thursday but we might have to cancel if we get a bunch of

people coming in and how hard was that but oh no we can't do that what kind of stupid planning was And here, okay, I talked to Pomp about this. I'm going to repeat this story. Here's what's happening. This is a fucking nightmare. Private equity guys are buying hospitals. Right away, you're going, okay, the patients are going to suffer because these guys are going to squeeze the shit out of the hospital for profit.

And then you go, or they're going to strip mine the thing by dumping a huge wad of debt into it, paying themselves a huge amount of money and in their bonuses and then sell the shell of the company the hospital into the open market which i totally blame the fed for you know how do you blame the fed for that because it's only when money is so available and capital is so cheap and there's so much money flooding around the system that you can sell a stupid fucking company with debt to the gills and a balance sheet that's a worthless sack of crap to a bunch of idiots who are buying shit just because they're so stupid.

So that company that's been loaded with debt and gutted of assets is worth zero. Yet somehow in the JPO Fed-run economy we're in, you can sell those things for a lot of money, which is all part of their profit. Then the company goes bankrupt. The buyers who buy it discover that buying a company loaded with debt was a stupid idea because some 22-year-old goddamn animal sitting in a cubicle had blown it. No idea and was just getting it because of the yield.

Right. And so then what's going to happen? First of all, the hospital goes through bankruptcy. It's not going to go away, but it's going to be a mess. Now, the alternative back to the original, let's say the PE guys hang on to the hospital and they turn it into a cash cow. then what we're now going to get if we're going to get national health care now i've got a

guaranteed payer so that the pe guys will get paid handsomely every fucking time the ethics of money production but you're guido holstman more people need to read it the fed should be put in a sack with a hyena and tied up and thrown into the lake and that's how they used to kill guys the old days they'd put them in a sack with some sort of rabid creature and they'd throw them in the lake and when the animal started fearing for its life, it would chew the shit out of the guy in the sack.

That's what we do to the fed right there. I'm getting more demented with age. I should stop reading books about medieval history. I mean, I think you're really exemplifying an anger that exists out there. I have it.

I do too, but I think more people are starting to realize. That's something we've been trying to spread. I think genuinely and wholeheartedly that most of the problems that exist in the world, most of the problems that Republicans and Democrats think they're fighting over stem from monetary policy. When I was a kid, I used to have talks with my dad. They were great talks, one of which I remember one vividly where I said, we're talking about the depression. And I said, so you could buy up real estate and make a fortune. Basically, I was, as a teenager, inventing distress asset sale

purchases right he said yeah but no one had any money and somehow that locked into my head that said you have to have money at the bottom if you want to buy cheap which then I eventually learned you have to therefore have money at the top you can't be fully invested at the top or you won't have money at the bottom so you can't be riding the euphoria to the bitter end because then you're just going to lose all your money back so then one time we're talking about he was a contractor And he went into this area that he had nothing to do with before, cement pumping. It used to be a hauled cement up in a big tub, building a building. You'd haul it up all these floors.

There was a cement pump that could pump cement seven stories. Now, you can imagine the value of this thing. You can also imagine the cost of the thing. Now, this is probably 1970-ish. So in 1970 dollars, the thing cost $350,000. That's a lot of money. And I asked him, I said, why did you go into the cement company? He said, you mean besides the fact that I could make money, why?

I said, yeah. And he said, anyone who can find that kind of money is a valid businessman, and I can compete on the playing field with that guy. He says, what I can compete against is some fly-by-night douchebag who comes along and undercuts my prices and drives us both into bankruptcy in the process. And he says, so he was describing the idea of a moat. He was saying that the problem

of getting a $350,000 cement pump is a moat to protect good businessmen from idiots. And what are the Fed doing now? The Fed is creating more idiots and the Fed is creating more zombie companies who stay in business only because of the Fed largesse and they're cannibalizing the profits of good companies. They're making it harder to make money.

And meanwhile, at some point, they're going bankrupt, but they're going to gut the living shit out of reasonable businesses en route to their bankruptcy. That's a terrible model. The Fed is filled with idiots. And this is playing out in the VC startup world too. We're seeing SoftBank's strategy is they invest in 20 to 30 different companies in the same vertical so your uber your grub hub uh

seamless we work like and i didn't even know until about a week ago that we work pulled off their ipo is under some other name did they i did not know that i read i swear to god i read it i heard they pulled they slipped an ipo in there we work i just was it just called we i remember them oh they had another name i did not hear that it up into a big pile of shit and and ipo that thing fast and and they they they i fuck i don't know they're broing down now sold out now they bro down but like so that's like the vc world's like a microcosm of the fed on a grander macro scale like you just wouldn't have all these vc guys all those private equity guys and stuff if you didn't have unlimited capital and by the way when capital is unlimited

that means our savings the money we squirrel away is of no value because it used to be that that formed the foundation of capitalism and now it's like no we don't need to borrow your money we don't need your deposit because we can just get fucking money from the fed yeah i mean capitalism And that's why we don't get an interest rate. Because the Fed has priced money, the Fed has priced savings completely into the trash can. And that's why I think they're all a bunch of assholes. I hate them. I detest them. Because they think that a committee of 12 morons somehow should be setting the price of capital. And they're just, I can't imagine the level of stupidity of these guys and i why i think i know more than them the only reason is because i know

there's 12 idiots in there so i've got to know more than them i completely agree i'm not bringing bitcoin up again but someone referred to me on twitter the other day as this morning actually america's number one ranter i i would stand in your corner and back you up on that title if you network where he says i'm mad as hell and i'm not taking it that network was a network the movie where he says i'm mad as hell i'm not taking it anymore right i think it was the network maybe i'm gonna go the route of that tunisian i'll light myself on fire or something but what's so i would think that you think that we should return to a sound money standard like how do you think that's possible with cold i'm more of a moderate than that believe it or not i actually

don't oppose the idea of the fed what i oppose is the idea of the fed being the fed should be the referees on the field i do believe that you know jp morgan bailing out the banking system which was a gold standard but dad runs the idea of having some sort of back but they need to be there just in case they need to follow the budget model of charging in big interests if you need it You know, it's got to be punitive interest rates. And they need to – the Fed should be the referees on the field. They think they're out there to take snaps from the center. They think they're playing wide receiver now.

Well, isn't that rosy thinking? From first principles, yes, you'd like them to play referees to start, but the mechanisms of allowing them to be referees leads to them taking the snaps at some point. It's just a slow entropy towards that. Right. But the problem is, is they've just lost the plot line. They've completely lost their way.

And Draghi, right? Draghi kind of set a new low watermark by, you know, saying whatever it takes. I think there are smart guys out there. I think the BIS has actually got some pretty smart guys at the BIS. They seem to understand how fucked up the system is. I don't know why. but what i'm able to tease out of stories coming out of the bis but generally i would say central bankers have got this god complex well i think they should be able to just you know king canute

the tides out or something i don't know have you ever watched the uh documentary all all the plenaries men all the what's men plenaries p-l-e-n-a-r-y apostrophe s that good i would look that up it dives into how the bis actually works within the uh international banking system it's bad moments that's for sure well that's that's what this documentary gets as that the bis may be the supernatural um actually big the death star the death star yeah the big boss um so during the all i don't got that the more the further along i go in this game the more i'm willing to believe that the the the overlord model uh all the plenaries let's see how fast it takes plenaries men didn't even autofill yeah it's uh

okay it's an hour there we go okay i'm leaving it up on my screen i'll come in find it that's a good one um very well researched uh ties into hsbc and tim geithner and hsbc i think it's just reconstituted bcci what's that bcci was the bank of the drug lords and the and the criminals and the oligarchs and stuff they were the 12th biggest bank in the world if you go if you google it and go to wikipedia and so it was it was the banker to the assholes and and it was big because there's a lot of assholes and so what happened is some scandal broke and the whole thing unraveled and i think they all i think they all scrambled over to hsbc i mean it would make sense they had those teller windows yeah fitted for the mexican drug lords i i know and why why we don't execute

bankers is so beyond me it's so you know that we we execute people for killing one person the bankers goddamn they kill people in mass right the the death and dismemberment of people by the bankers it's just staggering to me it's the whole one death's a tragedy millions of deaths statistic yeah i know i know oh well if i was king of the world i'd probably just rape and pillage too so well i think uh in the next six to eight months we'll see if the guillotines come out depending on how all this goes if if this lockdown was when it finally comes out you don't win either my son getting it gets crazier than me which is a little scary um i said you know but you don't win when you get to that stage when if you have to get the guillotines out you go through a period

of serious problem and you end up with something you didn't see coming right all the revolutions the only revolution that really worked well was probably ours right the only violent revolution right yes a lot of peaceful yeah well then there's the bitcoin revolution i know you're gonna say it so i'll say it for you it's peaceful it's very peaceful it's opt-in they're gonna hang you guys i don't know yeah it's uh yeah maybe i should buy bitcoin i don't think about it i'll Hey, we're going to get the energy lobby into it and defending it within the next five years. So you're whoring your way through the energy lobby now.

If we have to, we will. And the incentives line up to where it's perfect. It's a win-win-win for everybody, for Bitcoin, for the energy industry, for energy independence in the U.S., which is a huge topic right now, and for the incentive to distribute our computing supply chain as well. I want you guys to win because my gold will do well too. I'm happy. It's an attenuated version of Bitcoin.

We're going to eat gold's market share. It's just going to be a better store of value. You think gold will not be? You think I'll lose owning gold or just not win enough? You may win in the medium term, but long term, the opportunity cost of holding gold over Bitcoin will prove. I think you've proven enough for me. Yeah.

I don't know, Dave. I feel willing to buy green bananas, but not much more than that. I hope we can do this well into your early hundreds. There's no way I'm making it to the early hundreds. No chance. I haven't taken care of myself enough to make it to the early hundreds. It's never too late to start. You know, I thought about that when Pomp asked me,

what's the big mistake you've made, any big mistakes? The only thing I could come up with was letting myself go to shit. And I realized, but that's not even, I can fix that. yeah pick up a lacrosse stick go hit the wall start 10 minutes so when my son took up lacrosse yeah i was playing a lot of lacrosse that was good he's not playing lacrosse now so that's wall yeah that's the one thing that crushed me about these lockdowns that ruined the college lacrosse season the ivy league shut down first looking pretty good too yeah yeah i mean my uh my wife's cousin plays for Penn and I think they were scheduled to have a

very good, they were ranked top 10, I believe the start of the season. The Ivies own the top 20. Yeah. I know. Now Cornell is supposed to be pretty good, but they can break your heart.

They can break your heart. Cornell has a new coach now. Again, Cornell has gone through too many coaches. You don't do well going through coaches. coaches yeah as soon as tambroni left you guys uh as soon as he ditched you guys for penn state it's been a little a little uh revolving door thousand dollar salary in lacrosse that's that's giving it i'd i'd teach uh i'd go coach badminton for 850 000 um yeah but he hasn't he hasn't

he hasn't rocked there he's done well so he pulled penn state from you know obscurity up to up to the pretty good but he's yeah i i think tambroni's got a fundamental flaw in the way he coaches and the fundamental flaw is that he can't resist freezing the ball when he's got the lead yeah that that bit you guys in the ass in the uh championship against uva i saw so many games through the years because he frees the ball what happens is tambroni runs his team with an iron fist so if tambroni says freeze the ball that means freeze the ball that doesn't mean use your head out there and take a shot if you see one that means freeze the fucking ball the problem is all the other coaches all the other players know this so the second they see

tambroni's team freezing the ball you go double it up go molest the shit out of them because now one of those kids on that field has got the balls to take a shot and and that's the problem and and so after uh after tambroni left i walked into deluca's office who was now the head coach i said I'm going to ask you to do me one favor. I've been a lacrosse fan here since Eamon McEnany and Mike French played here back in the 70s. I said, let the kids play to the buzzer. Don't freeze the ball.

I saw too many games get lost. So I had a surgery not too long ago, and my surgeon played for Richie Moran, who I've gotten to know pretty well over the years, starting when I was about 12 years old, actually, I went to a camp, it was a real meat market lacrosse camp. And I didn't understand what they were at the time. But when the camp has coaches from Hobart, Syracuse, Cornell, Navy, Army, Hopkins, Maryland, you know that it's a meat market camp, right? It's not to teach you how to play lacrosse, it's to find goddamn talent.

It sounds like a blue chip camp right there. It's a blue chip camp, right. And I didn't know it at the time. But so, oh, I'm talking to this doc who played for Richie Moran. And I said, I said, Tambroni froze the clock. And he said, oh, he lost a lot of important games doing that. And so I just did not want to ever see. You know what I like?

You might remember this. You might not. those who are March Madness fanatics will remember the greatest March Madness. The greatest March Madness was relatively obscure. I could argue it's the one where Cornell got to the sweet 16, but others would not agree with me. The greatest March Madness, in my opinion, was a Villanova beating george center something no it was when hank gathers died and he was that he was the marquee player for loyola marymount and he dies like right before them the march madness he keels over from a heart attack on the court so their their first round draft choice guys gone and

these guys were run and gun offense like you've never seen these guys held the ball on average from the inbound to the first shot, 5.9 seconds. These guys were racking up 125-point games. And they could have two minutes on the clock and a 15-point lead, and they would run down that court and put up three-pointers. And they mowed through the brackets, and it was so spectacular. That's what I want to see Cornell lacrosse do. I want to see them push into that cage every goddamn minute of that game.

I should go up to Albany and practice with that team. Yeah. Well, you know, Ithaca High School had a team. My son took up lacrosse late. But you can pick up lacrosse late. It's one little sport. You can get away with that if you're a good athlete. So I bought us two sticks, and then I sent them to a bunch of camps,

and I hired a Cornell – not the assistant coach, a volunteer coach. There's the lowest rung in the coaching ladder as a volunteer coach. No pay. You've got to pick up money on the side. I hired him to coach my son. I hired a Cornell track coach to coach him on how to run. And we played fast catch-up. He ended up on a travel team.

The first game he ever played was something like three months after he picked up a stick. He played up in the Lake Placid tournament in a triple consolation match. but it was adult men's division he's going against division one players and he's been he's been flicking the stick around for three months and he hit the pipe twice boss boss yeah and he played an entire half as a middie without a break because they everyone else had died from the tequila and uh so in any event so he played on a travel team and none of the kids knew he'd never played and uh and so he got really good really fast and i made him play both hands i absolutely made him play with the gloves all the time we just played hours and hours at a time

and um and uh and then uh and then he he was a violinist and he got he got the uh he got the uh uh solo and he wanted to play lacrosse and risk the solo was his true dream so he got first chair yeah he was first chair already but he got the solo too they're independent and he and so he said i can't play lacrosse senior year i can't afford to smash my fingers i went to i went the other way i played bassoon and decided to play lacrosse over the bus here's here's where i went I was playing lacrosse until 10th grade, and it was on a good team in Syracuse. And I was small, and I was a gymnast, and I just loved gymnastics. And I told this story the other day, actually on a podcast,

but I just didn't feel like I was very good because the guys I had to play against were better. So there's a southpaw there who – I was the only ambidextrous guy. this was back in the 70s and so two-handed was was rare and and i i actually somehow uh was slightly left-handed even though i'm a righty and so i'm playing it on this team with these guys and the southpaw's clearly better than me in fact at that camp i watched the coaches frothing over the guy and um he's clearly better than me and then i'm playing against this defenseman who's this big goon who's beating the fuck out of me constantly in practice and and and then years later so i i quit lacrosse and took up gymnastics full-time i did some college gymnastics but i was

too busy um i also grew to six feet um and and years later i found out that that that the south paw became a three-time all-american at first team all-american at syracuse the defenseman became the 12-year-long snapper for the Cowboys. And then I realized I said, you know, you might have used the wrong benchmark to assess your ability in that sport.

And there was another defenseman there who was fine. Nothing about him was a problem. He ended up playing for Georgetown, right? I was surrounded by talent I didn't know, so I thought I was, you know, mediocre. My assessment was I'm mediocre, I like gymnastics better, so I quit

lacrosse to play. And I don't regret it because I really love the gymnastics. I just adored the gymnastics. I'm just imagining a timeline now. You're not a chemistry professor at Cornell. You're a lacrosse coach. Tambroni never was. Here's a stat for you.

I have coached two collegiate sports. Find a modern era professor of anything who's coached two collegiate sports. One's a pretty low level assistant coach in Taekwondo. and the other for a couple years i was head coach of the gymnastics team at cornell at cornell hell yeah what uh what made you stop doing that uh they got a real coach and the taekwondo i i kind of timed out i had a my kids were keeping me busy and my i was getting out of shape and and uh but uh and i was an assistant it's not the most elaborate coaching position but yes i i used to uh i can't remember there's kids i used to spar against i love sparring

the cornell kids it was so much fun and they loved it too because we couldn't decide who liked beating the shit out of whom more the college professor beating the shit out of the undergrads or vice versa it's wrong i'm coach i'm one day in the in the ncaa championship i'm a corner coach for this kid who's who's who i consistently could be but in the tournament training of stuff which i used to do um i'm thinking this guy's getting really good he ended up taking a silver in the nationals out here i'm going holy shit another guy who i thought was really good all the way and i i watched him pass me but i told the coach i said this guy's good he kind of didn't believe it he said no i don't know he ended up losing but i watched him pass me

i i at one point i could beat him and then he just got better much and i was starting i was probably 36 years old at that point so i was starting to slow down too he ended up losing in the athens olympics seven to four to the gold medalist holy shit right and and and i'm saying holy shit that was you know i don't mind getting the fuck beat out of me by him i guess right and it was funny so I went he came and gave a seminar he's a professor very high-ranked professor at Penn he came and gave a seminar so I went to see him and we were like asshole buddies I was so tired of those guys and he stands up there he gets introduced as they didn't know about the Athens Olympics and he got introduced as being on the in the Pan Am Games and and and the guy who

introduced him said I had no idea he was this elite Taekwondo guy and the kid the guy's kid stands up there he's not not a kid he's like 40 years old and and i'm just beaming with joy he sits he stands up there and he says uh he says yeah professor column up there used to beat the shit out of me shattered and shit way out of shape and and my peers who know me they're going what what and uh that was that was that did not last totally long though he he he got by me i remember one day i was sparring him and i was beating him and the coach said chinadim that's his name he says you just have to beat the shit out of him so chinadim was letting me spook him and and i turned around i said you really have to put it in those terms

that was true so i should have done taekwondo when i was younger i took it up when i was about 30 yeah molder of mind and sculptor of warriors man of many many uh talents here in front of us here it's a skydive when i was in high school and stuff there's always a little risk taking but never awful right i'm not a big believer in this you could die i would never do parkour or any stupid thing like that even as a kid no chance but the skydiving was fun until my instructor died yeah that'll uh did he die skydiving yeah he actually blew himself up in an air show with explosives lovely yeah so so the last couple of jumps was a fundraiser for uh for his widow and i got a concussion on the first jump because the way i landed

and and i'm trying to pack my shoot i got this bolt of lightning right in the middle of my vision this huge bolt i'm packing my shoe trying to see around the bolt of lightning to pack the shoe most of you go you know note to self maybe you should not jump anymore today right i jumped two more times but then that was the last day i said okay yeah this is getting kind of kind of sketchy so i never got good i you know it was free falling but it was never and i i never did the tandem thing that's for voices they make you do that now but there's nothing more spectacular than than being on your first jump and being outside the plane on your own having to hurl yourself off the goddamn little tiny platform and you know you've got a static line so it's not like you have

to pull the chute or anything but but but but you're on your own out there you're hanging out of the strut and you are on your own boy the adrenaline rush was extraordinary yeah i uh i like to keep it on the ground like going surfing skateboarding in the past i didn't pay for my son to do it if he wanted to do it i just but now it's all tandem shit yeah it's first free fall my first free fall i pulled my emergency chute by mistake it's not that rare actually and and so it was tangled up and i'm going okay don't worry keep your shit i look down and my emergency chute's gone i go fuck it's tangled up you know it wasn't tangled it was just twisted but but i'm thinking oh god that was really stupid dave you know so you like to make that mistake

once yeah i did not pull that one again i had to buy a case of beer and i was only 16 so so i had to get someone to buy the beer for me that's the rule you pull your emergency shoe by mistake you gotta buy a case of beer and uh and as a haze yeah something like and uh you know i i one of guys used to jump with was a swimmer for florida state it was a it was an interesting crowd of characters and a lot of athletics going on so um so now i don't i don't regret shit i'm you know i'm trying to figure out what the next chapter is going to be i think i'm probably just going to become a full-time blogger and uh but i got about five years left in chemistry i would enjoy that i enjoy your writing very much yeah i'm not sure it'd be fun if i had to do it all the time

i write every day it's it's not easy well it's to write but uh you know um i'm writing a review article right now that i'm not going to submit to a journal for five years i just i happen to have the time to do it so i said fuck it i'm going to start writing it and now it's on chemistry why would you wait five years it's kind of a swan song review so it's kind of like a here's my career and i'm not ready for my career when it's not over it's psychologically dubious right i don't want to i don't want to go out there on record looking like i'm cashing in my chips and um so i'm funded for another four years and so um whether i renew after the four years it'll determine it'll depend on what i'm thinking about um there's a bird um i don't know but

i'm not going much past 70. in life or work work might not make it to 70 life um who knows right i just had a friend die uh yesterday actually he uh i feel a little bad about this because i uh got into a fight about his medical leave and he just died of a heart attack it's like maybe i should have pulled back on that whole medical leave part um yeah he had he had some hard work on and they said he was fine you could ride your bike you're fine and then he he killed right over massive heart attack another friend uh died rock climbing they said he was dead by the time he hit the ground that was about a month ago heart attack as well yeah and he was only about 60 maybe maybe 58 or something just no warning damn right suck sorry to hear that yeah i i you know

You know, what's that phrase? You know, being dead is like being stupid. The only one who's not suffering is you. It's a very good one. It is a very good one. It is very good. Yeah. Okay, dude, I'm going to let you go because I've gotten a couple calls from my wife and she doesn't know why I'm still talking to you.

All right. I'll let you get to that. Thank you. It's always a pleasure. long format three week podcast model well um i'm sure i'll hop into your dms at some point in the in the future and we'll we'll do this again okay okay say hi to the bit kooks all right i will i'm sure they'll say hi to you they will go ahead keep tweeting guys enjoy the rest of your day yeah all right bye

peace and love freaks