TFTC: A Bitcoin Podcast - Tales from the Crypt #124: Dave Collum

Episode Date: December 23, 2019

Join Marty as he sits down with Dave Collum, Professor of Organic Chemistry at Cornell University, to discuss: - Climate Change - Bitcoin - Jeffrey Epstein - Inflation - The Fed - much more Follow Dave on Twitter: https://twitter.com/DavidBCollum Check out Dave's 2019 Year in Review Shoutout to our sponsor: Cash App. Head over to the App Store or Google Play Store, download cash.app and start #stackingsats today. Use the promo code: "stackingsats" to receive $10 and contribute $10 to OWLS Lacrosse you download the app. Subscribe to our YouTube channel: tftc.tv Contribute to the show: https://tftc.io/contribute/

What is up, freaks? It's your boy, Marty Bent, here to introduce this week's episode of Tales from the Crypt. I did a terrible job of introducing my guest. When we hit record, someone do a better job here. I sat down with Dave Collum, professor of organic chemistry from Cornell University, but he's much more than that. I've been following him on Twitter for quite some time now, most acutely for his views on finance, but he's got views outside of the world of chemistry and finance and in my opinion it is an example of a critical thinker that we need more of in the world today so i was very happy to be able to sit down with dave over the computer last friday and go over his 2019 year in review before it dropped i had not

read anything before we had this conversation um so it is pretty pretty raw and uh it did read his year in review over the weekend i highly recommend you freaks go do that if you have not already if you have done so already don't worry this podcast touches on a few other topics as well as bitcoin and approaches the subjects in some different fashions as well so it's definitely worth listening to uh dave again as somebody i think is uh one of the best thinkers i've encountered on the internet uh in the recent years and i want to drop uh or excuse me read this tweet that he dropped in july of this year before we jump into this episode because again And we talk about some taboo subjects that are going to trigger some people.

All right, here's a tweet. I am a conspiracy theorist. I believe men and women of wealth and power conspire. If you don't think so, then you are what is called an idiot. If you believe stuff but fear the label, you are what is called a coward. I think that's a very powerful statement. And that's basically the vibe of this episode. So I hope you freaks enjoy it.

We do talk about Bitcoin. Dave is a gold bug and Bitcoin skeptic. But I think we had a good conversation about the subject. This episode of Tales from the Crypt is brought to you by Cash App. As you know, Cash App is the simplest way to send and save money. And now it's the simplest way to try to grow your money. Introducing Cash App Investing. You guys already know that you can stack sats on the Cash App.

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what is up freaks welcome back to tales from the crypt it's your boy marty bent here in brooklyn with another remote interview with a very special guest a man i've uh I've been following on Twitter for many years. I've been infinitely fascinated by his takes. I think we align pretty well philosophically and just really excited to jump into this conversation. I want to introduce you freaks to Dave Collum. Dave, thank you for coming on the podcast. Oh, it's my pleasure.

I love these sort of chats. No, I get a lot of value out of you having these chats too. We were just talking about your most recent podcast on QTR when you were peeing into a mug. That was a great app. I love QTR, too. I was a fellow Philadelphian. I think he's got a very good podcast. Right.

So the reason I wanted to get you on today is multifaceted. I want to talk about Bitcoin at some point. This is a Bitcoin podcast. I want to talk about inflation at some point. But first, I want to talk about your year in review. You do an annual year in review that tends to trigger some people. And you're about to drop yours tonight, hopefully, if the revisions get in. And you think it's going to cause a couple shit storms, particularly around climate change.

Why do you think that is? Well, you know, every year I write about things that I care about. and sometimes there's stuff that I think I care about when it comes time to write, I don't care about it. This year, I think climate change was my biggest, most sort of cathartic section of the thing. I'm going to dial it back. For years I've been surrounded by climate change believers. One night I had dinner with the Secretary of Energy, and I told him I was agnostic, and he flinched, and I said, well, but it would take me 10,000 hours to be qualified to have an opinion, and what had been bothering me is how many people

who I didn't think were qualified seemed to have a strong opinion, and he conceded that point, and then I had a couple of people nagging me to look into climate change, and they would say things like, you know, there's important scientists who don't believe the climate's changing that much, or don't believe humans are doing it. I'd say, you know, everyone I know thinks climate change is real. I don't know a single person who doesn't. And they'd say, well, you know, prominent scientists don't believe it. And so I said, well, send me some, right? Give me some links. And so I expected that they would send me some names from, you know, Sheboygan State college, college of, you know, agriculture and whatever. And, and instead, they sent me a list

of people who were serious, you know, big swinging dicks. And I said, Okay, but, you know, these guys probably didn't deny climate change, they probably shot down some model and the chain, the deniers, which I call deniers and changers, the deniers probably, probably, you know, claim credit for it, even though they just mathematically torch somebody's model, right? And so I started Googling them and that was not the case. These were serious scientific players, Nobel Prize winners, physicists, solar physicists,

who were saying that the climate change story is just wrong. It's just, and they're saying the science was shoddy inside. So the first sort of domino to fall was the fact, was the claim that no serious scientists would deny climate change. And I had just found dozens, actually, who were denying climate change, who were, you know, one guy was the head of the National Academy of Sciences, one guy, you know, solar physicist, chairman of Hebrew University's physics department, right? I mean, these are seriously smart guys. And they were saying it's baloney, it's a hoax.

Some were saying, you know, it's not what they're, you know, as extreme as people say, so there's degrees of denial. So I started digging in, and what I eventually, conclusion I came to, not with great confidence, cuz I didn't do 10,000 hours. But a big part of it is a hoax, I think. There's a $600 billion a year being spent on all facets of climate change. And one of the realizations is that the huge conflict of interest mean that if we found out that climate change was a dud, $600 billion would go poof. and so what are the odds someone's going to find climate changes a dud and the answer is zero

right there's too much money riding out of them so and i tear into it there's i have like 26 maxims where i talk about all the problems you know the the the dying polar bears and how much how much mccrock they are and stuff like that just all the stories receding glaciers have horrifyingly inaccurate depictions behind them and so i chew away on that and act like a judge I just, I don't know the field, but I'm adjudicating the case between the deniers and the, and the, the, the changers and that the changers, a lot of lying going on in that field. There's a lot of real fraud. Yeah. I mean, it, uh, it just seems that way, right?

You have the, uh, a front child of the movement, Greta, um, they're parading her. That's comically stupid, right? Yeah. Right. I mean, at least I think so. um it's yeah but you could argue that the scientists are not doing that right you could argue that's just well you know the scientists might be doing their job and i think they probably are but i think if you got a scientist behind closed doors they'd say look

we don't there's a lot of stuff we don't know i think the scientists would not be out there screaming about the destruction of the planet well if you were able to find all these scientists who had come to the conclusion that maybe the climate is not changing in the ways that people like to think it is how come none of those uh sources are getting into the mainstream or aren't getting out to like how over what oh they get shut down fast so there's a great story like the guy in hebrew university remarkably smart this guy graduated from college at 18 or something he's a genius he published an article in forbes basically saying it's the sun stupid right i mean it's the sun if you follow solar cycles you follow earth's temperature it's the solar cycles and uh

and he said he also claimed that there's not a shred of direct evidence that co2 changes the temperature of the planet and i'm not qualified to say that's true or not i am qualified to say that that guy's smart as hell it's his business and he's doubting right and uh he published this in forbes and about three hours later they pulled the article really yeah yeah they forbes said it's not up to our standards was this recently yeah yeah there's there's some profound liars in the field right there's some there's some there's fraud charlatans liars um there's things like oh i don't know we've all heard that 97 of climate scientists believe that it turns out that's a complete fraud that is a complete where's that stack coming from well so there's a number of

this one guy did a great dissection of a whole bunch of polls and he looked at each one and said how they do it that particular one and I heard a guy say that's not even a debatable number that that's true and one of my colleagues at Cornell I supposed to be a smart guy that comes from someone who plowed through 11,000 papers on climate science looked at just the abstracts forgivable you can't read 11,000 papers they called out all the papers that didn't meet some criteria right first and foremost the ones the abstract said nothing about climate change and and they called it down to a subset of 11 000 papers that turned out to be 79 papers

of which 77 centers climate change and that is 97 so that's where they're pulling that stuff from so 77 out of 79 that were called from 11 000 that's where that number comes from so someone who knows that who cites that number they're a liar if they know that's where i come from and they cite that they're a liar they're a fraud i'm calling you out you can suck my salty balls you bastard right well i guess we should dive into what where what are the specifics of the conflicts of interest like forbes pulled that article or is the media connected to it um you said there six hundred six hundred billion dollars right i mean that that pays off that pays a lot of people yeah right there's whole departments universities there's whole divisions of governments

there's whole programs to fund solar cells there's lobbies or so here's a great great story that i picked up this year michael moore went to to make a movie right it's not hard to picture the movie michael moore wanted to make and he dug into it and the guy made it with a guy named gibbs i think it is who he's made he made fahrenheit whatever he did a bunch of movies with and they dug into it and there was this article and it quoted them and they said we dug into this and it's just not what we realized and he's they said that the big conflict is in the is in the climate industry and what they discovered was the story was just all wrong and then it was it was people looking for handouts and tax rebates and and selling solar panels and and it was it was people whose entire

jobs are about screaming about climate change and so the movie that ended up making was called planet of the humans um you can see the planet of the apes uh spin there um my understanding is it's going to of course hammer big industry but it's not going to hammer big oil it's going to hammer big big wind big big solar stuff like that yeah because we're finding out in germany right now that as much as we want these renewable energies to come uh to fruition and come to the market uh it's really the wind only blows you can't really make the wind blow and you can't control the clouds and i think germany's finding out they had a huge green energy push the last decade and it's becoming very unprofitable from them too so they're trying to force us

into energy sources that aren't really profitable at the end of the day or reliable yeah you know i've known chris martinson for probably 20 years now ironically we've never met it's just digital right but i have friends who i've never met i don't know what you call these people acquaintances i don't know um chris got interest in resource depletion chris is remarkably green chris is you know thinks we're destroying the planet i sign off on all that now i think the earth's more durable than people think right and all you have to do is remember back to those who say, oh, no, we're destroying the Earth. George Carlin said it well. He said, look, the Earth's going to be fine. We're just not going to be there to see it. But just as a reminder, I remember when,

for example, the oil wells were burned in Iraq, and it was going to be nuclear winter with all those oil wells burning away, you know, Saddam and Nuqtis. And we had Carl Sagan on TV talking about nuclear winter and this and that. And we put them out, and it was gone, right? So you go, okay apparently not um the one that really was horrifying and vividly horrifying was when the gulf oil spill right and from the gates of hell we'd we'd opened up the earth's core and oil was spewing out in the vast quantities and just filling the gulf and and it was going to turn the gulf into the dead sea right and then we kept it and now then you know everyone will say well no there's still some damage you go yeah but they're still fishing they're still swimming there they're still

still doing everything you just it it's gone right for all intents and purposes it's as far gone as the exxon valdez is gone so the earth is much more um durable than we ever give it credit yeah and so it's commenting no i also like that example they game on qtr about the uh the coral reefs too after like a hurricane decimate i forget what area the reefs sort of replenished because people weren't swimming in the ocean with lotion and stuff like yeah that's a fascinating story. That actually came through a friend of mine who was talking to some tour boat guy in the Caribbean. And my friend was talking to the guy who was setting it up, and he asked about the reefs. He said, oh, the reefs have never been better. And my friend said, why? And he's an

engineer at Cornell. And the guy said, well, because of the hurricanes, which actually beat up the reefs pretty badly, but because of the hurricane, we've had no tourist seasons for several years and uh and he says that the reefs are totally rejuvenating because you don't have apparently the sunscreen is a disaster people fondling the reef stepping on them with their flippers and and that by the reefs being left alone they've completely come back i've read places that the reefs go through life death cycles repeatedly they cycle like everything else in nature now i i can't confirm this because i saw it just once but i i've been told the great barrier reef has dozens and dozens of die-off rebirths and we could just be looking here's the mistake

the climate science and the more to the point the climate activists the biggest mistake of them all i think they make what they do is they try to figure out all the things that can explain the changes and then what they do is they use process of elimination they'll say okay we can explain all these changes but there's a still this wad left and that must be human and that kind of logic i run into a lot in chemistry where a student will say well what else could it be and my answer is without fail all the things you're too goddamn stupid to realize and so because these guys have a you know like when you do long division and you have a remainder they say well that remainder is human and that's that's stupid right that's that's shoddy science

Yeah, no, that's actually, this is probably a part of the conversation where you can insert Bitcoin into it, because I think Bitcoin actually produces an actionable thing that we can use to actually help clean up the environment, because it creates the incentive specifically to go consume stranded gas, which is one of the worst. Why is that now? Explain that. so bitcoin mining is very energy intensive takes a lot oh oh so just the consumption of energy yeah i've never known which of those numbers to believe right i'm reaching a point in my life and in point of my effort to understand the world um and because every year seems different i have to study different things every year to understand it um i don't believe anything anymore so someone site i cited a paper the other day yesterday i put it i'm i'm twitter i posted a paper about pelosi's brother-in-law getting some 750 million dollar contract for solar panels right i just

posted i said look is this is this say an impeachable or or or um imprisonable offense right i just asked that rhetorical question given that she's hammered on trump right just seemed like in a well time someone sent it to me it's a eight-year-old article and this guy scott nations from cnbc jumped all over me i've never seen this guy on my twitter feed and he's talking about what a loser i was and anyone could could anyone could have shown that was baloney in two minutes and and he cited you know check facts.org well it turns out that the various fact-checking organizations or these partisan operations and so i had someone had actually already pointed that out to me and i went to checkbacks.org and i read what they said about that article but then what i did is i

booted up a couple other articles like oh steel dossier things like that to see what check facts said about that and they were wrong in all those they were wrong in the syrian chlorine gas attacks they were wrong in all the things that we now have information wrong about comey and clapper and right so so so so we don't have a source of valid information we don't have a walter cronkite we have bloggers that's all we got we have guys like you marty well no sure and that's actually one of the bitcoiners favorite books that they like to read it's called the sovereign individual it was written in 1996 by david rees moggs the uh current british party no response yeah this is run by him and um lee davidson and they basically predicted

that in the future in the information age you'll never you you have to be able to validate things for yourselves you're not gonna be able to tell what's true or false absolutely yes and i watch the sources and i watch them cross and if i see an article that comes out of some obscure place and i i here's how i saw it happen i saw it personally happen i was talking to a guy named Tony Deaton, who turns out to be a famous Swiss money manager, old money wealth preservation guy. And I eventually talked him into doing an interview on Real Vision TV, only to find out after the fact, it's the first interview he ever did. And I didn't know that. So Real Vision did this big hoopla and I go, shit, did I do that? So anyway, so I'm talking to Tony and Tony says

he bought GLD and he had $60 million worth of GLD and he tried to cash it in for hard gold. And GLD said, take a hike. And he said he had a team of lawyers and he tried to press GLD to give him the gold. Now, I think within the prospectus, they didn't have to. But Tony tried and they didn't give him the gold. Is GLD the ETF? I posted that. I posted that.

I told a friend that story. And then I watched that move around the globe. And then I called Tony back. I said, Tony, please tell me that story's true. Did I get it right? And he said, yeah. He says, I wrote about it in 05 or 07 or some years back. And I looked up and there I was. He had written about it. But I watched my transmission circumnavigate the gold globe because I just told, I think I told Grant Williams, he put it in one of his blogs and boom, off it went. And Dave's story had become part of the fabric of the gold community that's it was right but the source

sucked but and it's fascinating how quickly that can spread right like i uh right i had the pleasure of interviewing jack dorsey earlier this year and it was crazy oh that'd be fun it was the first uh it was the first time experience like fake news in real life at being a part of a story that was fake i think he's sincere you get did you get that impression i do i do i do i think he's a lefty but think he's sincere i do as well uh disclaimer cash app which is a square company is a sponsor of this podcast but i do uh okay i do think he is uh is pure and for the cause he's doing at least uh what he believes what he's doing with bitcoin in particular i think he's earnest um i think he's right but you know so twitter is said to be this left-leaning thing i think that's

true but i think that they're i i don't think they're left leaning like some uh partisan hit job i think they just lean left yes no and you can see last week it's a sincere left-leaning yeah and last week i think jack's thread uh about hiring five developers to work on an open source standard for social media in which he could give up control on twitter wouldn't be the only client through which people could send these types of messages was an admission that he sort of wants to give up control he doesn't like having to censor people he doesn't want to be embedding so one day you know rudy you gotta know rudy van haven't seen he's one of my favorites rudy rudy rudy is the twitter legend right so one day rudy sends me a direct message um i don't even know

who rudy is rudy's a friend i do not know who he is rudy sends me a direct message he says we're about to get booted off Twitter. And he says, go look at Jack's feed. And Jack had followed the two of us. And I said, I don't think Jack's in charge of booting us. And I actually know where it came from. Because one day I was feeling sort of warm and fuzzy. And I said, you know, people bitch about Twitter, but I find it to be a remarkable ecosystem and remarkably open to ideas. And it's a friendly place to be for the most part. Right. And I said, and then, of course, Rudy, Rudy haven't seen us here so how could you not love this place right somehow that got on jack's desk and he followed the two of us that's that's how that happened but but not many people have the coveted jack

follow right in the world of twitter where you know there's people who are important because you want to talk to them but then there's just the trophy right yeah there's the tanya mcgrath jack dorsey uh joe rogan um guys like that who you know i chat occasionally with joe but but but it's more just wow right yeah uh these are heroes no i know um i know the feeling i am also in the jack dorsey follow club it feels uh oh you lucky boy it's about 3 000 of us so it's not that elite but it's it's 3 000 versus about 5 million the other way so yeah it's uh honored to be in it with you hi jack you may be listening you may be listening what's up jack you may be listening you never know um no but going back to like how bitcoin so talking about you're saying that

you don't know about the stats on bitcoin energy it's a big fud line out there is that uh bitcoin consumes so much energy it's going to boil the oceans right and then is that true i mean it's true that bitcoin consumes a lot of energy yes bitcoin consumes a great amount of energy will that stop once will that stop when bitcoin's done being mined or will that continue as bitcoin sort of just whips around the blockchain uh that'll continue um but miners over okay so it is energetically expensive yes but uh so that this is where the nuance comes in right so there's definitely a lot of energy consumed but what you find is that it actually is most of the times uh either renewable energy in the form of stranded hydroelectric or geothermal um or stranded gas

uh which is so on how is it how is it located how do you sort of coordinate off that way how do you know it's that not just a power cord into a server i mean there is how do you know that's the kind of energy fueling it there is a power cord into a server um at the end of the day i know but the server's hooked up to the grid right that's just energy well so the economics of bitcoin mining are such that you need to find the lowest cost energy and that just so happens So they're going and looking for the off-hour power. Yes, because to help with their profit margins, what you find is the cheapest energy is that which is wasted or not used at all.

And so in the case here in America, mining is actually starting to come to America. And what you're seeing in the back end oil shale in North Dakota and Utah is a lot of these oil fields, they'll drill oil, and then they have excess methane and natural gas. that just they can't they literally cannot contain it and build the pipes to get it to cities because they're too far so they're just forced to vent or flare it on site and it's actually terrible for the environment and it's a lot of energy it's just wasted so it's really a distant why don't

why don't we put steel mills and stuff up in places like this right i mean for example there's a company which has done very poorly i should add but but it's in iceland and it taps into the geothermal right yeah why why do we not attach smelters or whatever to the to the um to the natural gas fields uh i can't speak to that specifically i would imagine i guess it would be don't the smelters have to be by the supply where the stuff is mined or yeah well maybe but it also but if there was something that would require a huge amount of heat for example the idea of getting free energy because you're you're for one thing it probably costs the energy companies to flare it they probably have to pay some tax on the flaring yes that's

a big problem they have emissions taxes so the energy companies would pay you to take that flared gas and use it yes and that's and and then the question becomes why not um like for example one in Iceland, they have aluminum, you know, processing plants and stuff like that. And they're there because of the geothermal not because of the aluminum. Yeah. Well, I imagine it's just a lot. And why would you choose Bitcoin over doing a steel smelter on site, it's probably just a lot cheaper to do Bitcoin to get the raw

materials and bring them on. So the servers are up at the Yeah, so that's the problem is it's a it's a travel and distance problem they literally can't transport the energy from the fields to the cities it's not profitable to build the pipes nor is it possible to contain all the energy and get them into pipes so you show up you solve that transport problem by trends uh by showing up to the field and you bring the bitcoin miners to the source and you cap it on the field mine the bitcoin on site and you can send it anywhere in the world so what's the current number of bitcoin left to be mined

What's that number now? It's less than $3 million. We're over $18 million. So that means you've got, at current prices, around $20 billion of Bitcoin left out there, at current prices. You're probably better at math than me. Well, say you take $1,000 and you make it $1 million into $1 billion. Current price right now.

Seven times three is $20 billion. I'm trying to, the price has been so volatile this week. It's at $71.50. We'll call it $7,000, right? Yeah. So it's about $20 billion. How long before you think that's gone? The rest of the Bitcoin?

Yeah. How long before they've mined it out? 2140 is when the last Bitcoin will be mined. So Bitcoin supplies... That's known? That's a projectable number? Yes, because of the way Bitcoin mining works. The algorithm.

Well, most importantly, the difficulty adjustment of the mining. So if two miners... So how many per year get mined then? right now so every 210 000 so the schedule started from the genesis block to block 210 000 there was 50 bitcoin per minute or excuse me per block um so half the supply was mined up front in the first four years so that was uh doing math in my head right now like 10 and a half million in the first four years and cut that in half again so we did 5.25 million between 2012 and 2016 2016 there was another halving that cut that to 12 and a half bitcoin per 10 minutes that's what we're currently

in next may that'll get cut to 6.25 bitcoin per 10 minutes that's very formulaic yes yes do i remember this correctly um so in some sense i make for the perfect person because i know something but not much um individuals could mine bitcoin in the early days right yes and you could just get out your computer yes uh right so the way mining has evolved throughout the years you could it went from cpu chips from your laptop you can mine on your macbook to uh gpu chips which are graphics processing units which are usually used for gaming computers to a short period of FPGAs. I forget what that stands for.

But now what the market is, the standard is an ASIC. So it's a chip that's dedicated to solving the Bitcoin SHA-256 hashing algorithm particularly. It does that one function and nothing else. And what we're seeing is that ASICs are becoming more commodified over time. They're becoming more efficient

and having longer life cycles. These are serious servers now, right? you're in some big stuff with the the a6s right yeah they're pretty i mean they're not nice like a minor still these are not retail miners now i mean you could buy you could retail so that's the thing like if you have cheap energy or energy that you're able to siphon off somewhere like uh like in a college dorm room say like you can personally mine and contribute to what's called a mining pool and get a payout a little bit you're not going to find a block yourself but you will contribute hash rate to a pool and that pool will divvy up uh the coins that they

Now, is mining more a skill or is it literally just a CPU thing? No skill at all. It just requires plugging a machine in and pointing it somewhere. I see. I see. Okay. So what do you, what's your biggest fear? What's the biggest risk to Bitcoin as far as you're concerned?

Apathy. People don't realize that they need it. Well, what if apathy goes on forever? I don't know. I don't know. I hope it doesn't. Bitcoin could still persist. um it's just whether or not i mean bitcoin's gonna the biggest hurdle bitcoin has to overcome

is is the state and is very much an affront to their ability yeah their ability to print money but i do believe it is a uh the fundamentals of the system are such that it does have a chance at actually being uh being able to to fend off attacks from the state well you're the most circumspect person i've talked to about bitcoin most of them are doing the you know fist pump they can't touch us and i'm going i i don't believe that i think the way you presented it is sounds reasonably valid and that is that you are going to have to beat the sovereign states i see several foes for you guys one is you're gonna have to beat the sovereign states all of them because they're not gonna like it they'll pretend like they don't care but i i'm positive

they won't like it um does bitcoin have to be convertible to dollars for it to be worth anything i don't think so no it just has to be convertible if it's to be a money it just has to be convertible for goods and services right okay it would be it would be much harder but but that that becomes exposure to the state right because you you it's essentially like saying you know sort of in this a real world of bitcoin you're safe the second you sort of reach out of that world and you you connect to the real world where the sovereigns have are the biggest kids on the block um you're at great risk of them saying you can't do that no no i agree i like to visualize it like a uh like a shuttle going into space and we're still bitcoin has to sort of grow and run parallel to

the current financial system and the incumbent system and eventually uh sort of parasitically siphon off of it and then after it's out of the atmosphere break off into its own thing right and and eventually run in the wild by itself to me that for bitcoin i did about a three hour one one day with a guy ironically located in moscow former nsa guy i i don't know why nsa guys are living in Moscow, right? This, this, my head. Um, and he said that Bitcoin does not have to go mainstream to thrive. Uh, yeah, I would, uh, I would agree with that. Right. Um, okay. But, but if you can never leave Bitcoin world without getting sort of caught, right. Without, without the sovereign saying oh by the way you just bought a car with bitcoin the tax on that is

50 percent no yeah yeah it's definitely a problem that's been overcome but people find creative ways to get bitcoin into dollars without going through a centralized exchange well but now now you're but now you're potentially quite readily they can convert that to a federal offense right yeah right the sovereigns can do anything they want they can outlaw they've proven that so so now what you have to become is an outlaw do that and and most people won't do that and therefore it'll keep bitcoin at a profoundly low level uh sort of just for outlaws to exchange chits with each other right well i don't like that narrative that it's all like outlaws so in bitcoin as much as it doesn't need mainstream expect uh adoption especially here in

the west like it doesn't need adoption in the west probably won't get adoption in the west people that need it most are people in places like venezuela argentina right people that are hong kong people are being forced into it that way and that's what bitcoin is really there when you have no other options and it serves that need very well we're actually finding there's a a gentleman here in new york city matt alborg he sat down with him a couple episodes ago he's doing some great research on uh p2p exchanges in in like across the world and he found that actually bitcoin is being used uh like mostly like not mostly but like bitcoin uh adoption in states like venezuela argentina hong kong russia is is higher than most when you factor in uh gdp per

capita and access to the internet and stuff like that so even though um well so there's an interesting old school analogy to this someone i read this article once where a guy told a story about a check that finally made it back to him or he had written a check in some distant land for some service by the time they made it back to him it was covered with scrawl and the check had become a valid check from a U.S. bank had become a currency, and they were transferring it to each other. And the check was making the rounds, and it got more and more signatures and sign-offs and stuff. When it finally made it back to him, the thing had been used as a currency for a very long time, just because it was a valid check from a valid Western bank. And so in some sense,

that's what you're describing. You're describing a currency that is designed to be able to circumvent decidedly bad authorities right that's the yes that is bitcoin cannot work if it does not fulfill that use case so um what i have trouble picturing is bitcoin becoming truly mainstream i i don't think the western authorities will let it buy i i and i know people say that you know yes we can do it without them but again if they outlaw it and go six-pack has to become an outlaw to use it they're not going to right we could also in theory not pay our taxes but we also know we'll get screwed no i agree um and that's why the next go ahead i was gonna say that's why um yeah we got to win the battle of ideas it's uh i think it's important that the oil and gas

industry here in the states is getting involved it's a big lobby if it's uh helping them reduce submissions and uh become more profitable i'm sure they'll they'll have an incentive to fight for bitcoin their representatives well here's another analogy for bitcoin talking to you is making me think about it in some sense it's like napster oh yeah definitely a lot like you started out this background thievery of songs and the system was able to adopt it exploit it turn it into what itunes right and and and use the business model of napster and incorporate it into the mainstream which allowed therefore the idea of napster to survive but why were they able to shut down napster well i don't think they shut it down per se i think they they brought it above board

well they shut it down in its initial state there's no free file share but why were they why were they able to shut it down uh i don't know i mean because people don't like to break the law because they had a central leader because they had somebody they could go to say hey you built you built napster well that's true too yeah yeah so i totally get that so then you there was a guy yeah i can't remember so because bitcoin's immaculate inception uh you sort of have this jurisdictional arbitrage that will play out like if one state makes bitcoin illegal it will they'll may make it illegal for their citizens but it will work and around the world without them and other jurisdictions may say hey we like bitcoin we're going to use it so the other interesting

challenge i think bitcoin faces right now it's the dominant player right if you say bitcoin it's like saying kleenex right yes there's a lot of bathroom tissues but kleenex says it all um but aren't there something like 5 000 cryptos right now yes there are a lot of affinity scams in bitcoin's quick yeah right and so so it seems to me the other risk is um there's always metaphors reminds me of the dot coms where one of the things that caused the dot com bubble to burst was there was just this overwhelming supply of these random dot com companies and eventually it kind of caused the whole edifice to topple over now you had survivors just like you had car companies that survived the 20s and 30s um when they were talking like 250 of them at the time yeah you have survivors

but it strikes me as possible that to survive may not necessarily be the leader at in 2019 um i would push back with that and say that i would uh uh compare bitcoin uh not to the dot com not to the dot com bubble not to the companies that made up the dot com bubble but the protocol wars that came before the dot-com bubble the comp you serve versus aol versus the open internet so yeah right that's that's more analogous to what's going on in bitcoin where bitcoin is a protocol and protocols have different network effects and uh system uh distributed system effects that they are i would argue more winner take all than uh than a stock market or something like that right so so so yeah it's it's like battles between you know microsoft word and word perfect

and and all sorts of things where beta versus vhs right and i'm told beta lost that because i somehow made it not porn friendly and uh um and so yeah so so i guess one of my concerns would be and i'm not saying therefore you're an idiot because i don't believe that um you were an idiot if you bought bitcoin at a dollar and sold it for five dollars um that one of my concerns would be that you don't know who the winner is going to be bitcoin's the leader no question but when you have 5 000 contenders not now i read again i don't know what to believe but i read that there's ones which are much more efficient than bitcoin much more uh consumer friendly than bitcoin i again i don't know if you're your listeners are bitcoin

fans don't send me an email or if you want to send it i don't care but but i'm not picking on you right i'm just saying that when there's five thousand this is like a big wimbledon bracket right and you guys have the lead you're the top seed but but it doesn't doesn't say that in the end it's going to be you very very valid uh concern and argument but i would push back by saying that you're never going to be able to replicate the uh the essence of bitcoin's immaculate conception now that there's many eyes on this space the the purity of bitcoin's launch can never be replicated so that's one thing number two amazon amazon yeah number two um the the more efficient faster lighter blockchains uh they may market themselves with that but they also don't tell you about the

trade-offs that come with those with those better uh functionalities bitcoin is actually at the protocol level slow dumb and pretty stupid like it it only does a very few things but it doesn't very well and that's all bitcoin at the protocol level needs to do it doesn't need to be able to do very complex computations at the protocol level we should probably put that up the stack second and third layers so bitcoin gold's a pretty stupid metal too but exactly so it only needs to do very few things you need to switch it needs exactly it needs to assure that any individual can download the blockchain participate in the network and send a transaction without it being censored and in a peer-to-peer fashion that's all it needs to do

and everything else from there is gravy everybody else in my opinion came in saw how and that's the thing these are open source softwares they can be forked and you can easily spin up your own cryptocurrency and people saw that and saw it as a way to make money and are trying to replicate bitcoin success but i would argue yeah tell me about that tell me about the give me some background or give me some insight into the you know i read about you know bitcoin scams and i again i don't even know these exchanges and where some guy walks away dies with 190 million with the codes then they say oh maybe he didn't die after all right maybe he's down there with jeffrey epstein and his friend you know who knows right so so uh tell me about the um tell me about the risk

factors that the media loves to present just like they like to talk about tungsten filled gold bars right yes um exchange hacks throughout uh have been the bane of bitcoin's existence throughout its history obviously mount gox being the biggest bitfinex was hacked a few years ago um that's yeah a lot of fud around that a lot of people uh see that exchange are getting hacked and sort of push that on bitcoin to say bitcoin getting is getting hacked but that's not the case bitcoin like gold is a is a bearer asset it's a digital bearer asset when you have when you have bitcoin on an exchange you are basically it's like having bitcoin in a vault you're trusting that that the people that operate that vault are going to gold safe the vault's not yes and exactly

and so when you have bitcoin what you should do is take it into your own possession and it demands extreme ownership it is a bearer asset at the end of the day and then there's those horror stories like these have nothing to do with bitcoin but the guy who had all his codes on a hard disk and his wife you know put it in the trash and i'm thinking you know if i had my codes on hard disk i'd have about 20 hard disks right i'd have thumb drives i'd have all sorts of shit tucked away i there's just no way hard drives fail right what was he thinking so you'll like this story i don't know if you have time to go back and listen to a podcast but we had a guy by the name of john dell on a few months ago and he was actually one of the biggest drug dealers david jane rowe right

got in a lot of trouble yeah they got in a lot well this guy did get in a lot of trouble he was a drug dealer on the silk road and he was one of the biggest dealers uh on the website is he the guy who got thrown in the who scout for silk road i can't remember no not ross albrecht um this is just this was an individual dealer on the site and he actually wound up getting arrested for uh something not to deal with the silk road something to do a mute space of him dealing in person he went to jail and they took all his personal possessions where they like put it in bags and they keep it uh for you and give it back to you when you get out so he spent four years in jail and they put his usb with all of his bitcoin that he made from the silk road on it and they

literally handed his bitcoin back to him like when he got out of jail they had no idea it was on this little usb stick so he was he was he was forced to hold all this bitcoin from like twenty dollars to twelve hundred oh yeah you know i if you could give me bitcoin for 20 bucks let me out with it 1200 i'd go to jail right i did you know i wouldn't hang myself but um yeah yeah that's interesting but that's it shows the power of bitcoin unbelievable stories there must be some spectacular stories of not you know i did a podcast the other day with max kaiser and stacy herbert um and they were very early adopters they must be stinking rich right i mean just truly extraordinarily wealthy now yeah they're uh they're big bitcoin believers they've been around

right and they've been for a long time i mean max have been ranting so and given that they started life with with some resources right this is not the 12 year old in middle school who also a few of them have done well apparently um but these guys must have thrown a lot of money at the start when you multiply what 70 000 or something you you win yeah some people have gotten insanely rich from this stuff and there must be people who have totally liquidated right they've just oh yeah done it and then they there was uh the infamous bear whale uh he sold 30 000 bitcoin at 300 and i was around then we all watched uh the order books i forget what i think it was okay coin maybe we all watched the order books as uh they ate away at 30 000 bitcoin this dude sold

at $300. You know, people ask me, God, I do so many podcasts now, but Tony Greer from TG Macro, he asked me, do you have Bitcoin? And he asked me two questions. I said, no, no. He couldn't believe it.

I said, here's what would have happened. I think I first started paying attention to Bitcoin was back in the single digit dollar value, right? But it was so wacky looking, right? It was so fringy looking. It had to be a religious faith, by the way. You have to have religious faith to hang on to anything good, right?

If you buy Microsoft at the IPO, the temptation to take profits on that would have been overwhelming the whole way, right? And so if I had bought Bitcoin at 10 and it went up to 100, I would have sold. I would have said, look, this is this creepy, weird currency that so-and-so convinced me to buy. Tenfold, I'm taking it and I'm done. And then I would have been in therapy for the rest of my life. So I don't regret not buying it because I would have been the guy who sold $800 worth of founder shares of Apple. Now, there's many of those stories out there. Oh, there's countless stories out there.

Yeah, well, that's the thing. The volatility is really jarring to some people. Oh, it's way worse than anything I've ever seen. Yeah, well, doesn't it make sense, though? We're trying to discover new digital monetary good. Wouldn't it be? So someone was talking about how Bitcoin has settled down, and that was a problem. I have mixed emotions on that, because if Bitcoin's going to work, it's got to settle down.

Yeah, at some point, but I don't think that's going to be anytime soon. Right. But if it doesn't settle down, it becomes just sort of the speculator's playground. And so it's not going to serve this sort of the universal purpose. You know, if I go to the store tomorrow and my groceries cost 20% more because some whale dumped Bitcoin, it's a problem, right? Yeah, well, it's got a- Currency needs to hold value.

Yeah, but does it go through a continuum, right? Does it start out as a collectible like it was in 2010, where it didn't have a price and move to a store of value where you're literally using it as a saving account. Well, it's more of a store of value. Yes, right. But it's more of a store of value now. What's that?

It's more of a story, or the overwhelming use case now is store of value, but that's not to say that medium of exchange won't come in the future, right? Right, but for example, the dollar would not be the reserve currency if you could lose half of its value in a year. Yes. Yes. Right. So Bitcoin has to settle down if it's going to mainstream, I think.

Oh, I agree. I would agree with that. But that will it will just take time. Well, the Bitcoin owners, will that then trigger a big sell off again? Right. It is. It's kind of a paradox in that on the one hand, I think a lot of owners of Bitcoin are not doing it as a store of value. They're doing it because they want to get rich. I think you'd be. So the question is, what's the equilibrium price where the people holding it are willing to hold it at that price and not worry about the fact that it's not going up? Yeah, I think you'd be surprised at the amount of fanatic long-term holders. We call them hodlers here. There's a funny story behind that.

Yeah, we call them hodlers in gold, too. Anecdotally, I don't know the exact number. I know there's a very strong contingent on Twitter, at least, and I've met very serious long-term hodlers in life. There are people that view Bitcoin as an opportunity to revolt against the fiat banking system. Oh, yeah. So that's why I'm not in any way hostile to it. I'll tell you what you guys do to me that's painful. I think you're cannibalizing safe haven asset investors.

Hey, I'm a big believer in the gold bugs and the Bitcoiners should get along. No, no, I totally agree with that, actually. But I think gold would be higher if Bitcoin didn't exist. I think it's sapping up demand. I think actually GLD was invented to sap up demand so that people wouldn't grab the gold. I think GLD was give the proletariat their paper gold. And they can, of course, make money off GLD, stuff like that. But I think the rush to gold in the absence of Bitcoin, in the absence of GLB, there'd be a physical gold squeeze that would be pretty hard.

Oh, I don't disagree with that. In some sense, a lot of the consequence, my world is a consequence of your world. In some sense. No, I definitely agree with that. I mean, it's opportunity cost, right? At the end of the day, you got to decide where you want to park your wealth. And I think moving forward, at least me personally, when it comes to viewing the option to store my wealth in gold or Bitcoin, I'm going to choose Bitcoin just because it's easier to send. It's hard to get physical gold and then protect it.

Bitcoin's easier to protect, send. It's more divisible and actually more extendable as well. Right. And then at the same time, gold has that history. Exactly. It has the Lindy effects. Right. If you were to say, look, one of these two will be zero in 20 years, you know which one you'd have to bet on, right?

Bitcoin, yeah. So it's kind of a conservative versus non-conservative wealth preservation, right? Yeah, but that's not to say there's not room for both, right? Oh, I think there is room for both. Yeah, yeah. It's like we have a euro and a dollar, right? yeah no well there's i i like to have both options the more uh hard assets that people can save their purchasing power the better buying bitcoin oh it's young squire it's a party bet

it's a very uh very personal question now i got i got into bitcoin i was when i was in college i was studying economics in college um at depaul university and uh it was what year 2012 um i was taking some bitcoin i was a poor college student mind you and i i learned about it i actually did read up on it before i dumped a bunch of money into it um uh but uh yeah i was in college studying economics i think i stumbled into it because i'm writing paper on monetary policy and i was like googling uh exotic realized googling exotic monetary policies system was run by idiots right well at the same time i was working at a managed futures fund and so we were in a fund of funds and so we had a bunch of ctas indexed in our fund and my job was to write our

our commentaries on why the fund performed the way it did which entailed me speaking with all the cios of the hedge funds we were indexing and and also entailed me following the fed and other central banks around the world for three three years and that's so i was learning about bitcoin and studying this in practice in real life and yes i quickly realized that the people that people that think they're the smartest men in the room had no idea what they're doing um right i was like 23 what the hell right there's a there's a name i've done in kruger effect i think where the people are still i can't hear you too great right now i was you were slipping out on me too all right is that better seems fine to me you were not going out enough to worry me

but um no that's perfect um you're back now what were we talking about oh yeah my story yeah that's how i got into bitcoin i lost i lost faith in the fed very early on luckily i was yeah we're on the same page there i was uh i was a senior in high school in the fall of 2008 taking a economics elective actually and it was literally right when lehman was collapsing and my teacher was like oh boys this is uh this is a big thing and so i went to college like i have i have some funny uh on record stuff, I sent an email to my former close friend and housemate, Rick Sherlin at Goldman back in May 6, 2002. And I can see the email trail below it. And I had said something to him, but I can't see that. But he said, you know, there's always risk. What is it that has

you especially on edge right now this is in 2002 i wrote about a five-page email and i laid out the subprime banking crisis in all its glory and the one thing i got wrong i said general electric was going to go south i said i said general motors um um whatever that gmac whatever the heck that the funding one was going to go south he said the banks were going to go south and the one i missed was i thought jp morgan was going to be the tip of the spear and that turned out to be precisely wrong um and uh and then uh and then what five years later it did it actually shows you how early the subprime risk was showing up the subprime risk was actually showing up in the late 90s believe it or not so then one day i'm standing in front of my organic

chem class and it was march of 2007 and i always tell stories i i tell stories about what my kids did that were outlandish you know tell stories about i did that was outlandish you know but i was going to dive into a ported potty to get my watch back you know stuff like that and um i turned in the class and i said sort of out of the blue i said the banking system's about to go down now and they looked at me in utter amazement now this is march of 07. now there's only one indicator that i know of that was saying that it was called the market avx index it was a derivatives index and it was starting to take it was it's flat as a pancake and then it just started to tank and there's this woman named tonta codename who was writing about stuff that was going

on inside the pipes of the banking system that was bad so i turned the class i tell them this and i said i literally said which i can't believe i said you might find yourself someday not being able to get money out of an atm machine right i can't believe i actually came up with that winner because that was very close to what we got to so then it turns out in 2009 i had the same group all over again in a senior honors thesis class we meet once a week in the first day of class i said and it was february of 2009 now right so it's just a complete storm happening no one could miss it. And I said to the class, I said, did I not tell you that this banking system was going to collapse? And they said, yes, you did. And I said, did any of your econ professors, many double

major? And did they tell you? And they said, no. And I said, what are those assholes paid for? Right? So then I had guest lectures through the semester. My first guest lecture for honors thesis chemistry was the CEO of Morgan Stanley Bank. and he spent two hours talking to the kids about the mortgage crisis he had cut his own teeth on generating two million fold levered mortgage-backed security funds he said he left in 06 because he saw it coming he said i have got to get out of here well so it seems like we're right back where we were in that period of time it's very much and they say the banks are safe I don't think they are because corporate debt is considered ground zero.

Yeah, the CLO market is crazy right now. The CLO? Oh, my God. The leveraged loan market, which is basically payday lenders for companies, is totally cramped up. And the leverage inside corporate America is so huge. Well, you know, underfunded pensions, all that stuff. and therefore the the question is could the banks possibly be safe when their corporate clients are all not safe and the answer is no i don't think so no yeah i mean what's going on with this repo

market right now did you see there was a glitch in the fed systems yesterday and direct deposits were having problems getting out oh i didn't even see it i was busy yesterday so i was i saw nothing yesterday yeah tell me about that what was the glitch uh apparently a few banks were affected by a network glitch at the federal reserve which prevented them from getting out direct deposits in a timely manner um oh that's interestingly so that so so i'm sure your readers listeners know this but then but back and i think it was september of 18 there was this big hiccup where the repo rate went from two percent steady as can be to nine percent one morning yeah we've been covering at all right yeah we've been covering that topic pretty heavily here we actually just

And so it's like when your cardiologist says, oh, shit, what was that? And then they go, oh, shit, there it is again, right? You're in trouble at that point. So my theory, I asked tons of people what was happening. I put out an AP Twitter, and I collected, in my interview, I collected all the answers. And they were all delivered with great confidence. And there are dozens of answers. and what I think the bottom line is that the bank is an emergent system and it is so complicated

with so many feedback loops that it just occasionally has a cardiac arrest and right now it's having cardiac arrests and the Fed doesn't know what they're doing they just know that they have to keep shoving money into the banking system as fast as they can and they're pretending like it's normal and it's not normal right it's like if your cardiologist said yeah that spiky shit don't worry about it that that'll pass that's indigestion right it's not no the uh most recent episode i recorded a man named parker lewis uh he used to work for kyle bass he's like a fed mensch he's been following the fed very intently reading theirs where does he work now why did he leave kyle he works at unchained capital um and works uh it's a bitcoin uh oh my

God, Darkseid. He's a light sider. I love Kyle. I chat with Kyle occasionally. He's an interesting character. You should ask him about Parker. So Parker, we had a very good conversation. Basically, to simplify, the Fed unwound $700 billion of their balance sheet over the course of 18 months

and didn't expect a liquidity crisis to pop up anywhere when every dollar is levered out like 39 times. It just makes sense that there would be a liquidity crisis, right? So I don't know if they're stupid for not knowing this had to eventually come to this, or if they're stupid or cowardly for not being able to take the pain that's somehow to get from here to normal. It's like, you know, you were in college. Sometimes you just got to hurl, right? You down that 18th beer, and it's time to let her rip. And if you somehow think you get to skip that part, you're dreaming. Yeah, but it's as if they're desperately afraid to let that happen because they think it'll all die.

Well, so here's what I think they're afraid of. So this thing I write, I realized when I got done writing this year is that absolutely every last chapter was more about social change than anything. So I wrote a lot less about screwy IPOs. I didn't even talk about WeWork, right? And I realized that's all kind of pregame ceremony stuff right now. So we're seeing all sorts of wacky stuff. But until the first kickoff, until that game's in play and all of a sudden we start seeing that thing, exact revenge on the speculators, none of it matters. It's just noise. And so I didn't write about it this year. And so, but I realized that what I wrote about every single chapter had some component. I wrote about Bitcoin, right?

I'm not a hodler. I wrote about Bitcoin because it's about social change, right? I write about gold, social change. Modern monetary theory is about social change. Is it really? Is it about control? Oh, yeah. No, it's rising socialism.

It's socialism. It's Marxism on the rise. And so I think the Fed is terrified of the next recession because they know that when Joe Sixpack is put out of work again and they're bailing out the banks again, that it could get violent. I think we're I think we're I've heard historians say we're pre-Civil War set up right now. i've you look at it the ripped his face i've heard that too if you look at what's going on in virginia right now it's uh it's getting scary down there right and and i've watched adam schiff who i consider to be one of the most repugnant people inside the beltway which is which is like winning wimbledon right yeah it's hard to do it's hard to do that and you know it's a bias right i

have a political bias but he seems repugnant to me um he was giving a talk and people started yelling from the audience, liar, liar, liar. They were disrupted as hell. And as much as I hate shift, I go, this is not good. And it's not good for several reasons. One, it's just a sign of the social fabric tearing apart. The second thing is what bothered me more, and some of your followers may be offended by this, but I think that's a tactic of the left, not the right. So the left speaker right and and throws milkshakes on people for for for being right-wing and stuff like that so i find the left's behavior to have been pretty appalling since the 2016 election they when they woke up and found out that their favorite candidate was beat by the person they

consider the most repugnant person on the planet they lost their shit and so they decided that there are no rules and that we're going to change this world no matter whether we're doing it the way the wrong way we're going to make it happen right so it's a kind of a noble cause syndrome it's called and i so i think the left lost their mind i think the right's going holy we got a guy in the white house that no one expected we kind of won right the bipartisan message of trump bipartisan support should come is that the two parties try to feed us dogshed and we said we're picking them this time and in some sense left or right you should say you know that's kind of a win and it's also a message to the guys inside the beltway don't push us we will vote

you out and we will vote in a bad looking person if we have to i i actually kind of like trump now i mean i pulled the lever with a very shaky hand that day um only because hillary was was was worse than adam schiff um but i could have voted for bernie because they would have neutered him he wouldn't have done any damage um i could have but i was written up in the guardian for supporting you're not gonna believe this the the the washington bureau chief of the guardian picked this up off twitter he picked up half the story he says i'm writing about elizabeth warren this is like 2000 i don't know 14 or something 15 it was a long time ago um he's i'm wondering what this elizabeth warren thing is and and and i saw that you support her now what he didn't know is

i used to chat with her late at night by email and i'm a right i'm a reagan republican right but we used to chat late at night and i wrote some blogs for and stuff like that but but uh but i said it's weirder than that um because i also support ron paul and and his brain explodes and and i said it's because i think they're both honest i'm not so sure about elizabeth warren now although i haven't given up on her but she's got super lefty scary lefty maybe she'd pivot to the middle later but boy it's her her multi-gazillion dollar plans are scary to a to a libertarian type um but in any event so these are repugnant people but the left lost their mind the right hand but now when i see those tactics coming out of the right

i go okay the war is on now right yeah it's pretty fucking scary um right what uh do you think there's room for a centrist here like there are people just drawn too far to the polar opposites of each other we'll find out right we're gonna do the experiment in 2020 um i i think do the democrats have them now i'm pretty sure trump gets re-elected i i would say so too i i i so i asked my left-leaning friends which is what i would call everybody um i said what demographic voted for trump who won't vote for him now and i can't name one yeah maybe i can't think of a demographic that will turn on him well if the democrats had the balls to put tulsi in front like i think about voting for her i've been telling friends about tulsi for about four years

i go who and i go and this woman in hawaii you got to pay attention same i have tweets from like 2016 like tulsi you should run for president right tulsi and she's hotter than hot too oh my God, what a double win, right? What a double win. But no one knew who she was. I'm going, this woman. And I realized the other day during a podcast, she must have already been running because there's no way I would have spotted her if she wasn't projecting out there, right? But I told friends, Tulsi Gabbard, Hawaii, watch her, watch her, watch her. And then she did the Rogan podcast. And I think that launched her. I think Rogan can launch a career. And that's my dream one, by the way. If I get a Rogan podcast, no offense, Marty, you're not Joe Rogan.

If I get a Rogan podcast, I think get on the boat with Frodo, head off with Elvin Chicks to good places. I would love to see you on Rogan. It would be so much fun. And I've watched people say, you got to get calm, you got to get calm. But it's just white noise to him. He's getting presidential candidates. There'd have to be something to shake the world. He follows me, so we're connected.

But it's a loose connection. We can make this happen. He might listen to this podcast. You don't know. Maybe. Joe, I want a goddamn podcast, if you're listening. I'll do anything for it. I'll pay for my own travel.

Do you think the Democrats are going to self-sabotage again? Like, I feel like Tulsi is honestly the only... Oh, yeah, I do think so, yeah. They're not going to let Tulsi near anything. Andrew Yang, they're trying to stuff down now. Apparently, I didn't watch the debate, but I saw a bunch of polls that suggested he won. And then the newscasters didn't even mention it.

Like, they didn't mention Ron Paul and O.A. i was on ron paul's home page of his website no way as an endorser right that was cool that was awesome i had to have i got to have dinner with him one night just by chance not for being on his website just i was at a meeting a investors meeting a best friend conference i was speaking at and uh and he was the sort of the keynote speaker and they they sat me next to him at dinner. He's such a sincere, soft-spoken, humble guy. I would have loved

to have seen Ron Paul president. Oh, my God. He would have been so good. He got dicked over, too. I mean, there's plenty of YouTube videos. He got dicked over by everybody. They wouldn't mention him by name on Fox News. It was like Lord Voldemort, right? Holy screw.

Just like Bernie, right? Do you think the system's sustainable, though? Do you feel like we're at the tail end of this form of this democracy? Right. How's that forth turning? Not only here, all over the world. Yeah. Yeah. So I finished my interview and I said I pointed out that there was a lot of violence. I said violence is trending. When I had mentioned that the central banks had opened the Overton window by claiming that their QE was normal. I said you're opening the Overton window. It's not normal. Overton window is the window of possibility.

Right. I said the populace is opening the Overton window, too, now. and the violence is trending and so i think you know just like the french revolution the american revolution they they come in waves i he something feels wrong to me my i'm i it's like it's like i'm in a thunderstorm and i can the hair on the back of my neck is standing up i completely agree what like my conclusions i so i write about all the shit and i try to be funny i'm snarky as shit I'm irreverent but I get to the conclusion and I go deep dark and there's no humor and it's all this is why I am so so pessimistic and not 140 pages of stuff that wasn't that and then I get to the end and I just go bam and I hit him with this freight train of of darkness you think it'll

wake people up well it wasn't by design so I write the whole thing and then I write the conclusion and last. And I got to the end and because I had inadvertently sort of lizard brained my way through social change, I got to the end and I realized that what my lizard brain had done is it kept drawing me back to the questions about social change and the movements and things that are in the air. And so I realized the conclusion is that shit is happening and it's done. I'm terrified of new corporate America. I'm a capitalist, right? But General Motors, US Steel, General Electric, they were huge, powerful companies. I never felt like they controlled me. But now I feel like the corporate world controls me. So Facebook controls us.

us. Google controls us. They don't just know everything, but we could easily reach a point where you're late on your healthcare payment and your car ceases to function because you owe them. This is why we need Bitcoin. I don't want that. Neither do I. That's why I focus on Bitcoin. If you jaywalk in China, the cameras pick you up by facial recognition, and by the time you step on the curb, you've had money deducted from your bank account.

well that's the beauty of bitcoin it's a push system they can't pull it from your bank account right and well i i'm with you that's why i'm sympathetic to it but god damn it they're they're gonna squeeze you hard oh i know who's who's a cash economy right if you get audited and your spending habits don't match your your irs report they're gonna hammer you right yeah yeah so the bitcoiners if they end up on the the ugly the wrong end of the ugly stick to have to beat sovereign states that's a war right that's not just a skirmish oh no i know but i think it's a an imperative war that needs to be fought we're heading into i'm totally with you we're heading into the digital age we have a decision we either have china's surveillance

economy exported to the rest of the world or we defend freedom in the digital age with tools like the other problem we have is we are spending so much more than we are creating our the growth in our debt is you know five percent above the growth in our gdp you can't grow five you can't grow debt five percent above gdp no i mean you're doomed yeah and we're making shit too we're producing shit like right what is twitter what is twitter facebook netflix google um what do they create amazon even is just a it's it's a great great company but it's not us steel it's not the standard oil yeah making little trinkets like uh no amazon wealth aggregates it doesn't create as much as it aggregates wealth right yeah it's because amazon i think well that created wealth

no it didn't it aggregated it you are now wealthier great congratulations yeah they don't heat houses they don't build houses they don't they don't they don't feed you they don't do the things that we have to get done now apple does but i think apple's rca 1929 i apple went to replace jobs and they replace them with scully again apple's dead i mean the i mean they're not dead obviously but the uh post steve jobs apples is not up to snuff and i don't i don't think the products suck dude the keyboard sorry for calling you dude the keyboard on the last uh macbook i know people do it all day i think they're from john elway actually i know where i got he walked past a mean lineman one day and the guy was looking snarly and always says

hey dude ever since that moment i've been calling people dude um everything sucks yeah well is that because there's a misallocation of capital enabled by fed policy i would say yes well but even i'm just talking apple right they went from the magnetic connect and i do a plug in that that's going to break your computer when your labrador hits it well that's you now need adapters why is that they're driven by the quarterly balance sheet the quarterly numbers right there's they have extremely high time preference that's another reason why I like Bitcoin because it helps people refocus time preference low versus high time preference nobody wants that nobody

wants to build beautiful things that take a while anymore it's all plastic crap you know what the Berlin Wall fell I had two thoughts almost back-to-back so i had grown up my whole life thinking that wall was permanent the sense of permanence the berlin wall was it right the cold war was permanent i had grown up in the cold war and then the wall fell so the first thought was wow just truly wow i can't believe it the second thought i had though very very quickly was who is going to control us now there was these two forces that were incredibly balanced and we couldn't go into the middle east because we would cause world war three and they couldn't go into the middle east because they would cause

world war three so it's this stalemate on all these fronts and all of a sudden boom the soviet union's gone and i remember rogoff claiming that uh that we would save the soviet union with a martial plan like approach right fuck henry to understand is the reason the martial plan was there was because of the soviet union and we didn't have to help the soviet union because there was no soviet union to protect against so now now he's just trying to push nerp on the world he went from that bad idea to this one right nerp hang him like mussolini yeah you put out you put a nerp on my ass i'm i'm i'm voting for guillotine shit right it's uh nerp is just insane All right, let's dive into that. Why do you think NERP's insane?

Well, you can't charge people to lend money, right? That's not the free market. There's not a shred of free market in there. The free market would never even let you lend money for less than inflation, right? So the question is, well, how do you get NERP then? And the answer is because they jerry-rigged the system by statute. You have to buy certain kinds of bonds. And if they make them go negative, then you've got to buy those bonds, right? The various companies that by statute have to buy those, they buy them. And then I saw this great interview that sealed the deal by a guy named Mike Green. And he talked about why, for example, Argentinian 100-year bonds, which is the stupidest thing ever, right? I would rather have a payday loan operation

lending to crack horse than buy argentinian bonds and and um and they've gone up they went up 75 last year the capital gain on argentinian 100 year bonds went up 70 they will not they will not go a decade without defaulting so whoever's buying them they're trading pokemon cards they issued those bonds last year didn't they yeah and they've already defaulted yeah and you know Treasury yields on Portugal and Hungary and Spain are below 10-year U.S. Treasuries, right? These are nuts, right? The bond market is completely and utterly broken. The question is, how is this happening?

Well, Mike Green points out that you have indexed market cap-weighted index bond funds just like market cap-weighted index stock funds. So, we know now, if you are paying attention, that the reason the FAANGs have taken off like crazy is because the bigger the market cap, the more money gets dumped into them, and so you get this virtuous cycle up, which will eventually lead to a vicious cycle down, right? The reverse trip is exactly the same in reverse. But the bond funds are the same. That's the part I didn't understand, such that as these bonds went to lower and lower interest rates, they got more and more of the money dumped into them because of the market cap of the bond i can't remember the term i keep

forgetting this term whatever the the price of the bond goes up so more money goes to buy that bond so the stupider the bond the the the the more overvalued it becomes the more money goes into it right this isn't this is not buy low sell high stuff and so what happens is is that now what apparently once you cross zero the algorithms go nuts yeah it's uh einstein's into those bonds did you read howard mark's letter a couple months ago i try to read everything howard puts out depends which one well the one where he's talking about nerp and maybe einstein was wrong that uh compounding interest is not the eighth wonder of the world i've made that argument for forever there's there's nothing exponential that's sustainable a guy named albert bartlett at

berkeley has talked about our failure to understand the exponential function is a fundamental problem nothing can grow exponentially so it's it's all very linear yeah and and so compound interest is not the greatest invention of all time it's it's great while it's compounding but then there'll be a reset what the average person doesn't understand is that over the 20th century or over 150 years since the end of the 19th century that stocks have returned about the same as the gdp over that makes and that makes us and it's a very low number you inflation adjust you take out fees taxes all that crap you get about three and a half four percent and that's what you used to get in the 17th century and in the 18th century those were sort

of the rates you could get on bonds and stocks. And Ben Graham said, look, anyone who thinks they can make more on equities than on bonds in the long run is delusional. So going back 150 years, do you think stuff was less volatile, prices more stable back then? Well, we had a gold standard, so that helps. You don't have to deconvolute inflation, you have to pull it out there's something i post on twitter that someone else posted to me just two days ago i think it was called the chapwood index yeah yes kind of like a a shadow stats.com inflation index where they look at 50 cities they look at 500 items this is a classic basket of goods and the inflation rates in these 50 cities have been running at 10 percent right and i

wouldn't have put it that high but it sure as hell isn't jay powell jaybo stupid 1.7 that's moronic no it's i mean the cpi is rudy is a very big proponent of this the the cpi is a terrible metric yeah and the other thing here's one thing that no i've seen no one talk about i don't know why i talk about it all the time for 10 years now um no one talks about the accelerated rate of depreciation of a good and my favorite story i broke a goddamn blender it's one of those big ones you drop it on your foot you're going to the er right and uh and uh and i dropped it and i it shattered and so i had to buy a new blender that blender was at least 40 years old the new blender lasted about three years all at four that means that there was a tenfold inflation correction

needed in terms of the cost per function and that's never accounted for it's never accounted for right the fact that your client lasts for five six seven eight years that's it never accounted similar to shrinkflation almost in a different way it's similar to shrinkflation but this one doesn't get accounted for and so the fact that you know when i was a kid if i got a toy for christmas i played with it all year the average toy for christmas now is a life expectancy of about new years yeah well this goes back to time preference and like easy money leading to a misallocation of capital it makes us build shitty products like people are gonna have access to those loans but also because people can't afford the good stuff so they buy the shitty stuff they

don't realize they're in a vicious cycle yeah well let's talk about this vicious cycle right to keep up with inflation the common man if he is able to do so is forced to do that via mutual funds stocks bonds whatever um do you think that common man doesn't happen no the common man couldn't afford a 400 emergency expense but should we like in the digital in for humans like should we have to chase yield this way or should we have a monetary good that just allows us to maintain purchasing power over time at least maintain it maybe grow that person power being hodlers we we agree on this one right this is you know the idea that so so the central bankers who say inflation is too low they're they're liars or morons or crooks they're not

they're not being honest right they're not being honest to themselves know full well that inflation is a bad thing paul volcker before he died said two percent is way too high right rest in peace you know the the federal reserve act says they have to have a stable currency they didn't say a stable inflation rate they said a stable currency right and the stable currency zero and many of us would argue no it's actually a net it's a deflation because of technological gain right yeah no it's uh it is but like that's what i think is aiding to this increase in violence and what's tearing at the social fabric right people are mad left right doesn't matter everybody's mad but they blame politicians but do you believe that the core of

the problem is the fed and not the politicians well it's certainly the fed because part of it's because the fed is the only ones who actually have the kind of centralized power to make a difference right so the fed could hike rates when they have to be hyped and take the pain Which Volcker did. Nobody's done it since Volcker. Don't forget, our national debt was peanuts compared to now. So Volcker had slack to work with. And Volcker also was looking at this inflationary effect. It was just huge.

And it wasn't just inflation of 10%, which we just talked about, but it was the expectations of a huge inflation too. So he, people, I remember that period. It was painful. It was painful, that kind of inflation. Volcker realized that even if his job is to take care of banks, he had to deal with his inflation. He was not so self-sacrificing as much as just that's what history was calling upon him to do. Yeah, there was long gas lines and stuff like that going on, right? But Powell's cowardly.

People thought he was tough. He's cowardly. Actually, someone said, Druckenmiller the other day, I watched an interview, And he said, he said, Powell's like yelling, but not as good. And I'm going, oh my God. Oh God. My head just exploded. Well, I sort of feel for them though.

There's like, they, they have a, they're just forced to keep the charade alive at this point. You're too generous. I don't. No. Do you think? Their, their job is to not screw this up. Yeah, exactly. Their job is to, you know, it's like, it's like a feeling bad for the general who couldn't

make the call on dropping guys on omaha beach right yeah he can't be the general if he can't look and say look we're going to lose a ton of guys this is going to be on this is going to be gaslight yes but we have to do this right and i'm not sure we did right i you can debate that but if you realize that you got to put guys on omaha beach you can't recoil from it because it's going to be ugly yeah that's a very good point it's a very good point that's what leaders are right You know, they say opportunity makes leaders. It does not. Opportunity reveals leaders.

It feels like we don't have any very many good leaders today. Well, certainly not inside the Beltway. No, definitely not inside the Beltway. I never thought I'd reach a point. You know, I was never a big Obama detractor. I was so impressed with his ability to be at the mic. He's better than Clinton, in my opinion. And he wasn't appalling, in my opinion.

He bombed too many countries for my taste, especially for a liberal. I think a liberal should not be bombing countries, right? If the neocons are country bombers, the liberals should not be. But he bombed the hell out of everybody. That wasn't good. But I never thought I'd reach a point where I'd say, holy shit, I'd take Obama back right now. He looks awfully good compared to the loonies that we're looking at now. By the way, the people have to pay attention to the modern monetary theory, right?

That shit is coming. And it's just bad news. it is marxism wrapped up in garbage right it's it's it's it's three week old sushi that's just bad why why is it such a hot topic now it's like uh parker we were talking about earlier you talked about it's it's too best two bastardized theories put together for like a completely brain dead bastardized theory it doesn't even make sense i wrote about it you got 12 pages on modern monetary theory where i've tried to put it together and it turns out the modern monetary theorists did the heavy lifting for me they wrote a manifesto this year which by just reading the

manifesto you go oh my god now i get it they're scared right their own manifesto traumatizes the reader is it about the green new deal oh that's a part of it but that's a small part of it oh it's they nine trillion is a small part of it well that's a big number but it's a small part of their platform they think that government government committees ought to decide what industries to influence they think they ought to use monetary policy to decide how to emphasize one industry over the other they think that um they think that you can keep printing money that you should just pay for it by printing they're setting up the cognitive hubs they're going to spatially redistribute us and they say that um let me think of the other things they say

They say that monetary policy, their distinct issue is they have to deal with the fact that some people are too wealthy, right? And so monetary policy is in charge of that. So they think that they're in charge of deciding how quick to burn the economy and stuff like that. It's like there's no room in their theory for free markets. They think that you should keep higher. The government should hire people to do stuff when the economy is not running at full throttle.

So they want to build bridges to nowhere and crap like that and big digs and stuff with workers. And then they talk about how when the economy is running well, they'll D, the phrase was D, employ, disemploy people and let the free market take over. And I'm going, so you're going to what, stop the big dig? you're gonna stop the bridge to nowhere and you're gonna and you're gonna you're gonna build them with temp workers or something what what what are you talking about they don't they have no idea how to handle inflation they they you know they think they think they can't they they think they're in charge of directing money to solve the climate problem well i mean this is really fully stopped these people need cat scans they're nuts yeah well it's individuals who think

they can micromanage very complex systems emergent systems like how how is this not how is this not like known that these systems are complex and should be emergent tell me no one can give me an example of a single thing that didn't evolve right that didn't evolve through trial and error calling the herd throwing out the failures keeping the winners right i don't care if it's the microchip an organism i don't care what it is they evolve you have to have a darwinian selection to make a complex system and they want to take that out as does the federal reserve so their their best argument is the fed and the current system are are run by idiots and i go yes we agree on that part uh 100 agree how do we rest control from

these idiots who was it uh hike said we'll never have control of our money till we rest it from the whole hands of the government gold i would argue is in the hands of the government via the volts in the 6102 acts executive order 6102 bitcoin on your own bitcoin maybe that sly roundabout way to take control the money you know we need bitcoin or gold both will do fine that's my guess my guess is bitcoin and gold are joined at the hip in terms of the future i think gold is like sort of like a treasury bond where bitcoin is more of a um a more speculative um um protection mechanism right so higher risk higher reward i like that i like that uh description right and i'm just going with the treasury yeah

well dave thank you for all that you do it's been an incredible hour and a half it just blew through 90 minutes pretty quickly or in 90 minutes but it felt like ranting i like ranting you know to have someone to rant back and forth with and i get it off my chest i can tell well we have plenty more time to rant if you have anything else on your mind that you think needs to be ranted on uh well so my year review gets uploaded tonight this is friday the 20th in case i don't know when this is loaded um but not evening of friday the 20th part one um the most entertaining part might be the epstein part i paid pretty close attention all right let's dive in and one of the problems the epstein story presents is that it's part of

a continuing stream of independent sets of rules for powerful people and unpowerful so for example i was going to write a ton about jesse smollett the epstein story sucked the action right out of the room on that so i make brief mention of it right but but you know michelle obama calls someone in chicago next you know he walks right that's how the system works so that struck me as an important story but then epstein right behind here's what i'll say to your readers um listeners the epstein story in my opinion is the biggest scandal in u.s history and they are furiously trying to put it away because because they they want to keep the story simplified to he was a perv he had friends who are pervs let's move on right that's what they're trying to do

it is a web of thousands of people that goes back decades and and and and and doing things and and controlling the world in a way so it really is you know it really dwarfs things like kennedy assassinations in my opinion stuff like that i think it dwarfs it uh i do as well i mean it's it was it was so fucking blatantly obvious what was happening i mean well there's a non-obvious part i think um i think there's a more than 50 chance he's not dead uh i mean you're you believe that or you believe there's a possibility yeah not just possible i put it if i had to bet a paycheck right now i would bet he's not dead and here's the simple argument here's a simple argument i have an argument for why we'll never travel in time too so don't underestimate

me. Epstein had been doing, he was a Mossad intelligence agent for 40 years, right? His whole life, his whole adult life, he's been in intelligence. He's been setting up honey traps. He's been, you know, running a bed and brothel, brothel and breakfast. And he's been, they say he was blackmailing people. I don't think that's the accurate description. I actually think he was luring people into this twisted world and of course he then owned them but but he then all they off they were offered power and wealth and young girls right this is not blackmail this is something altogether different so epstein had dirt that could bring bring down unbelievable people king andrew's sitting in jail he's sitting in jail and a guy with 40 years of experience is

he not going to say if i don't get out of here alive and in one piece i'm going to release the hounds that's what snowden did uh daniel ellsberg's pentagon papers he released it to multiple news sources so they couldn't suppress it right and and so epstein knowing the risk he was he kept getting you know convicted of stuff and then and then getting let off on easy things and sealed court cases and the whole mess shows that he knew how to play the game so you couldn't safely kill Epstein at all there's no way you could just whack him because he'd have a suicide it's called a suicide switch a dead man switch dead man switch yeah and and so he was untouchable in fact the biggest risk was someone who wanted this to happen killing him right that was the biggest risk in my

opinion and you know his his bimbat partner just only Maxwell who I give the nickname to jizz I was Very proud of that. Her father was the most famous Israeli spy of all time, right? I mean, this is a wildly connected world. Epstein traces back to Roy Cohn. He traced back to Meyer Lansky in the 20s, right? There's an amazing story here. And so he's on some beach with a facial reconstruction getting rub and tugs from jizz.

Jesus. And so it's witness protection, right? Yeah. But the punchline, I know who the dead body on the gurney was. Who was it? You really want to know now, or do you want your readers to? So if you read this thing, it turns out social media tore this apart fast. There's a picture of Epstein on the gurney.

Of course, have you ever seen a dead body on a gurney on the news? No. But this one made it to the news, right? So that right there is sort of odd. but if you look at the guy's face on the gurney the profile look at epstein they're not the same guy the ear is wrong the whole ear construction you know all this cartilage and shit totally different shape the nose on the guy in the gurney's got a distinct sort of bend to it epstein's just a straight edge so the nose is all wrong and so the question is who's the guy

the gurney well just so happens and this this i i put no probability on this theory none whatsoever but it's the funniest conspiracy theory of all time the funniest three weeks before that a guy who looks like epstein died and you look at him you go that nose looks right to me that ear could passed for right he died the media said unknown cause it was announced a number of articles were written said he was deeply embedded up the shenanigans and eastern block crap you know usual dark world the guy who died and as i put it i was so proud of this one i said he wouldn't even be freezer burnt yet right three weeks earlier but then i realized if you recognize the similarities you whack them and you need the carcass you take the photo of the gurney three weeks back right so

you wouldn't have to put them in deep freeze for three weeks you just take the photo and and there's all parts of the story that fall apart but the guy on the gurney the guy in the mets had at a baseball game you're looking at and you're going this guy died not question there's no doubt he died three weeks early there's no doubt you go that could be an epstein clone right there he's pretty good he looks like the guy in the gurney is wait for it wait for it hillary's brother no yes sir yes sir brother hillary's brother tony rodham three and i give an a plus to the spooks charged with getting a carcass and saying hillary's brother's a candidate and he gets whacked three weeks earlier no cause of death given and they put his ass on the gurney they

take a photo and i think the other message is maybe that social media actually picked up on this and they said that maybe it's a message to hillary epstein ain't dead either bitch right i don't know wait but he didn't die they did not announce cause of death there was a few news stories and that's it wait so hillary's brother did die he absolutely died yes major press stories you know credible press stories not that there's such a thing anymore but they were there and no cause of death every article said no cause of death given hillary announced it right that her brother died and blah blah blah and then three weeks later guy in a gurney looks like her brother posing as epstein damn i'll send you a copy of my year in review by email it's fucked up because

it's like not hard to believe that i know and you know the idea that the spokes could get him out of prison you know with jesus if they can't do shit like that right the guards fell asleep and they were overworked the fact that the camera went out the camera the camera went out there's no footage showing anyone going in and then there's footage that's not disappeared again i mean this they've been revising this plot on a daily basis and they're trying to put it away they are so they don't care if prince andrew looks like a perv they don't care clinton looks like a perv like That's a tough sell. They care if we find out that the Israeli Mossad is

infiltrated all of Silicon Valley. They care if we find out that there's a network of pervs, including maybe hundreds, if not thousands, of people globally. They care if everyone is all connected in this twisted web of connectivity. They don't want that shit. They want it to be, Epstein's a perv, his girlfriend's a perv,

he was he he was rich no one knows how he got rich there's no evidence that they know how he got ranch right the whole thing smells from topped about the the connection of f-team to the to the intelligence agencies is i think unambiguous the ambiguous part is what that finish that end game was right and i don't think you could kill him i do not think you could kill him because he'd pro yeah he'd probably definitely have a dead man switch right i'll tell you that's what i do right my holy crap right how could he be so stupid as to not do that well but it's like everybody knows it's bullshit and that well you know what you remember who the corner was right michael bodden yeah who else did he do in the past the um he did jfk

it was a young punk he did jfk and then he testified for oj and then he he he oh my god he was the corner of the stars he's 86 years old and they bring him in to do the autopsy and and you know say well he was strangled broke his hyoid bone they don't care if the world thinks he got murdered that's not relevant either because they say yeah he had lots of powerful friends he was a risk someone had him whacked we are what that doesn't shock us right this is the clinton body count is everywhere, right? All the memes on Twitter about Hillary and a guard's outfit bill and guards. It just went wild. There's no news in that. There's nothing new. But here's the deal. Not one of his accomplices, not one of the pervs that, you know, there's transcripts that have

been released of the civil cases. I've read them. They're original screen grabs in which the victim is saying this person naming names i'm not going to name because they have law degrees this person raped me why are they not being interrogated right where is jizz jizz maxwell why is she not being interrogated why did they not raid his island for months until he killed himself why we heard nothing about what was at the island right right we had to get luke rodolph butcher his last name Rudolfski to go to Peddo Island with his

camera by himself yeah well there have been so his there's a police video from 2005 I think it is where they obviously it's by protocol they walk through Epstein's house and they just film everything after he got arrested and there's you know there's sort

of mildly erotic art everywhere and there's and what's really noticeable is there's just bedroom after bedroom after bedroom and every bedroom has an attached bathroom right so they're all like master bedroom master bathroom sort of combos you know the houses i see you got a master bedroom master bathroom and then the kids all share right so the other thing you notice is there's stacks of towels there's toiletries none of it being used there's no toothbrush laying on the side of the sink bedroom after bedroom it's pristine you realize

you're not looking at a house there's no uh it's not a snapshot of a human existence there's no you know there's no uh dishes in the sink there's no stack of papers it is a bed and breakfast or what i call a a brothel and breakfast yeah it's a cat house running this operation out of his house and in his connection with roy cone roy cone was a massively evil hitman for political means he was a kingmaker and any he he was the lawyer to studio 54 where all the where all the hedonistic shit took place yeah what was going on at studio 54 well i don't know i don't even know if it exists now but back then it's where everyone was doing all sorts of uh stuff that you and i wish we could do um so cone was a badass and he was he was he had tied to rupert murdoch and the

reagan and he made he made and broke careers he was tied to uh cone was pictorially you can even see it he was tied to mccarthy he was tied to janitor hoover he he he was tied to mobsters Cohn was Jeffrey Epstein but here's where Epstein differed from Cohn Epstein was sort of I think pathetic so what they had was a guy who could do all the pervy shit but he wasn't a kingmaker right he was he was he he's like the drug dealer who consumed his own product too much so he got so wound up in all the bimbos that that he just wanted to go around and do the shit that he was helping other people do yeah you know everyone the left for example is shaken off the fact that clinton was all over the logs right right it's how do you forgive him for that

right why are you not saying holy shit well trump was even on the logs too like yeah but he wasn't on the plane i don't think and actually in the original transcripts there were some some some footage where um where they're asking about trump and and and the woman said no i never saw him but she had seen clinton she had seen uh prince andrew she she you know right then i i have this funny line sometimes i write shit i go oh i'm proud of that um where i where i had i i imitated fantasy island and i had and tattoo says boss boss deplane deplane and then and then ricardo Montalbán says, unshackle the girls. And so the

XC story to me is just humongous because it's been put away. Barbara Walters, Access journalist, never called anyone out on this stuff because they you know what they all share? They all want to be elite, powerful, connected. Well, that's actually

right. Well, I think I was actually very happy to see Project Veritas get that uh get that yes that hot mic yes they usually overplay it but that was a good hot mic or that one and but i think she said we had everything i'm going no you didn't you had a small fraction of the story right they didn't have everything and by the way that has not been released even now right what do you mean so now the story's relevant where is it right it's gone by the way this the epstein connects with harvey weinstein harvey weinstein connects with massad i mean this

this this is a this is an extraordinary so i think it's a web here's the question a normal guy normal guy your wife's not watching right normal guy we all like to think we're benevolent but But what most of us have never faced is not only some hot chick hitting on you, you're marrying some hot chick hitting on you, because you put out the message, hey, I'm not available, and you shake it off, you move on, and nothing happens. But what we've never faced is one where a hot chick's hitting on you, and her fucking job is to get you. So if some chick who could stop traffic is banging on you, and her job is to catch you,

that's when you find out what you're made of right and then the question is can you slowly but surely suck guys into this world so you suck them into that and they say oh yeah i get you an 18 year old next you know you're doing 16 years but you think your shit doesn't stink you think you're so powerful and all these people around you right and then the question is how hard would it be to get these guys to go all hedonistic and i don't think it would be that hard it's a slip it's a process a little bit at a time and you you justify it by saying i'm untouchable i'm you know and remember back when uh dominique strauss kahn got booted out of what is the imf i think they took him out with a honey trap they had a chick accuse him of raping her

and and he'd been banging chicks for years but when it was time for him to go and i think lagarde replaced him. They took him out. They just took him out. They just had her accuse him and out he went, right? That's how they do it. Roger Stone took out Gary Hart, that monkey business photo where Gary Hart was with the chick sitting on his lap in a boat called monkey business. And then that leaked. And next thing you know, he's not running for president anymore. Roger Stone set that up. Who's the former prosecutor? I keep forgetting his name. Gaunt face. He's very ambitious then he got taken out by some prostitutes um here in new york um yeah it's um spitzer not spitzer it's her elliot spitzer yeah yeah he got taken up by stone and metaphor

those were just hits yeah those are honey traps those are that's the world they're in why these guys are so deluded is to not recognize that they're being set up Well, there's a guy, Peter Dale Scott, who studied drug cartels, Berkeley professor, studied drug cartels, and very quickly realized that drug cartels were not the story. Intelligence agencies were the story. I thought that drug cartels bought our politicians and said, look, we'll give you money or we'll bury your kids alive in your backyard. You make the choice. No, no. We decide which of these drug cartels gets to survive.

Just like in Afghanistan, right? You're our warlord. You go ahead and sell your poppies, but you work for us now. And if you don't, we'll kill you. And when Noriega went off the reservation, we went and got him. We had to go get him. He was irrelevant, but we couldn't let anyone else who was on payroll show that they can walk. So it's leaving the mob, right?

You're made mad at that point. And so Peter Dale Scott wrote about the drug cartels, but he talks about this idea of this deep state. He called it deep politics, but that's where the origin, I think he might be the origin of the concept of the deep state and about how once in a while a window opens and we get a quick glimpse you know what was that so a Kennedy assassination for example quick glimpse I'm a truther it turns out I I looked at I look at the physics I don't need politics for that I look at the physics I go not a joke my dad built buildings for a living he didn't buy it he built buildings for a living he didn't buy he had an expertise in fireproofing

He didn't buy it. And so I did a poll on Twitter. I got about 5,000 answers. 65% were truthers. There's a lot of people who don't buy the story. It's a matter of degree, though. I don't buy that story at all. Do you believe they did this?

I don't know. Do you believe they did that? Maybe. So it's degree. But there's components of 9-11 that are just dead wrong. I mean, start trivially. They found Mohammed Atta's license in the wreckage the next day. a hundred million pounds, tons of whatever,

and they find his license from the ball of flames, right? So they start lying immediately. They ship the Saudis offshore immediately, right? So right away, the whole thing's fucked up. Building 7 alone. Right, that doesn't mean that it was an inside job, but there are certain things about the inside job of 9-11 which are so problematic and so against the laws of physics

that I go, it's not legit. and there's some great truther um documentaries where where they they interviewed dozens of aeronautical engineers saying that plane would have ripped apart you can't do that right and pilots saying there's no chance i could fly that flight path right no chance i could fly that flight path the official flight path going into the pentagon was impossible for a person to fly manual and so there's all and actually chris irons at qtr i've been watching this for years when a physicist sent me the building seven video and i said holy shit that's all wrong but um but chris iron sent me a couple of these documentaries and they were just

great we go these are parts of the story i hadn't even seen like the uh i happily bet a paycheck 9-11 is a screw-up, a serious screw-up. I think Pearl Harbor was a total screw-up. I think Lusitania. I think we get into wars by false flags. Lusitania was loaded with armaments. It wasn't a civilian ship. Pearl Harbor, there are memos from admirals saying, do not put our troops in Pearl Harbor. They're indefensible. They did anyways. and they didn't even have guard towers they didn't even have guard they needed to get us into a war and we needed to sign off and so they needed to they needed japan to bomb the shit out of us there's memos guys saying we're going to get attacked within a week

right there this is just how governments do it yeah no at 9-11 in particular i mean i don't think it was an inside job by the u.s government there's some fuckery i mean the passport building seven it's all that's i mean it doesn't make any sense yeah it just doesn't the pentagon's wrong there's not a shred of footage of the plane hitting the pentagon nothing credible how do you fly into washington dc with 45 minutes notice and no one catch it on a camcorder right not possible not possible right and by the way i mentioned the flight path that's that plane did it did a 270 to hit the pentagon that's the official story at 540 knots it turns out the aeronautical engineers say you fly 540 knots at sea level the plane is getting

shredded those planes are spec to fly fast at 35 000 feet where there's no atmosphere they don't fly 540 knots at sea level yeah and they the pilot said i couldn't do that 270 if you made me there's just no way right so there's a lot of parts of the story that just just keep failing to add up and you know there's a lot of spaghetti that sticks to the wall kind of and you go well if that was the story i'd say forget it but there's building seven never should have no chance should building some of them no chance no and started a war we're still in it we're still in it and you know what the middle east is about it's not about oil it's about war the industrial military complex the trillions of dollars being spent

in the middle east is about war not about oil we can buy their oil that's not exxon's oil anymore that's aramco's it's about war it's about building jets and selling them to saudi arabia to then bomb yemen and pretending by the way last year i wrote about Syria's chlorine gas attacks and how they were all wrong. They were all, they were torn apart by social media. They made no sense. I wrote about it just in the last two months. There've been articles coming out saying those were fake. And I'm going, really? It took you a year to figure that out? Right? The Skripal poisoning I wrote about, the Skripal poisoning hung on the Russians. That was a farcical, farcical story. I'm an organic chemist. The drugs, the compounds they

supposedly were russian derived could be made in a standard sophomore organic chemistry laboratory that simple they're so simple that you can literally take the four key ingredients pour them together in a bucket and you'd have a toxic group even if you didn't take any care to do it right you'd have a toxic where they could kill people that's how simple they are i put them on my final exam and of course i thought i told the story about how i got into an international incident and then i and then i i i put the the the one of the the novichok nerve agents on the exam i said how would you make this let me give you a hint it'll take three steps total 100 credit in the entire class with one kid who screwed it up so apparently he can't be a

terrorist okay but they're trivial and then they said oh these have to be the russians they were lying right i ended up all of our i had al jazeera calling me right because i spoke out and said that they're lying maybe the russians did it but what they're saying is a lie yeah no i mean the syrian guessing in particular when john kerry was trying to get us into that uh right it was a total farce well but it also that instance in particular gave me a lot of confidence in the power of twitter because i honestly think twitter helped us not bomb syria after that and the conversation right i think that that's exactly right so what happened is the story fell apart too fast and so they couldn't justify it right if we had twitter if we had twitter when they were

trying to sell us the iraq war i bet we could have stopped it yeah no i mean twitter would torn the story apart what do you think that uh these communication channels now provide an opportunity for peace in the future are we going to give peace a chance well i write about that too social media social media digital world is either going to save democracy or cause the demise of democracy i don't know which way it's going yet yeah because they can send propaganda across it just as much as we can debunk it and what bothers the hell out of me um and i mentioned two names of people gavin mcginnis who i think unfortunately unfairly got hung out as basically a neo-nazi he's not not even close um the other guy who was hated by the left was uh milo yiannopoulos

right and and i understood why people hated him i mean he was very polarizing they've rubbed him out he's gone actually um taking him off all the digital world they've scrubbed him he's been erased he actually just did a very good podcast with ari shafir um talking about the concept of trolling highly recommend you go check it out i don't care what you think about what's the name ari shafir um he's a comedian he's actually good friends with rogan um a-r-i-s-h-a-f-i-r um but he had milo on about a month ago um basically explaining milo's mentality of why he trolls and it's to get at truce that's what trolling is about at the end of the day it's and and i understood why people hate him but i don't understand why in any way shape or form

is good news that he could be scrubbed right and there's great guys tim pool here's the guy started out super left and now you listen to him and boy he just hates the left um tim pool is this guy who's who's who at best i can tell has no credentials all he has is the head on his shoulders yeah now Tim's a wonderful job of tearing apart these issues now Tim's incredible I've been following him for a while actually trying to get him on the podcast too yes you should he's so smart I mean the smartest guy I ever met was a third grade educated bean picker brains and education should not be confused no no especially in today's education system menstrual studies is not appropriate i have a whole section on thoughts on college too where

i basically try to say quit wasting your money on stupid stuff i think college is a good thing but if the kid wastes it you're you know you're taking a four credit hour course of menstrual studies you're dropping eight grand right eight grand to study menstruation right your kid better find a better a cheaper way to find their self right yeah i mean you could teach yourself anything online i'm a big proponent of i mean in college i had a lot of professors where credentials are going to be under less emphasized oh definitely 100 where it's going to come down to your skills not your credentials i think we're already there especially in the world of software development oh my god yes yeah i mean edward snowden i don't think he was highly

educated right no no i don't think so um yeah so software development is very emergent like you you just learn by tinkering with it and you get good at it every time you know you can't be really taught i'm told yeah i think i'm the only guy in um the known universe who took a gradual level physics course without any calculus um uh so in any case it's been fun yeah it's been great Well, I can't wait to read your end-of-year review, even though we just talked about a lot of it. As long as these guys, you know, their family issues don't delay it. I like to release it on Friday evenings pre-Christmas. That's the kind of, you know, there's always one Friday you go, okay, that's the target Friday right there.

Yeah. Well, whenever it comes out, I'm going to be reading it very quickly. How are your thoughts of Bitcoin after this conversation? even though it wasn't really the focus well they haven't changed so much except for um because i've had conversations like this but um i'm not going into it um in in part because of this this i don't want the risk reward combo right i i'm i'm happy to dial it back with my gold risk reward and i do believe that if you win i win too and so i don't worry about that um i do think the big worry is is how bitcoin sustains itself against the state i think that's what i think that's the and i can

think of all sorts of ways they can try to squash you and then the question will be can they squash you and it seems to me again i keep coming back to it has to be sustainable as a not really mainstream currency because i think they can make mainstream not work i think the sovereign state can make people not willing to use it to buy a pizza now bitcoin is street money it is black market money right it has to it has to be able to survive as that kind of currency if it can do that his name is mccullough from from russia he he he said it it can his opinion was it can he says it doesn't have to go mainstream to survive um yeah there's gonna be some bumps in the road right oh there already have been many many bumps yeah i know the the the sell-offs are impressive right

they're they're they really look death defying there there's no stock or something that does that and then bounces right those are those are usually the last you know gurgling noises coming out of a dead company to do that yeah you get used to them after a while yeah it helps to be up so you know i was buying gold between 270 and 290 and so when it went from 1900 to you know 1200 ish um it's not that it didn't hurt but it sure as hell takes the pain out when you're still up by a factor of whatever and by the way over the last 20 years gold has beat the s p by two percent annualized something to think about freaks tackle the gold bugs at your own peril we've beat your asses for 20 years that's why i started buying it so you can bite me if you don't like gold

well i won't be biting you because i do like gold i also like bitcoin and i like you like you as well dave and i really appreciate you taking now we're at two hours and five minutes i really appreciate it it was fun i hope your uh hope your audience got their money's worth oh they're definitely i'm very interested to hear their reactions How many people click? What's your typical click count? We'll get around like 10,000 downloads here. Oh, that's pretty good. Nothing too crazy.

I have no idea what the click count on my year in review is. I have no idea what it is. I've never gotten a hard number. I should ask the Peak Prosperity guys. The other thing, it comes in two parts, and what I really want to know is what's the click count in part two? Is there a huge drop-off where people read part one and go, I just can't read part two, right?

Do people follow up? yeah do people follow all the way but um i get hundreds and hundreds of emails after i write this thing so um so i think uh you know it keeps inspiring me to do it but it's so cathartic and it is cathartic like passing a kidney stone cathartic it's uh i i reach a point where i have over 100 pages of poorly written poorly edited unfunny raw stuff no graphics it's just awful it's just a pile of prose and i look at i go this is just crap but i've written enough papers in my career to know that yes but crap can be edited out of crapness right so yes and i've actually got it there and i'm pretty happy with

it it's different this year yeah you're speaking to somebody who writes a daily newsletter and never edits it oh my god you have my sympathy yeah it's not fun it's yeah you gotta you gotta face it yeah yeah william buckley was asked how do you write three three op-eds a week and he says i just have to think of three things that piss me off every week i'm thinking oh boy that that sounds easy actually yeah people the bent is a daily rant that's what people call it and someone else said the trick is to be able to say the same thing a hundred times and make people think it's different that is true as well that is true as well okay let's call it let's do it let's end it we're out had fun that was a lot of fun you're uh i might freak you out with this

ending here peace and love freaks nothing freaks me out nothing other than someone who likes hillary