The Pomp Podcast - #1077 Dave Collum On Why Everything Is Worse Than You Think

Starting point is 00:00:00 what's up everyone this is anthony pompliano most of you know me as pomp you're listening to the pomp podcast simply the best podcast out there now let's kick this thing off david column is a professor at cornell university he also is a leading thinker on markets and the larger world around us in this conversation we talk about everything including why he's so bearish on the future months to come what he thinks about various topics like russia ukraine china taiwan the election, the virus, and much more. We also spend quite a bit of time talking about financial markets and financial assets, including Fed policy and many other topics that most of you are interested in. I really enjoyed this conversation with David, and I hope that

Starting point is 00:00:43 you guys enjoy it as well. Let's get into this episode and let me know what you think once you've completed it. Anthony Pompliano runs Pomp Investments. All views of him and the guests on his podcast are solely their opinions and do not reflect the opinions of Pomp Investments. You should not treat any opinion expressed by Pomp or his guests as a specific inducement to make a particular investment or follow a particular strategy, but only as an expression of his personal opinion. This podcast is for informational purposes only. All right, guys, I have Dave here. I don't know. We've recorded two or three times. This one's going to be the best one because we live in the most chaotic times.

Starting point is 00:01:21 Let's maybe start with the easy stuff. The Federal Reserve, they, for, I don't know, months, told us inflation is transitory. Newsflash doesn't seem so transitory. They now are saying that they're going to create tighter financial conditions and that will bring down inflation. Doesn't seem to necessarily be working. What's your general read on the Federal Reserve as the market maker and ultimately the judge, the jury, and the executioner of financial assets right now? I don't think they have control of the inflation at all. You know, Roach warned about it in an article about two years ago that they were making the same mistake as Arthur Burns.

Starting point is 00:02:02 Smart guys I know, like Einhorn and stuff, all say it's gotten into the DNA. The question I like to ask rhetorically is if you're a contractor and you were going to build a house two years from now, what sort of markup would you put on materials and labor to bid that house? And the number would not be three percent. So that's the inflation expectation problem. And I think I think it's I think it's profound. The idiots who say because inflation held firm and eight and a half percent, which we can ignore the you know, it's not eight and a half percent story. It's much higher. But Jimmy Iorio yesterday said his restaurant's doing twenty three, twenty four percent. In any event, the headline was that it didn't go up anymore. And then Kamala, the rocket surgeon, said, therefore, there was no inflation. So it's sitting at 8.5% by efficient numbers. She said, therefore, there's no inflation. I go, Kamala, you should have taken calculus. That's a second derivative thing you're talking about there. so when you see this so uh i think using the construction example is a perfect way to look at uh markets to look at how the real economy works and uh i don't know what the answer is in terms of

Starting point is 00:03:22 a contractor that is looking to bid a house that'll be built you know forget two years just one year from now right and i agree it's not three percent uh and i actually think they don't know And so some of that is just them causing slowdowns, them trying to wait. When we saw the explosion in lumber prices, there was a ton of people saying, like, we have no clue where this price will be 30 days from now, let alone six months or 12 months from now. And so I guess less about the specifics of the numbers, but just when you have so much volatility in various parts of the economy and so much uncertainty, what are the second and third order effects of that? should we expect there to be breaking of additional things across the economy just because people are scared or people are uncertain of the future? Or has markets always operated this way and maybe it's just being magnified because we're seeing big inflation numbers?

Starting point is 00:04:16 Well, to the extent that we've all seen over and over and over numbers quoted saying that the average person doesn't have $400 to replace a microwave if it breaks. And now the cheap ones cost 400 so that's a good number um to the extent that they say that the median family doesn't have that then if all of a sudden you tack on let's say conservatively eight and a half nine ten percent increased costs annualized uh where is that money going to come from and and so i think you can hear you know uh glass shattering you know teeth flying around the room now because i think the average family can't pay the bills. Yeah. And as we see this, obviously core inflation tends to be a metric that economists and politicians love to point to. I see you shaking your head. Core

Starting point is 00:05:09 inflation having all the things that you actually consume not included, which is, you know, some big brain mathematical analysis. What should we actually be paying attention to? Is the CPI number the thing to watch? Is it something like real wage growth? How do you actually analyze via the data that we are provided what's going on? Well, ironically, I mean, remember when inflation was low and everyone was ranting about how it would be great if they had inflation? I thought it would somehow deal with their mortgages and stuff. And I'm going, you guys have no understanding of inflation. No one who's lived through a serious inflation, which I'm old enough to remember in high school and in college, no one who's lived through it knows that it's good news. Anyone

Starting point is 00:05:59 who's lived through it knows it's bad news. These guys who say someone's going to erode their debt or something are dreaming because their wages are not going to keep up. And when the wages catch up, then you have all these secondary effects like, well, first and foremost, the markets are going to cut their profit margins in half easily because of the labor costs. And so they're going to have to either jack up prices, which is going to make it even worse, or they're not going to be able to jack up prices, which means that the market's just doubled valuation. So there's things like that. There's just so many, what do you do if you've signed a contract for five years for, I have a dog on my lap, so it's going to be a little jiggly here. What do you do if you've

Starting point is 00:06:44 signed a contract for five years? All of a sudden, your cost of goods and services, the projections are just way the hell wrong. This gets back to the house. But there are long-term contracts. There's people who have five-year wage contracts because they signed them, their union reps signed them back in 2019. I don't know. It's just nothing good comes of inflation. And the people who think it does have just not seen inflation before. And when we look at something like the labor market, obviously, the Federal Reserve and many other organizations continue to point to a strong labor market. And they're specifically looking at the unemployment rate sitting 3.5%, 3.6%, open rolls in America, 10, 11 million, depending on

Starting point is 00:07:28 the week. Is it something where the labor market will be a lagging indicator of a recession or trouble and we should expect those numbers to degrade in the coming months? Or can we actually get this like stagflationary period and the labor market stays strong, but people are being hurt on the real wage front? Well, you put in a premise there. I don't think it's a strong labor market. I think it's a broken labor market. So if you look at labor force participation, it's pathetic. It's bad. And so the fact that somehow labor and management are not meeting eye to eye to come up with a working arrangement means that price discovery in the labor market is broken. I would never call this a strong labor market. I'd call it tight, but it's tight because it's

Starting point is 00:08:24 not working, right? The food market is tight when there's no bread on the shelves, right? Same thing. Yeah. Explain a little bit more what you mean by it's tight, but it's not working. Well, again, back to labor force participation. We've got a ton of people who are not working, and I can't even tell you why. It's a surreal thing. It's like if you walked out in the woods and there was no birds and no squirrels, and you go, there's something wrong here, right? There's something creepy quiet. And whenever I ask, and every establishment I go into, everyone they look understaffed to me and they act understaffed right so you're getting lousy service you're a walmart you can't find anyone to ask a question to right that sort of thing

Starting point is 00:09:04 you go to a restaurant they're short of labor they've got signs in the door help wanted and i asked them where are your workers where did they go if they're not working here and they always say oh somewhere else but i haven't found this mystical mystical employer they just and i don't know how they're putting food on the table. So I'm just completely and utterly baffled. If someone knows, send me an email, dbc6 at cornell.edu. If you know anything about anything that I don't know about, send me an email. My email box is a shit storm, but you know, can't get much worse. So when you look at the labor market, every restaurant that I go to, I ask two questions, you know, how much have prices increased here? It's never 8.5%. It always tends to be teens or

Starting point is 00:09:49 hire. And then also I see the help wanted signs on top of it. And I always ask, well, how much have you tried to raise the pay in order to elicit applications? And so there's a restaurant here in Miami that I recently was talking to, and he's like, I need dishwashers. And he said, I used to be able to pay, you know, $10, then it was 12, then it was 14. He's like, now we're offering 18, can't get anyone. And he has no clue. He's just as perplexed as you are in terms of where did everyone go? Why is it that we've increased over the last three years or so from $10 to $18 and we still can't get anyone to fill the role? And so I thought that was really weird. $18 for a dishwasher feels like a high price given maybe where we're all anchored. But then I went

Starting point is 00:10:35 and I started to look at other average wages. And Amazon, for example, the average Amazon worker gets paid over $17 an hour, they're paying some people, you know, 20, 22, $24. And so it feels like wages, although they are going up in aggregate dollar amount, they're not keeping up with inflation, but it's a very different story than maybe what the mainstream talking points are of like, you know, Amazon screws over their workers. Like politicians are trying to implement $15 an hour. Amazon's paying 17. It just feels to your point, like I'm confused and I don't know why I'm confused, but I don't understand what's happening. Well, the one theory I heard from an uber smart and uber famous guy, and I never know what I should name a name or not, but you'd know him

Starting point is 00:11:19 if I said his name. He, I had him over for dinner and he pointed out two important things. One is he said that unrelated, but still worth putting in your quiver, that $18 trillion worth of U.S. debt is going to roll over in the next two years, 18 trillion, 18 trillion. And then he said that he thought that maybe it was during the lockdown, the illegal aliens had to go home because there was nothing here. And then they haven't made it back. It strikes me as a funny trickle up economics, right? These guys were kind of off radar. But if all of a sudden there's a couple million people missing than this then you're playing uh you know some screwy game at connect four or something whereas it's it's the patterns are changing i don't know yeah one of the uh the

Starting point is 00:12:14 the themes i don't know maybe through the end of last year was a great resignation all these people were quitting their jobs even into the beginning of this year uh and what i don't know how to measure but it feels like a lot of these folks went and they created jobs for themselves but they're not actually creating what we would traditionally think of as a business and they're also not going and filling other open roles. So an easy example would be if somebody leaves their job and they start a Substack newsletter, which seems really small. There's a real wealth creator. Right. Well, if you think about it right now, all of a sudden it's like, hey, I have all this freedom and we'll get into kind of the pros and cons of the freedom of movement and the freedom

Starting point is 00:12:54 not to go into the office versus like how much money you make and kind of your ability to invest capital and reach financial security. But it just feels like there's a lot of things like that, but it doesn't feel like there's millions of people who did that. So it's still, even if you account for these, you know, kind of non-traditional jobs or these non-traditional, essentially company creations, there's still a ton of people missing from the labor force that no one seems to be able to find. Well, the worst I heard is I had a couple of guys deliver a washing machine um and i asked them that question and one of them said he he actually is he's a truck driver he just muscles the watch machine big burly guy he he is up from georgia and they put him in a hotel

Starting point is 00:13:43 at night he drives a truck around new england and uh and and i i asked him where is everyone and he said, they're trading Bitcoin. I go, well, that's really gotten profitable over the last few months. So in any case, I don't have an answer. It really is a mystery to me. But it tells me something's broken, right? There's something so eerie and creepy in the world. And it's just one more log on the bonfire of why the hell is the world what it is. I've just never felt. It feels like I'm in some sci-fi movie or something. Yeah. When we switch from labor force, maybe we look at things like shelter, the CPI calculation, 33% of it is shelter. They still are estimating that it is non-existent, 5% increase or something year over year. But real estate prices are up near 20%.

Starting point is 00:14:44 rents are up near 20%. So the first question, you know, that I always ask is like, how do they calculate shelter if rent and real estate are both up 20%, but they say it's up five. But is this just a continuation? Like, as things get confusing, as things break across the market, we'll continue to see bad data. And we'll also continue to see parts of the market that used to be very important and very well understood, we should expect to just have less and less understanding moving forward? Well, this gets to the question of the housing and rental markets being either broken or having changed profoundly in the last decade. And so we go through that great building boom from around, it started around 1998, actually. The first writings of

Starting point is 00:15:40 a subprime crisis for in 98. I wrote about in 2002, I thought the banking system would collapse soon. It took five more years. But then what happened is we get the collapse. And then the question is, OK, so you have this massive inventory of houses. Where did they all go? And who bought them? And why? How did that inventory get absorbed? And this gets to a theory of some off-off-Broadway thinkers who say that it was actually sort of a hostile takeover of the housing market by permanent capital. So they say the housing bubble is bigger now, but you don't see the froth in the housing bubble. I mean, the fact is, you know, they're all cash deals and there's people bidding like crazy, but you don't have the condo flippers. You don't have

Starting point is 00:16:30 the crazy. You don't have the people. You don't have the euphoria. So it doesn't feel the same. What I think happened, and the number that I'm about to quote a number that was from a credible source, but it's an incredible number, and that is that I think Permanent Capital bought up all those houses, so big, huge tranches of money coming out of BlackRock and places like that. And I think they scooped it all up. Now, single occupant, single family dwellings are a terrible, terrible business. And the only way to make it a good business, you know, you're supposed to make something like one seventh of the cost of the house per year for it to be profitable, right? That's a historical number. And no one's getting that.

Starting point is 00:17:18 So the question is, how's it working? Well, it turns out you get there by getting cheap capital and and and heavy leverage. And what I heard was, is that BlackRock, who who clearly was scooping up vast, vast swaths of single family housing and buying up companies who are scooping it up and stuff like that. So you had these these aggregators and sort of like in like in Russia, where you had aggregators of the Russian chits after the Berlin Wall fell and then people would buy the chits off the aggregators. So BlackRock, I heard, was getting money at 0.15%. So if you can make 0.15% on a rental net above 0.15%, so if you can make 0.3%, then you've got a profitable business. Now, that's just absurdity, right? That's just a broken market again.

Starting point is 00:18:13 So at some point, I'm a big believer that regression of the mean is a force of nature. I got in an argument with someone who said, oh, the markets can just keep going up. I said, no, they can't. They won't. The credit cycle will end. Everything will end. Everything comes to an end. And it starts all over again.

Starting point is 00:18:32 And someone shakes the dam at Saskatchewan. We all end up paying for it. And we will have a bust. and and i think what's going to happen is again i've mentioned several podcasts so i feel like i'm recycling here but um different the overlap of podcasts is so small um i i i i have two black swans in my skull and obviously they're not my black swans because they're in my skull so they can't be a black swan but i think for the average investor there'll be a black swan One is that the Fed grew a spine and is not going to stop.

Starting point is 00:19:10 Now, the equity investors really ought to be troubled in general because it seems clear to me that the Fed is going to keep hiking until something breaks. Now, people forget what something breaks mean. They're defaults. They're collapses. They're WorldComs. They're Enrons. They're bad things.

Starting point is 00:19:34 And those were during a generic collapse. Then you get to the big collapse like 08-09. I think this one will be bigger. I think the next one will be bigger than 08-09. And part of it's because the inflation is going to box them in. So the Fed's going to keep hiking until it breaks. And breaking doesn't mean a 20% drop in the Dow. Breaking means broken bones, right?

Starting point is 00:19:58 ICUs. This is what they'll do. And so as long as the markets keep going up, as long as the collapses are not showing up yet, then I don't see a mechanism by which the Fed will stop. And again, I finally got an answer to a question I didn't have for a long, long time is, you know, guys like James Grant say 20% of the S&P are zombies. 20% of the S&P can't pay their interest payments with their cash flow. These are the 500 biggest companies in the United States, and they can't pay their interest payments for their cash flow. Now, to calibrate you, if you go back to the late 90s, I think it was the late 90s, but somewhere in the 90s, the zombie count was 2%, and the interest rates were 9%. So this shows you how out of whack we are.

Starting point is 00:20:48 So when those guys break and 100 of the S&P 500 can't pay their interest payments and the Fed is boxed in by horrible inflation, what's going to happen? I just don't know. But I think there'll be a lot of people being brought in on their shields, carried off the battlefield. So when you look at this, you mentioned that the Fed has grown a spine. Obviously, they've talked about… I'm not sure they have. That's black spot number one. I don't know if they have, but now Black Swan number two is that they pivot, as they like to say, and it doesn't work. And all of a sudden, the metrics just keep doing what they're doing and and things go bad. And you find out that the Fed is finally out of ammo. And the way I like to describe this in the 40 year credit cycle.

Starting point is 00:21:40 Is a is that that's a typical length of a credit cycle, supposedly, I you know, I'd have to ask Lacey Hunt. to fill in those details, but, but, but credit cycles are very long and sluggish things. And if it's over, then the game's over, right? The whole equity game is over. We're going to go through a tough period. And, and so again, 18 trillion rolling over, who's going to buy all that debt? What I just don't, I have trouble picking. This is stage four cancer. And, and, and you say, well, what do you do? And the answer is you put your affairs in order. Yeah. When you look at it, if the Fed, let's go through both these scenarios. If the Fed did grow a spine and they continue to hike rates, how high do you think the rates can get before things would

Starting point is 00:22:30 break, right? There's a lot of folks who say, hey, they can't get to 5% or 6% interest rates because the US will default and the system will break and kind of all these problems. How do you just think through maybe how high could it actually go? Well, it could be they're already there and it's just time now, right? It could be that, that remember in, in 08, 09, I literally told my class in March of 2007, that I thought the banking system was about to collapse. And this was not me analyzing spreadsheets. This is just reading smart guys. And, and, and, and, but most people couldn't see the cracks. The housing market cracked in 06. And so the housing market had already peaked. And so that game was over. And so that was a systemic problem. But it takes markets

Starting point is 00:23:22 and takes things. If you put a 20-pound block of ice out on the street in 95-degree weather, it wouldn't just turn to water. It takes time. There's kinetics to the process. So it could already be there. But the Fed will keep hiking because the Fed will keep hiking into until the breaking occurs. And that's why they overshoot because there's a lag, right? It's like driving a car with loose steering, right? You go to turn and it doesn't respond right away. So you turn harder next thing you know, you're fishtailing. Yeah. It reminds me a lot of last year. They were still conducting QE and still suppressing interest rates, and we had 7% inflation. Talk about overshooting. Just absolute, in hindsight, insanity. and it feels like they are likely to repeat that now on the other end of the spectrum because they're going to wait till it breaks and then it takes time for them to pivot.

Starting point is 00:24:19 It takes time for the market to internalize that pivot and kind of work its way through. So is this just now a game where the Fed will continue to overshoot in each direction as we kind of go through boom and bust cycles and there's just nothing they can do about it? Or do we need somebody to step in there and say, hey, let's stop the madness and prevent ourselves from overshooting and try to look forward rather

Starting point is 00:24:42 than look backwards in data? I don't know. The thing we should, and this is not in isolation either, right? So before we're done, we will have talked about all the fucked up things that might completely remove the control from the Fed, right? Wars and famines and, you know, There's so many ways the Fed, you can't, the Fed can't print wheat. The Fed can't print natural gas. The Fed can't print oil. So, and so I'm at a loss to see how this plays out. This is, again, the stage four cancer model.

Starting point is 00:25:26 I feel like it's game over, but I'm sitting there going, I'm having trouble picturing this whole death thing. You know, it's kind of not working yet for me. Right. What do you mean? It's game over. Is it game over in terms of like a U.S. default? It's just so much stuff breaks in the system that it goes back to the analogy of like shaking the Etch-A-Sketch and we start over. What does that mean? I when I say game over, I mean, I think we're going to get a generational wake up call. So the 40 year credit cycle. So, yeah, there's a guy named Murray Stalin, Horizon Kinetics, who I've I've been following for years. but but i listen i got invited to listen to one of their internal conference calls due to a friend at rbc and uh murray's a genius and and he said in uh early 1980s

Starting point is 00:26:14 two miraculous things happened one is russia was collapsing they weren't done yet but they were starting to and they desperately needed capital and all they had were resources so they just flooded the world with resources china was coming out of its medieval period and and they desperately needed capital all i had was labor so they sold labor dirt cheap and so we've had 40 years of unlimited resources and unlimited labor and and and he says that's not to be repeated i would add on top of that a 40-year credit cycle superimposed right on top of it although look, it's possible the 40-year credit cycle somehow because of that, right? Maybe Volcker didn't slay inflation at all. Maybe those two miraculous things are what stopped inflation.

Starting point is 00:27:04 And there are just things like that that just keep occurring. We started with interest rates at 16, they went below two 30-year rates. If you use the Fed model, which I agree with at one level, I think the idea that somehow rates correlate with equity prices, where I disagree violently with the Fed model is that you use interest rates to justify the equity prices. Because in that case, you're not explaining it, you're justifying it. And you can say, well, equity prices are fair value because interest rates are so low. And I go, so you're going to justify interest rates, equity prices by comparing it to the biggest bubble in history, the biggest, the most gargantuan bubble in history? Have a ball with that. But just because someone bought a Toyota for $150,000

Starting point is 00:27:58 doesn't mean I'm going to buy a Honda for $170,000. It just doesn't work that way. You're still screwed either way. If we go to the other black swan of the Fed potentially pivoting, midterm elections, I think is one reason why people are saying, oh, they'll never go into the midterm elections with high inflation or recession. You know, shocker, maybe we'll get both as we go. I don't buy that at all. I don't buy that at all. Explain. I think the midterm elections are already written down. I think I think, you know, the Democrats are desperately trying to achieve something, but it's probably not the midterm elections. So I think what you do is you let i think i think this is where you euthanize the patient you let the republicans

Starting point is 00:28:40 grab control of congress and the senate and you just let it go it's it's too late right you're in a barrel you're going down the niagara river you know help do something sorry it's too late you're done yeah so the midterms are right off unless they're not at which point um did you see that that election and that recall vote in california where where they were recalling one of, they say one of Soros's appointments. I always feel creepy saying that. And, and they discounted, they threw out 30% of the votes. They threw the poll watchers out. They did the same thing over again. So, so if, if, if the midterm election somehow, if there's a, you know, miracle on ice moment and the Democrats managed to hold power, I will never believe another election.

Starting point is 00:29:30 Yeah. I already not sure I will ever believe another election. I think they've been playing capture the flag for years, actually. But the anti-Trump one of 2020, I'm a big believer they rigged it. I would comfortably bet. To me, it would be a lot safer bet than an S&P index fund to me. Explain that more in terms of why are you so confident? Well, first of all, I think the data is there. Some more stuff came out with the 2,000 mules, but I watched it. I read about it. There's just so many things that just didn't make sense to me. And then on top of that, the drop dead argument is that they've done everything imaginable to take Trump out at the kneecaps, right? Everything imaginable. They've corrupted the FBI. They've done everything, but they forgot

Starting point is 00:30:18 to rig the election. I don't think so. I find that not even imaginable. They rigged them. Yeah, I don't doubt it. And people say, well, there were 61 court case. They didn't win any never made it to evidentiary standards. None of them. That's the rig. The rig is that not a single case went to court. They ended up in the courtroom, but didn't go to trial. They never got adjudicated. We interrupt this podcast to tell you about the most anticipated crypto event of the year. Masari's Mainnet Conference 2022 is happening this year, September 21st to the 23rd in New York City. It's three days of can't-be-missed keynotes, fireside chats, demos, networking, and more. They'll have folks like Ryan Selkis of Masari interviewing Ripple's Brad Garlinghouse,

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Starting point is 00:31:46 LMAX Digital, secure, liquid and trusted. Go learn more at lmaxdigital.com slash POMP. Again, that's lmaxdigital.com slash Pomp. So one of the things that I've asked folks on both sides of this, right? Some people believe, hey, I can't trust it. Some people say, you know, those are the results. I always ask. It's both.

Starting point is 00:32:06 That's both. Yeah, yeah. And what I say to them is I say, listen, do you think that 100% of people who have voted in every single election, there's been no errors? And people always say. No, but it's worse than that, though. I mean, there's going to be screw ups no matter what. Dead guys have been voting since they started voting, right? But I think it was wholesale. I think it was so in advance rigged where they made sure that they didn't go to bed that night wondering who would win. that they made sure that that that they would have the votes by morning and uh and and and the mail-in ballots and the whole thing was set up perfectly for the rig so so this is the big

Starting point is 00:32:52 difference in my opinion right is to your point about like dead people have been voting in elections forever right it's usually noise yeah it's usually been such a small percentage that it doesn't sway the outcome and uh i think most people they don't like to think about it that way It's true in every country. You're trying to get millions and millions of people to all cast some votes on something. And so that happens, whatever. What you're talking about, though, seems to be something that is much more malicious, nefarious, planned. Total deep state. Total deep state. OK, so here's let me let me dial it back, though. WikiLeaks had emails about election rigging. There were emails that suggested I can't remember which the two candidates won Pennsylvania because rigging came out of a WikiLeaks or something like that. But but years ago, when I think when Bush Jr. was running, YouTube was filled with with computer scientists showing how you could rig a machine in a heartbeat.

Starting point is 00:33:46 Right. So again, but that's kind of the capture the flag baloney stuff. That's just kind of the gaming that they do. And since both candidates were pre vetted, that didn't really matter. They didn't care who won. And it was probably relatively balanced battle. um but but but i think it was during the bush election the ceo of diebold which controlled the voting machines at the time um was a bush fundraiser a big one and and there's just no mechanism that that that's legit right that just shouldn't exist if you're controlling the voting machines you should shut your mouth and stay out of it and uh and then of course the voting machines rolled over to um to dominion now here's the the horror story of dominion dominion's a canadian

Starting point is 00:34:33 company and you go okay so a foreign sovereign state controls our voting machines that makes me nervous although i'm not sure i trust them any less than than we controlling our voting machines but it turns out dominion um the dominion um uh ceo had done big favors for for for the biden he was involved in the biden transition and and then you say okay that's a problem but then you find out dominion's actually a subsidiary of a subsidiary of ubs and you go okay that's a problem therefore it's not only owned by a sovereign state but it's not even canada and then you find out that that subsidiary is largely owned by a company in beijing so our voting machines are owned by beijing and that then the plot thickens when you remember that the voting machines the voting

Starting point is 00:35:29 system was was was connected to the internet that night and a lot of people don't know what that means what means that from across the world they could they could change all the votes is this something that moving forward will always now be part of the conversation like the united states uh historically was uh the legitimacy of elections the legitimacy of various organizations it was taboo it wasn't even a conversation uh without somebody saying you know go put your tinfoil hat on and sit in the corner now i see it on every mainstream side i see the democratic you know mainstream conversation i see the republican mainstream conversation it feels like the conversation across the board is very very different in 2022 than it was in 2019

Starting point is 00:36:14 before a lot of this stuff happened. Well, so, you know, I'm I certainly lean right. But that's not to say that I like Republicans. And so I voted for Bush Jr., who I didn't like the first time and not the second time because he fucked up completely. Right. He got us into a war. He killed upwards of a million people and it was all baloney.

Starting point is 00:36:40 and so that to me i've for years i've been putting it in the war crime category the weapons of mass destruction was a complete ruse you know you can't let a guy get away with that i mean he should be taken to the hague for that one um but um i i i think people are reaching a point where they feel like they don't have anyone on their side and i think that's where the populism is popping up. Populism is both left and right. Revolutions, which I think we're in, I think we're in a nasty one, actually, but it's under the surface, but it's real. They can come from the left or the right. And I think this one is coming from the left. So this is the whole critical race theory, the whole getting rid of religion, the whole, there's just almost every

Starting point is 00:37:32 topic, the January 6th hearings, the rigging of the election. So to me, the left seem like the guilty party largely now. And the right look like they're being responsive. They're just getting irritated. I think January 6th, the moment was optically ugly. I think January 6th, the response to that moment is horrific. Explain that. So, well, there's several there, Ted. I mean, one is the role of the FBI on January 6th is undeniable. We don't have good numbers, but, you know, someone explain Larry Epps, right? But there were many, many more.

Starting point is 00:38:12 There's an estimated 80 co-conspirators who didn't get indicted, who certainly look like feds. When the smashing of the windows and the smashing of the doors and the damage and the rallying it's done by feds what kind of a country have we become and so then great example q anon shaman boy right he's nuts right they say he's unstable i go what what gave you that idea right he's we're not we're not viking helmet um he broke nothing he walked through an open door they've been open from the inside he he he hurt nobody and he got um i think it was four or seven years in prison how do you get that i don't understand i i can't i'm not even sure what crime he committed i'm sure

Starting point is 00:39:03 there's some trespassing crime but that's that's and that's the democrats so you guys can rot in hell you democratic operatives who did that to that guy and who put you know what 700 people in prison, in solitary, without trial for the longest time and threatened 20, 30 year jail sentences and stuff like that. I hope you eat shit and die. You go any further than that, I think it's lock and load time by the red states. Is this something where both sides of the aisle are just ratcheting up the response to each other? And what I mean by that is you see, you know, I don't know, you see the language use, you see the constant like one-upping of each other. And maybe some of this is just like social media pulls to the extremes. But then also

Starting point is 00:39:59 you're starting to see action as well. And you can see something like, I don't know, Ron DeSantis going after Disney. And then you see something like Gavin Newsom doing things in California that is causing people to leave the state. And you just kind of see these different uh, things. And I think to the people who like to believe that they're rational or somewhat centrist, they say to themselves, like the world is going crazy. And like, I'm confused as to how we got here. I see. I, that's why I said the Republicans are being responsive. Um, I see ice. Um, I see, um, the Democrats as the ones who are taking it to the next level every time right now. That's why I clarify between, you know, left and right based revolutions. But

Starting point is 00:40:50 to me, the Republicans look like they're playing defense. I don't I don't. So so the whole thing at some level started from the Republicans many years ago. I think Gingrich turned politics ugly. I think I think he decided it was time to take off the gloves and start bashing people. So I think the Republicans get credit for starting the brawl. I think as much as Clinton's a sleazeball sociopath, I should clarify, Bill Clinton's a sleazeball sociopath. Not that they're not both, but it was an ambiguous sentence. That's not good. We have a president who's accused of being a rapist. We have a president who's accused of having a body count. This is a problem. But even Even with that said, you know, the Republicans going after him on a perjury charge and stuff like that.

Starting point is 00:41:43 These are procedural things. And so in many ways, Republicans started it. But now the Democrats have picked up their A game. The censorship is coming out of the left. Right. The censorship is all left wing. I don't see Republicans censoring the left at all. again, send me an email. If trying to stop teaching gender theory to five-year-olds is censorship, then I guess you can stretch the definition. But if I was a parent with a five-year-old and the kid came home and told me what they're teaching that kid in school, did you see the guy who got hauled out of a school board meeting because his daughter had been raped in a bathroom by a transgender? No, I did not. Yeah. So he's a school board meeting. His daughter had been

Starting point is 00:42:32 raped by a transgender and the school board tried to hide it. Now they have obviously eventually got the guy and it's a guy, right? If you're raping girls, you're a dude, right? You can pretend all you want about the others, but the rape is something wrong there. And even he goes to the school board, he's mad as a Hornet and, and they haul them out of there. The cops haul him out and i'm going i i'm amazed that he took that avenue to get to the school board i i i'm still i'm i'm actually baffled we're not seeing frontier justice vigilante justice i i my daughter gets raped someone's gonna die yeah there is um i forget the name of the the person now maybe we can uh we can pull it up uh in a second or look it up uh but i think there's a ufc fighter who

Starting point is 00:43:24 someone in his family uh was sexually uh assaulted uh and maybe even raped i can't remember exact details uh but he went after him and uh right and ended up getting arrested um and if you're in the jury if you're in the jury you're gonna convict that guy i i tend to think that uh uh if you're the prosecutor you don't want to go to a jury well but if the prosecutor's a left winger you don't know this is the problem and uh if if you're or should i say dishonorable how's that to be more fair then there's the guy lone survivor right remember that the navy ceo who the only survivor of a of a of a a raid in afghanistan or something and um and and some guy shot his dog yep so he hopped in his truck and he's chasing him down and he called the cops

Starting point is 00:44:16 He said, you got to help me here, because if I catch him, I'm killing him. And the cops intervened and got him. And the guy got something like three years in jail, which is exactly what the hell should happen. Yeah. Right. That's I know that. And enough. But but these guys didn't know what they were doing.

Starting point is 00:44:31 They were just punk ass kids. But but but but that is there are there are crimes to me that are that on paper are not as bad as they are in reality. So if you shoot your spouse, who knows what the story is? But there are things that happen where you go, oh, that really – they don't even have to be capital offenses, but that's deeply bad. so yeah well one of the um the pieces uh that seems to be missing from the mainstream uh conversation around you know guns uh crime all this uh remember in the indiana mall there was a i think he's like a 22 year old kid he i think the way the story was told was he was sitting in the food court uh with his girlfriend and a guy walked out of the bathroom started shooting people and it It was in like 18 seconds, right?

Starting point is 00:45:26 In 18 seconds, he pulled out a gun and he took him down. And he was a nationally ranked marksman based on his performance. From 40 yards, he hit him seven out of eight shots with a handgun. And you look at that. And again, like I'm always careful in that. I don't think anyone wants to live in a society where we basically return back to like the OK Corral. We just, you know, hey, let's meet at high noon and everyone pull out guns and start firing at each other. But it does bring a point of there's the gun control debate. There's also the armed citizens being able to protect themselves. And then I think you start thinking of these like sanctuary cities or these kind of decriminalization from the prosecutors versus actually having the laws changed.

Starting point is 00:46:13 And it gets in this weird world where you start to say like this is a very complex issue, but I think if we focus on the majority of citizens want to live in a safe society where they can go about their business and they are not worried about getting robbed, getting their things stolen, or having to deal with violence on a day-to-day basis, a lot of the complexity starts to look a little bit more clear as long as we agree like that is the goal. But when you hear some of these people talk, I don't know if that is the goal. Like there seems to be other goals that are competing with just like let's create a safe society for the average citizen. Well, so the overarching theory that covers all these concerns of ours is that someone's trying to destroy us. Do you believe that? Well, certainly – well, let me ask you this. Are we trying to destroy Putin? Depends who you ask. right if you ask me the answer is yes and uh and so there's no reason to believe that there's not

Starting point is 00:47:18 quid pro quos around the world um there's no reason to believe that china isn't necessarily trying to rot their system you know the united states has become a pretty serious bully now i know that there was an upside to it i'm reading a book right now by peter zihon i think that's how I pronounce his name. And he's a he's an extract for guy, which is the the intelligence analog of Blackwater. And, and, and, and he talks about this sort of thing. And, and it's lost my train of thought. But But in any event, um, yeah, I think, I think there are groups that are trying to undermine the United States. So we quit. Oh, the point being is, is that the arrangement we had post-war is the united states would keep the peace and that would promote global trade right

Starting point is 00:48:11 the united states at times is not keeping the peace i mean i i get it when i got into it over ukraine we'd go to ukraine ukraine the ukraine story is a total mess i i don't think i don't think any part of that story is true i i think the entire the mainstream media's presentation the ukraine story it's just i think it's just fictional what do you think what what parts of what they're telling us do you think are inaccurate or erroneous the parts where their lips were moving um the um as soon as ukraine showed up and right away you picked up the propaganda right it was like it was like biscuits slathered with you know sausage gravy and um and so what what i did is, I'd always been somewhat intrigued by Putin. And I went back and I binge watched everything

Starting point is 00:49:04 Putin. I went back and read articles about Ukraine that were pre-2022, which one could argue are going to be more accurate, because they're not trying to justify a war in Ukraine. And what you discover is the constant conflict between NATO and Russia. And here's what I'll tell you from binging Putin. Putin, Putin's a tough guy. There's no chance that a guy who's not a tough guy can run Russia. So if you somehow think, you know, you know, Justin Trudeau is going to run Russia, you're dreaming um he when he answers questions he is unbelievably direct and and you listen to him you go that sounds truthful it just there was just no sugar coating and and so he he gets asked about you know dealing with oligarchs and he doesn't say i whack them because right so he

Starting point is 00:50:11 doesn't fess up to everything or i locked him up because what his response to dealing with the oligarchs is they robbed russia blind and they did they absolutely robbed russia blind but but so when you listen to putin you go god damn it this guy is to the point every he doesn't duck questions his answers don't seem evasive every once in a while you sense one that he doesn't want to put an answer to but for the most part they're good then you start reading about about NATO. And when the wall collapsed, you know, NATO made all sorts of promises to Russia that they wouldn't, you know, try to scoop up all these states surrounding Russia. And they had told Russia that. Why? Because, well, NATO's sole purpose is to oppose Russia. So if you want to

Starting point is 00:51:03 say, well, Putin, you know, this bullshit about the existential risk, I go, when you've got this entire organization of countries whose sole purpose is to oppose your country, that in itself is existential risk. Now, they don't have to be acting in a risky way, but it is existential risk. Now, every time Russia gets attacked, it's been attacked by armies moving through Ukraine. Ukraine is to Russia as Mexico is to us. If Russia was putting troops on the border of Mexico, How many seconds would it take for us to bomb the live and piss out of them? The answer is I don't think you'd even see the flash. I think it would just be over. And and so but where the real problem came is that Putin repeatedly, repeatedly said to NATO, you can't have Ukraine.

Starting point is 00:52:00 And you can say, well, he doesn't have the right to say that. And I go, well, we said you can't have Cuba and we've said all sorts of things you can't do. And when I really get desperate arguing with the Ukrainian weeper, and I feel terrible for the Ukrainians, they're going to get slaughtered. There's no question the victims here are the Ukrainians. This is an awful situation. But I don't get lost in that part of the story. The story is that it's NATO versus Russia. And when I really get frustrated, I say, OK, in the last 20 years, which country has bombed out more other countries and killed more people?

Starting point is 00:52:36 Russia or the United States? and and they all oh uh you know they make up some argument about you know why we did what we did and i said okay we obama bombed seven muslim countries which of those countries attacked us he bombed seven of them which of those attacked us the answer is none none so why is that not a war crime when we elect a liberal democrat aren't we supposed to stay out of wars one of the basal things you might hope to get out of a liberal democrat is not be in wars well we apparently didn't do that very well so we've killed millions so statistically speaking the united states is a bad guy statistically speaking you can't make a case against it

Starting point is 00:53:20 so then putin approaches nato repeatedly and says look it's existential risk for us so So sovereign states have issues that aren't necessarily backed by legal, rural legal tribunals, but they have issues they got to deal with. And so when we're talking to Russia and Russia's talking to the United States, which is NATO, there's no difference. It's just the United States. It's one thing for the two to say, to be negotiating, saying, well, we can't give that up or you can't have this or that or that.

Starting point is 00:53:53 You're negotiating. We didn't do that. We said we don't care. We dissed them completely. We completely dissed them repeatedly. And so when you're a sovereign state and you're facing what you believe to be existential risk, it doesn't even matter if you're right. If they say to you, we don't care about your feelings, you know, in a marriage, that's a divorce. And in a battle like we're facing in Ukraine now, that becomes a war. Now, on top of that, you had, you know, 100,000 Azov battalion guys amassing in

Starting point is 00:54:29 Mariupol and the Azov battalion's a bunch of Nazis. And the press will say they're not. You go pre-2022 and you find out, yes, they're Nazis. You watch John Mearsheimer talks and he tells you all about the Nazis. And Mearsheimer's brilliant, actually. Steve Walt, brilliant. There are smart guys out there saying this is 100% NATO's fault. This war did not have to occur if NATO had been able to behave itself. How much of like the NATO activity, I call it almost like flexing for social media, right? There's like this like mainstream conversation and you almost are trying to score points on social media to some degree, although not, you know, they don't count in likes and retweets and all that, but society has shifted. And so there's not the, um, I don't know, I call

Starting point is 00:55:17 it like a top hat diplomacy, right. That we, that we may have expected 50, 60, 70 years ago. And they weren't perfect, but there definitely was this element of, uh, gentlemen's diplomacy, diplomacy to some degree. And sure there was negotiations. They would listen that there was a conversation. Uh, and yes, sometimes we did go to war, uh, obviously with the two world wars and and things like that, where there was disagreements, but it feels like this to your point is something else. Like it almost feels like an unforced error that just came from the lack of, uh, diplomacy. And so naturally it feels like you get war and maybe we didn't have to get this. Well, it feels to me like there's

Starting point is 00:56:01 cold warriors sort of calling the shots and we're we're we're in theory not in a cold war and so you it feels like there's guys who just can't come to terms with the idea that we don't have to oppose russia with every ounce of our being i i just don't see what russia's done to justify this they say oh they took crimea i mean these are these are border skirmishes by u.s standards what happened the monroe doctrine what about just saying stay out of the stay out of the western hemisphere dudes um and i just don't think it's our job to be patrolling the baltic states to be patrolling all these countries that that are constantly changing borders constantly right if you look at a map you ever seen one of those dynamic maps where it shows

Starting point is 00:56:56 the borders change over time they're just flapping around constantly it's europe it's europe is a gigantic pile of tribalism and it's always been that way right germany germany wasn't even a country until after the middle ages right germania was just a bunch of bearded crazies running around the dark forest trying to invade ancient rome right exactly exactly exactly they were the The only ones who didn't get conquered. This episode is brought to you by BCB Group. With a dedicated focus on institutional payment services, BCB Group provides business banking,

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Starting point is 00:59:05 how much of that fed into the Americans' lack of appetite to participate on the ground in Ukraine versus you think it's more of a generational just, It didn't matter if we had botched that or if we had withdrawn at that moment. The American citizen doesn't have nearly the appetite for war that maybe we once had decades ago. Well, the term botch, I would question because because it was so bad that it had to be intentional. It really had to be intentional. I swear that you and I could sit around with a six pack and come up with a better withdrawal. right? In fact, we wouldn't need the six-pack. The six-pack would help. And so if you look at

Starting point is 00:59:52 every facet of the withdrawal, they left the weapons intact. They left the keys in the ignition. They left pallets of $100 bills. They left an army that they said would defend the country. There's no, and they lasted, what, about 30 seconds. There's no way the CIA didn't know that this army wasn't ready. There's no chance. No chance. They were on U.S. payroll. The second we pulled out, they were going to go off U.S. payroll. Guess what? You don't have an army if you're not paying them. And so nothing about it makes sense unless the idea is that what it really represents is us saying to the Taliban, here are the keys. We're leaving your weapons. Behave yourselves. Here's what we expect. And there's money to put gas in the vehicles and have a nice

Starting point is 01:00:44 day. Now, the only thing I can't explain is why we had to do it in a way that was so humiliating. And that always takes me back to how do you know where the motivation comes from when the president of the United States is so compromised. And I know there's people who won't agree with that, but he had dirty dealings in Ukraine, he had dirty dealings in China, who knows how many more he had around the world. If someone says, do it and do it ugly, and they own you, you do it and you do it ugly, right? When we look at the, I don't know, takeover of Afghanistan by the Taliban for, I don't know, the hundredth time as empires have gone there and been unsuccessful.

Starting point is 01:01:35 The two things that stuck out in my head, one was a thought of history and another was one that I read on the internet. And the thought of history was just in the first time that we gave the Taliban weapons, right? It just, this time was more so they took them from us after we left them versus us literally sending them

Starting point is 01:01:54 to help arm the rebellion, you know, decades ago. But the other thing I read, and I want to say it was from Tim Kennedy, who is a former Special Forces sniper or may still be active, but maybe it was from somebody else. And he said, listen, we have on national television videos of the Taliban sitting inside a building. There's a bunch of them sitting there. I got a great idea. Let's just go drop a bomb. If we really, if we really, really feel like these people are thriving, we are at war with them. Charlie, get the fuck out of here.

Starting point is 01:02:31 You know, why during the withdrawal are we basically, it appears to be getting more information, identifying where folks are, literally have a live video feed, all these different things, and we just walked away? And maybe that was part of the plan. Well, that gets back to the fact that they could have turned it ugly fast. So, I mean, the surrealist moments of all were where we had U.S. citizens outside the Air Force Base fence that we're not letting in, and they said, look, throw these people on planes, get them out of there. And and and Jen Psaki saying, well, we couldn't identify who was who. And I go, since when does that matter to you guys? You're bringing in gazillions over every border, best I can tell. So so and then they said they got 90 percent of people wanted to get out out.

Starting point is 01:03:27 And I'm going, that may be a good stat for a snowplow or something, but it's a bad stat for getting U.S. citizens out of a hostile territory. And and and they were so matter of fact about that. And then there was then there's this question, if you know you're going to pull out, why would you let why would you give visas to a group of school kids to go on a big adventure in Afghanistan? Right. There's just nothing about the thing that makes sense. So so when nothing makes sense and it means the model's wrong and you have to have a new model, a new model is that. And by the way, you know, you know, those those U.S. citizens left behind. Have you seen any stories about the horrors that they went through afterward? Any? no none right they're as silent as that as they are on the vegas shootings right

Starting point is 01:04:14 my favorite um and so so it's not what it it's not what we were told and i don't know what it is right i don't know i the layer of the onion they're showing us is not the right one the layer of the onion i'm sitting at might not be the right one either there's times when i'm talking to my brother i go we talk about okay which which event history would you like the answer key to which is the one where you'd like to say okay tell me what the hell just happened right when some people would say 9-11 some would say some would say you know Pearl Harbor somebody who knows what but but but but there's there's these events I I don't even know if we know what history is anymore I I've I've you know that the press has been owned by the military for decades long

Starting point is 01:05:01 before they officially became prostitutes they were still uh in bed with the military and it was considered the loyal thing to do so you know during world war ii you know the movie theaters were putting out anti-japanese anti-german cartoons and it's always been there right they japanese had tokyo rose you know whatever um but now it's gotten to the point where the press's entire business model depends critically on whoring their way around um propaganda explain that well so the internet destroyed the press at some level the conventional press got wiped out right and uh and so how are they paying the bills and and it's no longer dan rather and walter Cronkite going on TV and telling us what might not have been true, but we all were happy as hell

Starting point is 01:05:54 thinking it was true. And on Sunday morning talk shows, you'd have five or six guys sitting around a table and you got the sense that they were discussing important topics from different angles. And you had George Will with a super right-wing thing and you had lefties, they would go back and forth. It was civilized debate. And yet you got the feeling that they were sort of peeling back layers of the onion for us. And you get none of that. Now you don't get it on Fox news. You don't get it on, on CNN. Um, to the extent I lean, right. I like the lies coming out of Fox news better. Um, I think there's one journalist who looks like one conventional journalist who looks like he's trying to get it right. And that's Tucker Carlson. I think people

Starting point is 01:06:38 think Fox is this homogeneous right-wing machine by no stretch of the imaginations of that there's agrees but there's the stupid talking heads who just are are propaganda machines themselves um but but but there's i i depending on what time of day you're watching fox news you get a very different presentation of history so um so the press the press is the press is now subsidized and i think that probably uh they're kept alive by um by the political system right and um they're kept alive by um 75 of their ad revenues come from pharma so if you want to know how the hell we keep not getting a straight answer on things like vaccines and covid all you have to do is recognize that that pharma my brother said something the other day that struck

Starting point is 01:07:33 me as profound you know those tv commercials where they advertise a drug and you go what the hell did they just tell me right there's a bunch of old guys walking around with smiles on their face what drug was that my dog is killing me here and she doesn't take no for an answer he doesn't take no for an answer um and and you don't know what the drug was and you don't know why you know oh yeah i'm gonna run off and take who the fuck cares uh right and and you wouldn't do that and and he said no i i think what they're doing is that they're just advertising as a revenue stream so if your farm instead of having a lobbyist you know you say okay look just throw throw some fucking ads right advertise our you know anal cream right i don't care what

Starting point is 01:08:16 just advertise and so 75 of the advertisement revenues are from pharma why because then when you have some big catastrophe like vioxx or or bextra or nexium or any there's so many um what you do is you say oh by the way don't cover that story and they don't cover the story you think oh by the way you think oh yes oh yeah absolutely absolutely was there on any tv show early on a debate about the pros and cons of vaccine on any on any mainstream press did a bunch of smart guys sit around the table on sunday and say, well, what are the pros and cons of vaccine? Let's consider risks of vaccine. People don't seem to know this. The history of vaccines is a horrifying history, not horrifying in terms of

Starting point is 01:09:08 evil dudes, although there might be some of that, but just horrifying in terms of how hard it is to create a vaccine that doesn't slaughter people. It's a very difficult thing. And so there's books on vaccine production that predate COVID that talk about all the failures that occur and how they've got vaccines for things in the military, but they can't use them because it kills the guys. And so making a vaccine is hard. Did anyone discuss that? Did anyone discuss in any way, shape or form how? Did any of the press talk about? Now you can hear it now, but don't forget this is just recently. It's as though they've said, okay, we're done now. So go ahead and talk about it all you want. We don't care. But did early on, did anyone talk about vaccine injuries?

Starting point is 01:09:53 in anyone which are absolutely real absolutely real we just don't know the numbers because the authorities who would have to keep track of them the big grand overarching group that would really be needed to keep track of all of them are a bunch of liars and so they're not going to cover it nothing was covered nothing but propaganda and so this gets back to the frontier justice part There was a story the other day I read about a woman, about two, one is a husband-wife team, talked about the kid, the husband didn't want to vaccinate, the wife did, she took the kid to get vaccinated, he got wiped out by it. You can imagine divorce court in their future. Another is where they had a kid who had serious autoimmune issues. their doctor and the family all agreed they're not going to vaccinate the kid goes to school

Starting point is 01:10:45 and they bribe them with pizza and they vaccinate them and fuck them up royally explain to me why that father doesn't go and blow someone's head off it's not that i think he should it's not that i think it would be good it's not it's that i don't understand statistically how these things are happening and somehow the only shooters we get are random shooters who kill random people for no apparent reason i don't remember that remember the la cop who declared war on the la police department years ago i don't want to guess at his name but i think it was eric something uh i do remember and they and they basically they tracked them to like a cabot or something right i think he ended up they burned them they

Starting point is 01:11:28 burned them they set it on fire yeah i read his manifesto he was not insane he was not a loner he was not isolated he cared about life he just decided he'd seen enough i i don't understand now let's go to uvalde how do you have so here's a town that's town of 15 000 it's 50 miles from a nearby bigger town 70 miles or 80 miles from a different one it's in the middle of nowhere and the number they say is they had 370 cops there how do you get how do you get 370 cops i i don't understand that what were they doing there right so right away the story starts getting flaky and then you've got 77 minutes where a bunch of cops won't go in and you so and the problem is the explanations don't make sense to me so i say

Starting point is 01:12:27 oh they're cowards really i would think that you could pick 10 names out of a phone book and one of those 10 would go in and say fuck you i'm not waiting i hear gunshots i'm going and and out of out of all these cops no one went in until supposedly some border guard went in and shot him did you watch did you watch the hallway video yeah i watched it and you know again uh Hindsight is 20-20, and so obviously we know what happened, but given that we know and you're sitting there and you're watching it, your blood just boils. You just are getting – you're just getting so mad. I don't even think that could be – I just don't think it could be true. What do you think it is?

Starting point is 01:13:11 I don't have – I don't know. I have been bothered by all the shootings for years now. For years I've been bothered. The shootings all follow similar patterns. uh the man on the street who gets interviewed minutes after it occurred are always talking about multiple shooters they go away and all of a sudden it's a single lone shooter by the way have you ever seen a detailed discussion of of one of the shooters lives you ever seen anyone talk about what led up to it what was the what was the setup no you see a drug addled kid in court

Starting point is 01:13:46 looking wacky as shit getting convicted sent away or getting executed or whatever and you get no insight you get no backdrop you get no no anything and and um again my favorite if you want to dig into it the vegas shooting was a complete fraud i it it's the most extraordinary story i wrote about 20 pages on it and i only got about 20 of the story i don't know i don't know much about that one what what happened well there's two documentaries now which you can go on if you go on rumble rumble or bit shoot you can't get it on youtube because of course they won't let it be there um and and what happened is steven paddock supposedly shot uh something like 1500 rounds out of a 34 story window in the mandalay bay right um right away the chief of police who apparently

Starting point is 01:14:39 wasn't given the plot in advance um said there's no way it's not humanly possible for one person to shoot this many rounds now within a day saying it's only one shooter um but it turns out that there's there's the documentaries one thing that i pick up right away is that they kept interviewing the same guy over and over and over the networks were using one guy there were 20 000 people there But somehow a guy named Mike Kronk was the only guy who kept getting interviewed. And YouTube kept rolling to the next interview like it does, you know, 15 seconds later. And there's Mike Kronk again, new network, same guy. His story's drifting.

Starting point is 01:15:18 It started out with him saying his buddy got shot three times in the chest. Now, a marksman told me from that distance, you can't get shot three times in the chest unless the guy's a sniper. And because there's too much spray. and um and then the guy mike crock's talking about his friend sticking his fingers in his own bullet holes to stop the bleeding i'm going no right away that was my bullshit meter that was my bullshit moment and then you start listening to audios which by the way we're getting deleted off youtube assess you can find them um audio she can just hear all sorts of weapons going off just tons of that that that that that and whack whack whack whack you know you hear all these

Starting point is 01:16:01 different guys took the recordings they pulled all the different weapons apart said here here's one that's superimposed on another here's one and um steven paddock had no history of guns or anything i think i think he might have been a gun runner that's my suspicion but i think he took the first first bullet and the question is um and then there was there's always the post thing that occurs. Remember in January 6th, when four cops committed suicide, you go, what? Four cops committed suicide after January 6th. Well, there was a bunch of very strange deaths of people who survived the original shooting too. Like six or seven people out of 20,000 within a month were dead. And you go, what's that all about? I don't know. I just know. So if you find the videos,

Starting point is 01:16:48 if you find the documentary on the Las Vegas shooting, I bet you to rumble and you'll watch you'll see the problem there was shooting all up and down the strip there was literally a lady walking through the crowd saying to people in 45 minutes you're all going to die i mean just strange shit like this and there's there's there's taxi cab footage where the guy's going he's shooting out of the fourth floor window i shooting out of this he's shooting out of that there's video footage of the cops going into the room and saying turn off your cameras right that's the favorite trick and then one guy didn't turn off his camera and that survived and you're in there they say there's no broken windows then you hear a window smash just surreal shit it just doesn't

Starting point is 01:17:29 make sense so and then the question is okay the biggest shooting since the civil war the biggest shooting since the civil war when was the last time someone mentioned it in their rallying cry to get rid of guns never right you don't you don't know shit about it because it's old and who cares well the reason they don't care is because they botched it badly enough that that it can't be used as a rallying cry they don't want anyone looking at the guy the you know the guy got shot in the leg the security guard who was actually on the floor where paddock was he supposedly got shot in the leg um trauma surgeon said by the way these weapons do a special kind of damage you'd bleed out just from a leg shot just because it turns your leg to jello supposedly

Starting point is 01:18:13 but but this guy gets shot in the leg next thing you know reporters are trying to get to his house And there's a bunch of cars without license plates in front of them. The house is protected. Next thing you know, you find out he has several social security numbers. Next thing you know, he's in Mexico. When asked about him going to Mexico, I said, well, are you planning a vacation? I go, you know, I think letting him go to Mexico was probably not a good move. And then he comes back.

Starting point is 01:18:38 He does one interview on Ellen DeGeneres, which is owned or shows owned by Mandalay Bay. And the whole story is nuts from head to toe. so here's the problem once you see one plot like this if your moment was pearl harbor couldn't have been pearl harbor the way it went down um you know 9-11 whatever it is once you once you wrap your brain around one of them there are no there's nothing to constrain you from pondering crazy ass ideas and so you can't say oh that would never happen you can no longer say that and there's just too many of these there's there's too many things that just don't make sense you know there's i don't know shit about it but you know the israeli sunk one of our

Starting point is 01:19:25 destroyers and no one ever talks about that except for the guys who care about it um you know it's been going on since the dawn of time the lusitania was a setup right i i don't think we started a war without some sort of false flag initiation of the war right so dave let me ask you this question because i think a lot of people who who listen to this right that there's um i'm probably melting their circuits unfortunately well unfortunately in society there there's basically uh a move to the extremes right and so there's some people who i imagine are listening to this and they're sitting there shaking their head like yes he gets it he you He's talking about the things that I believe I see.

Starting point is 01:20:07 And then there's others that are like, oh my God, this guy is an absolute insane extremist, conspiracy theorist, et cetera. How do you balance maybe rationality when it comes to things that you are confused by? Because what I'm hearing you say, and correct me if I'm wrong, is, hey, there's a bunch of stuff that seems really weird, but I don't have the answer. It's not like you're saying, hey, the story you're being told is A, but really the story is B. What I hear you saying is I got details, you know, one, two, three, four, five, six, and they don't add up to me. And now I'm confused and I don't know what to think. So how do you kind of maybe go through the world as we have so much access to information where there are a lot of things that don't seem to add up? Like do you just sit and think about them all day?

Starting point is 01:20:57 do you just throw your hands up and say i'm not going to solve it and like let me move on to the next one like how do you kind of just navigate all this well after a while they they get matter of fact so i'll see something i'll see some stat about the vaccine killing people like i i know i'm done i i've i've come to terms with so i write about it right one of the things i do is i write about it if if if your ideas are incoherent writing about it tends to reveal that and now It's not to say I'm not clever enough to write a plot. I did a podcast recently with a guy whose worldview and mine don't match up. And he knows a ton of facts.

Starting point is 01:21:38 But in some sense, we all have like a Christmas tree and we hang the ornaments off it. What we do agree is that the world's screwed up. He just has this sort of Davos leaning and I say, I think China's involved, you know, and we disagree on that. and the problem is you can reach a point where you've got a model that's robust enough that you can make anything hang off it, and it doesn't mean it's right. As a chemist, by way of background, I went into a very complicated field that some thought we'd never understand, and some thought they did, and for 40 years, I've discovered over and over and over that what experts who are really trying to get it right, got that wrong. They asked the wrong questions. You wouldn't believe

Starting point is 01:22:25 things where I could say to a freshman, here's why this isn't even possibly a valid argument, right? And you go, oh, shit, I hadn't thought of that. And so it's a very complex field and just 40 years of relentlessly showing that what people thought was not true. I'm finishing a paper right now in which there's probably 500 papers in the literature all used the same mechanistic model to explain it. And it was just in a different zip code when you actually dug into it. So I'm comfortable with the idea that experts can be wrong. And over the years, I've gotten comfortable with the idea that psychopathic people conspire. Last time we talked about this. Yes. Yes. You know who's nuts? The guys who think that people who are in positions of power don't conspire. Those people need a CAT scan. There's just no chance that's not true, right?

Starting point is 01:23:26 When you start to extrapolate this maybe to financial markets, is the same thing true, right? The non-financial markets are crazy. There's all these things that don't make sense. And then when we look at the financial markets, same thing. We saw major banks getting in trouble for manipulating markets. We've seen issue after issue after issue. How much of it's true in finance as well? well the finance i i don't i don't get as dark in the sense that um you see greed and corruption

Starting point is 01:24:02 but it's it's at some level it's kind of garden variety it's on a massive scale the other thing is there's there's a non-trivial number of instances where what people attribute to nefarious dark forces are just 20 somethings and cubicles running markets around like crazy and just, you know, bidding it up and then bidding it down. And they're committing crimes, of course, you know, they're spoofing and stuff like that. But the bailouts of the banks at some level, you say, well, of course, they're going to bail out themselves, right? Who wouldn't bail out yourself? And so I think the markets, what has changed is that they've gotten so financialized. On Twitter, you'd be hard-pressed to find someone beyond Jesse Felder

Starting point is 01:25:01 and John Hussman talking about valuations. I do it all the time. And the problem is valuation doesn't tell you anything about timing. So I've been ranting about valuations for a long time. I think valuations sort of escaped the gravitational pull of of of the earth or tried to escape it starting in 94. So I think we've been drifting further and further from what I'd call a credible valuation since literally 94. Why? Well, actually, I look at 25 metrics evaluation I do every few years just to touch base. And in 2021, I did it. And, you know, if your favorite valuation is PE, may God have mercy on your soul, they can fake those like there's no tomorrow. But I use 25. They have to do with price to book, price to revenue, price to Tobin's Q, composite valuations, price earnings, you name it. um there's a whole bunch of them and they all kind of point to the same number of about

Starting point is 01:26:06 as of the end of 2021 we're sort of 110 to 150 overvalued historical fair value now what's noticeable is that if you look at all these valuation charts and if people are interested go to my pin tweet it's in there um what's noticeable is they all seem to peel away from historical metrics around 1994. And what you can see is that corporate debt took off in 1994 and didn't look back. Corporate debt is a percentage of GDP, normalized to things that shouldn't take off. That's in part the credit cycle, of course. But now here we are with 20% of the S&P being zombies right and and if 20 of the s&p can't pay their their debt with their cash flow the s&p should be priced a lot lower and um and it's not right what happens when those 20 default on their

Starting point is 01:27:12 debt i don't know is it possible is it possible for us to get there or is the constant intervention in markets obfuscating that to the background. And so, yes, prices matter, but maybe we can't look at the historical measurements as like that's actually where we could fall back to. Well, then you can't look at historical returns either then. That got presented to me by my smart friend sitting at dinner that night. He said, maybe your historical metrics are no longer valid. And I said, therefore, historical returns are no longer valid. If you're paying twice for a revenue stream than you used to pay, long-term sustainable is you can't get a good return, right? It's like if you buy a 30-year bond right now, you know what you're going to get

Starting point is 01:28:06 off that bond. You can trade it if you want. I'm not a trader. I'm not talking about trading. Trading is part of the problem, right? There's so much money sloshing around that it has become the market, but it's not about investing. And so if you buy a 30-year bond right now, what's the return on it? 3%, 3-something, 5-something? I lose track of these. I guess the 10-year is close to 3.

Starting point is 01:28:37 Let's use the 10-year. If you buy a 10-year bond, it's going to return 3%. it's a predictable return. You've overpaid for that bond, right? And if you think, well, I'm going to sell it to some sucker, you're going to have a ball, but that's not investing. And someone has to own that bond all the way to the end. What does your portfolio look like now? Like what's the makeup percentage-wise? I did some jiggling at the end of 2020, actually. My portfolio is probably 35%, percent maybe as much as 40 percent precious metals um there's i have some money in a in a

Starting point is 01:29:16 place that i count but i don't control and it's a it's an old man's you know 30 70 fund sort of thing and and i have no say in it and i i count it at the end of the year but um so that's sort of generic that's about one seventh of my wealth um that was an inherited chunk um i i moved into energy at the end of 2020 which was an absolute bottom call if that was the bottom right you never know what it's the bottom but if that was the bottom i nailed it i didn't size it like druckenmiller so um i never do i i always average in and every once in a while i think it's probably a good time to add some more energy. I think we're looking at an energy bull market somewhere in the energy sector for decades. The problem is, I don't know how to play it. I don't know

Starting point is 01:30:13 if it's energy services companies. I think you want to avoid energy companies that have to develop energy sources going forward in a big way, because I think the politics makes that almost impossible amount. So I think you want to buy energy companies that in some sense are almost like royalty trusts, where they've already got their pipes, they've got the refineries, they've got their wells, and they can keep pumping the energy out of the ground. I have a lot of cash. That was fine. I didn't mind missing opportunity, but now the inflation is causing trouble. So I've been desperate to figure out how to handle that. I own no Bitcoin, as you've probably surmised. It's not that I don't think it could do well. It's just not me. I just finished Morgan Housel's

Starting point is 01:31:03 book on the psychology of money. And he gets at that point very much. He says, what's completely sane for you is insane for me and vice versa. There's no right and wrong on some of these things. Some of these things are how you're wired. I'm not wired for Bitcoin because it would take me too long to understand it. And I would never forgive myself if I lost a bunch of a serious amount of money. And I, I would totally forgive myself for not buying it because, well, for starters, I passed on it at 10 bucks per coin. Um, and I would have sold it at 50 and then I would have been in psychotherapy for the next 20 years. Um, and, and then, um, yeah, a lot of fixed income sort of stuff. And when you look out over the next 12 months, 18 months, we started

Starting point is 01:31:52 the conversation off with the Fed's going to continue to hike rates potentially if they did grow a spine until things break. Are you doing anything different now or kind of preparing for worse times or just the portfolio you have is the portfolio you have? Well, I am prepared for worse times. What is different? It's not different in eternity different. It's not that this time it's different as in unique although i would argue the markets are uniquely frothy um i would say they've a new high watermark for crazy um what i'm preparing for what i blew in 0809 was that i was totally ready for it but i i i thought there had to be much more damage and in defense of that view, is that I don't think anybody could have foreseen

Starting point is 01:32:47 the level of intervention. And remember, when the Fed essentially bailed out the system by putting $30 billion into JP Morgan to take Bear Stearns, that sucked the oxygen out of the room, 30 billion. People were stunned by that. And now we're throwing trillions around, literally trillions. And so I would say that the Fed has gone completely out of orbit in terms of their willingness to intervene. They just didn't do that before. And I did not see that coming. And so I saw what came out of the 0.9 low is just a dead cat bounce. I thought we're going to be looking at a highly damaging 90% correction. And if you buy a 90% correction after the first 50, you still lost, let me do

Starting point is 01:33:47 some quick math, 80% of your money. Or as Einhorn said, one night at dinner to a tech bull, it's a well-known phrase but this guy was too naive to know it he said you know you know what a 90 correction is he says the 90 corrections where you get an 80 correction then it gets cut in half he says he says you have no experience with something that gets cut by 90 or 97 einhorn lit into the guy and uh what was the guy's response he was just frothing at the high profit margins of of uh of tech not recognizing that that idea that regression of the mean is a force of nature and profit high profit margins get scooped up and and and dealt with because if it's a high profit margin competitors can jump in and cause you trouble and um and so what you

Starting point is 01:34:47 really want my dad when i was a kid taught me he said he went into a business that was capital intensive during the 70s, right, where capital was expensive. And I said, why did you go into that business? He was a contractor, but this was a weird offshoot for him. He said, well, besides the fact that I think I can make money is that the fact that it's so capital intensive sort of protects me against a wildcatter because a shitty businessman can't get the capital to do this. And he says, I can compete with a credible businessman. We can both play in the same field says it's the guy who undercuts me and destroys us both simultaneously that i can't deal with so he was describing a moat right and and capital constraint is a moat for those who have

Starting point is 01:35:34 access to capital and the what the fed did is the fed took our savings which uh used to be the capital right savings was capital and they said they took away that role of of savings as as capital and they said look you don't need to you don't need to borrow from dave we'll lend it to you and so they they they made they they started by making my capital worth less and then they've reached the point where they're risking making it causing my capital to be worthless this episode is brought to you by core the free non-custodial browser extension built by ava labs which is more than just a wallet did you know that you can also bridge bitcoin natively across the avalanche bridge and take advantage of the thriving defy ecosystem in that community with core any crypto

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Starting point is 01:37:04 Free NFT domains provide all the benefits of premium Unstoppable Domains, including fee-free lifelong ownership if you don't have a blockchain.com wallet no worries there's new free domains available to everyone either join the wait list for a free blockchain.com domain or visit unstoppable domains.com to buy your domain today starting as low as five dollars unstoppable domains.com as we watch everything play out around the world uh deglobalization seems to be a major theme uh reshoring of manufacturing supply chains even potentially labor seems to be something that over the last two and a half years has become a more obvious thing. What's the impact on financial markets, kind of like the macro trends for the next 10,

Starting point is 01:37:48 15, 20 years? Do you feel like deglobalization and reshoring of some of these things will change where returns can be captured? Or is this still the same thing, just go buy great businesses and don't worry about some of these kind of macroeconomics, maybe like a Peter Lynch, You know, if you spend 15 minutes on macroeconomics, you spend 13 minutes too many. I think the globalization reshoring will be massively inflationary. OK, so, you know, this Murray Stahl at Horizon Kinetics said the age of monetary policy is over. So that miracle Russian resources, Chinese labor, credit cycle of 40 years, that provided a tailwind for the equity markets. The boomer demographics, Peter Zion is a total demographic count.

Starting point is 01:38:40 And when your demographics are favorable, which they were for the last 40 years, then you've got this massive workforce just showing up and cranking shit out daily, right? And you have a relatively small percentage of the population who were consumers and only consumers. We're now heading into an aging global population, but certainly in the United States, but China supposedly is much worse, where you've got a growing number of consumers who are expecting to have things done for them, and they don't have to paw on the oar anymore. They were retired. And and so you're going to have demand for goods and services and a smaller number to provide them. That's a highly inflationary setup. So whatever your model is going forward, I think it better deal with that problem. And the other thing inflation does is it shifts money into the hands of the rich. because because because financialization certainly doesn't help joe sixpack and and we could have all sorts of strife all sorts of stress all sorts of populism all sorts of dumb presidents right

Starting point is 01:39:55 and so i it's it's not to say that it hit charlie would you please shut up i'm getting You know, go defend yourself. Wait a minute. Where the fuck is he? There he is right there. I got three dogs. Only one's being a pain right now. This too shall pass, right?

Starting point is 01:40:23 Yeah. But it's, but you know, you know, the depression was only 10 years. I argue the depression's 15. i got an argument with a stanford economist who said no no you're wrong about that i said that you know low consumption during world war ii blah blah blah and he said no the the gdp during world war ii went up 15 something like that and and it after about 10 years i i took him on in writing i said no your gdp number is wrong because gdp should include depreciation of assets So if you crank out a drill, you could get 10 years out of that drill. If you go to the movies, you get two hours out of that movie. So they just are not equivalent contributors to GDP.

Starting point is 01:41:13 And World War II's GDP might have been rocking, but we were making battleships and bombs and planes and stuff like that. And the depreciation rate on those was measured in very short timescales. Now, what we did do during World War Two is we we made great progress towards improving mass production. So we took what Henry Ford did and we put it on steroids. And so that was the was what World War Two left us with was a highly functional economy in a world filled with unfunctional economies. And so so we were wealthy at the end of World War Two. But but but but World War Two was, I think, the blow off of the Depression. but it passed they say okay so this too shall pass but people suffered right world war ii passed but people suffered the civil war passed but people suffered and so you know if you went and

Starting point is 01:42:11 stomped on an anthill in your backyard you could stomp on it all goddamn day and the next day you'd go out there and there'd still be an anthill there but there'd be a lot of dead ants too i don't want to be one of those right and you think that's basically what uh what is likely to happen here is that uh this too shall pass but there'll be a lot of suffering uh for various groups in between now and then that's right that's right i mean depression unemployment was 25 i mean there were parents giving away their kids there were it was an awful time for some people. And you just don't want to be that person. So you have to prepare not to be that person somehow. Yeah. One of the things, um, before we wrap up that, that I found, uh, absolutely

Starting point is 01:42:57 fascinating was back in 2020. Uh, I think it was in the, towards the middle or end of March, I wrote a piece and I said, um, unemployment could basically eclipse the great depression unemployment numbers. And this was the week before we got the first 6.6 million of unemployment claims in a single week, right? So right before it skyrocketed. And what I had done is I went and I just analyzed a bunch of different sources that I found that were telling me at county levels or even at certain state levels of layoffs and of what they perceived to be this incoming gigantic leap. And so it made me go look at the great depression unemployment numbers and everyone knows the 25% number. Cause that's the big headline number, but actually it took three years

Starting point is 01:43:46 before it got up over, uh, 20%. I think it was something, you know, it was around a historic low, you know, kind of mid 3%, then it jumped to like eight, then it was like 15. And then eventually we got up over 20 and it stayed there for quite a while. It was like, I think it was three or four years where we were above 20% unemployment. And so the point that I was trying to make at the time was just like, look, you don't have to ever hit 25% to have as bad unemployment or worse than the Great Depression. And if you look back at the numbers, the official numbers from kind of this COVID situation, we got to 14% unemployment in the United States, right? Well, even if you believe those numbers too, you would have a tough time arguing that 2020,

Starting point is 01:44:29 that we've created any wealth whatsoever, right? We didn't produce anything. People weren't building houses. They weren't building buildings. Things were shut down. Research programs and pharmaceuticals were shut down. Oh, there's wealth creation maybe. And yet somehow at the end of the year,

Starting point is 01:44:52 what was the market up that year? In last year. 2020. I think it was up like 15% or something. Yeah, and then in 2021, it was up like, I think, 28%, 30%, something like that. Right. The market has to, at some level, track GDP. You can't grow the market faster than you grow wealth, which is, crudely speaking, GDP.

Starting point is 01:45:20 And so the GDP numbers are sketchy. There's a great book, by the way, in case someone's still listening to our podcast. by Robert Gordon on wealth creation. And he said that 1870 to 1940 was a phenomenal period of wealth creation. There's these primary inventions like electricity and things like that. And then there's what he called secondary inventions, which is appliances. And so they spin off. And he said, oddly enough, the best decade ever for secondary inventions was the 1930s we created a lot of wealth in the 1930s um and uh and um and he said then then it goes pretty flat i got two dogs working you know then it goes pretty flat from 1940 to sort of 1970

Starting point is 01:46:11 and then uh and then he said it's it's it just pancakes that real wealth creation just pancakes like crazy going forward. He said there was a blip from the decade from 95 to 2005, which was the tech thing. He said, but then it just flattens out again. And he draws some real interesting analogies. What is really transformational wealth? And you can say, oh, look at Amazon. Well, I would say more transformational than Amazon was the Sears robot catalog the sears robot catalog was was the prototype of amazon you got this catalog you can order anything of any one of 10 000 things before that you had to go to your your your country store and buy nails out of a barrel and shit like that and you can buy prefab houses and shit through

Starting point is 01:47:00 the sears robot catalog parts for your car it was amazon so amazon is not as transformational as sears and and and we we brought electricity you know the wright brothers one of the wright brothers lived to see god damn these dogs live to see jets oh my god how is that possible how do you how do you go from inventing air flight to seeing jets in in your lifetime and so i think that the modern economy is hugely a hollowed out thing right so you got tesla which is inventing ideas but but the actual wealth creation is is is still hard to detect um this market cap is way out of proportion to what it actually produces uh you've got facebook that if it went away today the world would be a better place you got what netflix netflix is a poor man's hbo

Starting point is 01:48:07 Charlie, get the fuck out of here. He is a – Boston Terriers are half bulldog, half terrier. The bulldog part shows up occasionally. Dave, real quick. The book that you're talking about is called The Rise and Fall of American Growth by Robert Gordon. It's brilliant. It's brilliant. And in the description on Amazon, it says,

Starting point is 01:48:28 In the century of the Civil War, an economic revolution improved the American standard of living in ways previously unimaginable. Electric lighting, indoor plumbing, home appliances, motor vehicles, air travel, air conditioning, and television transformed households and workplaces. With medical advances, life expectancy between 1870 and 1970 grew from 45 to 72 years. And then it says Gordon challenges the view that economic growth can or will continue unabated, and he demonstrates that the life-altering scale of innovations between 1870 and 1970 can't be repeated. He contends that the nation's productivity growth, which has already slowed to a crawl, will be further held back by the vexing headwinds of rising inequality, stagnating education, an aging population, and the rising debt of college students and the federal government. So, and the people who have iPhones and stuff are going, well, that's just not true. But you go, okay, tell me how many times you have to do something online where it doesn't frustrate the shit out of you. things that just shouldn't have been put online now is online and and and you know i'm always

Starting point is 01:49:33 amazed how many websites would benefit from just looking at how amazon puts their website together so i i give them full credit for optimizing what it is they do i think they've done a phenomenal job but there are so many again netflix baffles me and then we replace exxon from the dow with salesforce.com what the hell is salesforce.com people say oh it's cloud this or cloud then i go Well, then how about Google, if you want to do it? Why would you put in Salesforce.com? And I think they are translucent companies. It's just not that good, in my opinion.

Starting point is 01:50:13 And they're not transformational. I mean, progress is always forward. Even during the inflationary 70s, progress moved forward. you know and transistors were invented and stuff like that i can't remember the 60s i guess was the transistor but um the other thing buffett recently i'm not a big buffett fan i respect his ability to to grow wealth not grow wealth grow uh personal wealth um not create wealth but he pointed out that um that five of the six biggest companies in the world are u.s based companies and if you look at them they are these translucent type companies um not that they haven't wait are you

Starting point is 01:51:01 barking now you fuckhead jesus christ and uh and uh but he pointed out he said if you look back 20 years here's the 20 biggest companies in the world or 30 years um and 14 of the 20 were japanese and he said 30 years from now it'll look that different again so here's a guy who's always saying i'll never bet against america who's saying 30 years from now the five out of six biggest companies will not be american and and and so in some sense he's he's trashing himself He's trashing his own model. And so the next 30, the other thing I keep going back to the Zeehan book, Zeehan got into my skull last week.

Starting point is 01:51:54 He's worth paying attention to. I don't, I, I shouldn't talk about him cause I'm still working my way through it. But Zeehan's thinking is that he's overconfident, but he's, he's, he's worth listening to. Nevermind. Um, the future will not look like the past. That's a safe statement. I think this next recession will be a killer, because we have too much debt. The Federal Reserve has no ammo to fake our way out of it. And I kept trying to get to a thought that those three things that occurred, four or five things that occurred momentously over the last 40 years that won't repeat.

Starting point is 01:52:42 One of the things they did is they created an equity market. It was this relentless series of V bounces. So the market would try to correct, and then it would bounce right back. And someone who says that a 20% drop that rallies back to where it was before within a year, if you want to call that a correction have a ball it corrected nothing precisely nothing all it did was reinforce the idea that you can't lose investing in stocks now oh guy you want to pay attention to very very off radar off screen uh he's got him ed mcquarry at uc irvine and he's analyzed markets back a couple hundred years and and he talks about you know equities and bonds

Starting point is 01:53:33 they break even. Ben Graham said that, too. They break even. If you take the bond market disaster post-World War II, a couple of decades there, the 200 years, equities and bonds tie each other. And Graham said anyone who thinks equities necessarily beat bonds in return is delusional. Now, maybe things have changed now, but regression of the mean will occur. It always does. And if you look at something that's way, way, way off any sort of historical metric, I don't know when, but you got to assume it's going to regress. The bet as to when is dangerous, but to bet that it won't regress, that's the most dangerous. Yeah, it's the mean for a reason, right? Yeah, in fact, what the Fed has done is prevented it from ever going below the mean You know, the markets weren't even that cheap in 08, 09 They were below fair value for about a month

Starting point is 01:54:40 And I said that when I was at a dinner with Mark Spitznagel Who's one of these deep Zen types And he concurred And Jeremy Grantham, too They both said, look, they were below fair value for the shortest period of time. So if the horrific collapse of everything caused the markets to spend a month below historical fair value, what did you correct? And people, you know, when the markets were down 20%, people would ask me, colleagues, ah, the markets are down 20%. I'm getting real nervous.

Starting point is 01:55:18 I said, okay, if a year and a half ago, I told you that you would not make any money over the next year and a half, would you have shit your pants? The answer is no. They'll say, yeah, that would be fine. Well, I said, that's what you just did. But the message also is we haven't corrected anything. We unwound a year and a half of fraud. We haven't even gotten back to the, I'm not even sure we're back to the pre-COVID peak. which was already a disastrously high peak.

Starting point is 01:55:52 And so I think we're going to unwind. I think the S&P is going to unwind sub 2000. I had something jar me a little bit yesterday that made me wonder if my math's a little off, but I, I, I actually think we could get that at 1200. 1200. Yeah. I think it's that far out of whack. 1,200 would be below historic fair value, comfortably below.

Starting point is 01:56:21 There's people right now who are going to hear you say that, and they're going to go shut their computer and go for a walk outside. Well, go look at my pinned tweet and look at the 25 metrics evaluation and ask if you unwind those. I think the 25 point to about a 65% correction. Where does that get you to? It gets you to the mid-teens. And that only gets you to the mean.

Starting point is 01:56:42 And you and I both know that you're supposed to spend half your statistically weighted time below the mean for it to be the mean so you can say ah the means now change okay um ed not um um ron grease and he goes by the name the chart master sent me a plot one day that i'd never seen and i've never seen anyone else post it and i don't know why. It is the return of the S&P over the 20th century, the last 100 years, corrected for the M2 money supply. And it's dead flat. It's not gently sloping. It's dead flat. Is it possible that that's the way to correct for inflation? That's a Milton Friedman correction, right? That's money supply.

Starting point is 01:57:36 Is it possible that the actual capital gains on the market through the last 100 years are zero, corrected for M2? Probably. What that means is all you get are dividends. And the evidence that we're way over fair value is that the dividends are half what they used to be. They used to be around four, four and a half. Now they're terrible. but i do see opportunity a bad secular bear market will hurt everybody but if you're super patient i think the energy sector looks good i would rather buy it in a

Starting point is 01:58:15 horrific sell-off um but the inflation's got me a little edgier than normal um the the lost asset class i keep throwing this out and it makes no difference the lost asset class is platinum and platinum miners go look up the three biggest platinum miners sabanier imperial and uh and uh anglo-american platinum and they have dividend yields in the high single digits net cash in the balance sheet pe's of five when i asked a friend at rbc for more information on them because i'm sitting there going what am i what am i missing and by the way this is with platinum not having moved in 20 years so they're printing money without platinum helping them and and and i asked a friend from rbc for some of their inside information and the data he sent me was five years

Starting point is 01:59:15 old and i said that's all you got and he said that's it so they're not even being looked at and so i own some of the platinum miners they've gotten cheaper since i bought them And maybe there's geopolitical risk in South Africa. There's geopolitical risk in every country, best I can tell. And so there's that. I used to be a big fan of the tobacco stocks, not morally, but financially. But then they went and bought vape companies. I kind of screwed that pooch.

Starting point is 01:59:54 There are things out there that you could buy If a gun got put to my head I still think I think the bear market has started I think the secular bear market has started How long can it go? How long the Nikkei go? I would argue the Nikkei is still in the bear market

Starting point is 02:00:17 I knew you would argue that Well, if you own the Nikkei in 1989 You're still underwater Yeah to me to me the definition of a recession being the downturn is bullshit a recession if you think about what what the recession the physical interpretation of a recession is a dip a hole a pivot a divot from your your sand wedge um you're not out of a recession so you're out of the hole. If you're in a sand trap on the upslope, are you out of the trap? No. So to me, a recession

Starting point is 02:00:54 should include both the downturn and the upturn required to get back to even. That's a recession thing. The Nikkei, if you own the Nikkei in 1989, you're a 55-year-old businessman. It's now 30-some-odd years later, you're an 88-year-old businessman and you're underwater. You're not a businessman, by the way. You're just a broke old

Starting point is 02:01:23 guy. You couldn't trade it. I think the markets could become uninvestable. Let's say the Nikkei was the known universe. Let's say that's all you had. It's a big market. It was the most

Starting point is 02:01:39 famous country of its time for investing. You couldn't do anything with the Nikkei for decades. There was no way to invest it. And I got into it with George Noble, who's way smarter than me, but, and he said, well, you get short. I said, no, you couldn't. It took too long. The erosional cost would kill you. He said, well, you can do this and that, and he has all these fancy things. I said, now you're talking professional class investing or trading. Said, we can't do that. I can't do that. Very few people can do that. And so I think the markets could become uninvestable. The markets were uninvestable from 67 to 81. They treaded water inflation unadjusted. They lost 75% inflation adjusted over 14 years.

Starting point is 02:02:31 How old are you now, Bob? 34. So when you're 50 years old and you've gone nowhere, inflation, you've gone down 75% inflation adjusted. It's crazy. It's crazy. And the average investor doesn't know that's possible. They've been told that can't happen.

Starting point is 02:02:54 Jeremy Siegel, by the way, Ed McCrory tears Jeremy Siegel a new one from head to toe. So, Ed McCoy wrote a couple of papers on this. They're really, he sends them to me. I don't know how he picked me out. Maybe I sent him an email. But investing is just not supposed to be this profitable. Buffett said 4% a year. He said when you take out all the fees, everything, 4% a year.

Starting point is 02:03:19 Jeremy Grantham just quoted that same number in a podcast I listened to recently. 4%. If we buy AMC stock, though, we're going to just go to the moon. The moon and back. Yeah. It'll be like I do an analogy between what's that one with Sandra Bullock where gravity. Yeah. I said, this is not like gravity. You're not going to get up and stagger away on some beach somewhere at the end of the movie. Right. So I, I, I've become rather dark. I must admit. But I'm positioned such that unless the inflation really finds a way to shred me – and by the way, the fact that the metals are not responding at all is rather stunning. Gold miners look cheap to me.

Starting point is 02:04:09 The gold miners are printing money now. I think the one thing I'll say is most of the assets that people would have thought would be inflation hedge assets, that is true, except for if you're in a liquidity crisis. and what I think we are watching is exactly what we saw in 2008. And I've talked about this over and over again. And frankly, people who understand what happened then and understand how liquidity crisis worked, they kind of nod their head and say,

Starting point is 02:04:37 yep, okay, that makes sense. People who don't just latch onto the fact that an asset can only be an inflation hedge or not, right? It's just this black and white thing. And if you go back to 2008, gold went down 30%. And that didn't mean that it wasn't a safe haven. It didn't mean that it wasn't a non-correlated asset over a long period of time, any of that stuff. It just meant that for those six months of the summer of 08, when it went down 30 percent, along with everything else, there was a liquidity crisis and correlations went to one or close to one.

Starting point is 02:05:05 You sell whatever you can. Yes. And, you know, when I was a kid, I might have told you this in a previous podcast. I was having a conversation with my dad. He was a great street-level economist running a construction business that survived. And at one point I said to him, I said, so you could get wealthy buying real estate in the 30s. This is in high school. I said this to him and he said, yeah, but no one had any money.

Starting point is 02:05:36 And this somehow that planted the seed of an idea in my skull that said you have to have money at the bottom. Which means, therefore, you have to have money at the top. You can't hold on to shit to the bottom and then get money. and so you you you really have to resist the irresistible urge to be invested when being invested has been so profitable now ironically he made a probably a hundred fold off general electric and i tried to talk him into selling it because because i had paid attention to jack Welch and his bean counting and stuff. And I knew that GE Capital was a problem and stuff like that. But how do you convince a guy who's made a hundredfold on a stock that he should sell it?

Starting point is 02:06:27 And why the hell should he listen to you? And Morgan Housel's one of his most strong arguments in this book that, again, I just finished, is that you really, really, really want to resist the urge to stop the compounding. So one of the reasons why you have to invest by your own personal metric is so that you don't bail. And so I try to buy an asset now in which i use michael barry's thesis that if if worse comes to worse you hang on to it and that's not netflix and that's not arc that's none of those that is kind of gold because you say fuck it right um it's been around 5 000 years i'll hang on to it it it is it is i don't know quite a bit of rio tinto it would take an asteroid to take out their mining operations

Starting point is 02:07:34 they have a big dividend they have a low pe and and they have cash on the balance sheet and i just feel good about that i i don't i'm i'm avoiding every company with debt i can handle a little as long as the debt's small relative to the revenues and i say okay you know one exception is tobacco dave i literally could talk to you i think for like two days straight no sleep and we could talk about all the dark crazy shit going on in the world so what do you disagree with you i babble my ass off but where would you say oh shit you know that that part's the part i just can't sign

Starting point is 02:08:20 off on what what what part did you have to bite your lip going oh fuck we just lost our we not only lost our audience which you already have acknowledged but but you lost me too right was there any part that i i think the uh there's two pieces um one i don't actually i don't know the answer to either one of them but the one thing i would challenge is this idea that we're going to go into like a super deep uh kind of painful recession and i agree with the analysis actually right that like that is where we would be headed um i probably have more confidence that the fed uh is going to wave the white flag pivot and just start dropping monetary stimulus all over the place again you know well before we get to i don't know can they do that though here's the problem

Starting point is 02:09:10 this is why the inflation strike is so important can they do it with inflation screaming at them i i don't think that they have uh the classic trade-off between inflation or recession right uh was all fed policy driven they can do whatever now we have this stagflationary period and i think they're going to have to choose you're going to have to bite the bullet on one which one are you going to bite the bullet on and my guess is that if you say we are going to prevent our true on full you know catastrophic recession and people will have to live with high inflation that is the lesser of the two evils because you and i will yell and scream from the hill what are you guys doing this is insane inflation sucks all this stuff but the average person yeah things got

Starting point is 02:09:59 expensive they have no clue what's going on whereas i'm not sure that's true i think they're gonna blame somebody oh they for 100 but the people who are responsible aren't elected officials And so from that standpoint, if you really look at it, Powell getting reaffirmed, reappointed, whatever you want to call it, by Biden, I think was actually a pretty important data point on, okay, we're now going to go across party lines here. We are going to kind of hang our hat on this approach, less the person and more the approach. and I'm always careful to say like I don't think that Jerome Powell if he was to be replaced by somebody else would necessarily look good or bad I just think that somebody would do exactly what he's doing like he's doing what their data tells them to do and what their models and kind of their framework is we just live in a really really complex time where you know as you know we've

Starting point is 02:11:01 talked about before I don't think a human-led monetary policy is ultimately up for the task of navigating a world of unknowns, right? Like, I just find that a losing battle. And so I choose to shield myself from it, you know, in a major way, right? And that's where obviously the Bitcoin stuff comes in. Now, the downside to it on a day-to-day basis in the short term,

Starting point is 02:11:29 if you're not looking at it from an investment standpoint, you're not looking at it from shielding, you know, your investment portfolio, all this, and you're saying, hey, I live paycheck to paycheck, right, going back to not having the $400. Can you put your economic wealth into an asset that goes up a lot and down a lot? And sometimes, you know, both of those in the same week? Well, you know, a little bit harder to wrap your head around that. And so I think different people have different objectives, right? And so I just find it hard that the Federal Reserve will allow us to go into some, you know, 08 style

Starting point is 02:12:05 uh recession but if they do i then question um so much does inflation come down as much as just the base effect takes place right there's like a base effect eventually well i'm not sure the base effect in countries where inflation gets out of control they don't get saved by the base effect Yeah, but what I'm saying is like if you look at – so the 0% inflation from June to July, right? They're celebrating saying – No, no, that's not true. That's just a lie. Of course.

Starting point is 02:12:41 There was 8.5% inflation. Of course. And so that 8.5% though, remember, I think it was June of 2021 was the first month we had over 5% inflation, and it never came back down. We have now gone more than 12 months with over 5% inflation in the United States of America. And so if we have 8.5% in July of 2022, that is now compounding. We're now in the compounding game. That's exactly right. And so one thing we know is that if inflation stays up, we are not going to be talking five years from now about, I don't see how this has stayed up without causing a problem. Correct. Because if you're losing 10% of your spending power a year, and that goes on more than one year, again, half the country is going to be starving pretty soon.

Starting point is 02:13:40 So this is a countdown clock right here. This is a countdown clock at loss. So this is not sustainable. There's the other. That's the little one. She's a perpetual puppy. um the other thing that i would say to you is uh again i agree with your analysis on uh the non-financial events a lot of the data points don't add up a lot of the data points just leave

Starting point is 02:14:07 you scratching your head saying what what is going on right right and uh i think it was actually you who maybe two years ago i think you're doing a podcast with marty bent and in it you were going over your year in review and you said something that always stuck with I'm pretty sure it was you who said you know the problem with the climate change debate is that most of the analysis that is done the thesis gets negated when the experiments are done and so naturally some portion of the scientific community basically just throws their hands up and says well we tested all are other ideas so it must be humans right rather than go and prove here is exactly what humans are doing but whatever right and i kind of feel a little bit like uh when you get into the really

Starting point is 02:14:59 dark stuff not not you uh personally but like just the deeper you go down these rabbit holes uh and we all do it it's kind of like um uh it's kind of like the modern version of uh the thing that you do that you don't want anyone to know you do except for just some weirdos like you and i that that we end up talking about it right but like people get on the internet and they start googling around and they end up in some weird place and then they're kind of like oh shit like how did i get here you know whatever but things don't make sense and so we've now seen enough examples where we're losing trust in institutions or we feel like we're being misled or whatever we just immediately assume it's nefarious and i do wonder um if if you try to fight that which

Starting point is 02:15:47 is very hard i mean i i fall victim to it all the time how much of it is just like the world is weird we don't understand a lot of shit and so like you can take a bunch of data points and like the natural conclusion may not be the actual answer versus like no this shit's real dark and like there's really fucking nefarious things that happen and like you know We just happen to have uncovered the data points or the ingredients, and so we just haven't yet found the smoking gun that ends up with the conclusion. And each situation is different, right? I think it's easier to detect the bullshit than to undo it and to unravel it. And so when you start catching people lying to you – so the climate change, one of the first tip-offs is that you start running into big lies.

Starting point is 02:16:38 and and and and they actually philosophically believe that their cause is so just that that lying is legit it's sort of like if trump's hitler then of course you do anything to make sure that he doesn't get re-elected and if you really think he's hitler of course the dog's doing it again if you really think he's hitler then who who wouldn't do anything to prevent him from getting re-elected and the mob psychology where you all agree right you and your echo chamber agree that he's hitler and so you you get reinforced and i think to go down unconventional paths you need some reinforcement but there's an optimum in that curve so you need reinforcement so that so you don't feel so insane you just can't do it

Starting point is 02:17:28 so when i was buying gold in 1999 there was not much reinforcement but there was a couple of key players who were going you know this is looking like a pretty good time to be buying gold and and uh and without that i couldn't have done it and and when i was buying tobacco stocks and god i think it was like 2003 or i can't remember so long ago when they were facing a big lawsuit and stuff and and it it took me a while to piece together the story to say um this lawsuit can't hurt him since i realized the lawsuit couldn't hurt him i go oh these are a buy now and um and so i can i think i think i'm okay at generating enough concern digging out enough data to say okay the story we're being told is wrong but without digging out enough data to be able

Starting point is 02:18:28 to say, and this is the true story, because that's a totally different bar. That's a totally different standard. And if they're really good at being nefarious, you could be 20 layers of the onion wrong. And all you have to do is things like, you don't remember, but when we found out that Reagan was trading arms for hostages and stuff like that, you go, what? Really? And all of a sudden you find out, wait a minute, we're now allied with Al-Qaeda or the Taliban, right? weren't they the bad guys at one point so the very surreal world and and and then you you you watch someone like like khashoggi get killed in the saudi embassy right he's one fucking guy who cares i mean who the hell cares he's one guy in the saudi embassy you go to saudi arabia you

Starting point is 02:19:19 get killed excuse me that's a darwin award as far as i'm concerned and and it's a shame for the family. But meanwhile, the press completely ignores tens of thousands being killed in Yemen by the Saudis. One dead Khashoggi versus tens of thousands of Yemenis. There's no way to explain those two contextually. The juxtaposition of those two facts just doesn't make sense. without invoking geopolitical, nefarious, propaganda-rich everything. I went back and read Edwin Bernays' classic 1926 book on propaganda, just to look at what the godfather of the field said about propaganda. We're slathered with propaganda.

Starting point is 02:20:11 It's part of our culture. So everything, when they try to sell you a car, it's propaganda. but where it gets dubious is is when the government is using propaganda to get you to sign off on just total dog shit and and now that the government is 50 percent of our gdp it's you know back at the turn of the century the other century the government was like three percent of GDP. It didn't matter. Right. The world just it kind of ran itself. And the government was this. Now you could get some senator to pass some law that made your business work better. But but now the trillions and trillions of dollars are being handed out. So Halliburton went from

Starting point is 02:20:58 being a company that used to be involved in getting energy out of the ground to a company whose sole purpose is to get government contracts. That's their entire business models to get government contracts and and and government's now so big and the corruption therefore is so deep and i think back to climate change people say well you know big oil is paying you i got there's i have tried to find the thread of big oil to climate deniers i can't find it and there's a lot of people trying to say it's there i can't find it what i can tell you is is the climate industrial complex, on the other hand, they're projecting $150 trillion to be spent on it. That's serious money. That starts adding up after a while. And so, again, for me,

Starting point is 02:21:54 the climate change story changed when I found out that they were lying their ass off constantly. and and and we can talk about that if you want i mean the first lie is that there's no credible scientists who don't believe it right that's the standard statement the only guys who don't believe it are not credible nobel prize-winning physicists all over the globe have denounced it but no one cares the former head of the national academy of science said it's the biggest hoax in history is he not credible the guy used to run nasa's temperature monitoring program says there's no there's no warming the 500 phd scientists at nasa wrote a letter saying please cut back on your rhetoric there's gazillions of people screaming at the top of their lungs that this

Starting point is 02:22:46 story is wrong you know doomberg right i do doomberg is a smart bastard and i know his background and he was highly placed and he said when he gets into this debate he just points out that that the equations are all nonlinear and anyone who does modeling knows that nonlinear, a pile of nonlinear equations can't be solved. And so, so I, no, I, I think, I think most of what we're being told is a big lie, but does it matter? Most of the time? No, I've, I've turned on pharma like you wouldn't believe COVID destroyed pharma's

Starting point is 02:23:28 up i i think if if you're taking if you're taking a drug to lower your blood pressure you should talk to your doctor you got duped if you're taking nexium you got duped if there's just so many there's so many drugs out there that the the not only serve no purpose but that my wife just took a drug for uh she has a vomiting disorder and uh and dylan was working and stopped working so so we went to doctors recently they put her on a new one called lamotrigine or something one in 10 people get a rash that sends them to the er one in 10 is that and can be fatal the fda cleared that that's a miracle drug to take that kind of risk

Starting point is 02:24:25 and i think the fda is now clearing drugs with no justification whatsoever i think the fda has been completely commandeered by big pharma completely 100 and and and i could be convinced that there are good drugs coming out still i was involved in chantix in a very sort of peripheral way and but but i think so many of the drugs we're taking, you know, the drug from Biogen that got cleared for Alzheimer's? No. Last year, in the middle of the vaccine push, Biogen got a drug cleared for Alzheimer's, $56,000 a year. It turns out that the FDA panel, I think 13 said no. And the 14 said, I'm not sure. and the FDA cleared it.

Starting point is 02:25:26 I just found out from a book I just finished on the FDA that they actually had terminated the clinical trials. And then all of a sudden out of the blue, they cleared the drug anyways. So I think the pharmaceutical industry has gone from trying to develop legitimate drugs to developing a business model where they can push drugs through regardless of their efficacy and and and and they can win in court of course it's it's a it's a tax and so i don't think i'll

Starting point is 02:26:06 ever take a drug which i can't identify the positive effect so if i have an infection i get it if i have a rash and the steroid makes it goes away i get it but if you say some level of something of mine is too high or too low not taking it the statins are a nightmare the whole statin story the people taking blood pressure modifying medicines there are people who need it because they're super high risk but they're they're they're um they're giving it to everybody they're saying oh your blood pressure is 160 over you know 100 you should we should put you on a statin they did a clinical trial looking for evidence that that was needed the clinical trial failed. It didn't stop them. My wife was on a drug called Neuron. It was passed for shingles pain.

Starting point is 02:26:56 Pfizer said, okay, let's see if we can get this cleared for neuropathic pain. And it turns out that they did a clinical trial and they got nothing, nothing, zero, bupkis. And then they called in a bunch of experts and said, look at the data again, make lemonade out elements. Find a way. And the internal documents from a court case said nothing. This group said, it's over, game over, not going to happen. They approached the FDA informally, and the FDA said, don't bother. And what did they do? They got a couple of academics to write a bunch of fraudulent papers on the potential of Neurontin for neuropathic pain in general. Pfizer then bought a million copies and they handed them out to doctors all over the world. 98% of Neurontin's

Starting point is 02:27:51 market is off-label generalized neuropathic pain. It's crazy. It's crazy. So I believe, here's what I think has happened to Pharma. They have picked all the low-lying fruit, period. they've got the antibiotics they've got some antivirals and now they're they're they're trying to go for lifestyle they're trying to go for things that just change who you are sort of and um and i think therefore what it means is it's an industry that should be shrinking because there are no longer low-lying fruit. And instead of naturally shrinking like people who made wagons for a living in 1900,

Starting point is 02:28:43 they have chosen to use graft and corruption to keep their business model going. Dave, I want to stop right there. We're just going to – as an ending sentence, I think there's more of it in the world than you and I want to see or admit to others. There's a lot of people who may not have heard our previous conversations. Where can we send them to find you on the internet or find the year in review or any of the other things that you write? Well, if you search my name, David Column, and year-end review, and then you put in a date, it's gotten harder because Peak Prosperity changed their website. But you'll find year-end reviews for each year back about a dozen years.

Starting point is 02:29:37 If you go to Twitter, it's David B. Column is the handle. I figure I'm not long for this world on Twitter. I think I'm close to getting booted. I just found out yesterday, there's a bot that checks and seeing if you're being silenced. and I scored worse than Alex Berenson and James Woods. So, and there's very few people who are scoring poorly. And I, I, they're, I've noticed funny things. So I think I'm going to be on Twitter for a limited period.

Starting point is 02:30:07 But at David B column, the year in review from last year is my pinned tweet. And it's a be careful. It's not for the faint of heart. It's 300 pages. pages we will definitely do this again maybe we'll do it again when uh when you write this year's yeah i wore you down i think hopefully no hopefully you're gonna write this year's gonna be 400 pages no it's not actually i i i i have to invent i have to reinvent it somehow i i've been thinking of various angles to come just write a 10 pager just like super short 10 pages the problem is you can't get into anything then it just becomes a shallow list of bullets you can't digest a topic that efficiently.

Starting point is 02:30:50 That is very true. I'm just going to have to leave shit on the cutting room floor. All right, my friend. I appreciate it as always. Every time I talk to you, you make me think much more deeply about various aspects of the world, but also financial markets. And we will definitely do this again.

Starting point is 02:31:06 So I appreciate your time today. Adios muchacho. It was fun. Thanks so much for listening to today's episode. I really hope you enjoyed this one. Make sure you're subscribed on Apple, Spotify, or your favorite podcast player. And if you're looking to transition into a brand new job in the Bitcoin or crypto industry, we've got you covered.

Starting point is 02:31:23 Head over to thecryptoacademy.io. My team and I have been working with the top HR teams in the industry to develop an intensive three-week training program with over 50 live events. We teach you exactly what you need to know to break into the industry, including live interview prep and resume review. Our students have been hired at over 75 of the world's best Bitcoin and crypto companies. go to thecryptoacademy.io to learn more. Again, that's thecryptoacademy.io.

Starting point is 02:31:49 If you enjoyed today's episode, make sure you share it with your friends and I'll see you all for the next episode.

The Pomp Podcast - #1077 Dave Collum On Why Everything Is Worse Than You Think

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