The Pomp Podcast - #1289 Dave Collum Says Disaster Is Coming In 2024

Episode Date: January 3, 2024

Dave Collum is a Professor of Chemistry at Cornell University. In this conversation we discuss his year in review of 2023, which includes financial markets, bitcoin, digital totalitarianism, political landscape, climate change, biological males, and more.  ======================= Base is making it their mission to bring a billion people onchain. But what exactly is Base? It's an Ethereum L2 offering a seamless experience for both builders and users. With near-zero gas fees and rapid transaction speeds, Base is shaping the future of the onchain world. Base is a canvas for everyone, with hundreds of apps in the Base ecosystem, whether you're an emerging creator, a seasoned developer, or someone exploring the onchain space for the first time, Base is designed to bring your ideas to life. So, if you're looking for a platform where the future of onchain is being built daily, Base is your destination. Join in and make onchain the next online. Learn more at ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠base.org⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ and follow along on Twitter at @BuildOnBase to see cool things to do onchain, everyday. ======================= Trust and Will has simplified the process of creating and managing your will or trust online. They leverage a data-driven, design-first approach and amazing customer support to help you protect your legacy from the comfort of your home starting at just $159. Sign up today for 10% off using ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://trustandwill.com/pomp⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ======================= Pomp writes a daily letter to over 250,000+ investors about business, technology, and finance. He breaks down complex topics into easy-to-understand language while sharing opinions on various aspects of each industry. You can subscribe at https://pomp.substack.com/

What's up everyone? This is Anthony Pompliano. Many of you know me as Pomp. You're listening to the Pomp Podcast, which is my effort to find the most interesting people in the world and sit with them for hours while I ask questions in an effort to learn. So it would mean the world to me if you would subscribe to the show on your favorite audio platform, watch episodes on YouTube, and tell your friends and family about the podcast. My goal is to help millions learn from the world's most interesting people. So let's get into today's episode. This episode has become an annual tradition. It is a conversation with Dave Collum, professor of chemistry at Cornell University. Dave puts together a year in

review every single year. This year is almost 200 pages, and it is definitely worth reading. Dave and I sat down and we talked about many of the different themes, including his investment portfolio and how he sees financial markets, why he divorced his equities in 1999 and married gold in cash. And then we talk about things like the physical metal market, why he sees the US stock market in deep, deep trouble and potentially headed towards a major correction. And then we talk about a number of other topics that he covered. Now, Dave has no shyness at all in his body. He's willing to talk about the things that most people don't want to discuss. And they even think may be taboo in society. I don't agree with everything that Dave writes or talks about. But

it sure is interesting to listen to how somebody who's obviously a highly intelligent person thinks about the world and many of the different developments that have occurred recently. Other topics include why he thinks climate change is a scam, why he thinks that writing about certain topics is essential to American democracy and freedom, how we can think about biological males competing in women's sports. And then we even get into things like why we are already being ruled by algorithms and how authoritarian CBDCs, digital IDs, facial recognition software, and carbon budgets all are marching us towards digital authoritarianism. I really enjoyed this conversation with Dave, as I do every single year.

This one is a doozy, so I hope that you enjoy my conversation with Dave Collum. 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. Today's episode is brought to you by Base. Base is making it their mission to bring a billion people on chain. What exactly is Base? It's a layer two offering a seamless experience for both builders and users. With near zero gas

fees and rapid transaction speeds, Base is shaping the future of the on-chain world. Base is a canvas is for everyone with hundreds of apps in the ecosystem whether you're an emerging creator a seasoned developer or someone exploring the on-chain space for the first time base is designed to bring your ideas to life so if you're looking for a platform where the future of on-chain is being built daily base is your destination join in and make on-chain the next online learn more at base.org or follow along on twitter at build on base again that's at build on base to see cool things to do on-chain every single day. Today's episode is brought to you by Trust and Will. I've gone through a number of different changes in my life over the last few years. I got married,

I had a kid, and I had to start thinking about how could I ensure that my wife and my child would be okay if anything ever happened to me. That's where trust, wills, and estate planning come into play. Now, most people, what they do is they get introduced to a friend, an uncle, or someone in their local community. It tends to be someone who's really expensive, a lawyer, an accountant, or somebody who does estate planning and they just simply are using a one-size-fits-all template and just telling you pay me thousands of dollars and I'll use the same thing for you as the guy down the street. But that's not what Trust and Will does. They have a trusted online estate planning product that starts as low as $159, which allows you to now protect your legacy

from the comfort of your own home. You get to leverage their excellent customer support available via phone, email, or chat. They have thousands of five-star reviews and a rating of excellent on Trustpilot. It takes most people 20 to 30 minutes to complete their estate plan with Trust and Will. And not only that, but if you go to trustandwill.com slash pomp, you'll get 10% off. Plus you'll get free shipping of all your estate planning documents. So go to trustandwill.com slash pomp and make sure you get an estate plan in place. Whether it's for you or one of your loved ones, having a trust and or a will can literally be the difference between someone being taken care of and someone not. Go check them out today at

trustandwill.com. All right, guys. Bang, bang. I have Mr. Dave Collum back again. It's going to be a spicy conversation, as I think we've had multiple times. But Dave, I thought the first place that we could start with your year in review is on the financial markets. You've got all the weird stuff. You've got the conspiracy theories. You've got all the craziness in there, just like every other year. But the financial markets really, I think, tell a story that weaves many of these other things in there together. And what a lot of people may not know about you is you had this epic investing run up until about 2009. And then you started to change your mind about how financial markets worked, about assets that maybe you wanted exposure to or didn't want

exposure to. Help us understand over the last couple of decades, how has your thought process about investing, especially the macro market, changed? And then how is that being expressed today in the portfolio? So I actually should preface this with one of the most cutting emails I got after publishing this thing. I get a lot of support from a good friend who's a famous money manager in Europe. And he said, I think you've lost your edge in investing. And I think it's because you're focusing on all that other crap. And what I think he has backwards is two things. One is that I'm hunkered down for the apocalypse. And so if I can get a 6% return, then I can set a huge win because I'll take 6% all day for the time being.

Where what I do will either work or not is when we do have the next serious downturn, which I think is going to be a whopper, and how I do during that. That'll determine whether I've been smart or stupid. it um but but but he also has it backwards in the sense that i'm sitting on my hands like crazy right so i've got my position and now i'm just waiting for the markets to to you know game day to start and and and so what do i do well i focus on the other crap and and that's the way it's what else am i going to read i can read all the overvaluation crap i want and it's not going to changed my mind at this point. I'm just waiting for the recession and the serious sell-off and what I think will be exceedingly painful period. So in any event, so by way of investing, I started

out 100% bonds, 1980. And there's people say, well, it would have been nice to be in equities. Well, bonds had about a 12 to 15% return for that decade. So it by no means was a bad move. And 87 crash, I was chatting with a senior colleague in the coffee room and we were talking about it. And he said, you know, and I knew nothing about investing. When I was a kid, I thought I wanted to go to Wall Street, but I'd launched since not paid attention. And he said, yeah, I don't own equities.

And I sort of looked at it, I said, you know, you're right. So post 87 crash, I moved heavily into equities. And I was a raging tech bull, which is incomprehensible to the people who know me now, incomprehensible. and I was buying you know I didn't buy dot coms I looked at ebay um did some math and said no it's overvalued too much um and uh but I own dell and I own worldcom I got I got into worldcom when it was a tiny little company in in in Mississippi and I got out in 99 just so so that was quite a feat that was uh that would turn out to be just sort of raw luck I was fear of the markets so in

any of that. So I became a tech bull probably in early nineties. And I really believed, I mean, I was really Kool-Aid swelling, rocking and rolling. And then it wasn't so crazy either. And then it got crazy. And in mid 98, I had studied the structures of markets enough and I moved half my equities out. I just, I just went to safe Haven and said, there's just something wrong here. And, and then almost to the day, we sort of marched our way into the Asian crisis. And I said, you know, you're either a genius or an idiot. I'm not your witch because you left half exposed and you got half out of harm's way. And I swore I'd get the rest out if it came back. And it came back. So by mid-99, I was selling my Dell and Warner

Lambert and WorldCom and Rational Software and all these companies, BMC Software. My old roommate in college was Goldman's software. He started their software group, a guy named Rick Sherwin. And so I was getting some pretty good information out of him. And then I emptied my portfolio completely out of equities by mid-99. And the Nasdaq was rocking, making me look like an asshole. And I went into gold. I went into gold cash, and I actually went into the Prudent Fair short fund, which I've done twice and done well twice. I will never do it again because I'm just, I shouldn't be shorting.

It's just, that's a fool's game. But so I was buying gold from 290 down to 270 and then I couldn't take any more pain. But I had a standing off at the local coin shop, said, look, you get a couple ounces of gold, I'll pay you cash for it. For about the next, I don't know, seven years, up to about 457 an ounce.

i i bought gold and funny story at one point he said to me it was actually at 457 an ounce and he said he said don't you think this is the top he knows i'm gonna buy it so he doesn't care i said no um how many guys are buying gold from you and he said four total and i said then the other three are friends of mine right he said yeah i said i sent them to you didn't i and he said yeah and i said that's not like a mania to you and he said no and uh so in any case and then So I carried the gold all the way up to 1900. In the early 2000s, the best analysis I ever did is I bought Philip Morris. The analysis was right.

So the fact I made 700% on WorldCom, I'm not proud of it because I didn't know what I was doing. But Philip Morris, I knew what I was doing. I really did it right. So I did well by that and the various tobacco stocks. And then I also went into energy. i tried to go into commodities i talked to jimmy rogers partner for about two hours i talked to a market maker in the rogers commodity fund it was too sketchy for me i don't like sketchy and and and it would have been fine um so i just went into fidelity commodity equity so i just started

buying you know the funds that had all the big cap oils and stuff and so um so although i actually had years in a at least one year in the 90s where i made a hundred percent plus return and that's the that's the exposure to the market and this is where it's crazy it shows you as a mania i was 150 percent exposed and so i made like 150 percent and so so i um but my best decade was was the 2000s. And it was not the best decade in terms of absolute numbers, but while equity investors were getting ravaged by a couple of serious bear markets, I compounded 13% a year from January 1st of 2000 to December 31st of 2009. And that kind of got me on a bit of a map. People started, I wrote about it and people noticed it and said, oh, wow, that's different.

And then I wrote about the subprime crisis on May 6, 2002. Now, I wasn't seeing this. I don't do spreadsheets. I was just picking up from guys like Bill Gross and Josh Rosner and guys saying, look, we got a subprime crisis brewing here. They're really, you know, General Electric's going way out on the risk curve. This is nuts. And, you know, the Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were looking sketchy. And I wrote about in 2002, I told my class,

I occasionally blurt shit out to the class for no reason. And in March of 2007, I turned to the class. I said, the banking system's about to collapse. And the indicator was two things. One is the market ABX index was dropping. That was the derivatives market. And mainstream press wasn't watching it. But the bloggers were saying, wait a minute,

this thing's just going down, down, down. what's going on in there, and there's, I don't know if you know this woman, Tanta, a woman named Tanta, she was blogging on it, her name was Doris Dungy, and the old veterans will know this, she was seeking alpha or something, and she was talking about, she says, you don't understand the chaos underneath the surface, in the pipes of the system, what's happening, and that's when, you know, they were selling squares, and cubes, and stuff, and you know, CPDOs, it was this crazy time. And so I would have, I did have a prudent bear short for that downturn, but I would have been bolder, but I didn't trust counterparty at that point because I was really a doom and gloomer

at that point. And so what amazed me is it really took two more years after I could hear the market crack. And this is what people don't understand. They hear this cracking noise and that's the market breaking and they think well okay but nothing happened so we're fine I go no that's the first of many many noises that you're going to hear over the next few years and so I was confident I was so liquid and at the bottom I bought some more tobacco but not much of anything because I was convinced there was another factor of two in the downturn and and because we had done so much damage and what I didn't see coming, and at best I can tell no one on the planet saw coming, was $30 trillion, right? So there's people who said, oh, I saw it. I said,

they do anything they have to. I go, show me your blog where you said $30 trillion. Because I remember when they bailed out the Bear Stearns for $30 billion and it sucked the auction out of the room it's like holy moly what just happened wow that's scary and that's just chump change right that's just a bad day in some regional bank now um and uh and and so i just and and i'm not and and and of course you'll hang out of the gold because because because if they're gonna dump 30 trillion but but something somehow the inflation didn't catch and it's because they were basically shoving it into the federal reserve as reserves and so it wasn't getting into the paws of the people and so it wasn't going direct as they say

um so i really miss the inflation thing i thought inflation should have gone wild um and uh so i was basically liquid gold you know i i had the the energy to about 16 which i overstayed my welcome there. Started going back in 20, thanks to Jesse Felder. And thanks to kicking Exxon out of the Dow. I said, you kick Exxon out of the Dow, replace it with Salesforce.com. I'm buying Exxon. That's real straightforward. But not a big position. Big enough that I care, but not big enough to to really to really you know it's not life-changing and um and um and so i've been you know sort of compounding four or five percent a year for through a decade where everyone else is partying like crazy and so so i've got people saying you know you're such an idiot you know

when are you going to admit you're wrong but but there's one metric on wall street that that is never going to be broken and that is that that that the valuations of the market will mean regress and and the markets are yes absolutely yes i do now so um one of the ideas that i see circulating online and i don't know yet uh all of the nuance surrounding it but but i think the main idea is qe and what they did in 2009 broke the market and now you have this world where uh Anytime there are going to be these market drawdowns, they rush in, they're going to, you know, kind of outlaw bear markets, outlaw recessions. And because of that, the historical valuation metrics are harder to use to evaluate today what is overvalued and what is not overvalued. So how do you kind of balance that the macro environment may have changed, the tools they use may have changed when you're using those valuation metrics?

um well so so to make the assumption that the valuations are never coming down means that you own investments let's say we're 150 overvalued so you're making so the markets are priced to make 40 of what you would if the markets were priced at fair value so um there's a plot in my year in review i've got an even better one that ron grice sent to me um that shows the s&p over the last hundred years corrected for M2 money supply, which is a far cleaner inflation metric than, and I don't think he's published that. That's the funny thing.

I think he just sent that to me. I'm not sure. And I don't know if I've never seen, I've been watching for it. I've never seen anyone else publish it. But what it shows is that if you correct the markets for M2 money supply, which seems like a stunningly clean way

to correct for inflation, over the last hundred years, the markets have drifted downwards. slightly now so the conclusion that i drew from that is that is that all you got were dividends so now back at the 100 years ago markets were returning six and a half percent yield dividends and now they're returning one and a half percent so so that so so if you want to say the markets are going to stay up at this price you have to say and therefore i'm going to get a return of about a third of what I would have normally gotten. Now, he sent me a modified version of

the plot in which he did the total return. And the total return turns out to be over 100 years, 3.79%. That is the dividends, right? So that's it. So my claim that it's all dividends, that's what the average dividend was over that period. Now, the interesting thing is that Buffett in his faith iconic 1999 fortune article said that after you're all done and by the way his his uh grice's plot does not include taxes and fees and shit it's just the market index so you take a 3.79 return over 100 years and start pulling that other shit out of there you're hurt i mean you're really hurt um buffett said the most you can ever hope to get by the time you've done unwinding everything but he didn't include taxes was four percent now everyone says

oh Warren Buffett knows everything but then they ignore that four percent part and um and so that's about right that's what Grice's plot shows and um and and that's what uh Ben Graham said years ago and Ben Graham said look stocks and bonds are going to return the same over a long period period um Ed McQuarrie followed up on that same thing so people have an expectation which as you know since you suffered your way through this damn thing um as you know for the last 40 years the markets have been on a road rage so so the recency bias is not from 2000 it's not from it's not from 2008 or 9 it's not from it's not from 2000 it's not from it's it's not from 1987 it's from 1981 and it turns out the most stunning statistic from 1981 is that the market valuations

This is getting to your point. The market valuations, which are inherently inflation corrected because it's the price divided by something that attract like GDP or sales or revenues or Tobin's Q or whatever, Case-Shiller. um it it turns out that they compounded a little over three percent a year for 40 goddamn years that means you had a three three point something percent tailwind from the low of 81 where you couldn't give that shit away to the high where people would buy any piece of shit that moved um so so so then the question i ask rhetorically is what happens over the next 40 years when that 3% turns into a negative 3%. And it will. I just don't know when. But it will. I mean, there's a sort of a, if you go back to ancient Rome or something, you'll find there's a margin of return that's modest, but it's above inflation. That's what you demand. You're not going to ask

for inflation payment. You're going to ask for something a little above. And if you're priced to get almost nothing, then you'll get almost nothing. So you essentially in the letter say that you divorced equities in 99 and you married gold and cash, right? When you look at that, there's a whole new generation of people who actually agree with your thesis and say,

you know what, I want to hold some cash to spend and I want to hold some sort of asset that will benefit from this inflation that has sound money principles. They seem to be going towards Bitcoin, not gold. Each time we've talked, you've had a little bit varied view of Bitcoin. How do you think about it now? Well, I know an awfully large number of smart people who are enthusiastic about Bitcoin.

What keeps me away from Bitcoin, people don't understand a couple things. One is I'm a bit of a Luddite, and Bitcoin is a digital asset. and i don't even trust the damn cloud right i i don't trust i i i have trouble with i've had cloud storage screw me up and and you know i password problems and stuff like that so so i i find and at one point i couldn't get stuff out of box i put a bunch of important stuff box i couldn't get it out and they said oh by the way you're over your limit now you got to pay for more storage i'm going, to get my shit out? Are you kidding me? And so Bitcoin, I know I can hear all the Bitcoin guys going, oh, but they can't touch us. I go, I kind of don't. First and foremost, I don't need

the hassle of having to worry about the tech behind Bitcoin. And I think if I spent a huge amount of time reading about it, I would come to terms with it. But it's still a digital asset to me. It's still something that I could imagine somehow when they finally suck me. If I go into Bitcoin, one could argue that's when you guys should sell, right? And every hodler out there seems to want me to go into Bitcoin. I'm like the holdout or something. I don't know what it is, but boy, they all go at me. And they're civil. I think the hodlers are, you know, I think they understand that I'm sympathetic. The second thing is, is I am confident that at some point you guys either going to be absorbed by the state or do battle with the state. And that's a capital S

state. That's not, that's, and, and, and you haven't yet, right? That day is in the future sometime. And, you know, once in a while you hear a Yellen or, you know, Christine Lagarde or someone say something that's sort of a shot across your bow and you guys flip her off and you know but but at some point i think you're gonna have to do battle with the state i think it's gonna be epic it's gonna be battle of the bastards i call it and and and you guys are gonna win or lose i'm not interested in participating in that battle right now it hasn't caught my attention Now, Lynn Alden made one of the more interesting cases. She kind of presented it as the equivalent of stitching diamonds in the hem of your clothes, escaping some totalitarian regime, and you have your codes, right?

You have your codes. And that I'm more sympathetic to, except I'm too old to be running from, you know, I'm the old guy sitting in the middle of Kiev going, fuck you, I'm not moving, right? So one of your big themes is that the totalitarianism is increasing all around us and to a degree it's already here, right? Especially in this kind of digital overlords. So it's surprising to me that you are sympathetic but also you don't want to buy it.

Well, so the other problem is, is I wouldn't go, there's, it'd be very hard for me to picture going in deeply enough to be life-changing. So as I, you know, I did this great analysis of Philip Morris. I made a lot of money over the years. It's not life changing. If all those, I bet on, I bet on Russia's, the RSX index. Two days before I had owned it for several years, I wasn't alone.

Grant Williams was interested in it too and copy in these guys. But two days before it went south, I said, I'm taking a flyer on it and I bought it. and then it went to zero, right? It might come back. I don't think so. I think by the time it comes back, JP Morgan will find a way to steal my RSX. But at the same time,

there's no way I would have gone deep enough into it to really make a killing because I don't do it that way. I average in over time. So I can average into Bitcoin over time. People say what price would interest you. It's not about price. it's it's it's about it's about the the battle with the state and the annoyance of having to

worry about my codes and shit it just it's just not it's not interesting to me i'm i'm sort of gonna hang with gold and i have physical gold um and so it's i'm you know bitcoin light by that model i'm a goddler um so let's talk about some of the uh topics that you covered okay um and And there's a there's a third there's a third one that I haven't completed writing on, which is the darkness. It's total dark lordship. I saw that in January 2024, the third part will come out. So if I can finish writing and it's so painful to write, I don't know. But go ahead. All right. Digital totalitarianism. You have a section. You say, we are already being ruled by algorithms, and our future is offering up authoritarian CBDCs, digital IDs, facial recognition software, and carbon budgets, all enabled with AI.

It is a march towards digital authoritarianism. Is there any way to stop it, or is this just like a foregone conclusion? I don't think so. So the troublesome thing is that is it the basal level, not even humans trying to get us sort of level, but just the creep of every time you use your credit card or every time you go through security at the airport or whatever, you're handing a decision over to an algo and it's going to say yes or no. it's always binary yes let them through no kill them you know whatever and and every time you put in your credit card it says yes you you get to buy that item or no you don't and and and i gotta confess i'm annoyed when i have to go find my phone to log into some website because it they want to do the double double password shit and and i go you know i this site's not that important

to ask me to do that. My bank account's fine, but this site's not worthy. And so we are going to increasingly ask computers to make decisions for us. So my wife has health problems, as you know, and I have to go through all these health portals and I'm reading my own lab reports and shit. And I made a joke, I thought it was funnier than shit

about how you're gonna do your next colonoscopy be using a robotic gerbil fitted with a gopro camera that you run off your iphone um but medical care is getting like that and and so we're really we're every time you hand over the one time i got i was on a a help call i was talking to a helpline and and i'm really sympathetic to what it's like to be on the end of one of those right because everyone's always pissed off about something And I lost my shit because I kept saying, look, I don't understand this word that you're using. And then I got off the phone after having lost my shit. And I thought, were you talking to a computer?

Because it felt like it was circling around. And I realized, you're talking to AI computer. And I don't want to talk to an AI computer. I don't want to read a blog not knowing if it's written by AI or a person, right? I don't want to read AI blogs. I think there are times where an AI write-up on something would be instructive. But we can end up in a point where everything online is just AI. And by the way, it turns into gibberish fast when it's just AI.

Someone mentioned that recently where they said, when AI is feeding off of AI, it spirals out of control real fast. Now, they might fix that. but that's i'm right now reading michael malice's book called the white pill it's it's a stunningly good book it's about the soviet union and how awful it was and and you're left with this do not let that happen here it's so so here here's the the short story of of this book just to get your attention we know that stalin killed 40 million what no one knows or very very few people know is how what transpired while 40 million people were getting killed he didn't just line him up and shoot him in ditches it was society completely imploded on itself and and it just

turned it just it just went completely toxic and and somehow was created by first latin and then stalin but but but but the message is very clear to me don't let that happen here and you can see it happening here now we're miles and miles from that maybe the u.s and the western world doesn't have the russian dna like cultural dna to ever go there but it's possible and i'm i'm infuriated with the current administration who seems to have no respect for the constitution and and you can say oh he's just a right winger you know no no i would be appalled i you know i didn't support i i went totally negative on george bush when he got us into iraq you know no i'm not just a right winger but but this administration is is is is totally throwing the basic principles

of who we are under the bus what are some examples uh the border let's start with the border so they're just letting people flood through the border i'm not against immigration yeah let's unpack this because i think that um there's a big portion of the audience that uh they understand kind of what's happening right they see the videos online etc why do you think it's happening do you think it is uh a conspiracy that you know they've come together and they said hey we should do this because you know i've seen theories that uh it'll increase the number of people who vote democrat all the way to uh the other extreme which is like no this is a complex problem people are incompetent and therefore rather than try to come up with a solution they just say screw it let

whatever happen happens and that leads to you know hundreds of thousands of people come across the border every year like that i don't that one i that one i don't believe okay i don't i don't even i don't even see a token right now if you listen to that that liar press conference uh press secretary karen what's her name um she's out claiming right from day one they try to get get control of the border. There's not a shred of evidence, not a shred. So no, they welcomed everyone. They could shut off the border. They could have done it. They fought Trump the whole way when he tried to do it. And so there's a benign interpretation. One benign interpretation is that someone's watching Peter Zyhan and saying, we need more people. And Zyhan is this demographer

who's a neocon of a higher order, but he's a demographer. And he says, look, I wear a 1.6 population replacement, which means we're going to have trouble. We're going to have a terrible time, but not as bad as other countries, but we're going to have a terrible time. And so one could argue that someone has a twisted view of how to solve that problem. That's the most benign. It looks to me like it's an attempt to destroy the concept of a border. So it looks to me like it's a globalist move and and and if you know there's two nationalists in the world who are really devout nationalists that that that you can name there's more um but but but there's two really stand out and the two are are trump and putin and and and who's getting the most golf right

Trump and Putin. And so I would say that, I would say that, that the United States stands between the globalists, the guys who really do want to have a borderless world for some reason that I don't quite understand, except for power. Power is everyone seems to want. And so you destroy the borders, right? And you get, you know, I used to laugh off the Soros arguments, but then he starts you know he's been helping place DAs and stuff and you know the January 6th to me was one of the most heinous periods post-January 6th was the most heinous periods of American history that we've locked people away for years for having gone to a protest and I can hear people screaming going no no they did this they did that no they didn't those were feds in the crowd

the crowd nothing was going to happen without the feds intervening at January 6th nothing bad Nothing really bad was going to happen. And then there's 40,000 hours of tape and they still won't release it. But whenever they do, you go, holy shit, that guy didn't do anything. And he got how many years in prison, right? So I don't know if you know who this person is. Felix Somari. I know the name. The Raven of Zurich. This took me months to track down. And for those that don't know, he was very well respected in – he was able to call a number of market tops, bottoms throughout the World Wars and became sort of a trusted confidant of many bankers, economists, etc. And in the book, he has this story when he was a young kid, I think he's like 12, 13 years old. There's a shoemaker that he's talking with and the shoemaker has an accent and he's, you know, a shithead 12-year-old, right? He starts making fun of the guy's accent and his dad basically slaps him and says, you know, hey, we don't do that here.

And in the book, he claims that from then on, he was immune. I think the exact quote is, I was immune to the virus of any nationalism. Right. And so I think – Nationalism doesn't require, though – we have states, right? Yes. I don't sit there and look at the guys in Pennsylvania and say, oh, those fucking Pennsylvania douchebags. It's just a way of organizing society.

So break down the difference between what I think some people see as like nationalism driven by hate and a zero-sum game versus kind of more the organizational things, the pride of being from a nation, the – what I would consider a much more innocent view of the importance of nationalism, not so much a zero-sum game but maybe actually a positive-sum game. Well, so if you, I've read a lot of anthropology, for example, I love history. As society got bigger, right, we went from, you know, a dozen guys running through some jungle in Borneo to across the Savannah to bigger groups like 150, you start picking up structurally different societies by necessity, right? So the pure anarchists just don't get it. that you you have to somehow start building structure and i think there's kind of a natural evolution of structure and so at this point the the the the the the nation state is kind of the natural um structure for the current world now the globalists might say yes but we're heading away from the current world and therefore we should go to a globalist world but it's also

world that they want to run. And that's, you know, it's like, it's, I have a quote in there where someone says, you know, you know, you know, follow people who are trying to find the truth, you know, be wary of those who actually think they found it. And so, so the nation state still to me makes sense. And, and, and I don't want some guy in Brussels telling us to not eat meat. for example which is the stupid shit stuff that are already pushing right so already that the globalist view of the world is looking so stupid so stupid evil some combination of the two that i don't want anything to do with it it just doesn't make sense i actually think in some sense one of the reasons why i'm a pro-choice guy but roe v wade in some sense makes sense

because i don't see there why there's why why mississippi should necessarily have to follow same moral values as california they're really different populations in a profound sort of way and and i know that roe v wade happens to be a highly charged issue but there's still little sort of states rights mentality in me and i don't think we should i think there's a lot of things It should be at the state level. But I see things happening on a daily basis that seems so evil to me. Like now there's two states that have tried to keep Trump off the ballot. The woman in Maine, I did a tweet the other day that got a lot of support. I said, should she be tried for depriving both us and Trump of our civil rights?

you know there are crimes in which you deprive someone of their civil rights that's how they convict some people on stuff and i said if she takes him off the ballot that's depriving me of my civil rights and so i think she should be convicted if if if it turns out the story that we're being told is correct right that always comes back to that probably know it's a fake story for christ's sake trying to a robot wrote the damn thing um and but but but it was truly unbelievable to me that the Colorado Supreme Court, for example, could take them off the ballot. These are supposed to be super learned judicial people. And I think a five-year-old could explain to them why they made a mistake. I mean, I think I could explain it. I used to go home from faculty

meetings and talk to my son, who was like seven, say, Thomas, here's the setup, boom, boom, boom, what do you do? And he'd say, here's what you do. And I go, yeah, my colleagues don't seem to see that part you know um and so so the fact they took him off a ballot is to me truly extraordinary and and it's and then you have to say but it it can't even be for the reason that it appears to be right it's it's not there's something else altogether they're trying if it was a republican court i'd say well they're trying to generate support for the guy because it sure as hell i'm i'm voting for trump period i want to see him get in there and go green goblin i i i've just lost my shit at this point i i don't i want him to get in there and cause trouble there's context here

that i think if people haven't read the year in review they need to understand in 2016 i think you say you begrudgingly voted for him or cautiously cautiously um and then in 2020 you were kind of agnostic explain a little bit as to why were you cautious or you know kind of reluctant in 2016 why agnostic in 2020 and now i hear both in the letter but also uh from you it sounds like a much more kind of hardened heels dug in on voting forum what is that evolution like well so the first evolution was i i had been aware of trump the developer trump the narcissist trump the so in 16 um in 16 when he ran i said this guy's just looney tunes right now i actually had read an article written in 1984 about him as a developer it was really interesting because

everyone found him beyond annoying but he always got the deal he always got they'd say you know everyone wanted that piece of real estate somehow donald got it and i can't understand how he did it and people would say you know after a while you just say donald just tell me what you want just just and that's how he works right and and i i watched the documentary recently and they he built a huge office complex one time and he didn't get any of the signatures. I've gone, oh,

that's so criminal. And I go, that's chutzpah. I, that's no, that's, that's not just criminal. That's a guy who,

who really, and, and the, the concrete workers were on strike, but his, his, his building was getting concrete. He got,

that's good. He's in with a mob. He's such a bad person. I go, he's getting the job done. Right. And so there's always two, that those sort of two sides to Trump.

And I watched him knock off 13 Republican candidates. I'm going, boy, that was impressive the way he did that. Even though someone referred to it as incompetent and I go, he just knocked off 13 people, right? Now he's going against Hillary, right? No one else could have done that. That's not incompetent, it's extraordinary. So I could have voted for Bernie over Trump

because i thought oh he's generic they'll neuter him he can't do any damage although i'm not positive that's true so trump gets an office you'd be hard-pressed to name something he did that was really bad now you really would be hard-pressed yeah you're gonna oh he's a liar i go oh no one ever lies in dc right trump's a bullshit on us biden's a liar they're different trump will say i caught a fish this damn big and and biden will say i graduated from this college first in my class, and he didn't graduate from that college, right? One's a lie, one's bullshit. And so I had no trouble voting for him in 2020, but I wasn't sure I wanted more chaos. I was thinking if Dems could come up with a candidate and bring us back to earth a little bit, that

would be okay with me. And then watching what they've done to him over the next four years, I go, okay, let's elect him. He knows where the spoons and forks are. He knows when he first got into office. He couldn't build a cabinet. He didn't know who to trust. He couldn't trust anyone from either party. Neither party wanted him in there. He now has his war cabinet. And I want to see him do it. Now, it could get ugly, but it's not his fault. Not in my opinion. So I've heard stories through the rumor mill of people who either worked in the administration or know Trump, that when he first got into office, there would be situations where he's sleeping at night

and he would get a phone call. And so the staff member would come in and say, excuse me, president, I'm sorry to wake you up, but there's a general on the line in Iraq, Afghanistan, wherever. And basically they were calling and they needed the president's approval for a strike, very similar to Obama having to give the final order to go after Osama bin Laden and things like this.

And supposedly Trump would be like, was he a bad guy right we'll kill him right the simplicity of it i mean there's there's and he's not stupid if you watch his documentary you watch the things he did people think well you know he's totally uncontrolled he went to military academy he was a leader at the military academy i mean he's not he's not the he's not the loser he appears to be he's idiosyncratic that's that's different. And so, and you would be hard pressed to, you know, so for me, one of the drop dead issues that allowed me to vote for him the first time was he said, we have to get along with the Russians. And I said, he's dead right. And then of course they hang Russia collusion all over him

And they got nothing. They got, you know, the Durham report gave a little bit to everyone. But when you got to the bottom line, he explicitly says we found no collusion, period, none. And and I think it's treasonous to make this shit up the way the Democrats do. I think that if you really I don't know what the formal definition of treason is, but in my skull, I have a definition of treason. And when you're, to me, it's pretty close to a coup d'etat when you're doing the shit they did against them. And it looks to me, to me, the Biden administration itself looks like a coup d'etat in the reverse sense.

I mean, they're doing shit. Like when Biden was told by the Supreme Court, you couldn't cancel student loans. He just tried to find another way to do it. What do you do when the president ignores the Supreme Court? They can't just have to rule on him every day. At some point, they've got to be able to say, no, no, Joe, Brandon, whatever your name is, stop.

And I don't care how many right wing Supreme Courters there are. That's sort of the bottom line for me. And so and so I think the Biden administration has been truly horrific. And I think the January 6th Stalin-Lennon show trial component of January 6th is a horrific chapter in history, horrific chapter in history. And I have friends who say, you know, you do the time, the crime, you do the time, right? And I go, well, first of all, show me the crime. Second of all, you know how I defend a January 6th person? It turns out your brain chemistry changes in a mob.

Temporary insanity. You could get psychologists who'd say, yes, temporary insanity plays. But there wasn't shit done. It was feds in the goddamn crowd doing the shit. And so I see things that are so... So non to Tocqueville. So anti to everything, everything that sort of fundamental principles that we used to think we stood for. Maybe I was just dead wrong.

There was some bad shit at the turn of the century in the United States that was happening, some really non-constitutional things. And so that's what got me angry. And the problem is it's not making me happier. And it's it's also I don't see where it's getting me closer to some sort of solution. So that's the problem. Let me ask one last question on politics. I'm going on some of the other topics. It sounds like you believe Trump will win.

Yes or no? Oh, I don't know. No, I think they'll rig the election. OK, they did. They did the first time 2020 was rigged. 2020 was rigged. Explain your logic for for having so much confidence in that now. Well, first and foremost, I think there's plenty of evidence.

Second of all, most importantly, the one that I go, look at both parties, by the way. No one wanted him in the White House, correct? Neither party wanted him in the White House. They did everything imaginable to impeachments, indictments, you name it, to keep him out of the White House. Is there any chance? They said, oh, but we can't rig the election. you want to bet on that one no it's insane to bet on that one of course they rigged the election they've been rigging it for years but it's kind of a capture the flag rig whereas you know you

know dinking around over here oh they stole Pennsylvania from us you know shit like that this was a wholesale rigging under the guise of the COVID lockdown and the mail-in ballots and all that shit. And Carrie Lake has a great case for the rigged election. And if you dig into the smartmatic voting machines, it turns out through a series of shell companies, they trace to Beijing. I mean, it's a colossal mess. And the problem is there's no evidence they're going to ever run a clean election. They'll run a clean election when they don't care which side wins. Then they'll let it be clean. But we know we all hate these guys, right? We know we'd vote every last one of them out of office, but they have a 97% reelection rate. That's not rigging. That just shows you

the hopelessness. The Democrat superdelegate model is an abomination, right? The fact that 30% of the goddamn delegates come from insiders who get to just vote however they're told to vote, That's just staggeringly. But it turns out that if you look at the structure of political parties, they're just non-for-profit organizations. The only way you'd stop the Democrats from doing what they do and the Republicans from doing what they do, I think, let's say you wanted to stop it. I think you'd have to charge them with some sort of RICO charge and say you fundraised under false, under pretenses. pretenses means false it turns i just kind of realized that under pretenses you you you you committed fraud by raising money the way you did that's that's how i would go at them if if if now on the other hand who wrote the book god damn it i can never remember the name someone wrote a book

about the legality underlying the the the court actions underlying the uh 2008-9 crisis and they talked about all the cases that that they built against wall street guys and some some appeals court would spend three hours looking at the date and throw it out after they'd spent months building a case against so no one went to jail right nobody a couple of little guys a couple of couple of indian guys from the hedge fund right yeah get the indian guys why not we don't care about them. And so, and so I just see criminal treasonous levels of behavior from a system that I don't remember showing that. Let's talk about climate change, which is another topic that I think you explicitly said climate change is a scam in the letter. Explain what you think is going on

there well i have to go back a few years i've got an email trail which i've got people pestering me about it i'm saying look all my friends believe it the scientific community believes it i don't know where you're going with this right i actually was sitting with the secretary of energy one day and told him i was agnostic and he flinched i said it would take me 10 000 hours to figure it out so i'm not qualified to cast a vote um my brother and some other guy pestered me into digging into it and i finally out of frustration i said to the other guy's name david walker i said as far as i know there's no credible scientists who don't believe this story and i have to sort of go with the science right it's pre-fauci um he said oh yes sir i said send me names so i expect him to

send me names of people from sheboygan state college of fine arts you know and things like that and that they're not going to be credible and i they could know but but if i'm going to overturn a globally accepted theory it's going to take more than some guy from sheboygan right and um he sends me about 20 names of people who are at elite institutions so i go okay but they're probably a bunch of climate scientists who said this model sucks or that model sucks and therefore you know we got to redo them and and the deniers are turning that into therefore there's no climate change. So I start Googling them and that's not what they're saying. So you hit guys like, you know, right away, Richard Lindzen, former head of the National Academy of Sciences, geophysicist at

MIT says it's the biggest hoax in history. And you go, whoa, whoa. You find out the American Physics Society put together an elite panel of a dozen guys said, you're charged with looking into this and they all came out deniers they all said this is just crap science just total crap science from that group emerged you know freeman dyson right that guy's one of the legends of physics will happer i think was on that committee i'm not positive but so i can name for you nobel prize winners in physics um that say that it's totally a farce so a guy like um richard coonan wrote a book and i think he thought he could have an effect it's not about science but he was on the committee um and so he wrote a book and what he does is he kind of tries

a tightrope walk where he says you know man influences climate but then he proceeds to torch it now he's he's internally inconsistent because he says he says there's not a snowball's chance in hell that the scientific community has the capabilities of predicting the temperature a hundred years from now and here are the 10 000 fucking reasons why here are all the things they can't account for you know physicists at stanford says the error bar on their numbers five times the number you know there's that the former founder of greenpeace says this is a complete farce the guy who ran the nasa satellite program monitoring temperature said it's a farce you find out that some of the big climate change guys are compulsive liars,

pathological liars. And then you start picking up the little tidbits, like, you know, the melting glacier. Ah, Dave, look at that melting glacier. And you find out that underneath that glacier are 1,200-year-old trees, which means they grew there 1,200 years ago. And therefore the glacier is not melting

after a million or 10 million or 100 million years. It's just going back and forth, oscillating. You know, I saw a headline that said, you know, it hasn't been this warm in 600 years. I go, let's rewrite the headline. It was this warm 600 years ago. And then, you know, you see the picture of the starving polar bear. If there's anyone watching this who doesn't have the image of that starving polar bear on an ice floe, it looks pretty emaciated. And you find out the world's expert on Arctic mammals says that the polar bear population has tripled since the 70s.

the world's experts on the great barrier reef say the reef oscillates back and forth and it's not climate uh the increasing salinity of the of the uh of the ocean turns out didn't hold up that got blown out of the water last year this year's winner the nobel prize in physics said that it's such a farce they came in account for clouds clouds you know how important clouds are and Influencing the Earth's climate and the sun's radiation. And so what you find is, I got to sit down with Konstantin Kaysen for about an hour this fall. He's the guy who gave the talk at the Oxford Union. And if you haven't watched it, you really got to watch it.

And I said to him, I said, when you started digging into climate change, how long did it take you to figure out that it was a farce? And he said, a couple hours. it's that bad actually and so what you discover is the 97 and michael crichton picked out this one the 97 consensus number which they all cite lying their asses off you lying motherfuckers if you're a climate person and you cite that number you're a lying motherfucker that came from a ridiculous study of a bunch of papers where they took several thousand papers looked in the abstract, which I'm okay with, and they threw out all the papers, which the abstract wasn't definitive, and said, what percentage of the abstracts that made the definitive statement

said it was a crisis? They said 97%. Well, it turns out it was 77 out of 79 papers out of thousands of papers that they threw away most. Creighton pointed out, he said something like 0.4% of the sample size was used to come up with 97% of the 97% number. So they're lying, pathological lying. If you're a climate scientist, you quote that number, you're a liar. I'm calling you out. You're a shithead. Okay, I'm that angry at it.

And I called the guy, there's a debate here. And I walked up afterwards and I said, you know, you're lying about that number. You cited it, you know, you're lying. He was hamming and hawing like crazy. And I said, you got to stop doing that. So I'm calling out the serious climate scientists and saying, if you don't clean up this, if you don't clean up this community, and if you don't start challenging shit, we're just going to throw you all away. You're just going to end up on some dust heap with all the vax guys who supported Fauci. So, yeah, so I, and by the way, Kuhn's statement about how man-made climate change is real, but not a problem.

and then he proceeds to make the case you can't possibly predict it he's contradicting himself because he should never say man-made climate change is real if you can't possibly make the prediction so then so i saw thomas soul talk about it the other day and he points out a very important one he says that one alone i'm waiting for an answer i'm not getting it and that is if you look at you know 300 000 years of the co2 content of the ice which you can get out of Greenland ice course and the temperature which you can get various ways which I believe they know how to do it that the there's an 800 year lag so you take the two curves which they correlate beautifully visually if you look at this plane go look at that co2 correlates with the climate

well there's an 800 year offset co2 rises 800 years after the temperature rises and they're trying to say co2 is causing the temperature to rise when in fact no what happens is the temperature rises the oceans degas the co2 comes out of the ocean and the co2 content goes up and they just lie they just ignore that and then they you know the the middle ages so happer i saw a happer interview the other day and i i did a climate change podcast for the guy who's been following this shit since 07 i said here's the here's the killer question i said do you know and this guy I think it's honest. I said, do you know any solar physicists

who believe the man-made climate change story? He says, nope, not a one. He's been doing podcasts writing about it since 07. Not a single solar physicist believes the climate model. And so Happer starts talking to me and says, they're now changing all the numbers from the past. They're just going back and rewriting the numbers and backfilling.

And so what was called the medieval warming period, when it was warmer than it is now, They're trying to rewrite those numbers to make it cooler. So he says the numbers from the past are now changing. When you see so many people convinced, or at least saying publicly one thing, but you're coming to a different conclusion, what is the information or what is the data that you think could convince people to see it the other way that are not in the scientific community? Or do you think that this is one of those arguments where logic is logic succumbs to this like fake morality and people then believe, oh, to be a good person, I have to believe this thing, regardless of what the evidence suggests. So it's it's both categories.

I think I think there's sound thinking people that have simply never asked. and if you threw the data at them i've given several talks on it no one has ever come up to me and challenged anything i presented um and and um so i think there's people i could convince you give me an hour i could convince them i could just show them shit after shit after shit that just doesn't make sense you know scandals which the scientists claim they admit they lie because they got to keep the narrative going that sort of thing um then there's the group that if you read eric hoffer's the true believer no i've not it's a brilliant book i know we all get told what books to read but this is a brilliant book we're in the 1953 and it's about mass movements so it's

kind of an early version matthias desmond's more recent book um which is also a good book um um and and the true believers are are sort of the standing army the people the foot soldiers in movements and they they um typically in these movements you've got early thinkers the guys who put forth an idea like uh like in the social justice shit the early thinkers were guys like herbert marcusa and his wife and stuff like that they put out the idea sort of in the abstract and And then you get the movers and the shakers. And what happens is the Army, it's not a very flattering view, but the guys who sort of run the ball, really carry the ball, blocking and tackling, are typically serious losers, as described by Hoffer, who have very little to show for their lives. And he says that what that does is it tees them up for two things.

One is that they that they they say, well, anything would be better than what I'm experiencing. That's how you get people to sign off on socialism and things like that. And and and and by becoming part of a movement, you become more important. You become the true believer and you become you now have a sense of purpose. So I threw out a few barbs about climate change in my class. and they landed like bricks. My brother pointed out, he says, it's like telling some Muslim that Muhammad's a pedophile.

It just doesn't work. It's not gonna work. And then I realized, yes, because the kids in my grad course now have been told by every authority figure since daycare, right to the present, that it's a crisis. What it is, is it's $150 trillion grift. and everyone who wants a piece of that pie,

and when you have $150 trillion pie, there's a lot of people who want a piece of that pie. They'll all sign off on it. I got colleagues, you know, my opening three paragraphs of my grant proposal to the DOE is about climate change, right? They're not going to come out and say, look, climate change is bullshit, but I want money. There are no unfunded climate deniers.

There are no funded climate deniers. it's a darwinian selection has cleaned the scientific community absolutely pristinely out of all the people who would question it because they no longer have money they no longer therefore publish papers they no longer have a say so we've so they no longer have a seat at the table which is exactly by the way what they did with covet and the vaccine when you see the oil companies uh getting added to like the esg index and tesla being taken out Is that just a signal that even the people who would not normally be associated with ESG, they're really good at lobbying, they're really good at spending money? They're just grifters.

They're just grifters. That's Larry Fink trying to get Vanguard money, right? The ESG or their globalists, right? Again, the climate change guys want to tell us what we can eat, what we can't eat. They want to have our phone, have some app that tells them we've used up our carbon allocation for the year or for the month. And you can no longer buy steak because you've used too much carbon. It just it just these are people. They've got their polls that say that some like 60 percent of college kids nowadays are basically socialists.

They have no understanding of what socialism has done throughout history. Not a shred of an understanding of how not only is it not worked. But it kills people by the countless numbers. Now, capitalism has bad days, but usually that's when capitalism is turning into socialism or fascism, actually. So when capitalism goes bad, it turns into fascism because they commandeer the machinery of government, and then they go destroy the hodlers. another topic that uh you write about is um biological males competing in women's sports i haven't written yet but yes i'm going at it yeah well you at least mention it in um in the first part um talk a little bit as to less about um maybe how we got here but where do we go from here is the four like one of the concepts that

i'm really interested in is uh there's a number of things uh immigration at the border uh whether it is you know biological males competing in uh women's sports leagues all these things they have momentum and to reverse momentum there's only a couple of ways to do it right there's some kind of awakening i think you know kind of the lockdowns were an awakening for some people and they literally picked up and they moved to other states, like there's got to be some extreme external thing that forces it. Or there also can be one or a very small group of people with the backbone, the courage, the leadership skills, the communication skills, et cetera, to stand up and basically educate folks and say, hey, look, this is not what I agree with. I'm in a leadership

position. I'm going to change it. But outside of those two things, like how else can the momentum them be stopped and potentially reversed? Well, so the challenge, the reason I'm not optimistic is because they can come up with new things to screw us faster than we can debunk. And I don't like the word debunk in general, because it assumes that you already know the answer and you're going to collect the data to show the answer. But so let's say we win. I think that transgenders in sports is going to die a natural death because it's so stupid it's it's insane so so when i write about it i'm going to write about two things first i'm going to i've i've got notes and shit on all this first of all i'm going to point out that if you're

legitimate transgender i you have my sympathy because it's a tough world and and it's hard enough to be a teenager. You can be the captain of the football team and you still have self-doubts because you're 16 or 17 years old, 18 years old. And you can be the hottest chicken on the planet and you still think your ass is fat. And so it's in an age bracket where self-doubts are just everywhere. And the problem is you have these adults who themselves are suffering from, you know transgender by proxy and and they're telling you oh your problem is that you're actually a female and and we can make you happy and so it's a sucker bet so so so so um the two things i'm going to go against is one is doing medical interventions on teenagers um i'm already seeing

that's starting to collapse because I think the liability insurance for the medical system is now starting to soar because the hospitals that are doing transgender surgeries and injections and stuff are starting to get their asses sued off. And I want to see them destroyed because I don't think you should ever let a pre-adult make that call. And you say, well, what about their parents? And I go, you know, we don't let parents tie their kids up in the basement and beat them either. If we get wind of it society will step in on that one too and so you know and they say what if they think they're you know they really feel like they're a woman i go well you know when someone says you know i'm fat and they're anorexic we don't let them identify as fat we say no get

them fucking help and so so this idea that someone who thinks they're female and then you get you know middle schools with 50 transgenders in one middle school this is not a medical problem this is a social movement right and which is fine it's a little embarrassing when you're in a fraternity years later and your friends find out you spent time in dress and you know eighth grade but um but but when we're sterilizing them and doing bad things and and and you know the the horror of horrors is the fake vaginas i think those people i'm spending the rest of their life in extreme agony is my understanding they just don't work and and it's the the adults doing it i think are are you know when the swedes first started doing i think it was the swedes

they spent several years working with the person to make sure that they really were a good candidate for some sort of transgender treatment and and now it's as little as an hour chat with a shrink And next thing you know, you're getting injections. And maybe these injections don't hurt you, but I've read just too many articles saying that, you know, sterilizes you and it's not reversible and you have to keep doing it. And so there's just there's just no way we should be doing this to kids. And they say, well, but if you don't do it young, then I go, I don't care. I just don't care. I just, I think that doing something, such an intervention on a teenager, and I think we're going to look up 10 years from now, and there's going to be a bunch of adults who transitioned, and they're going to be saying to their parents, where were you when I needed you?

You needed to be my parents. You need to say, whoa, whoa, whoa, slow down. Go ahead, wear a dress to school. That's great. Go ahead, let your hair out. you know, braid your hair. I don't, I don't care, but no, we're not going to castrate you. And so, so there's that. And then there's the sports, you know, women in sports. When, when Title IX showed up, there were two noticeable things. One is women started getting

opportunities in sports they can get, and, and a number of men's sports were destroyed. So I happen to have been a gymnast in the old days, and most gymnastics teams got wiped out. wrestling programs got wiped out because they needed to somehow find a way to equate the two gender sports. And the lawyers on the campuses concluded that it was money spent or something. And so they wiped out men's sports to bring them down and elevated women's sports. Now, I've also coached two collegiate sports, both gymnastics and taekwondo, and both have women's components. And I see what sports do for women, and it's phenomenal. it's phenomenal taekwondo especially taekwondo is way better for the women than the men it's not

because it teaches them to be killing machines it teaches you to have composure when someone's smacking you and to say look if it doesn't actually hurt me it's not a problem right if they actually damage me it's a problem but it's not a problem that someone's in my personal space i have to deal with them but you learn that's what it teaches you how to when i used see taekwondo i was a little older and um i uh i used to go right into range and use all defense i'd spar against the cornell kids they were good they're second in the nation um and i'd go right into range i'll smack away and defend and and it would drive them nuts actually they go he's in my face constantly and i would just block and then i'd wait and then

all of a sudden they'd be they'd kick me six seven times i'll score a point i'd see an opening I'd smack them and uh and it worked pretty well and and women learning that now now you've got this thing where women have gotten their sports and now you're saying oh now let's guys compete now let's let guys compete so I and what I'm stunned by is the entire female sports establishment is not standing up and saying no no and Riley Gaines I think she I think she probably triggered the beginning of the end she's been doing battle and she said she had so many people behind closed doors without putting their names on it saying i support you keep up the fight and at one point the head of the ncaa said that she says i'm fighting you

why would you say that i'm fighting you i asked a three-time olympic medal winner what her views were and i watched her tighten up and i realized i just asked her a question that almost wasn't fair because she answered it honestly and somehow it got out she'd be kicked off the team and that shouldn't be happening but i think we're getting to the point now where women are bailing out of sports there was a uh jujitsu championship where tournament there's tons of these things where where where something like all the weight class were won by dudes and i'm going to call them dudes because i don't give a fuck um

and and and there were actually divisions that were all dudes but at some level i think some of these guys who are the most appalling cases are actually guys who are trying to destroy the idea so in the way lefter says i'm a dude i'm a chick and then he breaks the world record he's he's jamming it in their face so i'm not sure that they're all bad i think they're doing doing doing the right work so well zooby um is you must have been an athlete i can see i can see it in your face your chisel what what sports you do uh i played uh football basketball and baseball in high school right and uh i mean look there's also um i don't think people quite understand the difference of athleticism even between um in i think it was college uh

yeah in college um certain sports would play other sports in their sport and without passing judgment you know there are certain sports where the people are bigger faster stronger more athletic and yes they can use those uh those components to make up for the lack of you know finite or uh kind of nuanced skill so if you take a football team and you go and you play soccer right of course uh the soccer players are better at all of the skills that are needed for soccer but if you play for a certain amount of time there's a good chance that some of the football players may actually be able to score quite often because they're just bigger well you know faster whatever right one of the most famous lacrosse players of all time was

jimmy brown the running back yes and i can't he used to put his thumb on the ball it turns out i i knew the head coach and and but he can you imagine being a midfielder and having jimmy brown running at you with the ball you would just send up a smudge mark right so well so the other thing It turns out the women's Olympic hockey team practices by playing against prep schools. Yes. Boys prep schools. Yes. Right?

Now, we've seen this, I think, Clay Travis. I think I saw he's the guy who issued like a million-dollar bet. He said, I'll pick the best men's high school team, and they'll go play a WNBA team or whatever. They'll mop them up. So again, that is the extreme, you know, somewhat zero sum. I'm really trying to make a kind of a bombastic point by doing this. But to your point, we actually can just look at what the teams are doing themselves. And I don't think that it's a positive or a negative, right? I have a daughter. I don't think that there's certain sports that I would want her to play if I knew, you know, like, what is she going to go play football? Right. She's like, hey, dad, I'm going to go sign up to be a running back. I would be like, you know, let's make some different choices here. Right.

By the way, we're not going to do transgender surgery on you either. Right. Now, in fact, I'm my son was a pretty good skater when he was real little. And I sort of waved him away from hockey because I decided that the hockey culture was kind of toxic. The parents were toxic. But I don't think I'd want a kid to play football as much as I understand. I you know, the head head risks are there that are serious enough that, you know, you know, probably 75 percent of them now on Bitcoin. So, you know, we know they're demented. When you start thinking about 2024 and beyond, there's a lot of problems in the world. Right.

What is what's the positive view? What what what passes your filter as like these are things that are going right? Well. Again, Crichton's very good on this one, too. If you remember back in the 60s, it felt like the world was collapsing around us. you know the vietnam war was going on to the older generation they were watching their kids all of a sudden they discover free sex with birth control they discovered drugs rock and roll sounded awful to them you know elvis presley wiggling his hips and you know so they went

from bobby darren and neto and a cello to to the doors very quickly and uh and so and yet the civil rights violence in the in the cities and stuff and so um double-digit inflation of soon thereafter so you know i it there's always tough times and and so you have to remind yourself that this is not that different again michael malice's book reminds you how bad it can get there's nothing in the united states nothing in the united states that approximates what the soviet union was doing to its people um anywhere pick the worst place camden i don't care there's nothing um and um and so i have to remind myself of that um i do think we're heading into a period of tumult so so you know the great depression last what a decade i argue it asks i got an argument

with a Stanford economist, I think it was Stanford. I said that the Great Depression didn't end until after World War II. And he said, well, you know, and I talked about restricted consumption and things like that. And he said, yeah, well, you know, but it turns out the GDP showed

that the Depression had ended during the war. And I spent some time pondering it and I said, no, no, no, no, no, no. Because your GDP was a false GDP. You were creating shit and blowing it up. right so if you create to me gross domestic product needs a depreciation rate component built into it so if you make a blender the last 40 years your gdp is better than if you make that same blender but it only lasts five years because it breaks and that's one of the missing um so you

didn't produce the wealth making the chintzy blender that you did making the good blender and and so during the war the depreciation rate of everything was phenomenal we're making battleships are getting sunk and we're making planes we're going down and we're weapons and you know ammo and are it was just very costly and but so i don't i you can't count that as gdp and here's a gdp point that you might have picked up you might not have tell me that's robert gordon's book um that you suggested this to me two years ago did you read it it's one of the best books i i've told tons of people about it for those that don't know the rise and fall of american growth and it basically makes the argument that uh was it 1870 to like

1940 i think is uh the timeline um there's tons of uh innovation there's tons of gdp growth um my favorite example well two of them one is the elevator and the importance of building urban density by one simple invention um running water electricity i was gonna say the second one is every home is completely disconnected you know in 1870 and by 1940 they're all connected uh roads electricity you know uh phone lines the whole thing orville wright lived long enough to see jets wrap your brain around that right people talk about amazon being pioneering amazon was not pioneering the sears roebuck catalog was pioneering sears roebuck catalog was amazon yes it took a couple weeks not a day and it wasn't anywhere near as big but we went

from guys buying you know flour out of barrels and country stores all over the country see ordering shit having a train deliver it to you sometimes you can order prefab houses and stuff right there you can order all the car parts you needed from the sears robot catalog and uh and so that was just amazon and amazon's just a more digital version and uh the other thing that's really interesting is there's remember the part about primary versus secondary invention so electricity would be primary and a vacuum cleaner or or a dishwasher or something would be secondary the best decade for secondary inventions was the 1930s right in the middle of the great depression we invented more secondary inventions than any decade so we created wealth during the great

depression and uh and um here's where we're going to get we're going to be lied to in a very big way And I hinted this, I kind of talk about it a little bit this year, where as the boomers get older, we're going to spend a fortune on health care. And that's going to go into GDP, when in fact, it is the cost of keeping up a rapidly depreciating asset. So it is the cost of struggling to keep an asset that's trying to go to dust from going to dust. That's not gross domestic product.

That's depreciation. but it's going to show up as GDP. When you think about the national debt, we're at 33 trillion on our way to a gazillion. We could try to grow our way out of it. That is not going to happen. That is a, it is a option, but I know you don't think it's going to happen.

What would have to change in order to be able to do it? I think we're already past the failsafe point. So I think we already have the commitments you know the social programs and the social security and the and the military it's not we we we'd have to drop our military to zero and and kennedy might do that but um he's not getting in the white house um and um and and what do we grow the debt grew last year 10 so that's a death spiral there's not a shred of evidence that the political system has any sort of backbone in it to stop that spending we spent 200 billion on on ukraine what if i were powell i'd be livid

the guys would say powell's beholden to the administration i go powell i would think would want to wring the neck of the administration as he's trying to get control of monetary policy and their fiscal policy is completely out of control and so um and so i think we're past that point, I think you could, you know, there's a town in California that had a water problem. It's a good example of a more general principle. And they said, we got to cut consumption 20%. There's no question you can cut 20% consumption of water anywhere. There's no question you can do it. At the end of the year, they had cut 3%. And so people don't, we don't do it. We will drive the car off a cliff like Thelma and Louise and clean up the pieces later. And so what I can't

picture is how it resolves. So it will resolve, right? It doesn't just stop. It's an infinite loop, right? It will resolve. But I can't picture, they say, well, we're going to inflate it away. And I go, have you noticed how mad people are at inflation right now? We're just warming up if that's the model we are just warm I just I went to get a roast at the store yesterday now I'm not sure what the roast was they tried to sell me but I I said yeah I'm looking for a roast a pretty big one and I point to him I said tell me that one right there how much would that cost and uh he puts on the scale and he says 240 dollars I go what I said I think we'll have a boneless turkey instead.

And, you know, the inflation rots societies and it's making people grumpy and there's people going to the store. And I, you know, remember five years ago, you'd see some article that would say, you know, 50% of the population doesn't have money in the bank to cover a $400 emergency. Where are they now?

right? They don't have a penny. They swallow that $400 in six months, that margin of error. So paycheck to paycheck is not even true anymore now. It's paycheck to credit card to debt to whatever. It's not like you can refi your house, right? So we've milked that lactating cow down to bone dry one of the um most interesting stats uh and i wrote about it the other day i basically said financial markets are like uh the crouched lion right they kind of sprint from far away land get close to the prey crouch down inch closer and by the time the prey realizes they're there it's over um and it feels like financial markets have been doing that but probably the best example is single family homes in america have been going up even though interest rates

are at over five percent and mortgage you know 30 year uh fix went over eight percent and it's on a national level at least exactly the opposite of what everyone told you was going to happen well i think so i think it's a broken market though so there is no price just so so there's a they call it a tight housing market but it's only tight because those who want to sell and those want to buy can't can't see eye to eye so there's no price discovery and so the people who have the three percent mortgage simply won't sell because they don't want to then end up with a seven percent mortgage and and so so but at some point people have to sell boomers again rapidly depreciating asset they're rapidly depreciating houses are going to be sold by rapidly depreciating boomers

and and who's who's going to buy those McMansions not Barry Sternlich and and and I did a pretty good job I think this year of laying out the the the rise of the the permanent capital purchasing of houses and how they they made a business model out of buying single-family homes which is a terrible business to rent single-family homes by getting them on fire sale in 0809 by by hiking rents like crazy, by getting the capital to leverage the shit out of it. I read somewhere that Blackstone or BlackRock, I can never keep those two separate, was getting money at 0.15%. So you take a terrible business, you lever the shit out of it, you make a razor thin profit margin on a hugely levered portfolio. And then, well, what would hurt this business model? Well,

rates rising and rates have risen. So I figure that we are about to see explosions all over the real estate market. Why they are not yet audible is unclear to me, but they have to, because the costs of buying a house just doubled. And so you either have to buy half the house or pay half as much or something but it just doubled and you know what it's like to buy a house you sit down with the realtor they say how much money do you have how what's your annual income this is how much you can afford and your wife says that's what we're buying and and and so so if the the realtor says that quantity of is what you can afford divided by two now because everything cost more. Round numbers, the real estate market has to cut in half. Will they ever let that happen

or will they step in? Yeah, yeah. No, no, no. They have to let it happen. No, because then we'll have an inflation problem. Remember how Twitter used to be loaded with people saying, oh, I'd love inflation because that'll make my mortgage cheaper. How's that working out for you guys? is your mortgage any cheaper? The answer is no, because your wages are as sticky as your goddamn mortgage. So I had a guy, Joe McCann, he's a former macro trader, worked at a place that you would know. He's got a partner who worked for a very well-known billionaire investor, managed hundreds of millions of dollars, about billions each individually. They now run a fund that's focused on the crypto market. And one of the things that he said to me is his friend said to

him, and now it's kind of become his calling card, that essentially the government and the Fed is in a precarious position. It's either full-blown depression or dog coins to a trillion. That's kind of their optionality. And so a full-blown depression actually sounds way worse than dog coins to a trillion. Well, but crypto is highly inflationary. Correct. The introduction of crypto. That's just a lot. It's not if you own it, right? It's an inflation hedge if you own it but it's highly inflationary to the system because what's it worth now two trillion is that a round number good guess something like that yeah call it two trillion that's two trillion that didn't exist that came from zero right that came from scratch

now there's some upfront cost buying servers and stuff like that i remember when guys were mining crypto on their telephones right that was how easy it was in the olden days when And only nut balls like Max Keiser were buying it. But yeah, I turned it down at 10. 10 bucks a coin. I think there's a difference between like Bitcoin being kind of, you know, digital gold, whatever. And I think, you know, macro investors are like, okay, cool. If I see gold, this is a digital version.

Like I can wrap my head around that. what he was really talking about was like the craziness the absolute insane insanity of dogecoin going up to you know 50 billion dollars or whatever right and it was kind of this you know uh but that doesn't that doesn't create the wealth right that's that in itself is a fictional it's just a it's not wealth creation it's wealth aggregation it's just shifting wealth yeah and and it's at some point you have to create wealth it's at some point the entire system is based on wealth creation aka robert gordon's book not just you know nvidia is going to be a out of on a milk carton at some point right nvidia nvidia is priced five times what sun microsystem was priced at

before it did a 95 swan dive nvidia is going to be laughable it's going to be hysterical it's going to be it's going to be a chapter of you know what not to do books so you think nvidia is going to be one of the poster children for Great Crash. Yeah, right. There's a lot of people who disagree with you. I know. That's why it's so pricey, right? At the top, let's say the market.

So as you know, I make a case for a 40-year secular bear market, a multi-decade bear market. Now, that doesn't say it won't go up and down. People will be able to trade it. But if you think, well, that could never happen, And I go, don't tell the Japanese. They're still underwater 35 years later. And another detail of the Japanese market is, let's say, if you own the Nikkei,

you owned 14 of the 20 biggest companies in the world. How could that go wrong, right? How could that possibly go wrong? Well, the guys on the U.S. market now own the Mag7. And even Buffett turned on sort of U.S. equities this year. He kind of said, you know, 40 years, some number of years from now, the U.S. will not have the biggest companies. And so I thought he said never bet against America. Is he changing his mind?

Yes, he appears to have changed his mind because he's looking at the craziness. If you instead of owning the Nikkei, you just started buying it. You're some 22 year old Japanese kid who just got out of University of Tokyo and you started averaging down. took you 20 years to break even 20 years to break even now you're doing okay now but but when the the boomers have to sell their equities and they're talking about this big wealth transfer from boomers to their kids i go their kids have to buy the fucking stocks that the kids are supposed to get rich on the boomers have to sell them to someone's and and therefore you know it's it's it's not going

to be a wealth transfer without without a depreciation of the ticker price because there's no one to buy it and and and so i i think we are going to have i i talk about about about 10 tailwinds that we had from 1981 to the present. And then I kind of cover how those will now be headwinds. And it's not to say it'll happen today or tomorrow or next year or even this decade, but I'm confident that somewhere over the next 40 years, you're going to look up and say, we haven't moved anywhere because we're sitting at 150% overvalued. And if you're 150% overvalued and you tread water, inflation adjusted, you just tread water and say, okay, I'll just buy and hold and wait and let the market come back to fair value slowly. 35 fucking years.

35 years of treading water. You want to go straight down, it's like 68% or something. You want to stretch it out over 50 years, you can get a total gain of about 20%. Compounded, it's like 0.5%, over 50 years. Once you are up at these nosebleed levels, there's no safe route home, period. Golden cash, that's it. Well, and then you've got to somehow beat inflation. So we're in treacherous waters.

Someone will do well and they will be deified as the investor of the decade. And it might be a hodler, might be a goldler, might be uh might be some guy who found a couple of small companies that are just going to rock my worst investment ever was i i i received shares of lab corp of america in a in a merger that eventually i didn't know what they were i knew what i owned but i didn't know what they were and so i sold them they're up hundredfold that was the worst move ever made was selling LabCorp of America. But I've done well. If I can tie inflation, I'll do fine. I'm in good shape. All right. I've got two last questions for you before I let you go.

One, name three investors that you're impressed with right now that people may not know. Who are the people that you pay attention to what they're talking about, what they're doing? When you've got a question or an idea, you call and talk to them. Who are three people that just may surprise folks? Well, I don't know if they're going to surprise because a guy who I get a lot of useful information from is Jesse Felder. um i get a lot of useful information off a guy who just appeared on my radar about a year ago but it's not about investing it's more about macro is is peter saint ange he's on twitter if you're not following him you should peterson is prof saint ange o-n-g-e and uh brilliant

brilliant macro analysis, snarky as shit, does one a day, very entertaining, rising star. And who do I think really has, you know, I have money with a couple of guys, a small cap investor who I like a lot is Eric Cinnamon. I like the guys at Horizon Kinetics. I haven't given them money yet because I think there's going to be some serious whooshing. the mistake I'll tell you what the mistake I made in 0809 was so so liquid um I was so convinced you know Einhorn I think at least he says he invented the phrase but if what's a 90% correction well it's an 80% correction and then cuts in half and and so so if if if you buy because it's dirt cheap because it's dropped 50 and then it drops

to 75 you just lost half your money now better than buying it at the top but this I started to talk about what's the top the top is some Tuesday afternoon at 203 the Nikkei hit its peak and the peak represents period of maximum optimism as evidenced by the price at the precise moment when the justification for optimism is zero zero point zero you're about to go in through the valley of death for the next 35 years and um and no one knows it so it's like father guido sarducci's coming in to go and plan it you remember you know that you remember that from snl where he's talking about he's talking about uh how you get older and then you get younger and he says and you meet this a young a chick he's speaking in his italian accent

and he says and says you're 20 and she's she's 18 and she's really hot next thing you know you're 22 and she's the 16 and he says now you're in a big trouble and in some sense the markets are like that you know where you're at but you don't know which direction they're going now i'm confident that um the markets have big downside as expressed by either serious price drop or a seriously long period of just suck ass. And to me, time is my enemy, not price. I would love to have a massive correction. I'd love to have a three-year drop

into the Great Depression. What I don't want to do is, what would suck would be, our last really serious correction was 1967 to 81. We lost 75% inflation adjusted and it took 14 years. Losing 75% is a bitch. Giving up 14 years of your investing life, a third of your investing life, really, to get nothing, to lose that 75%, that kills you. That's what killed the Nikkei investors.

Time. Time, time is your enemy. So time is your friend in a bull market, and time is your enemy in a bear market. I'm predicting a multi-decade bear market where time will be your worst enemy. And I don't know. I think the markets could be uninvestable. I did a Spaces with George Noble. What an honor.

And I said, I thought the markets would be out of best when he asked me to explain. I said, the Nikkei. He says, well, you could short. I said, no, you couldn't. Took too long. You'd burn your money to a crisp trying to short the Nikkei because it didn't just drop like a stone. It just worked its way down over about 15 years. You go broke trying to short that thing.

So I think the markets could become absolutely uninvestable, besides the occasional lucky person who can cherry pick. But that's in the seem to lab, you know, fooled by randomness moment, right? That's where there are going to be, in a sample size of 10,000 money managers, there's going to be some who flip the coin heads 10 times in a row. It's statistical. So there will be winners. Are they because they're geniuses? I got to figure Druckenmiller had a special touch. I think David Tepper has a special touch.

Dalio who I think is a hoser but I read his book and and it was very good it was kind of fourth turning with a greater military and economic component but he sees us going into a period of great uh stress and violence he's we're right on the cusp of a of a you know 15 20 year cycle. And so my last question is, uh, you put the books that you read each year at the end of the letters. Um, so people can go check those out. But, uh, if you had to pick one or two books throughout your life that really stand out as having the biggest impact on the way you think the way you see financial markets, uh, or even think about some of the other topics we've talked about what are like the one or two books that you would suggest um that's kind of obscure and called

banking in the business cycle written in 1937 i actually read the original but then they reprinted it so you can buy it probably on amazon by phillips and mcmanus i think and it was about what really created the great depression and it was an austrian view um the price of time is a modern book that everyone should read um and if you know edward chancellor is considered god in this world of you know credit and and crisis and and and he says that when interest rates get to two percent you always have a crisis well they went negative so you know i think edward's probably uh watching the tickers with interest i think the great crash of 1929 is a classic um um i think i i really like robert gordon's book which we talked about i really like the great

believer the true believer which we talked about um sleeper out there and the the mystery of capital by hernando de soto is about international markets and international economics and why Africa is never going to be a hub of financial, of wealth creation. I'm trying to think what else I should put together this list. I have at least a dozen years of it, of books. My big advice is audio books. When your wife sends you to the store, she's actually asking you to read for 10 minutes each way. when I commute 12 minutes to work it's 24 minutes of reading um I can get through about 25 books a

year just in the car and uh and so uh and you can always get through the book um and uh I encourage people to read history I read about the middle ages middle ages are great by the way ah world lit only by fire great book very snarky very funny yeah but i've read about roman history and i've read probably half a dozen books in the middle east um nothing stuck um avoid books that um too many names too many foreign names i started to read gordon chang's book about china and it was just too many chinese guys um whereas michael mouse's book about russia is not so he avoided that trap somehow and so i'm i'm a big i'm part way through it right now but it's unbelievable book uh how about you you tell me add some um i would say books over the last

i don't know year or so um that i would really suggest i got a whole list here of uh Give us no coin or the book. If you had one book, you said, look, I got one pitch. What's the pitch? I'm going to read Lin Alden's book. Yeah, in terms of just a book to read about crypto stuff or Bitcoin. There must be one that's the Bible. It's either Lin Alden's Broken Money. That's my next book, actually. Or Saifedean, The Bitcoin Standard. I would say those two are the books. My buddy Jason Williams, he wrote one called Hard Money You Can't F With.

That's pretty good too. I like those three. Let's see. Books this year, Barton Biggs, Hedgehogging. You ever read that one? I think I read that one. That's about 15 years old, I think. That one's got some age on it.

The Raven of Zurich is a good one. I really like this. It's called Rules for Aging, Roger Rosenblatt. But it's kind of like pithy things that you can do in your life to make it better. Here's one for you. Millionaire Next Door was very good. Oh, yeah. That is a good one.

I once stood and listened to a guy who I might call kind of a digital friend. I don't know what you call him. Where he gave a talk on 10 stupid books. And that was one of them. And afterwards, I said, you didn't read it, did you? There's no way you read that book. He just thought it sounded stupid. And it's about saving.

It's about the psychology of saving. so i i think if you don't understand that what it's really about is saving not about not about investing it's about saving so so you may have noticed i had an expensive year i bought my wife a car and i had to do some shit around the house and i still saved 25 percent of my gross salary right and so so when my kids were in college i still had a net savings when my kids were in college and uh and that that is the one time i said to my dad i think i should be saving more he started to rip into me i said well i now i'm saving between 25 and 30 percent of my gross he said oh never mind right he backed off he thought i was not saving anything i said no but

i had to be able to do better if i was living on a low salary got some big raises should have been able to live should have been able to save a huge percentage of that but your your your life expands to fill your wealth right you somehow find a way so if you can save 25 of your gross the rest is noise at some level i uh i could not agree more where can we send people to find you on the internet if they want more dave column well i do try to answer emails they're getting this time of year it's it's a bit of a nightmare um but I try to answer them um and um that's how I met a lot of people I don't cold called an email like to Rickards or something like that and and and they'd answer back yeah you know some very famous guy I just had an email exchange with

Jeff Sachs and he says thank god we're not university presidents right and I'm going no kidding um and then i'm at uh um i'm at twitter at david b column where my pin tweet is my year in review i appreciate your time everyone looks forward to this every year and we will do it again in 2024 my friend adios