The Pomp Podcast - #1406 Dave Collum | The Economy Is Worse Than You Think

Episode Date: September 9, 2024

Dave Collum is the Department Chair and Professor of Chemistry at Cornell University. In this conversion, we talk about the economy, inflation, stock market, investing outlook, politics, Trump, Harris, Vance, Walz, RFK Jr, geopolitical analysis, and how you can start to think more independently.  ======================= Xapo Bank, the world’s first fully licensed Bitcoin-enabled bank, offers military-grade security with an unmatched blend of physical and digital security, as well as pioneering regulatory oversight, so your funds are always protected. Beyond secure storage, they enable you to grow and use your Bitcoin. Earn daily interest in Bitcoin, spend with zero FX fees using a global card, and make instant payments via the Lightning Network for unrivalled access and convenience. Visit ⁠⁠⁠https://www.xapobank.com/pomp⁠⁠⁠ to join. ======================= Gemini is the safe and secure way to trade crypto. Gemini is offering eligible new users the opportunity to earn $100 in BTC when they trade $1000 in crypto within their first 30 days of signing up. Head over to ⁠⁠https://www.gemini.com/partners/pomp⁠⁠ and start trading crypto to earn $100 in BTC. ======================= Pomp writes a daily letter to over 265,000+ 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/ ======================= View 10k+ open startup jobs: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://dreamstartupjob.com/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Enroll in my Crypto Academy: https://www.thecryptoacademy.io/

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. What's up, guys? Today, we have Dave Collum. Dave is the department chair and professor of organic chemistry at Cornell University. Dave is a fan favorite, and for good reason.

He always brings unique perspectives, and he's got some crazy ideas about where the world is going. But in a weird way, Dave has been more right than you would think. And so paying attention is always worth your time. In this conversation, we talk about the economy. We talk about inflation, what's going on in the stock market, how you should think about investing your money moving forward. But then we get into politics and we talk about Trump and Harris, Walls and Vance. We even get into what he thinks about Robert Kennedy Jr. On top of that, we then get into all sorts of geopolitical analysis, where he sees things in the society that don't make sense, and then what he's thinking about, what books he's reading, and how you at home can start

thinking more independently and critically about the media, free speech, and many more topics. Dave Collum is one of my favorite guests because he always forces me to think more deeply about different issues. Sometimes I agree with him, sometimes I don't. But that's the beauty of conversation is I'm constantly looking for people I can learn from and people that will make me think much, much more

than I would otherwise. Here is my latest 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 Gemini. Gemini is a fantastic platform. How do I know? Because I've used it for years. These guys get it. They right now have a special offer where they are offering all eligible new users the opportunity to earn $100 in Bitcoin. That's right, 100 big ones. They're going to get out in Bitcoin if you go and you trade $1,000 in crypto within the first 30 days of signing up. What is Gemini? Gemini builds crypto products that are simple, elegant, and secure. Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss, the billionaire Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss, Founded Gemini in 2014 with a security-first mentality and ethos of asking for permission, not forgiveness.

They've been pioneers for the crypto industry since day one. And unlike many exchanges, they are available in all 50 U.S. states. Gemini has tools for new and advanced traders. They've got an advanced trading platform called ActiveTrader, which is where crypto traders go for advanced charting tools, access to over 300 crypto trading pairs, and multiple order types to trade the way you want. Head over to Gemini.com slash partners slash pump and start trading with Gemini today to earn $100 in Bitcoin. That's right. Gemini will give you $100 in Bitcoin. If you head over to Gemini.com slash partners slash pump and you trade $1,000 in crypto within the first 30 days.

Today's episode is brought to you by Zappo Bank. Let this sink in for a moment. Over half a trillion dollars in Bitcoin has been lost or stolen. Whether that is misplaced hardware wallets or an exchange that went bust, the risks are very real. That's why I think where and how you store your Bitcoin is absolutely critical. Now meet Zappo Bank, the world's first fully licensed and regulated Bitcoin-enabled bank. They're known as the Fort Knox of Bitcoin. With over a decade of expertise in Bitcoin custody, they blend no holdback security, including military-grade Swiss bunkers, cutting-edge digital protocols, and strict regulatory oversight. This comprehensive approach ensures your funds are always protected no matter what. With Zappobank, you can grow your

wealth with interest paid out daily in Bitcoin. You can spend anywhere with zero FX fees using their global card, or you can make instant payments with the Lightning Network. Head over to Zappobank.com forward slash Pomp to join. That's X-A-P-O-B-A-N-K.com forward slash Pomp. Go check out Zappobank today. All right, guys. Dave, I thought a great place to start this conversation is the US economy. Some people are saying it's amazing. The consumer is resilient. Asset prices are up near all-time highs. Everything is going to be golden because Jerome Powell is going to cut interest rates. And here we go again. Other people are pointing to a variety of data points and they're saying we are really bad shape and a recession is right

around the corner you always have unique views how do you evaluate where we are with the u.s economy right now well i think it's tanking so i think the slope is steepening um as we kind of hinted at before um i think the economy i was watching peter teal the other day with joe rogan i don't know if you happen to catch that but teal said that that tech has been stagnating for 30 years i'm going you know i could make the case potentially and and it has been made actually but but i didn't expect teal to say that i have this so what do you think the inflation rate is uh what do you think it is i would say i would say that it is probably 50 higher than reported so like four and a half percent or so right now yeah i just had breakfast at a place i used to get a

breakfast special plus a beverage for about 10 bucks it's not 20. and and and yes jimmy ioreo is inflation in any way sort of shrinking down to manageable numbers which means the cost still going up but just slow he said no no it's the prices the inputs are still rising very quickly you can't find someone who actually knows prices who doesn't say the inputs are rising so i think there's a grift going on here i think they're convincing us so let's say john williams or or butowski of chapwood index or right or half right those guys put inflation at you know sort of five or six percent higher than the cpi which is so jerry here's how stupid the cpi is right first let me rail on a couple things cpi 27 weighted uh housing and the mechanism by

which they determine that the rate is they they do a survey which i've never been asked so i wonder who's getting surveyed um how much could you rent your house for how many people on this planet could answer that question right that's a stupid question right and and so so so that's 27 of cpi Then they hedonically adjust it and they say, well, because you got more buttons on your blender, you know, it's actually cheaper than you think. And, you know, I flip it around. I said, yeah, and that blender's got a life expectancy of a fruit fly. That's that's the truly hidden inflation is rapid depreciation of all the crap we buy. Just things don't last.

They can't be fixed. And then you got substitution. Here's the funny one. So they hedonically adjust for quality. And then they say, by the way, if inflation goes up and you were eating prime rib. or you're eating, I don't know, sirloin steak. And because it's going up, you switch over to chicken, which is half the price, although unbelievably high, but now half the price. They say, therefore, you're going to substitute. So your inflation rate's really not that high

because you just substituted. And I used to say, okay, then we're going to eat bugs and grubs and shit and there'll be no inflation, right? That's fine. But non-hyperbolically, you ask the question, well if chickens half the price of beef isn't the free market saying it's half the quality therefore shouldn't you hedonically adjust it down by precisely the amount of money that you're supposedly saving by dropping to a lower quality product to save money and therefore substitution is complete nonsense so you got all these inflation metrics economists like to exclude things that go up. Rosie actually explained that in a way that I finally understood that the economists are not necessarily brain dead by noting that economists are uninterested in

things that only go up. So best example, postage stamp, right? The day you walk in the post office, the price of stamps has gone down. Hell will freeze over, right? So that turns out to not have economic content in it, right? So, we're always going to say, oh, look at the price of stamps. That's telling me something. No, it's telling him nothing. Whereas there are items that can go up or down depending on supply demand. That's why economists exclude all these things and focus on things that can go up or down, which means, therefore, there's natural inflation and deflationary pressures. Well, but that's a very narrow subset of the world. Now, I think it's a valid way to look at it provided you explain to the people you're talking to what the hell you're

doing and and and if most of our world is just non-stop going up to then just ignore it not explain why you're ignoring it not explain why you're focusing on these things that go up or down then you're you're completely missing your target or you're lying one of the two so i i've been wondering if the if the inflation rate is being missed so badly that it's possible that the real GDP has been shrinking for years. So here's two questions for you. One, do you think that the understatement of inflation is intentional? Or do you think that they are trying to outsmart themselves and come up with the quote, unquote, real inflation measurement? And in doing so, they're just, you know, missing to the downside. So kind of, you know, how do you evaluate why

it's being understated? And then second is, if we were to create a new inflation metric from scratch today, how would you design that to actually get us the real inflation number? Well, first of all, I'd get rid of all the stupid stuff I just rattled on about. But I do understand why you have to account for the fact that things are improving. But you say, well you know cpus are you know are getting faster but the software is getting more bloated so you know is there really anything about microsoft word that's improved in the last 15 years no nothing oh there's probably some something you can click that links up to an ai or something you know but it's just not worth the damn when was last time apple invented an

innovative product a real innovation you know the kind that you got elon who's trying to send rockets to mars that that's at least innovative right and i know he's not everyone's favorite person but um meanwhile you got like companies like nvidia that look like to me potentially a fraud um pretend they're they're they're they're they're um vendor financing like the like the bandwidth guys did in the dot-com era so they'd loan money to the people buying the chips from them and then there'd be borrowed money using the chips as collateral and the whole thing's insane And some like 35, 40 companies are doing this. Their customers are countless startups trying to develop AI, right?

If you can code, you're writing an AI program right now, right? Maybe you're taking a break to listen to Pomp and Dave, but you're writing an AI program. They have no earnings, no revenues. At some point, they will run out of money and then video will run out of customers. And at some point, Huawei, which I've heard rumor of, is going to come up with a chip that's better. I've heard they have one that's better. and and so nvidia is going to do in my opinion a 95 swan dive those companies are our economy facebook tell me why facebook is our economy tell me what about facebook makes our economy

our economy what's good what what merit does facebook bring to the story twitter we have fun with right you know but it's it's it's not u.s steel it's not general motors it's not the modern era tech companies these digital companies cloud storage right they replace exxon mobile with with with salesforce.com right please explain to me how that's a rational thing to do they replace pfizer with something else i don't know well pfizer you could argue should burn in hell but says the consultant of 20 years um so i the economy feels bad at several levels one is it feels like we're not creating wealth and robert gordon's book you know gordon's book creating wealth i think we might have talked about this before too you're the one who told

me the rise and fall of american growth uh you're the reason why i read it yeah it's great isn't it it's a fantastic book and i always tell people two things from that book first is uh the invention of the elevator and how underrated the ability to go up rather than out uh was to uh to american growth and then the second being how quickly we went from individual houses completely unconnected to having water electricity roads etc where now all of a sudden people were able to actually participate in society in a way that they couldn't previously you know you read that book and you walk away and say wow and things like the sears robot catalog was just amazon yeah right and and it wasn't as worldly as amazon but you went from you know buying from a country store buying flour

out of a barrel and nails out of a barrel and to to be able to order 10 000 items online and have some train delivered a couple weeks later now we shortened up the time scales and stuff but amazon is not innovative compared to that at all at all you could order from the sears robot catalog you could order houses prefab houses you order replacement parts for your model t so let's talk about innovation for a second because i do think this is pretty interesting right where you have higher inflation than what they're stating um you have a gdp growth number which uh if you look at a really long time frame gdp growth used to be near zero now at least we're in low single digits um so what is also what is p what is the p of gdp well that that is up for

debate well but they talk about how our economy is 70 consumption i go wait that's not an economy you create wealth you then get to spend it that's the consumption part right and so if you're not creating wealth you don't get to spend it you don't get to consume and so the real wealth of the country is its ability to create well not consume it i wrote uh recently i said that the u.s stock market is a millionaire minting machine it's the greatest machine we've ever created the challenge is that if we're creating paper millionaires because they're simply allocating to the stock market and you know percent of stock market allocation as a percent of financial assets is at an all-time high now i think it's 42 percent

uh fidelity just reported that uh the number of people with one million dollars in their 401k is up 31%. Almost half a million people at Fidelity now have become millionaires in their 401ks alone. You go and you look at NVIDIA, the numbers came out that I think it's one out of every three employees at the company is estimated to be worth over $20 million. 75% of all employees are millionaires. Would that mean 25,000 people who work at the company today are worth a million And you look at all this wealth that's being generated. I do think it begs the question of on the GDP growth and on innovation. You mentioned Elon. I think there's a lot of people who say, hey, you know what, actually making rockets reusable and kind of going to space, pretty, pretty productive. If you're able to actually make something. It's innovative. It's innovative. Innovative. If if you make something like Neuralink work where you can actually use computers to bring back, you know, certain things that people want to do if they're injured or, you know, whatever, that'd be pretty innovative. But I do think that the list is much shorter than people would realize. And, you know, there's some interesting things that even from Gordon's book, he talks about the fact that planes don't really go that much faster.

In fact, they might be going slower than they once did. And so- From the Concorde, right? Of course. I recently just saw a story. There's a guy who used to use the Concorde. But at least now they provide you with your own tools in case the door flies off. Well, the guy that I saw, he was like the number one flyer.

And so he used to take a flight from London to New York, I think, every week. It took him three hours on the Concorde. and so you know there's boom supersonic they're trying to build a supersonic jet that uh would be used for commercial purposes whether it works or not unclear but if you kind of go through from a productivity and innovation standpoint um i do feel like you know we're we're looking at ourselves as look at how innovative we are as a country um it's just a much much shorter list than uh than people it's also cute shit do you think it's not yeah yeah i mean ai's gonna do things like i use grok um i use grok to get started on an issue so if there's something i

don't know anything about i i actually start with grok because it's better than just having to click links grok gives you this paragraph that says okay you ignorant moron this is the kind of stuff you should have been asking about and then you can maybe dig in more directly but the the disadvantage advantage of, of, of, of consolidating what Google might be the first page of links. Unfortunately, Grok's, I think a little too, um, Twitter centric, right? So, so, so you get what Twitter thinks and there's rumors that Twitter doesn't think very clearly. Big, if true, big, if true, big, if true. So, um, so there's that. And then, and then on top of it, Um, on top of all that, we have seemingly insurmountable issues and they're never

insurmountable. It's a train you don't get to jump off of and say, okay, we're done. Right. It just keeps going and going and going. But, but you know, what are we growing our data? What's the current rate? About seven, 8%, something like that, which means it's, it's quite a large percent and above our ability to produce, there's not a shred of evidence that we will ever be able to produce at that level. If you're waiting for some technical revolution, you're dreaming.

I think it was Howard Marks is probably the most credible source, but there's a number of guys who say, look, GDP inflation, which is inherently inflation corrected, for the 20th century was like 2.2% growth. You can't you can't grow your debt at 7 percent on that. We're just and if debt to GDP is growing.

So the numerator denominator cancellation of inflation, whatever it is, you know, even though the denominators crap at this point. I don't know how we get out of it. And Yellen just signed a document that came out of Treasury that was something like 450 pages. I had a funny exchange with my buddy David Einhorn, who I really adore because he'll talk about any subject. And I sent him this report. Oh, no. So first I talked about our unfunded liabilities. And I said, you know, Larry Kotlikoff, Boston College puts them at like $250 trillion now, unfunded liabilities.

Now, what are unfunded liabilities? they're liabilities which we've made promises that if you make normal assumptions about revenue going forward they are the promises you don't know how you're going to pay for so they're not just promises they're the promises for which you go according to my bank accounts that's not going to work and i said i was sort of 50 trillion and he didn't believe the numbers he said no no no no no no no no no so about a year later i run into this this treasury report it was kind of a funny exchange because i i sent it to him and he said well you know i hate we've got a problem but it's like 70 trillion it's not it's not 175 trillion for medicaid and social security and uh i said

it was 175 trillion from the report and he said no so you know i we got a problem but i hate it when people quote these things hyperbolically and i said to him i said go to page 294 look at table you know f35 last line of the table and the response i got back from is shit i missed that and and and of course he did right page 394 table whatever um but it was a report coming out of the treasury saying we have honor 25 just for those two we don't know how we're going to pay for and so you say well what do we do and i go well it's kind of a stage four cancer moment right where someone says you you got your your pancreas is shot you're gonna go and you go well what do we do and you go you get your affairs in order i don't know but we don't get our affairs

in order as a country we just we keep moving forward but i don't know how and then of course politics is a mess a total mess does the debt matter anymore yeah yeah i think it does why Because, well, because you do have the government borrowing money, and so it is growing because of that. In fact, our interest payments on the debt now exceed our military payments, which are huge. And as it gets bigger and bigger and bigger, eventually you can't get anyone to buy your debt, so then you have to print. And now, here's a question for you. Can you name a country that inflated their way out of debt? This is a trick question.

It's not an easy answer. And I can tell you what some of them are. But off the top of your head, can you say, everyone always says, oh, we'll just inflate our way out. Now, my first snarky response is, OK, so we all owe, according to that unfunded liability number, we all owe $2 million apiece. Now, I didn't budget for it. You hodlers might have budgeted for it, but I'm still human.

and um and and and and and then and they said but we were just going to inflate it away now okay so you're going to inflate away two million dollars worth of my spending power that's that's the same goddamn thing you moron right they're taking your money as you know and um and so so i can't think of a country that actually successfully did it now i get answers there's one i haven't been able to yet buttoned down but people say canada i think was in the 90s but my digging tells me canada kind of blocked and tackled their way out they kind of knuckled down their resource base kind of saved them and they paid off the debt they actually got control of it the good old-fashioned way by by getting tough actually great britain did in the 19th century but if we're back to

the 19th century we're already in pretty much weird space now um people like to cite the u.s post-war. They said real rates were, you know, 10% below inflation or something like that after World War II. I agree, except for the fact we're also the biggest superpower in the history of superpowers, including today. We were something like 40% of the world's GDP. So if you're going to tell me we inflated away our debt while ignoring the fact that we sold everything to everybody at all times for a couple of decades then you're missing a big part of the how we got the hell out of our post-war debt you're missing a big part of that story now the weird one turns out to be israel they did some sort of weird colossal devaluation of their currency that

lasted for a couple years and then just dropped right back to the baseline and i haven't been able to get a good coherent without a lot of effort actually that discussion of how it happened how they did it but their inflation rate went from something like six percent to two hundred percent and then hovered up there for a couple years and then came right back down and i go what was that and if anyone out there knows send me a link i i i would like a nice coherent write up on how they did that one of the interesting mostly inflating away your debt doesn't work i think i think you end up in one of these um in the end you end up um with a deflationary default one of the interesting things to me is that um i can remember when i was a young boy and i would

listen to uh politics in the background my dad was watching or my mom um they would talk about balancing the budget that was like a key campaign safe you know phrase if you utter that american people like hearing that. I don't hear either candidate talking about balancing the budget. I do hear Trump talking about cutting spending or spending less to a degree. I think his critics would argue that the debt went up very fast under him in 2020. But the actual commitment to not spend less, but to get to a balanced budget, to reduce the deficit, to kind of do a number of these things it seems like we almost given up on if a candidate was to say that we're like that's never going to happen um you know given that it's been almost 25 years since we had a balanced

budget in america what do you think and that wasn't even balanced either so that was that was on balance sheet balance but there was all sorts of off balance sheet stuff that was way out of control still um little woo-woo accounting that's exactly right it was way woowoo accounting but clinton got his headline and that's all he wanted um so so um i'm not i think trump's trump trump comes up with ideas that are on the edges are appealing but i don't think he has any big ideas to save anything he he's going to want to cut taxes and i know that the austrians which i profess to sort of support i support the austrian business cycle i can't profess to be austrian economically literate because that's a very different world actually

The business cycle basically says bigger the boom, bigger the bust. The Austrian economics is a much more intellectually intensive thing. But he likes to cut taxes. He wants the Fed to jack up the markets. His economics at some level is my least favorite part. The part I like about Trump is to tell people to screw themselves and, you know, put people in their place and things like that. If he builds the wall, if he lets the J6ers out. So on the economy, though, let's stay on that first and we'll get to the other policy things.

It seems like. And I'm going to say this and don't fall out of your chair, but I actually think Trump and Harris are both moving to the center on a bunch of policies because they're realizing that's what American public, the kind of general public wants. And they're starting to reach agreement on a number of different campaign topics, which is somewhat mind blowing. So the easy ones are. So how has Trump moved? How has Trump moved? Let's start with Trump's moves. So maybe the most obvious move that's not economic is his thought process around women's reproductive rights. He's now pushing things down to the state.

He's saying, hey, look, I'm not going to do a national ban. And he's talking about financing from the government or kind of stimulating via these IVF, you know, kind of practices and things like that. And so, again, it's a fool's game for us to say, like, how far is he moving or, you know, how much closer to the center? But it's obvious that he's maybe taking the edge off of some of these ideas and he's kind of pulling. I don't remember the national abortion ban. I think that might be a DNC fabrication. Yeah. But just like, I think that he has softened his stance in general when it comes to women's reproductive rights. He's downplaying the vaccine. Yeah, downplaying the vaccine. I mean, there's definitely things that I think, you know, he is doing, which I actually think is going to help

him in the election by doing it, right? Now, Harris, who is the most left-leaning senator, you know, kind of everyone knows that the policies were radical to the left. All of a sudden, you know one borrowing policies from trump and no tax on tips uh also uh i've read that she now supports the border wall right um so like they're reaching agreement to some degree and the similarity is that they're both populist candidates when it comes to a lot of these topics they're trying to reach kind of you know middle america the average american whatever on economics though when you look at the two candidates at first you think that they couldn't be further apart But I actually think that both of them are trying to solve the same problem.

They agree on what the problem is. Harris says, we got to address this, you know, kind of debt issue, et cetera. I'm just going to take more money from the people. I'm going to tax unrealized gains. I'm going to go after all these, you know, kind of somewhat radical economic policies that are going to drive tax receipts. And then therefore, I'm going to be able to address this issue. I would argue, and I think a lot of people are arguing, that approach seems to be economically

illiterate. Like you can't tax unrealized gains. You can't do a lot of stuff. that's just a talking point that she thinks sounds good and very populist and actually to some portion of america they're like that sounds amazing it's only for people over 100 million dollars in net worth that's not me screw the rich people and you know take all their money on the other hand starts there by the way of course starts at the top guys works down well the uh the the metric guys go back to is the income tax federal income tax you know was

instituted to help pay for the war it then was ruled unconstitutional it then was brought back and it was 1% of the population, they owed 1% of their income. Today, more than 50% of the population pays federal income tax and a good number of people pay more than 50%. So yes, it definitely does expand. That's the camel's nose under the tent.

Yeah. So when Obama put in national healthcare, which I didn't vehemently oppose, I went to ask my dad that question and he said, well, it sounds good on paper, but every time he asked the government to spend money for you, they do such a bad job.

You should never do that. um but we kind of need something i mean we're kind of doing it ad hoc where you know you show up at the er you get treated and then at the same time there's things that maybe could have prevented you from being at the er that might have been a lot cheaper and stuff like that so i i think the problem here's the problem national health care also first of all you can't have four million people coming over the board or per year and have national health care right you can't have welfare state and open borders let's start with that the second thing is it would be reasonable to say look everyone gets this sort of basal level health care well that basal level is going to get

lifted like crazy and if you don't think so just ask any lobbyists from any major pharmaceutical company right they are going to raise that bar and so pretty soon it's just going to be free health care for everybody massive amounts and it will be time i guess to invest in pfizer merck again things like that um but but but who if you say a basal rate so are you going to say to someone by the way your basal rate covers this but not this and then you're going to be called a racist right and so it always it's going to go bad i don't think i don't think we have the leadership to pull off a tough solution which means therefore i think we're going to hit the wall like in a you know a nascar race well if you go to the other side so harris is saying hey let's

raise tax receipts let's go do this trump is actually saying the exact opposite right he's saying hey let's lower tax receipts let's you know inflate our way out let's go spend um let's kind of uh go build and kind of do all that their proposed policies on the economic side to address the debt are very different but they actually agree that hey this is a problem i worry that neither when you say agree though it sort of implies that i think trump has a compass i think he doesn't always use it. So I think he says shit to get what he wants, right? The narcissist takes over pretty fast. I don't think Harris has a compass. That may be true. But when you say agree, she moves left. She's moving left based on what she's saying. There is not a shred of

evidence to what she's saying. She even remotely believes. I don't see her processing the day and saying, maybe I got that wrong, right? You just get the sense. And someone described it as, look, she's got former Biden people. She's got her own inner circle. She's got Obama people. Her head's being spun around in circles. And I don't think she has the minimum sort of self-determination to take a serious stance on anything. That's what scares me about her. So here is an interesting question for you. Forget the two current candidates, but the the president in general, is it better for the president to say, I'm listening to what the people want. And regardless of my own personal views, I am going to carry out the will of the

people. And if it is at odds with my personal views, I'm still going to carry out the will of the people. Or is it better for us to have a president that says, Hey, here is what I believe you're voting me into office. And I'm going to do what I believe. And it's this interesting question of, I think we like the idea of the former, but we actually vote for the latter. Right. We like the idea that the president listens to the will of the people and is going to kind of reflect that. But if you actually look at the campaigns and you look at the way people vote, it seems like we just vote on what does that person believe or what do I believe that person believes? And that's who we put in office. What do you think? Well, to be self-consistent for at

least 20 years i've been saying i think any one of these people would be acceptable as president if when they got an office they did what they felt was right because that that implies that the person would sort of find that they have that moral compass that guides them to find the answer and if you know it's like listening to you know uh you know one of the Weinstein brothers or something, they process the information, goes ahead and rattles around, and then they try to find the answer. I think any party could come up with a candidate who, if when they got in office, they were voted based on basic principles, but that they do what they think is right. And I do believe that the population is not

capable of fully handling all the truths of what running this country means, right? I agree with that. Let's put it in terms of Putin, right? Putin's a sociopath. Putin is a tough guy. Putin is running a country that if you were not those two things, you couldn't run the country. And so he has to do what he has to do. There's a sort of you can't handle the truth component to Putin.

Justin Trudeau could not run Russia. Macron could not run Russia. None of the European leaders could run Russia. Zelensky could not run Russia. Um, and, and so if, if, if I spotted a leader who I thought would, when they got in office, they would do what they really sort of deeply believe is the correct thing. I'd vote for that person. Now, who was the last person to fit that description? Well, Kennedy. Now I think this is a Kennedy Shanahan ticket. If you really look at it hard.

Explain. Well, first of all, if they put Kennedy in charge of VP, they'd neuter him. If they put him in charge of health and human services, that would be really transformational. They made him attorney general. That'd be really transformational. If they made him head of the CIA, that would be a waste because the CIA would just find a way to neuter him. That would serve no purpose. A lot of people would like to see that. No, the CIA can take care of itself. They can override Kennedy. No problem. So I would like to see Trump build a cabinet of talented people. So my cabinet would be Kennedy. I'm happy with Shanahan. I know she's a super lefty. I'm a righty. I don't care.

I would love to see Tulsi Gabbard get in there. And I know there's little flickers of information about her that maybe bother people, but I'm willing to, you know, Jesus Christ, look at what's in there now. I mean, a bunch of pedophiles, a bunch of thieves and stuff like that. So flickers of issues are not going to veto a person. I'd like to see Douglas McGregor as Secretary of Defense. I'd like to see Jonathan Turley put on the Supreme Court as soon as the spot opens. There's just, there are some great people out there you could put in positions of real authority. The Attorney General, Merrick Garland is a disaster, a complete disaster.

To me, he's treasonous SOB. I think he's treasonous. There might be some legal definition of treason that excludes that, but I think he's treasonous at a moral level. And so I want to improve upon those positions. With good people in there, you don't need a president. Who would you put in as the Federal Reserve Chairman and the Treasury Secretary? uh i'm not sure how relevant they are i'm not sure you have control over that you know that they're gonna answer to the bank no matter what so jamie diamond would be a potential

selection uh dot diamond is a powerful bastard diamond may be patriotic right he he actually may I thought Powell was going to be good. He's done more. I've sat on a couple of panels with prominent economists than me, right? And anyone who knows me knows I might have some skills, but prominent economists is not one of them. And disagreed with the whole panel and said Powell's going to be tougher than you guys think. He said it's going to hurt. He's going to cause pain.

He's worried about his legacy. He doesn't want to be Arthur Burns, wants to be Paul Volcker. He has no allegiance to Biden. Biden's administration has been a pain in the ass. He's trying to get control of stuff, and they're just spending like drunken sailors. And so they used to say, we need fiscal help. Now they're basically, I think if he'd speak frankly, he'd say, you guys got to stop shipping pallets of money around the world. This is not helping.

and um so i don't have as bad of view of powell as some i think i think that powell uh one thing that he has not yet gotten credit for because he hasn't had to use it is uh i called he reloaded the ammunition right he got in interest rates back over five percent he could now cut three four hundred basis points and still not be at zero i don't think he should though i don't think he should he doesn't need to do it but i'm just saying the fact that no but even if it's painful i think you had to leave it there yeah but but go back to 2021 he was all out of ammunition they had you know nine plus trillion on the balance sheet he has interest rates at zero for you know a year and a half uh any sort of slowdown that isn't induced by the fed he's got no tools now fast

forward you know kind of beginning at 2022 to you know q3 2024 and he's got interest rates that he can now cut he's got you know i don't know 1.5 to 2 trillion dollars he sold off the balance sheet Um, whether he uses the tool or not, he reloaded all that ammunition and, you know, barring We got us off the zero bound. Yeah. And, and barring the NBER, you know, basically sticking their finger in the air and trying to call whether in a recession or not with the two quarters of negative GDP. Are we in a recession now?

Forget about my long-term always shrinking economy. Are we in, will the NBER say that we are already in a recession a year from now? I don't think it matters. And here's why. No, it doesn't matter. No, no, I don't think it matters. You're right. But do you think that first, just do you think they will declare that as of September 1st,

2024, that that will be in the recession? Do you think that will be in there? I actually think this might sound a little crazy. I think it may matter more how they view their relationship with Jerome Powell than what the economic data says. Because what we learned in 2022 is that it was very important to them, to the administration, and I also think to the Fed, for it not to be considered a recession, even though they got the two quarters of negative GDP growth. And so NBER, which is supposed to be a bipartisan nonprofit, came out and said, we're not in a recession. It doesn't count.

And so I now am of the belief that the kind of indication of recession or not has much less to do with the economic data than we ever thought and has much more to do with backroom politics and certain things that we just – we as the American people may never understand. But imagine a world where Q3, Q4 of 2024 is declared a recession as a kick in the ass to Powell as he's leaving his post. i'm not saying that's what's going to happen but they're also going to tell us that q3 q4 was a recession after it's over so that they'll say and now it's over so don't worry about it right that's what's stupid about that of course but but like declaring a recession or not a recession right and again i'm actually of the belief that they're i don't even like the definition i don't i don't like the definition i don't like it's just so arbitrary one thing that i do think is uh kind of a thing I've been beating the drum on

around why it doesn't matter though is because I saw this chart and we'll try to find it and if we can we'll put it up on the screen but basically it goes all the way back to like 1920s maybe 1900 and it shows the frequency of recessions marked by these vertical lines

and then the kind of width of the bar or the line shows the severity how long did it last, how severe was it, etc. and if you look in the first just getting wider and wider and wider yeah well here's what's interesting in the first 70 or 80 years yes of the 1900s right you just massive frequency severity etc when you then look over let's say the last 30 years very infrequent much less severe and so what basically has happened

is the central bank has perfected the playbook of how to deal with these how to manipulate the economy, how to stimulate both implicitly and explicitly. And so now we're in this weird world where if a recession hits tomorrow, do you really think six to nine months from now, we're still going to be in economic pain? Or are they just going to pull out these bazookas and they're going to fire 500 basis points of rate cuts. They're going to print trillions of dollars and we're going to be back to all time high prices in financial markets. You know, what was it in 2020 nominally yes oh sure yeah but in 2020 what happened in march was the lockdown we were back to all-time high prices by august i blame the fed for the lockdown actually explain the fed for

well because of the fed it said look we can't print all that money we can't back you they wouldn't lock down i mean it's fair point right the fed had to say okay we got your back then they said okay we're gonna lock down that yeah the fed should have done better in my opinion now let me give you let me give you the column model of the economy going forward the nice thing about it is i won't be shown to be wrong until i'm dead but but as as you younger members are experiencing you know i remember that chemist talking about that shit you talk about how they've perfected it let's go back to 1981 the markets for at all-time lows valuation wise people don't even know what valuation means. That's how stupid the investors are now. They think valuation is

price. No, valuation is the market relative to some metric that it ought to track, whether it's price to book, price to revenue, price to earnings, Tobin's Q, you name it. There's about 25 fairly prominent ones. It inherently, inherently corrects for inflation because the denominator is always inflationary, inflationarily adjusting too. So if inflation is running wild, if your price to revenue is six it is goddamn six so back in 1981 let's use pe because it's mentally easy even though they fake the e part um the p.e of the market was about six it was dirt cheap inflation was running wild that's why the p.e was so low interest rates were in the high teens you could get so much goddamn money out of money markets which and here's the odd thing

if if at the end of every year the money markets in the bank accounts have 15 percent more than they had at the start of the year where'd that money come from i'm having trouble identifying that because they say you create money through loans so who's borrowing at 15 percent right i know i got a mortgage at 15 but creating money must have been hard but somehow if you had you know 100 trillion at the end of at the end you had 113 or 115 trillion where'd the money come from right that's a that's a that's a question that's not as easy to answer as it sounds okay so 1981 interest rates are an all-time high so we've got this unbelievable tailwind where the next 40 years rates could methodically almost linearly drop which makes things cheaper and cheaper and

cheaper to buy using the credit markets we started at the lowest valuations in history we had a boomer demographic the boomers were just hitting their stride they brought their wives with them and so so we had phenomenal demographics which which which which which economists which unfortunately i'm selective i refer to economists as like idiots when i need to and and as smart guys when i need to and and it could be both um but economists say demographics was everything and so we had phenomenal demographics we had china coming out of the dark ages offering slave labor at about 20 cents an hour to make shit for us we had russia that had not yet collapsed but desperately needed capital and so it was started selling resources

we're helping them we're sending before the soviet union collapsed we had our oil guys in there showing russia how to pump oil out of that place and how to get minerals out of that place and stuff like that. We had tailwinds, none of which will repeat for the next 40 years. There's no chance we're going to repeat those because we're not at all-time lows valuation-wise. We're not at all-time highs interest rate-wise. China is now fully grown. You say, oh, we'll replace with what? Zimbabwe? Who's going to replace China? India? Yeah, India is already partway there. So India is not starting at 20 cents on the dollar, 20 cents per hour. and um so so all these tailwinds are gone now during that 40-year period this is an amazing

stat during that 40-year period the valuations which should be wobbling around but there's no trend in valuations and if you want to say well the valuations can double and i go then the return from those valuations is going to cut in half it's arithmetic right so the valuations over that 40-year period compounded, I think the last time I did the math is 3.4% per year compounded. What happens if the next 40 years valuation is compounded negative 3.4% per year to the next secular low? We will look up 40 years from now and we will have not earned one penny on our investment. Now, 40 years, 40 years of without a catastrophic event in GDP or anything like that, in a while, they'll do all sorts of jerking and wiggling and there'll be highs, there'll be runs,

there'll be lows. 40 years from now, regression to the mean takes us to the current market prices, inflation corrected. Here's an interesting point around this. Because inflation has probably been higher than the government number right and now the internet has opened people's eyes to inflation being reality yeah um i know a lot of people who are taking their cash and they're buying stocks as an inflation hedge they're saying hey these things go up right it's denominated in dollars dollars being devalued inflation's taken off stocks go up i get wealthier we see you know 42 percent of uh stock market allocation as a percent of financial assets you know the whole thing should historical valuations matter less because now you have a monetary premium on top

of those historical valuations and so today you should actually expect what used to be quote unquote fair market is now slightly higher because of that monetary premium and that hiding from inflation well let me give you first a couple of factoids and then answer your question um Horizon Kinetics looked at the triple Q and looked at how, according to their prospectus, they calculate it. They calculate the valuations. The triple Q supposedly, and I'm saying supposedly because I've got to believe Horizon Kinetics, but these guys are smart, averages the PEs of the companies in the triple Q. So it's reported now that the PE of the QQQ is somewhere in the mid-20s or something, I'm sure. I haven't looked in a long time.

But they recalculated and they said, look, here's the deal. When the PE of a company in the QQQ is over 40, they round it down to 40. When a company in the QQQ has no earnings, they give it a PE of 40. So the highest the PE can possibly get on the QQQ is 40. if you actually take the triple Q and create a Buffett-like mega company and you sum total the market cap and the earnings and losses and shit,

and you treat it like it's a Berkshire Hathaway on steroids, PE around 100. So what are you buying when you buy the triple Q? You are buying at current valuation a 1% return. Anything after that's got to be growth. Whereas if you bought something with a 10% PE, you're buying a 10% revenue stream, which could be altered by collapsing revenue or rising revenue, but you're earning stream, actually. And so if you wish to say, look, valuations don't matter, then you also have to say that returns from those ongoing business concerns don't matter. And I do not believe that could be factually correct.

So, if you're willing to say, look, valuations stay up at these levels, your current return on the triple Q is going to be 1%, not 5%. So, let's say that valuations show returns are going to be much less. They're going to be much lower. I went and I looked actually today. I think that S&P over the last five years is up like 40%. Triple Q is up 140%. Russell 2000 is up like 42% over the last five years. Do you think it is sustainable to continue to see those types of numbers?

And if not- No chance. No chance. What happens? Zero chance. What happens? Well, now I'll go back to Buffett, 1999. Legendary article where he talks about investing.

and it was during the dot-com bubble so i think he was trying to throw a bucket of ice water on some people saying wake up he said and it was valuation independent so it wasn't because the valuations are high but just generally the stock market he said by the time you're done accounting for a b c d and e the most you can hope to get out of the markets is about four percent in the intelligent investor originally he and graham and then edited now originally graham and dot edited by buffett um they said for example if you think that you can earn more on equities than bonds over the long term you're the word they use was delusional why well what happens is is everyone uses a benchmark this favorable and they go you go well you know

what about the fact that okay 1906 was a market top inflation correct that market top inflation correct the return on the s&p from peak to trough forget about the first trough forget about the second trough the final trough in which the price of the market in 1906 was attained for the last time 1981 1906 to 1981 you treaded water now people say well i trade i go good fucking luck because i can't buy and hold is not trading we're told to buy and hold 1929 i think it gets up to 1992. there are 40 there are a number of 40 to 75 year periods throughout the 20th century now are we going to repeat the 20th century i'm not convinced that was a pretty good century right where the

market treaded water inflation corrected for 40 to 75 years there's about four of them peak to trough now you say well that's unfair i go but it's a harsh reality right if you if you own the nike in 1989 peak to peak you just broke even and that's without correcting for inflation that's without correcting for fees that's not without correcting for taxes which you will incur along the way so what do you get well what you get is about you get dividends you get dividends. What was the average dividend during the 20th century? Well, it started pretty high and ended pretty low. The average is about 4%. Thus, Buffett's number. Now, a guy named Ron Grice sends me updated charts occasionally,

one that I particularly like. And I didn't know if he was publishing or not. He has. It's the S&P 500 corrected for inflation. But rather than using the fake CPI, he uses the m2 money supply now it's not perfect but it's super numerical it seems like an awfully clean way to measure how the market's responding to the amount of money there now you got the whole shadow banking system and crap like that but it turns out that from 1925 to the present correcting for inflation using empty money supply the market drifted down all you got was dividends i mean so i used it and then he sent me an updated rat one he said here is the total return including dividends 3.79 that's kind of an error bar within four percent

it reminds me a lot um if you were to take from 1971 to today and denominate the stock market in gold it's flat to down right you know there's a bunch of different ways to kind of look at this analysis but there's a hundred years though of course this is not just this this is this is a huge number the question is does that mean you shouldn't invest in equities depends where i i I don't think there's a lot of old timers out there who say that, look, if you overpay, you're going to underperform. And if you way overpay, you're going to way underperform. So you got guys like Grantham, who I consider to be an optimist, saying, look, over the next 10 years, the S&P is going to return negatively. Then you got guys like Hussman, who I would say is trying to become an optimist, but he puts it worse.

so i think the bottom line is is that you can really look like a complete asshole for many years but what people don't notice is is that there's those moments in history where all those games that you thought were above what you should get they all get me remember bill miller who i who used to follow me on twitter i don't know if he still does he maybe heard me say some shit blocked me but he beat the s&p for 13 straight years he did what a hero right gave it all back in one year that's what markets do he gave it all back in one year but to his credit and i got a soft spot for bill is he then became the single largest individual shareholder of amazon outside of bezos and that worked out pretty well and then he bought so i think there

I think there are guys who are smart. I think there are guys who are smart who can beat the market. So this idea of the efficient market hypothesis is nuts. Can we go back for a second? Hold on. I can't let you get away with just an incredible comment. Declaration of bizarreness, yeah. Jeremy Grantham is an optimist.

A lot of people are not going to know who he is, so maybe you can give a little bit of context. but uh if you were to pull wall street optimist may not be one of the first 50 words mentioned when uh talking about jeremy he's an optimist compared to me um i think i'm the most bearish guy on twitter although husbands i i may be husband the other guy who seems to get it is jesse felder i think there's i think grant williams understands um i just got a call from tony deeden who very few people will know but he's a legend amongst those legend right you want to hear a funny story are you going to reveal are you going to reveal how uh tony deeden's only public interview happened that's right i already told you then so forget it no no no no but you

haven't said it publicly you have to say it publicly oh is that right yeah you told me in private oh so tony started calling me and then then one day he drove off from new york city we spent the whole day on my deck i mean it's really an amazing thing um i am now supposed to go to his 40th anniversary of edo ice capital i think it is holdings uh to give a talk to in in the swiss alps he says he's going to fly my wife and i first class he said that you can't refuse my offer so tony um tony calls me one day and i said you should do a podcast with grant williams and he said okay so i introduced him and i've got the email trail now i don't know if grant had to do some more cajoling because he did a recent interview where he said he had to cajole

him but but but i introduced him now hold on this is an important part tony dean is a legendary investor he is somebody who um the people on the inner circle of wall street etc are very fascinated by because of his track record his approach his ability and i don't know him either a lot don't know him either there's a mystique because a lot of people don't know him but also he had never done from my understanding he had never done a public interview before so he so grant does this two-part interview and he opens with this is the first interview he's ever done and i like fell back in my chair and i go what really so one day grant got interviewed i was hoping grant would give me kudos in the most recent podcast he did where he mentioned that he had to cajole Tony

into doing it. But one day he did get interviewed and they said, how did you get the Deaton interview? And he said, it was sort of a combination of Simon Mikhailovic and Dave Collum. Now Simon turns out to be on the board of directors of Edelweiss. So that would make sense. One day I drove down to New York City, four and a half hour drive just to spend the afternoon chatting with grant and simon and simon's apartment right condo just just to shoot the shit and then i drove back what did you guys talk about everything life everything gold precious metals this is probably i don't know probably 10 years ago and um so in any case um what was the original question oh oh the optimism of grant them so grant them when he's feeling

really enthusiastic to talk about this situation and he says look, I have had the privilege of witnessing three great bubbles now. And he says this is the big one. Now where I part ways with Grantham in a very big way is that he believes in climate change and I don't. I mean, I believe it changes, but he takes it very seriously. And I do think, you know, raping and pillaging mother earth is happening, but it's not

about CO2. Let me put it that way. He believes, I think he believes CO2 is a problem. And I do not think it's a problem at all. And that's where we part ways, but it shows up in his investing and stuff. So did you see the recent article, um, maybe it was New York times or Wall Street journal. I can't remember, uh, where somebody wrote a op-ed and they said that, uh, they don't use AC. they tend to try to stay outside of their house during the summer they go to the park where they're shade they don't have a washer machine or a uh or i'm sorry a dishwasher or a dryer etc and the thought process was they're helping to slow climate change it's a religion right the monks used well the monks used to walk back in back in antiquity

There were these slagilists who would walk down the street and whip themselves bloody, deprive themselves of all earthly belongings for some religious reason. So there's people who think that somehow it's virtuous to suffer for a good cause, right? You want to read a great book, so I'm going to sell a few books here. I must have mentioned in some previous podcast, Eric Heller's The True Believer. Very short, very easy read, and it talks about mass movements, and it talks about how people get sucked into it. I have realized to understand the world we're looking at, which to me is a terrifying world now, you have to start reading about totalitarianism. You've got to stop reading the bullshit stuff and start reading about how totalitarianism arrives, how it sort of sneaks into the storyline. Matthias Desmet, Psychology of Totalitarianism.

Hannah Arendt about the Nazis, if you wish. That's a very tough read. um michael malice is the white pill i loved um give us dave give us kind of a quick two minute overview you've been reading a lot about this there's a lot of people who they're going to hear you say that they're going to tell themselves they're going to go read the books they're not going to go read the books give us kind of a two-minute overview of um what is it how does it happen what have you learned and kind of going down this rabbit hole well it seems some theories say that it's sort of this this idea that starts in elite circles where someone says you know it'd

be really great if we shared the output of society with everybody you know that sort of thing and and then it somehow finds its way into the masses the masses are the foot soldiers and so um by hoffer's description which is a 1953 book uh comes out in audio i love audio um the masses are are painted by hoffers not very flatteringly as these people whose lives are pretty directionless so they're the dregs and i don't mean that pejoratively but they have very little to show for their efforts then very little hope and and and it and in the cause whatever that cause is does several things one is um it it blames somebody i'm miserable because i once had a student commit suicide after he passes oral exam i think he had demonized the exam and then when he

still wasn't happy off himself but but so it gives people something there's some reason why their lives suck and then by virtue of signing off on this cause they now have a tribe they now have they now have something that makes them feel consequential and so and then he goes into the psychology the whole thing where he talks about how and if that bubble gets burst they often will find a new cause they will find something else and they can flip and those are kind of the true believers actually and so there's people who actually will hop from cause to cause but they they they need a reason to be one could argue that's the role of religion through history right so you get together and you all agree there's a god you all agree that you have to do

various things and in good times your god is a benevolent god and you're being taught benevolent things in bad times it's not so much so and so um so i think we're seeing um and then what happens is it reaches this crescendo where sort of shakers either direct this energy towards something good or directed towards something bad and and and and um the climate movement look at how many people it is their life to worry about climate change right and one can argue i'm a true believer and it sort of has it taken over my being saying look bearishness but i think the math backs me on this one the climate change story um it turns out it's the science behind it there's such a heap of in it really demonstrably bad science and i've asked rhetorical questions like let's say

ddt was killing the raptors right back in you know silent springtime where where where where the eggs were thinning and stuff like that in and someone finally figured out it's the ddt and we we stopped the DDT, we saved the eagles and the ospreys and all these raptors who were heading for extinction. If that happened today, would we figure it out? No. We'd blame climate change. It would obscure everything because it's this gigantic global religion. Now, why? Well, it's a population control issue. Why people want to control the population? I don't quite understand why the king of spain wants to attack the king of france he needs another 100 million square miles what what what why i don't i don't understand these massive wars now i'm a reagan

republican so it's not because i'm a but i don't understand why we're in a perpetual state of war you can go okay well you got the industrial military complex etc etc you know there's various answers but um that's why i've been reading about the soviets and stuff trying to understand some of this crap so um so the climate change problem and the first thing you find by the way is you'll be told and i've got a paper trail showing me following this path actually because my brother was pestering me and i said look everyone i know believes it ned what am i supposed to do here i'm not a climate scientist but i don't know anyone who doesn't believe this fucking story why do you think it's wrong right and then another guy started pestering me i said

one day to the second former secretary of energy stephen chewies i was having lunch with him and he i said i was agnostic and he flinched and i said well it'd take me 10 000 hours those are that's a gladwellian 10 000 hours to form an opinion and he says well that's a valid point and so so so then this guy bugs me and i said look there's no credible scientists that don't believe this story and he says oh yes there are i said send them to me so i'm expecting a list of people you know joe schmoe from sheboygan state college adjunct professor of who the fuck cares right and it's not harvard stanford caltech you name it oxford you name it mit and and i'm thinking okay but these guys they probably shot down a model and the deniers are blaming the blaming

and saying therefore there's no climate change you know no that's just scientists scrubbing the system when they get it wrong right so i start googling them so within four hours i discovered that there's a good couple of dozen unbelievably prominent scientists who say this is 100 load of crap so the first big lie blew up in four hours four hours of reading So the former head of the National Academy of Sciences, the founder of Greenpeace, the head of NASA's temperature monitoring program, 500 scientists from NASA, Stanford physicist at the Synchrotron, the former provost at Caltech, geophysicists at MIT, all saying this is crap. The most recent was the 2022 Nobel Prize winner in physics saying it's just a load of crap. He said they can't even account for clouds. This is just bullshit.

And so you quickly discover that there's plenty of people who think this is horseshit. Then you look at the science I started digging in, and it's just such shitty sciences. Now, for those of you who are listening to this who are in the climate world, I think there's probably really good science being done. but they can't step out of the shadows and say by the way you know i'm studying the clouds and i'm getting a lot of valuable information but this climate change story is bullshit because there goes their funding you lose your seat at the table instantly instantly i've asked colleagues who actually believe in climate change said let me ask you this if we submitted a grant and the grant application looked like it was pointing towards super preliminary results that

climate change was not a problem would it be funded they said not a chance you can't get funded unless you sign off on the narrative then you got john kerry climate czar john kerry knows less about climate than i do i guarantee you i if you put me on a stage with him i would shred his long lanky carcass from head to toe he doesn't know anything so who they put in charge of now that carrie's stepping down you're not going to believe this pizza hunter john podesta is now climates are this now why is everyone signing off because they're promising 150 trillion dollars of spending on climate change to do what though like part of this um I think people have seen the articles, solar panels, electric cars.

Yeah, we're going to back the the electric vehicle charging network. And I think it's Pete Budachek is was in charge or overseeing. They spent tens of billions, I think maybe it was 100 billion, whatever number eight of them got eight of them built. Now, again, to your point about the kind of Gladwell in 10,000 hours, I didn't spend more than 20 minutes Googling around. I saw enough sources that were all telling a similar story. And I said, well, it's probably true, but it's not going to affect my life either way. But it sounds kind of like it's a crazy story, right? So that was my-

It will affect your life because we're going to squander huge amounts of money. Well, just the point of whether there was eight, 15, 100, or zero, it was not nearly as much produced as the amount of money that was spent. That was my basic takeaway. Well, here's a great example of a grift. Okay. I mean, there's grifts everywhere, everywhere. So I know guys, I know personally guys who are putting up solar farms, and they don't believe they do any good, but they're making a ton of money.

So here's, I think it was Australia, but I could be wrong on this. They go to a farmer, and they say, we will pay you $20,000 if you let us put solar panels up right here and hook them to the grid, right? what the farmers don't realize is that the contract that they're signing means they are now responsible for the solar panels the guys who put them in walk with the bucks walk with the government handouts walk with the subsidies and the farmers got the solar panels and doesn't realize that if that becomes a toxic waste dump or they start breaking down they start fucking up the farmer's problem it's the farmer's problem that's the kind of grift we're getting and so um the wind turbines i don't think are ever going to be worth this shit

i think that's and the bio is already been they don't even talk about the biofuels or they don't seem to are wind turbines uh killing the birds yes my wife's an ornithologist but i can live with that except for the fact they put the turbines on the high high airflow regions where the birds migrate and so i said well let's put nets on her catch you and make make it in you know get arthur daniels midland to catch him and make you know you know make osprey soup yeah um so it's like but but they're they're destroying not only the environment itself they do not they have no idea what they're going to do with all these wind fires, these solar panels.

And one hailstorm can wipe out a square mile of solar panels. One hailstorm can destroy them. You'll talk about climate change and the stupidity there for hours if I let you, but I want to zoom out for a second. Zoom out. There was a tweet that David Sachs tweeted. He said, the West has a real enemy, and it is itself. I read it.

And you retweeted it. And so that must mean to me, obviously, retweets equal endorsements on Twitter, unless you didn't get them. Not always, not always, but usually. Well, whether you think it's an endorsement or not, everyone's going to critique you and say it's an endorsement. Well, if I retweet something Kamala posts, it's not an endorsement, guaranteed. So David Sachs tweet, explain why is the West its own enemy? Why does that resonate with you? Um, I think our political, I'm a big fan of the Weinstein brothers, Eric, both of which

I've communicated with Eric more than, than Brett, which is a little ironic because I'm, I have more overlap with Brett, but I've probably spent four hours on the phone with Eric. And one of the things about Eric that's extraordinary is he's a genius. He's a genius of a, of a level I don't often see. And he wrote an article in 2011 that said politics was going to be like kayfabe, which is, for those who don't know, professional wrestling. It's the fakery of professional wrestling. Now, what Eric is conversing in, which I must admit I didn't know at all, is that professional wrestling has all these layers. So they're not just faking it.

But like so much of what we digest these days, it's it was like created by psychologists to say, how do we get the fans most engaged? How do we get them coming back? And and there's this whole there's these layers of mixing truth and falsehoods and tricking people and whipping their emotions back and forth. And so kayfabe really is a much more sophisticated thing than just a bunch of big guys yelling at each other in an in what looks like a play. and he wrote a 2011 article saying politics was going to become kayfabe and it looks like we're there now and he did a chris williamson um chris williamson um interview which is really funny because about a year ago he did one and at one point williamson said it's too late for a new candidate maybe less than a year ago and and and eric said i wouldn't be so sure and eric late laid out this no no no no you don't understand that they can do anything they want

and then and then i about two weeks ago i posted and said just watch the first five minutes you'll fall out of your chair and eric nailed it he nailed what happened with biden the attempted assassination with trump and stuff he he nailed the fact that we have no idea what's going to come in 2024 election and um and and i posted it and then about a week and a half later they did a redo and williamson opens with that story and i'm going oh that's funny that's funny so um so i've lost track where we're at but uh but um i think the problem we have now is at the turn of the century, government was small. And it was crooked as shit.

But a 3% of GDP government, crooked as shit, can't do a lot of damage. Now, what it did do is it allowed things like child slave labor and factories and stuff like that. So there really were problems, and it's not like the race battles had been won yet or anything like that. So government was not great. the carpetbaggers had done a number on people but it was small and captains of industry bribed government to stay out of their way right they might have gotten some perks like the railroads

got land grants and stuff like that so that there's some giveaways now government what 50 percent of gdp or something right it's a huge number now companies pay bribe politicians to give them our money and that's a very different kind of an economy how do you know that politics has become kayfabe i don't it's it's a relatively recent i talk about ideas migrating from my head to my stomach where i hear it and it's in there and it's kind of intellectually in there but then all of a sudden one day it just goes whoop and i go oh oh oh fuck oh i got it and there's even ideas that seem straightforward but then all of a sudden i got it that the sort of the implication finally clicks and and and the candidates are so bad and we can't even get someone credible to

want to do it except for like kennedy who who all his all his flaws is still in my opinion a phenomenal candidate and you know people like to point at some of his idiosyncrasies let me let me help you with that one he grew up watching his uncle get shot watching his father get shot watching his his his aunt gets lobotomized um watching his his his cousin die in a plane crash which is sketchy so he turns into an alcoholic for a while is there anyone shocked by that right and and you I don't know why he insists on telling things like the bear story in Central Park or whatever it was. You know, I've got Bobby, Bobby, Bobby.

I was on a Zoom call with him. He seemed very sincere. I think he's trying to get it right. He's just that description, a guy who's trying to get it right. And by the way, they talk about how extreme he is on climate change. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. He at first made reference to punishing people severely. But I think he's talking about the polluters.

and and but he said at one point he said i do not support big government solutions to climate change which means let the free market sort this out or it means i don't believe it but i don't dare say it i i don't know but he seems to say anything he wants so we've spent time talking about trump and harris we've also talked about kennedy let's drop down and talk about uh tim walls and jd vance as the vice president, uh, candidates, what is your assessment on, uh, those two? Well, I read hillbillyology before Walt's before JD Vance was famous. I had minor issues with the book. I said, you know, you were raised by hillbillies, but you yourself kind of grew up in a non hillbilly world. Although your family influences

you a lot, there's a little bit of a disconnect of him somehow ending up at Yale law school. I believe that J.D. Vance, but let's say he got there. I don't have a problem with that. I think someone spotted him at Yale, and I think they put him on a grooming path to this position. I don't think this is an organic growth into a politically prominent position. I think this is standard play. I think clearly they did it with Obama. They had to have done it with Hillary, too.

Hillary's graduation speech at Wellesley was brilliant. and someone had to spot that um and so um so i didn't trust him and then here's an interesting story back to eric weinstein he said he was in a room with a bunch of right wingers and him he said he's the only guy left of center in the room and he comes from way left of center and it was a day or two they spent some outing and i did he didn't go into the details of how they all ended up together but he said those guys sincerely sincerely unambiguously believe in helping the little guy and he said now he said it could have been a ruse where their whole ploy was to get about 20 of these guys together and eric weinstein and i was in charge of taking the bait then going

out and telling the world but he says i don't think so and so i'm okay with vance i'm okay of events i wanted him to pick tulsi i thought it would have been brilliant a former democratic presidential candidate chick military speaks well pot right what's not to like about her as the vp she might have said no i don't know um i do think having kennedy in the cabinet not as vp is is better um so now let's go to um so shanahan is very left of center but she's going to be in there i think um so i'm okay with jd van snow i don't think he's he doesn't scare me waltz i think is a scary so real quick on jd before we get to uh to tim walls um growing up in the environment he did and then ending up at Yale. One of the parts that depending on the years that I think kind of

gets lost is, you know, he served in the Marines. He deployed overseas. Didn't he do that after Yale? Someone told me that, but it could be wrong. I don't think so. I could be wrong on it, but I'm pretty sure that he did it before. And that makes sense. Going from Yale to the Marines is not correct and so uh one of the things that people don't realize is um during the time in which he did this which i think was late 2000s early 2010s you can look at the uh look for the date right that is all that is when a lot of the programs started at university yeah he was in the marines right after high school okay so i i think that um right around the time i was in the military then. I deployed to Iraq in 2008, 2009. And so coming back, there was a multitude of programs

where these universities and banks, financial organizations, et cetera, were setting up these veteran-focused programs. So Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan, right? All these guys are setting up saying, hey, let's go get these veterans. Universities as well. I'm not saying that JD Vance got into Yale because he was a veteran, but it would not surprise me that that is the transition. That's the missing puzzle piece to you go from what many would consider kind of a blue collar, you know, the hillbilly community that he talks about in the book to all of a sudden you're able to transform. And the military in particular is the one area where you can take a blue collar hillbilly, put them in that uniform, you put them in that uniform and they walk out

the other side. And all of a sudden they are accepted into other parts of society because of the military uniform, not because of where they came from. It's a very, they say, sir, yes, sir. And they show up on time. Yeah. And I think people look at it. It's admirable. It's, you know, all these different things, but it is in a weird way. One of the, um, the military serves as one of the best social mobility tools in American society. Although no one thinks of it that way. I totally agree. No, I do. And I, I tried to talk to my son into joining the Navy. Yeah. I never understood it until I served in the military and I saw the breadth of different people that were there. You had people who were college educated, went through ROTC, were officers, you know, kind of the white collar version of the military. And then you had the blue collar. I had no other choice. I was going to be in jail or here. You know, that was the other end of the spectrum. and when you have that shared service that uniform all that kind of stuff when you walk

out the other side um to the people outside the military the rotc uh kind of you know college educated officer and the blue collar you know uh enlisted soldier they both just wear the same uniform and they come out the other side and it's a pretty interesting dynamic and i bet that jd you know that was a huge part of uh kind of the transition well the other thing is i've never confused well never for very very long time i have not confused education with intelligence so these inherently possibly the smartest guy i might have ever met now i've met a few smart ones but was a guy with a third grade education i picked him up hitchhiking he smelled he had a suitcase broken handle he was 10 years younger than he looked he's going to pick beans or

something somewhere and i drove them and i everybody has a story and that's my wife calling me but she's just gonna have to get with the program um everybody has a story but but it turns out that um um so this guy i'm talking to him and then what he says to me i'm picking up something he says to me what do you do i said i teach right need to know basis he said what do you teach i said, chemistry. He says, oh, interesting. He says, where? And I said, Ithaca. And he says, in the high school. I said, no, I teach at Cornell. He says, oh, Cornell's really good in chemistry. And then he starts naming chemistry departments. Now, if he named Harvard, Yale, you'd say, even bean pickers

know these guys. He didn't. He said, Caltech, Chicago, Berkeley. I go, how the fuck do you know this? And he says, oh, I read a lot. So I start talking to him about it. And he's telling me about Thoreau and Walden Pond and his effect on his contemporaries and and then i i'm going oh man the guy's with me he wanted to learn how to fix engines in the military but he he had flat feet but then they drafted him that he didn't get to choose right so it was infantry and he said but i picked up a book and he starts talking about the physics of engines and then i so i started steering him i said what did you like poetry says no not really and then he starts talking about all these poets

and and it was just for four hours this guy bent my brain backwards and i realized that this is some guy who for some reason i used to feel bad that he that i didn't try to do something until i got older and wiser and realized that i wasn't going to save this guy this guy was not on track of a normal society for some reason it was way beyond my capabilities to fix right um so i see guys who are super smart like maintenance guys in the building and stuff who are super smart great common sense that that may not have gone to college but they got a great brain and so vance could have been super smart and then and then finally exploited when he got to ohio state and then when he got to to yale so there's that and um what about but i must admit

waltz creeps me out waltz um waltz has got some fibs in there and and you know you say well this is politics but there's there's fibs there's bullshit and there's lies um trump is the biggest bullshit artist right so if he says i you know this is the biggest crowd in history that's bullshit right but also it's it's a kind of harmless it's just bravado it's just like you You know, I'm you know, my dad is the king of the world, you know, that sort of thing. Biden is a pathological liar, right? He tells he says, I graduated first in my class and he didn't. That's a factual statement.

That's not right. Waltz, I think, has that in him. There's too many fibs coming out. Somebody I supposedly who knew him said that he was constantly lying. now i don't trust that completely because you can dredge up people to hammer kennedy you can dredge up people to hammer trump you can you can always do that but i worry what creeps me is his mannerisms the spidey sense level and i i did a twitter poll which i said ignore the ignore past actions ignore the ticket that maybe you hate is there something about his demeanor that gives you

the creeps and i got 3.8 percent no and then i got like 20 percent some and then i'm near near 80 said absolutely so there's some there's something waltz puts off that that you know he supposedly was not coach of his football team he was assistant coach i can forgive that i said I've said I coached Taekwondo and gymnastics at the collegiate level. And I usually call from a low level Taekwondo coach, but I was head coach gymnastics for a year or two. And so someone could if I didn't qualify that thing and say, well, you are an assistant coach. Right. I don't care about that. But he got fired from a DUI. We don't hear that part of the story unless that's a lie.

It's back to the what's the fact in this world. Right. um i i watch him and there's just something the way he the way he acts in public the way he acts on the stage i could not do that i could not act like he acts there's something pathological about that maybe that's what it takes to get the politics but it's so fabricated looking to me and so there's something that creeps me about him and his statements and from the past about how you know free speech doesn't include misinformation i go well you'd have to shut your mouth how's that now i've got another book for you very important book if everyone in the country read it would transform the country jonathan turley's the indispensable right is about the history of

free speech in the United States and it's both scholarly and riveting so he doesn't bury you in arcane bullshit but when he talks to you about the cases and by the end of the book your brain is twisted in a knot you're going okay what would I do where does this fit into the free speech debate but Walt said you know the guys who say that that the constitution doesn't protect you from mix from from spilling out misinformation these people should be locked away somewhere where they can't hurt people there's something so but but they get free speech too but they're they're in a position to hurt us with their their their so they can say it but we also have the right to say shut the fuck up and and i'm not voting for you so the last thing i want to talk

about is free speech and uh media media outlets okay um i get the sense that you're not a fan of any of the media outlets uh that may be wrong not the main not the main ones i can tolerate fox only because their bullshit is more more aligned with my interests but um you know you can watch five shows in a row on fox you see the same material you know and and and you know there's when tucker was there i hated tucker when he was younger all right and he he describes himself in ways i go yes that was the guy i didn't like right his own description of his youthful youthful stupidity is exactly what it is that that that um made me averse to him okay hitting the apex in his john stewart interview that really illustrated to me why tucker was not very good at that age

he somehow realized not to do that he somehow found his voice and so now i really like him there's things i don't agree with of course but um but he's now his own media empire um the media has sort of constitutionally protected rights i i'm not qualified to know if they have special rights but let's take for example firing of tucker Smartmatic or Dominion one of those so I can't remember

which one sued Fox for things Tucker said about the election being rigged without a whimper Fox settled

for 730 million dollars or something now in any other errant history going back a ways Fox would have fought that

to the Supreme Court right that's their job to fight that to the supreme court that's their if we are going to give you special constitutionally granted rights you also have responsibilities in my opinion i don't care if you want to have opinion pieces and stuff like that but but the media has a responsibility to society and the failure of the media is going to be the failure of society in my opinion and that's what scares me but um but now they are just political machines and they i think they lie their ass off and and so so let me finish that that dominion story so fox settles for 730 million dollars without a whimper what's it do they don't fire tucker

They just take them off the air. Why? Because then they thought they could control them. What they forgot to realize was he can do whatever he wants without charging. Now it's free speech. It's not a breach of contract because he's not collecting money for it. And so I think he might still be on Fox's payroll while he reams out Fox left and right. Now, I went to check Dominion to see what happened to their share price because Dominion is not a big company.

I'd previously written about it. Dominion is Canadian. Troubles me that our machines, our voting machines are coming from Canada. But I go, well, Canadians are probably no worse than us, although now I'm beginning to wonder. Dominion turns out to be owned by a subsidiary of UBS, which is majority owned by a company in Beijing.

That plot thickens fast. So Beijing owns our voting machines. That's a problem. That's a fundamental problem. Walk us through that again. dominion is a small company dominion is canadian dominion is owned by a subsidiary of ubs which the major owner of that is a company in beijing so beijing controls our voting machines and they did connect to the internet the night of the 2020

election and people blow it off i go you know if beijing owns the voting machines they connect to internet we just handed our voting connectivity to beijing that night so so what happened so tucker's calling out dominion for his i went to see what happened to dominion share price and i discovered that in 2018 dominion had gone private so they were no longer publicly traded how convenient just in time for the 2020 election without the shining light of auditing and all the stuff that goes with being publicly traded i did however find their revenues they had annual revenues i think it was like 18 19 million dollars and they for damages they got 730 million dollars how do you dance how do you get a company with 18 or 19 million dollars of revenue

how can you damage that for 730 million dollars the answer is you can't it's 10 it's 10 times the value of the company now here's what i think really happened i think dominion wanted the win i think the political system wanted the loss i bet you no money changed hands they needed the headline they need to get rid of tucker they failed to get rid of tucker he has more eyeballs from twitter than he got from fox news but i think i think the i think that the political now here's another great thing another example trump gets shot at first i thought it was fake i was in the that can't be real it was it looks so perfect but i now believe it's real i believe there's multiple shooters i believe there was a conspiracy i there's there's just way too much

evidence pointing to um some sort of deep state shenanigans i'm guessing that that crooks was probably brainwashed up the kazoo he probably didn't even know what he was doing at the time that's my guess but but there's the ballistics don't make sense nothing makes sense you turn on any station what you should see first of all was a tremendous call for what the hell just happened right after the event they should have taken every secret and there's all sorts of missing secret service agents and there's all sorts of things that were odd for that day they should have taken everyone involved put them in a separate room and said what do you know tell me what you know what did you see what was fishy about they didn't do that

they wiped up the crime scene fast as can be it was a crime scene they wiped it up and then you go on tv and every single person is arguing over who should be fired i go so we've got an attempted assassination of a president a murder and some shots some people got shot and we're talking about firing people that's the narrative they're trying to distract us it's like the lab leak story they're trying to say oh it came from a lab it came from nature well how about the fact that we're running bioweapons labs overseas let's talk about that how about they released it on purpose maybe who knows let's talk they don't want to talk about that they don't want to talk about the presidential shooting so they talk about who should be fired the chick who got

fired right what's her name cheetle he probably had no idea what happened she started lying right away she started lying right away she should have said look we're still trying to figure this out shut the fuck up leave me alone right so when you see elon battling in brazil for free speech is that different or the same as the u.s trying to um ban tiktok in the u.s like what are the similarities and the differences well the tiktok story is more complicated than us banning tiktok in the united states it's not that i'm gonna i'm gonna take a risk here i have a gag order on israel gaza i personal gag order tiktok they want to ban tiktok because they're softening brains of our children excuse me you guys are doing a fine job yourselves i don't i i i i agree

but it i and they say well china is sucking up also i go yeah so are you i i don't care i really don't care then you find out that we say to china you got to sell tick tock to us what kind of story is that and then you find out that manukin secretary of the treasury and a bunch of financiers are putting together a package to buy tick tock and i go what the hell is that all about and then you find out i think it might be might even be from mike benz that the real problem with tiktok is that there's a huge pro-palestine slant to tiktok so i think the tiktok story is about israel wanting to shut tiktok up interesting what about x in brazil well either elon's a kayfabe story and he's doing a great job and x is better than it used to be so

i'm glad about that what's amazing is the number of people who should be supporting elon who are not the people want to shut elon down because of misinformation and disinformation the fact that they just arrested that guy from what telegram pavel durov pavel yeah there should be screaming from everybody everyone should be saying what are you doing right but there's not because we are now that's why i gotta read jonathan turley's book he says um freedom of speech comes under fire whenever the country and it gets troubled and and and he goes through case histories where he talks about some guy who criticized the government and he was factually correct and they still threw him in jail and the supreme court supported the decision right and

there's just strange things through the history of free speech so elon we should all be backing elon's free speech rights and and but should we care about brazil it's brazil's problem and if they want to shut it down okay i mean i've got a brazilian etf so i should worry about that but not much it feels like um i don't know if you're familiar with the paul singer elliot management versus argentina story yes wasn't that fascinating when where where he cornered them legally he cornered them legally but but i don't know if you remember he also seized physically seized one of their warships oh i don't know that part oh you're gonna love this So Singer, the Elon Brazil thing has the framework of an individual private citizen with a monetary or corporate interest up against a foreign nation, right?

Right. Singer was a private citizen who had an investment firm who owned the bonds that he had bought pennies on the dollar, was way in the money. They owed him the money. They said, screw you. We're not paying you hedge fund man in New York City. uh and he said wrong wrong tree to be barking up and he eventually um seized he hired i believe as a private military contractor and they seized a warship in argentina they took control of it they said well this is our collateral uh and if i remember all the details correctly i think it

was off the coast of africa is where they they found but there was another problem too where they were cornered where if they had defaulted on the bonds because of the legality of that complex world that would have caused a cascading failure throughout the system too and singer knew that so he said you have to pay me yes or you will cause this cascading failure and they were trying to find ways to get around it they couldn't figure out outsmarted him it was like a 12 or 15 year battle but again you know private citizen monetary interest against a nation state elon is much more powerful and much richer than Singer

in that situation. And so I know nothing about the Brazilian judge. Don't even know his name. But I do know Elon may be the wrong tree to bark up because he's got a hell of a lot of

influence. But more importantly is that he seems to be the type of person that when you ratchet the pressure up he only knows one speed. He ratchets up bigger and faster. Did you read his biography? Did you read his biography? I did.

It was great. Now, I'm sure there were favorable things, but it was so entertaining. Which, remember, when he was a kid and he wanted a scooter, he would stand there next to his dad and say, Dad, I want a scooter. And his dad would say, No, you're not getting a scooter. And he would just stand there and stare at him. He would just stare at him. And then the next night, he'd go, Dad, I want a scooter. no and elon would just stare at him so so i think his you know on the spectrum personality

gives him kind of a superpower now i know guys like you know guys who tried to short tesla and it's a totally rational thing except for the fact that they didn't they misjudge what elon could do so my understanding is elon must have paid to keep tesla floating using dogecoin is that right isn't that what he did my read on uh tesla in the shorts is that um don't try to be rational with any irrational person when you're arguing with somebody that's right that's exactly right and um the version in finance is never bet against a magician and again interesting interesting phrase a magician the critics will say oh they're manipulating the stock they're doing accounting they're you know all the critiques we've all read online and and again

i'm not an expert i'm not a forensic accountant i couldn't tell you the first thing whether these people are right wrong whatever but what i do know is that when you look at the history and career of a magician they continue to pull off magic tricks and so the first rocket blows up the second rocket blows up somehow some way he eventually gets one that works so what should have destroyed him should have been gambler's ruin where where you're betting against the house and eventually their liquidity exceeds yours and you go broke so if you draw an inside straight which he seems to do all the time yep eventually you get you get liquidated except for and he doesn't except for the thing that he i find it very difficult to believe that

he master planned he somehow built this cult of personality which leads to a and rightfully so a belief that he is the best entrepreneur of our generation he is one of the true innovators in our society capital will always follow the magician and therefore he doesn't need to just have his own balance sheet he has to be able to dip into the house's pockets when needed the difference some level this is kind of trump like really trump trump trump trump built a building in new york city in which you know you can imagine how many signatures you have to get he didn't get any of them and no one noticed he had no signatures he just built a fucking thing if i remember correctly elon musk donald trump and kanye west

all have birthdays in june in our gemini's i don't believe any of that shit i'm not i don't either but that's funny except for that's a big coincidence that's funny well there's only 12 months in the year so so so the odds that's not astronomically improbable no but but elon trump and kanye well it's 144 to 1 you know the uh uh the phrase that kanye has uh used is uh uh show me a genius that isn't crazy oh yeah you know or the other one is it takes a crazy man to try to change the world yeah and so if you look at you know elon in particular um there's a maniacal uh you know kind of indomitable will that is uh very hard um i think for people to understand it's unnatural

it's uh it's rare and so um i always just come back to when i when i see the shorts getting excited it's just never bet against a magician well the other shorting is very very hard so i've been getting emails from mark cojones and he finds stopped right he stopped no no okay i don't i don't think so right now he's going after a politician and he he calls him he goes out there You go, he's a goddamn criminal, you know, and he swears his ass off and stuff and he gets mad and stuff like that. But I know that people within that world respect him enormously. So, um, so he finds the criminals, then he goes at him and he goes at him with everything

he's got. He beats them senseless. But, you know, I read Dinehorn's, um, full, some of the people, some of the time, I think, or something like that, you know, that book. and he went after oh god alliance capital or something i can't remember the name was so long ago i read the book but but he he brought the case to the sec and he laid out the case for the criminal behavior and this and then he got stonewalled and then something like a month later one of the two guys they presented to switched and worked for alliance right that's how crooked

the system was and then what ultimately caused alliance to fail i think was the 0809 crisis so it wasn't the fact that they were criminal the criminals can keep going for a very very long time but at some point they get liquidated they do get liquidated i think that is a great place for us to end this episode where can we send people on twitter twitter david b column on twitter until they kicked me off but i'm feeling okay now with with with elon at the helm and i occasionally write and you go to youtube i mean i'm just all over youtube now and um and rumble places like that i always enjoy talking to you i always learn something so please keep doing it one last book diana west american betrayal if i didn't mention it already

diana west american american betrayal it's a it's a complete rewriting of world war ii history she describes how the soviets completely controlled the flow of the war completely and at first i didn't believe her i thought she's a neoconsian economy behind every rock by the end of the book i'm going holy shit she nailed it and then there's a follow-up called the red tide which is like a sequel which brings us up to the great example john brennan i can't stop can i john brennan they say oh indiscretion he voted communist once in his life oh my god no his communist connections run deep multi-tentacled there is something so wrong with this story i'm gonna go read the books and then we're gonna talk about it again at the end of the year when

you put out your beautiful end of your review and by the way i'm not suicidal disclaimer we will we will talk to dave again at the end of the year i appreciate your time thank you so much you