The Pomp Podcast - #465 Dave Collum on The Wild Year of 2020

Episode Date: January 7, 2021

Dave Collum is a Professor of Chemistry at Cornell University. He is a popular staple of FinTwit and writes one of the best annual summaries at the end of each year. In this conversation, we discuss investing, markets, wealth creation, social justice issues, the virus, anatomy of riots, mind alteration, bitcoin, conspiracy theories, and the political landscape.  ======================= Exodus is an absolute game changer in the crypto wallet space, and we’ve teamed up to offer an exclusive discount for you, as listeners of the podcast. Sign up for Exodus today using my promo code Exodus.io/pomp. This is a no brainer for both newcomers and crypto heavyweights - go sign up today.  ======================= Crypto.com is the only all-in-one platform that allows you to BUY / SELL / STORE / EARN / LOAN / INVEST crypto all from one place. Join over 1 million users currently using the Crypto.com app. Download and earn $50 USD using my code ‘pomp2020’, or use the link https://platinum.crypto.com/r/pomp2020 when you sign up for one of their metal cards today. ======================= Download the top-rated DraftKings Sportsbook app NOW and use promo code POMP when you sign up to get one hundred to one odds on any football game THIS WEEKEND. That’s code POMP for new players to get a shot at one hundred dollars on any football action this weekend.… for a limited time, only at DraftKings Sportsbook! =======================

What's up, everyone? This is Anthony Pompliano. Most of you know me as Pomp. You're listening to the Pomp Podcast, simply the best podcast out there. Let's kick this thing off. Dave Collum is a professor of chemistry at Cornell University. He's a popular staple of FinTwit and writes one of the best annual summaries at the end of each year. In this conversation, we discuss investing, markets, wealth creation, social justice issues, the virus, anatomy of riots, mind alteration, Bitcoin, conspiracy theorists, and the political landscape. I really enjoyed this conversation with Dave, and I hope you do as well. Before we get into this episode, though, I want to quickly talk about our sponsors. First up is Exodus. They

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See DraftKings.com slash Sportsbook for details. If you've got a gambling problem, call 1-800-GAMBLER or Indiana 1-800-9-WITH-IT. Go get the DraftKings app today. All right, let's get into this episode with Dave. I hope you guys enjoy this one. Anthony Pompliano is a partner at Morgan Creek Digital. All opinions expressed by Pomp or his guests on this podcast are solely their opinions and do not reflect the opinions of Morgan Creek Digital or Morgan Creek Capital Management.

You should not treat any opinion expressed by Pomp as a specific inducement to make a particular investment or follow a particular strategy, but only as an expression of his opinion. This podcast is for informational purposes only. all right guys bang bang i have a treat once again dave is back uh the year in review is out uh i have no clue how the hell you write this every year but uh thanks for coming on and talking about it yeah it's always my pleasure uh we had fun last time it went for a long time too i have a hard stop today so i think that's you saying dave don't run us into tuesday i would literally recorded with three or four hours with you, but my fault that I have to move it around a little

bit today to record. Let's just remind everyone who you are, what you do at Cornell, and then what the process is for you to write this year in review each year. So I'm an organic chemist. I started pondering, I mean, my face was embedded in my career, you know, 100% to the point I knew nothing about what was going on in the world until somewhere around 95, I started getting serious about markets. By 98, I started to get nervous about markets. So I had gone into equity. I'd been bonds till 87, went into equities after the crash when a colleague, I read about the crash ago, what's that about? He said, well, you should go into equities despite that crash. So I moved equities after 87. And then I got serious and I made a lot of money being a tech bull and thinking

i was a genius and then i and then i got nervous and 98 i started liquidating by mid 99 i was out 100 out um i went long cash and gold and i've most of my gold i would say i probably bought um two years before the low so it's sort of been the 270 to 290. some more after that running it between sort of 300 and 450 and then after that around 2015 it's getting old now so it's getting hard to remember but around 2015 i dropped another wad on 1200 and so uh so in any event i i turned into a bear in the late 90s and um i really never recovered from that i think it's very hard to be a the guys who are unbelievably good are the bear bull combos and i don't know how they do it because i don't think the markets have ever been sane since since um i don't know the 80s i think

they were saying as hell um and and so i'm i'm laboring over the question of where do they go from here and i i think i can make a hermetically sealed case that uh that we can't win from here okay i don't think there's a mathematical way to win from here explain that well individuals can win right so david tepper can trade it up and trade it down drunken miller guys like that but The collective market, I think, is so far overvalued that someone has to own it. So to the extent that it regresses to the mean, and I created this graphic, which I'm really proud of, showing how you regress to the mean. And I gave a series of paths, including a precipitous drop to the mean, which would

be a 50% or more correction, probably 60% would get us to historical means. Treadwater takes 35 years at assumed normal GDP growth. And there's combinations of time loss, which is time scares me more than price, and price loss. And you can make the assumption we're going to stay above the mean, but then your returns are going to stink because you're not buying a revenue stream at a credible price. So your bonds are going to return you zero, negative actually, right? If you buy bonds now, you can't make money. You can trade them if you're a bond trader. But if you're buy and hold, you're going to lose.

And 60-40 portfolio, therefore, 40% is loser, guaranteed loss, in my opinion. And the equities are 2x, 60%, 120% overvalued-ish. And so if they never collapse, you're still buying a stream of revenue at twice the price, and therefore, half the return. And so I think the idea that you're somehow going to get even a 5% return, I make the case using some buffetology and stuff that even during good times, you make about 4% total. So I recently wrote about inflation. And of course, it's like a flame war on Twitter because everyone thinks they know what actual inflation is. uh, CPI targets, uh, or numbers are anywhere between zero and two and a half percent over the

last, uh, decade or so. Um, then there's things like the Chapwood index that'll show, you know, 10, 12%, uh, and pretty much a bunch of analysis. That thing could drop fast. Yeah. Well, here, here's the thing is, and then everything in between, right? So kind of, I think that those as the extremes, it's kind of CPI is probably under counting Chapwood is, uh, if anything over counting or accurate, um, and there's all a bunch of stuff in between. how do you think about it? And really from the perspective of like, we see what the nominal returns on a lot of these investments are, but the key being, well, what are the real returns really depends on what kind of inflation do you think that we actually have, regardless of what

the official numbers are? Well, there's what we have and what we're going to get. And then what we're going to get is not here yet, of course. What we have is somewhere between those two, I agree with you. So Chapwood is the inflation index by getting the Towski. Yep. Ed, but I work for Chapwood investments. I think I was supposed to get introduced to him. I was hoping to, cause I wanted to pick his brain, but it didn't happen yet. And, and that's the inflation in cities. And one could argue that that's an inflated estimate of inflation, but I think it's an honest one. So I think if you live in a major city, the Chapwood index running double digit for the last five years is not a crazy number. I don't live

in a city and therefore i don't think my inflation numbers are that high but if you live in san francisco you know i've got former students living there and they're paying four grand a month for an apartment that's got people shitting on the sidewalks in front of it right i mean it's just it's as big as that room you're in yeah right exactly um so what's interesting to me about the bad i think the fed is lying i think they must know they're lying um i think they keep making stuff up to justify what they're doing so history so they're trying to make sure history doesn't write a bad chapter that we at least accept it i don't know which i've labored for 20 years whether the fat are clueless or liars i just don't i to this day i've asked famous people you know are

they clueless are they liars and and it's a coin toss no one seems to really know but but they're one of the two what what do you think uh i it's hot green span once said if you think we don't know what you can see you're dreaming and that makes sense to me so i gotta figure they're liars and i i think they're and i think it was um ken rogoff's book i think it was in that book he said you know to inflate away debt which appears to be what their model is um you can't inflate it away unless people don't understand it's happening once once they do then they correct for it and then you lose the effect. So it needs to be a covert inflation. So the line would be consistent with the idea we're going to inflate away the debt, and we're going to try to convince people

that we're not inflating away the debt so that the bond market doesn't collapse and various bad things happen. It's going to produce a massive problem if that's what they're trying to do. The other thing is the leverage in the system has simply gone up. So they have yet to show me they know how to inflate away debt. They know how to create inflation, but they're creating even more debt than the inflation. So I don't know what their plan is. I don't think they know what their plan is. I think they're hoping. So this is obviously a highly complex, manipulated system. There's lots of questions as to what data to believe or not believe. Is it maliciously inaccurate or is it just inaccurate in some cases?

What do you think? I think that the inflation levels, one, on a geographic basis are different, obviously. Two, also socioeconomic status or kind of buckets experience different levels of inflation. For some reason, everyone always just uses those CPI numbers. But my favorite question to ask people right now is, what do you think the difference is between the top 20% of Americans inflation and the bottom 20% of Americans in inflation? And so if you say to me, hey, the top 10% or top 20% get, I don't know, 2% inflation, right? Let's just say that it's kind of 1% to 2%, and the bottom 20% is only having 3% or 4%, I think you're full of shit, right? It's just way much more kind of egregious on the extreme ends of the spectrum. And so when you do

that, what you start to understand is it then gets compounded by, what is it, bottom 45% of Americans don't own investable assets. So they're literally living paycheck to paycheck. They're just holding their wealth in cash. And if they're also the people who have the highest propensity to experience higher levels of inflation, the goods and services that they consume. There's a really strong argument that, I don't know, bottom 20, bottom 40% of Americans have 10 plus percent inflation, right?

Then you put them in cities and you kind of like start stacking this on the deck and you say, well, no wonder the wealth inequality gap is just exploding in two different directions, right? I would put the cut higher than top 20. Okay. I think the 20% cutoff, those people are hurting too. Okay, what do you think the cutoff is?

have to go five at best so i once created this thing called the five percentile guy and i i looked at what five percentile meant in various categories the five percentile guy is is i mean at that point made 154 000 a year um he was or she was there we go um uh uh had a net worth of 1.1 million even though uh i had a chat with stephen roach who said no that's the total assets to take their house out is more like 700,000, which is a scary number. And demographically, they're boomers, right? Not to say there aren't some from the other demographics, but you get to the top five percentile by patiently investing and saving and doing whatever and getting promoted. And so that tends to be the boomers. And then I did the analysis and said, okay, so let's assume

top five percentile guys are about to retire. What do they get? And if you assume they can take out 4% a year, which is, conservative money managers would say, don't do that now. And they even would have said, don't do that in the olden days, that you could run out. But 4%, it came out to something like $48,000 a year. Now, if you're earning 154, and you're only taking out 48,000, you're in trouble, because you didn't learn how to live on 48,000, you learned how to live on 154,000. and so even the american dream was about to get squashed by the top five percentile people now there's you know there's social security you can throw in there stuff but you know it's it's really hard to dial it back i think and so i think you gotta take out a chunk of money so i think you

have to have 25 multiples of your annual salary to retire that's my one of the one of the things that's also interesting is i think we're now at uh close to or at 50 of the u.s government budget is, or no, I'm sorry. I think it's going to be 50% by the end of the 2020s will be allocated to people over the age of 65, right? Through all of the different government programs. I think we're somewhere closer to like 40% at the moment. And so the belief is that all of this is interconnected, right? Is basically you've got all this manipulation going on. There's all sorts of inflation or lack of returns. There's people who are having rising costs of goods and services. and so what it does is it puts an even bigger strain on the government entitlement programs

or government support programs uh those we know there's a bunch of issues and so it's not only do the issues they have are going to persist but they're actually going to accelerate and so does this all end in like some big bang and like the whole system blows up or is there some other like pressure release valve uh in the system that we need to move towards to kind of maybe not solve the problem but just like mitigate some of the damage that you know people see on the horizon well i think a year ago i would have said i can't see the big bang theory working um not that i didn't think it could happen but i couldn't see it i couldn't intuit it um now i can feel it so if you look at this year you look at the amount of money so like 25 of the dollars ever created

were created this year i mean that's a big number right and that's that's a problem uh corporate leverage which started out the year catastrophically at a world record is i think worse now. Do you agree with that? That's my take on it. If not worse, close to it, for sure. Yeah, with businesses that suck, right? Some of them are good, but the corporate world is just not in great shape, in my opinion, and we're floating on a bed of air. And so we've resolved nothing. We've added a huge amount of leverage to the system. I think what's being underestimated this, the number of sort of we'll call middle class, the people who were paying their mortgage, paying their rent, and they might have had some small grocery or some small business,

not the millionaire next door, but the 300,000 there next door, something like that. What we're underestimating is the fact that that guy probably burned through all his money to stay alive this year. And so he probably still has his grocery store, but he mowed through his savings. and and and if that's the case i don't i don't know what happened right i think we knocked out nest egg this year and that's why we can't yet see the carnage yeah one of the interesting things if you kind of think you know just uh in a generalized manner you basically had 0809 let's say people who were in their uh late 30s to maybe early 50s uh they essentially went through the financial crisis many of them either got wiped out or significantly impaired uh they then start

to rebuild, whether it's a savings or a job or whatever. But they're overly conservative. They've got the pain and kind of the mental anguish from that financial crisis. And so really that decades long equity bull run right before the virus hits, they don't participate in the first, I don't know, five, six years. And then just when they start to kind of loosen up and say, OK, look, this time is different. I'm going to start investing again into 17, 18, 19, and 20. They're buying at higher levels in equity markets. And then you get the coronavirus and the government lockdowns. And the data I've seen so far is like most of the people who were selling in March were the older demographics because they don't have time on their side and they don't know how long this

is going to last. And so basically, you know, the millennials are the ones who are buying, they're getting stimulus checks. They've got all the time on their side. Sports are shut down. This is the new gambling and all those kind of narratives. But the older generation, they're selling their equities because they don't want to have 50 percent less. They're OK with 25 percent less or 15 percent less. And then all of a sudden the market turns around and takes off. And they basically got shaken out of equity positions that they would have been better off holding. And so it's really interesting to kind of see an entire generation who really has gone through three separate crises. You've got the equity crisis, you've got the housing crisis, and then you've got kind of the coronavirus thing. They never had a long enough runway to really build back that nest egg.

And so I think you're right in that those people are in a really, really bad situation right now. Yeah, and again, we're so overvalued. If someone doesn't think we're overvalued, you've got to look harder because it's preposterously overvalued. In 2019, I looked at 2018, I looked at 20 metrics evaluation. They all pointed to a 50% overvaluation, and the market's gone up since then about 35%. The GDP has grown about, if you ignore the COVID beating, GDP has gone up around, call it 5% total in those two years. So the numerator has gone up 35 percent, the denominator has gone up a few percent, making the valuations another 30 percent higher, basically. Let me ask you this.

That's a Red Bull, you know, die from space when it finally happens. I don't know how it's going to happen. I don't know what to tell people. I don't have a crystal ball, but I think it will happen. It's never failed. I don't see a mechanism by which it cannot happen. do you think valuations matter anymore? Not right now, not today, but they will.

And again, so, you know, the triple Q is priced now at a P of about 100. Now, if you look it up, you'll see numbers in the 20s. Those turn out to be fraudulent numbers. And you wonder how they committed the fraud. Go look at Horizon Kinetics. They did a full analysis. Triple Q is a Berkshire Hathaway-like unit. has the earnings to give it a P of about 100.

So does the Russell. And so there's what, 14% to 18% zombies in the S&P. These are companies that can't pay the interest rates on their loans with their cash flow. And with interest rates at 5,000-year lows, if you can't pay the interest on your loans now, you have no buffer. And to calibrate you when interest rates were 10% back in the 90s, there were 2% zombies. And so when interest rates were, by our current standards, oppressively high, people could all pay their loans.

And so that shows you the mess we're in. So no, if it stays up here, it means that you're going to get, the PE tells you you're getting 1%, right? It's like the analogy I use, I always look for metaphors. If you buy a Toyota, good car, good, solid Toyota Camry for three hundred thousand bucks, you're going to get hurt in the trade. Might be a good car, but you can't pay. I went through the fangs this year. I'm stunned at the at the at the valuations of the fangs. These are the stocks that carried the entire market for the last couple of years.

Their their their valuations are garbage. Their valuations are ridiculous. I go through every one of them and show how much they could lose and still not be overvalued and still not be undervalued. What are the general numbers? Well, so Amazon went up tenfold in six years. So if it gave back the entire gain, it would have a PE of 15. Netflix went up a hundredfold in 12 years. If it gave back all hundredfold, meaning 1% of its current price, it would still be losing money and would lose access to the credit market. So here's a company

that went up a hundred fold and loses money. That, that, that, that, that's insane. You know, salesforce.com, you know, price to cashflow is ridiculous. Gets put in the Dow, they take out Pfizer. What kind of insanity is that? Salesforce.com is a bad joke compared to Pfizer or Exxon, the ones they took out. You know, you got Apple, which has obviously been a phenomenal investment. Their earnings and revenue has been growing about 2.5%, 3% a year for the last few years. So if you're buying Apple because you think it's a growth stock, you got to explain to me why 3% a year growth is good news. And it's at its highest valuations ever. Amazon, even though I picked on it, it's hard to know where Amazon is going to be. But

um, how, how many more doublings do they have? Right. A lot of the exponentials that Amazon is not going to become a $10 trillion stock because it's still just retail and they've almost clocked. They've almost taken out retail. So I, you know, what, what do you think people should do? Like if you were talking to a son or daughter and they said, dad, this is really bad. I have no clue what to do. What's your advice to them? Well, as odd as this sounds, my advices would be to emphasize saving more than investing. So get used to cutting money out of your paycheck. Use your tax exempt aspects. You know, I shelter about 30% of my paycheck into tax exemption forms. I actually tell them, look, I think at some point

the money you put in now is going to get whomped. Do not worry about it when it happens. Remember, I told you it would happen. Just go 60-40. Just start. Get started. At some point, you'll average in. By the way, someone did a little math for me. The Nikkei, obviously, you know, as I said, they've been sitting on a donut cushion for 30 years. The Nikkei is still 60% recovered from it's 89 high. People don't understand that if you're really in an overvalued situation, that it can take decades. I have a plot that I've drawn two years in a row now, where the inflation adjusted capital gains on the Dow treads water for considerable periods of time. So from 1906 to 1986, I think it is, 75 years, 1906 to 1981, 75 years, the inflation-adjusted capital gains

did not move for 75 years. Now, there were ups and downs, and the David Teppers rode the ups and downs, and generations rode the ups and downs, but that's a long time to not make any money. You got dividends from that, but you also have taxes. You have taxes on the inflated returns, So nominal gains produce taxes that are not fair. And, my brother's calling me. And so that people don't realize how long you can tread water from overvaluation. From 1929, it was just eternity before you were even

for the last time, not the first time, the last time. And so Buffett's estimate of predictable returns, valuation aside, he puts it at about 4%. Rob Arnault puts it at 3.1%. I had it at 4.5% before I read those two guys' analyses or paid attention to them. And so it's not 6%. It's not 7%. It's not 15%. Those are not even remotely sustainable. So I think the boomers are in for the rudest of awakenings or the meanest of regressions, as they say. So before we move on to some non-financial stuff. Bitcoin, I know that you have a whole bunch of views, but are usually pretty realistic and honest. What's your thought there given the recent price rise and then

kind of overlaid with all the nonsense going on in the traditional market? Well, the hodler podcasters like to have me on. I'm a bit of a target for them because I'm a guy they think ought to like Bitcoin. I also don't pick on you guys for owning Bitcoin. This year, obviously, was a good year for you. It also was a good year to the extent that it appeared to become somewhat normalized by big investors getting in. So, you know, Yusko and you joined up. And so that was a sign Yusko was willing to go to Bitcoin. But then this year is a whole bunch of big money guys. I will reiterate my concerns about Bitcoin. I think that you at some point will come head to head with sovereign states. And at some point, you'll either be able to stay

below the radar of the sovereigns, or you are going to end up in the battle of the bastards on the battlefield. And I'm going to bet on the sovereign states. I don't mind not owning it. I would have sold it. If I bought it again, I would have sold it again. So I most would have traded it. I would not have been able to hold it through the run. You have to marry and invest They would say, don't marry an investment, bullshit. You have to marry an investment. You have the hundred baggers in Microsoft for people who believe no matter what. The hundred baggers in McDonald's just said, I believe, right?

I'm not. Yes, I've been beaten up this year, but I'm not letting go. And so for me to go serious on Bitcoin, I'd have to become a believer. And it's not the mechanics I don't get. It's the belief that you are going to do battle with sovereign states. and um and i did a podcast last week and the guy kept saying well i don't think we're gonna but he didn't give me a reason why i said well at some point they're going to they're going to make you either go uncryptoed they're they're going to want to tax you and they're not going

to want to give up um their unique hold on currency right they live and die by currency you know dollar look at the battle over the dollar reserve currency status what's going on I think Bitcoin, you know, they talk about sovereign cryptos. We both know how stupid that is. The whole concept of a sovereign crypto, it's like saying a jumbo shrimp, right? I think they're going to want you to be above board, clean, taxable. And then I'm not sure what it becomes at that point. But I can picture a path where you guys do well.

I can picture the path. But I can also picture a path where Bitcoin does a 100% correction. Let me ask this question. Is there a world where Bitcoin ends up becoming the solution for the sovereigns? I think it requires the sovereign collapse. The actual sovereign nation or just the central bank slash currency of the US dollar or other major currency? I think it requires a collapse of the monetary system, the Bretton Woods system. I think it requires something that even as a hodler, you're not going to want to go through. You'll be glad you have Bitcoin, right?

That I agree, but it will be a period of great, it'll be the dark ages sort of, you know, and so that will be the battlefield, right? They're not going to go down without a fight, I think. And I've had hodlers say, no, we don't have to beat them. They're not going to care, blah, blah, blah. It's too broadly based. I point out that they knock gold out of the game. And it not only was central to our monetary system, but it was in the Constitution.

They still took it out. So I'm confident that when push comes to shove, they will find, you know, all the illegal stuff they did in the bailouts this year, right? There's no laws that they have to follow. So that's my bet. What I think is also true is that the prominent famous hodlers now, the ones that you're going, oh, I can see these guys doing this, right? They're going, oh my God, Hedge from Adger X just became a hodler. That's fantastic, right? I don't think they're strong hands. I did a Twitter poll and the poll suggested a lot of people think they are, but I think they're traders. I think these are guys, these are like the guys who front ran the Robin Hooders and stuff,

Robin Hodlers, I call them. I think these guys ran for the run. I think they did some window dressing this year because they didn't want to look like they didn't own it, right? You know the drill. But I think if Bitcoin starts having trouble, these big hands are going to leave as fast as they showed up. And in fact, I was going to get into cannabis with Todd Harrison. And I had a couple of hours on the phone with him. I don't know why. It's not like he was selling it to deep pockets here, but eventually didn't go with it because he's a derivatives trader. And the last thing I wanted to do was own money in a fund where the guy is hardwired to run when the going gets tough, right? That's his job to run. So I can picture like getting

beaten up and then I'm saying, okay, we're wrapping up the fund. I go, I don't want you to wrap up the fund right now, right? I've suffered, you know? And so I didn't go with it for that reason. I think this, this big money supposedly entering Bitcoin now, I don't think you know how strong the hands are. They could be strong, but I don't think. One of the interesting things to me, and I think directionally, like your thought process is exactly the way that I would think if I was a complete skeptic, right? Like if I basically was saying, Hey, this is interesting. I don't necessarily believe, but I also understand it well enough to not use arguments like, uh, it's worthless. Nobody wants it, you know,

kind of the really basic stuff. So, so I think that you're, you're directly correct in, in kind of the skeptical argument. Uh, the two things that, um, I think are part of the conversation and important to pull up are one uh there is a very large base about 60 of uh bitcoin in the circulating supply that hasn't moved in 12 months even with all the volatility so they're not institutions on most hands they're usually retail and that base is very very strong holders right and when there is high degrees of volatility like 400 people uh it's more than 400 i think there's like 4,500 wallets with $10 million of Bitcoin or more. So that's single digit thousands. If you lower it down to like a million dollar threshold, it goes to tens of thousands. If you lower it

even lower, you eventually get to, I don't know, Coinbase has got 35 million registered accounts. So let's say that 50% of them are active users. We'll find out when they go public. But you're talking about more than 10 million just in the United States for sure. But if you take the top 40% of the – if you look at the largest 40% of the hodlers, it's a small number of people. There are some extraordinarily wealthy guys at the top there. And I would expect them to hang on. What I'm not convinced will hang on are the hedges who this year announced they were buying. So those folks, here's what's interesting about them.

uh, people who are going and buying Bitcoin and just putting it into some sort of cold storage, they've got direct access to it and they kind of have, you know, possession of the Bitcoin. If something bad happens, 100% agree with you, they're selling, right? The one thing that is really interesting though, is take something like, uh, GBTC, right? The, uh, the publicly traded trust that holds Bitcoin. There's no redemption function of that fund. And so once somebody gives them money and gets issued new units or shares that bitcoin can't come back out of grayscale's hands so what is likely to happen is there's a premium today if something bad happened it would actually trade at a discount to nav but that bitcoin is quote-unquote being held now it's

not in the sense of that's like the central fund of canada is the precious metals so they're similar all the metals they don't actually what they were doing is they were buying metals and skimming i I didn't like that part of it. They were taking the premium and boiling it down, but the people who own the shares weren't getting the medals. Yeah. So let's talk a little bit about the year in review. One of the things that you talked about that I think is going to be fascinating for people to understand is this anatomy of riots. We saw all kinds of crazy stuff happen.

We saw a virus. We saw government mandated shutdowns. We saw kind of social unrest around social justice issues. And then we saw flat out riots. How do you think about the riots, the social justice, you know, kind of protests and acts of defiance in relationship to what we're talking about on the finance side, the virus, the government made a shutdown and kind of does that stuff persist? Is that a thing that just happens during an election year and then it kind of dissipates? like, how do you just think about that? Well, I think you're right on all counts. I did what I call the anatomy of the riots. And there's different players and they serve

different roles. And so you start out with the top shelf of the guys who flat out think the world's unfair and they should go out and protest. And they do so out of deep-seated conviction that they're right. I think there's right below that group and indistinguishable from them are what called the virtue signalers who want to go out and show that they're virtuous i'm virtue signaling drives me nuts so i'm pretty pretty critical of that group i i think you shouldn't be showing your virtues that way um but underneath there there's a whole bunch of other layers one of which is the antifa guys who i think are organized and i don't think they're i i don't know i don't have a good feel for where that organization's come from but they've got money behind them

um i wrote about a guy who went to a bunch of them and he kept seeing the same faces at different cities and so there was serious organization um i think that crystal meth toting um antifa guys are being paid to show up and beat heads and smash windows and stuff i think they're on someone's payroll uh i've increasingly become concerned that china's running at all and so um and that When I say increase it, the last couple of weeks, things have shown up on my computer screen that said, holy shit, I'm underestimating China. Like what? Well, I just, did you see that? We're going to end up in election fraud fast.

There was a video about election fraud by Epoch Times. And for about 45 minutes, it was the standard stuff of video footage of ballots being dragged out of closets and stuff like that. in testimony of people saying, I watched them load a truck that I drove from New York to Pennsylvania. I think the case is pretty good for a wholesale election fraud. And it traces to Beijing. And I didn't know that until, I don't know, two or three weeks ago. And then this documentary going along showing what for me was kind of review. And then it spins over to Dominion, which is the voting vote counting company and i was familiar with that and then they start saying okay who owns dominion and all of a sudden it just goes batshit and and it says here's who owns

dominion but here's who owns them goes to ubs and one of the wings goes to ubs beijing and we are increasingly seeing connections between between the election fraud and chun and and then they show this video of a guy who is supposedly xi jinping's right-hand man one of his key sort of inner circle giving a lecture to an auditorium full of people and the subtitle people say well how do you know what the subtitle says i go there's 100 people in my building who could show that to be bullshit they're not going to try to fake subtitles everyone speaks chinese you know every other person here um and he starts out he's he's this personable guy and he's talking to the audience And he says, he says, we've had control of the upper echelon of U.S. politics for many years.

We've had total control. Right away. Wow. What did he just say? Right. I don't know why he's saying this so brashly. And then he says, then all of a sudden Trump gets elected. We lost control. And he says, we tried to, you know, get money into people to get them to deal with it. he says if you if you can't get get help you use a wad of cash and people laugh he says and if one wad doesn't do we give him another wad of cash and he says that usually works he says we couldn't do it and then he gets to the end and he says and now biden's going to be in the white house and the whole audience laughs and he says we're okay now and i can't watch that video and not wonder, A, why are they so brash? And do they really own our government at this point? Do they

really have control? And do stories of sort of Obama's ties with Beijing and stuff, are they real? Certainly, I think the laptop and Biden, I think Biden is going to be absolutely worthless at dealing with China. He's going to be of zero, he's going to be destructive. That's the biggest problem I have with Biden being president, is I think that they do own him 100%. And I think that therefore any progress made towards evening up trade is absolutely blown out of the water with him in the White House. I don't think there's a prayer. Let's talk about the election first before we talk about kind of where we go politically. Do you think that it was election fraud? If so, how? And kind of like walk me through your thought process of how you even

just evaluate something that a year ago, if we talked about people would dismiss as absolutely insane theory that the elections are rigged, that now all of a sudden is a very serious debate in our country between two political parties that seem to be getting farther and further apart, you know, on a daily basis. Well, so I've been paying attention to election fraud for many years, probably 15, because I'm always sniffing around dark corners trying to find stuff that other people are not spotting. So there was some WikiLeaks back in the McCain-Obama election, there were some WikiLeaks about crap going on in Pennsylvania and stuff. And so I always viewed it as, there used to be, maybe they're not anymore because

YouTube has become a Stalinist operation, but there used to be videos, people showing here's how you hack an election computer to get whatever vote count you want. And these YouTubes were being posted as long as YouTube has existed. So computer hackers have all claimed that the election is absolutely perforated, that anyone could rig it if they wanted. But it always seemed like, well, probably the two teams are just battling. It's like playing capture the flag, you know, and who cares? And the bottom line is, is that as long as the two candidates were both anointed, do they really care, right? And the answer was no until Trump fucked him up. And I think Trump caught him off guard. I think they thought they had control of

him and they didn't. And so what happened? So for four years, the DNCs hated Trump with every bone in their body. The RNC to an unknowable level has hated Trump, right? That's the thing we don't know is that how many people in the RNC are signing off with Trump saying, look, this is our guy, whether we like it or not, how many detested. And clearly, there's a serious neocon group who's never signed off on Trump. The never Trumpers at the highest level exist. But we don't know the percentage. I picked up something this year that was very strange. I wrote about the bailouts. I wrote about the corruption. And I was scraping data about politicians' families who got bailout money. And I sort of rounded them up from different sources. I put them into one bullet.

And I noticed the first thing I noticed is they were Republicans. I'm going, well, it's a right winger. That's not very good. That's so embarrassing. But I'm going, but Trump's administration, of course. Right. The second thing I noticed, which was surreal, and it may just be a coincidence, but they were all in they were all in battleground states. it was Michigan, Wisconsin, Georgia, Florida, Arizona, Texas. And I go, did they bribe Republican politicians with bailout money to do something for the election? And I, it's just an odd correlation. Just one of those right now, that's just my spidey sense picking up something that I don't yet understand. So in any event, so the entire left hates him. Some percent of the right that we don't fully understand hates them. The entire media hates them, including a decent percentage, I think, of Fox News. I don't think Fox has ever been 100% Trump. You got Tucker,

yes. You got Hannity, yes. But you got a bunch of people who really didn't seem to play the Trump card a lot. You got the average bloke who has been brainwashed or been beaten down with the mantra that Trump is the second coming of Hitler, which allows you to have worker bees who are saying, I'm doing this because this is for the good. And they might even consider doing things that they wouldn't have considered before because Trump's evil. And once you successfully tar him with that brush, then honorable people do dishonorable things, right? Would you kill Hitler if you could? Of course you would, right? Well, you demonize someone and then you say, now you got to do it. So you got the intelligence, right? There's no question the intelligence guys

after Trump. And then you say, OK, they had four years to prepare for the election. They tried to get him on impeachment, renegade the whole thing. They couldn't bring him down. Did they really forget to rig the election? So I use kind of the counterfactual argument. I cannot fathom that they didn't. And I've watched, looked at the data, and I think there was wholesale fraud. Here's where I feel guilty. In my interview, I didn't talk much about it. But in the conclusion section, I did. And I phrased it in a way that I regret. And that is, I said, you can see I don't believe it, but I made some statement about, was it enough to determine the election? I think I said something, I think I implied no, and I regret that. I think I was being dishonest, actually. I think I was so punchy by the end and I was so far out on a limb talking about all these dicey subjects that I think I decided to protect myself.

And this morning I was thinking about writing a blog on that topic and saying I didn't quite get that right. Yeah. What's so fascinating to me is I've started the conversation with people of forget this election, for example, or as an example, just do you believe that there has been election fraud in the past? And it's very hard pressed for me to find people who say absolutely no. They get the count right every single time to a T, you know, literally tens of millions of votes on either side and they nail it. Then I ask, you know, do you think that there was a next enough either inaccuracies or election fraud in the past to change elections? Harder to find people who will who will agree with that. I think most people want to believe. Sure, they don't get it exactly right. They get it directionally right. And therefore, the outcome of the election is, you know, what the will of the people is or however you want to describe it. But you could ask them, why did they do the fraud then if it never influenced the election?

Well, here's the part that I then ask is I say, do you believe that there will be more inaccuracies and fraud in the future or less? And do you think that it has the possibility of starting to affect elections? And almost resoundingly, the answers I've gotten are yes. So basically, it happened in the past. It wasn't that bad. It didn't actually influence elections. But now that there's more political divide, there's more polarization, more extremism, it will likely continue and ramp up from here. and it may reach a point in the future that could change elections.

And so what I say to myself is they're probably directionally right. They just don't understand how quick it can happen, right? It can happen quickly, yeah. So I did a poll on Twitter, and I called in some favors from some heavy follower counters, and I got to about 18,000, 20,000 votes just to get a sample size up. And I always have you determine what your view is and whether you lean left or right. I always get the psychopaths and say, I don't lean. And I go, get a psychiatrist, a psychiatrist, you need help.

And what I found was, is that 66% of those who lean right thought that it was unprecedented wholesale fraud and 37% of those who leaned left did. And I'm staggered, I'm staggered that the numbers are actually that low. I can walk past this. I can get past this, but if they don't fix it for 2024, I don't know. We're a banana republic at this point. Yeah. Do you believe the Hunter Biden laptop story?

Absolutely. Or how do you think that plays? 100%. 100%. What is kind of your analysis in terms of, one, the story of how they get possession of the laptop, and then two, the materials? yeah the way they got it was sanitized to be legal but i'm guessing they got it a better way than that although although rogan said yeah someone said to rogan how do you how did he leave it in the shop and rogan said he's a crackhead right you know let those explain

a lot um i use that great graphic where it's you know get hookers call china and then says pick up laptop they all have x's with the pickup laptop um yeah i think there's a lot of very prominent people who saw the evidence and said, yes, I've seen it. It's real. Some very, very high level people said it's real. I also think it was not about the election. And then I started asking, why did they play it so poorly? They let out little bits of it. They showed some photos of Hunter. Easy to confirm. It's trivial to confirm, actually. Just take a couple of generic emails to generic people and say, did you get an email from Hunter Biden on this day? If they did, you can say, therefore, the guy who gave me that date, time, and email, obviously has the other

end of that, that email chain. And so I'm sure they can confirm it. The question is, since they did it poorly, as far as the election is concerned, they did it too late. There were some like 40 million mail-in ballots already. It looked like an election dirty trick. And so I said, okay, I don't think it's about the election. So what's it about? I came up with four vested interests in the laptop. The other thing that I've written about before is the two parties do not want to draw blood. So they want to inflict pain, but they don't want to draw blood because they know that if there's a war, they'll all get killed. It's like mob families, right? You say, okay, I don't like what they did to us, but we're not starting a mob war over that. And so, for example, Clinton

pardoned 1,100 truly despicable people. And I went through the Clinton pardons. They're all bank fraud and drugs. They're just all bank fraud and drugs, which means Clinton got paid off 1,115 times. And it's a huge number of pardons for a president. The Republicans picked on Mark Rich. What they didn't pick on was that Hispanic guy from Guatemala or something who got caught with 800 kilos of cocaine, and he got pardoned. They didn't mention that guy and a bunch of others. And so it's clear to me, Clinton pardoned a bunch of bad people for money, and the Republicans did not call him on it. And that's the troublesome part. And they've now made it very hard to find the pardons. I've got links that show the pardons, but they're hard to find. They don't Google easily

now. So what happened? So the four vested interests are the RNC has the laptop. They could have thrown it out there during the election, maybe hoping to have an effect, but saying, hey, Joe, we got your son's laptop, and if you don't stay in line, we're going to destroy you, right? That would be a vested interest, especially those who actually wanted Trump out of there and wanted an insurance policy to make sure that getting him out of there, that there was a way to handle the guy they put in. By the way, I go back to the Iowa caucuses, and Biden and Harris were so pathetic. What do you think the pay line was for a Biden-Harris administration, like 1,000 to And then we end up with them. They were just awful. And if you had said those two are going to end up running the country, I go, no, no, no, not at the Iowa caucuses. They were gone. She quit the next day. Zero, zero delegates. Right. He looked like a post-it. He was nothing.

So they got inserted. Does he finish the first term? No. As president? No, no. What happens? Well, I don't know when, but he's going to get sick. They're going to put her in. That's my conclusion. I'll be shocked if he makes it. Some people think he's not going to make it to inauguration. That would be stupid because a day after inauguration, everything's legal. A day before, it's hard to say what the rules are. It could get pretty dicey in courts. Does Trump leave office?

Yeah, I think so. I think he's a patriot. I think he's a loon, but I think he's a patriot. So then the second group is the DNC. So the DNC would like, has a vested interest in the laptop because they can say, okay, Joe, now it's time to go. We want Kamala in there for reasons I do not understand because she seems so vacuous and amoral to me. But that's just a first impression. I have to qualify that. I have to give her a chance. But I'm not optimistic. The third is Trump family. So Trump's leaving office. They have the laptop. Rudy had the laptop. So this is all consistent. I could imagine them using the laptop saying, if you come after my family, we'll destroy it. Right. And I could imagine that being a risk for the family. And I could imagine them saying,

as long as we have the laptop, you can't touch us. Do not release your goddamn DOJ on our sorry asses, right? And then the fourth group, which doesn't even need the laptop, is China. Because of the laptop's real, China has all the recordings, all the videos, everything. There's no chance that Hunter Biden met with anybody in China at any point without video and audio surveillance on him 100 percent of the time, which means they own the Bidens. Period. And I'm despondent about that because I do think the thing that Trump had right, whether he played it right, I don't know, is that we have to somehow be able to compete with China. And I think we've we've whatever progress we made. I think the the Biden win negates it all. All of it. What is a Kamala

Harris presidency look like? Oh, it's scary. I don't even know who runs the country at that point. I re again, everything I get is off the internet. Right. And, but this is why I like talking to you. Cause cause you understand that, right? It's like, look, the information I'm getting is the information I'm getting. And here's my conclusion based on that information. So I try to pick up shards and I try to see where self-consistency shows up. It's a real challenge actually you know you get some lead like uh like the the you know george floyd trying to understand why he died you know there's lead you know i don't think that's a piece of information of value um if i've read kamala harris correctly she's a an opportunist of a higher order which

describes everyone inside that beltway um i don't think she's particularly good at anything i think she has less moral compass than Hillary. Now, I hate Hillary because I think she's a super criminal, but she's a super criminal, not unlike, say, the mob bosses who I think have principles. I think they have dotted lines. I'm not sure Harris has that. I mean, she really just looks like this kind of, I read a book on sociopathy and she looks like one of the chapters to me. They all sort of do in their own way. But Trump is not a sociopath. I think I think, you know, people hate Trump. They think he's so destructive for the country. The one thing I think is true is he wanted to be great. It's his narcissist in him, but he wanted to be he wanted to be on Mount

Rushmore. And I think he knew that to do that, he had to do things that were great and patriotic and stuff like that. So I think I anyone who can't see the merits and things that Trump did is just too narrow for me. I mean, I can see the merits in Obama. God, I can go back to Jimmy Carter. I'd have him back in a heartbeat now. If you think Trump is nothing but bad, your mind is narrowed. Yeah. The one thing that seems to be agreed upon by both sides is that there's an incredible level of divisiveness and extremism in American politics today. Does that continue? Does that continue? And then there's a blow up and a third party emerges.

Like, how do you see that playing out? I think you're thinking too locally. Did you see that World Economic Forum 90 second video of what the future is going to bring? No, I did not. Oh, man. Remind me to send it to you. It's a 90 second short. So you got this guy, Klaus Schwab and Christine Lagarde talking about the Great Reset.

Try to get someone to tell you what it is, right? The Great Reset. and i'm trying to find people who might know i'm not even sure they know but this 90 second video from the world economic forum starts out by saying how good the future is going to be and it says you're not going to own anything and you'll be happy about it and i'm going oh oh oh red flag first first line in the thing red flag and then they say everything you need you will rent we're going okay from whom right and it will be delivered by drone which is their way of saying it'll be cool and then they show a heart being um a heart being synthesized by 3d printing you go

okay cool and then they say you won't eat as much meat for the good of the planet it'll be a treat you'll have an occasion i'm going up to to you're not telling me what i'm eating and they talk about the u.s will not be the dominant superpower now i don't have a problem with that idea because at some point we're kind of looking like the roman empire and so so i could imagine why people going you know the the goss and ostrogoths and the and the vandals and stuff are going we got to get these guys out of here i get that but to put out a video saying that strikes me as that's that you know you're saying we're coming to rome right and that's a little problematic and uh and it says and it it talks about how that the world will be run by a group of countries and and the whole

thing is so creepy i shared with my wife who doesn't like to even talk about this shit and she said she was creeped for the rest of the day so if you haven't seen this world economic forum um i posted it on twitter this morning if you want to go to see my twitter feed it's one that I said, look, I'm posting this again. It's the creepiest 92nd video I've ever seen. And therefore, I don't think second party, third party Democrats, Republicans is potentially relevant here. I think there's a much bigger story. And I've been talking with smart guys from Wall Street, from from from plate. This is not we're not talking guys who are who are living in their parents basements, who are now creeped out by this new world order thinking. And and

then the question is, what's the role of COVID? What's the role of the lockdowns? What's the role of the war on cash? There's all these things that are kind of, you know, what's the role of China? Is Russia collusion, a Chinese PSYOP, you know, and I've reached the point now where I think it's possible that the world is way more screwed up than I could have imagined. And you know, i go outside the box pretty far but i'm creeped out more than usual so one of the things you talked about is mind alteration uh i've been talking about desensitization to all the craziness the chaos uh is that intentional is it literally just people are worn down they've been sitting at home for the last eight nine months they've just been bombarded with one crazy thing after

another from a global pandemic to governments taking people's individual you know rights and liberties to literally UFOs now being confirmed to whatever, you know, whatever ridiculous thing you, you want to, uh, to bring up. Um, is it just literally the bombardment of constant chaos and uncertainty and ridiculousness that's wearing on people or is there some, something else that's kind of at play? Um, I, it all could be part of the same plot if that's what you mean. Um, at all so i as you know a couple years ago probably three years ago i said look i've had a better paycheck i think climate change is real i it sort of was a vote and confidence of my brethren in the sciences i said but i'm i don't i've done the homework so i don't know personally

and then two years ago i said um i sort of amped it up a little bit and then last year i dug deep And I said, is climate change real? And when I spent hundreds of hours reading about climate change and reading the stories about it, who says what? And I got to the end of that pursuit and I wrote about 25 pages on it. I think it's really good. I think the whole climate crisis story, not the climate change, but the climate crisis story, I think is baloney.

I'm a denier. I'm a complete denier. Explain the nuance between the difference between the climate change and the climate crisis story, because I think the nuance is really important here. The climate change story is by definition climate changes. Here's what I can tell. I can give you a synopsis of the beginning of the problem. First, you'll be told that no credible scientist doesn't believe it. Right. That's the first thing. That turns out to be one of the big lies, because what got me to think about it is people started beating on me and saying, Dave, you know, people do don't believe it. And I thought it was a baloney. And you can run into Nobel Prize winning physicists all over the planet who are saying they're not just saying I'm not sure what's happening. They're saying this is baloney. It's extreme. Famous, famous physicists that, you know, solar physicists saying it's all the sun has nothing to do with any of this crap. And then you find cancel culture embedded in the debate. You find censorship embedded in the debate. You find vast lies embedded in the debate. You find this belief that that it's so important that we have to stay on the narrative at any cost.

that's not science at all that's propaganda and then you find as soon as you start looking at the numbers you go holy shit you know they talk about big oil trying to deny there's climate change like big tobacco did i believe the big tobacco did but um big oil hasn't spent hardly anything best i can tell they probably support a few workshops and shit in the think tanks but um It turns out that climate industrial complex, which is the general term I use for any money spent having to do with climate change, whether it's departments formed, whether it's government agencies, whether it's carbon credits, you name it, solar panel companies, it's a trillion dollar year business. So if you somehow don't think that's a conflict, you're nuts. You're completely

nuts. And then I started finding that all the claims weren't holding up. So there is no evidence whatsoever that we're getting an increase in weather events from climate for 100 goddamn years. There's no evidence that we've gotten increased climate events. The sea rise is rising the thickness of a dime every year. And it's been doing that for 10,000 years. And the starving polar bears, starving polar bears. Well, the polar bear population has increased threefold since the 70s to be starving is because there's too goddamn many and uh and you just go on and on and on and you just find lie after lie after lie and after a while i go this i'm done so i was not going to write anything ever again they had lost the scientists i'd written what i was going

to write and then michael schellenberger published a book and michael moore did a movie and moore started out looking at climate change from the perspective of the guys opposing it and discovered that the conflict was the climate changers. So Moore prepared this movie, and it was a compelling movie. And it started getting knocked off the internet as fast as that could be posted. So now you have to go to bizarro sites to find Michael Moore's movie. Michael fucking Moore, right? This is not some obscure guy. This is a guy who ought to be able to get it into the theaters, right? And it got knocked off YouTube. And so it's one of those, the narrative. So there's the narrative on COVID. There's the narrative on climate change. There's the narrative on

shutdowns you name it every one of these narratives um are being shaped by silicon valley so i've concluded that somewhere behind silicon valley is a very dark and sinister force and i think uh i was watching this guy eric wine say he thinks that jack dorsey has been totally captured he thinks jack and i've always had this sense i think jack is a sincere guy and he's lost control of twitter I don't think he controls what Twitter does. Who do you think controls it? Jack Dorsey. You think Jack controls Twitter or Jack doesn't control Twitter?

No, I think Jack is now a puppet. I don't think Jack has control of his own company anymore. Okay. Who do you think controls it? I don't know. Probably, probably. Elliott Management? The Deep State, if you want to call it that.

The Deep State. I don't think Silicon Valley is just, you can say, oh, Silicon Valley is a bunch of lefties. I don't think that's it. I think I think they are a bunch of lefties. But I think I think I think it's being used to shape our narrative, just like CNN is totally controlled, just like MSNBC is totally controlled. This is what's frustrating. You can't get back when the Biden laptop story came out, which, by the way, was a story. Forget about whether they should be saying, look, here's why it's not true. Here's why they just denied it. They just flat out deny every major news. They they they blocked it from being posted on Twitter. The censorship was unbelievable.

And so this is the part that's got me creeped out. I think we're heading for an authoritarian state. I never used to talk that way. I used to think there was always the risk. But if you don't keep reminding yourself of what it is that made us what we are today, you'll lose it. Now, Jonah Goldberg wrote a book on this about three years ago. He said, we've got to teach each generation how we got here.

And I now realize that Jonah was screaming. at the top of his lungs. What do you make of the non-tech or the non-Silicon Valley tech world? So let's go to the extreme example. In recent days, everyone has been asking, where's Jack Ma? Like Jack Ma has just completely disappeared. No one's seen him for two months. I don't know. That's probably someone took him out, right? So it reminds me, you know, when Putin took out one of a couple of those oligarchs, right? It's just in the US, I think we take people out in other ways but but they just rub them out right so let's say that uh and again i want to be clear here and i think you're saying the same thing of like that's not what we necessarily uh are saying

happened or uh evidence right yeah it's just but the question is being asked so let's just go through the hypothetical situation of um if that is true and that ends up being what happened uh jack ma is no longer alive uh regardless of the story of how we get there what's the impact for U.S.-China relationships, financial markets? Does that wake up people in America to say, wait a second, we thought that was great technological innovation, we should backtrack? Does that wake people up and say U.S.-China relationship should be different than it is today? Or do people just say, ah, there's another billionaire down the street and let's keep living our lives? Well, it depends on our media, right? And I am so despondent about our media

because they are the narrative shapers. Some guy came out and said, was denouncing conspiracy theories and what a bunch of idiots they are and stuff like that. And he said, they fail to understand how complicated it is to set up a big conspiracy. And I go, but it's not. It's trivial to set up a big conspiracy. All you have to do is control the response to it. So they botch him badly. And then they just make sure that the media never covers the botch part. Biden, right, when he was starting to run, when he's starting to get serious, I think they decided to try to put him in the White House. He had a lot of dirt in the closet. And it was at two levels of dirt. Forget about China, which was there too. But he had a lot of videos of him groping wives of

senators and visitors and stuff. And there's people who claim that, look, they had to stop Christmas parties of this type because Biden was just groping wives the whole way, stuff like that. And so they had this outpouring of news stories about Biden groping. And then they covered him as just the old, fondly old guy, and he's really benign. And then they sanitized it. what they never touched was him groping all the kids and he there you know there's tons and tons of youtubes of him groping 12 year old girls and you're going holy shit grandpa you can't do that and someone had to tell him you can't do that over and over he did it there's probably 30 minutes of compilations out there of him groping kids that never came out because that's too yucky

and so um so the media is totally in someone's pocket i just don't know who's and and at one point i would have said the dnc um i'm now willing to entertain that it goes all the way to beijing i just don't know at this point i'm lost one of the one of the craziest moments to me where people always said trump is such an outsider and i was like kind of he's a rich dude right he's from new york he knows all these people how much of an outsider is he uh but the one moment where i sat up and did a double take was uh in the latest coronavirus stimulus package they basically had passed it it's going to his desk to sign and he uh like a frankly an absolute savage got a press conference together and stood up there and just rattled off all the pork that was

in the bill i mean literally you know a billion dollars here a hundred million dollars here the 50 million dollars to this museum that's been closed this that whatever you're just going through it and you're sitting there and i think it was chamath palpatia who tweeted and said if he had done this his entire election and avoided all the crazy chaos stuff he'd had a second term because i think unless unless the election was rigged but fair the thing though was that when he did that i saw people from both parties online saying whoa this is interesting this right here where you have an outsider who's basically willing to take the political risk right but in his case not necessarily risk and expose this stuff i could get behind that and so what

makes me wonder is like weeks in office he said what's this with a four billion dollar air force one contract this is way overpaying cancel the contract and boy said wait wait wait tl we can drop the price right so he started out doing that i think if trump had not been running into relentless walls, you would have seen more of that. When you are trying to deal with Russian dossiers and impeachments and stuff like that, you don't have time to do stuff like that. Although I think he still tried. He's so idiosyncratic to defend him is problematic because he's not normal by most metrics. But there were things I think he wanted to be great. I come back to that. I believe he wanted to be great. I want to finish up talking about, uh, the idea of consuming

content. Uh, my wife always talks about like a content diet, similar to a food diet, bad things in bad things out, uh, very similar with content. Where do you, when you wake up every morning, what do you go read? How do you seek out information that maybe isn't so controlled in the mainstream media? Are there specific books or sites or, um, people you follow on Twitter? Just like when you think of the information you consume, what is that? Well, you know, there's the bloggers that we like. And there's so many now that it's hard to keep up with any one blogger religiously. And so I sort of keep an eye on Twitter.

I get a lot of emails now. People send me stuff. So I'm a bit of a conduit where people send me stuff to draw my attention to it. My email box has become a dumpster fire because of that. I'll confess, I actually think the best site, if you gave me one site, it would be Zero Hedge. Now, that's not to say that they get everything right, but they're so edgy and they're willing to go so far into darkness to look for things. And I have not detected, I've detected anti-establishment bias. That's clear.

but but i've not detected something where i got the feeling they were molesting me and and so i think i they're getting stuff wrong at times of course just like we all do um but you see stuff there that you simply won't see anywhere else and that people love to pick on zero hedge and i go dude give me another site any site i and i did a poll one day on zero hedge would you would you rather get your information from zero hedge or the media or you know other and zero head got 92 two percent and and so the chinese uh lab and the virus stories i mean like literally quintessential example of i don't know necessarily if they're the only ones who thought it or looked into it right i don't want to go that far i don't know what happened in other newsrooms or whatever

but they by far were the ones first willing to put it out there show them show the work and so you know in a wild world i i saw i don't remember new york post or cnn or wherever it was uh but there was a um article recently said a senior level u.s intelligence officer has confirmed to whatever publication uh the most likely right not saying it is the only but the most likely explanation is that it leaked out of this lab and again people will debate is that good is that bad uh should they have stopped it should they not what i don't care about all that it's just the fact that if that was a story back in March, April, and people had it and they had facts, but it wasn't reported, that shows a bias just as much as publishing it with an

anti-establishment bias, right? Given that I'm kind of anti-establishment at this point, I'm okay with the anti-establishment bias. But I think journalists are supposed to be at the establishment at some level. I think they're not supposed to be kowtowing to the establishment. They're supposed to be looking under rocks to find bad behavior, and they're not. So to me, the Constitution gave them special privileges, and with it came special responsibilities, and they've completely and utterly failed. The mainstream media has utterly failed. So Trump's correct about that, too. The media is, on some level now, our enemy. That's not to say that we and wrap them up because that then totally defeats the purpose of having media. But

I'm a big fan of people who can cross over the center line almost unexpectedly. So the sort of the two mirror images of that are Tucker Carlson and Bill Maher. Now, Maher's not even a journalist, but Tucker Carlson is. Now, Tucker is very right wing. But when we were talking about going into Assyrian doing shit. Tucker Carlson was hammering away at that and say, don't let him drag us into a Syrian war. This is crazy. Tucker was dead right, dead right. And he, by the way, was the first to post that goddamn interview of the presentation of the guy talking to the audience in China saying we own the U.S. government. We control the top echelon of the U.S. government. That first showed up on Tucker Carlson's show. And so I like Tucker. I can ignore the parts I

disagree with um i don't like anything on cnn because i've never seen anything on cnn that was remotely unbiased you saw the gingrich interview on cnn was that funny or what did you see the gingrich one i did not i'm only imagining what it could possibly be talking doing a cnn interview with two people zooming two women um and all of a sudden he starts talking about George Soros rigging elections. And I find George Soros to be a bit of a garbage can where you dump all the things you don't understand into it. I'm beginning to worry that maybe I've underestimated the importance of George. But for a while, I just said, oh, yeah, everything we don't understand is George Soros' fault, right? Now, that seems stupid. But he starts talking

about Soros. And you can watch one of the women, she's sitting there and he mentions it. And she's started looking at the ground and then he brings it up again and she says we're not going to go there and the other woman chimes in she says yes we're not going to go there what was immediately obvious to anyone watching and you go find this it's an unbelievable footage she had a producer in her head saying dive dive dive get the fuck out of that story now leave now right and so gingrich says, what, this is verboten? We can't talk about this? And they went to commercial. The next day, they did a pathetic apology. But that was clear to me that they were not, and this was Fox News, I think. And it was clear to me that they were being told, get out of that discussion

now. And I don't like that. So I don't trust Fox News, except for a few key individuals any more than any other. And during the fraud discussions, you say, oh, Fox is backing Trump. No, they weren't. They weren't. They were taking a much more centrist line. And only a few of the extremists who are sort of loyal soldier types were backing it. So I don't like the censorship. I think it's a horrifying pattern that we're seeing. We should all defy it. The other thing you should define,

I say this in my interview, but I'll say it to anyone, stop being intimidated by the term conspiracy. Stop being intimidated by the term conspiracy theorist. These douchebags conspire. They conspire all the goddamn time. Please just say, you're right. I am a conspiracy theorist. These assholes need our attention. Don't let that term and stop saying I'm not a conspiracy theorist, but because you goddamn are, you're just a coward on top of it.

So please accept the badge of honor. It is our job to theorize about conspiracies. And I say that every year and I, the most retweeted and liked tweet I ever put out there was a tweet supporting the idea of owning up to conspiracy theories. I am a conspiracy theorist. I think people of wealth and power conspire. And if anyone who doesn't think that, get psychiatric help because you are an imbalanced person. Stop being intimidated by that term. When someone tries to do it, smack them for me. If you have to punch them, verbally annihilate them, do what you got to do, but don't let them push you back with the term conspiracy. it pisses me off to no end they're trying to shut down the conversation own it say yes and you're a dick that's the phrase i'm a conspiracy and you're a dick i just put it to some guy i put it to some guy yesterday who came out and said had some bloviating thing about all your stupid goddamn conspiracies he was like boo check mark and down the thread some guy posted his linkedin

And he's from the World Economic Forum. I go, shit, they just closed the loop, right? So he's officially a douchebag. All right, before I let you go, I got one question. We've got eight sleep, which is a smart mattress. This is their question. I sleep on it every night. What do you do for sleep?

Do you sleep a lot or do you not sleep at all? I've been sleeping more because I read a book on why we need sleep. And it convinced me that it convinced me that no one can function on less sleep. Now there's always people, it's a badge of honor that says to work on less sleep. I only sleep four hours a night because I'm such a macho man. Turns out you're not functioning well. This book convinced me that you might think you're functioning well, but you're not. And the book talked about all the connections between not getting enough sleep and disease states and all these things. And I finally realized I'm not getting enough sleep. So, I used to just wake

up and get up. And I now have taken to the habit of waking up, doing what I got to do, and then trying to get some more, going back to bed. And so, I sleep quite a bit now. This is a mattress company. I just bought a mattress, Tempur-Pedic. It's a little too stiff. My back hurts. you should have got an innate sleep they got nice uh makes it nice and cool sleep deeper i i kind of thought tempur-pedic well those memory mattresses are great and this this one isn't a memory foam mattress in my opinion it's missing the memory part so all right uh where can we send people to find you on the internet um um at twitter at david b column um if someone's dying to send me an email if you're smart enough to get my email address which requires using google

um i'm not going to give it to you i'm going to require as a minimum filter that you're smart enough to find my email address which by the way is subtly in my bio of my twitter feed um then you can send me an email and i try to respond to those and uh where can people read the uh year and Review. Say that? Where can they read the Year in Review? It's my pinned tweet. And if they're not on Twitter, they can search David Column Year in Review 2020, and that'll get them. And if they want to look at another year, just put a new date in. That'll get whatever year you want. This year, I also included a section called Decade in Review, and I pulled out all the sections that I wrote for the last 10 years I thought were timeless and were durable. The

ideas were durable and that that you could read them today and still get the holy shit moment out of them like i think uh i think i wrote the best thing written out there right now at least on the las vegas shootings which were by the way totally bogus there's something dead wrong with that story and i i lay that out pretty good so i bought 20 links to the last 10 years of of articles that that i think have withstood the test of time and so check for that i highly highly recommend people go read it it's probably the best thing written all year uh every year so uh one thank you for putting the time in to read it or to read all the information and to write it um but we will have to do this again my friend i i always enjoy it so thanks so much for your time you betcha that was

fun Thank you.