The Pomp Podcast - Professor Predicts MASSIVE 70% Stock Crash | Dave Collum

Episode Date: January 5, 2026

Dave Collum is a Professor of Chemistry at Cornell University. In this conversation, we discuss asset prices in 2025, the economy, and the impact of monetary policy on markets. Dave explains why he believes the stock market is overvalued, why he’s concerned about risk assets, and why he’s uneasy about gold’s strong performance despite being a major holder. We also touch on his annual letter, inflation, investing outlooks, U.S. politics, geopolitics, and why independent thinking matters heading into 2026.=======================BitcoinIRA: Buy, sell, and swap 80+ cryptocurrencies in your retirement account. Take 3 minutes to open your account & get connected to a team of IRA specialists that will guide you through every step of the process. Go to https://bitcoinira.com/pomp/ to earn up to $1,000 in rewards.=======================As markets shift, headlines break, and interest rates swing, one thing stays true — opportunity is everywhere. At Arch Public, we help you do more than just buy and hold. Yes, our dynamic accumulation algorithms are built for long-term investors… but where we really shine? Our arbitrage algos — designed to farm volatility and turbocharge your core positions. The best part of Arch Public’s products is they are free! Yes, you heard that right, try Arch Public for free! Take advantage of wild moves in assets like $SOL, $SUI, and $DOGE, and use them to stack more Bitcoin — completely hands-free. Arch Public is already a preferred partner with Coinbase, Kraken, Gemini, and Robinhood, and our team is here to help you build smarter in any market. Visit Arch Public today, at https://www.archpublic.com, your portfolio will thank you.=======================Uphold is the easiest way to buy and sell crypto unlike any other platform allowing you to trade in just one step between any supported asset. Check them out at https://uphold.sjv.io/K0RXra. This video includes a paid sponsorship with Uphold. I’m compensated by Uphold for promoting its products and services and may receive commissions from referrals. Terms apply. Not available in all jurisdictions. Digital assets are risky and may result in the total loss of your capital.=======================Timestamps:0:00 - Intro 1:31 — 2025 asset performance & Dave’s big picture market view5:56 — Debate: productivity/AI & “new era” valuations11:33 — AI: the tech may be real, but the investment setup may be bad?20:07 — Dave’s portfolio positioning & Gold vs Bitcoin28:08 — Tether: transparency vs risks32:40 — Evaluating Strategy leverage & premiums35:25 — “Rough seas ahead” & why valuation is the core risk46:17 — U.S. economic policy, tariffs, DOGE, government “fraud”1:13:30 — Housing affordability: why building “luxury” can lower overall rents1:18:48 — AI + education: personalized tutors vs losing the ability to think1:22:42 — Tucker Carlson experience & media backlash1:35:08 — Where to find Dave’s annual letter & closing thoughts

This episode is brought to you by Accenture. When your advertising operations fall out of sync, everything else follows. Spotify and Accenture are working together to reinvent the rhythm of ad sales. Using automation, analytics, and smarter workflows to simplify campaign delivery and access better data across the business. The result? Less time spent on operations, more time connecting brands with the moments and fandoms that matter most. Learn more at Accenture.com slash Spotify. 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. 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. What's going

on, guys. I'm very excited about my annual conversation with Dave Collum. Today, we're going to talk about asset prices in 2025, what he sees happening in the economy with monetary policy, and what he's excited about for 2026. Dave is always somebody who brings a very different perspective to our annual conversation. This year is no different. He's going to explain why he thinks the stock market is highly overvalued, why he's worried about risk assets, why he's actually sad that gold did so well and he's such a big holder of it. And then we go deep down the rabbit hole and we cover his annual letter, which I highly recommend that you read. And we talk about a bunch of different topics that you probably heard in the

headlines or the mainstream media. Dave's just got a different view on it. So here's my annual conversation with Dave Collum. All right, Dave, we got a lot to talk about. I figured let's start with financial assets and the financial markets. Very interesting year. Obviously, gold, which you've been a big proponent of, has done fantastic in 2025. Silver also having a fantastic year. Stocks, I think, kind of did above average and then Bitcoin being down on the year. What's your take on asset prices, their performance in 25, and maybe how you're starting to think about 26 moving forward? Well, I've been the broken clock for many years, as you know. In 2015, I made what I consider to be an airtight case that we had regenerated a bubble and we're staring into

the abyss. And I not only did it with numbers, but I also did it by quoting legends of finance who said, what have we done again? This is insane. Some guy called for a 30-year bear market. And then from 2015 to the present, we've gone straight up. And the question is, were they all wrong or are we that much more insane? And I think we're that much more insane. So I left it all on the field this year in terms of sort of breaking down my view of the markets. Every year, I sort of dodge in and out of different topics. And this year, after the fact, I thought of some things I have talked about but um it it at some point our day of reckoning will come no way to know um don't put a headline say column call for a crash i never call for a crash i actually think we're going to

have decades of of poor uh poor wealth creation what does that mean well it doesn't actually mean poor wealth creation in terms of creating things that are important like in the 30s we can mention gordon's book for about the fourth time um but i think that so so i do arithmetic so i have us at 200 percent over historical average valuation i could be too pessimistic it could be 100 it is not below that and so if you ask you know what do you have to do to get back to historical average valuation, let's say 200%, let's be optimistically catastrophic, then you got to drop 70%. And by the way, you can't do a bungee jump. You can't do a bounce. You can't climb back up in three years and call that a correction because you corrected nothing. To get back to historical

average valuation, you have to stay there, which then allows you to project historical average returns. So if you're 200% over, which is 3x, a lot of people fail to do that math correct, you can pretty much divide your prospective returns out to some unknown distance. But at some point, you're going to give it all back. It's appreciation pulled forward. If you say, let's grow our way out, right? This is the Gedanken experiment I like. Let's grow our out, you say, well, what's the GDP going to grow at? Well, the 20th century, which if we could tie the 20th century, you'd really have to kind of call that a win, I think, right? That was a pretty good century. We went from no electricity to the moon in 70 years. Allegedly. Allegedly, allegedly,

exactly. And the GDP grew depending, again, it gets all mucked up by the inflation numbers and stuff. But the GDP grew, some people say, as low as 2.0%. Some say as high as 2.5. No one goes higher. So let's give it optimistic 2.5%. What that means is if you take 1.025 and you compound it for some number of years, and the market just, that number of years out has regressed to the mean. And I don't care how you go. It can go up and it can go down. But some number of years out, you're at the mean you will have regressed to the mean meaning you will not have made a penny of capital gains in 45 years so when you look at i i show a chart too you saw the chart i hope you saw the chart with the arrows i mean and and it actually you can't help but conclude that somewhere

between 2040 and 2075 we're going to be back to to the 2000 peak all right so hold on though let I think what people enjoy is when you and I debate a little bit. You did last time, too. Yeah, we went at it last time. That's pretty good. This may be one of the only things that I disagree with in this review, which is one of the things I keep trying to square in my head is companies today are essentially making the claim. Now, again, whether they do it or not is a different thing. But what they're making the claim is, hey, we are going to be more productive, we are going to drive more revenue, and we're going to do it with less employees.

So if we're more productive, we're more efficient, then therefore our company should be more valuable. Therefore, the historical valuations likely don't apply nearly as much as they did in the past. The company is more valuable. The second input that I pay attention to is I don't think pre maybe 1980s or so, people really used the stock market as an inflation hedge. I think a lot of people now use it as some sort of inflation hedge. So it's like a monetary premium on top of the historical valuations. And so when I look at that, I say, like, it makes sense to me why valuations today should be higher than they were historically. Maybe just on that point alone, do you agree, disagree, think I'm an idiot, think I'm not completely crazy? All of the above.

You have to be careful there. You can't equate stock market gains nominally with stock market gains inflation adjusted. Let's assume we have some magic mechanism to inflation adjust. I have a method that I would use. If you put me in charge and said, we need an inflation number, I don't buy the trueflation argument. I don't like the billion price index that came out of MIT. I think actually the MIT billion price became trueflation, is my guess. Because you've got to statistically weigh the billion prices, and there's no way they can do that.

I would find 100 diverse companies, really diverse. plumber, maybe a store, maybe a diner, and you can pick them carefully. And just say, tell me year over year what your input's changed, your labor, your input, stuff like that. You'd get a pretty accurate inflation number. And you don't need 200 or 500 or 10,000. Just pick 100. Or you can pick 100 categories and pick five in each category. I don't care how. But the bottom line isn't, you'd get a real inflation number. Okay. And valuation is the price divided by something that ought to track the price, right? There are plots showing it trends up. I do not believe those plots. I think those plots are a lie, actually. What I think those plots are is

that they're including the last 30 years in which the valuations have climbed further and further from equilibrium. And it looks like they're trending up because for the 30 years, they've gone up and so um and so evaluation divide is a price divided by something both of which are inflation sensitive earnings revenues you name it book everything's inflation they should not trend and therefore you can't justify higher valuations unless you want to accept lower returns true except for if the companies you know take uh an nvidia or a company and you probably are gonna go uh real crazy with all the bats i know i know i know let me pick a different let me pick a different example i'll let you do it and leave it alone now let's let's let's get past the fact

i think he'll end up in in leg irons before this is over you you think that jensen is going to go to jail no because no one of importance ever goes to jail but besides that okay but you think that what they're doing is like Enron-like? Yeah. Explain. I don't think it's as bad as Enron. Well, they're doing all sorts of vendor financing. So more like global crossing or something like that. All sorts of vendor financing. So they lend the money to the vendor. The vendor buys the chips. The chip uses the collateral of the chips to take out loans to buy more chips. Jack Gambles has done a phenomenal job on this. And this has been known for a long time. I first picked up the scent about four years ago and um and and and so uh it's it's it's it's price to revenues of something like 40

but that's insanity right that's insanity i remember when scott mcneely said price to revenues of 10 was insane he said what were you thinking right well the thing about nvidia is if i remember correctly uh nvidia's pe multiple is lower than uh costco's well okay let's talk costco then, if you want. I mean, it doesn't matter. Be careful by using a benchmark that's also totally fucked up, right? So when they say energy stocks are cheap compared to you name it, I don't care. I want to look at energy stocks and say, are they cheap? And are they cheap? Will it kick out a cash flow that will pay me inflation plus some sort of return that I'm okay with? And energy stocks i think are cheap but i also think at some point this column fear of a big whoosh

there's no point in history where you had a big whoosh where the the cheaper stocks didn't get cheaper too and so i think right now going out on the risk curve anywhere in the deciles of valuation has risk if you've got if you gotta buy equities right if you're running a 60 40 portfolio pick your 60 carefully i think we could have a 60 40 portfolio where both get crushed okay because because the bonds are are way wrong price too well let's come back to bonds in a second because i think that those are just horrible investments in general but um that's right let's stick on what would be the furthest out on the risk curve in the public markets in terms of um you know the ai stocks etc uh on the ai stock side um what is your general take on uh

whether they're real or not like do you believe the profit numbers do you believe the adoption Do you believe in the future of AI? Oh, I believe in the future of AI, yeah. You know, Gundlach said this. It was really well said. He said, you know, you can't get more transformational than electricity, period, right? I dare you to try to find something that's more transformational than electricity. The electricity stocks peaked in 1911.

So you can think, you can see the future of electricity. Tesla predicted the damn internet in 1926. it doesn't mean you're going to make any money. It doesn't mean you're not going to get crushed. As Einhorn said to Mike Green one day in an interview, he said, no one anticipated, very few at least, anticipated in 2000 how spectacular the internet would be, right? We were just beginning to imagine what it could do.

And it didn't stop you from getting your ass kicked. And now it's more overvalued than in 2000. So now we have a problem. bottom line is it's ultimately got to be a cash flow and and so what do you have you have google google was this stock that i had a colleague tell me it was at a moat a huge moat i go what moat he said well they have two million servers i said a hedge fund could buy two million servers and uh and and and and but but it did look like a moat and now they're in a battle for their lives right google is in trouble their ai sucks you think so and and i do yeah i don't like it at

all who do you think is doing it well like who do you actually i actually like grok i'm sure chat gpt is fine grok to me just so convenient because it's always right there um and and if i had to do something serious with ai i would do more exploring i don't doubt ai is going to make it the ability to ask a question it's like taking a google search and taking the top five pages of the links and then writing a paragraph for you to tell you what's in them right what a what a what a change um but it doesn't mean you're going to make any money in the next it'll be that it'll be the guys who scrape up the debris who then right the guys who bought bandwidth for two cents on the dollar after the crash, that's when you start actually creating real wealth.

They talk about how AI is generating huge GDP. I don't think so. I don't think so. Let's say you think a gas station will be very profitable, so you build a gas station. You call that GDP. No, that's a cost of getting to the point where you can begin to create wealth for yourself the cost of setting up all those servers is a tax on your wallet it's got to come from somewhere so now what you have is you have all these high profit margin tech stocks microsoft you know whatever and and and and an oracle who's whose credit default swaps started soaring right people think they're going to default on their debt and uh and and and so so they're high profit margin companies that, that with, with, with, with limited Capex needs. And all of a sudden now

they become, they become low profit margin companies, huge Capex needs. They're building, they're talking about, you know, building, you know, trillion dollar numbers of servers that have the life expectancy of a souffle. So they're going to have to do it again in three years that's that's a lousy business that's like selling bananas or something you know that's just that's a lousy business and and that doesn't even include the fact that some smart kid out of stanford might come along and just knock your ass because he came up with some way to do ai cheaper but there's like for example the data center in new orleans literally consumes the same amount of energy it will consume the same amount of energy as new orleans who's going to pay for that

right do you think these are hugely expensive so here's a question do you think that that's necessarily a bad thing and uh i asked from the perspective of there is no developed wealthy prosperous nation that does not consume a lot of energy yeah but that's consuming energy like the borg though that's not efficient consumption it might be efficient consumption but but it's it's without precedent the kind of consumption right so so for example you know You can draw the nation's prosperity. It's almost a linear correlation with energy consumption. I'm not sure that's not going to jump off the curve.

It's just huge amounts of energy. It's like how it's being consumed, you think, could finally be the thing that changes that. Today's episode is brought to you by Bitcoin IRA. Are you a crypto investor with a retirement account, but don't have any crypto in your retirement account? Listen up. This is for you. Bitcoin IRA is revolutionizing the way Americans save for retirement by helping smart investors diversify their savings

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your account before tax day search for bitcoin ira in the app store or visit bitcoin ira.com slash pomp to join 200 000 americans on their journey to upgrade their retirement that's Visit BitcoinIRA.com slash pump to upgrade your retirement today. If we could crank out a bunch of nukes real fast, then the energy story gets taken off the table. Right. Can we do that? Do you think we can do that? If we desperately need it, all of a sudden you go, you know, those regulations, we'll just forget about those. That strikes me as possible because that's the kind of crap government does these days is just, you know, arbitrarily makes decisions. And I want nukes coming. I think nukes were long overdue. And so, but there's so much pushback that I think we will hit a wall before we scrape ourselves off the wall and move forward and get the nukes and stuff like that.

So, yeah, let's talk about maybe things that are a little bit safer, but still in the equity world. What about like consumer staples, you know, things like the Walmarts or those types of companies? Those also have gone through a lot over the last year or so. I mean, you know, go back to April with the tariffs and everyone was so scared. But it seems like actually those businesses have done decently well. I'm not very good at those. So so I could imagine that being the case. we do have debt hidden everywhere right so that so that you get the the private credit markets

and you get you get also to debt private equity and stuff like that so so so someone asked me in a podcast one day about the resilient consumer and i said if you're using debt to consume you're not a resilient consumer you're a moron right you're you're you you have not come to terms with your place in society, right? You really can't afford to keep doing that. So I'm not convinced that the consumer is resilient and therefore the consumer staples. You know, like grocery stores, for example,

have profit margins of something like 3%, right? So I'm not very good at that stuff though. So I can't say those might be safe places, but don't forget in 1981, when the PEs of the market was six, half the companies were below six yeah and so if you buy a company thinking p12 is safe good luck you know it might be a six and that's why i'm not taking many bets on risk assets right now i'm i wish i wish we would correct in a serious way i want to be able to buy something

at a reasonable price again for the last two years if i remember correctly uh you've been very bullish on gold um and you have been uh pretty heavy in cash i've been bullish on gold since 1999 for the record yeah well i just mean in terms of your portfolio and kind of how you've been describing right you know your tactical positioning uh i think gold has been um a fairly uh uh big position but also you've been pretty bearish on equities in general what are you currently how are you currently positioned has anything changed in a major way over the last year um well besides sort of organically changing because gold you know when i laid out my investments this year that the percentage gains were just ridiculous did you see that page

i saw i mean they were outlandish i had like 250 percent gainers and stuff and that's totally abnormal for me i did that in the late 90s when i was a tech bull but not not since then Um, so, so my assets at risk, which I subtract my house, which is an expensive house, no mortgage for the record, because I don't like that. Um, subtract away fixed income that, that you can make money and fix income of your gun lock, but the rest of us, you get 4%, right. Um, and, um, and, and, and the, and then, so I would say, um, 50%, maybe a little more of my total net worth is, is I call a risk asset, the kind where you can wake up, you know, six months from now and find out you got your butt kicked.

Um, I made 65% on those. And then you average that in with the, the, the stuff that went basically nowhere. and you end up with about a 30-some percent return. Is that good? You're being rhetorical here, aren't you? There was a poll I cited, and I hope you caught it by, oh, God, what was the polling agency? And they asked the consumer, retail investor,

what do you expect as a sustainable return going forward? And they said, above inflation, 11.7%, I think was the number, right? I'm going- Why so bearish? You guys are brain dead. You guys are brain dead. You are incomprehensibly brain dead. And so when I make 30-something percent in a year, I got to figure, either we are in a fundamental change, which you Bitcoin guys are certainly betting on, and that things really are shifting in a way, and this is not just an oscillating normal cycle, or there will be some reckoning days. you know there will be some tough years um so um so i own the big play that wasn't big in terms of percentage but it was big in terms of me digging in was the platinum play which i nailed um i didn't i the total return was probably about 40 platinum itself was more like 100 but i

averaged in i was watching it for a couple years and i said when is this thing going to get off a flat line and then the second it flickered i started buying and i bought i probably bought 10 times and and the average return for which was all in the second half of the year was around 40 something percent um and and that i'm optimistic about because um at the current rate of production which is deficit the above ground platinum supplies supposedly and i've try to figure out if there's a way to refute this supposedly will be gone within two and a half years. Wow. If that's not a, if that's not a bullish setup, I don't know what is. And you get it from South Africa. I posted a Rubio quote saying, fuck South Africa. We're done with you

guys. I'm going, oh boy, that's not good. So if South Africa becomes a true failed state, right? The Marxists take the means of production and discover they don't know how to produce. Are you talking about New York or South Africa? Just kidding. South Africa. No kidding. New York. The New York problem is interesting. So they elect a guy who's whacked out of his mind Marxist. But I think you could say with some confidence that he's probably going to do what he's told. Right. He's not going to go Marxist. He's going to have powerful people saying, oh, by the way, dude, if you if you don't want to get shot in the ear, you're going to do this right so i i worry less about what he did than the fact that the new yorkers voted for him

that that's a fundamental screw-up right there um so in any event so the platinum story um if if south africa goes south more souther souther um then then the miners will get killed but the platinum will soar i i believe and so the platinum story i think is a very good story for years potentially all right i it pains me to let you do this but take your victory lap on gold versus bitcoin you know for years now i get to come on it doesn't matter i gotta take my victory lap why do you why do you think it doesn't matter because you guys bitcoin oscillates with much bigger oscillations you may have noticed i didn't in any way taunt the bitcoiners on my Twitter feed. There was, you will not see it. And in fact, a lot of times I, I, I taught the people

who are taunting him, say, look, if, if, if you, if you can't take a 30% drop in Bitcoin, you should get out of that game because this is going to be centered. Now, the question I like to ask you guys, and this, this is the, the bit, the bit, you Bitcoiners, not you, you're smart, but there's a bunch of loonies out there who keep saying, Dave, you don't understand Bitcoin. If you did, you'd buy it. And I go, look, I don't understand the computer I'm talking through right now either, but I can still use it. I understand Bitcoin well enough to understand the logic. I think I understand. I mean, there's things I don't understand about it, but what the hodlers who are a very green group of investors, you've got to admit that there is a ton of people

who know about Bitcoin who don't know about markets. Well, I would even argue that I would argue that I don't know what the percentage is, but some large percentage of Bitcoiners are actually uh they don't even view themselves as investors they view themselves as savers they're saving right they're saving into an asset that can't be debased away and so it's a it's a completely different mindset and they would even say you shouldn't have to invest you should be able to just save the wealth that you create for yourself and after it drops 80 percent yet again before going up 500 they will be in fetal position you know asking for their mom and saying i can't breathe um if you got that joke um and and uh what they don't know is about markets in history

and and so so so i i can live with my limited knowledge of bitcoin but i can't what i'm having trouble living with is is my less limited knowledge of of markets in history and i've been laboring over trying to understand so the bitcoiners have shifted their narrative it went from being a currency to an asset class, right? I mean, it really, you don't think about buying, you can, but you don't think about Bitcoin as the way we're going to buy pizza. It really is more about preserving wealth, I think. But then Larry Fink and these guys show up and they went from being libertarians, you know, we're independent of you to, oh, Larry's on our team. And by the way, Larry Fink's on my team. I'm going to slice my throat because Larry Fink is, you don't want

Larry Fink on your team. I really think that's a changing narrative that is, that may be important, may be a positive, but it's like, you know, he's like John Wayne Gacy, right? I mean, you got, he's on your team, but he might eat you. He might do a Jeffrey Dahmer's on you before you're done. So that should be disquieting. I worry about things like Tether. So is Tether audited? uh i think so at this point yeah they don't have early yeah i mean look here's the thing about tether right so i uh i know the team um i know people who have literally gone and counted you know the gold bars in the reserve etc uh howard letton coming out and saying that uh you know they got the money um but i think actually one of the most interesting things about tether

is they have this attestation page now again some people will question and say hey is it you know actually what it says it is whatever but like they publish here is every single thing in the reserve and i can't remember if it's updated daily or weekly but is it a level of transparency that you don't get from the traditional banks and so i actually think tether is um safe well one i think it's safe but also two is i think that it's one of those things where uh it's kind of like tesla to me for years people thought it was controversial and there was this you know bulls and bears and kind of this huge difference what's unique about tether is it's a private company so it's not like somebody can go buy the stock if they want to express a long or short position. Two is the

asset or the product that they have. It's a stable coin. It actually shouldn't go above or below a dollar. And so you can't make money that way either. Yet it is still so controversial because everyone believes that Tether is a huge reason why Bitcoin goes up or down or has any sort of price. Yeah, that's not what I worry about Tether. What I worry about Tether. So my understanding of tether is that they back the coin with treasuries and and as long as you're not trying to trade them that you you have a cash flow i don't care if it's low or high you have a cash flow and and that's and so that's their profit and and they can take their cash flow and buy anything they want right so as long as they're backed one for one dollar for dollar by the treasuries um what i would worry

about would be whether and if you know the guys you know they're reputable that's one thing but what i would be worried about with tether in a big picture is if if there's the stuff they're doing with the cash flow that's coming off if they get their ass kicked and then they start dipping into the reserves the ftx situation yeah the things that so so if they become my fractional reserve of stable coin yeah then the shit starts hitting the fan in my opinion i actually think that uh if you were talking to uh any of the guys over there they would they would agree with you they would say hey look if we start dipping into customer funds like that'd be a problem now what i do find uh fairly interesting um and i don't know what the right percentage is i'm not

you know a basil to expert by any means or any of that stuff but uh they actually have a slight over collateralization of the customer funds because of some of their profits they you know they lose some stuff there now what i perceive they've never told me this but i perceive tether you know one of their biggest problems are what do you do with all the profits they make too much money like well isn't it their money no of course their money but if you're let's just say you have a business and you have i don't know the latest numbers i think that have been public are like 150 employees and they make like 13 billion dollars in profit so if you're mark cuban 25 years ago you bought treasuries but like what he just said i don't need more than two billion so

you just bought treasury correct but it's just like what do you do with 13 billion dollars and if you look at some of the announcements they've made they you know they invested 750 million dollars i think in rumble they bought you know northern data they uh have invested uh in this brain-computer interface company. They're making huge, hundreds of millions of dollar investments. But this is their money. That's the key. This is their money. So they're just taking revenues from treasuries and taking them and buying risk assets. My concern would be if somehow they do something nutty. And then they say, well, so I know a kid who worked for a department store and he got in trouble because something happened. He had a car payment. His mother-in-law said,

look, I'll cover it on Monday. And he took cash from the store to cover it. And then he would return it on Monday and, and then I'll hell broke loose. He ended up in jail. And, um, and, and so you're not allowed to do that. And what happens, those people do do that when they get in trouble. And so, so, um, but, but that can happen in any company, right? Correct. Correct. Right. So, so so that's my my other concern i'm watching sailor and and his share price the client i've asked many of you guys you hodlers um capital h um um is he leveraged they always say no not much and and and well no and no and not much are two different answers so i know i know they say not much okay they say not much and and but his share price suggests that there's

something going on there because his the the market is is is is knocking um msdr down um much more than bitcoin well i think that um let's just talk about those types of companies when we use uh strategists as an example i find very fascinating um you know first it was like let's let's buy with equity. So they bought $500 million or so off the balance sheet. Then they started to use the convert. The convert terms were very attractive, 0% coupon, you know, kind of give them access to essentially free money to a degree. Bitcoin's price going up really allowed them to kind of get the flywheel started. And then what the market has been trying to figure out is I always look at the premium to NAV historically has been how much is the market convinced you're

going to buy more Bitcoin? Because if you have a premium, then you have access to the capital markets if you have no premium then it becomes hey well what are your tools now the introduction of the preferreds is really interesting because these things are offering across these different companies eight to twelve percent i think is the range that i've seen that's a pretty big nut right in terms of you got to pay out let's call it 10 11 12 percent every single year and so the introduction of his dollar uh you know kind of balance sheeters dollar reserve to be able to cover that for some period of time. What I think gets lost in the analysis is that if absolute last resort, he had to sell Bitcoin to fund the preferreds, he's got something like 50 plus years

of capital. Now, Bitcoin's price could go down. That number could get shortened. There's kind of a sacred cow of don't sell the Bitcoin or whatever. But I do think that a lot of people look at it as the Bitcoin is almost like this illiquid thing that couldn't be sold. So when you then look at as, hey, it can be sold tomorrow. And sure, there's that sacred cow where he doesn't want to do that. But in order to be able to fulfill some of these obligations, he's just got a lot of money. Right. And so I don't worry about I guess. Oh, yes. I don't I don't see that. I don't know about his company well enough to know that. That's why I just ask you guys. Here's a question i like to i like to ponder and what has my attention 100 is that i do believe we are going

to have um uh rough seas ahead and one could make the i talked to people in the whole market or in the certain sector yeah the whole global the whole global thing between private credit and sovereign debt and they're they're and and the the system keeps resetting the system it's been resetting for 500 years it just keeps resetting and uh and and one could argue that guys in high places say okay it's time to reset it right it doesn't matter it will keep resetting um bitcoin has never been through such a reset bitcoin has been through a reset in the bitcoin market it has not been through like a global financial crisis yeah that's right yeah that's right i don't worry about the Bitcoin is a hermetically sealed market.

You guys know what you're doing. Some of you. Well, we're making progress. You wouldn't have said that three years ago. So we're getting there. No, no, no, no, no, no, no. I don't like owning anything just because of price. Yeah, I know.

I really, I really, owning gold is not because I don't like chasing. I really wish someone said, well, you really like owning gold. I go, no, I don't. I dislike having to own gold. I would much rather be able to buy, you know, the S&P with a P of eight. I mean, it just, you know, and so what chasing just price bugs me. I do not like it. So you say that there's rough seas ahead in your piece.

You talk about a lot of different things that are going on. We can talk about domestic issues. We can talk about international issues. We can talk about, you know, kind of disruptive technologies. What drives the rough seas? Is it a political thing? Is it an economic thing? Is it a technology thing? Is it a combination? Purely valuation, purely valuation. So the rough seas ahead are because we are not positioned for

rough seas, right? I mean, there are ships that go up into the North Sea and have no trouble, right? If you're in a yacht, you're in trouble up there. And so valuation is the origin of all the risk in my opinion so so when you have a case shiller pe that averaged 15 for 110 years which allows you to say from the case shiller pe you probably got about a you probably got about a six and a half seven percent return eight percent return from the average case shiller pe it's now 40 it's 42 or something right if that regresses back to the 110 and if you don't give me 110 years to set a baseline for an average and if it goes below the average which by the way we both know how to calculate a mean you're supposed to spend statistically weighted half your time

below the mean and half your time above the mean now it doesn't have to be time but it has to be price weighted time right and and so so if we correct i do believe there's a chance that we are going to go back and test the 2000 peak at some point in the future. I believe that sometime in the next 10 or 20 years, we're going to go test the 2000 peak. And that's shown graphically. That is that you could, I don't know if you do this after the fact, you could show a picture of the graph and you can see it. There are four or five times from peaks in the 20th century, of which from the peak to the last time it reaches exactly that same inflation adjusted price, took 40 to 75 years people don't know this all you have to boot up an inflation adjusted chart

and put a ruler up across the chart and start looking don't look at for how long it took to recover look for how long it took to get back to that same price for the very last time 40 to 75 years which means from the 2000 peak 40 to 75 years later somewhere in that window we should touch that peak one more time and if you look at the plot you go oh my god it is going to do that look at that plot that's the most important that's what you're worried about now yes and so so so you don't have to be out of the market for 40 to 75 years but you sure as hell though you you own expensive assets it's risk if you own the top you're dead yeah what do you think that that plays into why gold has done so well i don't know gold i don't understand gold um

i was owned since 1999 my cost basis goes as low as 220 because i bought it in a closed-end fund that was 28 below nav at 270 an ounce so whatever that calculates to um silver i was buying monster boxes for like $4.50 an ounce. It was just ridiculous. Gold short-term is not an inflation hedge. It's a ridiculous claim. Medium-term, it can be. People say, well, when rates are going down, gold will go up. And I go, no, no, look at the 70s. Rates went up, gold went up because they both correlated with inflation and so uh long-term gold's a great inflation hedge so you know the back in ancient rome it announced a goal paid for a month of manual labor manual labor hasn't changed they were probably a little stronger back then but but but it hasn't changed the whole you

know bought a good suit what's a toga cost compared to a three i i don't know how to do that one um so so gold has been you can tread water long term you have tried to water for thousands of years um but at some point what would people ask what would cause me to get rid of my gold um i would have to see something better to put it in i could even imagine a scenario where i take a wad and put it into bitcoin i am going to be watching the next big downturn watching how bitcoin behaves and and and i am it's not going to be based on the price per se i'm not gonna say oh now it's cheap i'm gonna be watching how it behaves in a risky bad ugly global banking problem yeah because i guess there's an argument that bitcoin could skyrocket to a million as everyone

flies to it or it could drop 90 yeah yeah and i'm gonna i'm gonna miss it of a source and i'm okay with that right i you know it's not if you get if you become stinking rich with your bitcoin doing that i'm probably going to become moderately rich with my gold right yeah i do think that they directly get beaten up gold gets beaten up during those uh deflationary flavored downturns where where where prices are getting readjusted well i don't know if i ever told you this uh in 2020 march 12th i think it is is the big drop it bitcoin went down 50 in a single day it's a tiny oh really yeah in a single day i didn't even notice that yeah now the reason uh you'll love this so on the night of the 11th uh i remember it clear as day i said everyone around me is scared

i mean you could just feel it right i was in new york you just feel everyone was getting like oh my god and you knew when the gates open tomorrow morning there's gonna be pain right and so i started looking i said well what happened in 2008 and i went back and i looked and there's this chart that shows gold went down for about six months during the liquidity crisis kind of component of 08. And so I wrote the next day and I basically said, hey, we are in a liquidity crisis. Here's what happened in the past, blah, blah, whatever. By the way, gold went down, I think it was like 50% in six months. And so I think that this thing could go down, blah, blah, blah, and I'll stop. The next day when I wrote that, I published it in the morning, Bitcoin went down 50% that day,

and I was on the couch crying. I was like, oh my, we're going to watch this thing go to zero, right but but but but you are now a more seasoned veteran um bull markets i'm willing to i i really if i ever said bitcoin was total bullshit that's when i've lost my mind because i'm not qualified to say that yeah but they are tied to say that you if they're tied together and they're going to go up over the long run and they could you know different paces different times whatever i guess one of the questions that i have which i don't know the answer to this and it's probably the one that you know given i've been so publicly uh supportive of bitcoin people will be like oh yeah really really yeah you uh you genius well gold's up you know 70 on the year bitcoin's down

six percent does that mean that bitcoin will catch up to gold does that mean that these two have to you know close the gap does that mean gold's gonna go down and and the short answer is um i don't know and and actually that i don't know gives me you know kind of a peace of mind and then i just i don't know the answer but i do think that that is the question everyone wants to understand is if gold ripped historically bitcoin does catch up right kind of 100 days later or so then bitcoin usually kind of accelerates but that doesn't mean it has to happen historically being 15 years right correct um actually the reason that i again the reason i like platinum so much is because it's a it's not a price story it really is not a price story it is about uh lack of availability

of platinum now what i don't know is what to believe in the whole silver comex shanghai you know there was a huge amount of check they talk about backwardation right is is there a third trimester abortion of the english language more than the phrase backwardation right it's like someone said what do you call it backwardation right so i wrote a sentence that said while zoo is doing backwardation and that time was doing forwardation the metals were doing upwardation and then i came up with something else that was doing downwardation um it makes sense to me yeah makes sense to me um again the platinum story is because there's no platinum and we need platinum and so i i gotta figure that and it's not like they're gonna stop making ford f-150s

because the platinum's too expensive they will pay what they have to pay to get the goddamn platinum the platinum story might be china saying holy shit we need platinum and then we ain't gonna be able to get it and so we're gonna they could have warehouses that they're sort of putting ingots of platinum in as we speak, right? But unless I find out that I've been duped on the numbers where they say the deficit production is this much and they're wrong, consumption is this much, I've tried so hard to confirm and refute these numbers. The platinum story just can't go away if the numbers are right. How do you think about the economic policies that have been implemented over the last year or so we obviously have uh trump with the tariffs deportations seem

to be a really big input into the economy we see housing coming down some of those things some people will point to uh kind of the immigration policy stuff um obviously there has been um a number of trade deals that have been struck just like what's your general take if almost you had to give a report card on economic policy in america over the last year um he started out great the tariff story i was more sent way more sanguine about the guy named tony nash used to work for the economist high level i think i did a podcast with him i didn't know how famous he was i'm just yakking away with the guy um what i took from it and this sort of created was this idea that a tariff um can be absorbed by the producer the importer or the consumer now to the extent

that a tariff is a tax which i think it is um then you're collecting a tax which now is distributed instead of from the consumer is which we have to pay whether it's based on real estate or whatever it's now paid by part by us part by the importer part by china and india and so we actually got other countries to pay part of our taxes now the problem is if that then allowed us to cut taxes elsewhere that'd be a win but we didn't do that doge was brilliant doge was brilliant as soon as he i go holy shit he just hired a bunch of code heads to find all the waste right brilliant and then what came of it nothing really nothing unless someone can point to it i'm sure you know they didn't move usai they didn't get rid of it usaid they moved it to the state department uh i thought

they got rid of FEMA, which is $29 billion down a rat hole every year. FEMA. Someone said, well, what would we do without FEMA? And I go, FEMA does zero. FEMA does zero. I know people work with FEMA. They do zero. And my wife has seen FEMA. Zero. They killed people in New Orleans during Katrina. Zero. $29 billion down a rat hole. And then all of a sudden, two months later, Pam Bonney talks about FEMA being on it. I go, Pam, I thought you guys got rid of FEMA. So the Doge idea was brilliant. Nothing came of it, in my opinion. So I'm very disappointed.

There's one thing. I agree that in its form, it underproduced what people expected. But I think that it underproduced for two reasons. One, Elon going in, if we said, hey, there are, just like a private company, Elon, go and find all of the fraud, go find all this, make it more efficient. i'll bet every dollar i have to my name he can go and do that he has proven that in all these did you read his biography did you read his biography yes nominal yes he he was the guy that's what was so brilliant about he was the guy he ran into a bunch of people you know you mentioned mom donnie getting the tap on the shoulder like hey no no no basically they were

tapping him on the shoulder like okay yeah but not over there or not here and i always remember uh the one video of all the politicians standing outside i think it was like the education department or something like that guy standing there there's this one guy and they're going hire that guy holy he just stood there and like eating a candy bar or something just but like i mean think how crazy that is there's a group that is at work trying to go and find fraud and they have politicians banging on the door basically being like stop i mean just just the visual it's crazy i know now so fraud is now a critical part of our gross domestic power now here is what i think did come out of it right uh i think there's two things in there and they're

somewhat related one is elon's maybe one of the top skills he has he can make any job any company high status and all of a sudden it became high status now go work inside the government you see a bunch of top talent that has gone there they've now started to hire younger people like he changed the way people thought about going and working in government the second thing and maybe the most important thing this kid nick shirley nick shirley is doge in a decentralized form and i tweeted this and i said that my understanding of the internet is that nick shirley got 100 million views on x and got a couple million views on youtube he just saved us a fortune but he just incentivized an entire generation of content creators that now we're all going to go to every daycare in america

they're going to go to every home health aid in america they've all got their cameras right and now they're chasing not a financial incentive they're chasing views and nick shirley showed them if you can find fraud you get views and he is now going to deputize the influencers he 100 100 and so you know i hadn't thought about i hadn't thought at that level and that's that's really that's really good thinking there that that i'm that i'm up with so you can push back against elon you can push back against doge because it's centralized power but the whole like bitcoin approach of decentralization now you have these guys running around now here's the thing i believe that what's going to happen is it's cool and he's cool he got 100 million views

elon retweeted him bill ackman retweeted him tim urban retweeted him people are celebrating him he's going on the podcast tour like you get views you get famous if you find fraud right now that's a phenomenal observation the other thing you won't be able to evaluate the trump presidency for 20 years we know that no no no but but but he he could hypothetically there might be trump haters here but just stay with me let me let me throw out a hypothetical that he's transformational right he's he he will be the guy who transformationally sort of got us to to divert this aircraft carrier from a path that was really a bad path if kamala had had won the election that aircraft carrier would be sailing off the edge of the flat earth at some point she would

have unburdened us unburdened by what has been um that's exactly right and and by the way i also think she's mk ultra product i think she's actually a manchurian candidate a legitimate manchurian candidate and i'm not alone there's an expert on mk ultra who says she's a manchurian canada what are your thoughts on uh um tim walls and the minnesota uh daycares and like that whole thing because this all plays into the doge thing but like do you think that the politicians who are in these states are complicit encouraging it or do you think it's just a classic like it's a big you know budget there's money flowing everywhere they have no clue what's going on and uh you can maybe claim that they are incompetent but not complicit incompetent

probably bribed, right? They were probably paid to stay incompetent, right? So they probably knew that they were being bad people. I think Minnesota might've been a target because of Tim Walz being the VP candidate. So you get more sort of bad press out of Tim Walz than out of some generic governor who we don't know his name. So I think that makes it more headline. Like, look at the crap they tried to feed us right so if harris got into something they'd go after her too even though she's i think hopefully has become irrelevant for the rest of time um and and i the other thing is i did a tweet that got more more views than i thought i said that if you um i said if you think the somalis did this without help from behind um you're a retard and what i love is the fact

Now that Trump's elected, we can call people retards. Now, let me clarify that. Retards are one of three people. It's your best friend, it's your sibling, or it's someone who is pathetically clueless, but in no way, shape, or form is it a person who's born without certain skills. We don't call those people retards. But your brothers are retards. You know your brothers are retards. And there was this great meme that showed Trump. Which one? Which one? Yeah, I know. I know. There's this there's this great meme. It says Trump signs executive order. The retard is not acceptable again. And so I use it all the time. It's we got to get possession of these words back. You got to be able to call people douchebags. You know, there's just it's just that we have to grab it back from the left. um so um the question is is it in every state and i don't i don't think it was somalis i mean i think somalis were the front people but they were just the standing army right they were the guys

who were who were and i think it also they're probably the plausible deniability crowd right so they say let's put some somalis in front of us right it's sort of like black lives matter was a total scam but you know they put black guys legitimate in front of them so so that you could hide behind that and um you saw the put it did you see the political donations from the daycares have you seen this yet no no so again i'm not an expert on this i can only go off of what i read online and uh i don't think it's ai right you know it's kind of like my general defense at this point for anything i see um but basically uh the report came out that about 35 million dollars got uh donated to politicians from daycares and so the whole idea is like you

know, you're essentially taking money from the state, you're giving it to the daycares, the daycares are turning around and they're donating money to the politicians. And now all of a sudden you sort of say, hey, hold on here a second. Now, I don't remember that report. Is that nationally? Is that just from Minnesota? Just from Minnesota, that'd be kind of a big number. But they compared it to like the top tech companies, daycares are doing more political

donations than, you know, whatever. And so what I start to look at is there's some people online who they are 100% biased. But I don't think that being 100% biased means that your information is always wrong, right? Yeah. So it's always like, hey, look, I want to actually see three types of arguments. I want to see people who are really biased one way. I want to see people who are biased completely the other way. And I want to see the people in the center.

And then I'll make up my own mind. But Glenn Greenwald is trying to get it right. Yeah, just give me all the flavors and then I'll go to the side. The number one thing that I see from the highly biased fraud is everywhere people outside of the daycare, you know, kind of videos, home health aides in New York. So there's something like the reports are 40 percent of job growth in New York is in this home health aid. And supposedly there are very few checks on like, are you actually taking care of who you say you're taking care of? and, you know, all that kind of stuff, something like 14 or 15 percent of all home health aides in the country are in New York. So you say, look, New York's big, but it's not that big.

It's not that big. Right, right, right. And so, again, it comes back to this idea, you know, I asked about economic policies, et cetera, like put aside all of the just like ferocious, nasty political debate, like just throw all that out and just look at from an economic standpoint the number yeah just like number i look at it and i say i 100 can see how somebody says if people go into a hospital it leads to higher costs for health care it leads to worse outcome like there's all these things that are negative if we can have some portion of those people diverted and taken care of at home it could lead to lower cost better outcomes you know more happiness but whatever so like i'm all for if you can bring down the health care

costs if you can do all this stuff like that makes sense and it's easy to see why something like this gets approved but also i can see an argument of how the heck do you check right i mean there's i i right i think there's tens of thousands it's about as uncontrolled as the uh covid lockdown money it's crazy and so now it's coming out even i again i saw a report again there's again 100 biased in terms of fraud is everywhere people but now they're saying that there's like people in the Somalia government, I think, who share the same address in Ohio with the person who got caught up in the Minnesota like feed, feed America or whatever the name of that thing was that there's a bunch of prosecutions. And then there's a bunch of other businesses that

all share the same address of, you know, that home or whatever. And you just start to say, look, I don't know what's true and what's not. But where there's smoke, there's usually fire. But I don't think these are Somalis. If I said to you, go to Germany and set up a scam, it would be really hard because you wouldn't know the german system so i believe the somalis are the front men for for they're getting caught up in it yeah yeah they're the worker bees they're the worker bees um and and also it's one of these things where we're these the guys who really committed the big fraud right we're talking tens of billions um are happy to have us screaming about somalis and deporting them they don't care about that right so so so it's like you know it

was the virus coming out of a lab in China? It distracts us from the fact that it came out of North Carolina, right? And so I think there's that problem. I think that anywhere you have tons of money, you have crooks, period. You shove money into the system. NGO, you give me an NGO, I'll show you fraud, as far as I'm concerned. So I am in the extreme fraud everywhere category. um and and in fact here's one for you i i picked up little shards on this and i don't know what to do with it because it's only tiny bits but um there's some repeat there's a non-statistical very oddly non-statistical repeat lot of winners and there's a very non-statistical bankruptcies coming out a lot of winners and the narrative is always that they don't know

how to handle the money and so they get over their skis and then all of a sudden And, you know, like a pro athlete. Right. But but then all of a sudden you you hear about some Zorro Trust that won the lotto and it turns out to be an Epstein tied organization. And you go, wait a minute. They won the lot. And then you realize you won the lottery. Today's episode is brought to you by Arch Public. As markets shift, headlines break and interest rates swing. one thing stays true. Opportunity is everywhere. At ArchPublic, they help you do more than just buy and hold. Yes, their dynamic accumulation algorithms are built for long-term investors, but where they really shine? They're arbitrage algos designed to farm volatility and turbocharge your core positions. The best part of ArchPublic's products is they're free. Yeah, you heard that

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these bazillions of dollars being dumped into the lottos you go well it's audited by and i go oh and the auditors did a such a fine job in 06 07 when they gave triple a ratings to everything so or you've put a gun to the auditor's head say by the way we're going to kill your family if you don't make sure these numbers come up, right? It's easy to get around an auditor. And so the question, is it possible? And right now, it really is a question, not just a rhetorical question, but is it possible that the lottos have been getting scraped away by crooks? I mean, I don't know, but that's a lot of money. How many billions of dollars? Right. What's the latest jackpot was like one point six billion. That's nobody even talked about it.

So I'm sure no crooks have thought about how do we get our mitts on that. Right. And so so so I do think one of the problems we have in the in our current financial system is that there's there's so much money now floating around that you're just asking for criminal behavior. And the example I like to give you is as long as I think the interest rates are way wrong, they're way wrong. The set rate. And at one point, Bernanke, my favorite one of my favorite quotes is from 2015 where Bernanke said there's this odd misbelief that somehow the Federal Reserve policy influences asset prices. I go, oh, there's a retard. There's a guy who's just beyond comprehension, but actually more to the point, he knows better. He's just a psychopathic liar. And so when you can buy a viable company, private equity, by the way, I got an email from a very prominent money manager who said you're dead right on private equity part. When you can buy up a company that's totally viable, saddle it with debt, saddle it with fees, fuck it all up, sell the shell of a worthless company

off to some Kentucky-based pension plan that's 18% funded, and make money. Monetary policy is too loose, period. If that's profitable, if it's profitable to buy single-family homes and jack up the rent, it's a terrible business. You want to house people, you build a rectangular building with 500 units in it. Single family house, that's terrible. But if you can get the money at 0.15%, like BlackRock, and buy tens of thousands of these houses, and you can make money,

well, 0.15% is too low an interest rate. Let's start with that. If I asked you, and I probably have asked you this before, if I said, look, here's my Gedanken experiment. You have to buy a 30-year treasury. You know it'll probably be paid off, right? You don't know what inflation is going to do. You don't know what history is going to do.

It might not get paid off. Here's the rules. You can't sell it. And that's an imaginable thing. But the hypothetical is you can't hedge it. And I've tried to present this to people and say, well, I do this. And they go, no, you're missing my fucking point. You've got to buy 30 years of income stream.

And you've got to sit on it for 30 years. What would you demand out of an interest rate? What would you demand? Not knowing what the future is going to bring. High. Like 10, maybe? At least. Right.

Could be you're going to get screwed no matter what number you pick, unless there's lots of zeros. It reminds me of probably one of the investors that I respect the most. Somebody who is very well known, very well respected. um one time i was at dinner with him and he said to me uh the following the hardest problem in finance is the intertemporal transfer of wealth and i said well i'm not smart enough to understand what that means so you know run that back on uh in plain english and he said that transfer from me to my kids well just a hundred years how do you how do you how do you get the money a hundred years in the future right so yes to your kids grandkids etc and he says name one person in the

world who's ever done it not you know walton family or you just go to these you know kind of dynastic type things probably right probably rothschild's and his point is they are they have nowhere near the money they once had they solve a lot but they have nowhere near what they used to have and so he says but let's shrink the uh problem set forget 100 years how would you give yourself a million dollars in 20 years and you can't start with more than a million right right how would you how would you protect a million dollars for 20 years and so you know you start well, real estate. Well, there's a lot of places that were pretty hot, you know, 20 years ago, not so hot now, right? Interest rates, like you start going through all this stuff. And even if

you're like, oh, you know what, I'm going to do some sort of loan with a really high interest rate, but whatever, like maybe the loan goes bad or, you know, I mean, you start thinking about this. And so naturally I start thinking about things like gold and Bitcoin and, you know, things that I think are, you know, kind of in a different class, but. But even gold doesn't work because there are 20 year periods where gold sucks. So it's a fascinating question. Now, and I think I've told this story on the podcast before, this individual goes a step further and he basically says, that's why Buffett's a coward, because Buffett gives away all the money because he doesn't want to try to actually solve that problem. Forget that part for a second. But this question of like the 20-year transfer, it does really, really start to complicate it when you think about the rise of AI. How many AI companies didn't exist two years ago that now look like they're going to be the future, right?

When you look at the stock market over valuation and, you know, it's probably one of the hardest problems in finance. How do you transfer money over a 20-year period? In 89, something like 14 of the 20 biggest companies were in Japan. none of them are now in that category and and here we are again now it's the u.s and so you're absolutely right um and so you end up stuck with a you have to gamble i mean you you have to gamble so here's how we're going to do it because it's so unfair that the rich guys just keep getting richer, we are going to give access to Joe Sixpack private equity. Now tell me, tell me that I think I use the quote from Mencken in the private equity section where they're going to give

401k access to private equity, which is basically the ultimate distribution, right? That is the ultimate. Okay. We just found the biggest pile of suckers on the planet. We're going to get rid of these office buildings that are 10 cents on the dollar, but they're priced at power. We'll sell them to that funded power. They will then suck it up. And, uh, I won't know for 40 years and won't know for 40 years sooner than that though. That'll be sooner than that. But, um, I pulled out the quote from making races at some point, you got to put knives and start slitting throats. If, if, if some guy took me for everything I was worth and it was a scam, he'd be at risk. he would be at risk and uh and and that would that would make people think twice about it

and that that's getting into sort of revolution right now here here here's a here's something that drives me nuts what percentage of the financial gurus think we should be dropping rates right now what percentage do you think more than 50 more than 50 yeah right right so so let me let me see if i got this right those same gurus would say we got screwed because the federal reserve cut rate put rates too low for too long and i would add to that too many times right and now they're saying but we got to do it again how insane is that now my next question is now got this young generation. While rates dropped from 17 to zero, essentially, over 40 years, the average age of first-time buyer of homes doubled. Went up, excuse me, went up linearly

and went up about 10 years from 30 to 40. And so here rates are dropping. They're saying that makes housing more affordable, but the average age of home buyer is going up, not down. So how can that possibly even exist right so now what we're going to do we're going to take a generation who just spent a fortune up to their ass in student debt to major in sociology at dipstick college and or cornell um and and and then and then and then they can't buy a house they can't buy a house they can't afford a house but we're gonna drop rates so that the boomers can take these overvalued McManches made out of plastic and sell them without losing any capital gains on that house to this generation because rates are so low now. They're going to put them low

again. They'll give them back a 50-year mortgage, 3% rates, right? So that that next generation can get screwed yet again because rates will go up and they'll own a house that they paid that was way overpriced. I bought a house in 1981 that I could afford after a year working at Cornell with interest rates at 16%. The reason you can afford it is because the houses were cheap. I bought cheap houses at high rates. Rate goes down, my house goes up. That's how it works. Rates are now going to go up at some point. They absolutely are going to go up at some point. I don't care what the Fed wants to do. The rates are going to go up because I really do believe free markets have a way of wrestling free of constraints and at some point we are going to

regress to and through the mean you cannot name me an asset class that got way overpriced that didn't get cheap again art i bet i bet it has no no no i bet it has you're you're saying now Yeah, now. Right? Well, we're at the top of a cycle. We're in the everything bubble, right? This is a stage four cancer to the extent that absolutely everything is now out of reach. And we, by the way, have younger generation who are pissed off.

They're broken. They say, I don't want to get married. I don't want to have kids. I can't afford them, right? This is not a rosy future. you want to hear when you're you want to hear 20 to 40 year olds are depressed you want to hear a you are not going to rock you want to hear a crazy view of uh how i think you solve some of this so have you seen these studies building luxury apartments or how homes drives down the cost

across the entire socioeconomic uh curve just by supply so like you go into um any town usa if you start building luxury apartments affordable housing prices go down which is counterintuitive right you're like well you're not building housing for the affordable community you're building it for pulling people out of it it's pulling people out of it people migrate up right and so you free up some of the the supply and then that drives the price down okay so the people not living not living in houses who are going to move to houses what's that going to do to commercial real estate 100 no no but just take for a second that real estate example then um same thing is true in what i'll call luxury items the more you know lvmh is the more art the more just things

that only rich people are going and buying feeds into the velocity of money it feeds into uh the gdp growth like all this kind of stuff and so one of the things that uh i took away from the entire new york city mayor race is that if you went and you looked in these communities at the demographics that voted for which candidate right the lowest socioeconomic kind of uh cut across all of the different boroughs did not vote for mom donnie even though the policies were supposed to be helping those people i by the way heard that the jews did which which is hysterical it depends it depends on uh which right which borough and stuff but the thing in theory in theory the jewish vote should have stayed away from mandami but here's the thing is that what you essentially got is you

got wealthier people whether even middle class too wealthy they were voting for policies that they think were helping their you know their neighbor or the person who needs help right right whereas those people were not voting for those policies at the rate that you would think they are and so what becomes interesting is if you think of that same example from a political standpoint and you now bring it back to the economy how many things do we do in the economy that is supposed to be addressing affordability when actually when you look at the data the things to address affordability or build luxury apartments and you'll drive the price of all apartments down because guess what it's easier to build luxury apartments than it is to build

affordable apartments right right right and so it's like you know the water going down because they're less price sensitive. They're less price sensitive. Guess what? The people who usually block the building of affordable housing or the rich people who don't want the affordable housing in their neighborhood or whatever nonsense that they're voting against. And they'll move out. They'll move out. So all of a sudden you say, you know what, we're just going to build more luxury apartments. Well, they're all for that because they say, oh, if you build more luxury apartments, that should drive, you know, cost down. Now, what you actually get is you get some pushback there anyways, because like, well, I don't want the apartment I currently own

to go down in value right so you do get you know still some of this pushback but the the thing being that sometimes by address by trying to address affordability you actually have to feed the beast in these other areas and that's what actually has the impact i have your next reading assignment i can't wait roshir sharma roshir sharma okay find it um and it it's it's a book about what has happened to capitalism but it is not a screed and it's not one of these guys who says look you have to let us just do anything we want and you know anything like that you know rashir shamra uh what went wrong with capitalism okay and and and it's this great what i would call it a sort of a great overview

of what i call um good intentions bad interventions yep and and and it sort of boils down to that and he goes through this this is what they did but this is what then happens he does this great analysis it's very much in line with what you just said where you say we got to build affordable housing and then and then what happens is you you bring in people who really need housing next thing you know it's a crack house right you know things like that and so so there's just things that go wrong he he talks about capitalism going wrong because of ill-conceived notions and it's so it's not a super duper pro-capitalism as much as a super duper uh uh quit being an idiot think of tesla i think you'll like it tesla started at the top built a sports car and worked their way down

right used the the uh funding other than the government funding but they used the funding of people buying the sports car to price and sensitive buyers price and sensitive buyers guys who would buy it just because it's cool and so i i think that um you know it ultimately goes back you and i think one of the themes of our conversations every year is that uh there is significant misunderstanding of how markets the economy and assets work and i tie that into the education system. And maybe one of the areas that I am most optimistic about is the fact that this rise of AI, the end game in education is that every kid has a personalized tutor. And if they're able to better understand how this stuff works and become smarter, maybe

we get better policy over time. I'm just not counting on it. problem i have with it and i've articulated this many times is that i think you um i think you learn by organizing your thoughts constructively and so for example doing podcasts right so you have these discussions you get better at articulating the views that you think are right you get better at taking out the stupid ideas that you thought were right because someone comes like says oh by the way lower rates are going to hang you know expensive houses on the younger generation you go oh i hadn't thought about that you know that sort of thing um writing as a scientist i can tell you the project wasn't done until i wrote the paper and it was self-consistent

and it was coherent and all the pieces i say oh we got to do this experiment this experiment we didn't do that we got to do these control experiments and and i think ai is going to undermine a lot of that. And so kids are now not writing papers. They're just having AI write their papers. They're not doing their homework. They're having AI do their homework. Do you let them do that in class? I don't know how the universities are handling this. I happen to be in an experimental... The two courses I teach, I don't see where AI can save you. I can't picture how AI can save you. I would never give, I was going to teach a writing course. Cornell has a freshman writing

seminar program. You take two semesters, any topic imaginable. The idea was, look, find a topic you like, but you're going to write papers and you're going to learn how to write better. And when I took it, when I was a freshman, I took art history and I took sciences literature taught by a couple of full professors, but I had to write papers. And I was going to teach a freshman writing seminar on personal finance. And I got cleared from both ends. I didn't know what I was going to talk about. You can imagine talking about 401ks, why the Roth IRA is a sack of garbage, and things like that, which I believe it's misunderstood. And what saving is, what debt does, you can imagine. I could have quite a party. And for freshmen, they might say, holy shit,

don't major in sociology let's start with that right they might say this is not practical um and and the problem is is then chat gpt showed up and i said i'm not going to grade a bunch of papers written by computers so the course should still exist in my opinion but as a writing course no i think every institution should teach personal finance that would be a good start yeah i it's funny i have people send me stuff all the time emails you know uh memos all kinds of stuff and i can tell the ones i probably missed some that were written by ai that you know but i mean sometimes people just literally copy and paste and it's like written in the exact you know bullet points with the header that you know whatever right um and on one hand i'm like come on man

right like why are you sending me this on the other hand i'm like you know what it's probably better than if they had sat down and wrote it by themselves and so i struggle with how to kind of approach it i totally agree but here's the problem i have noticed and i it couldn't be just my psyche could be i had a very tough year um where i had a sort of existential crises where i i got into it with the zionists you can hear hints of that you if you read the last couple chapters um and it wasn't a fight i was looking for and i stepped into it by going on tucker carlson and finding out that i just stepped into world war iii um but does he have a big audience i'm told i'm told and and uh it was absurd and so i had to write a chapter to counter the douchebags um

i called the head of a national jewish organization a mean motherfucker um and i can see you really uh learned your lesson to not do that no no that i called after the fact oh i see i see so i i called him out because he called me a holocaust denying nazi and i go okay you've just thrown down the gauntlet buddy and so victor davis hansen lied his ass off about stuff i said he lied his ass off he at first i thought he just misread the historical literature at one point i said to a former chemist to a former historian um let me explain this to you right um he was over three he was wrong he's just flat out wrong but then i realized that was not the story this is a war against tucker carlson and i happened

to step in in the hot zone what what happened what happened with him he was you know obviously he was at fox he left everyone kind of was like hey this guy's like the new media and then it does seem like there is just something did happen to him it becomes much more controversial i think on both sides like people are very um just in let's argue so i read his book i believe that he had a bit of a come to jesus moment when he went to iraq for a month while the war was going on and he realized that a war he had supported was completely insane and i think he had his holy i think he is a moral guy and i think he had a holy cow i am just on the wrong path so then i us in fox he was pressing the envelope i mean he was really pressed pressed over his skis almost as

though he was saying i dare you to fire me kind of thing um and then he gets fired and i think he got fired because they didn't want him around at fox for the next election so that they could rig it and um and then they found out that they were trying to keep the video on youtube okay you can delete that um and i think what they failed they kept him on payroll so that he had a non-competitive clause but but but if he doesn't accept money he's not competing and so he just went onto twitter and and and and and and and built the fan base now um i think he reached a point where he said i am not gonna sit by and watch what i think are the wrongs of society and i have watched him in his shtick is getting smoother, better, more coherent, less deniable over just a matter of months.

If you listen to him, you go, I can't find something I can argue against in that presentation. And he clobbered Ted Cruz. He put Ted Cruz right through a wood chipper in an interview before mine. And then Ted Cruz came after me. Mark Levin came after me. It was really just an ugly situation for me because i don't want to be in that league i that's what i realized i realized i'm a little thin-skinned um i'm happy to start a debate at the in the amateur ranks but but when it got to the professional ranks it got really unpleasant for me and so i had to write a counter-attack but then say you can come at me again now but you're not going to land a punch because i'm a no-show for that fight you can swing all you want but i'm not going to be there

and uh and and but i was mad and it's altered me it is would you have gone on tucker again knowing everything you know now yes i'll tell you i'll tell you what i've kind of noticed as the pain of it has worn off i realize that i am i have gotten to play in what could turn out to be an historically important chapter. And so before I was on, Dave Smith was on, and he's certainly very outspoken. Thomas Massey was on, and he talked all about the lobbyists. And Charlie Kirk was on, and I can't remember what he talked about, but we know what happened to him. And at least Some of us think we know exactly why. And so, when I went on, I didn't realize that I was,

I was walking into Europe in 1939, thinking I was on a vacation. But there is something, there is something about being there. It's like going to a Celtics game or something, right? You're there, it's the big leagues, you get to watch and so yeah i would do it again i would go on again i might change the wording of literally one sentence that i said i i for an hour and a half i spoke about the most bad

shit stuff you can imagine right i i decided i could never imagine that did you did you by chance watch it if not you should watch it because i i decided i was going to hit hot topics i decided i was going to give this guy a buffet table and so we went back and he picked up on the fact that that's what I was doing. So he just let me like, you know, sort of ADHD, just go from topic to topic to topic from, you know, Las Vegas shootings to, you know, the vaccine to you name it. He let me go all over the place. And it's like a Dave column, greatest hits. They've come greatest hits. That's exactly right. And, and then he recognized there was a theme and he said, so the theme is there's, there's nothing here that makes sense now. Right. And I said, yeah, that is a

it's a professional wrestling and we we talked and i loved talking to the guy and we talked about stuff after the chat that was dark as dark could be and uh and and so uh and while we're sitting at lunch at breakfast chatting where he's trying to figure out what his staff stuck him with you know that sort of thing um um he's getting text messages from senators i mean it it was surreal and and and then one comment that really i read a lot of the comments i try to read comments but there were 6 000 right so i didn't read 6 000 comments but i went looking for evidence that the commenters picked up on any problems there were none i mean they were unbelievably there was a lot of joe six-pack saying that was so great right a lot of guys who don't have a voice right

and one guy said and this was kind of stuck with me he said he said i i was wondering who the hell this guy is he said then i realized he is me and i go what a great way to phrase that and that really stuck with me and so um one of my friends you know um i but shouldn't name famous european money manager um elite um he he said he was watching it he called an italian friend over to it and said watch this and uh i bet you i know who it is i'll tell you after i think i already know who give me initials give me initials first name t yeah yeah he sent me the most spectacular he's been such a great friend um by the way his first famous interview i set up i don't know if you know that i know we don't have to say anything else people be able to figure it out yeah and

people said how did that happen and and i got and i was given credit for setting it up uh he had never done an interview before um so in any event um he calls his italian friend over and after a few minutes the guy said this guy speaks truth and and i think that's critical so if you start filtering yourself if you start if you start if you start muzzling yourself but um but there are some people i don't want to do i was going to write about satanic cults and and stuff like that which by the way, is a huge problem. You can't, for three years I've been studying them and, and either they've completely faked me out or there's some real dark stuff out there. Can I give you a book to go read? Yes.

There's a book, um, it's called cults, C U L T S. And it goes and it takes a, uh, historical look at a bunch of cult leaders. And, uh, there's a couple of, uh, not really satanic, but, um, similar you know like uh the guys doing the voodoo uh with the animals and the pots and you know kind of like they were sitting there eating the cats type stuff right like that type of stuff right and you read through this and what you realize is the whole satanic cult uh you know club story yeah it runs through a lot of those cults i mean there's a lot of similarities and how these things come together darker than what you just said they're way darker than what you just said it was very they're not necessarily just they're not just cats and barnyard animals

in those pots um there's some humans involved well then the the thing that uh the book goes through i mean i think there's like you know charles manson right i mean it goes through a bunch of the charles manson right um but you can just see there's a bunch of similarities between these various uh kind of historical stories things that you know for especially young people who are listening to this who don't know these figures are if you go talk to your parents or grandparents and ask them about some of these figures they'll have they'll remember it you know following along the story as it you know developed type thing right um right and you just start to realize like yeah man history does repeat itself you know different forms the problem with the cult story

the problem with the cult story a couple problems one is that you get about 80 percent of there and you can see the finish line but there's this this gap that you have to sort of jump over and so there's very very famous hollywood types who who appear to be satanic but you wouldn't want to have to win it in court right and so you're sitting there going okay everything points that way but like for example like the charlie kirk story who shot charlie kirk well you can point at sovereign states but you can't prove it but everything says look you know the wife's in the in in the garage he's in a puddle of blood the dad's the father's the husband's sitting on the couch drinking a beer who you're going to talk to first right you don't have any evidence

he killed her but who are you going to talk to right so so so you can really smell it the cult thing is so strange but it the problem is it's so dark that if you if i just if i just i've done talks on it if if i just threw you into the deep end of that pool you just say i just cannot believe this is true you just could not comprehend that it's true and and it is true the breadth of it is is hard to get germs around the the depth of it um who who is involved so i talked to tucker this is what i talked to tucker about he says and i know these people and his staff was watching bug-eyed and we're talking about it and he outdid me he outdid me and i'm going holy moly and then he actually interviewed a guy after that who looked at at uh satanic cults in uh hollywood

and silicon valley and but they didn't talk in great gory detail it was it was oddly sanitized which tucker has a habit of doing it's crazy world so so so after by the way after what made this year so hard to write was i was going to write about charlie takes me right to israel i already had a fight with those guys was going to actually write about israel and i thought i could do it without being inflammatory and i go you know if there's gluten in my bagel they're going to get mad at me so so no i'm not fighting those guys um and then someone said well i was hoping you'd write about the satanic cults i said so you want me to go from trying to distance myself from rabid zionists to go after the satanists this this strikes me as going the

wrong direction here right and so um in any event what um where can we send people for you what would be most valuable where you want people to go after listening to this um my year in review it's my pin tweet um what is your uh your x or your twitter account uh david b column and then my pin tweets um it's excellent i don't recommend you know one of the problems we face is everything from finance to to to social stuff to politics is really way more screwed up looking than it used to look is that is that correct in your opinion yeah i mean just and and so the the politics looks like it's grotesquely corrupted at this point um and wall street right i mean it's a soulless place right and so so so and and then you find out that you know we went through this whole

woke period where the your kids are being taught that you know that that you know my generation wore bell bottoms the younger generation decided it was cool to cut off your dick right it just makes no sense and um and and i i don't know if i recommend people try to understand this because because once you go on one of these rabbit holes and you go holy moly i i did not know this was here i i did not know it was this bad if you dug into the somalia somalia story you would you would be repulsed by what you found i was too busy writing when that story started to break so i actually am a little thin on it um i'm not sure i recommend people go down these rabbit holes it's almost like ignorance is bliss you know just you know put food on the table go to your kids little

league games you know watch fox news if you want right they're all liars they're all liars i'd rather watch fox than than the others but um they're pathetically inaccurate in my opinion and um follow just enjoy life enjoy enjoy every warren zavon on his deathbed said enjoy every sandwich you're wolfing down a you know a excelled sandwich not noticing that it really tastes great but you're too busy trying to get it down because you got to get to some meeting enjoy that sandwich michael crichton tells you you know look at headlines from 30 years ago everything seems so hyperbolic and none of it mattered in retrospect um there's a famous maxim i use maxims in class all the time don't worry about the little things

two maxims don't worry about the little things and everything's little there are very very few things that happen in your life where a year later it will matter now that attitude can turn you into a slug right if you say i don't care about anything right you become a sociopath but um but but but but try to enjoy your existence and i did at least enjoy doing this stuff chasing these things not sure where to go from here not sure i'm going to be able to believe anything i read going forward right you know your own lying eyes will now really lie you know you you did you see the the silver guy who was talking about how the banking system was going to collapse chinese guy they call him chinese guy did you see chinese guy i did i posted as more

doom porn so it clearly but but but here's someone putting out huge volumes of of content somehow just carpet bombing the internet with content about the silver market and most of it was actually pretty accurate but maybe not all of it right that's the problem so we will talk again my friend i don't know in six months or a year definitely in one year keep writing the year in review i know that uh it's a beast but i enjoy reading it and so do half the length this year half the length i told someone this morning i said he he took it easy this year i wrote 156 pages i know i've right now i've read i'm reading and copy editing i'm gonna sell the anthology it's not me bob moriarty the gold bug he's doing all the heavy lifting he's paying for a copy editor

he's paying to set it up and i just have to upload it and it's going to be 16 years of them 16 volumes reading them has been eye-opening because i'm relearning what i knew about subjects i go holy shit i forgot all about how crazy that was and uh and it's about 3 000 pages i'll be the first buyer you got one buyer right okay okay okay just and if you want i get swag sent to me i get crazy email sent to me if you want to send me an ingot of platinum look at this guy yeah i've never made any money off what i do i've never made any money off what i do just you're doing a great job i always appreciate it i always enjoy talking we'll do it again next year