The Tucker Carlson Show - Dave Collum: Financial Crisis, Diddy, Energy Weapons, QAnon, and the Deep State’s Digital Evolution

Episode Date: August 20, 2025

There aren’t many Ivy League professors as bold as Dave Collum. It’s amazing he still has a job.  (00:00) How Collum Predicted the 2008 Financial Crisis (11:00) Collum’s Mission to Uncover the Truth About Covid (19:36) Government Experiments Being Conducted on Foster Care Children (24:17) What’s the Truth About Diddy? (34:07) What’s the Truth About the Assassination Attempt on Donald Trump? (1:00:45) Are We Being Purposefully Distracted From Things That Actually Matter? (1:12:04) The Real Dangers of AI Dave Collum is a professor of organic chemistry at Cornell University, where he earned his BS in biology and later returned after completing his PhD in chemistry at Columbia. A former department chair and 20-year associate editor of The Journal of Organic Chemistry, Dave has also consulted for major pharmaceutical companies including Merck, Pfizer, and Amgen. Outside of academia, he’s known for his sharp, contrarian takes on politics, economics, and culture—often shared via his unfiltered X account (@DavidBCollum), frequent podcast appearances, and his widely read annual “Year in Review” at Peak Prosperity. He’s also coached collegiate gymnastics and taekwondo and has been featured in outlets like The Wall Street Journal, Rolling Stone, and The Federalist but usually on topics far removed from chemistry. Paid partnerships with: Dutch: Get $50 a year for vet care with Tucker50 at https://dutch.com/tucker Liberty Safe: Visit https://LibertySafe.com to find a dealer and learn more Beam: Get 30% off for a limited time using the code TUCKER at https://ShopBeam.com/Tucker Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In all-American and veteran-owned company, freeze-dry wholesalers is offering Tucker listeners a lifetime discount of 15% off with code Tucker at checkout. Using proprietary freeze-dry technology, freeze-dry wholesalers is the only company in the industry that can freeze-dry whole steaks, entire pork chops, and more. With a diverse line of products lasting for the next 25 years, freeze-dry wholesalers is the perfect option for hiking, camping, or stocking up your emergency supply. Receive a lifetime discount every time you use code Tucker at checkout. Go to freeze dry wholesalers.com today and be prepared for tomorrow. Very few college professors do what college professors are supposed to do, which is kind of breakthrough outside campus into the conversation among smart people about what the world is about.

And in other words, they don't kind of influence their broader culture directly. and you do, and you're an organic chemistry professor. Are you allowed to do this at Cornell? Are you allowed to kind of opine on economics, social policy, foreign policy? Like, what are your administrators saying when you do this? I don't know if it's generally true, but Cornell's not giving me any golf. The only problem I had with Cornell, and we talked, you know, we had breakfast and we talked a little bit about, I think my colleagues wish I would shut up, but they don't tell me to shut up, although, you know, they've told me to stay on. I have kind of an intellectual Tourette syndrome. Stay in your lane.

Well, I'll be in the middle of class. Like in March of 2007, in the middle of class, no warning, I blurt out the banking system's about to collapse. I'd written about it in 2002, but I turned, I said, I think it's about to collapse. This is an organic chemistry class? An organic chemistry class. And they looked at me, and I just said, look, I think the entire banking system's going down the tubes now. And it took another year and a half to... Did they say that's not a related discipline? What are you talking to them?

No, no, no, no, and gave me guff for that. What was entertaining about that particular Tourette's like outburst is that I had the same kids in an honors thesis course two years later. in the first lecture, one lecture a week, the first lecture, I said, didn't I warn you? This is February of 2009. So didn't I warn you that the banking system was going to collapse? They said, yeah, you did. And I said, did your econ professors tell you that? They said, no.

And I said, what are those assholes made for? In this thesis course, I used a lot of guest lectures. So my first guest lecture was the CEO of Morgan Stanley Bank. And he had cut his teeth on mortgage-backed securities, and he spent two hours talking about the catastrophe that we were in the middle of in February of 2009. and so yeah i do occasionally go off the rails but but no one gives me grief i got canceled in 2020 the closest you and i i've been following you for years but the closest you and i actually came to actually meeting but we didn't um was in 2020 i got canceled during the height of

cancel season right remember how it was happening all the time and and the probability of me ending up being interviewed by you was pretty high because it was being i got canceled and i was written up in the federalists and places like that. What were you canceled for? Oh, it was a real crime against humanity. I supported the police. Oh, okay. It was one of those.

Remember the guy got knocked over in Buffalo? Yes. A friend of mine, I was doing a podcast with that Saturday, posted that late one night and said, I think this is just appalling when the old guy got knocked up by the riot police. And I watched the video a couple times. I said, well, Chris, his name was Chris Irons. I said, we can talk about it on Saturday, but I have no idea what he was doing there.

So this is in a tweet. And I said, he was poking riot police with something that looked kind of like a taves or something. Turns out in retrospect, it was a skimmer. And so I said it looks like kind of a self-inflicted problem to me, right? I didn't say he deserved it or anything like that, but it is self-inflicted. if you poke a riot policeman and he knocks you over, right? That's pretty much, you know, it's a Darwin award. Bears and riot policemen shouldn't be poked.

Turns out what I learned that night was that cancel culture is not organic. It was incredibly astroturfed. The speed with which it happened was staggering. It was automated. Within 20 or 30 minutes, email boxes all across the administration were filling with complaints. It went everywhere. I had to lock down my Twitter feed fast and things like that.

And then Cornell was on sort of a war footing trying to figure out what to do. Now, they're trying to figure out what to do just because they wanted the fire to be put out, right? So they weren't against me in that sense. It was during the lockdown. So I didn't actually, there was the advantage of everyone was locked down. But I wasn't sure Antifa wouldn't show up, and we know that's not organic either, right? And so I slept with some loaded guns, and I was emotionally ready to blow someone's brains out. How many 10-year professors in Ivy League schools have guns at home?

I don't know. Just you? Well, there's probably more. We have Natural Resources Department and stuff like that. And those guys probably use the resources available. But the one mistake Cornell made, they made two mistakes. First of all, it turns out the guy was a grifter. The whole thing was faked.

And there's video footage of him telling people he's going to go get knocked down and people yelling at him for doing that. It turns out the blood that came out of his ear. I've talked to physicians, they said it would never come out like that. There's pictures of him on the gurney talking on his cell phone behind the ambulance. The press couldn't find him in any of the hospital. He made a lot of money on GoFund me. So he grifted.

While he was supposedly in a coma, his Twitter feed, which had all sorts of fuck the police kind of comments, was being scrubbed very quickly. And so the turn to the whole thing in retrospect was a grift. So I was dead right. Cornell was on a warfutting, trying to figure out how'd just stop this. There's graffiti all over the campus and stuff. And so they made two mistakes. One is at no point did someone from Cornell reach out and say, how are you?

you doing, right? Because I got North Carolina, got canceled, and he killed himself, right? I wasn't going to kill myself. It was unpleasant, I would admit that. How long had you been at Cornell at that point? Oh, that would have been 40 years. Four years. Four years is an undergrad, so, you know. So he spent 44 years at Cornell at that point, so not a newcomer. No, and by the way, the guy who was the provost at the time was a friend of mine. He was, I knew him from the day he got to Cornell. He's the president. And it's useful. So when I, when I told, I, I knew I was coming here and I asked a trustee, I'm going to be talking to Tucker. Is there anything? And you'd like me to somehow get out there, not that I'm going to be there talking, man. But it would be stupid to miss it. And I sent a quick

email to the president and said, is there anything? And he gave me a couple of bullets, but they were obvious. They were the obvious things. And the second mistake they made is eventually they put together some, and the Daily Sun was doing what I called the Daily Column, where they'd publish an article out what an asshole I was, right? And they'd write an article about the football team and get the NSA, by the way, did we mention columns an asshole, right? That's sort of thing. So they finally wrote a letter denouncing me. And it was signed interestingly by the president, who I didn't really like that much, that president. The provost, who's a friend of mine, which was ironic. The chief of police, which was super ironic. And a couple other administrators who was

missing was one of our deans, the dean of arts and sciences, who didn't sign it. He would have been an obvious signer. And he once said to me, what good is tenure if you don't have free speech? Now, they weren't trying to hurt me. They were just trying to put out of fire and put it out. So in that sense, they did the right thing. Do they call and tell you they were going to denounce you before they did? No. And by the way, I know a number of trustees. at this point. And they all said they should have just shut up. So that was a mistake. More recently, a guy named Rickman, I think it was, you know, made that statement about it being exhilarated that Israel got attacked, right? And he shouldn't have said that, right? That was stupid.

But what people don't understand is that universities are a funny combination of free speech and academic freedom. We're supposed to foster speech. And that means dumb speech. That means sometimes hostile speech, right? And you know that drill. And then the president denounced him, same president, the one I didn't really like, the one who denounced me. And she said, this is only the second time I've denounced something. A faculty member said, and I go, yeah, I was the first. Hey, to brag, but we're pretty confident this show is the most vehemently pro-dog podcast you're ever going to see. We can take or leave some people, but dogs are non-negotiable.

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Go to shopbeam.com slash Tucker for 30% off. What about the then provost, now the president, who is your friend who denounced? Do that affect your friendship? No, not a bit. They were just trying to put out of fire, and I was ready for the fire to be put out. What helped is several trustees wandered in the president's office and said, don't even think about doing something stupid here. So I had one day I put out a tweet, talk about how lovely Cornell is.

Cornell is a phenomenal institution. So my loyalty to Cornell is tainting my vision. But Cornell is not like the other ivy's. It's not Harvard. It's not Princeton. It's in the middle of this idyllic setting with we have 200 gorges. the people at Cornell are self-selected. They're the ones who want to live here, right?

If there was a college in your neighborhood, it would be filled with people who love the outdoors. It would be filled with people who like this way of life, right? Cornell has that. And so, by the way, it's ranked number one in a critical category. It has more top 10 ranked departments than any school in the country. And that's because we have so many different things going on here. So it's a very special place.

So the letter denouncing you was really just kabuki. I mean, it was just... It was kabuki, yeah. It was tried to just put out the fire. And it did. And I paid a price. I lost a consulting gig at Pfizer because of it, because I was now a Nazi, you know. Wait, Pfizer didn't stand by you?

I had consult there for 20 years, and they were going to Zoom consulting. And Pfizer doesn't need a controversial consultant either. So they just cleared the deck as well. So I don't hold it again. I hold against, what I hold against Pfizer is the vaccine. I don't hold. The guys I can tell with the Pfizer were great guys. And Pfizer, they were trying to get their job done right and stuff like that.

Why do you, as an organic chemist, why do you hold the vaccine against them? Because I think it killed a lot of people. And they knew it. I read the, so I started writing about COVID right away. You can imagine, right, as scientists. I started networking. I'm in a group called Doctors for COVID Ethics for four years where we had every major antivax on the planet go through this. Wait, so you're a consultant to Pfizer.

You're a pretty famous, one of the most famous organic chemists in the country. So if you say the Pfizer COVID-Vax killed a lot of people, it can't be dismissed as crank talk. Well, it could be because I'm not a vaccine expert. I'm an organic chemist. So I have certain technical skills that probably help me burrow. And it's the genetics majors, an undergrad, that helps me. I don't use the biocam or the genetics, but it allows me to sort of read stuff. But you think it killed a lot of people?

Well, the Pfizer papers, which are papers written about the clinical trials and the VERS database, show huge number of problems, right? And so the doctor for COVID ethics, we had every famous anti-vaxxer. One of the first ones I went to, it was Bobby Kennedy, and we had, you name it. You name an anti-vaxxer. You name the Malones, the Ryan Coles, the Brian Artis's. You can go on and on and on. They all went through this group. And we talked about things three or four years became well-known.

Is anyone keeping track of how many Americans were killed by it? Well, it's very hard because, first of all, every flu death got absorbed into the COVID stats. So the flu disappeared, which can't be true. And if it did because we were locked down, then how did we all get COVID, right? So there's now studies coming out from other countries because we have too many people who will look very bad when this data comes out. But the Japanese, for example, have come out and said some very strong things about what didn't happen. The head of the Japanese medical system, I think, came out and said that you could correlate the number of deaths with the number of shots. Right.

And so it's now that the gag order has been released, scientific studies are making it into the literature. And there's already thousands. It's got to be one of the great man-made disasters of our lifetimes. The lockdown, too. I think you mentioned, or someone did in one of your podcasts about the travest. Maybe it was Walter about the day. travesty of locking down. You tell me how old a kid is, and I can tell you what subjects he does not, or she does

not know. So if you were studying trigonometry, the year that everything was locked down, you don't know trigonometry at all. We pretended to teach them. They pretended to learn nothing to happen. And do you see that now? Well, you could see it going through the system. So, for example, our first year grads who were taking organic chemistry, went

during lockdown when they showed up, they were very weak in organic chemistry. Yeah, you can see it. So think of the poor kid who's five years old trying to learn how to read and write and everything's through a mask, right? That, that, that, and there's imprinting periods, right? There's periods where you learn to read and write or you're kind of in trouble. And so we, we, it was disastrous. It was absurd.

And the whole thing was done by Fauci. But how could, but our Zoom group, by the way, had Scott Alice. And so I asked Scott. I said, Scott, was it malicious? Fauci and Berks did what they do was malicious? And I think it was. I mean, I think there's evil forces behind those two, but he took a different tact. He said, you cannot fathom how stupid those two are. That was his answer. He said, Fauci never gave a scientific argument, never. And he said, one day, this is a staunch. She said, one day, this is all recorded. So I'm not, you know, talking behind his back. This is, there is a recording on the internet with us. He says, one day he walks in with a scientific paper that Atlas had read.

And so he's thinking, whoa, Fauci is actually going to say something scientific. Fauci went to say encephalomyelitis. Now, if you work at the 7-Eleven, you might stumble on that one. But if you're headed, the entire health organization, you shouldn't. And he said he botched it so bad it was unintelligible. And Atlas said, come again. What'd you just say? And Fauci wouldn't repeat it.

He said, Burks was yanking shit off the internet, making pie charts having not a clue what it meant, not a clue. That's terrifying. Now, here's the Christian Malice, though. He didn't speak up, I don't think. Fauci. Atlas. I think he sat there. Can I ask you to back up just a moment, though?

So you're describing now incompetence, but you alluded earlier to Malice. What do you think the dark forces behind Berks and Fauci were? Well, I think they, first of all, they love the fact we're talking about whether it came out of a lab in Wuhan because that way we're debating whether to blame the Chinese or not, right? When, in fact, I think it came out of a lab, probably in North Carolina. A number of guys who've tracked both the disease and the vaccine back years before it showed up on our dinner plate. I think low level of malice would be... Wait, you think it came out of a lab in North Carolina? Yeah, Ralph Barrack.

You can follow... Guy named David Martin has followed the patent trail. And artificial organism can be patented, not a natural one. Yes. And you can follow the patent trail on COVID. And you can follow a vaccine patent trail. And it got to watch you get moved around, move from point A to point B. If it was created North Carolina, how did it get to Wuhan?

And what was that? Because we were funding, we were funding research in Wuhan because we were not allowed to do game of, sorry, I keep tapping the table. Oh, it's all right. This is a topic that deserves some table tapping. I've done podcasts where I have headphones and I have four boss, three Boston Terrier, soon four, and they snore. I can't hear them because my headphones are noise.

dampening. And then I listed the pot to hear this humongous amount of snoring behind me. So I'm aware of background noise. You didn't bring the terriers this morning. I didn't bring the terriers, no. So, but you, I just want to flesh us out a bit. You think it was created or begun in North Carolina, then brought to Wuhan for. To be elaborated, to be studied, to be. So I think we took everything offshore because it got, gain of function, got banned in the U.S. but I don't think we banned it there were something like 36

bio-weapons labs in Ukraine of U.S. origin. So why is Ukraine perfect? Ukraine's perfect. To run a bioweapons lab, you need first world infrastructure and third world people

to test shit on. Ukraine's pretty much got that, right? Because Fauci, for example, in the United States when he had to do clinical trials when one of his lower rank they'd go to

foster care they would do clinical trials on foster children what yeah you got to read Kennedy's book yeah

he did he did an estimate they used an estimate 13 14, 14,000 foster kids to do clinical trials they said the kids would figure out

they're getting sick and they wouldn't want to take the meds that's so that's like not so so I think Fiji's been been doing damage

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Nuremberg Code? Well, exactly. It was codified there, for scientists, but for the rest of the world, and certainly American culture, we were taught that testing potentially dangerous drugs on people without their full consent or on the weakest among us or, you know, euthanizing mental patients, wherever. All that was bad. Right. I thought that was one of the big lessons. of the Second World War. Well, as we both know, there are no rules. Well, that's, boy, is that the truth?

There are no rules, right? There are none. There are rules for us, you and me. But there are subjects for which people could be thrown in prison. You know, a great example would be Diddy. So what happened with Diddy? I think what happened with Diddy is

Diddy had a bunch of very incriminating tapes. I think, you know, Epstein Light. And I think they arrested him to round it all up all the date. I think they did it to get all the date away from Diddy because he was being sued in civil court. And the guilty party said, we got to get it out of there before the civil court gets it. And so they arrest Diddy. What they just convict him of? Nothing.

They could have put him away for 20 years based on what he did, the just. some Bieber, right? They didn't even get them on any of that. So it's a classic, it's a classic case. I know I saw like a nutcase, but yeah, you've had a lot of nutcases on your show. I had a guy. My brother is trying to dial me back his day. They're going to think you're a nutcase if you talk about all the things you think about. And I go, well, I think that ship has sailed. You know, as I said to, well, I thought that was the whole point of academic research was the, you know, the predicate for it, the basis of it is free thinking. Well, but But according to Douglas Murray, I'm not supposed to talk about it unless I'm an expert.

Well, you are a demonstrable expert in your area, I mean... Which is not Diddy. It's not Diddy or not a tenure professor of Diddy Studies at Cornell? We could have it, you know. We do have subjects and... So you think the point of arresting Diddy was to shut down inquiry into what Diddy was doing? Get the data, right? Well, that's clearly the point of the first Jeffrey Epstein arrest.

Hunter Biden's laptop. Tell me your view of Hunter Biden's laptop. Well, Sidney, what's her name? Lawyer, come on. Sidney Powell. Yep. Elite lawyer, now down a few notches because you work for Trump, and that always gets you in trouble,

said that if Hunter Biden's laptop were ever released, no, if Anthony Wiener's laptop were ever released, the government would fall. Weiner's laptop had kill switches in it. I mean, it was filled with crap that wasn't supposed to be there. We never get to see it. Supposedly, nine cops watch the videos on Wiener's laptop. They had to keep leaving the room because they couldn't stand what they were seeing,

and all nine are now dead. And there's names and faces and deadness, right? They're real people. Now you can say, well, maybe they died for other people. reason. I go, but it's still nine cops. And, you know, it's like the five cops who died after January 6, right? The four of them were suicides. Out of according to AI, there were about 80 cops really in the thick of things. Four of them died from suicide. I don't need any more information to wonder what the hell is going on there. That's one of those standalone

observations where I go, that's not right. The math of that doesn't work for me. I've got pictures of Ukrainian, see, I'm going off topic. I've got pictures of known Ukrainian operatives with, you can believe this, with the QAnon Shaman guy. I think of the horns in January 6th, at January 6th. What is that all about? I've got videos of... That seems totally normal.

Yeah, yeah, totally. I've got videos of... With the National Guard 100 yards away not doing anything? I've got videos of John Sullivan, right? The guy who was supposedly Antifa, have been antifist. said, no, he's a Fed, don't talk to him, who then filmed Ashley Babbitt getting shot. This guy's getting around. What's your image of an Antifa person?

Lost soul, tattoos everywhere, right? No meaning in life, right? Yeah, and no path forward, really. No path forward. These are societies. If they're real, that is. If they're legitimate. But, I mean, if you look at the mugshots of Antifa arrest or the people who came to my house,

Antifa there, I mean, these are, you know, I, I, Obviously, I disagree. They threaten my family. I don't like them and all that. But you also feel like these are like one step above homeless. Like these are losers. Right. And so if he's on teeth, it's really odd that he was a nationally ranked cyclist.

Are you serious? What I know about nationally ranked anythings is their lives have purpose. Now, there's a mugshot. You follow this Patriot Front story. I'm really. This is, now the helmet's on, the leash to the jungle gym is on, the Patriot front guys. Those guys who'd stop around looking like neo-Nazis who also were buff and had no pot bellies and covered their faces and get arrested and they're handcuffed with their backpack still on and their megaphone still over their shoulders and and then I saw mugshots of them. Not a single tattoo.

Yeah. No tattoos. These are neo-Nazis. Not a single tattoo. They didn't have like Waf and S-S lighting bolts on their cheeks. No, swastikos, you know. Right. So we are in this big Walter Kernish. We're in this made for the internet plot. Walter is great in his description of the,

I've been tracking the Manjone's story. It's not the right story. There's something wrong. Walter laid it out. Now what Walter didn't say is, who's behind them. That's obviously the question. I mean, you can look at all of these different stories,

particularly the acts of violence, which are because they are acts of violence, are examined much more closely than any other kind of act. And it doesn't make any sense. I mean, the shooting of Trump a year ago in Butler, Pennsylvania, just doesn't make sense. Do you know what I just read the other day? The guy who shot Thomas Crooks, right?

There were bullets, flying all over that place. But it was a catastrophically poorly set up defense of Trump. But the guy who shot Thomas Crooks was the same guy who organized the protection of Trump. And they said, oh, you know, he didn't get convicted of anything. And other guys, didn't I go, well, so the guy who was in charge of making sure that after the assassination was done, he popped the assassin is somehow not getting prosecuted.

Why am I not shocked? So you're saying he was the Jack Ruby figure here. He was the Jack Ruby figure, yes. So what was odd about that story? Well, first of all, all the news agencies were there. This was a totally irrelevant rally in an irrelevant place, Butler, Pennsylvania. And there's a stranger story there. And again, I just pick up these shards and sometimes they fit together into a story.

And sometimes it's just put it in your head, keep it there until you get more detail. tale. There's a guy sitting behind Trump named Joseph Fuska. Fusca is his last name. I've seen him before many times. He was by the Q&on guys, which are a bunch of whack jobs, said to be, you're not going to believe, said to be John F. Kennedy, Jr., waiting to come back and save the world. And I'm going, oh, you guys have lost your minds finally. you've really gone. It doesn't matter that that's a total crock. Fusca is this guy, and they say,

now his name is Fuska and whatever, you know, blah, blah, blah, blah. But he's one who supposedly is J.FK Jr. in disguise. Fuska was there sitting right behind Trump. I go off all the rallies. There he is. Who is he? I don't know. And what's really interesting, Trump gets shot.

Everyone's reacting, and Fusca's not. And then there's two pieces of footage. When you say you've seen him before, you've seen him in photographs before? Oh, he had been talked about. I've dug down some deep rabbit holes and find this guy. So one of the things you discover, you know this as well as anyone. You think you're going down a rabbit hole and you discover go Beckley-Tepi. You get down the rabbit hole and you go, this thing, there's an entire ecosystem down here that people don't know exists.

once you it's like once you ask how did Kennedy get killed and you go oh boy you know that that's troubling right and then building seven which you talked with ron johns who by the way was in our doc zoom group right when i'm talking we had everyone we had everyone um once you go on one or two of these and you go i i can't trust anything and i'm i work in a field where you're supposed to feel like get the facts and say now here's an odd story a friend of my binding all my annual reviews that I write. I write one blog a year. I've been thinking about why.

Can you just pause and describe what that is? That's really the reason I wanted to talk to you was because your interview is well known among people who are paying attention. What is it and what do you do it? So the people trying to wreck our civilization want you to be passive. They want you weak so they can control you.

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and chewy fudge with a chocolatey coating. Swing by a gas station and get an O'Henry today. Oh, hungry, oh Henry. So, I stopped paying 100% attention to chemistry and started on the side

looking at markets when I became a boomer with some wealth and I started paying and I became, it was a tech ball. And then by 98, I realized the markets were in trouble. I'd read enough books, read enough blogs, read enough articles. And so, and then that naturally led me to politics, because if you don't understand politics, you don't understand economics.

And around 07, I wrote a, I used to, on this chat board I was at, I'd write a summary at the end of the year. And part of it was to make sure that my fairly extreme views weren't costing me, serious. pain and suffering. And instead of getting 200 clicks, because this group is about 200 of us talking, it went to like 4,000. I go, what happened? I said, oh, I put it on my blog. Someone told me that. So in 2009, I decided to do it seriously. 30 years of investing. So I wrote this thing, I said, 30 years of investing from the cheap seats was the title. And it went wild, actually. And part of it was because I'd been highly successful as a rank amateur through the 90s as a tech bull. I made 700% on WorldCom and then got out.

I made 700% a Dell, Warner Lambert. I thought I was a genius. And so I had years where I made over 100% without leverage. And then I got out. And I got out due to Y2K, which turns out to be a grift. Yeah. It took me decades to figure that out. I thought I just blew it.

But no, Silicon Valley selling software and hardware. And I can make that story, I want, but it's not worth it. And then, and then, so I start paying attention to politics. And then I just went deeper and deeper down rabbit holes. I see, I know I'm reading about Putin in 2012, trying to understand what's going on there and stuff like that. So I just kind of naturally go down rabbit holes. Now, you can't market a blog worse than writing one a year, right? That's about as bad as you get, and I don't charge for it.

So there's that. And then I realized, though, the reason it works for me is if I wrote a blog once a week, most of them would be garbage. Because imagine how many blogs it would have written about how Trump and Elon are best friends. Right? And now it seems irrelevant. I'd be writing about how Trump and Elon are enemies. And then a month from now, it'll be irrelevant because there'll be best friends again.

You're right? And so you could – I could not write a weekly blog. And so what I do is – by writing once a year gives me a long time to think about it. So I get the idea. And then I sort of watch and go, oh, look at that. That's a puzzle piece right there. So it essentially is book length, 250, 300 pages every fall. And you don't charge for it.

And you also can't write it in March. That's not a year in review. So I usually end up with about 700 pages of links and notes. And if I see something, we talked before about using tripe metaphors, you know, how we both hate it. But once in a while, I'll see a way to insult a person. I'll go, oh, I'm saving that. Right. Now, the other reason is really great.

Where do people find it? It's published at peak prosperity. and it's my pin tweet so stays up there all year and then until I publish the next one and it gives me the chance to collect the information to ponder what's going on that year and then some things become irrelevant so I don't write about them some things are not

some things become trite right but I think my analysis of the 2016 election for example is really good the prophetic line I was watching BET Please don't get me to explain while I'm watching BET in black entertainment today or something

whatever television And some burly black guys talking about Trump And he says, forget the messenger Listen to the message, listen to the message, listen to Matt I'm going holy moly, right? Turns out he was the head of the end of the new black panther party I go, Trump just got endorsed by the black panthers And then I saw Jimmy Brown the running back say he will be a president of the people.

And so I wrote, it might just be a flicker, but I think the black communities move into the right. And boy, was that ahead of its time. And so what I won't do is write about something that everyone's writing about. Why? The other problem I face is that I don't write about stuff I'm going. an expert, I write about stuff that I know nothing. And so when I wrote about, I've been following Putin, but when the Ukraine war came, first thing I noticed, I bet you noticed it too. It wasn't a war. It was a police action. And they weren't killing people. They were moving troops across the border.

They were talking to Ukrainians. They were, and I kept saying to my wife, does not a war. And you see some grandmother going, ah, this is just really terrible. You know, and I'm going, that's a lot. And I'm going, It's not a war. You want to see a war? Look at Baghdad day one. Right. That's a war. That's what a war looks like, right? You'd see an explosion from 20 miles away. You wouldn't know what blew up, right? Like, my wife thought I was nuts. I go, it's not a war. It's not a war. Well, it became a war because, as you and I both know, NATO wanted a war. And so it morphed from being a police action, which I think Putin was trying to throw a fastball past NATO's chin and saying back off on this whole NATO thing. Correct. And so when I wrote about that, I found about 20 to 40 guys who were trying to get it right, which includes you and includes guys like Max Abramson. Do I know that? Do I have that right? Glenn Greenwald. The guy who died, what's his name? The guy who got killed by the Ukrainian. Gonzalo Lira. The American who was murdered by the Ukrainian government. And we could have gotten him out with a phone call and we chose not to.

Because the narrative was Putin's bad. Ukraine's a bunch of really nice guys, super nice guys. It's a democracy. What a crock of shit. That was a lie from head to toe. We wanted a war. We still want a war. I have intelligence friends too, not like you, but I have them.

And I was talking to one the other day. I think he likes to talk to me because he can talk to me about these subjects. And in his universe, I'm the only guy he can talk to for which. he doesn't have to worry because everyone else in his world is connected, everyone else in his world. I think he liked to have real honest conversations. One day, we're on the phone. He says, do you do signal? I go, yeah.

So we went to signal. He said someone was listening to us. Boy. There's a lot of that. There's a lot of that. Yeah, I know. So there's always a narrative. There's always one narrative, and we're now in an era where you only get to talk about that narrative.

You know that, I know that. You and I were just mutually. Yeah, and the penalties for straying from the story are real. Yeah, totally. I mean, whatever. There's been no age in human history we're telling the truth. The real truth is rewarded. So where you first really won me over. So you and I agree that when you were young, you were a punk. Yeah. The fact that you're so proud of the metamorphosis is great. It may. have come before this, but where I noticed it was the Las Vegas shootings, where we kind of talked a little bit of breakfast, here's the funny story. They interviewed that night, I got in Mike Crunk. And Mike Crock tells me, the night of the shootings. The night of the shooting. That was 2017, maybe? I can't remember. Yeah. And Mike Crock told this story. He didn't look very emotional, which I found a little odd. I, by the way, think all the shootings within an air bar are

not what they appear to be. I'll take it all the way back to Columbine if you want. But Mike Crock talks about his friend getting shot three times in the chest from hundreds of yards away. And later, as a marksman said, not possible. Too much spray. A sniper would be required to hit a guy three times. And the guy was just doing this, right?

And Mike says his friend stuck his fingers in the bullet, his own bullet holes to stop the bleeding. I'm going, now you're lying. Why is Mike lying? Right away, Red Flag, why is Mike lying? And who is he, by the way? Well, that's a great question. So Mike then finishes how they put him on a cart and wheeled them out. And may I just ask why?

I'll tell you. Why did you know he was lying when he said his friend put his own fingers? Because you don't get shot three times in the chest. provide your own health care. Fair, fair, right? We thought this through when we started this podcast a year ago and we decided we're never advertising anything that we or people on our staff don't use. Period. We're only partnering with companies that we agree with and endorse actually in our personal lives. So we want to announce a new partnership with a survival company we trust most. Last

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It was really, 500 people. It is the biggest shooting. It says probably Gettysburg. Yes. Right? When was the last time we heard of gun antagonists say, remember Vegas? We got to get rid of guns. Never.

Never. Right. And you know why. So it rolls to the next interview And it's Mike Kroc, new network, same guy He tells the same story Now he's looking a little more emotional And his story changes just a little

Just a little around the edges And then it rolls the next interview And there's Mike Kronk again And I go, why you got 22,000 people And why are you interviewing Mike Kronk? And then there were oddities that Well, I've shown up like some lady walking through the crowd saying you're all going to die tonight

And they will, they carted her away And things like that. Yeah, yeah, weird stuff. And so I tried to figure who my crack was. He's just some hick from Alaska, right? He's just some hick from Alaska after the fact I looked and just picture him holding an elk by the horns, you know, that he shot. The next day the head of the police said, there's no way one guy did it. The following day he said one guy did it.

It takes a long time to show one guy did it, right? That's something you don't know. there's a lot of debris before you figure that out. There's now a documentary called Route 41. So I dug into this. What I noticed is you stayed with a story for about two weeks maybe and you were bringing up and Colter jumped in, you know, Paddock was making money how playing video poker. That's the way he's making a living.

That's like saying I'm a professional crackhead. And then what happens is there was shooting. shooting all over the place. They were shooting everywhere. In the city that day. In the city that night. And so now there's, if you don't believe me, there's this documentary called Route 41, and they got stuff I didn't know about, but they also got stuff that, um, that I, so it's

kind of an answer key for me to use academic terms. And if you watch Route 41, you will see there were shooters everywhere. There are cop cameras showing shooters. And then remember the guy got shot in the leg up on the floor where Paddock was? Yes. Some guy named Jesus or something, right? Some illegal with two Social Security numbers. Hello.

And then afterwards, reporters tried to get to his house. His house was being protected by cars. They had no license plates. And then all of a sudden he goes to Mexico. And when asked, well, where did he go? They said, well, he was planning a trip to Mexico. So when I wrote it by I said, oh, by the way, hey, Susu, when you get back, could you stop in? We've got some questions for you.

Right? And then he comes back and he does one interview on Ellen DeGeneres. And Alan introduced him saying, and he's there with a handler I had already seen. I'm going, wait a minute. That guy, I've been seeing that guy a lot, that other guy. So Jesus is looking at his feet. His name isn't Jesus, but it's something like that. Alan introduced saying, this is the only interview you're going to do and you've got to get it off your chest. I'm going, oh, shit, here we go. And then and then the handler's doing all the talking. Hey, Sus is looking at his feet. And then we never hear about Jesus again. Probably he's in some shallow grave somewhere because he's too inconvenient.

But I tried to interview him at the time. Really? Yes. Couldn't get to him, could you? He drove to Mexico from Vegas. Right. Two of them did. Yeah, probably with an escort.

Yeah, then he came back. And, yeah, I tried my hardest thing. Now, Alan works for the company that owns Mandalay. His handler. Yeah. No, no, Alan de Generis. Ellen, I'm so sorry. Yeah.

And so they're buttoning it down. Now, what you see from Route 41 videos is there are just an enormous amount of chaos. There's enormous numbers of shooters. Even that night, you were seeing videos from cab drivers saying they're shooting over here, they're shooting over there. And there would be some chaos, but there's way too much. There's guys who took audios and said, here, bam, bam, bam, bam, bam. They're here, that, that, that, that.

And so you could hear multiple guns, the whole thing. So then what happened? Mike Crock, I start reading trauma surgeons saying there's something wrong with the story. You know, if you get hit with, you know, what was the AR-15 or something? Yeah. And a 308, a bigger, your rifle. You're going to die out there. You're going to bleed out right there.

Even if it doesn't hit a major artery, you're going to turn your leg to jello. Free chest wounds from a rifle? Yeah. Yeah. So what would he look like? And so then I saw an interview of a young woman and she's sitting there in a chair in the hospital and they're interviewing or I'm going, you look pretty perky. And then Mike Crock with the news crew goes in and interviews his friend. Now, first and foremost, we know HIPAA says, you ain't

bringing a news crew into a hospital room. Second, we know three shots of the chest. He'd be in the ICU. The only way you'd know he's alive is that there'd be a beeping on the screen and he'd have hoses coming out of every orifice and he would look dead. And so, So they take the news crew and they interview his friend, he's got a nasal cannula, a nasal cannula. So I'm sitting there thinking, oh, so you're talking with three holes in your chest. What do you stick in your fingers so the air doesn't come flying out of your chest holes, right? And then I notice the screen's not even plugged in. Now, what is Mike Cronk now?

He's a state senator from Alaska. In Alaska. I think he's a state level state senator. What? Yeah. who's the chief of police he became governor nevada or something right so so again

so there's a guy named john cullen who did an analysis of the shooting and his conclusion a relative a relative yeah no no no no no this fell different john worked for oracle he's some on the spectrum code head he also analyzed the butler shooting um the audios of the butler shooting He's an on-the-spectrum code head. He's on the spectrum code, and he sort of bears down and grabs on something a little too firmly, I think.

But he brings the-as-on-the-spectrum cone-hids. Yeah, I know. And he, there was pretty good evidence that a lot of the shooting was coming from helicopters behind the mandalay. And he tracked the transponders turning on and off behind the mandalay. The story was that Muhammad bin Salman was on the top floor. The Crown Prince of Ruler Saudi Arabia. Yes. Yes.

a guy who lots of people would like to kill. And his theory is that the Saudis tried to flush him out of there and on the way out, they would cap him. Now, they blew it. If that's the story, they blew it. I think the helicopter idea is not bad. But I did a couple podcasts with John, and I said, John, but what about all the shooting on the ground?

And John was kind of dismissive. I go, you can't dismiss it. You can't let that stuff go. Your model's got to include that. But it occurred a year later, Mohammed, remember when Khashoggi got killed? What was his name? Jamal Khashoggi.

Now, a non-Kashoggi is one of the most famous CIA guys on the planet. Jamal Khashoggi is one who got diced up and fed to the camels. Now, he's a New York Times reporter. I think he was also CIA. Washington Post columnist. Yeah. And he was killed in. In the embassy.

in Istanbul, I believe. Okay. Supposedly, on the anniversary of the Vegas shootings, supposedly Muhammad bin Salman had a party, locked the doors and showed a video of him getting sliced up and said to the royal sitting in the room, don't even think about it. Now, when I wrote about Khashoggi,

everyone was having a cow over Khashoggi, right, when he got killed. I'm going, we're killing. tens of thousands of Yemenis. We killed five million people in the Middle East directly and indirectly due to our post-9-11 responses. Yes, right? And I

called him ODK, one dead Keshogi. I said, it is insane to worry about one dead guy in a region of the world where people die for no reason all the time. Who is at war with his own government, the Saudi government? I mean, I'm obviously not for

vivisecting people, but I also think like they're later, yeah, there there's a scale of evil and starving kids is worse than what happened in Gushoggi. I agree with you. Right. So you were the only mainstream guy who I watched steadily on the story, staying with the Vegas shootings, noting that there's something wrong. We got very hassled by law enforcement in Las Vegas, which was, you know, I worked at Fox News, obviously at the time and big supporters of law enforcement. I've always been a big support of law enforcement.

I've never gotten hassled anywhere. Just the opposite. Oh, you work for Fox News. Oh, my gosh, of course. Slow down. The official law enforcement is what got you. Man. I mean, they blocked our camera position.

Oh, yeah. They were totally opposed to us doing that. I've never had that experience. So let's stay on the shootings just briefly. Uvaldi. There's problems all over that shooting. Remember that shooting in Texas where the guy got into school? I knew the mayor, yes.

There's problems all over the place because, first of all, there's something like 800 law enforcement guys within reach of the damn. thing. And there was a ton of like 5,000 people. And then they didn't go in for 78 minutes or something. I remember. Excuse me. You show me 10 cops, probably eight of them have kids. Right now I'm reading a book called The Moral Animal. It's about human behavior. And out of those eight, eight would have gone into, I don't care what you say. I'm going in. Of course. You give me a soccer mom. She's going in. Right. And then there's it was the mom who did go in it and her story was incoherent her story she came out and she said this

and then she said this and it was not consistent and i'm going that's just a narrative thrown on top of it so what are we looking at here so k fab what does that mean k fabe is something eric weinstein wrote about he was asked write an essay with a bunch of other scholarly types and he said that politics it was k fabe it was professional wrestling And there's all these layers, there's all these tricks. It's way more sophisticated than people think, the way you get, the way you engage the audience and you have some reality and some non-reality and things change. And he talked about politics being K-Fab.

I don't think anything you see can be interpreted literally and at face value. What would be the purpose, however? Well, as I was telling you, a friend's binding all my annual reviews, and I will probably make a thousand dollars off this. I mean, this is not getting rich. I'm paid probably 0.001 cent per hour pay for this task. I had to go back. I've been proofing the drafts from previous years. And what I noticed about 2013, 14, 15 is something's changed.

and what's changed is you could get facts and you felt like you were going to be and the stories would break and they would stay that way and they wouldn't be shifting around and you can say okay here's what happened and here and this piece fits in here and now you can't

now it's like we talked about using tripe metaphors here's one but I really like it It's like when your GPS starts randomly rerouting you. And our GPS just keeps random, rerouting. I'm not taking that right turn now, you know. So you just boot the GPS and you break out your gazetteer and you figure out where you're going, right? And so our GPS is rerouting us constantly.

And one of your guests, Mike Benz, who I occasionally chat with briefly, who's very impressive. and as as I've said, I don't know everything about him, and I don't mean just in a casual way. I think there's a complex story there. But right now he's saying the right stuff. He gave a talk one day where he talked about how around 2013,

the so-called deep state, which is a term I've tried to figure out where it came from. And I think the guy gets the most credit is kind of Peterdale Scott, who wrote about drug trafficking, Berkeley professor, and he called it Deep Politics. But I think it predates that, but that's where I get it from. He said the Deep State realized they were losing control with the narrative.

They had underestimated the Internet and social media. Exactly. And as a consequence, they had to get a hold of it completely. And so this is where we're at. Now, we thought Trump was going to save us. We thought Elon was going to save us. my Twitter feed is a dumpster fire. So instead of taking away data, they provide excess noise.

So now instead of trying to suppress the signal, you just increase the noise. I think that's very deep. And I think it points to what's happening. I think it's clearly true. So what is the fact? That was the title last year's write-up. What is the fact? Yeah, it's impossible.

You can't actually control the, and you can't restrict the flow of information across the internet. You throw debris out there. Yeah. It's like the pilots who throw the debris out the back of the plane so that the guided missiles don't know what to hit. Of course, exactly right. Right.

And they also throw out debris so that then they can prove that it's not true so you feel like an idiot. QAnon was clearly that. QAnon. Yeah, QAnon. What was QAnon? I don't know. I don't either. I avoid, you know, I'd be listening to something and it would have useful information and all of a sudden then it would show the whole and here's Trump and his generals are going to save the world. No, I agree. But the interesting, I never do anything about Q&N. I never paid any attention at all. I have a good friend who I really admire is much smarter than I am, who because he is smarter than I am, took like a year to look into QAnon. What do you get? I don't fully understand it, but here's what I understand is that, you know, some of the predictions of QAnon came true.

I mean, it's a sophisticated thing. It's not just... Oh, I think it's a bunch of ex-spooks. For sure. It's not a bunch of college kids on... No. 4chan or whatever they claim it was. These are guys who are probably pissed that the system went bad.

It was... The point of it, and it's unclear, you know, who's behind it. I have some theories, but... people I know actually, but I don't know if they're true. But what is obvious to me is that it was, it's a control mechanism trying to siphon off some of that energy and move it in a less, siphing off the energy. That's exactly right. Less dangerous direction.

Right. Focus on Wuhan, right? Focus on the lab in Wuhan. That's siphoning off. It's all American politics. Like have a race war. Leave us alone as we loot your country. That's right.

That's right. There's a meme out there. There's a joke where the king. and his right-hand man, his chief of staff are looking at the angry townspeople. Some have pitchforks and some have torches. And the king says, don't you have to worry.

You just convince the guys with the pitchforks or the enemies or the guys with the torches. Right. Well, so you said that a couple times. Focus on Wuhan. I've fallen for that squirrel. Squirrel. I know.

A blind nut finds the squirrel. that's funny that's real I'm stealing that that's an original I like that I never know if I heard it and forgot where I got it

but that's an original the squirrel what is that distracting I think it is great you put me in an asylum overnight an asylum overnight yeah yeah my

my hotel's a former asylum is it really yeah you didn't ask no oh yeah it's a former asylum I said you finally got it right well i think there's there's wisdom here um there is wisdom here what are they distracting us from by having us focus on wuhan well huge amounts of grift you had you interviewed um katherine austin fits

yes i've been blessed this smart woman so i come out of nowhere i have no credentials beyond those that i can create right and i think one of the ways you created is by being truthful yes and i know truth is everything to you I try to make it that. And actually in this book, The Moral Animal, they say the reason we self-delude is so that you can be truthful and deceive your opponent. That's what self-delusion is. Yes.

I've practiced a lot of that. I've been adopted by some people who didn't have to adopt me. And so, for example, I'm tight with Steve Hankey, who's a famous economist. and Catherine has been very supportive and and there's several dozen who somehow have decided that that I'm worth their time and and help me and so they're useful to chat with. They're useful to, but Catherine's story and a lot of people think Catherine's nuts, right? But she talks about the huge amount of resources that have been siphoned off in the tens of trillions of dollars of resources that have been siphoned off. I know Kath Rostin-Fitz, you can disagree with her.

She's not nuts. That's not true. She's not what? Nuts. Oh, no, I don't think she is nuts, right. No, no, no, no, no. She's a grounded person. She could have things wrong, but that's totally different.

And I had a friend, another friend who I think is phenomenal, tell me that she's nuts. and don't, don't get nearer. And I said, no, I don't think so. And, and, but we all can get sucked down into the rabbit holes to the point you can get out, too. There are days where I wish, why don't you just go play golf? Yeah. Or right now I'm on a, my house is hanging off a hundred foot cliff looking west over Kuga Lake. I can literally throw rotten food off my deck and drop it down into the drink from, I can, I'll show afterwards, I'll show you a photo.

The view is such that if there are a place in the country where the view would cost $20 million, not Nethical, of course. And if people come and visit, they should, it's beautiful. I can't remember why I said that. That's probably saying that people dismiss, you know, the few who are just committed to pursuing truth no matter what as crazy. and you gave Katha Rost and Fitz as an example, but you said you can actually go crazy by looking too carefully into what actually happened. So the lake I'm on,

turns out broke the small, New York State smallmouth bass record about three years ago, broke the New York State Large Mouth Bass record last year, and I used to fish all the time when I was a kid and I haven't fished it. What's wrong with this picture? Well, if you got Smallmouth Bass there, I think you need to fish it on a fly rod.

I know. It'll totally change your life. It's not a fly ride. It's a deep lake. But you can catch them on the surface with a popper. And if you do, if you catch a sizable small mouth on a popper on a fly rod, you know. I'm an 18-foot-deep shoal guy. Sinking line.

But so, you know, my wife thought that I had fish removed from my thumbs because she never saw a picture of me that didn't have a fish hanging off my hand. But I haven't fished it. Because you're absorbed in trying to figure out what's happening. I'm absorbed in raising kids. I'm absorbed in other things. My wife has issues. I got to help her with.

and I have this fear of buying a boat. But you, as someone who has taken, you know, ample intellectual energy and intelligence and focused it on trying to figure out what are we watching, which I think is like a fair way to describe what you're doing. Like, what is this? What's the truth of it?

Has that been worth doing? That's the question. that is the question and there was a time where I thought if I could get to the truth then that would help in some way but now it's not as clear

Tell me what? Well, you know, now first of all, what is the truth, right? The truth is now becoming very ambiguous. Last year I wrote about the history of World War II. I did a mini Daryl Cooper. Yes.

And it started when I read a book by Diana West who would be good if you interviewed her. and it was it's this all revisionist history of world war two and you go well why would you want to read that well it turns out i think the story we got about world war two is all wrong i think that's right and and then i read about fDR and fdr's right hand man was a soviet spy certainly was right and confirmed confirmed we should have been one can make the argument we should have sided with hitler and fought Stalin patent said that so and and maybe there wouldn't have been a holocaust right you know But Stalin was awful by any metric, and we weren't his ally.

The story is that there were a few missing American soldiers at the Underworld War II in Russian territory. No. 15 to 20,000 were missing. And we left them there. And then you read about Pearl Harbor. We all sort of know the Pearl Harbor story is not what we're told. But I dug into that and you find out the pro, we knew to the morning that Pearl Harbor

was going to get attacked. Stalin was going to be attacked. he wanted us to take the Japanese office flank and FDR's right hand man was okay with that because he was a Soviet spy right then I read about FDR and the Great Depression find that that every single penny he spent trying to help the forgot amity slays the forgotten man was spent to buy votes every last penny he was a sociopath and every the only thing he could do was lie he was a compulsive liar his inner circle had to constantly cover for his lying and and and and and and and and And the only thing he's used for now is every time you want to grow government, you cite FDR. And so I read half a dozen books that sort of went at these different angles and wrote about it. So I start out knowing nothing and then I write about it and I try to write to learn, which is the most terrifying part of AI, by the way. If you take out the writing, you take out the thought. Completely agree.

The other thing that scares me about it, boy. Squirrel. AI's going to make the system very unforgivingly brittle. I'm not worried as much about the authoritarian slant that Elon occasionally talks about, which might be just to fake us out, who knows? I am worried that we're going to reach a point where, you know, when everything computer does is binary. So you go to the grocery store, you slip your credit card in it says you're good to go or didn't work.

Swipe it again. Didn't work. Sorry, you're out of here, right? They debank people. This is a big problem. What happens when everything is so A-Ied up that there's no person anywhere with an earshot who can help you at all? No one who can say, okay, let me get this for you.

Right. There's been a misunderstanding or there's some sort of human nuance required. Happened on the other day on a credit card where I was talking to a lady and it kept sending me in these loops and she finally straight out. But what happens when the code is being written by computer so there's no human who understands the code? So the system will be very brittle, be very unforgiving. Forget about whether it's used nefariously. Forget about whether someone uses it as an authoritarian tool, which is very real possibility. And I worry about that a lot.

Just the fact that no one will know who's driving the cab ever on anything. And also now you're taking out the intellectual part. So when I write, when you write, when I write a scientific paper, the project's not done until I've written it because that's where you lay it out. And if you can't put it on paper coherently with no way. internal contradictions you're not done you're not done understanding it you're not done understanding so the idea that writing is understanding i so i think people who don't write for a living or aren't forced to write regularly don't understand this concept is a hard one but the it's through writing or i would also say speaking you know public speaking that putting concepts into words

makes the concepts intelligible to the person who's articulating them like you don't really understand something until you've been forced to write about it. It's like a comedy shop. You go, you know, the great comedians will go down to the cheap-o comedy shops to practice, to figure out what works and what doesn't work, right? And then they go on Johnny Carson. Exactly. And so, so you write your way to wisdom.

So when there's no writing, there's no thinking. Right. So I read about Maui, the fires. I wrote about that. Very clearly a land grab. You may remember how many kids died? No. Do you remember?

USA article said 750 kids are missing. Yep. Right? When a kid's missing after something like that, they're dead. But they're not missing. They're dead. Maybe a couple found their way. Someone drove them out of town, but they're dead.

Try to find anywhere a statement about dead kids now. You can't find it. You go to Wikipedia. You search the word child. You search the word, you read it. There's no mention of dead children. There were 750 kids missing according to USA today. Then all of a sudden the governor saying, well, you know, we're worried about land speculators,

so we're going to buy the land up so that the speculators can't get it. And I go, so you can sell it to your friends, right? Is it possible? Maybe they mowed down Lahaina because they want to put up resorts and things, right? But what also was out there was this idea of directed energy weapons starting the fires. Now, I think that was a dead end. I don't think directed energy weapons for use, even though there's a, it's called DEWs, even though there's a DEW facility on Maui, you don't need that.

And there were videos, and I go, I think those are fake. So I found nothing, but I used it as an excuse to read up on DEWs. And I was reading Rand reports from 40 years ago. What is a directed energy weapon? It's basically Star Wars. And so it's Reagan Star Wars And everyone said, Oh, that's just science fiction.

I go, well, Gorbachev seemed to want to get rid of them Every chance he got. So Gorbachev took them very seriously. So it turns out what you do is you put something in space And it shoots some sort of energy, guided energy down to the surface of the Earth. And the different frequencies have different efficacies. And so some are really good at hitting a target.

Some broaden out like microwaves are different than some sort of. of ultraviolet laser. I'm not very good at this stuff. And then I started reading about how what they do is they use a pulse of one laser to punch a hole through the atmosphere and then the second pulse would go through that hole. I mean, it's really clever stuff. This is 40-year-old Rand reports.

What do they have behind the paywall 40 years later? Now, the best, I think, evidence of a DEW being used. And I was reading about fires in different places where trees were burning that shouldn't have burned and cars I wrote about it if someone wants to go read it that was a couple years ago the best evidence of a DEW so if you've got these you've got to test them right

it's like why you need why you need you know bio-weapons labs in Ukraine you got to test them and you can't use lab rats you look at the Quebec fires a satellite imagery of the Quebec fires, very mysterious. About 26-ish fires started simultaneously. How do you know some?

Well, if a fire starts, and then another one starts, it'll be downwind. So you'll see, it'll look like the Hawaiian Islands, right? Right. Boom, all at once. 26 fires. In a crudely buckshot pattern, there was 350 miles in diameter. diameter. Boy, that's a determined arsonist, or at least 26 of them.

Yeah. In the middle of nowhere. Yeah, with helicopter. I mean, there are no roads. But, but, no, a cell phone can't do it. You know, nothing, right? They're in the middle of nowhere, and all of a sudden they all start simultaneously, and I'm going, okay, that probably was them testing out their weapons.

And we have a lot of wars to test weapons, right? So your basic overarching theory is around 2014-15, it became clear to the people running the world that you can't keep information under wraps anymore because the Internet is impossible to control. And so you had to flood people's brains with extraneous and misleading information. And shut down people. They booted the President of the United States. States off Twitter. Yeah. How is that possible?

Because he was a racist? That's what they told me. That's what they told me. He was a racist. Right. You know, so many, something like 70,000 got booted off Twitter. My sister-in-law, who's, she had a Twitter feed. She can't get it back.

You know, somehow, I don't know how I survived that. What was her crime? She must have said something favorable about Trump or something. I don't know. So, but. The control of information, the shaping and people's understanding is the world around them, that's the whole game right there. So I used to say the Internet was democracy's greatest hope and worst enemy, and that it was a battle. I don't think we're going to win it.

And the reason I don't is because it's too powerful. And so whoever has control of it will then have that power. So it's only a battle for who gets control of it. Control of information. Control the digital world, yeah. So if you see voices out there dissenting from the... I hear voices, talking. If you see or hear voices that are dissenting from the official storyline,

they're going to have to be silenced or eliminated, I mean. Well, look at what happened. Look at the ambushes that occurred when Thomas Massey, who I think is great. Rand Paul, who I think is matured immensely, and who is the third Republican, who stepped away from the narrative, and all of a sudden the attacks were relentless.

Now, that could just be Trumpian Trump. It wasn't just Trump attacking them, though. I know. Marjorie Taylor Green. By the way, it's nowhere near as stupid. I mean, she's not even stupid. Oh, I know. She ran a construction company.

Oh, I know. and her um she just doesn't have whatever that normal the fear that controls people in dc we're like i can't but how you turn on thomas massey marjorie taylor green at least played a role in cave that you can imagine drawing fire massy's this guy you know who who built his own house and fixes his own car and he's he's an engineer he's he's he's he's he's he's the he's an archetype of who we ought to be as a country as a country i was so vehemently agree with and they turned on him yeah well i haven't we know why they turned on texted with him this morning um no i i i mean you know you could say i disagree with with thomas massey but if you think

thomas massey is the problem you are the problem i couldn't agree more um i couldn't agree more just because first of all he's a decent man which always matters to me and i think it should matter to all of us. You could, you know, give Thomas Massey a routing number and he's not going to take a dollar. He's just not. He's not going to... He's the only one without a handler. That's true. And I think we should admire that, even if you think that all members of Congress should be required to have handlers, it's okay to live in a world where one doesn't. That's what I find so... Well, it's not okay to live in a world where everyone else does. No, I agree with you, but I just find what's so interesting and there's a religious quality to all of these conversations that I find

It's so striking. It's like it's okay if you have, you know, all this power, all this money. If you're running the U.S. government or whoever you are with a lot of power, you know, you can afford to have some percentage of the population not play along. You don't need, it doesn't need to be an Albanian election in 1982. Like you can have some dissent. Unless you're an authoritarian state. I guess that's right. I mean, but even in an effective authoritarian state, in Saudi Arabia in the Emirates, these are, you know, basically theocracies.

They don't agree with that. But they, you know, these are Islamic states under Sharia law. You can kind of dissent. It's okay. You just can't do anything really threatening, of course. Right. But more dissent is allowed in Abu D.C. I just find that just absolutely incredible.

Like, what is this? Why can't they allow Thomas Massey to just like have his own Massey views? He's a vote. He's a vote. Okay, but you've got hundreds of others. Like, I just think it's weird. There's this desire to make sure that nobody sings off the song sheet. Like, and that person must be killed.

And I, wow, I just, I don't enforce that among my own children. So, do you know what I'm talking about? No, I absolutely know what you're talking about. We used to allow opposing views. Yeah, I mean, look, if someone is really a threat to the system, well, I think that should be allowed personally, because the people on the government. Depends on what way, but yes.

In what way? I have a very wide strike zone for that. But I get it if the system is like, I'm sorry, you're an actual threat. We have to kill you. Okay, systems exist to preserve themselves. I understand that. What I really can't even comprehend is

someone out there in a place I've never been and never will go among 350 million people is making a noise that I disagree with. I must crush him. What is that? That's just weird to me. Why are you going to the effort to shut down all to sense?

I don't know, but it's, that's, that's what's happening. Oh, I know. Not to swing the topic yet again. Let me, let me get back to the universities. People don't understand universities. There are people who do, obviously, but the average person doesn't. So, so people are going to say I'm talking my book. Let me take this opportunity with your gargantuan following to explain.

explain how universities work so that... Well, let me just say before you begin that I'm amazed by the broadness of your thinking right or wrong, you're certainly thinking thoughts that most people don't allow themselves to think, and you are a tenure professor at an Ivy League college, and you still have your job, apparently. So that does say something. It would be hard to fire me. Apparently. I mean, part of the problem is one of the reasons I got canceled is because I twice fought unionizations.

Yeah. And the first time was at the request of the dean of faculty. Second time was at the request of the provost of late night phone call. You got to fight this. You got to put together a team. And that's the now president. And so if they fired me, that group was sort of behind my cancellation. So firing me would have been hard because, you know, you know, witness number one would be,

did you ask column to fight the unions and did that lead to, you know, them canceling him and stuff like that? I really think Cornell is great. I think most universities are fine. We needed a fastball past our chin. Great example, Claudine Gay. Shouldn't be president of Harvard. Shouldn't be on the faculty. You shouldn't have a PhD, in my opinion.

That is the sign of the rot that has gotten into the universities. But then it's still an exceptional rod. So I don't see people at Cornell that look like clotting gay to me. And if you actually look in the whole DEI thing, you say, well, universities are super duper DEI. And I go, you guys are forgetting that a year ago or two years ago, if you weren't DEI, you got destroyed. The whole system was geared up to make sure you paid dearly if you weren't DEI. So you had to have your deans of diversity and the world was demanding it. And don't forget, this was a world where biological men were competing in women's sports.

They still kind of are, but at least it's now starting to dissipate. And that was, considered totally normal and was considered rational. And if you fought it, you get fired and things like that. So the universities were simply responding. Now, they'd gotten way left wing. My colleagues were all hired, all hired based on their skills, guaranteed. I would have, I'd remember a case if it was a DEI hire. I remember a case because I would have fought it. I would have screamed. I don't shut up on things like that. We try to find the best person in the world to hire and we go for that person if we can. And we do pretty well. And so if you were on a campus, you wouldn't see what we're hearing about. I don't think. You'd walk around the camp, you'd go, everything just

looks pretty normal. So you're in the hardest of the hard sciences, though. Do you think that's the problem. If I walked over the arts quad, I'd see some Looney Tunes, right? And we're now to start, the cost of an education is too high to waste it. And so if you're going to spend 300, hundred thousand dollars you can't you can't go into a career that you make 40,000 or that you make 25 because you're a barista yeah right it's just no longer even viable so you have to so colleges if I were president of Cornell I put together an elite committee of people I absolutely trusted and say you guys are in charge of trying to figure out where we should be in 20 years and how to get there because because we can't be here in 20 years

it's not going to work. Arts and sciences and this whole idea of this broadly based education was formed prior to the cost and was formed when wealthy people went to college. So you could be frivolous if you wanted. And getting a sheepskin could get you onto Wall Street and be the lead analyst for all the dot com's Henry Blodgett style, right? Those days are gone. And so colleges are going have to tighten up. But my colleagues are, I would say, on average, out of 20, out of 30 colleagues, I'll say maybe, I think 27 of them are left of center. And I can't explain why. Now, when I talk to them, totally rational people, totally reasonable people. The way it works as a chemist is you are an entrepreneur. You get a job. They give you startup money to get started. You have to then go raise

money. Funding rates are ballpark maybe 15% of the people get funded. By the way, the ones who never get funded, they've dropped off. So that 15% are people still trying. And now I'm going to brag. I put 21 in a row successfully. Do the math on that. That's improbable. But my colleagues are constantly battling. They're putting together this program. They're running research groups from 5 to 30. No one pays for that. They raise. the money from the federal system, we say, well, the Fed shouldn't pay the money. Well, years and years ago, we decided the way to run a research program in the United States was through universities and federal grants was a Sputnik thing. There's other ways to do it, but we set up

that system. And if you look at all the startup companies around the country and all the pharmaceutical agents, they all, you can trace their origins back to academic labs. Pfizer discovers far fewer drugs than they buy from some small startup that came out of some biochemistry department or some medical school or something. And so the academic research area is the foundation level starting point. I have a number of friends who are worth a fortune because they patented something. And that's actually good because it would be neutered and not even usable by the free market if it didn't have the patent coverage. And so it made sense. So it puts an incentive system in there, right? Cornell gets some, the

investigating gets some, the department gets some, and the world gets a new drug. It's not a crazy system. Now, there's other ways to do it, but that's not how we do it. And we produce the best science. So it worked. Now, the problem is that Trump threw a fastball past our chin and we deserved it. We absolutely deserved it. So he's saying, look, get rid of the guys in sports, which Penn did with Leah Thomas, you know, get rid of the DEI, which a lot of schools are trying to and at the same time ducking, you know, naming them by different things. But the fastball was needed. The problem is, as you said at breakfast, it was the social stuff that Trump was going after. But you don't go after the social stuff with social stuff you go after by going after the money right so harvard's locked down for

nine billion dollars of research funds and my understanding is it's still locked down cornell's locked down for over a billion with nine Harvard was getting nine billion from the feds for research for various and it's on hold and it's on hold and the word cancel versus frozen i i was trying to figure it out columbia i thought it was a cancel over for columbia got crushed um and then columbia put on a memo that said canceled. Now, I don't know if that's because it's been canceled, but my understanding is the money's not flowing. Now, the problem is, as a trustee said to me, you know, if this goes into 2026, we're in a world of trouble. I said, if this goes into August, we're in a world of trouble.

I've got colleagues with 15-person research groups that are all funded by these federal grants, and they do good science. They do good science. There's probably some crap in the hands. humanities, but they suck about $10,000 of grant money out of the system to do that stupid thing. I don't know. And I don't even know if it's stupid. And there's no mechanism. So now, if you're getting your PhD, there's no one who can give you a postdoc. That's the next step. That steps broken. So the system right now is on, it's flatlined. And I really wish they'd gotten rid of USAID and you told me they did. They just moved it. Well, that's a problem. But, But I think the academic research system was working.

I think part of the problem from a civilian perspective are the endowments. Now, let me explain the endowments. So let me just complete the thought by saying it's the no tax part that I think drives some of us to want to sort of storm the campus with guns because that's, you know, everyone's getting, I mean, the private equity guys are taking all their income as interest, so they're paying half the rate. But for a normal person, you know, you're paying over half. of everything you make to the government, and it's being spent on nonsense or given to Ukraine. And then there are these giant hedge funds called university endowments that aren't paying any taxes. And I think that can really drive people bonkers, including me. Well, I understand. There are some subtleties of endowments. Again, it's not to say that

you're not 100% correct, but I at least want to say to your listeners so they understand what they're complaining about. First and foremost, there are supposedly rules where the universities are not supposed to be competing with the private sector. So, and they get around those. But if Cornell builds housing is making money off the housing in town, that kind of breaks the rule, right? But they build dorms and, you know, things like that.

So you're right about that. The endowments are a funny game. First and foremost, I looked this up last week. Approximately 50% of all endowment spin-off. So it spins off at revenue, and Harvard's has been collecting since 1656. 50% of the money spun off goes to financial aid, which means making college more affordable,

admittedly not very affordable for a lot of people, but making it more affordable. So half of the money being spun off is going right back to education of the students. Another 20% support for academic programs, which means paying for things that would have have to be paid for or we'd have to do without. And I would argue we got bloated. So there's things we should have done without. If you looked at the dining program now compared to what they have now, it's really unbelievable.

I'm not against good food. I'm against DEI administrators and administrators in general. Like, college should be focused on the professors. I agree with that. And that's where we should have gotten the fastball pass our chances. Did any of these schools have more tenure professors than they do administrators? I don't think so. The administrative bloat is a combination of all the problems that drive you nuts

and the fact that the interactions between the university and the feds and the states has gotten more complicated. Right. So, for example, you need way more bean count. And grant writers and... Well, no, grant writers are me. They're us. The grants are being written by the faculty. And again, the DEI, Michigan's DEI payroll was 93 million last time I read about it.

That's a lot of money, right? But just when you get a federal grant, there's so many things you have to do. They ran it out of a shoebox. Here's your check. Spend it wisely. It's no longer like that. Now, it reached the absurd point where you're supposed to make statements about how you're going to save the whales and donate organs to Guatemalan orphans and things like that. And I think Trump's going to successfully get a lot of that crap out of there.

He would save Cornell a fortune if he could get rid of all of the DEI. Now, I do think the original idea of affirmative action makes sense. It basically said, go find people who are being missed. Look into the dusty corners where you normally don't look. and see if you find talent, right? There's a famous chemist named Henry Gilman. I thought the SAT was designed to do that. No, it turns out the SAT has problems now.

And the reason it has problems is because when Kaplan got a hold of it, and they for profit coach kids on how to do well. And then they made it such that the SAT could be taking three times and you get to use only the one you like all of a sudden the cost of maximizing your score on the SAT became prohibitive.

And so it's a legitimate argument that someone coming out of the hood cannot take the Kaplan course and take the SAT 3-10. But you shouldn't get rid of it. You should just be aware of what it's telling you. Would it be possible to design a corruption-free

screen for intelligence and, you know, initiative. Shut up racist. No, but I mean, no. So the idea was that the SAT was supposed to democratize education. We're just going to locate it. Discover kids who've got double 800s who you wouldn't have spotted. Exactly. Right. And actually have a child who got an 800. Couldn't get into college. So clearly it's like the system has gotten so corrupt. So, but the idea in Kaplan, you said, corrupted it as well. Well, it kind of corrupted the SAT.

Right. That's what I'm saying. Now, the GRE, which is the next level, is nowhere near as corrupted it because by then the students don't give a damn. They don't take the GRI. And they, so it's more legit. But is there, I mean, but the idea of a colorblind, class blind, pure, you know, meritocracy test is, I mean, why give up on that? Here's what I think we should do. I was graduate, I was a director of graduate studies, which involved admission into our grad program for seven years, record.

The only guy who held the four administrative positions in the chemistry department itself, that's pretty good for being the chemistry doucheback. And you learn about things. And I read undergraduate admissions on purpose for a number of years, and you read it, so I might read Manhattan, for example. and you learn about who's applying and stuff like that. And what I think you want to look for is a system where you see evidence that a kid overcame something. And it's not about color, although you can say non-statistically it's about color, right?

But a kid from the Ozarks, you know, J.D. Vance, who I find his origin story a little suspicious, I must admit. But so we had a kid who applied and everything was sunshine, and Skittles rainbows in his application. And one of his letterwriters said, his mother died here, his father died here, he was raised by his neighbors,

you know, and I'm going, and he didn't mention it? I hope you let him in. Oh, my God, yes. You give me, in graduate admissions, I see some kid from Stanford with a,

I see some kid from Stanford with 3.0. I didn't take them. Because a 3.0 is a kid who accepted a 3.0. You show me, I'll take a 4.0 from St. Mary's College of the Divinity. Because that kid said, here's the, they said, here's the highs you can get to. That kid got there, right? MIT kids with lousy GPAs or lousy grad students, even though they're smarter than hell,

but they're cocky. Now, it turns out, you show me a kid from Stanford with a 3.0 who played football. I take the kid in a heartbeat. You show me a kid from Stanford who, who is a 3.0, who is in, you know, who is, you know, brilliant violinist. I'll take that kid. Here's my son. My son applies to Cornell for reasons you know he was going to get in. But his resume, I had one son who was underachiever as a kid, who's now phenomenal.

And the one who is a super achieve. What's super achieving? And we didn't push him because it was a pain in the ass. We were driving all the time. Allstate orchestra first violin. medalist in the eight state regional gymnastics championship fifth of the nation equestrian played lacrosse got a resume better than that so here's what happened my older son who could care less about school just nothing is teacher also sweet kid no attention at one point i said to a

teacher said the only kids he's beaten her crack babies and she kind of blew a snap bubble and said yeah he's now phenomenally successful he's a super dad i'm so proud at the level of dadness that he is he's the director of event management at the council on foreign relations after being the most underwhelming kid in high school he grew up he climbed mount stupid a little bit late unfortunately he was in a family that could help him get over it when the time came the thing that we get credit for is not breaking him is not is not forcing him into a mold that didn't fit. You know who he is?

You know the book Ferdinand in the Bull? Of course. Child's story? Yeah, yeah. That book wasn't for kids. That was for the parents. That was telling the parents, your kid is Ferdinand, maybe.

My other one was Mike Mulligan's steam shovel. Yeah. Right? The more people watch, the faster he went. Ironically, the overachiever got to Cornell and got lost. the underachiever just grew nicely in college. And now the younger one is now a professional after trying cubicle farming and all that crap that you get by being a business major at Cornell Hotel School.

He's a professional violinist in Boston. Better outcome. Better outcome. Bank of Dad's important because violinists in Boston don't make a lot of money. But I'm happy to support it because it's his soul. You know why he's a professional? You want neurobiology? My wife was flat on her back when she was pregnant.

She put headphones against her stomach and played classical music when he was in the womb. I know prenatal development's important. By the time he's three years old, his friends are singing B-I-N-G-O, and he's listening to orchestra pieces. And he'd say, I like this part right here. And you'd hear the second violin's coming there, and you go, right there, I like that. And I'm going, holy shit, this kid's got an ear. He has an ear.

He developed an ear. womb. So don't do that to your womb. You'll have a musician in your family if you do that. So I want to ask you here, since you mentioned the struggle, you know, the triumph, but also the struggle to pay for it because the economy doesn't support young people very well. Since you did call the financial collapse of 2008, it sounds like. In 2002. In 2002. So you couldn't short, you couldn't get rich shorting anything. I shorted twice, and it's shortings for fools and pros, and the Venn diagram of those two is almost that.

That's exactly right. They're both. I know both. Yes. Yeah. Where are we now? We're in a catastrophic situation. Catastrophe seems strong.

Yeah. Well, I think you can make arguments the economy has a lot of problems. And there's a paradoxical problem with the economy, and that is you can go up to any 7-Eleven and they can't. hire. There's help wanted ad. So it looks like an economy burning, burning hot. But if you look at the high end, there's layoffs going everywhere. So there's foreshadowing of real trouble coming. So college graduates, even Ivy League graduates, humanities graduates, not engineers or chemists, but, you know, the market, the business guy or whatever, they're having trouble getting jobs. The kind that they're trained for, certainly. Yeah, but there's just, I mean, I know a bunch of them

but you see it in the numbers, educated 22-year-olds are having trouble getting jobs, but 7-Eleven can't hire. Right. So what is that? Well, so this is a normal sort of, it's a distorted version of, I think, a recession coming or in.

Now, where it gets complicated is if you don't believe the inflation numbers, which I don't, and you've got Chapwood Index and shadow stats that give inflation numbers that are probably on average six or seven percent high, than the official numbers. The official numbers are corrupted. And I don't want to go into it

because it's technical, but the CPI is crap. Yeah, I agree with that. Now, here's the problem. If the economy's been growing 2.5% and the inflation numbers are underestimated by 4 means we've been in a recession the whole way. Yeah, moving backwards. We're moving backward.

And you say, well, that can't happen. The recessions last, you know, two quarters or whatever. And I go, no, the British Empire was in a recession for a century, right? They just shrunk and shrunk and shrunk. And so, so no, you can be in, you can, you can be in a slow decline. So, so, but that's not what we're, that's not the catastrophe. Recession means decline.

Yeah. Actually, I think it's a stupid word because it's like, you play golf? No. Well, if you play golf, you go down into the sand trap. According to the definition of a recession, once you start climbing out, you're out. You ask a golfer if he's out of the sand trap because he's on the upslope of the trap. He's not. No.

So the fact that your economy is now growing again, if it's coming out of a hole, as far as I'm concerned, you're not out until you've gotten past that previous period. So you're at par. Yeah, so you're at par, right. Now, that's not the catastrophe because they happen all the time, and we've been able to either cover them or fake them or prevent them through very bad monetary policy. Right. And what's bad? Pumping the stock market is just stupid. But private equity buys.

Private equity buys, has bought up 80% of the hospitals, the health care. And what they do is they go in and they buy some organization. They strip its of its assets. They load it with debt. They pay themselves huge fees and bonuses. And then they sell the shell of a company, which is now effectively worthless, into the marketplace, like to pension funds. who are not smart enough to recognize that they just bought a piece of crap.

And according to Gretchen Morgensen, a 47% bankruptcy rate. Now, post-sale. Post-sale. Now, as long as it's profitable to buy it viable companies, destroy them, sell the shell, and make money, monitor money's too loose. precious capital if capital is of real value um it's a moat so good businessman can get capital bad businessman can't the fact that black rock could get get buy single family dwellings which is a terrible business you really can make money unless you can unless there's a housing boom and you leverage up to hell, the fact that they could get it in an interest rate

at 0.15% is a highly flawed system. And that's where the inventory went after 07-09. They got bought up by these guys who could lever up and then charge rents to people. So they basically scoop up the housing market. With free money. With free money. Kind of free money, unlike, you know, credit cards, which are 25%. right and not just free i mean if once you factor in inflation it's it's a gift yeah it's it's it's

it's profitable money literally just taking the loan is profitable yes you don't have to do anything yes yes right yeah so so here here's what happened somehow um the market has ceased to respond and the reason the market's important is because um it because of the wealth effect and that is that if you own equities, you own a house, and they're soaring in price, your spending habits change. I'm having a great year, for example, so when the bank of dad has to provide some liquidity to the children, I feel okay about it, right? The problem is that it's a false wealth. It's not real wealth.

It's a false wealth. So what happened? Well, I'm getting tired of seeing these. I see four-year plots of the equity market, and they make various comparisons. I go, don't go back four years. Don't go back 40 years. Go back 120 years. So I follow about 25 metrics of valuation.

Valuation is inherently a price of the market relative to something it ought to track, whether it's the earnings, the revenues, the book value, I think called Tobin's Q, the GDP, which is a fictional number, as I've heard you recently say. But I follow about 25 of them. So you can kind of track whether the markets have gotten expensive relative to the thing it ought to track. Now, around 1981, the markets were at the cheapest valuation, arguably in history.

Inflation was scaring everyone, which is why they were cheap. It turns out that the boomers were just, just hitting the workforce. So demographics was a huge tailwind starting around then. And most economists agree demographics is huge. Now, I'm disingenuous in that I quote economists selectively in the next sentence. I'll probably say something horrible about them. And so I'm obviously cherry picking my data, but economists like demographics.

So the boomers hit the workplace. So it was almost guaranteed. I think Reagan was not important. I think he did some very important things. but I think whoever got to be present was going to be at the beginning of a boom. It turns out that China was coming out of the Dark Ages. They started selling labor at slave wages. They were so desperate for capital when they sent their leader,

don't make me pronounce his name, to the United Nations. When he first started opening up. Is it Deng Xiaoping? Yes. and they had to scrounge to get the money to send them. I mean, they really didn't have any foreign capital. And so I remember when China said, we're going to let our workers keep some of their profits.

And it's like, whoa. Russia had, the Soviet Union hadn't collapsed, but they were in trouble. So they were obviously cranked in a resource base as hard as they could. And we had our guys in there helping them and stuff like that. And interest rates were at all time high. Nice. And if you read a 1999 article by Buffett, who I think is a hoser, I think he's much more of a stock jobber, much more of a conniver than he is. He loves to be the Mafia Don walk around in a bathrobe saying, I'm harmless. He is not harmless. When we're in the bottom, he breaks all sorts of laws. They do all sorts of insider crap to bail the system out. But he pretends to just like Dairy Queen and Coca-Cola and whatever. He wrote an article in 99 that said,

you want to understand secular, big, long, bowl versus bare markets, it's all interest rates. He said, it's not GDP. He said from 67 to 81, everything sucked. It treaded water, not accounting for inflation, and the markets dropped 75% accounting for inflation. So it was a horrible period. He said the GDP grew faster during that period

than from 81 to 99. But interest rates from 67 to 81 went up. up monotonically. From 81 to 99, they went down. So we started in 81 with interest rates in the high teens. And over the next 40 years, they dropped to zero. That is absolutely the story. So when interest rates are dropping, risk assets go up. Yep. Because they're competing against and as it gets cheaper. So bottom line is that we just enjoyed 40-year recency bias. Can you just explain that principle right there you said as interest rates drop risk assets go up or are you going to buy shares of a stock that by the way is treated you like crap over the previous 14 years or a bond that pays

you 17 percent right right so the bonds become less the fixed income become less attractive steadily for 40 years now take the case schiller PE which is which is just one of the metrics but i happen to like it it's a kind of an averaged earnings price earnings ratio it also it doesn't allow you to cheat because it doesn't use the immediate and forward P.E.s are stupid, but K. Schiller averages, so I like it. If you take the K. Schiller from 1880 to 1990, it just channels. It's a valuation metric and it just goes up and down and up and down, and that's what it should do. It responds to things. But it stays in a channel. It's flat. Valuation metrics shouldn't trend. They should trend for a while, but then they should regress.

to the mean unless you can someone can give me an argument why they should trend and I don't think there is one and I've tried to find one and then in 1990 they just kind of started to take off and the K-Shiller so the K-Shiller PE the K-Shiller PE averaged around 12-13 percent for 110 years then around 1990 oddly 1994 in every metric is when things left I think it was because of a bond problem or something I haven't been able to quite figure out why But the valuations went up. Now, here's the problem with valuations going up. And now they're astronomical.

So the KCHOPE average 13, which meant it was priced to return about 8% a year, right? If you think of it as a gas station and you're paying, you know, 13 to 1 earnings, you're getting about 8%. And it keeps pumping gas every year, you get about 13%. It is now 38. it's way above where it should be. It's a factor of 3, 200%. Now, if you assume it's never going to regress to the mean, now you're accepting, crudely speaking,

a 2.5% return, not an 8. Now, if you're okay with 2.5%, that's fine. But by the way, most pensioners, most boomers, are not planning on 2.5%. No, they're not. Right. Now, if it regresses to the mean, it's a 70% correction,

Assuming, if it's fast, assuming nothing else changes, no damage to the economy, you know, all the bad things that happen when you lose 70% off the equity market, which is a questionable assumption. Another way to think about it, which I think is much clearer, is if you say, look, we'll just grow our way. I think it go up or down or up and down. You don't worry about the path. You say, if we grow to a half percent a year, which I just questioned as being valid, but let's assume it's valid, if we grow to a half percent a year to get back to historical average of 13, we'll take 45 years. Now, here's the thing. I made no assumptions about good news, bad news. I assume this is going to be like the 20th century.

Two and a half percent a year, it'll be 45 years from now. I don't care what path you follow if we are at the average case. or P.E. And the economy grew to a half percent of year, the equity markets will have returned capital gains zero. And it doesn't matter if we crash and spike. It doesn't matter

if we get to, you know, a Dow, $40,000, $50,000, $60,000. 45 years from now, if we're at the mean, we will earn nothing. Now you say, well, that would never happen. You go, well, if you own the the 1906 high, you were even after something like 40 years.

I don't ask from if you own the- Even after 40 years. If you buy, if you own the top. Yep. People I say, well, how long did it take to get back to the top? That's a favorite question. You go, oh, you know, it took 22 years. Oh, it took 15 years.

Oh, it took. I like to ask a question. No, no, no. Not how long it took to get from the top back. to even. How long did it take to go from that top to the last time that that price was attained, adjusted for inflation? And those can go anywhere from 40 to 75 years.

All you have to do is look at inflation, adjusted S&P, and draw a line from a top across the S&P. And you will find that most of them break even in the mid-80s, no matter what year they started. So you're just answering the question, what the hell is going on with land prices and asset prices? Everything. Everything's mispriced. But is it mispriced?

I mean, if I've got excess money, you know, and I need to store it somewhere, and I'm listening to you, I'm like, oh, I think I'm going to buy something a little less volatile, a little more real. Like real estate. Exactly. Okay. The first time home, and I know this drives you bananas, the first time home buyers, not too many decades ago, were on average about 30 years old. Yep. I just read, what's the fact? I don't know, 56 now.

First time homebuyers, 56. That's been a massive consequences. Do you want to buy into that market that somehow seems like it has to regress because you can't have people going 56 years? years without owning a house, right? You personally, I think it was in Turning Point USA, you went absolutely nonstop about how you can worry about Ukraine, but we've got guys, we've got young adults who can't raise families and houses. Yeah, and it creates a very scary political environment where people don't own anything and therefore have nothing to lose and no future. Right. Well, Here's an interesting ADHD moment.

Monogamy versus polygamy. This will sound random, but it'll get you to the same. No, it's a core question, actually. These are the building blocks of the West. Turns out polygamy. Monogamy is viewed as favoring women. That turns out to be backwards. And it's a simple math.

Imagine there's 100 people ranked 1 to 100. Number 100 is Mr. Big Cheese. and on the women's side, hottest chick on the planet, right? Right. Monogamy says, number one, would marry number one, number two would marry number two in the perfect system. So think of it as just a very simple model. And that what you can't do is if you're at the bottom of the chain, marry up.

Right. If you do, then someone else gets pushed down. Of course. Right? So it would be of the interest of the girl working 7-11 to be jeopardy. Bezos's second wife. Yeah, I think that happened. So in fact, you can upgrade your game and, you know, Elon, right?

I mean, the guy's a reproduction machine, right? The women are signing off on it because it's better to be with a guy worth that kind of money than broke, right? And so it turns out that you say, well, then why did cultural evolution lead to monogamy? And the answer is is because it minimizes violence. Right. It's for the men. Of course.

So they don't fight. Well, yeah, because in a polygma system, the high status male scoop up all the women. Well, now in a situation where men can't provide the home for their families and stuff like that, and so we're going to fight. I've noticed. I've noticed that too. And so now here's the deal.

let's say I'm right and we're to mark it top and if if I'm not I think we're close one of the things that my peers who were paranoid as hell about this some very smart guys they tend not to put numbers on it I'm one of the few who puts numbers on it there's a couple others who do but they just say all the evaluations are ridiculous but no one wants to be on record that we're going to be to say it's catastrophically over price whatever correction you get you say see, I told you, I'm saying 200% over price. Now, how do you get out of overvaluation? You can't inflate your way out. No. Because the numerator, the price, and the denominator, the thing is supposed to track, both are influenced by inflation. So as your price goes up because of inflation, your revenues

go up because of inflation. You're still 200% over historical average valuation. And so you can't inflate away in overvaluation. So what, I mean, is this just a gravity scenario where ultimately it has to revert to its actual value? Best model I have, and they never work because it's always one of these, something will be creatively different, but the best model is in Niki.

Japan hit a high in 89. It briefly got back to that. 35 years later. It's actually below that, I think, if I remember correctly. Inflation adjusts for that, guaranteed. Yes. Yes, yes, that's right. I asked someone during a podcast if you can do this spreadsheet for me. I'd love to get it.

Someone did it. I said, what if you started buying the knee K at the top? Not own the knee. If you own the knee K at the top, you're dead meat. You died broke. But what if you started buying, 22-year-old graduate at Tokyo University? You started putting yen into the knee K in 1989. How long if you averaged it did it take you to break even?

It's around two decades. starting with zero in the Niki. So I was on a podcast with George Noble, a Twitter space actually. He was Peter Lynch's right-hand man. And he said, well, you could, I said, I think the markets will be uninvestable. He said, oh, you can do this and this. And I said, the NICA, and he said, oh, you could short. I said, no, you couldn't.

You can't short a market that takes 20 years to find a bottom. Right. You can short a market like an 07 to 09. Right, right, right. A volatile market. Yes. You can't. a market in inexorable decline, can't be sure.

So if we're in a top, aren't top supposed to be euphoric? Remember the dot com? Oh, yes. The world was changing. The nifty 50, you know. Webvan and E-toys and Pets.com. You know, sustainable prosperity. We are supposed to be true believers that the world is wonderful.

Do you sense much of the population thinks the world's wonderful? I don't. I don't sense that. and all around us are signs of... What's it going to look like when 70% gets clipped off this market? So I'm immediately going to Preper Survival Mode. Where are the enduring safe stores of value? I don't...

You can't answer that. I bought gold at around 270 an ounce. 270? Hope you bought a lot of it. I did. But it's worth a lot more now. You think? Yeah.

What spot price did, do you know? Ballpark 3,300. Yeah. I bought silver. I bought gold below 270. I'll tell you why, because my first purchases were actually in a close-on mutual fund that was trading 27% below net asset valuation because people say, oh, it's easy to buy back then. It was cheap. I said it was cheap because five of us wanted it.

Right. Well, of course. Right. And by the way, the top, some Tuesday afternoon at 203 p.m., we will hit a top that will be. decades later to be returned to potentially. The top is the point of maximum optimism, which paradoxically is the moment in time where your justification for optimism is zero.

The bottom is the same thing in reverse. Of course. So we're not happy now. So you're saying the herd's not always right. Is that what you're saying? I'm told. So let's hold on. Let's just go back to gold for a second.

So you buy... I bought gold net at around 210. come on well i bought it 28% below nav when it was physical delivery no that was not physical but then i started buying here's what i did i bought gold from the local coin dealer yeah and i'd say when you get ounces i'll pay cash and he sold it to me at spot and and he'd call and say i got three ounces in i'd go the bank i'd get out nine hundred dollars right and i'd buy the gold from them cash i buy silver from them. Cash. I could buy Silver Eagles at Spot. You go on eBay? Holy shit. Those things are like $10 above spot. And it was for ballpark $4 an ounce. And then I remember it was at $457. And I was buying from

him. And he said, don't you think there's a top? He knew I was going to buy it. He said, don't you think there's a top? $457 an ounce for gold. There's like 0.3 or something. I don't know. And I said, How many people are buying gold from you? He said, oh, about four. And I said, and the other three are my friends, aren't they? He said, yeah. And I said, does that sound like a mania to you? And so, here's the thing I've been on.

I'm a big fan of energy, but I think when the selling starts, everything sells. You'll be selling your children, you'll be selling, right, everything sells. So I think the idea of trying to get into any risk gas, it's so dangerous. I'll take 4% on a treasury, two-year treasury. Some people think, you know, I'll lock it up for two years. Oh, that'll save me. I won't dip by after six months. So at what price would you buy gold again?

Well, I've got so much I don't need anymore. If I didn't own any, I'd buy it now, but the Bitcoin guys would say buy Bitcoin at $117,000. I turned it down at 10. I wish I'd bought it. I would have sold it at 50 and spent the proceeds on therapy. Why on therapy? be. Because I would have sold it at 50. Right. Good point. And I know I would have. I know I would have. You don't believe in crypto. I don't think so. The crypto can me, I am their number one target.

They say you are a hodler. And I won't buy it. And the reason is because I believe that several layers. One is that I believe that the authorities are not going to let crypto take over. Of course not. And by the way, that means that they're going to lose total control over society? Yeah, I don't think so. You think the Rockefellers and the Rothschilds are going to hand it over to Max Kaiser and Michael Saylor? I don't think so. Right? You don't think that's what I think it actually is. You know, the first paper on crypto was written by three NSA guys. Yeah. That means I think if I were smart and I were going to bring in central bank digital currency,

which is an authoritarian nightmare, I would do it the way they did. I'd release the Crypto. I'd have guys pumping it. I'd have guys supporting it. I'd let them debug the networks and the kinks and the acclimate people to it. And then I'd say, okay, it was fun. We'll take it from here. And in the process, of course, you acclimate people to this new, digital world. New kind of commerce. Yeah, exactly. No, that's it. And I get rid of the ATMs and I would make airport convenience stores, credit card only. And I would do all that stuff to, to change people's... Ash is liberty. Of course.

Oh, I couldn't agree more. So, you just have too much gold. You just don't want any more gold. I just, no, it's, I'm. What about real estate right now? I'm long, I own a nice house. I'm long real estate by owning that house. I wouldn't buy real estate as a speculation.

If I, if you put a gun to my head, I'd say maybe farmland. But that's been getting scooped up. That's a pretty trite narrative now. Big time. Well, I follow that because I'm interested. And, I mean, it's turning for just crazy numbers in acre. Well, that's a problem. That's what I'm saying.

So here's what I watched for years and then jumped in. And it's a problem. The modern market, I bought gold steadily from 99 through about 03. And then I bought some more when it was around 1,200 in the teens. I said, okay, it's kind of flattened out. I'm going to get some more. So bought it around $1,200 in maybe 2016 or something. and but the modern markets don't wait if you get a good idea and social media it will close up that gap so fast you want to hit you so I'm bullish on energy long term energy equities and stuff but I think they're going to sell before they become a good buy and so I just can't commit a lot of money to the energy even though I think I have some mutual funds on uranium based investments which I think we got to go to and now it looks like we are

I actually think AI is not demanding nuclear energy. I think AI is being used as a Trojan horse to bring in nuclear energy, which I support. I think they're using the buzz of AI to say, now let's get the nukes going. People say, yeah, nukes. We need it for the AI. We've needed nukes. It was the obvious next thing to go to. Platinum.

For years I watched platinum. Own so little platinum that if it went to zero, I wouldn't even notice. I mean, trivial, trivial amount. And I've been watching, it's been flat. I mean, flat as in like a flat line, not moving away from $900 an ounce by a few dollars flat for 10 years after dropping. And I go, what's the platinum story?

Well, the platinum story is, I don't trade. I don't trade it all. If I buy it, I'm buying it saying, look, I'm hanging on to it. If it goes down, I don't trade. the platinum story is i don't believe in the evi i don't think it's a good technology i think it'll be here but i don't think it's going to take over the world i think the hybrids are going to take over the world well they make sense they make inherent sense yeah yeah yeah they're more efficient they use more platinum than evi than internal combustion engines yeah because because their catalytic

converters burn colder so they need more platinum now here's where it gets real interesting The platinum miners are in Russia and South Africa. Russia will therefore have control. South Africa could become a failed state so fast you don't know what it'd hit you, right? More to the point, and again, trying to get real facts on this stuff, but the above-ground platinum supply, the available platinum supply, is something like $3 billion, which is something a medium-sized hedge fund could buy. at current prices.

It's been in deficit production for at least four years. What does deficit production mean? Means that we're consuming more per year than the miners are producing. Based on the rate of deficit production that the above ground supply will be gone within about a year.

So there's no more platinum. Arguably. We could go to potentially Palladium, but you know, whatever. Platinum is not gone through a meme phase. So a little bit of trade room, he says, that mean phase could get spectacular. Platinum could go to 20,000.

Because it has industrial uses. Right. You know, it seems kind of natural, right? So I decided, I was, so I reached out to some technical analysts who draw the squiggles on the curves. And I make, I'm sarcastically, occasionally commenting about technical analysis, but I can't do it or don't believe in it or whatever. But I asked if you, I said, look at this plot. Where would you start getting excited? Because it's been flat for 10 years.

I don't need to put money in and have a. sit there for 10 years more. And a few gave me opinions about what price. I kind of formulated an opinion where I had to start and then hit it. Now, instead of buying it, you know, slowly, I said in the modern area, you got to move quick. So I started hitting the buy button. And I'm still not. I face a boomer dilemma. The boomer dilemma is the good news is my net worth is good enough. If I don't screw up, I'm fine. I mean, I could retire today, not earn another penny. Fine.

I want to leave money to my kids. I will be able to. The paradox is that to commit to an asset requires committing a percentage that's not stupid. If you commit 0.01% of your assets to it, it's not going to make a difference no matter what happens. So if you say, well, 5%. When I look at the quantity of money, I have to spend to commit 5%. It seems huge. But it's only 5%.

And so as a consequence, I go, look, if it went to zero tomorrow, I'd have a bad day. I'd lose 5% of my assets. But it would be too much money. So I'm fighting this bias about how many dollars it takes to get to a, I get it. So let me ask you just to a wrap-up question, which is, given your description of where we are, and you haven't even mentioned what could be a debt crisis when people stop buying our debt or slow down, but there are all kinds of things to worry about that seem imminent.

How does the average person respond? They don't have any money anyways. Fair. I mean, the average person has no money. So how does the five percentile boomer respond? Yeah. Well, years ago, I did an analysis on the five percentile boomer. This is how bad it is.

This is years ago, actually. And it actually got vetted by Stephen Roach, who's the executive director of Morgan Stanley. He looked at my numbers and said, actually, you've overestimated something. You should be more conservative. I invented five percentile guy. At that time, he was worth $1.1 million. He was earning $156,000 a year. You also know he's not 22 years old.

He's probably a boomer because it takes a while to get the 5 percentile. At a reasonable rate of withdrawal from a retirement account, Mr. 5 percentile guy who has to be living the American dream could take about $48,000 out. Annually? Annually. without risking going broke. And you know what? They don't know how to live on $48,000.

No. And they might have other assets. This is a complicated analysis, but that's a scary number. For a modern life, that's a... Yeah, well, but the other thing is, if he knew how to live on $48,000, he'd have more than $1.1 million.

Good point. And so we've got a whole generation that has got expectations that are just off the chart to start, And it's not because of a five-year or a 10-year recency bias. It's a 40-year recency bias. It's 1981. Let me finish that story.

From 1981, the valuation, which should not trend, compounded annually 4% a year. What happens over the next 40 years when it compounds negative 4% a year to get to cheap again? now you say well that'll never happen i go of course it'll happen show me an asset class that got over price it didn't become cheap again well if you believe in markets that's just by definition going to happen right and if there's a way to fake it so it doesn't happen then it means you're just diluting as to what actually happened you're not getting a reality right right and so the bottom line is is that the boomer demographic almost by definition was going to generate a bubble a big mother bubble because of the demographics now i was telling you about how

I was reading my old write-ups from like 13, 14, 15. I make a compelling case that the markets were crazy. How do I do it? I use numbers. I use stats. And I use quotes from the most famous money guys in the world. You know, Paul Tudor Jones, Stan Druck and Miller, you name it. These are not lightweights saying these markets are insanely overvalued in 2015.

What has happened since then? Straight up. Oh, for sure. Now, example, Apple, 10-fold gain and a growth in revenues of 50%. 95% correction brings that back down. Microsoft, 150% gain in revenues, 10-fold gain doesn't make mathematical sense.

Let's go to NVIDIA. There is the winner. $4 trillion of market cap being run by a guy who has a very sketchy past. 25-fold gain in revenues. You go, now we're talking. 250-fold gain in market cap. Yeah, so that's the problem right there. 90% correction takes you back to 2015.

Do you remember 2015 being depressed? I don't. Stan Druck and Miller didn't think so. Howard Marks didn't think so. All these guys were considered legends thought the markets were insanely overpriced in 15. And it's been

nothing but up. And that will end. I don't know when. And you think that all asset classes are tied to that? I can't say all because that means 100%, but if I found something that I thought was dirt cheap,

I'm glad I own the gold from as cheap as I did because when it goes down, I'm still up, 15-fold or something, right? So it makes it easier. Buying gold now from scratch would be harder. It would be that, you know, the number of dollars to get the percent position, that sort of thing. And I think the debt problem is global. If you actually look at the metrics for the growth in the global debt relative to global GDP,

the entire world has become priced much more than 10 years ago relative to what the world produces. So what's a global debt crisis? That's the question. You've got lenders and borrowers. It's a zero-sum game. No, it's not. Well, I know. A global debt crisis is when the entire world thinks they're going to get shit that the world can't produce.

And the way you think of how to create one, artificial Godinckin experiment. Let's say the leaders of the world got together and said, look, let's just solve this problem. Let's guarantee health care to all our citizens. Let's guarantee their pension, all our citizens. Problem solved. They go, well, but you didn't in any way, shape, or form increased the ability to produce wealth. So you now have obligations for which you haven't a clue. How are you going to pay for them?

Who's going to do it? We're going to have the Chinese delivering Chinese food to our doors still? I don't think so. We're going to be delivering food to the children. Chinese. So everything will regress. Forty your recency bias says it won't. It will. On that dark note, I'm just picturing myself showing up at a doorstep in Beijing with some Kung Pao chicken. Hoping for a tip. I can see you now, you turn the scanner around and shove the 25% tip in the guy's face. Professor, thank you. I hope this doesn't get you fire.

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