Dave Collum: Financial Crisis, Diddy, Energy Weapons, QAnon, and the Deep State’s Digital Evolution

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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 the 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 where.

Stay in your lane.

Well, I'll be in the middle of class, like in March of

07.

In the middle of class, no warning, I blurt out the banking system's about to collapse.

I'd written about it in 02.

But I turned, I said, I think it's about to collapse.

This is an organic chemistry class?

An organic chemistry class.

And they they looked at me and I just said, look, I think the entire banking system is going down the tubes now.

And it took another year, year and a half to.

Did they say that's not a related discipline?

What are you talking about?

No, no, no, no one gave me gut 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 09.

I said, didn't I warn you that the banking system was going to collapse?

I said, 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 lecturer 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 09.

And

so,

yeah, I do occasionally go off the rails, but no, 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,

was in 2020.

I got canceled during the height of cancel season, right?

Remember how it was happening all the time.

And the probability of me ending up being interviewed by you was pretty high because it was being written.

I got canceled and it 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 I 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 over by the riot police.

And I watched the video a couple of times.

I said, well, Chris, his name is 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,

I said, he was poking riot police with something that looked kind of like a taser 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, 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

and so.

And so I slept with some loaded guns and I was emotionally ready to blow someone's brains out.

How many tenured professors in Ivy League schools have guns at home?

I don't know.

I would not, 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.

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 a cell phone behind the ambulance.

The press couldn't find him in any of the hospitals.

He made a lot of money on GoFundMe.

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 that turned out the whole thing in retrospect was a grift.

So I was dead right.

Cornell was on a warfare trying to figure out how to 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 doing?

Right.

Because a guy in 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.

40 years.

Right.

That's four years as an undergrad.

So, you know, so you'd 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.

I knew him from the day he got to Cornell.

He's now the president, and it's useful.

So

when I told, I knew I was coming here, and I asked a trustee,

I'm going to be talking to Tucker.

Is there anything

you'd like me to somehow get out there?

Not that I'm going to be there talking, man, but I 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 call the Daily Column,

where they'd publish an article about 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 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 a fire and it put it out.

So

in that sense, they did the right thing.

Did they call and tell you they were going to denounce you before the 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 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 this 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.

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What about the then-provost, now the president, who is your friend, who denounced you?

Did that affect your friendship?

No, not a bit.

They were just trying to put out a 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 Ivies.

It's not Harvard.

It's not Princeton.

It is, 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 um and by the way it's ranked number one in a critical category um 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 try to just put out the fire.

And it did.

And, and it, I, I paid a price.

Um, I lost a consulting gig at Pfizer because of it, because I was now a Nazi, you know, and, and Pfizer didn't stand by you?

I had consult, 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, they just cleared the deck as well.

So I don't hold it against, I hold again, what I hold against Pfizer is the vaccine.

I don't hold

the guys I consult with at 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, a scientist.

I started networking.

I started trying to figure it out.

I'm in a group called Doctors for COVID Ethics.

for four years where we had every major anti-vaxxer on the planet go through this wait so you're a consultant to to pfizer you're a pretty famous probably one of the most famous organic chemists in the country so if you say the pfizer covet vax killed a lot of people it can't be dismissed as crank talk

well it could be because i'm not a i'm not a vaccine expert i'm an organic chemist so i i have certain technical skills that probably help me burrow and it's the genetics majors and undergrad that helps me i don't use the biochem 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 is which are papers written about the clinical trials and the VARES database, show huge number of problems, right?

And so our 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 Malone's, the Ryan Coles, the Brian Artises,

you can go on and on and on.

They all went through this group.

And we talked about things three or four years became the...

Is anyone keeping track of how many Americans were killed by it?

Well, it's very hard because, first of all, every fluke death got absorbed into the COVID stats.

So 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

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 travesty.

Maybe it was Walter, about the travesty of locking down.

You show me, 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 happened.

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 during lockdown, when they showed up, they were very weak in organic chemistry.

Yeah.

You could see it.

So think of the poor kid who's five years old trying to learn how to read and write and everything's so a mask,

right?

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 Burke?

And our Zoom group, by the way, had, had Scott Atlas.

And so I asked Scott, I said, Scott,

was it malicious?

Fauci and Burks?

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 text.

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 astonishing.

He 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 this.

He says, one day he walks in with a scientific paper that Atlas had read.

And so he's thinking, whoa, Fauci's 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 head of the entire health organization, you shouldn't.

And he said he boxed 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, but here's the Chris Mattis, though, 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 at 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 have tracked both

the disease and

the vaccine back years before it showed up on our dinner plate.

I think

low-level amalice would be.

You think it came out of a lab in North Carolina?

Yeah, Ralph Barrick.

Yeah, he

you can follow a guy named David Martin has followed the patent trail.

And an artificial organism can be patented, not a natural one.

Yes.

And you can follow the patent trail on COVID.

And

you can follow the vaccine patent trail.

So if it gets, watch it get moved around, move from point A to point B.

If it was created in North Carolina, how did it get to Wuhan?

And

what was that?

We were funding research in Wuhan because we were not allowed to do gain of.

Sorry, I keep tapping the table.

Oh, it's all right.

This is a topic that deserves some table topping.

I've done podcasts where I have headphones and I have four boss, three Boston Terriers, soon four,

and they snore.

I can't hear them because my headphones are noise dampening.

And then I listen to the pot to hear this humongous amount of snoring behind me.

So I'm aware of background.

You didn't bring the terriers as well.

I didn't bring the terriers, no.

So, but

I just want to flesh this 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 uh gain of function got banned in the u.s i i i but i don't think we banned it there were something like 36 bio bioweapons labs in ukraine yeah of u.s origin yes so why is ukraine perfect ukraine's perfect to run a bioweapons lab you need first world um infrastructure yeah and third world people to test 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 estimated 13, 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 nausea.

I think Fauci's been doing damage to people and killing people for many, many years.

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Be safe.

But to do clinical trials on foster kids, I thought after the Second World War, when both the Japanese and the Germans were doing things like that.

Nuremberg Code.

Well, exactly.

It was codified there, but

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 euthanizing mental patients or whatever, 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 data.

I think they did it to get all the data 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'd they just convict him of?

Nothing.

They could have put him away for 20 years based on what he did to Justin Bieber.

Right?

They didn't even get him on any of that.

So it's a classic, it's a classic case.

I know I sound like a nutcase, but you've had a lot of nut cases on your show.

I had a good case.

My brother is trying to dial me back.

His day, they're going to think you're a nutcase if you 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 Wayne.

Well, I thought that was the whole point of academic research was that, you know, the predicate for it, the basis of it

is free thinking.

Well, 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.

Which is not.

diddy.

It's not diddy.

You're not a tenured professor of Diddy studies at Cornell.

We could have it.

You know, we do have subjects.

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 she worked 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.

Wiener'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

watched 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 they're real people now you can say well maybe they died for other reasons i go but it's still nine cops

and you know it's like the five cops who died after january 6th right there 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're not going to believe this, with the QAnon shaman guy, the guy with the horns on January 6th, at January 6th.

What is that all about?

I've got videos of.

This is totally normal.

Yeah, yeah, totally.

I've got videos of-that 100 yards away not doing anything.

I've got

videos of John Sullivan, right?

The guy who was supposedly Antifa, but Antifa 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, no path forward, really.

I mean, these are nine

These are society's

if they're real, that is, if they're legal.

If they're real.

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, 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 Antifa, it's really odd that he was a nationally ranked cyclist.

What I know about nationally ranked anythings is their lives have purpose.

Now, there's a mug shot.

Did 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 stomp around looking like neo-Nazis who also were buff and had no pot bellies and covered their faces, get arrested and they're handcuffed with their backpacks still on and their magaphones 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 Waffen-SS lightning bolts on their side.

You know, right?

So, so, 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 Mangioni story.

It's not the right story.

There's something wrong.

And I, I,

Walter laid it out.

Now, what Walter didn't say is who's behind him?

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, you know, examined much more closely than any other kind of act.

And it like doesn't, it doesn't make any sense.

I mean, the, the shooting of Trump a year ago in Butler, Pennsylvania is just a little bit more.

Oh, I wrote about that too.

Everything.

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 say, 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, 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.

There's a guy sitting behind Trump

named

Joseph Fusca.

Fusca is his last name.

I've seen him before many times.

He was, by the QAnon guys, which are a bunch of whack jobs,

said to be, you're not going to believe it, 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 Fusca and whatever, you know, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

But he's one who supposedly is JFK Jr.

in disguise.

Fusca

was there sitting right behind Trump.

I go, of 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.

Now, 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 Gobekli Tepe.

You get down the rabbit hole and you go,

there's an entire ecosystem down here that people don't know exists.

It's like once you

ask, how did Kennedy get killed?

And you go, oh, boy, you know, that's troubling, right?

And then Building Seven, which you talked with Ron Johnson, who, by the way, was in our Doc Zoom group, right?

When I'm talking, we had everyone, we had everyone.

Once you go to one or two of these, then you go,

I can't trust anything.

And I work in a field where you're supposed to be able to get the facts and say, now, here's an odd story.

A friend of mine is binding all my annual reviews that I write.

I write one blog a year.

I've been thinking about why.

And I really.

Can you just pause and describe what that is?

That's really the reason I wanted to talk to you is because

your interview is well known among people who are paying attention.

What is it?

And why do you do it?

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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, I was a tech bull.

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 was 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 09, I decided to do it seriously.

I said, 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% on 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.

It took me decades to figure that out.

I thought I just blew it.

But no, it was Silicon Valley selling software and hardware.

And I can make that,

but it's not worth it.

And then, and then,

so I started 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, and, and then I realized, though, um, 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 I 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 they'll be best friends again, right?

And so you could, I could not write a weekly blog.

And so what I do is, is I, by writing once a year, it gives me a long time to think about.

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 I don't, and I, 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 if i see something we talked before about about using tripe metaphors you know how we both hate it and 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 it's really great i think where do people find it uh it's published at peak prosperity

And

it's my pinned tweet.

So it 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, and 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 why I'm watching BET in Black Entertainment Today or something, whatever.

Television.

And some burly black guy's talking about Trump.

And he says, forget the messenger.

Listen to the message.

Listen to that.

I'm going, holy moly, right?

Turns out he was the head of the NW of the

new Black Panther Party.

I go, Trump just got endorsed by the Black Panthers.

So I, and then I saw Jimmy Brown, the running back, say he will be a president of the people.

And all of a sudden, and so I wrote, it might just be a flicker

but i think the black community is moving to the right

and boy was that ahead of its time

and so uh what i won't do is write about something that i was writing about why yeah the other problem i face

is that i don't write about stuff i'm an expert i write about stuff 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, this is not a war.

And you'd see some grandmother going, ah, this is just really terrible.

You know, and I'm going, that's not a war.

You want to see a war?

Look at Baghdad, day one.

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?

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.

And so when I wrote about that, I found about...

20 to 40 guys who are trying to get it right, which includes you.

It 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 Liero.

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.

100%.

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 does have to worry because everyone else in his world is connected to everyone else in his world.

So I think he likes 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 we're just mutually

yeah and and the the penalties for straying from the story are you get fired are real yeah totally i mean whatever i

There's been no age in human history where 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 is we kind of talked a little bit at breakfast.

Here's the funny story.

They interviewed that night again, Mike Cronk.

And Mike Cronk told this shooting.

The night of the shooting.

The night of the shooting.

That was 2017, maybe.

I can't remember.

Yeah.

And Mike Kronk 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 error bar are not what they appear to be.

I'll take it all the way back to Columbine if you want.

But Mike Kronk talks about his friend getting shot three times in the chest from hundreds of yards away.

And later, 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 him out.

May I just ask why?

I'll tell you in a minute.

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 and provide your own health care.

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So then,

like YouTube, you see, it rolls over 15 seconds and then it goes to the next YouTube.

And we're, we're watching Vegas like you watch 9-11, right?

It was, it was really 500 people.

It is the biggest shooting says, probably Gettysburg.

Yes.

Right?

When was the last time you heard a gun antagonist 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 to the next interview, and there's Mike Cronk again.

And I go, what?

You got 22,000 people and why are you interviewing Mike Cronk?

And then there were oddities that were always showing up like some lady walking through the crowd saying, you're all going to die tonight.

And they wheeled, they carted her away and things like that.

Yeah, yeah.

Weird stuff.

And so

I tried to figure out who Mike Cronk 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.

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 this story for about two weeks, maybe, and you were bringing it up.

And Coulter jumped in.

You know, Paddock was making money.

How?

Playing video poker.

That's his, 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 all over the place.

There was 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 document called Route 41, and they got stuff I didn't know about, but they also got stuff 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 who 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 and and and then afterwards, reporters try to get to his house.

His house is being protected by by cars.

They had no license plates.

And then all of a sudden he goes to Mexico.

And when asked, well, where'd he go?

They said, well, he was planning a trip to Mexico.

So when I wrote it by, I said, oh, by the way, Jesus, 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 Alan DeGeneres.

and alan introduces 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 him, this is the only interview you're going to do and you got to get it off your chest.

I'm going, oh, shit, here we go.

And then, and then, and then the handler's doing all the talking.

Jesus 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.

I tried to interview him at the time.

Really?

Yes.

Couldn't get to him.

He drove to Mexico from Vegas.

Right.

Two of them did.

Yeah.

Probably an escort.

Yeah.

Then he came back.

And yeah, I tried my hardest.

Now, Alan works for the company that owns Mandalay.

His handler.

Yeah.

No, no.

Ellen DeGen.

Oh, Ellen.

I'm so sorry.

Yeah.

And so they're buttoning it down.

Now, what you see from Route 41 videos is there was 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's here bam bam bam bam bam they hear that that that that that that and so you could hear multiple guns the whole thing so then what happened my cronk

i start reading trauma surgeons saying there's something wrong with with the story.

You know, if you get hit with, you know, what was it, AR-15 or something?

Yeah, you're the 308.

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 just going to turn your leg to jello.

Three chest wounds from a rifle?

Yeah.

So, 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 her.

I'm going, you look pretty perky.

And

then

Mike Cronk with a 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 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 talking with three holes in your chest.

What are you sticking 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 of 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 was.

A relative?

A relative?

Yeah.

No, no, no.

No, no, it's felt different.

John worked for Oracle.

He's some on-the-spectrum code head.

He also analyzed the Butler shooting,

the audios of the Butler shooting.

He's an on-the-spectrum code head.

He's on the spectrum code head.

He sort of bears down and grabs on something a little too firmly, I think, but he brings it up.

He has on-the-spectrum code heads.

Yeah, dude.

I know.

And he, there was pretty good evidence that a lot of the shooting was coming from helicopters behind the mandala.

And he tracked the transponders turning on and off behind the mandala.

The story was that Muhammad bin Salman was on the top floor.

The crown prince of ruler of 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-Khashogi is one of the most famous CIA guys on the planet.

Jamal Khashoggi is the one who got diced up and fed to the camels.

Now, he's a New York Times reporter.

I think he was also a CIA.

Washington Post columnist.

Yeah.

And he was killed in the embassy.

In

Istanbul, I believe.

Okay.

Supposedly, on the anniversary, of the Vegas shootings, supposedly Mohammed 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, I was having a cow over Khashoggi,

right, when he got killed.

I'm going, we're killing tens of thousands of Yemenis.

We killed 5 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 Khashoggi.

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 layer.

Yeah,

there's a scale of evil and starving kids is worse than what happened in Khoshogi.

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.

I'm sure you did.

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 supporter of law enforcement.

We've never gotten hassled anywhere.

Just the opposite.

Oh, you work for Fox News.

Oh, my gosh, of course.

Slow down.

Official law enforcement is what got me.

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 the school

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's a town of like 5,000 people.

And then they didn't go in.

for 78 minutes or something.

I go,

excuse me.

You show me 10 cops,

eight of them have kids.

Right now, I'm reading a book called The Moral Animal.

It's about human behavior.

And, and out of those eight, eight would have gone in and said, 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 was the mom

who did go in 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 kfabe what does that mean kfabe is something eric weinstein wrote about he's asked to write an essay with a bunch of other scholarly types and he said that politics was kfabe 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 he talked about politics being K-Fabe.

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 $1,000 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 getting, and the stories would break and they would stay that way and they wouldn't be shifting around.

And you could say, okay, here's what happened in here, here, and this piece fits in here.

And now you can't.

Now it's like, and 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, rerouting.

I go, I'm not taking that right turn now.

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 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 a term I've tried to figure out where it came from.

And I think the guy who gets the most credit is kind of Peter Dale 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 of 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 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 that's clearly true.

So what is a fact?

That was the title of last year's write-up.

What is a fact?

Yeah,

it's impossible.

You can't actually control the, 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 do.

Of course, exactly right.

Right.

And they also throw out debris so that...

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, I avoid it, you know, I'd be listening to something, and it would have useful information, and all of a sudden, then it would show the hole.

And here's Trump and his generals are going to save the world.

No, I agree.

But the interesting, I never knew anything about QAnon.

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 did he get?

I don't fully understand it, but here's what I understand is that,

you know, some of the predictions in 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

4chan or whatever they claim it was.

These are guys who are probably pissed that the system went bad.

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's a control mechanism, trying to siphon off some of that energy and move it in a siphoning off the energy.

That's a

less dangerous direction.

That's right.

Focus on Wuhan,

right?

Focus on the lab and Wuhan.

That's siphoning.

It's all American politics.

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 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 are the enemies of the guys with the torches.

So you said that a couple of times.

Focus on Wuhan.

I've fallen for that squirrel.

Squirrel.

Wuhan thing.

Squirrel.

Why?

A blind nut finds the squirrel.

That's funny.

That's a real, I'm stealing that's that's an original and i never know if i heard it and forgot where i got it but that's an original it's the squirrel uh

what is that distracting i think it is great you put me in an asylum overnight in an asylum overnight yeah yeah my my my hotel is a former asylum is it really yeah you didn't ask no oh yeah it's a former asylum and 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 interviewed

Catherine Austin Fitz.

Yes.

I've been blessed.

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 create it is by being truthful.

Yes.

And I know truth is everything to you.

I try to make it that way.

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 there's several dozen who somehow have decided that I'm worth their time

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 and the tens of trillions.

of dollars of resources that have been i know catherine austen fits 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, she's not.

She's a grounded person.

She could have things wrong, but it'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, don't get near her.

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 Cuga Lake.

I can literally throw rotten fruit off my deck and drop it down into the drink from, I could, I'll show you afterwards, I'll show you photos.

It's the view is such that if there are places in the country where the view would cost $20 million, not an Ithaca, of course.

And

if people come and visit,

they should.

It's beautiful.

I can't remember why I said that.

That's probably.

I'm saying that people dismiss,

you know, the few who are just committed to pursuing truth no matter what as crazy.

And you gave Catherine Fitz as an example, but you said you can actually go crazy

by looking too carefully into.

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 largemouth 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've got smallmouth bass there, I think you need to fish it on a fly rod.

It'll totally change your life.

It's not a fly rod.

It's a deep lake.

It's a.

But you can catch them on the surface with a popper.

And if you do, if you catch a sizable smallmouth on a popper on a fly rod, you don't.

I'm an 18-foot-deep shoal guy.

You're 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 going on.

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.

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 revisionist history of World War II.

And you go, well, why would you want to read that?

Well, it turns out I think the story we got about World War II is all wrong.

I think that's right.

And then I read about FDR and FDR's right-hand man was a Soviet spy.

Certainly was.

Right.

And there's

confirmed.

We should have been, one can make the argument we should have sided with Hitler and fought Stalin.

Patton said that.

So, and maybe there wouldn't have been a Holocaust, right?

You know, there's a, but, but the, but Stalin was awful by any metric, and we, we, we weren't his ally.

Um,

the story is that there were a few missing American soldiers at the end of World War II in Russian territory.

Yeah, 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 stories now, what we were told, but I dug into that and you find out that Pearl Harbor, we knew to the morning that Pearl Harbor was going to get attacked.

Stalin knew it was going to be attacked.

He wanted us to take the Japanese off his 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.

You find out that every single penny he spent trying to help.

the forgotten Amity Schlays, the forgotten man, was spent to buy votes every last penny.

He was a sociopath.

And the only thing he could do was lie.

He was a compulsive liar.

His, his inner circle had to constantly cover for his lying.

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, and, so, so, I, I read a 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, you take out the thought.

Completely agree.

The other thing that scares me about it, boy,

squirrel.

AI is going to make this 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, everything a 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 AI'd up that

there's no person anywhere within 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

sort of some nuance required.

It happened on the other day on a credit card request talking to the lady and it kept sending me in these loops and she finally straightened out.

But what happens when the code is being written by computers?

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 a 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 internal contradictions, you're not done.

You're not done understanding it.

You're not done understanding it.

So, the writing is understanding.

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 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 the great comedians will go down to the cheapo 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 um so you're no writing there's no thinking right so i read about maui Maui, the fires.

I wrote about that.

Very clearly a land grab.

You may remember how many kids died?

No.

Do you remember the 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 is 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 were used, even though there's a, it's, they're 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 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 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 of years ago.

The best evidence of a DEW.

So, if you've got these, you got to test them, right?

It's like

why you need bioweapons labs in Ukraine.

You got to test them.

You can't use lab rats.

You look at the Quebec fires,

satellite imagery of the Quebec fires, very mysterious.

About 26-ish fires started simultaneously.

How do you know?

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 that was 350 miles in diameter.

Boy, that's a determined arsonist,

or at least 26 of them.

Yeah, with in the middle of nowhere.

Yeah, with helicopters, I mean, there's no roads.

So, but, but that and say, no, a cell phone can't do it, you know, nothing right there 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, you, so, your, but 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 off Twitter.

Yeah.

How is that possible?

Because he was a racist.

That's what they told me.

Cut up racists.

That's what they told me.

Cut up racist.

He was a racist.

Right.

You know, so many, some 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 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 of people's understandings of the world around them,

that's 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 of the digital world.

Yeah.

So if you see voices out there dissenting from the.

I hear voices, Tony.

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 has 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 Trump being Trump.

It wasn't just Trump attacking them, though.

I know.

Marjorie Taylor Green.

Marjorie Taylor Greene, who, by the way, is nowhere near as stupid.

I mean, she's not even stupid.

Oh, I know.

She ran a construction company.

Oh, I know.

And

she just doesn't have whatever that normal, the fear that controls people in DC.

We're like, I can't.

But how do you turn on Thomas Massey?

Marjorie Taylor Greene at least played a role in Kayfabe that you could imagine drawing fire.

Massey's this guy, you know, who

built his own house and fixes his own car.

And

he's an engineer.

He's, he's, he's, he, he's the, he's an archetype of who we ought to be.

As a country.

As a country.

I so vehemently agree they turned on him

yeah well i haven't

we know why they turned on texted with him this morning um no 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 i 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 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.

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 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 like you don't need 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 they don't agree with that but they you know these are islamic states under sharia 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 Dhabi than in DC.

I just find that just absolutely incredible.

Like, what is this?

Why, why can't they allow Thomas Massey to just have his own Massey views?

He's a vote.

He's a vote.

Okay.

But you 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,

um,

do you know what I'm talking about?

Yeah, no, I absolutely

think about it.

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 only know that depends on what way, but yeah, 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 dissent?

I don't know, but

it'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.

Um, people don't understand universities.

Uh, there are people who do, obviously, but they're the average person doesn't.

So, so

people are going to say, I'm talking my book.

Let me let me take this opportunity with your gargantuan following to 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 tenured 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, a late night phone call.

You got to fight this.

You got to put 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,

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, Claude Ingay, Shouldn't be president of Harvard, shouldn't be on the faculty, shouldn't have a PhD, in my opinion.

That is the sign of the rot that has gotten into the universities, but it's still an exceptional rot.

So I don't see people at Cornell that look like Claudine 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 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 campus, everything just looks pretty normal.

The hardest of the hard sciences, though, do you think that's the problem?

If I walked over the art squad, I'd see some looney tunes, right?

And we're now destroying, the cost of an education is too high to waste it.

And so if you're going to spend $300,000,

you can't go into a career that you make $40,000 or that you make $25,000 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'd 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 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 to have to tighten up.

But my colleagues are, I would say on average,

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 who get funded.

By the way, the ones who never get funded, they've dropped off.

So that 15% is people still trying.

And 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 of anywhere from five to 30.

No one pays for that.

They raise the money from the federal system.

You 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.

It 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 investigator 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 it by going after the money.

Right.

So Harvard's locked down for $9 billion of research funds.

And my understanding is it's still locked down.

Cornell's locked down for over a billion.

Harvard was getting $9 billion from the feds for research for various research 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 columbia got crushed um

and then columbia put out a memo that said canceled now i don't know if that's because it's been canceled but what my my understanding is the money's not flowing

now the problem is is 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 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 step's broken.

And so the system right now is online, 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

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 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 supposedly are rules where the universities are not supposed to be competing with the private sector.

And they get around those.

But if Cornell builds housing and is making money off the housing in town, that kind of breaks the rule, right?

But they build dorms and and you know things like that so you're right about that um the endowments are are a funny game first and foremost um

i looked this up last week um approximately 50 of all endowment spin off so it's it spins off at revenue and harvard's has been collecting since 1656

um

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 is 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

that.

I agree with that.

And that's where we should have gotten the fastball past our.

Do any of these schools have more tenured 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.

so so for example uh

you need way more bean counters and grant writers and well no grant writers are me okay they're us the the grants are being written by the faculty um and again the dei michigan's dei payroll is was 93 million last time i read about it that's a lot of money right but but but um but just when you get a federal grant there's so many things you have to do it used to you they ran it out of a shoebox Here's your check, spend it wisely.

You know, that's what 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 DI.

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, coached 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 three times.

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

initiative.

Shut up, racist.

No, but I mean,

so the idea was that the SAT was supposed to democratize education.

We're just going to locate it.

And discover kids who've got double 800s who you wouldn't have spotted.

Exactly.

Right.

And actually, I 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, and Kaplan, you you said corrupted it as well well it it it that it it kind of corrupted the sat right that's what i'm saying so now the gre which is the next level is nowhere near as corrupted because by then the students don't give a damn they do i'll take the green so it's it's more legit but is there i mean but the idea that 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 used i i was graduate

I was a

director of graduate studies, which involved admission into our grad program for seven years, record.

I'm the only guy who held the four administrative positions in the chemistry department.

So that's pretty good for being the chemistry douchebag.

And you learn about things.

And I read undergraduate admissions on purpose for a number of years.

And you read regions.

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 could say non-statistically it's about color, right?

But a kid from the Ozarks, you know, a J.D.

Vance,

who I find his origin story a little suspicious, I must admit.

But but so we had a kid who applied and everything was sunshines and Skittles rainbows in his application.

And then one of of his letter writers 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 him 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 highest you can get to.

That kid got there, right?

MIT kids with lousy GPAs are 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 played football.

I take the kid in a heartbeat.

You show me a kid from Stanford

who is a 3.0, who is in, you know, who is

a 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 was a superachiever, what's superachieving?

And we didn't push him because it was a pain in the ass.

We were driving all the time.

All-state orchestra, first violin.

Gold medalist in the eighth state regional gymnastics Championship.

Fifth in 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.

His teacher also said, sweet kid, no attention.

At one point, I said to a teacher, I said, the only kids he's beaten are crack babies.

And she kind of blew a snot bubble and then said, yeah.

He's now phenomenally successful.

He's a super dad.

I'm so proud of 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.

And fortunately, 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.

It's not forcing him into a mold that didn't fit.

You know who he is?

You know the book Ferdinand the Bull?

Of course.

Child 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?

Faster, the more people watched, the faster he went.

Ironically, the overachiever got to Cornell and got lost.

The underachiever got, 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 is important by the time he's three years old his friends are singing bi-ngo and he's listening to orchestra pieces and he he'd say i like this part right here and you'd hear the second violins come in there and you'd go right there i like that

and i'm going holy shit this kid's got an ear

he has an ear like you he developed an ear from the 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 um

here since you mentioned the struggle you know the 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 um of 2008 it sounds like

in 2002 in 2002 so you couldn't short you couldn't get rich shorting anything um i i shorted twice and it's shorting's 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 ads.

So it looks like an economy 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

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 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 6% or 7% higher than the official numbers.

The official numbers are corrupted.

And I don't want to go into it because it's technical, but CPI is

crap.

Right.

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%,

it means we've been in a recession the whole way.

Yeah, moving backwards.

We're moving backwards.

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.

Um,

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 and 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 out 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 policies.

Monetary policy.

Right.

And what's bad?

Pumping the stock market is just stupid.

But,

you know, private equity buys, private equity

buys, has bought up 80% of the hospitals, the healthcare.

And what they do is they go in and

they buy

some

organization,

they strip it 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 morgenson a 47

bankruptcy rate

now post sale post sale now

as long as it's profitable to buy up viable companies destroy them sell the shell and make money monetary money's too loose

precious capital

If capital is of real value,

it's a moat.

So good businessman can get capital, bad businessman can't.

The fact that BlackRock could get

buy single-family dwellings, which is a terrible business,

you really can't make money

unless there's a housing boom and you leverage up to hell.

The fact that they could get it for at an interest rate of 0.15%

is a highly flawed system.

And that's where the inventory went after 07 to 09.

It got bought up by these guys who could lever up and then charge rents to people.

So they basically scooped up the housing market.

With free money.

With free money.

Kind of free money.

Unlike credit cards, which are 25%, right?

And not just free.

I mean, if once you factor in inflation.

It's a gift.

Yeah,

it's profitable money.

Literally, just taking the loan is profitable.

Yes.

You don't have to do anything with it.

Yes, yes.

So here's what happened.

Somehow the market has ceased to respond.

And the reason the market's important

is 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.

You, you, you, 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, 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 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 Altobin'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 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 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 president 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 him.

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, Soviet Union hadn't collapsed, but they were in trouble.

So they were obviously cranking 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 highs.

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 walking around in a bathrobe saying, I'm harmless.

He is not harmless.

When we're in a 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, bull versus bear 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

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

because they're competing competing against and as they get 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, has treated you like crap over the previous 14 years or a bond that pays you 17%?

Right.

Right.

So the bonds become less, the fixed income becomes less and less attractive steadily for 40 years.

Now, take the case Schiller PE, 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 doesn't allow you to cheat because it doesn't use the immediate and forward PEs are stupid, but K-Schiller averages, so I like it.

If you take the K-Schiller from 1880 to 1990,

it just channels.

It just, 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 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 case shiller, so the K-Schiller PE, the K-Schiller PE averaged around 12, 13% for 110

years.

And around 1990, oddly, 1994, and 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 KGRP averaged 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%.

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 2.5% a year, which I just questioned as being valid, but let's assume it's valid.

If we grow 2.5% 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 assumed it's going to be like the 20th century.

2.5% a year, it'll be 45 years from now i don't care what path you follow if we are at the average case shiller pe

and the economy grew two and a half percent a 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 you know 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 have earn nothing now you say, well, that would never happen.

You go, well, if you own the 06,

the 1906 high,

you

were even after something like 40 years.

I don't ask from if you own.

You were even after 40 years.

If you buy, if you own the top.

Yep.

People always 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 the 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 gonna buy something a little less volatile, a little more real.

Like real estate.

Exactly.

okay

the first time home and i 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 home buyers 56.

that's been a massive you want to buy do you want to buy

that into that market that somehow seems like it has to regress

because you can't have people going 56 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 in 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

um monogamy versus polygamy

and this will sound random but it'll get you to the same no it's a core 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 a hundred people ranked one to a hundred 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 jeff bezos' 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 polygamous system, all the high-status males 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 the market top.

And 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, oh, the evaluations are ridiculous.

But no one wants to be

on record

that we're going to be, to say it's catastrophically overpriced, whatever correction you get, you say, see, I told you.

I'm saying 200% overpriced.

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 it's 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?

The 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 the Nikkei.

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.

It's below it.

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 Nikkei at the top?

Not own the Nikkei.

If you own the Nikkei at the top, you're dead meat.

You die broke.

But

what if you started buying?

22-year-old graduate of Tokyo University.

You started putting yen into the Nikkei in 1989.

How long, if you averaged in, did it take you to break even?

It's around two decades.

Starting with zero in the Nikkei.

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 could do this and this.

And I said, the Nikkei.

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.

You can short a market like an 07 to 09.

A volatile market.

Yes.

You can't.

A market in inexorable decline can't be short.

So if we're in a top, aren't tops supposed to be euphoric?

Remember the dot-com?

Oh, yes.

The world was changing, the nifty-50, you know,

web van and e-toys and pets.

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 into prepper survival mode um what where are the enduring safe stores of value i i don't you can't answer that i i bought gold at around

270 an ounce 270 270.

hope you bought a lot of it i did

but it's worth a lot more now you think yeah um what spot price today do you know uh ballpark 3300 yeah i bought silver i bought gold below 270 i'll tell you why because my first purchases were actually in a closed-on mutual fund that was trading 27% below net asset valuation.

Because no one, people say, oh, it was 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 2.03 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 so we're not happy now so you're saying the herd's not always right is osher i'm told yeah i'm told so we're 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 he'd call and say, I got three ounces in, I'd go to the bank, I'd get out $900,

right?

And I'd buy the gold from him, cash.

I'd buy silver from him, cash.

I could buy silver eagles at spot.

You go on eBay, holy shit, those things are like 10 bucks above spot.

Um,

and and it it was for for ballpark four dollars an ounce

and 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 gonna buy it he said don't you think there's a top 457 dollars an ounce for gold it was like oh three or something i don't know and 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 uh

and so um

here's the thing i've been on i i 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 assets so dangerous i'll take four percent 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 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 $10,000.

I wish I'd bought it.

I would have sold it at 50 and spent the proceeds on therapy.

Why on therapy?

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 community, 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?

That's

you think the Rockefellers and the Rothschilds are going to hand it over to Max Kaiser and Michael Saylor?

I don't think so.

You don't.

You don't think so?

Here'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

acclimate people to it.

And then I'd say, okay, it was fun.

We'll take it from here.

uh and in the process of course you acclimate people to this new digital or new kind of commerce yeah exactly no that's 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 life cash is liberty of course oh i couldn't agree more so um

you you just have too much gold you just don't want any more gold i i just no no that it's i i'm what about real estate right now uh i'm long i own a nice house i'm I'm long real estate by owning that house.

I wouldn't buy real estate as a speculation.

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 an acre.

Well, that's a problem.

That's what I'm saying.

So here's what I got.

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 around, 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 and stuff, it will close up that gap so fast you won't know what hit you.

So I'm bullish on energy long-term energy equities and stuff, but I 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.

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 at 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 EV.

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 EV, than internal combustion engines

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 would 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?

It 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 has not gone through a meme phase.

So a little bit of trade room, he says, that meme phase could get spectacular.

Platinum could go to 20,000.

Because it has industrial uses.

Right.

You know, it seems kind of natural.

So, so I decided I was, so I reached out to some technical analysts who draw the squiggles on the on the curves.

And I make, I, I'm sarcastically occasionally commenting about technical analysis, but I can't do it or don't believe believe in there, whatever.

But I asked a few, 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 it 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 era, 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 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.

Yeah, fair.

I mean, the average person has no money.

So,

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 executive director of Morgan Stanley.

He looked at my numbers and said, Actually, you've overestimated something.

You should be more conservative.

The five 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 to 5%ile.

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 distorted.

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 overpriced.

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 deluding as to what actually happened.

You're not getting a reality.

Right, right.

And so the bottom line 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 Drachen 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.

Example:

Apple

ten-fold gain

on a growth in revenues of 50%.

95% correction brings that back down.

Microsoft, 150% gain in revenues.

Ten-fold gain.

Doesn't make mathematical sense.

Let's go to NVIDIA.

There's 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 Drachenmiller didn't think so.

Howard Marks didn't think so.

All these guys who are 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 a hundred percent but i i if i found something that i thought was dirt cheap um

I'm glad I own the gold from as cheap as I did because when it goes down, I go,

I'm still up, what, 15 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 say, well, you got lenders and borrowers.

It's a zero-sum game.

No, it's not.

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, Gdankin 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.

You go, well, but you didn't in any way, shape, or form increase the ability to produce wealth.

So you now have obligations for which you haven't a clue

how you're 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 Chinese.

So.

So everything will regress.

40-year 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.

And 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 fired and I hope you'll come back.

Anytime you call, I'm in the car.

Thank you.

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