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

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

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:02Anthony Pompliano?

  What's up everyone? This is Anthony Pompliano. Many of you know me as Pomp. You're listening to the Pomp Podcast, which is my effort to find the most interesting people in the world and sit with them for hours while I ask questions in an effort to learn. So it would mean the world to me if you would subscribe to the show on your favorite audio platform, watch episodes on YouTube, and tell your friends and family about the podcast. My goal is to help millions learn from the world's most interesting people. So let's get into today's episode. What's up guys? Today we have Dave Collum. Dave is the Department Chair and Professor of Organic Chemistry at Cornell University. Dave is a fan favorite and for good reason. He always brings unique perspectives and he's got some crazy ideas about where the world is going.

• 0:46Anthony Pompliano?

  But in a weird way, Dave has been more right than you would think. And so paying attention is always worth your time. In this conversation, we talk about the economy. We talk about inflation, what's going on in the stock market, how you should think about investing your money moving forward. But then we get into politics and we talk about Trump and Harris, Walz and Vance. We even get into what he thinks about Robert Kennedy Jr. On top of that, we then get into all sorts of geopolitical analysis, where he sees things in the society that don't make sense. And then what he's thinking about, what books he's reading, and how you at home can start thinking more independently and critically about the media, free speech, and many more topics. Dave Cullum is one of my favorite guests because he always forces me to think more deeply about different issues. Sometimes I agree with them, sometimes I don't.

• 1:31Anthony Pompliano?

  But that's the beauty of conversation is I'm constantly looking for people I can learn from and people that will make me think much, much more than I would otherwise. Here is my latest conversation with Dave Cullum.

• 1:42Speaker 01

  Anthony Pompliano runs Pomp Investments. All views of him and the guests on his podcast are solely their opinions and do not reflect the opinions of Pomp Investments. You should not treat any opinion expressed by Pomp or his guests as a specific inducement to make a particular investment or follow a particular strategy, but only as an expression of his personal opinion. This podcast is for informational purposes only.

• 2:06Anthony Pompliano?

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

• 2:49Anthony Pompliano?

  They've been pioneers for the crypto industry since day one, and unlike many exchanges, they are available in all 50 US states. Gemini has tools for new and advanced traders. They've got an advanced trading platform called Active Trader, which is where crypto traders go for advanced charting tools, access to over 300 crypto trading pairs, and multiple order types to trade the way you want. Head over to gemini.com/partners/pomp and start trading with Gemini today to earn $100 in Bitcoin. That's right, Gemini will give you $100 in Bitcoin if you head over to gemini.com/partners/pomp and you trade $1,000 in crypto within the first 30 days. Today's episode is brought to you by Zappos Bank.

• 3:34Anthony Pompliano?

  Let this sink in for a moment. Over half a trillion dollars in Bitcoin has been lost or stolen. Whether that is misplaced hardware wallets or an exchange that went bust, the risks are very real. That's why I think where and how you store your Bitcoin is absolutely critical. Now meet Zappos Bank, the world's first fully licensed and regulated Bitcoin-enabled bank. They're known as the Fort Knox of Bitcoin. With over a decade of expertise in Bitcoin custody, they blend no-hold-back security, including military-grade Swiss bunkers, cutting-edge digital protocols, and strict regulatory oversight. This comprehensive approach ensures your funds are always protected, no matter what. With Zappos Bank, you can grow your wealth with interest paid out daily in Bitcoin. You can spend anywhere with zero FX fees using their Global Card, or you can make

• 4:19Anthony Pompliano?

  instant payments with the Lightning Network. Head over to zappobank.com/pomp to join. That's X-A-P-O-B-A-N-K.com/pomp. Go check out Zappos Bank today. All right, guys. Dave, I thought a great place to start this conversation is the US economy. Some people are saying it's amazing. The consumer is resilient. Asset prices are up near all time highs. Everything is going to be golden because Jerome Powell is going to cut interest rates and here we go again. Other people are pointing to a variety of data points and they're saying we are really bad shape and a recession is right around the corner. You always have unique views. How do you evaluate where we are with the US economy right now?

• 5:01Speaker 02

  Well, I think it's tanking. So I think the slope is steepening. As we kind of hinted at before, I think the economy, I was watching Peter Thiel the other day with Joe Rogan. I don't know if you happened to catch that, but Thiel said that that tech has been stagnating for 30 years. I'm going, you know, I could make the case potentially and it has been made actually, but I didn't expect Thiel to say that. I have this. So what do you think the inflation rate is? What do you think it is?

• 5:34Anthony Pompliano?

  I would say, I would say that it is probably 50% higher than reported. So like four and a half percent or so right now.

• 5:41Speaker 02

  Yeah, I just had breakfast at a place. I used to get a breakfast special plus a beverage for about 10 bucks. It's not 20. And, and, and yes, Jimmy Iorio is inflation in any way sort of shrinking down to manageable numbers, which means the cost is still going up, but just slow. He said, no, no, it's the prices, the inputs are still rising very quickly. You can't find someone who actually knows prices who doesn't say the inputs are rising. So I think there's a grift going on here. I think they're convincing us. So let's say John Williams or, or Butowski of Chapwood Index are right or half right. Those guys put inflation at

• 6:24Speaker 02

  You know, sort of five or six percent higher than the CPI, which is so jerry. Here's how stupid the CPI is, right? First, let me rail on a couple of things. CPI, 27% weighted housing. And the mechanism by which they determine that, the rate is they do a survey, which I've never been asked, so I wonder who's getting surveyed. How much could you rent your house for? How many people on this planet could answer that question? Right? That's a stupid question. Right? And so, so, so that's 27% of CPI. Then they hedonically adjust it and they say, well, because you've got more buttons on your blender, you know, it's actually cheaper than you think.

• 7:08Speaker 02

  And, you know, I flip it around, I said, yeah, and that blender's got a life expectancy of a fruit fly. That's, that's the truly hidden inflation is rapid depreciation of all the crap we buy. Just things don't last, they can't be fixed. And then you got substitution. Here's the funny one. So they hedonically adjust for quality. And then they say, by the way, if inflation goes up and you were eating prime rib, or you're eating, you know, I don't know, sirloin steak. And because it's going up, you, you switch over to chicken, which is half the price, although unbelievably high, but now half the price. They say, therefore, you're going to substitute. So your inflation rate's really not that high. You should just substitute it. And I used to say, okay, then we're going to eat bugs and grubs and shit and there'll be no inflation, right? That's fine.

• 7:53Speaker 02

  But, but non-hyperbolically, you ask the question, well, if chicken's half the price of beef, isn't the free market saying it's half the quality, therefore, shouldn't you hedonically adjust it down by precisely the amount of money that you're supposedly saving by dropping to a lower quality product to save money? And therefore, substitution is complete nonsense. So you got all these inflation metrics. Economists like to exclude things that go up. Rosie actually explained that.

• 8:25Speaker 02

  In a way that I finally understood that the economists are not necessarily brain-dead, by noting that economists are uninterested in things that only go up. So, best example, postage stamp, right? The day you walk in the post office, the price of stamps has gone down. Hell will freeze over, right? So that turns out to not have economic content in it, right? So, Rosin say, "Oh, look at the price of stamps. That's telling me something." No, it's telling him nothing. Whereas there are items that can go up or down depending on supply/demand. That's why economists exclude all these things and focus on things that can go up or down, which means therefore there's natural inflation and deflationary pressures. Well, but that's a very narrow subset of the world.

• 9:10Speaker 02

  Now, I think it's a valid way to look at it, provided you explain to the people you're talking to what the hell you're doing. And if most of our world is just non-stop going up, to then just ignore it, not explain why you're ignoring it, not explain why you're focusing on these things that go up or down, then you're completely missing your target, or you're lying, one of the two. So, I've been wondering if the inflation rate is being missed so badly that it's possible that the real GDP has been shrinking for years.

• 9:48Anthony Pompliano?

  So, here's two questions for you. One, do you think that the understatement of inflation is intentional? Or do you think that they are trying to outsmart themselves and come up with the quote-unquote "real inflation measurement," and in doing so, they're just, you know, missing to the downside? So, kind of, you know, how do you evaluate why it's being understated? And then, second is, if we were to create a new inflation metric from scratch today, how would you design that to actually get us the real inflation number?

• 10:25Speaker 02

  Well, first of all, I'd get rid of all the stupid stuff I just rattled on about. But I do understand why you have to account for the fact that things are improving. But you say, well, you know, CPUs are, you know, are getting faster, but the software's getting more bloated. So, you know, is there really anything about Microsoft Word that's improved in the last 15 years? No, nothing. Oh, there's probably some, something you can click that links up to an AI or something, you know, but it's just not worth a damn. When was the last time Apple invented an innovative product? A real innovation, you know, the kind that, you got Elon who's trying to send rockets to Mars. That's at least innovative, right?

• 11:06Speaker 02

  And I know he's not everyone's favorite person, but meanwhile, you got like companies like Nvidia that look like to me potentially a fraud. Their vendor financing, like the, like the bandwidth guys did in the dot com era. So they'd loan money to the people buying the chips from them and then there'd be borrowed money using the chips as collateral and the whole thing's insane. Some like 35, 40 companies are doing this. Their customers are countless startups trying to develop AI, right? If you can code, you're writing an AI program right now, right? Maybe you're taking a break to listen to Pom and Dave, but you're writing an AI program. They have no earnings, no revenues.

• 11:50Speaker 02

  At some point, they will run out of money and Nvidia will run out of customers. And, and at some point Huawei, which I've heard rumor of, is going to come up with a chip that's better. I've heard they have one that's better. And, and so Nvidia's going to do, in my opinion, a 95% swan dive. Those companies are our economy. Facebook, tell me why Facebook is our economy? Tell me what about Facebook makes our economy, our economy? What's good, what, what merit does Facebook bring to the story? Twitter, we have fun with, right? You know, but it's, it's, it's not US Steel, it's not General Motors.

• 12:29Speaker 02

  It's not, the, the, the modern era tech companies, these digital companies, cloud storage, right? They replaced ExxonMobil with, with Salesforce.com, right? Please explain to me how that's a rational thing to do. They replaced Pfizer with something else. I don't know, Pfizer, you could argue should burn in hell, but says the consultants of 20 years.

• 12:53Speaker 02

  So I, the economy feels bad at several levels. One is it feels like we're not creating wealth and Robert Gordon's book, you know Gordon's book, Creating Wealth? I think we might have talked about this before too.

• 13:05Anthony Pompliano?

  You're the one who told me the rise and fall of American growth. You're the reason why I read it. Yeah.

• 13:10Speaker 02

  It's great, isn't it?

• 13:11Anthony Pompliano?

  It's a fantastic book and I always tell people two things from that book. First is the invention of the elevator and how underrated the ability to go up rather than out was to, to American growth. And then the second being how quickly we went from individual houses completely unconnected to having water, electricity, roads, et cetera, where now all of a sudden people were able to actually participate in society in a way that they couldn't previously. You know, you read that book and you walk away and say, wow.

• 13:40Speaker 02

  And, and things like the Sears robot catalog was just Amazon.

• 13:44Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah.

• 13:44Speaker 02

  Right? And, and it wasn't as worldly as Amazon, but you went from, you know, buying from a country store, buying flour out of a barrel and nails out of a barrel and to, to be able to order 10,000 items online and have some train delivered a couple of weeks later. Now we've shortened up the time scales and stuff, but Amazon's not innovative compared to that at all, at all. You could order from the Sears robot catalog. You could order houses, prefab houses, you could order replacement parts for your Model T.

• 14:15Anthony Pompliano?

  So let's talk about innovation for a sec, because I do think this is pretty interesting, right? Where you have higher inflation than what they're stating. You have a GDP growth number, which if you look at a really long timeframe, GDP growth used to be near zero. Now at least we're in low single digits. So.

• 14:33Speaker 02

  But what is also, what is P? What is the P of GDP?

• 14:39Anthony Pompliano?

  Well, that, that is up for debate.

• 14:41Speaker 02

  Well, but they talk about how our economy is 70% consumption. I go, wait, that's not an economy. You create wealth, you then get to spend it. That's the consumption part, right? And so if you're not creating wealth, you don't get to spend it. You don't get to consume. And so the real wealth of the country is its ability to create wealth, not consume it.

• 15:05Anthony Pompliano?

  I wrote recently, I said that the US stock market is a millionaire minting machine. It's the greatest machine we've ever created. The challenge is that if we're creating paper millionaires, because they're simply allocating to the stock market and, you know, percent of stock market allocation as a percent of financial assets is at an all time high now. I think it's 42%. Fidelity just reported that the number of people with $1 million in their 401K is up 31%. Almost half a million people at Fidelity now have become millionaires in their 401Ks alone. You go and you look at Nvidia, the numbers came out that I think it's one out of every

• 15:46Anthony Pompliano?

  three employees at the company is estimated to be worth over $20 million. 75% of all employees are millionaires. But I mean, 25,000 people who work at the company today are worth a million bucks. And you look at all this wealth that's being generated. I do think it begs the question of on the GDP growth and on innovation. You mentioned Elon. I think there's a lot of people who say, hey, you know what? Actually making rockets reusable and kind of going to space, pretty, pretty productive. If you're able to actually make something like-

• 16:17Speaker 02

  Well, it's innovative. It's innovative.

• 16:18Anthony Pompliano?

  Innovative. If, if you make something like Neuralink work, where you can actually use computers to, to bring back, you know, certain things that people want to do if they're injured or, or, you know, whatever. That'd be pretty innovative. But I do think that the list is much shorter than people would realize. And, you know, there's some interesting things that even from Gordon's book. He talks about the fact that planes don't really go that much faster. In fact, they might be going slower than they once did. And so-

• 16:47Speaker 02

  From the Concorde, right?

• 16:48Anthony Pompliano?

  Of course. I recently just saw a story. There's a guy who used to use the Concorde.

• 16:53Speaker 02

  At least now they provide you with your own tools in case the door flies off.

• 16:58Anthony Pompliano?

  Well, the guy that I saw, he was like the number one flyer. And so- He used to take a flight from London to New York, I think, every week. It took him three hours on the Concorde. And so, you know, there's Boom Supersonic. They're trying to build a supersonic jet that would be used for commercial purposes. Whether it works or not, unclear. But if you kind of go through from a productivity and innovation standpoint, I do feel like, you know, we're, we're looking at ourselves as look at how innovative we are as a country. It's just a much, much shorter list than people want.

• 17:33Speaker 02

  It's also cute shit.

• 17:36Anthony Pompliano?

  You think so?

• 17:36Speaker 02

  It's not. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, AI is gonna do things. Like, I use Grok.

• 17:45Speaker 02

  I use Grok to get started on an issue. So if there's something I don't know anything about, I actually start with Grok because it's better than just having to click links. Grok gives you this paragraph that says, okay, you ignorant moron, this is the kind of stuff you should have been asking about. And then you can maybe dig in more directly. But this advantage of consolidating what Google might be the first page of links. Unfortunately, Grok's, I think, a little too Twitter centric, right? So, so, so you get what Twitter thinks. There's rumors that Twitter doesn't think very clearly.

• 18:25Anthony Pompliano?

  Big if true. Big if true, Dave.

• 18:27Speaker 02

  Yeah, big if true. Big if true. So, there's that. And then, and then on top of it, on top of all that, we have seemingly insurmountable issues. And they're never insurmountable. It's a train you don't get to jump off of and say, okay, we're done, right? It just keeps going and going and going. But, but you know what are we growing our debt at? What's the current rate? About seven, eight percent?

• 18:52Anthony Pompliano?

  Something like that.

• 18:53Speaker 02

  Which means it's, it's quite a large percent above, above our ability to produce. There's not a shred of evidence that we will ever be able to produce at that level. There's, if you're waiting for some technical revolution, you're dreaming. I think it was Howard Marks is probably the most credible source. But there's a number of guys say, look, GDP inflation, which is inherently inflation corrected, for the 20th century was like 2.2%.

• 19:24Speaker 02

  Growth. You can't, you can't grow your debt at 7% on that. Yeah, we're just, and if debt to GDP is growing. So the, the, the numerator, denominator, cancellation of inflation, whatever it is, you know, even though the, the denominator is crap at this point, um, um, it, it, I, I don't know how we get out of it. And Yellen just signed a document that came out of Treasury that was something like 450 pages. Had a funny exchange with my buddy David Einhorn, who I really adore because he'll talk about any subject.

• 20:01Speaker 02

  And I sent him this report. Oh no. So first I talked about our unfunded liabilities. And I said, you know, Larry Kotlakoff, Boston College puts them at like 250 trillion now unfunded liabilities. Now, what are unfunded liabilities? They're liabilities which we've made promises that if you make normal assumptions about revenue going forward, they are the promises you don't know how you're going to pay for. So they're not just promises. They're the promises for which you go, according to my bank accounts, that's not going to work. And I said, I was 250 trillion and he didn't believe the numbers. He said, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. So about a year later, I run into this, this Treasury report. It was kind of a funny exchange because I,

• 20:44Speaker 02

  I, I sent it to him and he said, well, you know, I hate, we've got a problem, but it's like 70 trillion. It's not, it's not 175 trillion for Medicaid and social security. And, uh, I'd said it was 175 trillion from the report and he said, no, so, you know, I, I, we got a problem, but I hate it when people quote these things hyperbolically. And I said to him, I said, go to page 294, look at table, you know, F 35, last line of the table. And the response I got back from is, shit, I missed that.

• 21:18Speaker 02

  And, and, and of course he did, right? Page 394, table whatever. But it was a report coming out of the Treasury saying we have 125, just for those two. We don't know how we're going to pay for. And so you say, well, what do we do? And I go, well, it's kind of a stage four cancer moment, right? Where someone says, you, you got your, your pancreas is shot. You're going to go and you go, well, what do we do? And you go, you get your affairs in order. I don't know, but we don't get our affairs in order as a country. We just, we keep moving forward, but I don't know how. And then of course, politics is a mess, a total mess.

• 21:56Anthony Pompliano?

  Does the debt matter anymore?

• 21:59Speaker 02

  Yeah. Yeah, I think it does.

• 22:02Anthony Pompliano?

  Why?

• 22:02Speaker 02

  Because, well, because, um, because you do have, you do have, um, um, the government borrowing money. And so it is growing because of that. In fact, our, our interest payments on the debt now exceed our military payments, which are huge. Um, and, and, and, and as it gets bigger and bigger and bigger, eventually you can't get anyone to buy your debt. So then you have to print. Now, I, here's a question for you. Can you name a country that inflated their way out of debt? This is a trick question. It's not an easy answer. And I can tell you what some of them are, but can you get off the top of your head? Can you say, everyone always says, oh, we'll just inflate our way out.

• 22:45Speaker 02

  Now, my first snarky response is, okay, so we all owe, according to that unfunded liability number, we all owe $2 million apiece.

• 22:54Speaker 02

  Now, I didn't budget for it. You huddlers might have budgeted for it, but I'm still human. And, um, and, and, and, and then, and they said, but we were just going to inflate it away. Now, okay, so you're going to inflate away $2 million worth of my spending power. That's, that's the same goddamn thing, you moron, right? They're taking your money, as you know. And um, and so, so I can't think of a country that actually successfully did it. Now, I get answers. There's one I haven't been able to yet button down. But people say Canada, I think it was in the 90s. But my digging tells me Canada kind of blocked and tackled their way out. They kind of knuckled down, their resource base kind of saved them and they paid off the debt.

• 23:37Speaker 02

  And that they actually got control of it the good old fashioned way by, by getting tough. Actually, Great Britain did in the 19th century. But if we're back to the 19th century, we're already in pretty much weird space now. Um, people like to cite the US post-war. They said real rates were, you know, 10% below inflation or something like that after World War II. I agree, except for the fact we're also the, the biggest superpower in the history of superpowers, including today. We were something like 40% of the world's GDP. So if you're going to tell me we inflated away our debt while ignoring the fact that we sold everything to everybody at all times for a couple of decades,

• 24:21Speaker 02

  then you're missing a big part of how we got the hell out of our post-war debt. You're missing a big part of that story. Now, the weird one turns out to be Israel. They did some sort of weird colossal devaluation of their currency that lasted for a couple of years and then just dropped right back to the baseline. And I haven't been able to get a good coherent, without a lot of effort, I should add, discussion of how it happened, how they did it. But their inflation rate went from something like 6% to, to 200%. And then hovered up there for a couple of years and then came right back down. And I go, what was that? And if anyone out there knows, send me a link.

• 25:04Speaker 02

  I, I, I would like a nice coherent write-up on how they did that.

• 25:08Anthony Pompliano?

  One of the interesting things-

• 25:09Speaker 02

  But mostly inflating away your debt doesn't work, I think. I think you end up in one of these, um, in the end, you end up, um, with a deflationary default.

• 25:19Anthony Pompliano?

  One of the interesting things to me is that I can remember when I was a young boy and I would listen to politics in the background, my dad was watching or my mom. They would talk about balancing the budget. That was like a key campaign safe, you know, phrase. If you utter that, American people like hearing that. I don't hear either candidate talking about balancing the budget. I do hear Trump talking about cutting spending or, you know, spending less to a degree. I think his critics would argue that the debt went up, you know, very fast under him in 2020. But the actual commitment to not spend less, but to get to a balanced budget, to reduce the deficit, to, you know, kind of

• 26:03Anthony Pompliano?

  do a number of these things. It seems like we almost given up on if a candidate was to say that, we're just like, ah, that's never gonna happen. You know, given that it's been almost 25 years since we had a balanced budget in America. What do you think?

• 26:16Speaker 02

  And that wasn't even balanced either. So that was, that was on balance sheet balanced, but there was all sorts of off balance sheet stuff that was way out of control still.

• 26:26Anthony Pompliano?

  Low woo woo accounting.

• 26:28Speaker 02

  That's exactly right. It was way woo woo accounting, but Clinton got his headline and that's all he wanted. So, so I'm not, I think Trump, Trump, Trump comes up with ideas that are on the edges are appealing, but I don't think he has any big ideas to save anything. He, he, he's gonna wanna cut taxes. And I know that the Austrians, which I profess to sort of support, I support the Austrian business cycle. I can't profess to be Austrian economically literate because that's a very different world, actually. The business cycle basically says bigger the will and bigger the boss. The Austrian economics is a much more intellectually intensive thing. But, but he likes to cut taxes. He

• 27:12Speaker 02

  wants the Fed to jack up the markets. He, he, he, his economics at some level is my least favorite part. The part I like about Trump is that tell people to screw themselves and, you know, put people in their place and things like that. I kind of, if he builds the wall, if he lets the J sixers out.

• 27:32Anthony Pompliano?

  So on the economy though, let's stay on that first and we'll get to the other policy things. It seems like.

• 27:39Anthony Pompliano?

  And I'm gonna say this and don't fall out of your chair, but I actually think Trump and Harris are both moving to the center on a bunch of policies because they're realizing that's what American public, the kind of general public wants. And they're starting to reach agreement on a number of different campaign topics, which is somewhat mind blowing. So the easy ones are,

• 28:02Speaker 02

  you know, So how has Trump moved? How has Trump moved? Let's start with Trump's moves.

• 28:05Anthony Pompliano?

  So, um, the, maybe the most obvious move that's not economic is his thought process around women's reproductive rights. He's now pushing things down to the state. He's saying, hey, look, I'm not going to do a national ban. He's talking about financing from the government or kind of stimulating via these IVF, you know, kind of practices and things like that. And so, again, it's a fool's game for us to say like, how far is he moving? Or, you know, how much closer to the center? But it's obvious that he's maybe taken the edge off of some of these ideas and he's kind of pulling

• 28:39Speaker 02

  I don't remember the national abortion ban. I think that might be a DNC fabrication.

• 28:44Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, but just like, I think that he has softened his stance in general when it comes to women's reproductive rights.

• 28:50Speaker 02

  He's downplaying the vaccine.

• 28:52Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, downplaying the vaccine. I mean, there's definitely things that I think, um, you know, he is doing, which I actually think is going to help him in the election by doing it, right? Now Harris, who is the most left leaning Senator, you know, kind of everyone knows that the policies were radical to the left. All of a sudden, you know, one borrowing policies from Trump and no tax on tips. Also, I've read that she now supports

• 29:19Speaker 02

  Border wall.

• 29:19Anthony Pompliano?

  The border wall, right? So like they're reaching agreement to some degree. And the similarity is that they're both populist candidates when it comes to a lot of these topics. They're trying to reach kind of, you know, middle America, the average American, whatever. On economics, though,

• 29:34Anthony Pompliano?

  When you look at the two candidates, at first you think that they couldn't be further apart. But I actually think that both of them are trying to solve the same problem. They agree on what the problem is. Harris says, we gotta address this, uh, you know, kind of debt issue, etc. I'm just gonna take more money from the people. I'm gonna tax unrealized gains. I'm gonna go after all these, you know, kind of somewhat radical economic policies that are gonna drive tax receipts and then therefore I'm gonna be able to, uh, address this issue. I would argue, and I think a lot of people are arguing, uh, that approach seems to be economically illiterate. Like you can't tax unrealized gains. You can't do, you know, a lot of stuff.

• 30:07Speaker 02

  That's just a talking point that she thinks sounds good.

• 30:11Anthony Pompliano?

  And very populist and actually to some portion of America, they're like, that sounds amazing. It's only for people over a hundred million dollars in net worth. That's not me. Screw the rich people and, you know, take all their money.

• 30:21Speaker 02

  It always starts there, by the way. It always starts at the top guys' works down.

• 30:25Anthony Pompliano?

  Well, the, uh, the, uh, metric I always go back to is the income tax, federal income tax, you know, was instituted to help pay for the war. It then was ruled unconstitutional. It then was brought back and it was 1% of the population. They owed 1% of their, uh, income. Today, more than 50% of the population pays, uh, federal income tax and, uh, a good number of people pay more than 50%. So yes, it definitely does expand.

• 30:47Speaker 02

  That's the camel's nose under the tent.

• 30:49Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah.

• 30:49Speaker 02

  So when Obama put in national healthcare, which I didn't vehemently oppose, I once asked my dad that question and he said, well, it sounds good on paper, but every time you ask the government to spend money for you, they do such a bad job. You should never do that.

• 31:04Speaker 02

  But we kind of need something. I mean, we're kind of doing it ad hoc where, you know, you show up at the ER, you get treated. And then at the same time, there's things that maybe could have prevented you from being at the ER that might have been a lot cheaper and stuff like that. So I, I think the problem, here's the problem. National healthcare also, first of all, you can't have four million people coming over the border per year and have national healthcare, right? You can't have a welfare state and open borders. Let's start with that. The second thing is, uh, it would be reasonable to say, look, everyone gets this sort of basal level healthcare. Well, that basal level is gonna get lifted like crazy. And if you don't think so, just ask

• 31:45Speaker 02

  any lobbyist from any major pharmaceutical company, right? They are going to raise that bar. And so pretty soon it's just going to be free healthcare for everybody. Massive amounts and it will be time, I guess, to invest in Pfizer, Merck again, things like that.

• 32:02Speaker 02

  But, but, but who, if you say a basal rate, so are you going to say to someone, by the way, your basal rate covers this, but not this? And then you're going to be called a racist, right? And so it always, it's going to go bad. I don't think, I don't think we have the leadership to pull off a tough solution, which means therefore I think we're going to hit the wall like in a NASCAR race.

• 32:24Anthony Pompliano?

  Well, if you go to the other side, so Harris is saying, hey, let's raise tax receipts. Let's go do this. Trump is actually saying the exact opposite, right? He's saying, hey, let's lower tax receipts. Let's, you know, inflate our way out. Let's go spend, um, let's kind of go build and kind of do all that. Their proposed policies on the economic side to address the debt are very different, but they actually agree that, hey, this is a problem. I worry that neither proposal-

• 32:49Speaker 02

  When you say agree though, it sort of implies that, I think Trump has a compass. I think he, I think he doesn't always use it. So I think he, he says shit to get what he wants, right? The narcissist takes over pretty fast. I don't think Harris has a compass.

• 33:05Anthony Pompliano?

  That, that may be true, but, but I think that-

• 33:06Speaker 02

  But when you say agree, she moves left, she's moving left based on what she's saying. There is not a shred of evidence of what she's saying she even remotely believes. I don't, I don't see her processing the day and saying, maybe I got that wrong, right? You don't, you just get the sense that, and someone described it as, look, she's got former Biden people. She's got her own inner circle and she's got Obama people. Her head's being spun around in circles. And I don't think she has the minimum sort of self-determination to, to, to, to take a serious stance on anything. And that's what scares me about her.

• 33:43Anthony Pompliano?

  So here is an interesting question for you. Forget the two current candidates, but the, the president in general. Is it better for the president to say, I'm listening to what the people want? And regardless of my own personal views, I am going to carry out the will of the people. And if it is at odds with my personal views, I'm still going to carry out the will of the people. Or is it better for us to have a president that says, hey, here is what I believe. You're voting me into office and I'm going to do what I believe. And it's this interesting question of, um, I think we like the idea of the former, but we actually vote for the latter? Right, we like the idea that the president listens to the will of the people and is gonna kind of reflect that, but if you actually look at the campaigns and you look at the

• 34:26Anthony Pompliano?

  way people vote, it seems like we just vote on what does that person believe, or what do I believe that person believes, and that's who we put in office. What do you think?

• 34:34Speaker 02

  Well, to be self-consistent, for at least 20 years, I've been saying I think any one of these people would be acceptable as president if when they got in office, they did what they felt was right.

• 34:51Speaker 02

  Because that implies that the person would sort of find that they have that moral compass that guides them to find the answer. And if, you know, it's like listening to, you know, uh, you know, one of the Weinstein brothers or something, they, they, they, they process the information, goes ahead, rattles around, and then they try to find the answer. If any, I think any party could come up with a candidate who, who, who, if when they got in office, they were voted based on basic principles, but that they do what they think is right. And I do believe that the population is not capable of fully handling all the truths of what running this country means, right?

• 35:32Anthony Pompliano?

  I agree with that.

• 35:33Speaker 02

  So let's, let's put it in terms of Putin, right? Putin's a sociopath. Putin is a tough guy. Putin is running a country that if you were not those two things, you couldn't run the country. And so, so he has to do what he has to do. There's, there's a sort of, you can't handle the truth component to Putin. Justin Trudeau could now run Russia. Macron could now run Russia. None of the European leaders could run Russia. Zelensky could now run Russia. And, and so if, if, if I spotted a leader who I thought would, when they got in office, they would do what they really sort of deeply believe is the correct

• 36:14Speaker 02

  thing, I'd vote for that person. Now, who was the last person to fit that description? Well, Kennedy. Now, I think this is a Kennedy-Shanahan ticket, if you really look at it hard.

• 36:29Anthony Pompliano?

  Explain.

• 36:31Speaker 02

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

• 37:10Speaker 02

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

• 37:55Speaker 02

  He is a, to me, he's treasonous SOB. I, I think, I think he's treasonous. There might be some legal definition of treason that excludes that, but I think he's treasonous at a moral level. And so, I, I want to improve upon those positions. I, with good people in there, you don't need a president.

• 38:15Anthony Pompliano?

  Who would you put in as the Federal Reserve Chairman and the Treasury Secretary?

• 38:21Speaker 02

  Uh...

• 38:24Speaker 02

  I'm not sure how relevant they are. I'm not sure you have control over that. You know, they're gonna answer to the banks no matter what.

• 38:31Anthony Pompliano?

  So Jamie Dimon would be a potential selection?

• 38:34Speaker 02

  Uh, Dimon is a powerful bastard. Dimon may be patriotic, right? He actually may, I thought Powell was gonna be good. You know, he's done more. I've sat on a couple of panels with prominent economists and me, right? And anyone who knows me knows, you know, I might have some skills, but prominent economist is not one of them. And disagreed with the whole panel and said, Dimon's gonna be, uh, Powell's gonna be tougher than you guys think. He said it's gonna hurt. He's gonna cause pain. He's worried about his legacy. He doesn't want to be Arthur Burns, wants to be, wants to be Paul Volcker. He, he may, he has no

• 39:18Speaker 02

  allegiance to Biden. Biden's administration's been a pain in the ass. He's trying to get control of stuff and they're just spending like drunken sailors. And so they used to say, we need fiscal help. Now they need, now they're basically, I think if you could, if you'd speak frankly, he'd say, you guys gotta stop shipping pallets of money around the world. This is not helping. And, um, so I don't have as bad of you a Powell as some.

• 39:45Anthony Pompliano?

  I think that Powell, uh, one thing that he has not yet gotten credit for because he hasn't had to use it is, I call it, he reloaded ammunition, right? He got interest rates back over 5%. He could now cut 3, 400 basis points and still not be at zero.

• 40:00Speaker 02

  I don't think he should though. I don't think he should.

• 40:01Anthony Pompliano?

  He, he doesn't need to do it, but I'm just saying the fact that-

• 40:04Speaker 02

  No, but even if it's painful, I think you gotta leave it there.

• 40:06Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, but, but go back to 2021. He was all out of ammunition. They had, you know, nine plus trillion on the balance sheet. He has interest rates at zero for, you know, a year and a half. Uh, any sort of slowdown that isn't induced by the Fed, he's got no tools. Now, fast forward, you know, kind of beginning of 2022 to, you know, Q3 2024, and he's got interest rates that he can now cut. He's got, you know, I don't know, 1.5 to $2 trillion he sold. Off the balance sheet, um, whether he uses the tool or not, he reloaded all that ammunition and you know, barring

• 40:40Speaker 02

  We got us off the zero bound.

• 40:42Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. And, and barring the NBER, you know, basically sticking their finger in the air and trying to call whether an, uh, a recession or not with the two quarters of negative GDP.

• 40:53Speaker 02

  Are we in a recession now? Forget about my long-term, always shrinking economy. Are, are we in, will the NBER say that we are already in a recession? A year from now?

• 41:04Anthony Pompliano?

  I don't think it matters. And here's why.

• 41:06Speaker 02

  No, it doesn't matter. No, no, I don't think it matters. You're right. But do you think that first, just do you think they will declare that as of, as of September 1st, 2024, that that will be in the recession? Do you think, do you think that will be in there?

• 41:22Anthony Pompliano?

  I actually think this might sound a little crazy. I think it may matter more how they view their relationship with Jerome Powell than what the economic data says. Because it, because what we learned in 2022 is that it was very important to them, to the administration, and I also think to the Fed for it not to be considered a recession, even though they got the two quarters of negative GDP growth. And so NBER, which is supposed to be a bipartisan nonprofit, came out and said, we're not in a recession. It, it doesn't count. And so I now am of the belief that the, um, kind of indication of recession or not has much less to do with the economic data than we ever thought, and has much more to do with backroom politics and certain things that we just,

• 42:07Anthony Pompliano?

  we, we, as the American people may never understand, but imagine a world where, uh, Q3, Q4 of 2024 is declared a recession as a kick in the ass to Powell as he's leaving, uh, his post. I'm not saying that's what's going to happen.

• 42:23Speaker 02

  But they're also going to tell us that Q3, Q4 was a recession after it's over so that they'll say, and now it's over. So don't worry about it. Right? That's what's stupid about that.

• 42:32Anthony Pompliano?

  Of, of course, but, but like it declaring a recession or not a recession, right? And, and again, I'm actually of the belief that they're

• 42:38Speaker 02

  And I don't even like the definition. I don't, I don't like the definition. I don't like, it's just so.

• 42:44Anthony Pompliano?

  One thing that I do think is kind of a thing I've been beating the drum on around why it doesn't matter, though, is because I saw this chart and we'll try to find it. And if we can, we'll put up on the screen. But basically, it goes all the way back to like 1920s, maybe 1900. And it shows the frequency of recessions marked by these vertical lines. And then the kind of width of the bar or the line shows the severity, you know, how long did it last? How severe was it, etc.? And if you look in the first

• 43:14Speaker 02

  Just getting wider and wider and wider, yeah.

• 43:17Anthony Pompliano?

  Well, here's what's interesting. In the first 70 or 80 years, yes, of the 1900s, right? You just massive frequency, severity, etc. When you then look over, let's say, the last 30 years, very infrequent, much less severe. And so what it basically has happened is the central bank has perfected the playbook of how to deal with these, how to manipulate the economy, how to stimulate both implicitly and explicitly. And so now we're in this weird world where if a recession hits tomorrow, do you really think six to nine months from now, we're still going to be in economic pain? Or are they just going to pull out these bazookas? And they're going to fire 500 basis points of rate cuts? They're going to print trillions

• 43:59Anthony Pompliano?

  of dollars? And we're going to be back to all time high prices in financial markets? You know, what was it in 2020?

• 44:05Speaker 02

  Nominally, yes. Oh, sure.

• 44:07Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. But in 2020, what happened? In March was the lockdown. We were back to all time high prices by August?

• 44:13Speaker 02

  I blame the Fed for the lockdown, actually.

• 44:16Anthony Pompliano?

  Explain that.

• 44:17Speaker 02

  I blame the Fed for the lockdown. Well, because the Fed had said, look, we can't print all that money. We can't back you. They wouldn't have locked down.

• 44:24Anthony Pompliano?

  I mean, it's a fair point.

• 44:27Speaker 02

  Right. The Fed had to say, okay, we got your back. Then they said, okay, we're going to lock down then.

• 44:32Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah.

• 44:33Speaker 02

  The Fed should have done better, in my opinion. Now, let me give you, let me give you the column model of the economy going forward. The nice thing about it is I won't be shown to be wrong until I'm dead. But as you younger members are experiencing, you go, I remember that chemist talking about that shit. You talk about how they perfected it. Let's go back to 1981. The markets for it all time lows valuation wise. People don't even know what valuation means. That's how stupid the investors are now. They think valuation is price. So valuation is the market relative to some metric that it ought to track. Whether it's price to book, price to revenue, price to earnings, Tobin's Q, you name it. There's about 25 fairly prominent ones.

• 45:17Speaker 02

  It inherently, inherently corrects for inflation. Because the denominator is always inflationary, inflationarily adjusting too. So if inflation is running wild, if your price to revenue is six, it is goddamn six. So back in 1981, let's use PE because it's mentally easy, even though they fake the E part. The PE of the market was about six. It was dirt cheap. Inflation was running wild. That's why the PE was so low. Interest rates were in the high teens. You could get so much goddamn money out of money markets, which in here's the odd thing. If, if at the end of every year, the money markets and the bank accounts have 15% more than

• 46:02Speaker 02

  they had at the start of the year. Where'd that money come from? I'm having trouble identifying that because as I say, you create money through loans. So who's borrowing at 15%? Right? I know I got a mortgage at 15%, but creating money must've been hard. But somehow if you had, you know, 100 trillion at the end of, at the end, you had 113 or 115 trillion, where'd the money come from? Right? That's a, that's a, that's a question that's not as easy to answer as it sounds. So, okay, so 1981. Interest rates are an all time high. So we've got this unbelievable tailwind where the next 40 years, rates could methodically,

• 46:41Speaker 02

  almost linearly drop, which makes things cheaper and cheaper and cheaper to buy using the credit markets. We started at the lowest valuations in history. We had a boomer demographic, the boomers were just hitting their stride, they brought their wives with them. And so, so we had phenomenal demographics, which, which, which, which, which economists, which, unfortunately, I'm selective. I refer to economists as like idiots when I need to and as smart guys when I need to. And, and it could be both. Um, but economists say demographics is everything. And so we had phenomenal demographics.

• 47:21Speaker 02

  We had China coming out of the dark ages, offering slave labor at about 20 cents an hour to make shit for us. We had Russia that had not yet collapsed, but desperately needed capital. And so it was started selling resources. We're helping it. We're sending, before the Soviet Union collapsed, we had our oil guys in there showing Russia how to pump oil out of that place and how to get minerals out of that place and stuff like that. We had tailwinds, none of which will repeat for the next 40 years. There's no chance we're going to repeat those because we're not at all time lows valuation wise. We're not at all time highs interest rate wise.

• 48:02Speaker 02

  China is now fully grown. You say, oh, we'll replace with what Zimbabwe? Who's going to replace China? India? Yeah, India's already partway there. So India's not starting at 20 cents on the dollar, 20 cents per hour. And, um, so, so all these tailwinds are gone. Now, during that 40 year period, this is an amazing stat, during that 40 year period, the valuations, which should be wobbling around, but there's no trend in valuations. And if you want to say, well, the valuations can double, and I go, then the return from those valuations is going to cut in half. It's arithmetic, right? So the valuations over that 40 year period compounded, I think the last time I did the math is 3.4% per year compounded.

• 48:48Speaker 02

  What happens if the next 40 years valuation compounded negative 3.4% per year to the next secular low?

• 48:59Speaker 02

  We will look up 40 years from now and we will have not earned one penny on our investment.

• 49:07Anthony Pompliano?

  Now.

• 49:07Speaker 02

  Forty years, forty years of, without a catastrophic event in GDP or anything like that. It'll wobble around, it'll do all sorts of jerking and wiggling and there'll be highs, there'll be runs, there'll be lows. Forty years from now, regression to the mean takes us to the current market prices inflation corrected.

• 49:27Anthony Pompliano?

  Here's an interesting point around this. Because inflation has probably been higher than the government number.

• 49:36Speaker 02

  Right.

• 49:37Anthony Pompliano?

  And now the internet has opened people's eyes to inflation being higher.

• 49:41Speaker 02

  Reality.

• 49:42Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. Um, I know a lot of people who are taking their cash and they're buying stocks as an inflation hedge. They're saying, hey, these things go up, right? It's denominated in dollars, dollars being devalued, inflation's taken off. Stocks go up, I get wealthier, we see, you know, 42% of stock market allocation as a percent of financial assets, you know, whole thing. Should historical valuations matter less? Because now you have a monetary premium on top of those historical valuations. And so today you should actually expect what used to be quote unquote fair market is now slightly higher because of that monetary premium and that hiding from inflation?

• 50:20Speaker 02

  Well, let me give you first a couple of factoids and then answer your question. Um, Horizon Kinetics looked at the Russell to, looked at the triple Q and looked at how according to their prospectus, they calculate it, they calculate the valuations. The triple Q supposedly, I'm saying supposedly because I gotta believe Horizon Kinetics, but these guys are smart.

• 50:50Speaker 02

  Averages the P E's of the companies in the triple Q. So it's reported now that the P E of the triple Q is somewhere in the mid twenties or something, I'm sure. I haven't looked in a long time. But they recalcied and they said, look, here's the deal. When the P E of a company in the triple Q is over 40, they round it down to 40. When a company in the triple Q has no earnings, they give it a P E of 40. So the highest P E can possibly get on the triple Q is 40.

• 51:25Speaker 02

  If you actually take the triple Q and create a Buffett-like mega company, and you sum total the market cap, and the earnings and losses and shit, and you treat it like it's a Berkshire Hathaway on steroids, PE around 100. So what are you buying when you buy the triple Q? You are buying at current valuation, a 1% return. Anything else has got to be growth. Whereas if you bought something with a 10% PE, you're buying a 10% revenue stream, which could be altered by collapsing revenue or rising revenue, but your earning stream, actually. And so if you wish to say, "Look, valuations don't matter",

• 52:10Speaker 02

  then you also have to say that returns from those ongoing business concerns don't matter. And I do not believe that could be factually correct. So if you're willing to say, "Look, valuations say up at these levels", your current return on the triple Q is going to be 1%, not 5%.

• 52:33Anthony Pompliano?

  So let's say that valuations show returns are going to be much less. You know, they're going to be much lower. I went and I looked actually today. I think that S&P over the last five years is up like 40%. Triple Q is up 140%. Russell 2000 is up like 42% over the last five years. Do you think it is sustainable to continue to see those types of numbers?

• 53:03Speaker 02

  No chance, no chance.

• 53:05Anthony Pompliano?

  What happens?

• 53:07Speaker 02

  Zero chance.

• 53:07Anthony Pompliano?

  What happens?

• 53:08Speaker 02

  Well, now I'll go back to Buffett, 1999, legendary article where he talks about investing. And it was during the dot-com bubble, so I think he was trying to throw a bucket of ice water on some people, saying, "Wake up." He said, and it was valuation independent, so it wasn't because the valuations are high, but just generally the stock market. He said, "By the time you're done accounting for A, B, C, D, and E, the most you can hope to get out of the markets is about 4%."

• 53:38Speaker 02

  In The Intelligent Investor, originally he and Graham, and then edited, now originally Graham and Dodd edited by Buffett, they said, for example, if you think that you can earn more on equities than bonds over the long term, the word they used was delusion.

• 53:57Anthony Pompliano?

  Why?

• 53:59Speaker 02

  Well, what happens is, is everyone uses a benchmark that's favorable. And they go, you go, well, you know, what about the fact that, okay, 1906 was a market top, inflation correct that market top, inflation correct the return on the S and P.

• 54:18Speaker 02

  From peak to trough, forget about the first trough, forget about the second trough, the final trough in which the price of the market in 1906 was attained for the last time, 1981. 1906 to 1981, you treaded water. Now, people say, well, I trade, I go, good fucking luck, because I can't. Buy and hold is not trading. We're told to buy and hold. 1929, I think it gets up to 1992. There are 40, there are a number of 40 to 75 year periods throughout the 20th century. Now, are we going to repeat the 20th century? I'm not convinced.

• 55:02Speaker 02

  That was a pretty good century, right? Where the market treaded water, inflation corrected for 40 to 75 years. There's about four of them.

• 55:14Speaker 02

  Peak to trough. Now, you say, well, that's unfair. I go, but it's a harsh reality, right? If you, if you owned the Nikkei in 1989, peak to peak, you just broke even, and that's without correcting for inflation. That's without correcting for fees, that's without correcting for taxes, which you will incur along the way. So what do you get? Well, what you get is about, you get dividends. You get dividends. What was the average dividend during the 20th century? Well, started pretty high and ended pretty low. The average is about 4%.

• 55:52Speaker 02

  Thus Buffett's number. Now, guy named Ron Grice sends me updated charts occasionally, one that I particularly like, and I didn't know if he was publishing or not, he has. It's the S and P 500 corrected for inflation. But rather than using the fake CPI, he uses the M2 money supply. Now, it's not perfect, but it's super numerical. It seems like an awfully clean way to measure how the market's responding to the monomoney there. Now, you got the whole shadow banking system and crap like that. But it turns out that from 1925 to the present, correcting

• 56:32Speaker 02

  for inflation using M2 money supply, the market drifted down. All you got was dividends. So I used it. And then he sent me an updated one. He said, here is the total return, including dividends. 3.79%. That's kind of an error bar within 4%.

• 56:54Anthony Pompliano?

  It reminds me a lot, if you were to take from 1971 to today and denominate the stock market in gold, it's flat to down, right? There's a bunch of different ways to kind of look at this analysis.

• 57:08Speaker 02

  But there's 100 years, though.

• 57:09Anthony Pompliano?

  Of course.

• 57:10Speaker 02

  This is not just, this is, this is, this is a huge number.

• 57:13Anthony Pompliano?

  The question is, does that mean you shouldn't invest in equities?

• 57:18Speaker 02

  Depends where. I don't think, there's a lot of old timers out there who say that, look, if you overpay, you're going to underperform. And if you way overpay, you're going to way underperform. So you got guys like Grantham, who I consider to be an optimist, saying, look, over the next 10 years, the S and P is going to return negatively. Then you got guys like, like Hussman, who I would say is trying to, trying to become an optimist, but he puts, he puts it worse. So I think the bottom line is, is that you can really look like a complete asshole for many years.

• 57:58Speaker 02

  But what people don't notice is is that there's those moments in history where all those games that you thought were above what you should get, they all get, remember Bill Miller, who I, who, who used to follow me on Twitter? I don't know if he still does. He maybe heard, heard me say some shit, blocked me, but he beat the S and P for 13 straight years.

• 58:19Anthony Pompliano?

  He did.

• 58:19Speaker 02

  What a hero, right? Gave it all back in one year. That's what markets do. He gave it all back in one year.

• 58:28Anthony Pompliano?

  But to his credit, and I got a soft spot for Bill, is he then became the single largest individual shareholder of Amazon outside of Bezos. And that worked out pretty well. And then he bought Bitcoin early.

• 58:43Speaker 02

  So I think there are guys who are smart. I think there are guys who are smart who can beat the market. So this idea of the efficient market hypothesis is nuts.

• 58:50Anthony Pompliano?

  Can we go back for a second? Hold on. I can't let you get away with just an incredible

• 58:55Speaker 02

  Declaration of Bizarreness, yeah.

• 58:58Anthony Pompliano?

  Jeremy Grantham is a optimist. A lot of people aren't, a lot of people are not going to know who he is. So maybe you can give a little bit of context. But if you were to poll Wall Street, optimist may not be one of the first 50 words mentioned when talking about Jeremy.

• 59:16Speaker 02

  He's an optimist compared to me. Um, I think I'm the most bearish guy on Twitter, although husband's, I, I, maybe husband. The other guy who seems to get it is Jesse Felder, I think. There's, I think Grant Williams understands. Um, I just got a call from Tony Deeden, who very few people will know, but he's a legend amongst those. Legend, right? You want to hear a funny story?

• 59:42Anthony Pompliano?

  Are you going to reveal, are you going to reveal how Tony Deeden's only public interview happened?

• 59:48Speaker 02

  That's right. I already told you then. So forget it.

• 59:50Anthony Pompliano?

  No, no, no, but you haven't said it publicly. You have to say it publicly.

• 59:53Speaker 02

  Oh, is that right?

• 59:54Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, you told me in private.

• 59:57Speaker 02

  Oh, so Tony started calling me. And then that one day he drove off from New York City. We spent the whole day on my deck. I mean, really an amazing thing. Um, I am now supposed to go to his 40th anniversary of Atoice Capital, I think it is, Holdings, uh, to give a talk to in, in the Swiss Alps. He says he's going to fly my wife and I first class. He, he said, you can't refuse my offer. So Tony, um, Tony calls me one day and I said, you should do a podcast with Grant Williams.

• 1:00:32Speaker 02

  And he said, okay. So I introduced him and I've got the email trail. Now I don't know if Grant had to do some market joling because he did a recent interview where he said he had to cajole him, but, but, but I introduced him.

• 1:00:45Anthony Pompliano?

  Now, hold on Dave, this is an important part. Tony Deen is a legendary investor. He is somebody who, um, the people on the inner circle of Wall Street, et cetera, are very fascinated by because of his track record, his approach, his ability to kind of stay out of nonsense.

• 1:01:02Speaker 02

  A lot don't know him either. A lot don't know him either.

• 1:01:04Anthony Pompliano?

  There's some mystique because a lot of people don't know him, but also he had never done, from my understanding, he had never done a public interview before.

• 1:01:12Speaker 02

  So he, so Grant does this two-part interview and he opens with, this is the first interview he's ever done. And I like fell back in my chair and I go, what? Really? So one day Grant got interviewed. I was hoping Grant would give me kudos in the most recent podcast he did where he mentioned that he had to cajole Tony into doing it. Um, but one day he did get interviewed and, and, and they said, how did you get the Deen interview? And he said, he said, um, uh, it was, it was a sort of a combination of Simon Mikhailovich and, and Dave Callum. Now Simon turns out to be on the board of directors of Atoice. So that would make sense. One day I drove down to New York City, four and a half hour drive, just to spend the afternoon chatting with Grant and Simon in, in Simon's apartment,

• 1:01:57Speaker 02

  right condo, just, just to shoot the shit. And then I drove back.

• 1:02:01Anthony Pompliano?

  What'd you guys talk about?

• 1:02:03Speaker 02

  Everything, life, everything, gold, precious metals. This is probably, I don't know, probably 10 years ago. And so in any case, what was the original question? Oh, the optimism of Grantham. So Grantham, when he's feeling really enthusiastic to talk about the situation and he says, "Look, I have had the privilege of witnessing three great bubbles now." And he says, "This is the big one." Now, where I part ways with Grantham in a very big way is that he believes in climate change and I don't.

• 1:02:45Speaker 02

  I mean, I believe it changes, but he, he takes it very seriously. And I do think, you know, raping and pillaging Mother Earth is happening, but it's not about CO2. Let me put it that way. He believes, I think he believes CO2 is a problem and I do not think it's a problem at all. And that's where we part ways, but it shows up in his investing and stuff, so.

• 1:03:04Anthony Pompliano?

  Did you see the recent article, maybe it was New York Times or Wall Street Journal, I can't remember, where somebody wrote an op-ed and they said that they don't use AC, they tend to try to stay outside of their house during the summer, they go to the park where there's shade, they don't have a washer machine or a, or I'm sorry, a dishwasher or a dryer, et cetera. And the thought process was they're helping to slow climate change?

• 1:03:31Speaker 02

  It's a religion.

• 1:03:34Speaker 02

  Right. The monks used, well, the monks used to, back in, back in antiquity, there were these, these flagellists who, who would walk down the street and whip themselves bloody, deprive themselves of all earthly belongings for some religious reason. So there's people who think that somehow it's virtuous to suffer for a good cause, right? You want to read a great book, so, so I'm gonna, I'm gonna sell a few books here. I must have mentioned in some previous podcasts, Eric, Eric Keller's The True Believer, very short. Very easy read, and it talks about mass movements, and it talks about how people get sucked into it. I have realized to understand the world we're looking at, which to me is a terrifying world now, you have to start reading about totalitarianism.

• 1:04:18Speaker 02

  You've got to stop reading the bullshit stuff and start reading about how totalitarianism arrives, how it sort of sneaks into the storyline. Matthias Doesmit, Psychology of Totalitarianism. Hannah Arendt, about the Nazis, if you wish, that's a very tough read. Michael Malice's The White Pill, I loved.

• 1:04:40Anthony Pompliano?

  Dave, give us kind of a quick two-minute overview. You've been reading a lot about this. There's a lot of people who they're going to hear you say that, they're going to tell themselves they're going to go read the books. They're not going to go read the books. Give us kind of a two-minute overview of what is it? How does it happen? What have you learned in kind of going down this rabbit hole?

• 1:04:59Speaker 02

  Well, it seems, some theories say that it's sort of this idea that starts in elite circles, where someone says, you know, it would be really great if we shared the output of society with everybody, you know, that sort of thing. And then it somehow finds its way into the masses. The masses are the foot soldiers. And so by Hoffa's description, which is a 1953 book, comes out on audio. I love audio.

• 1:05:29Speaker 02

  The masses are painted by Hoffa, not very flatteringly, as these people whose lives are pretty directionless. So they're the dregs. And I don't mean that pejoratively, but they have very little to show for their efforts, and very little hope. And the cause, whatever that cause is, does several things. One is it blames somebody. I'm miserable because, I once had a student commit suicide after he passed his oral exam. I think he had demonized the exam, then when he still wasn't happy, offed himself. But so it gives people something, there's some reason why their lives suck.

• 1:06:12Speaker 02

  And then by virtue of signing off on this cause, they now have a tribe. They now have, they now have something that makes them feel consequential. And so, and then he goes into the psychology of the whole thing where he talks about how, and if that bubble gets burst, they often will find a new cause. They will find something else and they can flip. And those are kind of the true believers, actually. And so there's people who actually will hop from cause to cause, but they, they, they need a reason to be, one could argue that's the role of religion through history. Right? So you get together and you all agree there's a God, you all agree that you have to do various things and in good times, your God is a benevolent God and you're being

• 1:06:56Speaker 02

  taught benevolent things and bad times, it's not so much so. And so, um, so I think we're seeing, um, and then what happens is it reaches this crescendo where sort of shakers either direct this energy towards something good or direct it towards something bad. And, and, and, um, the climate movement, look at how many people, it is their life to worry about climate change, right? And one can argue, I'm a true believer and it sort of has it taken over my being saying, well, bearishness, but I think the math backs me on this one.

• 1:07:39Speaker 02

  The climate change story, um, it turns out it's the science behind it, there's such a heap of bullshit in it, really demonstrably bad science. And I've, I've asked rhetorical questions, like, let's say DDT was killing the raptors, right? Back in, you know, silent springtime where, where, where, where the, the eggs were thinning and stuff like that. And, and someone finally figured out it's the DDT and we stopped the DDT, we saved the eagles and the ospreys and all these raptors who were heading for extinction. If that happened today, would we figure it out? No, we'd blame climate change.

• 1:08:20Speaker 02

  It would obscure everything because it's this gigantic global religion. Now, why? Well, it's a population control issue. Why people want to control the population? I don't quite understand. Why the king of Spain wants to attack the king of France? He needs another 100 million square miles? What? Why? I don't. I don't understand these massive wars now. I'm a Reagan Republican, so it's not because I'm a... But I don't understand why we're in a perpetual state of war. You know, okay, well, you got the industrial military complex, et cetera, et cetera. You know, there's various answers, but that's why I've been reading about the Soviets, the stuff, trying to understand some of this crap.

• 1:09:01Speaker 02

  So, um, so the climate change problem, and the first thing you find, by the way, is you'll be told, and I've got a paper trail showing me following this path, actually, because my brother was pestering me. And I said, "Look, everyone I know believes it, Ned. What am I supposed to do here? I'm not a climate scientist, but I don't know anyone who doesn't believe this fucking story. Why do you think it's wrong?" Right? And then another guy started pestering me. I said one day to the former Secretary of Energy, Steven Chewie, I was having lunch with him, and I said I was agnostic, and he flinched. And I said, "Well, it would take me 10,000 hours, that's a Gladwellian 10,000 hours, to form an opinion."

• 1:09:45Speaker 02

  And he says, "Well, that's a valid point." And so, so then this guy bugs me, and I said, "Look, there's no credible scientists that don't believe this story." And he says, "Oh, yes, there are." I said, "Send them to me." So I'm expecting a list of people, you know, Joe Schmo from Sheboygan State College adjunct professor, who the fuck cares? Right? And it's not. Harvard, Stanford, Caltech, you name it, Oxford, you name it.

• 1:10:11Speaker 02

  MIT. And, and I'm thinking, okay, but these guys, they probably shot down a model. And the deniers are blaming, blaming and saying, therefore, there's no climate change. You know, no, that's just scientists scrubbing the, the system when they get it wrong. Right. So I started Googling them. So within four hours, I discovered that there's a good couple of dozen unbelievably prominent scientists who say, this is 100% load of crap. So the first big lie blew up in four hours, four hours of reading. So the former head of the National Academy of Sciences, the founder of Greenpeace, the head of NASA's Temperature Monitoring Program,

• 1:10:57Speaker 02

  500 scientists from NASA, Stanford physicist at the Synchrotron, the, the former provost at Caltech,

• 1:11:06Speaker 02

  geophysicist at, at MIT, all saying this is crap. The most recent was the 2022 Nobel Prize winner in physics, saying, saying it's just a load of crap. He said, they can't even account for clouds. This is just bullshit.

• 1:11:22Speaker 02

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

• 1:12:08Speaker 02

  They said, not a chance. You can't get funded unless you sign off on the narrative. Then you got John Kerry, climate czar. John Kerry knows less about climate than I do. I guarantee you, I, if you put me on a stage with him, I would shred his long lanky carcass from head to toe. He doesn't know anything. So who'd they put in charge of? Now that Kerry's stepping down, you're not going to believe this.

• 1:12:37Speaker 02

  Pizza Hunter John Podesta is now climate czar.

• 1:12:43Speaker 02

  This now, why is everyone signing off? Because they're promising 150 trillion dollars of spending on climate change.

• 1:12:55Anthony Pompliano?

  To do what though? Like part of this, um, I think people have seen the articles.

• 1:13:00Speaker 02

  Solar panels, electric cars.

• 1:13:02Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, we're going to back the, the, um, uh, electric vehicle charging network. And I think it's, uh, Pete Buttigieg is, uh, was in charge or overseeing. They spent tens of billions, I think, maybe it was a hundred billion, whatever the number was.

• 1:13:16Speaker 02

  Eight of them.

• 1:13:16Anthony Pompliano?

  And they got eight of them built. Now, again, to your point about the, um, kind of Gladwellian 10,000 hours. I didn't spend more than 20 minutes Googling around. I saw enough sources that were all telling a similar story. And I said, well, it's probably true, uh, but it's not going to affect my life either way. But it sounds kind of like it's a crazy story, right? So that was my.

• 1:13:37Speaker 02

  It will affect your life because we're going to squander huge amounts of money.

• 1:13:40Anthony Pompliano?

  Well, just the point of whether there was eight, 15, 100 or zero. It was not nearly as much produced as the amount of money that was spent. That was my basic takeaway.

• 1:13:51Speaker 02

  Well, here's a great example of a grift.

• 1:13:53Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay.

• 1:13:54Speaker 02

  I mean, there's grifts everywhere, everywhere. So I know guys, I know personally, guys who are, who are putting up solar farms. And they don't believe they do any good, but they're making a ton of money.

• 1:14:06Speaker 02

  So here, here's, I think it was Australia, but I could be wrong in this. They go to a farmer and they say, we will pay you $20,000. If you let us put solar panels up right here and hook them to the grid. Right? What the farmers don't realize is that the contract that they're signing means they are now responsible for the solar panels.

• 1:14:36Speaker 02

  The guys who put them in walk with the bucks, walk with the government handouts, walk with the subsidies. And the farmer's got the solar panels and doesn't realize that if that becomes a toxic waste dump, or they start breaking down, they start fucking up, the farmer's problem. It's the farmer's problem. That's the kind of grift we're getting. And so, um, the wind turbines, I don't think are ever going to be worth a shit. I, I think that's, and the bios already been, they don't even talk about the biofuels. They don't seem to.

• 1:15:10Anthony Pompliano?

  Are wind turbines, uh, killing the birds?

• 1:15:14Speaker 02

  Yes. My wife's an ornithologist.

• 1:15:17Anthony Pompliano?

  So.

• 1:15:17Speaker 02

  But I can live with that, except for the fact they put the turbines on the high, high airflow regions where the birds migrate. And so I said, well, let's put nets on her, catch them and make, make it in, you know, get Arthur Daniels Midland to catch them and make, you know, you know, make osprey soup. Yeah. Um, so, so it's like, but, but they're, they're destroying not only the environment itself, they do not, they have no idea what they're going to do with all these wind farm, these solar panels. And one hailstorm can wipe out a square mile of solar panels. So one hailstorm can destroy them.

• 1:15:56Anthony Pompliano?

  I will, you'll talk about climate change and the stupidity there for hours if I let you, but I want to zoom out for a second.

• 1:16:03Speaker 02

  Zoom out.

• 1:16:04Anthony Pompliano?

  There was a tweet that David Sacks tweeted. He said, the West has a real enemy and it is itself.

• 1:16:11Speaker 02

  I read it.

• 1:16:11Anthony Pompliano?

  And you retweeted it. And so that must mean to me, obviously retweets equal endorsements on Twitter, unless you didn't get the.

• 1:16:18Speaker 02

  Not always, not always, but usually.

• 1:16:20Anthony Pompliano?

  Well, it's, uh, whether, whether you think it's an endorsement or not, everyone's going to critique you and say it's an endorsement. So.

• 1:16:27Speaker 02

  Well, if I retweet something Kamala post, it's not an endorsement guaranteed.

• 1:16:33Anthony Pompliano?

  So David Sacks tweet, um, explain, uh, why is the West its own enemy? Well, why, why does that resonate with you?

• 1:16:44Speaker 02

  I think our political...

• 1:16:49Speaker 02

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

• 1:17:34Speaker 02

  But like so much of what we digest these days, it was like created by psychologists to say, how do we get the fans most engaged? How do we get them coming back? And there's this whole, there's these layers of mixing truth and falsehoods and tricking people and whipping their emotions back and forth. And so kayfabe really is a much more sophisticated thing than just a bunch of big guys yelling at each other in what looks like a play. And he wrote a 2011 article saying politics was going to become kayfabe. And it looks like we're there now. And he did a Chris Williamson interview,

• 1:18:17Speaker 02

  which is really funny because about a year ago he did one. And at one point Williamson said it's too late for a new candidate, maybe less than a year ago. And Eric said, I wouldn't be so sure. And Eric laid out this, no, no, no, no, you don't understand. They can do anything they want. And then about two weeks ago, I posted it and said, just watch the first five minutes. You'll fall out of your chair. And Eric nailed it. He nailed what happened with Biden and the attempted assassination with Trump and stuff. He nailed the fact that we have no idea what's going to come in 2024 election. And I posted it. And then about a week and a half later, they did a redo.

• 1:19:01Speaker 02

  And Williamson opens with that story. And I'm going, oh, that's funny. That's funny.

• 1:19:08Speaker 02

  So I've lost track where we're at, but I think the problem we have now is at the turn of the century, government was small. And it was crooked as shit. But a 3% of GDP government, crooked as shit, can't do a lot of damage. Now, what it did do is it allowed things like child slave labor and factories and stuff like that. So there really were problems and it's not like, you know, the race battles had been won yet or anything like that. So government was not great. The carpetbaggers had done a number on people, but it was small and captains of industry bribed the government to stay out of their way.

• 1:19:53Speaker 02

  Right? They might have gotten some perks, like the railroads got land grants and stuff like that. So there's some giveaways. Now government, what, 50% of GDP or something, right? I mean, it's a huge number. Now companies pay, bribe politicians to give them our money.

• 1:20:12Speaker 02

  And that's a very different kind of an economy.

• 1:20:16Anthony Pompliano?

  How do you know that politics has become kayfabe?

• 1:20:22Speaker 02

  I don't. It's a relatively recent...

• 1:20:27Speaker 02

  I talk about ideas migrating from my head to my stomach where I hear it and it's in there and it's kind of intellectually in there, but then all of a sudden, one day it just goes whoop and I go, oh, oh, oh, fuck, oh, I got it.

• 1:20:41Speaker 02

  And there's even ideas that seem straightforward, but then all of a sudden I got it, that the sort of the implication finally clicks. And candidates are so bad.

• 1:20:56Speaker 02

  And we can't even get someone credible to want to do it, except for like Kennedy, who all his flaws is still...

• 1:21:09Speaker 02

  In my opinion, a phenomenal candidate. And, you know, people like to point at some of his idiosyncrasies, and they go, let me, let me help you with that one. He grew up watching his uncle get shot, watching his father get shot, watching his, his, his aunt get lobotomized, um, watching his, his, his cousin die in a plane crash, which is sketchy. So he turns into an alcoholic for a while. Is there anyone shocked by that? Right? And, and, you know, I don't know why he insists on telling things like the bear story in

• 1:21:52Speaker 02

  Central Park, or whatever it was, you know, I, I've got the Bobby, Bobby, Bobby, I was on the Zoom call with him, he seemed very sincere. Um, I think he's trying to get it right. It's, he fits that description, a guy who's trying to get it right. And by the way, they talk about how extreme he is on climate change. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. He at first made reference to punishing people severely, but I think he was talking about the polluters. And, and, but he said, at one point, he said, I do not support big government solutions to climate change, which means let the free market sort this out. Or it means I don't believe it, but I don't dare say it. I, I don't know. But

• 1:22:36Speaker 02

  he seems to say anything you want. So.

• 1:22:38Anthony Pompliano?

  We've spent time talking about Trump and Harris. We've also talked about Kennedy. Let's drop down and talk about Tim Walz and J D Vance as the vice president candidates. What is your assessment on those two?

• 1:22:52Speaker 02

  Well, I read Hillbillyology before Walz, before J D Vance was famous. I had minor issues with the book. I said, you know, you were raised by hillbillies, but you yourself kind of grew up in a non-hillbilly world, although your family influences you a lot. There's a little bit of a disconnect of him somehow ending up at Yale Law School.

• 1:23:18Speaker 02

  I believe that JD Vance, but let's say he got there. I don't have a problem with it. I think someone spotted him at Yale. And I think they put him on a grooming path to this position. I don't think, I don't think this is an organic growth into a politically prominent position. I think this is standard play. I think clearly they did it with Obama. They had have done it with Hillary too, you know. Hillary's graduation speech at Wellesley was brilliant. Someone had to spot that. And so, um, so I didn't trust him.

• 1:23:55Speaker 02

  And then here's an interesting story. Back to Eric Weinstein. He said he was in a room with a bunch of right wingers. And him, he said he's the only guy left of center in the room, and he comes from way left of center. And it was a day or two, they spent some outing and I did, he didn't go into the details of how they all ended up together, but he said, "Those guys sincerely, sincerely, unambiguously believed in helping the little guy."

• 1:24:25Speaker 02

  And he said, now, he said, "It could have been a ruse where their whole ploy was to get about 20 of these guys together and Eric Weinstein, and I was in charge of taking the bait and then going out and telling the world." But he says, "I don't think so."

• 1:24:37Speaker 02

  And so, I'm okay with Vance. I'm okay with Vance. I wanted him to pick Tulsi. I thought it would have been brilliant. A former Democratic presidential candidate, chick, military, speaks well, hot, right? What's not to like about her as the VP? She might have said no, I don't know.

• 1:24:59Speaker 02

  I do think having Kennedy in the cabinet not as VP is better.

• 1:25:06Speaker 02

  So now let's go to, um, so Shanahan is very left of center. But she's going to be in there, I think.

• 1:25:17Speaker 02

  So I'm okay with J D Vance now. I don't think he's, he doesn't scare me. Waltz, I think is a scary.

• 1:25:24Anthony Pompliano?

  So real, real quick on J D before we get to, to Tim Walls.

• 1:25:30Anthony Pompliano?

  Growing up in the environment he did and then ending up at Yale, one of the parts that depending on the years that I think kind of gets lost is, you know, he served in the Marines. He deployed overseas.

• 1:25:45Speaker 02

  Didn't he do that after Yale? Someone told me that, but I could be wrong.

• 1:25:49Anthony Pompliano?

  I don't think so. I could be wrong on it, but I'm pretty sure that he did it before and.

• 1:25:54Speaker 02

  Okay, that, that makes sense. Going from Yale to the Marines is not.

• 1:25:58Anthony Pompliano?

  Correct. And so, uh, one of the things that people don't realize is, um, during the time in which he did this, which I think was late 2000s, early 2010s, you can look at the, uh, look for the date.

• 1:26:10Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:26:11Anthony Pompliano?

  That is, that is when a lot of the programs started at universities.

• 1:26:15Speaker 02

  Yeah, he was in the Marines right after high school.

• 1:26:18Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay. So I, I think that, um, right around the time, I was in the military then, uh, I deployed to Iraq in 2008, 2009. And so coming back, there was a multitude of programs where these universities and, you know, banks, financial organizations, et cetera, were setting up these veteran focused programs. So Goldman Sachs.

• 1:26:38Speaker 02

  Hear that actually.

• 1:26:39Anthony Pompliano?

  J P Morgan, right? You know, all these guys are setting up saying, hey, let's go, let's go get these veterans. Universities as well. I'm not saying that J D Vance got into Yale because he was a veteran, but it would not surprise me that that is the transition. That's the missing puzzle piece to you go from what many would consider kind of a blue collar, you know, that the hillbilly community they talked about in the book, to all of a sudden you're able to transform and the military in particular is the one area where you can take a blue collar hillbilly, put them in that uniform.

• 1:27:11Speaker 02

  Something.

• 1:27:12Anthony Pompliano?

  You put them in that uniform and they walk out the other side and all of a sudden they are accepted into other parts of society because of the military uniform, not because of where they came from. It's a very.

• 1:27:20Speaker 02

  They say, sir, yes, sir. And they show up on time.

• 1:27:23Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. And, and I think people look at it. It's admirable. It's, you know, all these different things, but it is in a weird way, one of the, um, the military serves as one of the best social mobility tools. In American society, although no one thinks of it that way.

• 1:27:37Speaker 02

  I totally agree. No, I do. And I, I tried to talk my son into joining the Navy.

• 1:27:42Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, I never understood it until I served in the military and I saw the breadth of different people that were there. You had people who were college educated, went through ROTC, were officers, you know, kind of the, you know, the white collar of version of the military. And then you had the blue collar. I had no other choice. I was going to be in jail or here, you know, that, that was the other end of the spectrum. And when you have that shared service, that uniform, all that kind of stuff, when you walk out the other side, um, to the people outside the military. The ROTC, uh, kind of, you know, college educated officer and the blue collar, you know, uh, enlisted soldier.

• 1:28:19Anthony Pompliano?

  They both just wear the same uniform and they come out the other side. And it's a pretty interesting dynamic. And I bet that JD, you know, that was a huge part of, uh, kind of the transition.

• 1:28:29Speaker 02

  Well, the other thing is I've never confused, well, never, for very, very long time, I have not confused education with intelligence. So these inherently, possibly the smartest guy I might've ever met. Now I've met a few smart ones, but was a guy with a third grade education. I picked him up hitchhiking. He smelled, he had a suitcase, broken handle. He was 10 years younger than he looked. He was going to pick beans or something somewhere. And I drove him and I, everybody has a story. And that's my wife called me, but she's just gonna have to get with the program. Um, everybody has a story, but, but it turns out that, um, um,

• 1:29:12Speaker 02

  so this guy, I'm talking to him and then what he says to me, I'm picking up something. He says to me, what do you do? I said, I teach, right? Need to know basis. He said, what do you teach? I said, chemistry. He says, oh, interesting. He says, where? And I said, Ithaca. And he says, in the high school. I said, no, I teach at Cornell. He says, oh, Cornell's really good in chemistry.

• 1:29:33Speaker 02

  And, and, and, and then he starts naming chemistry departments. Now, if he named Harvard Yale, you say, even bean pickers know these guys. He didn't. He said Kel-Tec, Chicago, Berkeley. I go, how the fuck do you know this? And he says, oh, I read a lot. So I start talking to him about it. And he's telling me about Thoreau and Walden Pond and his effect on his contemporaries and shit. And then I, and then I'm going, oh, man, the guy's fucking with me. He wanted to learn how to fix engines in the military, but he, he had flat feet, but then they drafted him, that he didn't get to choose, right? So he was infantry. And he said, but I picked up a book, and he starts talking about the physics of engines. And then I, so I started steering him. I said, what did you like poetry? He says, no, not

• 1:30:16Speaker 02

  really. And then he starts talking about all these fucking poets. And, and it was just for four hours, this guy bent my brain backwards. And I realized that this is some guy who, for some reason, I, I used to feel bad that he, that I didn't try to do something until I got older and wiser and realized that I wasn't going to save this guy. This guy was not on track of a normal society. For some reason, it was way beyond my capabilities to fix, right? Um, so I see guys who are super smart, like maintenance guys in the building and stuff, who are super smart, great common sense, that, that may not have gone to college, but they got a great brain. And so Vance could have been super smart,

• 1:30:58Speaker 02

  and then, and then finally exploited it when he got to Ohio State, and then when he got to Yale. So, there's that. And, um, What about Tim Walz? But I must admit, Walz creeps me out. Walz, um, Walz has got some fibs in there. And, and, you know, you say, well, this is politics, but there's, there's fibs, there's bullshit, and there's lies. Um, Trump is the biggest bullshit artist, right? So if he says, I, you know, it's the biggest drought in history, that's bullshit, right? But also, it's, it's a kind of harmless, it's just bravado. It's just like, you know, I'm, you know, my dad is the king of the world, you know, that sort of thing. Um,

• 1:31:41Speaker 02

  Biden is a pathological liar, right? He tells, he says, "I graduated first in my class," and he didn't. That's a factual statement that's not right. Waltz, I think, has that in him. There's too many fibs coming out. Somebody supposedly who knew him said that he was constantly lying. Now, I don't trust that completely because you can dredge up people to hammer Kennedy. You can dredge up people to hammer Trump. You can always do that. But I worry. What creeps me is his mannerisms, the spidey sense level. And I did a Twitter poll, which I said, "Ignore past actions. Ignore the ticket that maybe you hate.

• 1:32:24Speaker 02

  Is there something about his demeanor that gives you the creeps?" And I got 3.8% no. And then I got like 20% some. And then near 80% said absolutely. So there's something Waltz puts off that, you know, he supposedly was not coach of this football team. He was assistant coach. I can forgive that. I said, I've said I coached taekwondo and gymnastics at the collegiate level. And I usually cough up, I say, "Low-level taekwondo coach." But I was head coach gymnastics for a year or two. And so someone could, if I didn't qualify that thing and say, "Well, you were an assistant coach," right? I don't care about that.

• 1:33:09Speaker 02

  But he got fired from a DUI. We don't hear that part of the story unless that's a lie. It's back to the what's a fact in this world, right? I watch him and there's just something, the way he acts in public, the way he acts on the stage. I could not do that. I could not act like he acts. There's something pathological about that. Maybe that's what it takes to get to politics. But it's so fabricated looking to me.

• 1:33:44Speaker 02

  And so there's something that creeps me about him and his statements and from the past about how, you know, free speech doesn't include misinformation. I go, well, you'd have to shut your mouth. How's that? Now, I've got another book for you. Very important book. If everyone in the country read it, it would transform the country. Jonathan Turley's The Indispensable Right is about the history of free speech in the United States. And it's both scholarly and riveting.

• 1:34:12Speaker 02

  So he doesn't bury you in arcane bullshit. But when he talks to you about the cases and by the end of the book, your brain is twisted into a knot and you're going, okay, what would I do? Where does this fit into the free speech debate?

• 1:34:27Speaker 02

  But Walt said, you know, the guys who say that the Constitution doesn't protect you from spilling out misinformation. These people should be locked away somewhere where they can't hurt people. There's something so, but they get free speech too. But they're in a position to hurt us with their, so they can say it, but we also have the right to say, shut the fuck up and I'm not voting for you.

• 1:34:55Anthony Pompliano?

  So the last thing I want to talk about is free speech and media, media outlets.

• 1:35:03Anthony Pompliano?

  I get the sense that you're not a fan of any of the media outlets. That may be wrong.

• 1:35:06Speaker 02

  Not the main, not the main ones. I can tolerate Fox only because their bullshit is more aligned with my interests. But, you know, you can watch five shows in a row on Fox, you see the same material, you know, and, you know, there's, when Tucker was there, I hated Tucker when he was younger. And he, he describes himself in ways I go, yes, that was the guy I didn't like. Right? His own description of his youthful stupidity is exactly what it is that made me averse to him.

• 1:35:43Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay.

• 1:35:43Speaker 02

  Hitting the apex in his Jon Stewart interview. That really illustrated to me why Tucker was not very good at that age. He somehow realized not to do that. He somehow found his voice and so now I really like him. And there's things I don't agree with, of course, but, but he's now his own media empire.

• 1:36:04Speaker 02

  The media has sort of constitutionally protected rights. I'm not qualified to know if they have special rights, but. Let's take, for example, firing of Tucker. Um, Smartmatic or Dominion, one of those, so I can't remember which one sued Fox for things Tucker said about the election being rigged.

• 1:36:29Speaker 02

  Without a whimper, Fox settled for $730 million or something. Now, in any other era in history, going back a ways, Fox would have fought that to the Supreme Court, right? That's their job to fight that to the Supreme Court. That's their, if we are going to give you special constitutionally granted rights, you also have responsibilities, in my opinion. Now, I don't care if you want to have opinion pieces and stuff like that, but the media has a responsibility to society, and the failure of the media is going to be the failure of society, in my opinion. And that's what scares me.

• 1:37:13Speaker 02

  But, um, but now they are just political machines. And they, I think they lie their ass off. And, and so, so let me finish that, that Dominion story.

• 1:37:30Speaker 02

  So Fox settles for $730 million without a whimper. What's it do? They don't fire Tucker. They just take him off the air. Why? Because then they thought they could control him. What they forgot to realize was he can do whatever he wants without charging. Now it's free speech. It's not a breach of contract.

• 1:37:50Speaker 02

  Because he's not collecting money for it. And so I think he might still be on Fox's payroll while he reads out Fox left and right. Now, I went to check Dominion to see what happened to their share price, because Dominion is not a big company. I'd previously written about it. Dominion is Canadian. Troubles me that our machines, our voting machines are coming from Canada. But I go, well, Canadians are probably no worse than us, although now I'm beginning to wonder. Dominion turns out to be owned by a subsidiary of UBS, which is majority owned by a company in Beijing. That plot thickens fast. So Beijing owns our voting machines. That's a problem. That's a fundamental problem.

• 1:38:35Anthony Pompliano?

  Walk us through that again. Dominion is a small company.

• 1:38:37Speaker 02

  Dominion is Canadian.

• 1:38:40Speaker 02

  Dominion is owned by a subsidiary of UBS, for which the major owner of that is a company in Beijing. So Beijing controls our voting machines. And they did connect to the internet the night of the 2020 election. And people blow it off. I go, you know, Beijing owns the voting machines, they connect to the internet. We just handed our voting connectivity to Beijing that night. So, so what happens? So Tucker's calling out Dominion for his bullshit. I went to see what happened to Dominion's share price.

• 1:39:17Speaker 02

  And I discovered that in 2018, Dominion had gone private. So they were no longer publicly traded. How convenient, just in time for the 2020 election. Without the shining light of auditing and all the stuff that goes with being publicly traded. I did however, find their revenues. They had annual revenues, I think it was like 18, 19 million dollars. And they, for damages, they got 730 million dollars. How do you, how do you get a company with 18 or 19 million dollars of revenue? How can you damage that for 730 million dollars? The answer is you can't.

• 1:40:02Speaker 02

  It's 10, it's 10 times the value of the company. Now, here's what I think really happened. I think Dominion wanted the win. I think the political system wanted the loss. I bet you no money change hands. They needed the headline. They need to get rid of Tucker. They failed to get rid of Tucker. He has more eyeballs from Twitter than he got from Fox News. But I think, I think the, I think that the political, now here's another great thing. Another example, Trump gets shot. At first, I thought it was fake. I was in the, "That can't be real." It was, it looked so perfect. But I now believe it's real. I believe there's multiple shooters. I believe there was a conspiracy.

• 1:40:47Speaker 02

  I, there's, there's just way too much evidence pointing to some sort of deep state shenanigans. I'm guessing that, that Crooks was probably brainwashed up the kazoo. He probably didn't even know what he was doing at the time, is my guess. But, but there's, the ballistics don't make sense. Nothing makes sense. You turn on any station. What you should see, first of all, is a tremendous call for what the hell just happened. Right after the event, they should have taken every secret, and there's all sorts of missing Secret Service agents and shit. There's all sorts of things that were odd for that day. They should have taken everyone involved, put them in a separate room and said, "What do you know? Tell me what you know. What did you see? What was fishy about that?" They didn't do that.

• 1:41:31Speaker 02

  They wiped up the crime scene, fast as can be. It was a crime scene. They wiped it up. And then you go on TV, and every single person is arguing over who should be fired. I go, "So, we've got an attempted assassination of a president, a murder, and some shots." So, people got shot, and we're talking about firing people? That's the narrative. They're trying to distract us. It's like the lab leak story. They're trying to say, "Oh, it came from a lab. It came from nature." Well, how about the fact that we're running bioweapons labs overseas? Let's talk about that. How about they released it on purpose, maybe? Who knows? Let's talk, they don't want to talk about that. They don't want to talk about the presidential shooting, so they talk about who should be fired.

• 1:42:15Speaker 02

  The chick who got fired, right? What's her name? Chedle?

• 1:42:19Anthony Pompliano?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:42:20Speaker 02

  She probably had no idea what happened. She started lying right away. She started lying right away. She should have said, "Look, we're still trying to figure this out. Shut the fuck up. Leave me alone." Right? So.

• 1:42:32Anthony Pompliano?

  When you see Elon battling in Brazil for free speech,

• 1:42:40Anthony Pompliano?

  is that different or the same as the US trying to ban TikTok in the US? Like, what are the similarities and the differences?

• 1:42:49Speaker 02

  Well, the TikTok story is more complicated than us banning TikTok in the United States. It's not that. I'm gonna, I'm gonna take a risk here. I have a gag order on Israel, Gaza. I, I personal gag order.

• 1:43:04Speaker 02

  TikTok, they want to ban TikTok because they're softening the brains of our children. Excuse me, you guys are doing a fine job yourselves. I don't, I, I, I, I agree, but it, and they say, well, China is sucking up also. I go, yeah, so are you. I, I don't care. I really don't care. Then you find out that we say to China, you gotta sell TikTok to us. What kind of bullshit story is that? And then you find out that Mnuchin, Secretary of the Treasury and a bunch of financiers are putting together a package to buy TikTok. And I go, what the hell is that all about?

• 1:43:36Speaker 02

  And then you find out, I think it might be, might even be from Mike Benz, that the real problem with TikTok is that there's a huge pro-Palestine slant to TikTok. So I think the TikTok story is about Israel wanting to shut TikTok up.

• 1:43:54Anthony Pompliano?

  Interesting. What about X in Brazil?

• 1:44:00Speaker 02

  Well, either Elon's a kayfabe story. And he's doing a great job. And X is better than it used to be. So I'm glad about that. What's amazing is the number of people who should be supporting Elon who are not. The people want to shut Elon down because of misinformation and disinformation. The fact that they just arrested that guy from what Telegram?

• 1:44:25Anthony Pompliano?

  Pavel.

• 1:44:25Speaker 02

  Durov? Pavel, yeah. There should be screaming from everybody.

• 1:44:32Speaker 02

  Everyone should be saying, what are you doing? Right? But there's not because we are now, that's why I gotta read Jonathan Turley's book. He says, um, freedom of speech comes under fire whenever the country gets troubled. And, and, and he goes through case histories where he talks about some guy who criticized the government and he was factually correct and they still threw him in jail and the Supreme Court supported the decision. Right? And there's just strange things through the history of free speech. So Elon, we should all be backing Elon's free speech rights and, and, but should we care about Brazil? It's Brazil's problem.

• 1:45:14Speaker 02

  And if they want to shut it down, okay. I mean, I've got a Brazilian ETF, so I should worry about that, but not much.

• 1:45:21Anthony Pompliano?

  It feels like, um, I don't know if you're familiar with the Paul Singer Elliott Management versus Argentina story?

• 1:45:30Speaker 02

  Yes. Wasn't that fascinating when, where, where, where he cornered them legally?

• 1:45:37Anthony Pompliano?

  He cornered them legally, but, but I don't know if you remember, he also seized, physically seized one of their warships.

• 1:45:44Speaker 02

  Oh, I don't know that part.

• 1:45:46Anthony Pompliano?

  Oh, you're gonna love this. So Singer, the Elon Brazil thing has the framework of an individual private citizen with a monetary or corporate interest up against a foreign nation. Right?

• 1:46:02Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:46:03Anthony Pompliano?

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

• 1:46:35Speaker 02

  But there was another problem too, where they were cornered, where if they had defaulted on the bonds because of the legality of that complex world, that would have caused a cascading failure throughout the system too. And Singer knew that, so he said, you have to pay me.

• 1:46:51Anthony Pompliano?

  Yes.

• 1:46:52Speaker 02

  Or you will cause this cascading failure. And they were trying to find ways to get around it. They couldn't. Singer outsmarted them.

• 1:46:59Anthony Pompliano?

  It was like a 12 or 15 year battle. But again, you know, private citizen, monetary interest against a nation state. Elon is much more powerful and much richer than Singer in that situation. And so I know nothing about the Brazilian judge, don't even know his name. But I do know Elon may be the wrong tree to bark up because he's got a hell of a lot of influence. But more importantly is that he seems to be the type of person that when you ratchet the pressure up, he only knows one speed. He ratchets up bigger and faster.

• 1:47:40Speaker 02

  Did you read his biography?

• 1:47:42Anthony Pompliano?

  I did.

• 1:47:43Speaker 02

  It was great. Now, I'm sure there were favorable things, but it was so entertaining, which remember when he was a kid and he wanted a scooter? He would stand there next to his dad and said, Dad, I want a scooter. And his dad would say, no, you're not getting a scooter. And he would just stand there and stare at him. He would just stare at him. And then the next night, he'd go, Dad, I want a scooter. And Dad would go, no. And Elon would just stare at him. So, so I think his, you know, on the spectrum personality gives him kind of a superpower. Now, I know guys like, you know, guys who tried to short Tesla, and it's a totally rational thing, except for the fact that they didn't, they misjudged what Elon could do.

• 1:48:26Speaker 02

  So my understanding is Elon must have paid to keep Tesla floating using Dogecoin. Is that right? Isn't that what he did?

• 1:48:36Anthony Pompliano?

  My, my read on Tesla and the shorts is that,

• 1:48:44Anthony Pompliano?

  don't try to be rational with an irrational person when you're arguing with somebody.

• 1:48:49Speaker 02

  That's right. That's exactly right.

• 1:48:50Anthony Pompliano?

  And the version in finance is never bet against a magician. And again,

• 1:48:58Speaker 02

  Oh, interesting. Interesting praise.

• 1:49:01Anthony Pompliano?

  A magician, the critics will say they're manipulating the stock, they're doing accounting, they're, you know, all the critiques we've all read online. And, and again, I'm not an expert. I'm not a forensic accountant. I couldn't tell you the first thing, whether these people are right, wrong, whatever. But what I do know is that when you look at the history and career of a magician, they continue to pull off magic tricks. And so the first rocket blows up, the second rocket blows up, somehow, some way, he eventually gets one that works.

• 1:49:34Speaker 02

  So what should have destroyed him should have been Gambler's Ruin, where, where you're betting against the house and eventually their liquidity exceeds yours and you go broke. So if you draw an inside straight, which he seems to do all the time,

• 1:49:51Anthony Pompliano?

  Yep.

• 1:49:52Speaker 02

  Eventually you get, you get liquidated.

• 1:49:55Anthony Pompliano?

  Except for,

• 1:49:56Speaker 02

  And he doesn't.

• 1:49:57Anthony Pompliano?

  Except for the thing that he, I, I find it very difficult to believe that he master planned. He somehow built this cult of personality, which

• 1:50:10Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:50:10Anthony Pompliano?

  leads to a, and rightfully so, a belief that he is the best entrepreneur of our generation. He is one of the true innovators in our society. Capital will always follow the magician. And therefore, he doesn't need to just have his own balance sheet. He has to be able to dip into the house's pockets when needed.

• 1:50:35Anthony Pompliano?

  The difference,

• 1:50:35Speaker 02

  So at some level, this is kind of Trump like, really?

• 1:50:39Speaker 02

  Trump, Trump, Trump, Trump built a building in New York City, which you know, you can imagine how many signatures you have to get. He didn't get any of them and no one noticed. He had no signatures. He just built the fucking thing.

• 1:50:56Anthony Pompliano?

  If I remember correctly, Elon Musk, Donald Trump and Kanye West all have birthdays in June and are Geminis. I don't believe any of that shit.

• 1:51:11Speaker 02

  I'm not, no, I don't either, but that's funny.

• 1:51:14Anthony Pompliano?

  Except for, that's a big coincidence.

• 1:51:18Speaker 02

  Well, there's only 12 months in the year or so. So the odds, that's not astronomically improbable.

• 1:51:25Anthony Pompliano?

  No, but, but Elon, Trump and Kanye.

• 1:51:30Speaker 02

  Well, it's 144 to one.

• 1:51:32Anthony Pompliano?

  You know, the, uh, the phrase that Kanye has, uh, used is, uh, uh, show me a genius that isn't crazy.

• 1:51:42Speaker 02

  Oh yeah. Or the other one is it takes a crazy man to try to change the world.

• 1:51:46Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. And so if you look at, you know, Elon in particular, um, there's a maniacal, uh, you know, kind of indomitable will that is, uh, very hard. Um, I think for people to understand it's unnatural. It's, uh, it's rare. And so, um, I always just come back to when I, when I see the shorts getting excited. It's just never bet against a magician.

• 1:52:14Speaker 02

  Well, the other, shorting is very, very hard. So I've been getting emails from Mark Cohodas. And he finds.

• 1:52:26Anthony Pompliano?

  Right? He, he stopped.

• 1:52:28Speaker 02

  No.

• 1:52:29Anthony Pompliano?

  No? Okay.

• 1:52:29Speaker 02

  I don't, I don't think so. Right now he's going after a politician and he, he calls him. He goes out there, he goes, he's a goddamn criminal, you know, and he swears his ass off and stuff. And he gets mad and stuff like that. But I know that people within that world respect him enormously. So, um, so he finds the criminals. Then he goes at him and he goes at him with everything he's got. He beats him senseless. But you know, I read Einhorn's, um,

• 1:52:58Speaker 02

  Well, some of the people, some of the time, I think, or something like that.

• 1:53:01Anthony Pompliano?

  Uh huh.

• 1:53:01Speaker 02

  You know that book? And he went after, oh God, Alliance Capital or something. I can't remember the name, it was so long ago, I read the book. But, but he, he brought the case to the SEC and he laid out the case for the criminal behavior. And this, and then he got stonewalled and then something like a month later, one of the two guys they presented to switched and worked for Alliance. Right? That's how crooked the system was. And then what ultimately caused Alliance to fail, I think, was the 08, 09 crisis. So it wasn't the fact that they were criminal. The criminals can keep going for a very, very long time. But at some point they get liquidated.

• 1:53:45Speaker 02

  They do get liquidated.

• 1:53:47Anthony Pompliano?

  I think that is a great place for us to end this episode. Where can we send people to find you?

• 1:53:52Speaker 02

  Twitter, David B. Column on Twitter until they kick me off. But I'm feeling okay now with, with, with Elon at the helm. And I occasionally write, and you can go to YouTube. I mean, I'm just all over YouTube now. And, um, and rumble, places like that.

• 1:54:14Anthony Pompliano?

  I always enjoy talking to you. I always learn something. So please keep doing it.

• 1:54:20Speaker 02

  One last book, Diana West's American Betrayal, if I didn't mention it already.

• 1:54:25Anthony Pompliano?

  Diana West, American Betrayal.

• 1:54:27Speaker 02

  American Betrayal. It's a, it's a complete rewriting of World War II history. She describes how the Soviets completely controlled the flow of the war, completely. And at first I didn't believe her. I thought she's a neocon, she's an economy behind every rock. By the end of the book, I'm going, holy shit, she nailed it. And then there's a follow up called The Red Tide, which is like a sequel, which brings us up to the great example, John Brennan. I can't stop, can I? John Brennan, they say, oh, in discretion, he voted communist once in his life. Oh my God, no. His communist connections run deep, multi-tenacled. There is something so wrong with this story.

• 1:55:10Anthony Pompliano?

  I'm gonna go read the books and then we're gonna talk about it again at the end of the year when you put out your beautiful end of year review.

• 1:55:19Speaker 02

  And by the way, I'm not suicidal.

• 1:55:24Anthony Pompliano?

  Hi folks. That's always your disclaimer. We will, we will talk to Dave again at the end of the year. I appreciate your time. Thank you so much.