#1143 Dave Collum | 2022 Was A Disaster Year

Dave Collum is a professor of chemistry at Cornell University. In this conversation, we talk Dave's year in review of 2022. The discussion includes Federal Reserve, macro economy, geopolitics, the war in Russia & Ukraine, US military, and the impact of FTX collapse.

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. Most of you know me as Pomp. You're listening to the Pomp Podcast, simply the best podcast out there. Now let's kick this thing off. Dave Collum is a professor of chemistry at Cornell University. In this conversation, we talk about Dave's Year in Review. These are monstrous documents that he puts together, and this one is almost 100 pages. In this conversation, Dave and I talk about the Federal Reserve, the macroeconomy, geopolitics, the war in Russia and Ukraine, what the hell is going on with the US military and intelligence community, and how he sees the FTX situation unfolding. I really enjoyed this conversation with Dave, and I hope you guys enjoy it as

• 0:45Anthony Pompliano?

  well. Once you get done listening, jump on Twitter and let us know what you agreed with, what you disagreed with, what you liked and what you didn't like. I always appreciate the feedback, and I find it super helpful. All right, here's my conversation with Cornell's Dave Cullum.

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• 2:24Speaker 06

  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.

• 2:47Anthony Pompliano?

  All right, guys. Bang, bang. I am here. Dave Column is back. Ear in review. I thought a great place for us to start would be on the finance side. Over the last three years, we have seen absolute insanity across financial markets, activity from the Federal Reserve. We've seen bull markets. We've seen bear markets. Asset price go up, asset price go down. How do you start to just unpack what's happened in finance and in the economy since the beginning of 2020 all the way to the end of 2022?

• 3:21Speaker 07

  Well, I go back to 1981. I work from a different baseline, but so the Fed, in my opinion, let the markets leave orbit in 1994-ish. That's when the markets kind of took off and never looked back. And you can see it based on any valuation metric, that they barely touched fair value for the rest of the time. And so there was this accumulation of fuel in the system that had not been burned off and corrections corrected nothing. And I talk about corrections being... Combination of price and attitude correction and attitudes never got changed.

• 4:04Speaker 07

  So we have 40 years of recency bias where you simply never get punished for being in the markets. That's the rule. You're simply never punished for being in the markets. You get to 2020, so 2019, you get that repo madness period where actually we're just talking about Grant Williams before we went on. One night, Saturday night, Grant called me for two hours. We just talked about the repo madness, trying to figure out what it was. It's where the repo rate was spiking up to 10%, right? And, uh, and, and there was, at the end of the two hours, we concluded we had no idea what was going on. And it was fun chat, but, um, and so then the Fed sort of swooped in to deal with that.

• 4:49Speaker 07

  And I'm not sure they knew what was going on. I think it might've been, um, the behavior of an emergent system where, where it just started spazzing. It just, they, they didn't know what was happening. So they just, they just threw all sorts of kerosene on the thing or whatever you fan, whatever. Some, some metaphor. Um, and then, so what happens is they were, they were following, um, guidelines from a white paper from BlackRock that had been written in earlier in 2019. Oh, what a coincidence, right? And BlackRock's basically said in this white paper, the next crisis you're not going to be able to handle. And, and, and what you're going to have to do is you're going to have to shove money directly into the consumer, not just into the system.

• 5:34Speaker 07

  And it was called go direct. A guy named John Titus had been talking about this. And, um, and so when repo madness came, you can actually see the, the, the retail money supply. They have ways of dissecting it. I don't know how to explain this. It's way above my pay grade, but you can kind of see the money go direct. Uh, not just into the system in total, meaning it didn't just head off to the Federal Reserve as a reserve. It, it, it didn't go into some dormant sleepy place. And, um, and then, you know, within a couple of months, COVID shows up. Now I blame the Fed for the COVID lockdown. And you say, well, how do you do that? And I said, well, if the Fed hadn't said, we will provide everything you need to shut the whole goddamn global economy down.

• 6:19Speaker 07

  Then, then we'll do it. Now, if the Fed had said, no, we can't because we'll have an inflation problem, then there would have been a lockdown. It's that simple. And if they said, we're not going to backstop you, you're on your own. Um, then then Fauci and these guys wouldn't have been able to lock the economy down. And um, and so then that triggered, you know, there's been inflation all along that they've been lying about. This year, I'm going to have trouble because I just wrote 200 pages on this shit. And so I'm going to keep referring back to it. I apologize. But I wrote one of my favorite inflation stories about a blender that that broke that was 50 years old. And then you replace with a new one, it's a piece of shit.

• 6:59Speaker 07

  And why inflation doesn't pick up this changing quality at all, this bad downside changing quality. Pedonics to this downside. And um, and then I had just finished writing it and my fucking blender broke.

• 7:15Speaker 07

  I'm going, this is unbelievable timing. My blender broke. And um, and so, uh, so in any case, uh, they triggered serious undeniable into the DNA level inflation. And and when inflation gets in the DNA, it's it's no longer just a dial it up, dial it down. Inflation is not like the Fed can say, okay, we'll just cut back a little on the money supply or we'll cut back a little on the flow. It is now deeply embedded in the consumer psyche and employer psyche. So now they can't get people to work for for lower wages and they can't. Then things cost a fortune. My I published a tweet, which my brother keeps track of food. He's he's very well off, but he keeps track of everything. He's an accountant.

• 8:00Speaker 07

  And his his food bill was up 41% year over year. And so when you have inflation of that kind, Jimmy Iorio said in response to that, he said, yeah, his restaurant, the food bill is up 24, 25% year over year. And so the inflation had gotten real and gotten serious. And so now, so now the Fed had that. And it's not clear that the Fed really has the tools to solve this inflation problem because it's a very strange one. It's it's different as always, but it's got this.

• 8:31Anthony Pompliano?

  Before we get into the inflation kind of getting under control, explain a little bit more your comment about the Fed playing a hand in the government mandated lockdowns. Because basically what you're arguing is if the Fed was not willing to intervene in the market and provide the amounts of liquidity, if politicians also weren't willing to provide the fiscal support and basically bail out the consumer and also certain industries, then the science organism, if you will, or the science argument may not have led to the government mandated lockdowns. Instead, there would have been more balance in that debate?

• 9:10Speaker 07

  Yes. Well, first of all, let me tell you that the science behind the lockdowns was zero. The people making the decision about the lockdowns were guys who were not scientists. Tony Fauci is a moron on a scientific scale. He doesn't know anything. And and that comes straight from Scott Atlas, who spent months in the room with him, and he said he didn't have a shred of scientific thinking in his logic. And I was on a Zoom call with Scott, and I was pounding him with these little yes, no questions for about 20, 30 minutes. And and he said Fauci never once used a scientific argument. When he asked Burks about the lockdown and about masking in particular, he said, what's the best evidence

• 9:51Speaker 07

  that masking does any good? And I'll foreshadow this statement with there's not there's profoundly good scientific evidence that masks do nothing. There were 30 or 40 mass studies prior to COVID during flu epidemics and stuff, and not a single one found a statistically significant improvement in in the pandemic or the epidemic or whatever from masking up. The masks don't work. And and the masks themselves don't work. And even if they do at some level, it's like throwing stones in a in a brook. At the end of the day, the same amount of water is going to end up downstream, even if you perturbed the flow, it's still going to end up downstream. And so so the masking was farcical.

• 10:32Speaker 07

  And it was known to be farcical. I read a book in 2005 called The Great Influence, and the guy in that book said that they'd studied masking. It did nothing. It does absolutely nothing. On top of that, the masks that were being used, the bandanas and the rags and you name it, the cloth masks, they are farcically bad. That's like putting a screen door on a submarine. It just, it made no sense. So, so the masking was all a ruse. The question is why? So, when Burks was asked the question, why, what's the best study? So, this is Atlas asking her, what's the best study to give you, that you're using to justify masking?

• 11:13Speaker 07

  And she said, the beauty salon study. Now, the beauty salon study was a beauty salon where two girls masked in the beauty salon and two didn't. And the two who didn't got sick.

• 11:25Anthony Pompliano?

  That seems scientific.

• 11:27Speaker 07

  That's the beauty salon study. So, Burks is a moron. She's a twit. Fauci is not stupid, but he's been a bureaucrat for 35 years, running all sorts of bioweapons lab stuff, and he is not in any way a scientist. He's a, he's a crook. He's a mass murderer. He's all sorts of things, but he's not a scientist. So, the whole thing was based on no science. The entire response is based on no science. Now, now, what happens is the Fed provides the financial backdrop, the monetary backdrop, to allow Fauci and Burks to pull this off anyways.

• 12:09Anthony Pompliano?

  And when they do that, is this going into a room and they're like, hey, if we do the mandates, we need you guys to step in? Okay, yes, we're gonna step in. Okay, go issue the mandate to lock it down?

• 12:19Speaker 07

  I don't know how they covered it. I don't know how they did it. Most of it was, most of the discussion was done in meetings with Trump, Fauci, Burks, Atlas, and a bunch of others. And Fauci and Burks were running the operation. And Trump's biggest mistake, Trump sort of knew Fauci was leading him off a cliff, but he had delegated, and he stuck with his delegation.

• 12:46Speaker 07

  Now was Trump's big mistake. That's Trump's big mistake.

• 12:50Anthony Pompliano?

  Now, is this something Twitter, we now are coming to find out, the story that at least is being presented today, is that Jack Dorsey was the CEO, he had delegated a lot. There was other people who were doing all this kind of stuff. When Jack found out, he did his best to kind of correct the course of the ship, was relatively unsuccessful in doing that, and he ends up leaving. Is that a similar type example of what you think was happening with the White House during all of this, where Trump had delegated, they started to go off course, and at some point, did he try to step back in and get them back on course, or do you think he was just along for the ride?

• 13:28Speaker 07

  Trump was too, you know, Trump's idiosyncratic personality traits were not helpful for this thing. I mean, there's things that he's good at and things he's not good at, and a deeply scientific-based argument was not going to be it. And so Trump really sort of delegated and said, it's up to you guys, and he should have stepped in, and he didn't. I don't know why. I tried to pin Atlas down a number of times on what they were up to, and Atlas was very careful not to talk about motivation, whether it's a philosophical

• 14:08Speaker 07

  point, I don't know. I even had the passing thought that if he's positioning for a cabinet level position in some future administration, he's got to watch what he says. And so, but he, he, he really just, he, Burks would come in and give pie charts and bar charts and stuff in meetings, that she was dragging off the internet, same internet you and I use. And he said she had no idea what it meant. She had no idea about the scientific basis of it. She had no idea even the quality of the source of it. And these were the two clowns. And so he says, when I said...

• 14:53Speaker 07

  I asked him if it was, what their intention was, and he says, you've got to understand, you cannot imagine the level of incompetence in that room. He said, it was just so profound. And, and, and, and at one point, um, I said, is it possible that it wasn't out of malevolence? And that they, they really did what they thought was right? And he said, well, given how stupid they are, anything's possible.

• 15:32Speaker 07

  And when asked, somebody asked about reading Burks's book, he said, I didn't read it. I don't read fiction. And, uh, and she wrote a tell-all book that made her look like a complete asshole. She thought if she really got honest, that someone would say, oh, great, a refreshingly honest take, and then fessed up to fucking everything up. I mean, it was just, it was just, I, I didn't read the book. I read excerpts of other people who read the book, but it was, it was just a disaster. And then she got a facelift. I'm, I'm positive she got a facelift. So I said, well, at least you'll look better now with your eyes pinned back in your head. You know? I don't know. So, so, so those two clowns got us into a lot of trouble.

• 16:14Anthony Pompliano?

  Once we get into that situation with the government dated lockdowns, uh, the Fed and politicians.

• 16:19Speaker 07

  By the way, the Dorsey part, I'm not sure about the Dorsey part.

• 16:21Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay.

• 16:22Speaker 07

  I've always said that I think Jack is an honorable guy, but Jack was also in one of the top, he himself was on one of the top committees that handled the biggest decisions about censoring. And I, I, as far as I know, he didn't stop it. Now, I, it could have been, he could not control it. Um, I'm, I'm a little behind on the Twitter files because I've been busily writing and trying to get my life back and the stuff like that. But, um, but it's, it's now pretty clear that the FBI invaded social media and Google and, and various online things in a way that's prof, I think profoundly unconstitutional. I think it's just, so, uh, the other day Jonathan Turley wrote an, an op-ed that said,

• 17:07Speaker 07

  it's time to have another church investigation. The FBI is completely off the rails. And, and, and he just went through a litany of, of things that the FBI has done wrong that are, you know, 1950s bizarre.

• 17:20Speaker 07

  So the FBI is looking very, very bad here.

• 17:24Anthony Pompliano?

  Do you know who Vivek Ramaswamy is?

• 17:25Speaker 07

  They paid a number of these companies, a number of media companies, millions of dollars to tell the story about things like the laptop. That's what's coming out of the Twitter files.

• 17:34Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. Do you know who Vivek Ramaswamy is?

• 17:37Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 17:38Anthony Pompliano?

  He recently gave a speech and he basically said, listen, First Amendment and private companies and kind of that entire debate with the social media companies makes sense. And is a debate worth having, but the second that the government starts to go through the back door and kind of allow the companies or pressure the companies into doing their bidding for what they couldn't do through the front door because of the First Amendment, then all of a sudden that now brings the First Amendment debate to these businesses. And so whether it is the government itself not allowing free speech, or if the government is basically pressuring organizations to not allow free speech, is there a difference? I thought it was just a fascinating thing because what you start to get into is like, how do the courts look at that?

• 18:20Anthony Pompliano?

  How are the courts going to handle companies that are essentially acting as an extended hand for certain organizations? Or does the court say, no, actually that's not what they're doing and they can tell the organizations to kick rocks and they don't have to follow, you know, their instruction? It's a very complex.

• 18:36Speaker 07

  Well, so, so, well, except

• 18:39Speaker 07

  there's a kind of a faux libertarianism view that says they're private companies, they can do what they want. To which I say, okay, so can I exclude blacks from my diner? And society long ago said, no. And so, so, so that's not clear. I can't remember the number 2030 or something, 230. That basically says you're either a platform or you're a media outlet. And in one case you are responsible for your content. And you can be sued if your content's wrong. And in the other, you can't be responsible, but you also can't exclude people. If you're going to open the doors to everyone, you can't say, oh, but not you black guys, right?

• 19:20Speaker 07

  So, so I think that ship has long since sailed. And I think that the, the, the, the social media companies have long since overstayed, overplayed the hand that, well, we're private companies. We can exclude anyone we want. And, uh, and I think. Whether they like it or not, Twitter's the public square. It's where people speak. And if they really want to accept liability for what we say, I'll power to them because I want to see them get sued into oblivion. If that's the case, and they don't want that. So either you let us all talk. And I'm willing to give them a little latitude about, you know, you know, sort of inciting violence and yelling fire in a theater and that sort of thing.

• 20:04Speaker 07

  They get a little attitude to edit, but, but, you know, less is more. I'd rather be in the wild west of free speech than have some douchebag with a ponytail in Silicon Valley editing my stuff.

• 20:19Anthony Pompliano?

  How do you think this changes with Elon gaining ownership of the business?

• 20:23Speaker 07

  Fascinating question. The question is, is Elon, does Elon really believe everything he's doing? And he's certainly playing it well. Right? He really looks like the white knight. But if you read something like The Great Reset, one of the theories on The Great Reset is all these douchebags like Klaus Schwab are meant to look evil and then some white knight will show up and clear them all out and we'll go hallelujah and it'll be fucking Adolf Hitler. Right? And so the question is, is Elon really sincere? Is this coming from the heart or is this? Elon is one of the great minds and the great grifters of the modern era. He's both.

• 21:05Speaker 07

  And so the witcher we seeing, and we're either seeing a phenomenal grift or a phenomenal sort of intellect who's had enough. I don't know. Now, you got to remind yourself that every single industry has ever been involved in is deep state connected. Every single one.

• 21:22Speaker 07

  So he's, he's got, he's, he's deep state from head to toe.

• 21:27Speaker 07

  So the question then is, is a guy who's, who's that sort of tied to the, you know, whether it's rockets or, or, or battery technology or whatever, is that guy all of a sudden going to defy the deep state? It could be a farce. Could, could be a ruse. I don't know. I'm hoping he's doing it. I mean, I'm really praying he's doing it because we desperately need him to do it. We need more people to do it. We need him to be a role model.

• 21:53Anthony Pompliano?

  Explain a little bit more the idea that Elon Musk is both a great mind and a great grift.

• 21:59Speaker 07

  Well, he's a phenomenal hoser, right? I mean, he's phenomenal with marketing. He's got that, he's kind of got a Steve Jobs-like marketing eye. And he certainly, anyone who can build companies to shoot rockets to the moon and drive, build new, brand-new electric cars and stuff, and PayPal, where he started, I think. This is, this is a guy whose, whose mind is unconstrained compared to most people's. There's very few people in the world who can think that big and, and put it into action. And, and, and, um, and, and, uh, he's not, he's not, he's not stuck in it, but in a dotted line at all. And so I think he is a genius. And I, I think he's funnier than

• 22:43Speaker 07

  hell. I mean, there's no question. And I like to associate humor with genius. Um, and so I, I think he's a great mind, and he's also a hoser. He, he's been able to fund Tesla through the years by all sorts of cool stuff, like, you know, trading Bitcoin, right? Trading Dogecoin and things like that. He, he recognized the Wild West of the various cryptos, and realized that he could put money in and then pump it and then sell it, and no laws were being broken, right? And so he, he was able to, he's, he's been able to cook his books pretty good.

• 23:18Anthony Pompliano?

  You think that's what he's, do you think he's been doing that? Do you think he's been?

• 23:21Speaker 07

  Well, I think he's cooking them in the, in the, maybe not in the illegal sense, but, but if you're a car company, and you're funding yourself by pumping dumps on crypto, it's odd. I don't know if it's illegal, but it's, it's odd. You know, it's, it's, it's like a micro sailor, right? Sailor just flat out openly just trades crypto, right? But, but Elon did it to sort of raise money.

• 23:47Anthony Pompliano?

  When you see, uh, kind of the asset bubble that was created from 2020 into 2021, and as you said, might have even started in the 80s and 90s with some corrections along the way, what, what is kind of your view now in hindsight? With a little bit more clarity and understanding that obviously prices have come down. We have some tech stocks down 90, 95%. Bitcoin's down 75%. We've seen the indexes come down 20, 30%. Uh, how do you look at that asset bubble? And what do you think it'll be written as in the history books? Will it be the greatest asset bubble of all time?

• 24:19Speaker 07

  Yes. Um, yes, because it's been the longest duration.

• 24:25Speaker 07

  So most asset bubbles are real, you know, sharp rise and fall, right? So they they look like the Washington Monument.

• 24:34Speaker 07

  This thing, this thing has built over years. I really do think the market's left fair value. If you look, I look at 25 metrics evaluation. And you can say, well, this metric shows this. I go, look, I've got 25 that all kind of line up. And and they they all show that around 1994, the market just took off. And and an evaluation metric is is the price of the market relative to something that the market ought to track. And so, you know, one likes Buffett's because it's priced to GDP. You go, well, the GDP screwed up because, well, screwed up because for two things. One is it's inflation corrected, but the inflation number sucks.

• 25:14Speaker 07

  So you can make the argument that it's over, that it that the market's even more overvalued using that. But then others point out, well, the GDP of our of US companies, the S and P 500 are now much more global. And so price of GDP is not a good metric anymore. And I go, but that's a regressible situation, too. That's a regressible, that can be regressed to the mean. If we deglobalize, that's all going away. And so, uh, so that could be just a trend line. It's not a forever trend line. But on top of all that, um, I've got 24 more that they all generally agree. So at the end of 2021, I did, every several years I do this.

• 25:56Speaker 07

  I did a full analysis of market valuation. I went through the 25 metrics and looked at where they broke away from fair value. Every one of them busts away at 1994-ish. That turns out to be two things. One is, um, one is that's when we had to bail out the bond market. And and the second thing that Mike Green came in on, and I can't disagree with him. I was on a Twitter Spaces or something. Green jumped in and and I think he thought I had it wrong. I said, but I think he was actually saying, in addition, I, he might not have been saying it, but I infer in addition. That's when index investments really kicked in.

• 26:38Speaker 07

  And so, uh, and so propelled by mindless money and and a generous Fed. And the Fed just decided they just liked what they were doing. They just got a kick out of it. They had a, they had a, they started.

• 26:54Speaker 07

  They started in 1981 with interest rates so high, they had so much runway to work with to bring down interest rates methodically. It's almost linear, right? If you look at interest rates, it's almost like they said, okay, we can get 30 or 40 years of dropping rates if we do this right. It's almost like someone saw that. And, and so, so they just kept tapping the rates on and tapping them down. And when you tap the rates down, you tap the equity prices up. Because every nitwit thinks if you have a bubble, i- i- if you compare your equity index to something else that's also getting overvalued, that that's a good idea. So if you want to say, you know, the, the Fed model, which says that stocks are fair valued because interest rates are low, well, that's fine.

• 27:38Speaker 07

  But it's, it's like saying that, you know, buying a Toyota Camry for a hundred thousand dollars is fine because, because, because a Honda Accord also costs a hundred thousand. It, it's just, it's a bad metric. And, and interest rates won't stay low forever. It feels like forever. Right? Forty years of dropping rates feels like forever. But it's not forever. And now they're going up and, and the equity market is now ignoring that. So interest rates have gone, what, to 10 years, almost, it's doubled at least, right? More. And equities didn't cut in half. You know, a few select companies did, but they, they've just, the equity market has taken off the froth. It goes back less than two years.

• 28:22Speaker 07

  Do you really think two years of growing froth is all there is to this bear market? And I think not. I, I think, I think that's a farcically minor amount of correction. I think we're going to go, by the way, my friend at that founder's dinner, who shall remain nameless in a public podcast, said, um, said he thought the last two bull markets are going to be given back. And when I tried to pin him down, he wouldn't, he wouldn't say what his definition of a bull market was. My definition is 2009 to 2022 is one, and 2000, uh, 2003 to 2009, seven is another. I'll, I'll give him that. You give back those two, now we're back into triple digit S and P.

• 29:07Anthony Pompliano?

  You think that's going to happen?

• 29:09Speaker 07

  Uh, no. I, I don't think in, in, in nominal dollars it'll happen. I, I think the S and P should be, should be sitting in the teens somewhere right now.

• 29:23Anthony Pompliano?

  There's a lot of people who that would scare the shit out of them.

• 29:26Speaker 07

  I hope so.

• 29:28Anthony Pompliano?

  And do you

• 29:28Speaker 07

  It should.

• 29:29Anthony Pompliano?

  And why do you think that even though the Fed has been aggressively hiking interest rates and creating tighter financial conditions over the last 12 months and we have seen, you know, 20, 30% corrections in the indexes and some of the other assets coming down?

• 29:40Speaker 07

  But what's the S and P right now? It's like down, what, 12% or something?

• 29:43Anthony Pompliano?

  Something, yeah.

• 29:45Speaker 07

  And It's nothing.

• 29:46Anthony Pompliano?

  So do you think that the Fed and those tighter financial conditions just don't have the same impact? Or what gets us a deeper drawdown than what we've already seen?

• 29:54Speaker 07

  Oh, it's recency bias. It's you. There's a stickiness to the system. So, so if you convince people that every dip should be bought, then for a long time, every dip will be bought. And then over time, these dip buyers will start getting, getting, uh, getting hurt. They'll start going, you know, I, I bought the dip and for a while I was doing okay and, and, but you know, the lower highs, lower lows model is how they grind you to dust. If you, and my favorite one, you know, there's bear markets that you can look at as models, the Nikkei topped in 89.

• 30:32Speaker 07

  And it took, uh, I don't know, 15, 18 years to find plum the bottom.

• 30:39Speaker 07

  I mean, that's a non-inflation corrected. It took that long.

• 30:44Speaker 07

  And so the, anyone who tried to invest in the Nikkei from 89 on, forget about if you, you had your money in it already. Let's say you were a young punk. You got a job in, in Tokyo at 22 years old. It was 1989. You couldn't make any money. Period.

• 31:04Speaker 07

  And George, George Noble one day said to me, oh yeah, you could short it. I go, no, you couldn't. You know, that's true. You can't short a market that takes 18 years to go down.

• 31:16Anthony Pompliano?

  Do you feel like that is what is possible here? Do you think we could be in a

• 31:20Speaker 07

  I think it's probable.

• 31:22Anthony Pompliano?

  You think that it is probable that the US indexes could be in a bear market for a very long time, whether that's, you know, five plus years or 18 years?

• 31:30Speaker 07

  Generational, generational. Yeah, I think we're looking at a generational bear market.

• 31:35Anthony Pompliano?

  Unpack this a little bit more, because I think this is

• 31:37Speaker 07

  Okay.

• 31:37Anthony Pompliano?

  something that people are not hearing from many people.

• 31:41Speaker 07

  Okay, so I made a chart using Ron Greece's chart and chem draw to add the arrows. If you look at what happens, now, we might have talked about this before, but people have short memory, so it's not a problem. If you, if you look at what happens from the top, oh, six top, 1929 top, 1967 top, whatever, you, you look at what happens from that point on, what everyone focuses on. First of all, if you don't inflation correct, you're just an idiot. You got inflation correct. You can include dividends, but if you're going to include dividends, you also have to include fees and taxes. It's amazing how close those come to zeroing out.

• 32:24Speaker 07

  Because dividends, in the heyday of dividends, were 4%. Well, during the heyday of dividends, fees were about 2%. I mean, they were not cheap. And, and taxes were, were, so you made a few percent or two maybe off the non-capital gain. So if you inflation correct the S and P from the turn of the century, and you draw a straight line from the 1906 top, and you ask the question, how long does it take to recover? It's like 20 years, right? So that's generational. But here's the thing people don't know, is that if you ask the question, when did it not only get back to that value, but when did it reach that value for the last time, not the first time?

• 33:09Speaker 07

  And so usually you finally break through the 20-year-old value and then you, and by the way, Europe is at right now, Europe has been treading water for 20 years. Germany, big, big economy, it's been treading water for 20 years. So in any way, so you go from 1906, about 20 years later, I think it recovers. And, and then, and then, and then it goes up for a while, and then it comes back down, and it's amazing, it comes right, it came right back down to that same value.

• 33:39Speaker 07

  And it's 1906, 75 years later.

• 33:45Speaker 07

  From 1929, it went from the 1929 top and it returned inflation adjusted to the same value in 1981. If you are at a top, you can't win from there. There's no way to win unless you're unbelievably dexterous. There might be good value, but Hussman would say, look, you know, you got a stock that's got a PE of 10, you're going to make, you know, 10% in theory if it's, if it's GAAP. I mean, if it's really good GAAP and these guys really do or crank the printing presses and are making you money. But the price of those shares can cut the PE to five. When the PE is seven, half the stocks are below seven.

• 34:28Speaker 07

  So if we regress to a single digit PE, right? If you look at, if you look at the gains off 1981 inflation adjusted, it's about 6%. Half of those are PE expansion.

• 34:41Speaker 07

  Half of those are PE expansion.

• 34:46Anthony Pompliano?

  As you look going forward and we go through a generational bear market. So let's say that your probable outcome occurs. How do you invest in that? What do people do? You just sit out? You just sit out?

• 35:01Speaker 07

  It's, it's my analogy is a stage four cancer and you say to your doc, what do I do? And he says, get your affairs in order.

• 35:09Speaker 07

  So you, you, the problem is if, if you're not in good shape at the end of the greatest run in the history of finance, if you're not in great shape, like so many pension funds are not in great shape, you're never going to do it. Right? If you can't take 81 to 1981 to 2022 and get yourself in good shape, you owned it. You really screwed the pooch.

• 35:33Anthony Pompliano?

  You want to know what event was like the big red flag to me? There's a lot of like smaller red flags along the way, even if you go back to before the pandemic, when we had the inverted yield curves and CEOs leaving at all time high rates and all that type of stuff. But the one that I remember, I can't remember if I sent an email or I said it to, to a friend of mine, I said, hey, did you see CalPERS is taking on leverage?

• 35:58Speaker 07

  Yes. Oh, my God.

• 36:00Anthony Pompliano?

  I said.

• 36:00Speaker 07

  Everyone, but everyone's taking on leverage. CalPERS taking on leverage. What a disaster.

• 36:05Anthony Pompliano?

  Well, they had to.

• 36:05Speaker 07

  Kentucky, Kentucky has funded 22% in their state pension plan. Indiana, Illinois, these, these states are insolvent. And you say, well, then there's going to be a big bailout. And you go, yes, but now we have inflation.

• 36:20Speaker 07

  And so those big bailouts put a brick wall right in front of the, the, the, the inflation puts a brick wall in front of the bailout. So, so now the Fed has to face some reality. Now the Fed has got to either be, uh, support, um, support, uh, asset markets and currency destruction. Or they have to support, um, the currency and the integrity of the Fed. Which are they going to choose?

• 36:52Anthony Pompliano?

  So I want to unpack this specific point around, uh, you said earlier that inflation is now in the DNA. We, I think the November 2021, so from November 2020 until November 2021, uh, the inflation rate was like 6.8% for the trailing year.

• 37:09Speaker 07

  CPI, yeah.

• 37:10Anthony Pompliano?

  CPI. Before that, it was like 1.2, 1.4%. So if you go from 2019 to 2020, you get like, uh, less than one and a half percent. You go from 2020 to 2021, you get 6.8%. And now we have just over 7% from 21 to 2022. We are compounding, the compound annual growth rate of inflation is now over 6.5%. And what we are starting to see is that it's showing up, obviously, in prices. We know wages aren't keeping, uh, pace. And so I don't think anyone is confused, or at least anyone who with half a brain does not believe that prices are going to come back down. You're not going to see McDonald's and Chipotle drop their prices. The grocery store is not going to go and put a 20, 30% uh, drawdown in prices across the store, anything like that.

• 37:55Speaker 07

  Yeah, inflation is infinitely sticky.

• 37:57Anthony Pompliano?

  Yes. So now that we are here.

• 38:00Speaker 07

  Unless we have a catastrophe.

• 38:03Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay.

• 38:04Speaker 07

  If we get a real deflation, then that, bad deflations are feared by central bankers. And there's a variety of reasons, one of which is if you have a deflation and everything, then first and foremost, you can point straight at the central bank and say, it's your fault. You did it. So, so central bankers do not want that hanging around their neck. Second of all, let's say asset prices go down for, for 20 years.

• 38:32Speaker 07

  Where are the capital gains tax is going to come from? It's not a taxable gain.

• 38:39Speaker 07

  It's a taxable, it's a tax break. So it all, it just screws up that pattern too. And so, so central bankers hate, hate deflation. Deflation is an incredibly rational thing. In a real world of, of, of a non, not so flexible money supply, which is what you hodlers are trying to achieve.

• 39:00Speaker 07

  When, when, when you put out a loan and you charge, and you charge someone, uh, uh, uh, you charge them 5% interest. You gotta ask the question, where does that 5% come from?

• 39:12Speaker 07

  Right? So I got in an argument with David N. Fatah, the Vice President of St. Louis Fed. He's kind of on the spectrum, but he, to his credit, he would engage with the masses, including me. And he said that Volcker, Volcker fought inflation early, but his policies became inflationary. I go, fuck, I've never heard that. What, what are, what are you talking about? And he said, he made the case, and I'm not sure I didn't fill in the gaps or he made it explicitly. But basically, if you're shoving 15% into everyone's money market account, you're shoving 15% more money into the system, more spending power into the system, and that is inflationary. So while rates are high.

• 39:57Speaker 07

  You have this massive influx of money. Now, here's a plot that I only know of one person who's created it. And, and it seems so obvious to do, although now they don't report M2 anymore. But if you want to correct for inflation, instead of using CPI, which they've completely screwed up from head to toe, right? Completely, the Boskin Commission turned it into a fourth trimester abortion.

• 40:23Speaker 07

  The, you would plot the asset markets corrected for M2 money supply. That would be a pretty rational way and a pretty numerical way to correct for inflation. And M2, you know, I'm not an economist, but it's, you know, it's the cash in the bank. And so some pretty low level money supply thinking it's not derivatives. It's not all that weird stuff. But if you correct for M2 money supply from 1920 to the present, the S and P hasn't moved.

• 40:55Speaker 07

  Is it possible? I ask, is it possible that the capital gains in the S and P 500 for a hundred years have been zero correcting for that metric of inflation?

• 41:09Anthony Pompliano?

  So I've talked about this too much. People actually have gotten mad that if you go back to 1971 and when we went off the gold standard.

• 41:18Speaker 07

  Gold standard.

• 41:19Anthony Pompliano?

  And you basically denominate the indexes in gold or other types of assets rather than the US dollar. Many of them are flat or down. Some of them actually have lost money.

• 41:30Speaker 07

  Right.

• 41:31Anthony Pompliano?

  And so when you, you go further back, you know, call it a hundred years or so. It is interesting because you could basically look at there was a gain on the first 30 years. And then you basically took a loss in the last 70 and you basically end up flat, you know, give or take and kind of round numbers, if you will. And so if you're flat for a hundred years and actually the, the change in value is the debasement of the currency. Then it starts to bring up a lot more analysis in terms of wages. How have those changed? You start to look at, is the consumer, is the investor, is the business better off today than they were 20, 50, 100 years ago?

• 42:15Anthony Pompliano?

  And I think there's a very strong case that that may not be true.

• 42:19Speaker 07

  Well, so here's, here's, here's an interesting case that I'll make for you, though. There's a question that gets asked, and apparently when it, when the poll goes out, you get about the same percentage answer every time. And that is, would you rather live in 1925 on a $50,000 salary? Or in 2022 on a $50,000 salary? Now, think about it. There's, there's layers to that onion. You obviously are a rich man in 1925. But think of all the things you don't have. And the one that causes 86% of the people to choose the modern $50,000 is healthcare.

• 43:04Speaker 07

  I think that they realize, they go, holy shit, I could die of an ear infection. I think otherwise, it might be a great time to live, but don't forget, you got no TV, you got no, none of the things you really like doing. And so being rich, you know, you get to, you know, troll around, get chicks, hot chicks, you know, but your wife's hot, so you don't need any more of that. And, uh, and so it's an interesting question. So, so there is something that the hedonic adjusters have right, and that is that there, there has been an improvement in quality of life in some way, in various intangible ways.

• 43:40Anthony Pompliano?

  Well, I think the, uh, while, yes, there are absolutely objective improvements in life from a technology standpoint, healthcare, I mean, we can go down the line, there's a bunch of stuff, right? And I think the techno optimist believe that is going to continue forever. If you read, uh, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, which I think you've recommended multiple times to folks, uh, there's kind of this, you know, 50-ish, uh, period of time, maybe 70 years, whatever it was, where there was an explosion of connectivity.

• 44:09Speaker 07

  Wasn't that a great book?

• 44:10Anthony Pompliano?

  Amazing.

• 44:11Speaker 07

  It was an amazing book.

• 44:13Anthony Pompliano?

  It's probably one of my favorite books that I recommend.

• 44:15Speaker 07

  I got another one for you now. You know it because I emphasized it. The True Believer.

• 44:20Anthony Pompliano?

  The True Believer.

• 44:21Speaker 07

  The True Believer, my introductory section, I emphasize The True Believer. If you read one book this year, Eric Hopper, 1953, The True Believer, he will explain the world to you in a little, tiny, half the normal book-sized book. It's just an amazing book. It so got into my DNA. It explains mass movements and why they form and why, what gives them oxygen. And I spent a lot of, I spent a lot of time writing about it. And I hated doing it because if you go to read it, just say, well, Colin already told me the plot. But it was so important to me that I couldn't say, go to Amazon, trust me. And so I, so in my, my pinned tweet, if you guys are tweeters out there, which most of you are, is my guess, go to my, uh, um,

• 45:06Speaker 07

  go to my pinned tweet and read the introduction to my, to my year in review. And it emphasizes it's got an Eric Hopper theme. And I think it's, I think it's, some things I write are okay. Some things I think are great. That's, that's one of the great ones.

• 45:24Anthony Pompliano?

  When you look at the analysis that you described in terms of going back $50,000 in 1925 or whatever it is, or $50,000 today, there's a strong argument that actually people are sicker today. They're more out of shape. They are dumber because they sit in front of the TV.

• 45:41Speaker 07

  Watch your step there, buddy.

• 45:44Anthony Pompliano?

  And they sit and they doom scroll on social media, like all, all these things, right? It, it's this fascinating question because you can't just look at all of the positive improvements because there's also been some of that technology. Some of those improvements have led to degradations in the quality of life as well.

• 45:59Speaker 07

  We're living longer. We're living longer.

• 46:01Anthony Pompliano?

  We're, and so there is no, uh, I think, easy analysis, but also, uh, it scares the shit out of people to go backwards. I think there's like a psychological, uh, um, whether it's a bias or fear or whatever it is, where the idea of going back when, uh, you don't have TV, when you don't have a smartphone in your pocket, when you don't have, you know, healthcare as you described, you can't imagine how people lived that way.

• 46:27Speaker 07

  My childhood was great.

• 46:30Speaker 07

  So my childhood, you know, so odd. My mother was a profound alcoholic. I mean, really, sort of in your face in the mashed potatoes at dinner alcoholic, right? And, uh, and I still had a great childhood. Somehow my dad raised us to, to deal with her as though you would deal with having a retarded sibling or something, right?

• 46:51Speaker 07

  And, and we just, we would go out in the woods and we'd build forts and we'd go, we'd, we'd, we'd steal, you know, from local building contractors, their, their cement tub, and we'd drag it to the lake and use it as a boat. And we just, we just, just had a great time. And, and, and we didn't have all the bullshit. And we had three TV channels. Up, up in the Adirondacks, I have a cabin, as you recall, because that's when the dogs were giving me shit on our last podcast. Charlie's a legend. I, I read, he is a legend. He, um, and so, uh, I read comments and people say, oh, I would never read the comments. I read comments because there is content in there. And it's like watching a game film and say, oh my God, oh, I can't believe I threw the

• 47:36Speaker 07

  ball into that guy's hands, right? Um, but, um, but people were saying, I said, stage it better. And I go, I'm in the fucking Adirondacks, you idiots. They thought I was Ted Kaczynski or something. The other amazing thing, well, really amazing about the last podcast, which I thought, by the way, went really well. And you may have noticed in this year review, I gave your podcast top billing. I did, yeah, I appreciate that. Out of about 50. Um, um, what I noticed is I made some joke about inflation. I said, people don't have $400 to rub together. And now, you know, that to replace a microwave, which is about what a microwave costs now, right? And you wouldn't believe the number of comments. Oh, he lost me when he said a microwave costs $400. I go, really?

• 48:19Speaker 07

  That's what it takes to lose you? What, you got ADHD? Hey, there's a squirrel. Don't chase it, you fuck. You know, it just, it just, you know, I'm amazed. What, what comment section shows how many sociopaths there are in the world. Cause all you have to, I, I have to just read the comments and go, you really just said that? I just said, okay, so a microwave oven doesn't cost $400. Maybe I was being facetious. Maybe I was maybe I'm a clueless idiot, but my God, you say, I stopped listening when he said a microwave costs $400.

• 48:52Anthony Pompliano?

  You got it. You can't mess with the microwave people.

• 48:55Speaker 07

  The microwave. Microwave, the microwave industrial complex.

• 49:01Anthony Pompliano?

  All right, I want to move on because we got a whole bunch of stuff we got to get through. Next thing that I want to talk about, you did talk about this last time, but it was more of a passing thought and I want to read you a specific three or four sentences from, from the letter summarizing 2022. You said, my training as a parent tells me those demons are scheming. So indeed, I am a conspiracy theorist. If you are not one, ignorance is bliss. Hang on to those lovely thoughts. And what you're talking about here is people in positions of power and influence. And last time when we talked, you mentioned somewhat in an offhand comment, conspiring is what people do when they come together and they

• 49:45Anthony Pompliano?

  conspire to do something. And so you're now going from offhand comments to explicitly calling out much more, I think, your expectation and the way you analyze these situations. So I thought to be fascinating, when you read something in the news, how far on the I believe verse, I start at this is total bullshit. Do you start like where on that scale are you when you read something in the news?

• 50:13Speaker 07

  Well, it depends on the author for starters.

• 50:15Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay.

• 50:16Speaker 07

  Because if I'm reading Matt Taibbi, I assume, or Glenn Greenwald, I assume they're trying to get it right. And I will read anyone who's trying to get it right. I've been denouncing the use of conspiracy theorist as a pejorative for many years now. In fact, the one you just read was very mild.

• 50:35Anthony Pompliano?

  I know.

• 50:36Speaker 07

  I used to, I used to attack those. If you call me a conspiracy, if you, if I'm in a conversation, anyone says, well, you know, I'm not a conspiracy theorist, but I will stop them dead in their tracks, right there on the spot and say, why did you just say that?

• 50:50Speaker 07

  And I make them defend using that phrase. I said, "You're about to tell me something about someone conspiring to do something bad, and yet you're saying you're not a conspiracy theorist." We should be conspiracy theorists. We should assume that the politicians are up to no good. We should assume that the press has been bought and paid for at this point because all evidence points to it. Once the press is bought and paid for, they're lying to you. The last podcast I did was as recently as yesterday, and if you can wade through all the goddamn F-bombs that I dropped, there was content in there somewhere. But it was with Chris Irons, right?

• 51:25Anthony Pompliano?

  Mm-hmm.

• 51:26Speaker 07

  And I was out F-bombing Chris like there was no tomorrow. I think he's gone Hollywood or something. He was very tame. But if you're in the press and you're lying to me, you're my enemy. You're supposed to be trying to get to the truth. That's what the press is supposed to be. The Constitution kind of gave you special privileges so that you would help us. And I don't care if you're lying in favor of the right, or against the right, or in favor of the left, or against the left. If you're lying to me, you are my enemy. I want Edward R. Murrow back, and he was probably lying too, but I didn't know it. And so if you're sitting there telling

• 52:08Speaker 07

  stories like the laptop is fake, and you know you're lying, you're a liar, right? You're a despicable human being. I have nothing but bad things to say about you now.

• 52:18Anthony Pompliano?

  Do you think they thought they were lying?

• 52:21Speaker 07

  Yeah, I think they did. You know, you remember when the laptop story broke? How long did it take you to figure out it was real?

• 52:28Anthony Pompliano?

  As soon as Twitter started blocking all the links.

• 52:31Speaker 07

  It didn't even take that long. Because, you know, okay, so someone gets you a copy of the laptop. How do you check it? Well, you go to the email and you say, "Oh gee whiz, he sent an email to this guy in this state. Let's ask the guy if he got an email on that date. And if he did, you've got the laptop." It's that simple. So you knew the laptop was real, and the blocking was very fast. When they kicked the New York Post off Twitter...

• 52:57Speaker 07

  Right? The oldest newspaper in America that kicked off Twitter blocked that story. You knew the laptop was real.

• 53:03Anthony Pompliano?

  There was two moments where I knew stories that maybe people weren't as excited about, were likely to have more weight to them, more accuracy than initially thought. And both times it was because someone got kicked off Twitter. When Zero Hedge dropped the Wuhan Virology Institute information. And they literally had like, here's the doctors. And I think they put a phone number and email that was publicly available on the website. And that's what, you know, the doxing rule was somehow used to kick them off.

• 53:36Speaker 07

  And then the FOIA released Fauci's emails where Fauci sends an email that posts to Zero Hedge link. It says, we got to get on this.

• 53:45Anthony Pompliano?

  Yes. And so that one, I was like, oh, somebody should just go do some more research. And then I actually, I don't know if you remember this, very shortly after there, there was a, I call it an open source document. I can't remember if it was a Google doc or something got put together. Maybe it was a PDF and the writers of it were anonymous. No one knew who put it together, but it was very well researched. It was obvious that these are intelligent, sophisticated people who understood science and geopolitics and all this stuff. And they had put together this document. And I still today believe that they likely did it anonymously as a response to having seen what happened to Zero Hedge. So that was one. And then two was when, when the links got blocked on the New York Post story.

• 54:27Anthony Pompliano?

  Again, not because I had some insight or thought that it's a hundred percent true, but just it is the classic, like somebody tells you, don't look here. And every human goes, well, what's there? Why don't you want me to look there?

• 54:40Speaker 07

  I just knew the New York Post wasn't going with a fake laptop story. I just do. It's like when the Snowden papers come out, did you question them? Not a bit, not a bit. You knew, you knew that that's such a blockbuster that anyone who went forward with that, and if they were wrong, would be destroyed. And so, and so the FBI has become basically the Praetorian Guard.

• 55:08Speaker 07

  If the Republicans get in power, they will be the Republicans' Praetorian Guard, maybe. When Elon went to buy Twitter and the left shit their pants, it was very, very clear that they were about to lose a tremendous tool that they were using against the right. Now, there is this sort of, you know, one-party view of the world that says this party is, they're all the same party, there's no difference, and there's some truth in that. But the evils of the world I see right now are coming from the left. And I've looked for them on the right, I've made that assertion to people and said, "Give me examples."

• 55:47Speaker 07

  You know, I look at January 6th, and what I see in January 6th was an optically bad moment. I see the FBI infiltrating the crowd, causing trouble. I happened to run across, in the Ukraine story this year, I happened to run across a picture of a Ukrainian nationalist, which we should get to before this thing's over, with QAnon Shaman on January 6th. I'm going, "What are those two doing together on January 6th? What's that all about?"

• 56:21Anthony Pompliano?

  Explain this more, because people who haven't read this yet, the imagery is... And again, I am deferring to you that, obviously, the other person is who, wherever you found the image, is who they are saying it is. There's no way for me to check.

• 56:39Speaker 07

  Well, it's a picture, so it's either photoshopped.

• 56:42Anthony Pompliano?

  Correct.

• 56:42Speaker 07

  But there's a lot of pictures of this guy with QAnon Shaman. And then there's all sorts of pictures showing he's a Ukrainian nationalist, which is a sanitized version of saying, "He's a Ukrainian Nazi."

• 56:58Speaker 07

  Now, you will be told by mainstream media this year that Ukrainian Nazis are a conspiracy theory. All you have to do is go on Twitter. Here's my, your homework assignment. Go on Twitter and search Azov Battalion, A-Z-O-V, Azov Battalion, and start reading tweets. It's nothing but awfulness. It's just going back years if you want. Set a timeframe. You know, civil rights groups and, and, and, and world organizations watching out for the well-being of humanity have been denouncing the Azov Battalion the whole time.

• 57:31Anthony Pompliano?

  What is that? It's a military?

• 57:33Speaker 07

  It's a, it's a, it's a military group in Ukraine that are a bunch of Nazis. They traced their roots back to World War II where they were fighting with Germany against Ukraine and against the Soviets. And they were genocidal, they were, they were anti-Semitic, they were everything you'd expect out of a Nazi. Those guys made it through to the present. Now, they've had highs and lows, but in 2014, they really got their feet on the ground after the, uh, the Maidan, um, um, the Maidan, uh, uh, uh, protests and the, the CIA-sponsored coup of, of, of, don't make me pronounce his name, you know, Sankin Obik, I can spell it, I can't write it, uh, I can't say it.

• 58:16Speaker 07

  Um, so, so we toppled, the Ukrainian government put in our guy. And I'll admit that the previous guy was Putin's guy, but it's on Putin's back doorstep. So, you know, Putin should have his guy there. Um, and so in any event, so the Ukrainian Nazis really started getting legs. Now, these guys celebrate Stefan Banderas' birthday. Stefan Banderas was Goebbels' buddy during the war. He was a diehard Nazi. And these Ukrainian Nazis celebrate his birthday and I've, I provide links to video footage and they're scary as hell. The best analogy I have is they're not big in numbers maybe, but they're like a Mexican drug cartel. They, what they lack in numbers, they make up in ruthlessness.

• 58:57Speaker 07

  So those were the guys who were trapped in the Azov, Azov-style steel mill. Remember that? Where they were, they were in there and they were supposedly protecting civilians? Bullshit, they weren't. They were using civilians as shields. And, and, and Putin flushed them out of there. And I think they probably died a grisly death because Putin's moving to Ukraine or probably jumping the gun on you here. Putin's moving to Ukraine was to clear the Azov guys out of there. That was why he invaded Ukraine. It was to clear out the Nazi movement in Ukraine, which was picking up speed thanks to NATO arms and training.

• 59:33Anthony Pompliano?

  Do you feel like, so hold on, I got a couple of questions. First, that is the stated reason or one of the stated reasons from Russia and Putin. One, do you believe that that's actually why they did it? And two, do you think that the Russian people believe him when he says that?

• 59:53Speaker 07

  I think they do. I did a poll on Twitter and I said, which leader most cares about their own country? The choices I gave were Biden, Trudeau, Johnson, and Putin. 71% Putin. They can't even convince guys in the US that Putin doesn't care about Russia. Putin is popular in Russia. You look at the last 15 years of Russian history, it's been pretty tame, actually. And when I get into, do you want to go into Ukraine now? We can go into it. I'm into it already. Part of it's because it's the core of my write-up this year. It's the one where I said, okay, I'm bringing my A-game for this write-up. But, but Chrystia

• 1:00:35Speaker 07

  Freeland, let's go to the truckers. Remember? It was the most peaceful protest in the history of protests. These guys were cleaning the streets. They were playing hockey on the ice. They were doing everything you'd want to see in a protest. People were taking donuts and bagels to feed them and they were protesting that they didn't want to get vaccinated. And then Trudeau and Chrystia Freeland stepped on them like Nazis. Now, I'll say like Nazis. So they stepped on them like authoritarians and they shut up their bank accounts. They threatened to kill their dogs. They disabled their trucks. They shut down funding campaigns. They did everything that, and the reason was is because they could have just said,

• 1:01:16Speaker 07

  okay, you guys don't have to vaccinate. We got the message. We don't care. That's fine. It was time to stop the vaccination anyways. But they couldn't give the deplorables the victory.

• 1:01:28Speaker 07

  They could not in any way let truckers win because they could win in every country in the world. So they had to squash them like bugs. Now, who's Kristia Freeland? Well, Kristia Freeland is Ukrainian. She used to be, work in Ukraine. Her grandfather was a Ukrainian Nazi. She is in the World Economic Forum. She has the resume of a bad person. She is on the shortlist to be the Secretary of NATO.

• 1:02:06Anthony Pompliano?

  So when you see them step in with the truckers specifically, one of the pieces that I think shocked people was not that they pushed back, stepped on the protest, all that. I think now people understand like, hey, this idea of protesting governments, they're not cool with it. They may say they're cool with it, but for the most part, unless they agree with what you're protesting about, they're going to do things to deter this, to stop this, whatever. But I think it was the way they did it, the cutting off of the bank accounts and just the treatment of citizens in a way that you would treat quite literally terrorists, right? People who you thought had some sort of ill will. And I

• 1:02:51Anthony Pompliano?

  think if you walked around the streets, people would say, no, no, no, we are, in this case, Canadian, and we believe in Canada, and we believe in the freedoms of Canada, and we believe in, you know, XYZ components that make up that country. So it was very, again, kind of shocking when they started to use tools that previously had been reserved for what most people, I think, would have said were appropriate measures in stopping terrorist financing or those types of activities.

• 1:03:20Speaker 07

  I would say it was more appropriate for someone in the Soviet Union to step on that. To me, it was just so over the top.

• 1:03:29Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, over the top is a good way to describe it.

• 1:03:30Speaker 07

  And just, Justin Trudeau made very brash statements about them being neo-Nazis and about them being, being pedophiles and all. He made all sorts of accusations about the truckers. And he talked about taking away their, their personal freedoms. He said it. I quote him. And, and, and so Justin Trudeau is a sack of crap.

• 1:03:54Speaker 07

  And he should be voted out, but elections don't work anymore. So there's that. Um, so, so, so, so then you get, so then you get, um, then you get the, uh, the FTX collapse.

• 1:04:07Anthony Pompliano?

  Well, hold on, before we get, before we get to FTX, let, let's talk about, uh, Russia and Ukraine. Because

• 1:04:12Speaker 07

  Okay, well, that's, that's, that's where my heart is right now.

• 1:04:15Anthony Pompliano?

  In February, uh,

• 1:04:17Speaker 07

  Sorry for wiggling. My brother says I wiggle a lot.

• 1:04:20Anthony Pompliano?

  That's fine.

• 1:04:20Speaker 07

  My brother says I wiggle.

• 1:04:21Anthony Pompliano?

  You're good wiggle. It's all good.

• 1:04:23Speaker 07

  Yeah. Okay.

• 1:04:25Anthony Pompliano?

  In February of 2021, we saw Putin go ahead and, uh, and move into Ukraine, uh, invade the country. I think there's a lot of people who thought it was all talk. It was all, you know, bark, no bite. He wasn't going to do it. He did it.

• 1:04:38Speaker 07

  Which I think includes the CIA and, and our intelligence. They thought it was all bark and no bite.

• 1:04:43Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay. And once he did it, it felt like there was a pretty big shift. There was a lot of, uh, change in, in, uh, the coverage in the United States and globally. There was, uh, I think a lot of people in the United States, uh, one of your comments in, uh, your write-up was, uh, these geopolitical events happen to teach geography to Americans. People are like, hey, where's Ukraine? And then they started to, uh, unpack some of this. And then frankly, there's a lot of people who just said, I don't know anybody in Ukraine. I don't know anything about this. You know, why is the United States being involved? And you got kind of a, a very wide dispersion of, uh, responses. What's your read on the situation? Why, why, why is this happening?

• 1:05:27Speaker 07

  There was a lot of the latter, but I don't think there was.

• 1:05:31Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, I don't think that was a popular response. Yeah, I don't think that was a popular response or one that was the majority by any means.

• 1:05:38Speaker 07

  So here's the backstory. I went back and looked at all the times I wrote about Putin over the years. It turns out my first time I ever wrote about Putin was in 14, which happened to be on the heels of the, the, the overthrow of the Ukrainian government, CIA sponsored.

• 1:05:55Speaker 07

  And it was, I was just trying to understand what was going on at a very shallow level. And I don't know anything. So I had this huge disadvantage of, I literally was one of the guys who couldn't pick Ukraine on a map. I mean, you show me a picture of a map, I wouldn't have been able to assign Ukraine. So I actually put up a picture of a map and I admitted that. And I admitted in my write-up that I started from scratch. I had to first find Ukraine on a map. And I showed a map I said was a top-secret Pentagon map. And some guy said, "Oh, he doesn't have that. He must be a psyop, blah, blah, blah." And it's a fucking risk board, you morons. I picked a risk board. From the game Risk.

• 1:06:40Speaker 07

  And what's funny is, there's no Russia in the game Risk. They're all provinces. I said, "Oh, my God, they've already taken Russia off the map." So I had to start from scratch. I didn't know there was a civil war going on in Ukraine for years. So the Western Ukrainian, with a core group of Nazis, have been slaughtering ethnic Russians in the east for years, slaughtering them. So this is not a simple story. Zelensky is a complete hoser. Zelensky is phenomenal at what he's doing, but he's every bit as dirty, as slimy as any other leader in that region of the world, where he banned the Catholic Church, he shut

• 1:07:24Speaker 07

  down his opposing party, shut down all the minor parties. He did all sorts of bad shit. And everyone think, "Oh, Nobel Peace Prize?" I'd take him to The Hague for the shit he does. But so when I get into it with people, when I get really frustrated, I would drop to moral equivalency. And I would say, "Okay, okay, before you wave your fucking yellow and blue flag one more time, let me ask you this question. How many countries..."

• 1:07:55Speaker 07

  Over the last 20 years and how many people have been killed over the last, how many countries have been attacked and how many people have been killed by Russia, by the United States? And it's not even close. It's two decimal points apart. We have done 292, I think it's 292 military interventions and since the mid 90s. 292. Which of those countries attacked us? This year, we bombed Syria three days in a row. And the official story was that it was to send a message to Tehran. And I said in the write-up, I said, that's odd. I didn't remember Tehran, I didn't remember that Tehran was in Syria. This is confusing to me.

• 1:08:39Speaker 07

  We bombed Syria to send Iran a message. What kind of war crime is that? So I quoted Madeleine Albright admitting that there were 500,000 children killed in Iraq. 500,000 children and she said it was worth it. So please tell me how twisted she is. Please tell me, where was the video footage of those bloated carcasses? Where was the video footage of those dead children? So when you want to get all teary-eyed and all, you know, give Zelensky the Nobel Peace Prize, explain where you were when the Saudis were bombing Yemen and killing tens of thousands with our weapons that we provided.

• 1:09:21Speaker 07

  Explain why our more recent liberal president, which I don't include Biden, Obama bombed seven Muslim countries. Which of those countries attacked us? Seven Muslim, which attacked us? The hint, none attacked us. So who are the bad guys? Statistically speaking, we are the bad guys. Flat out, we are the bad guys. I want to be the good guys. And I provided quotes from the former Attorney General of the United States, Ramsey Clark, saying that the United States, that quote was, "The United States is something like the most warlike." No, Jimmy Carter said, "We're the most warlike country in history."

• 1:10:06Speaker 07

  Um, the, the, the, the, I think it's Ramsey Clark said, "The, the, the, the greatest crime has been US foreign policy." And then you can go to guys like Chris Hedges and find all sorts of hateful things. And, and so, so the bottom line is, is that, that, that while you're all sanctimonious, you, the people, um, about Ukraine, you wave your flag and you, you show great hostility to guys like me who, who try to look at it through Putin's eyes. Just try reading something, just anything, just read something so that you're not a complete fool. I call them the sanctimony industrial complex. They'll find a cause to get all bent out of shape over it. But when I get bent out of shape over something, I go read about it and I find out what I'm

• 1:10:51Speaker 07

  bent out of shape over. And sometimes I'm wrong. So the bottom line is, for years, back in the 2014 write-up, I quoted John Mearsheimer. I had forgotten that. John Mearsheimer is a University of Chicago policy wonk, who I've been in communication with since I rediscovered him. And he has been telling us that NATO has been heading us for World War III for 10 years now. He has been warning everyone that will listen, that NATO is taking us to World War III in their actions. Ukraine is on Russia's borders. Putin has been saying, "You can't have Ukraine. You can't bring Ukraine into NATO.

• 1:11:33Speaker 07

  It is an existential risk for Russia. It's not gonna happen." And people say, "Well, you know, who's he to say that?" And I go, "Well, we told fucking Cuba to take a hike. We would tell..." Yeah, how long would it take? How long would it take if Russia put missiles in Mexico? For us to turn Mexico into a sheet of glass? About five seconds.

• 1:12:00Speaker 07

  We would, we would scorch Mexico if there were Russian, Russian troops and/or weapons of any kind. So, why is it that Putin doesn't have the right to say, "Look, for us, Ukraine's it." So Putin brings in, first, the war started out in this very odd way. Putin had been warning, "You can't do this, you can't do this," they had communications right up through 2021. And the West, we didn't just say, "Look, we disagree because," we said, "Go fuck yourself." We said, "We don't care." You know why? We wanted Ukraine in a war with Russia. We wanted that.

• 1:12:40Speaker 07

  So to us, the Ukrainians are the same as the Irish infantry were to Longshanks in Braveheart. You didn't care if they died. We don't care if the Ukrainians died. We're giving the Ukrainians weapons to go get slaughtered. And if you, if you find the guys who are telling the story, so here are the names you want to watch out for. Colonel Douglas McGregor, he was in a position to be a cabinet-level military advisor in the White House. He was in a, he was going to be the ambassador to Germany Senate, vetoed it. Colonel, Colonel, I think it's Stephen Black, he, he was in the Virginia Senate for, for years, he was military, he was in the Marines for 31 years.

• 1:13:25Speaker 07

  You got guys like, more offbeat guys like Oliver Stone, you got, who's actually very good. You got guys like on Greenwald, there's, there's dozens of people who've been trying to tell the story, but the media doesn't want to hear it. The media doesn't want to hear it because they're paid to tell the other story. And so NATO is the cause of this war. NATO pushed Russia, they had to move. Now, what was the proximate trigger? That's the fascinating thing. Was it the proximate trigger that NATO was pushing Ukraine in, that NATO was pushing Ukraine to join NATO? They say, "Well, why is that so damn important?"

• 1:14:05Speaker 07

  Well, what makes it so damn important is that if, if Ukraine's in NATO, by treaty, if Russia steps on Ukrainian soil, everything kicks into gear. Everything goes straight to, "Now we gotta fight Russia." And so, so it's bad enough to be arming the Ukrainians with NATO quality crap. But to have Ukraine in NATO is like all the treaties that existed prior to World War I. They trigger events. And Putin said, "You can't do it." And we should have said, "Okay, we get it." Now, when the Berlin Wall fell, the Soviet Union fell apart. Germany was being reunited, which had more than just the Russians nervous because big

• 1:14:50Speaker 07

  Germany has done a few bad things in its day. We promised, written record, we promised the Russians that if they kept the Warsaw Pact from being reassembled, we would not push eastward in NATO. That NATO would stay out of that zone if Russia stayed out of that zone. And then we almost immediately put plans into moving eastward with NATO. And it started, it finally started in 97 officially with Clinton. And George Kennan, who's considered one of the greatest Cold Warriors of history, said it was the biggest US policy mistake ever, when Clinton pushed NATO eastward.

• 1:15:33Speaker 07

  And so, we pushed NATO eastward and we flipped off Russia. We said, "You don't matter." And a sovereign state does not want to hear that. It's fine to disagree with them, but they don't want to hear that you don't matter. And then at one point Biden says, "That words of rhetoric are really bad." This is where it gets completely psychotic. First and foremost, when Putin or a Russian speaks, it's a single voice. It's Putin's voice, to be frank, right? So when Lavrov says something, it's Putin. It's all been cleared. Putin, Russia, Lavrov, all these Russian guys all speak from a single playbook. When NATO speaks, it's a bunch of whack jobs.

• 1:16:14Speaker 07

  It could be anything from as high up as a high-ranking person in the White House, who's higher ranking than Biden, who's losing his marbles. But when Biden says, "The regime has to go." When John Bolton writes an op-ed that says, "We have to assassinate Putin. We have to set up an assassination of Putin."

• 1:16:41Speaker 07

  How are you going to explain to me that's not existential risk? So Biden says the regime has to go, and some newspapers said, "Oh, that's the most aggressive stance towards Russia since Ronald Reagan." I go, "No, that's bullshit. Reagan never said the regime had to go. You say a regime has to go. You're saying, 'Go ahead, light the place up now. We're going to take you out.'" So it's gobbling time. It's a Green Goblin strategy. You want a nuclear war, you tell Putin that's his only option. You'll get a nuclear war. Now, we hear about how Putin was pushing nuclear war. No, he wasn't. At all, he wasn't. Our press was pushing the idea that he was pushing nuclear war.

• 1:17:24Speaker 07

  And we had senators saying we should arm Poland with nuclear weapons. We had senators saying we should attack preemptively. Because NATO speaks in a bunch of voices of a bunch of loose cannons with... Our weapons are loose cannons with double-digit IQs. And so, the NATO message is crazy. You've got Kamala Harris doing her Dr. Seuss imitation over in Poland. And so, you know, Mearsheimer sent me a debate he did against Sikorski, he used to be the Secretary of Defense of Russia, of Poland. And Mearsheimer really didn't like the debate. He thought he and McFaul, who's a pathological liar to Russia...

• 1:18:08Speaker 07

  When you're a diplomat to a country, you're really not supposed to lie. According to the sort of the... According to Mearsheimer, who studies this stuff, he says, "When our leaders talk to us, they lie their ass off. When they sit down and they break bread and they talk to each other, they don't lie. They call a spade a spade." And McFaul was so proud of the fact that he was lying his ass off to the Russians all the time. And so, McFaul and Sikorski debated Steve Walt and John Mearsheimer. And I was... I found Sikorski repugnant. So then, months later, there's Sikorski saying, "We've got to arm Poland with nuclear weapons to go after Russia."

• 1:18:53Speaker 07

  How is this not existential risk for Russia? They want to pull weapons within seven-minute striking distance of Moscow.

• 1:19:02Speaker 07

  How is that not a threat to Russia? So we've been, we, I'm positive NATO could have stopped this war at many, many points along the way.

• 1:19:11Anthony Pompliano?

  What do you think they should have done?

• 1:19:13Speaker 07

  Stop the war.

• 1:19:14Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, but how, how would they, if you were running NATO and now, obviously with hindsight benefit, where do you think those points are that they could have stopped it?

• 1:19:24Speaker 07

  Any point.

• 1:19:25Anthony Pompliano?

  Just literally say, hey, we're not gonna take you.

• 1:19:27Speaker 07

  Putin was saying, I want in writing that you guys are not gonna move, you're not gonna take Ukraine into NATO. He, he's been saying it the whole way. You can't have Ukraine. He wasn't saying he had to have Ukraine. He was saying you can't have Ukraine. He was happy to have Ukraine just be there. He had serious tactical issues with having the ability to deal with Ukraine rationally. So he had pipeline issues and he has, he has the Soviet, you know, the naval fleet and stuff. He had to have Ukraine accessible to Russia. The invasion force wasn't an occupying force, wasn't big enough.

• 1:20:09Speaker 07

  The invasion force went into Ukraine to take out the Nazis, which were the problem.

• 1:20:14Anthony Pompliano?

  Do you think, and again, now we're into speculation land, so it's impossible to know.

• 1:20:19Speaker 07

  The whole way I've happened.

• 1:20:20Anthony Pompliano?

  What, what, what could happen? But do you think that if NATO had put in writing, we will not bring Ukraine into NATO, that would have been the end of it? Or do you think that he still would have gone in for this Asmoff or Asoff Battalion?

• 1:20:37Speaker 07

  No, that would have been the end of it.

• 1:20:40Anthony Pompliano?

  You think?

• 1:20:41Speaker 07

  I, I think, I, I absolutely believe that.

• 1:20:43Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay.

• 1:20:44Speaker 07

  No, we'll, we'll never know.

• 1:20:45Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay, so this was gonna be, my question is.

• 1:20:47Speaker 07

  So what was the trigger? This is, this is back to the trigger. I don't think the trigger was the NATO.

• 1:20:51Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay, what was it?

• 1:20:52Speaker 07

  So, so why, after all these years, did Putin finally move? And what happened was, I got two emails from guys who I don't know. It's one of these things, like, I, I'm now friends with a Canadian military intel guy who sent me an email and reached out, tried to tell me something absurd about the COVID virus.

• 1:21:11Speaker 07

  And he was in the military games in Wuhan in October of 2019. And he said, all the athletes got sick and Wuhan was a ghost town. And those two put together says, maybe that's when the virus got released. Now, I didn't know who this guy was. He was trying to get my attention. I was, you know, I'm humoring him. Turns out he's Canadian military intel. He's got boots on the ground in Ukraine, given of information. And he's confounded of what the hell's going on there. So this is a complicated story. So I think Putin was asking for an absolute openly stated willingness to back away from Ukraine.

• 1:21:52Anthony Pompliano?

  And the US and NATO don't, didn't want to do that and still don't want to do that because they viewed it as like showing weakness or?

• 1:22:00Speaker 07

  No, black, black. Again, these are just opinions, but black thinks it's just a research grab. NATO, which is the US, wants the resources of Ukraine and Russia. Now, I read an article that went way back and I quoted it that said NATO's biggest concern, or the US's biggest concern is an alliance between Germany and Russia. And the reason was this, because with German technology and Russia's resources, they would dominate the globe. So you say, why did we blow up the pipeline?

• 1:22:41Speaker 07

  Well, we did not want Germany signing a deal with Russia.

• 1:22:47Anthony Pompliano?

  You said that as if that, you said that as if that was a fact.

• 1:22:51Speaker 07

  I'm positive. Why would Russia blow up their own pipeline? I'm not alone, by the way. Guys like Jeff Sachs of, you know, Columbia, there's a ton of guys. And then the, the, the former Defense Minister of Uke, of Poland. When the pipeline got blew up, put out a tweet with a picture of the blown up pipeline and said, thank you, USA. He thanked the United States for blowing up the pipeline. And then he deleted the tweet. Of course, the screen grabs were hot and heavy.

• 1:23:21Speaker 07

  But so the fact that John Brennan said that the Russians are the lead candidate for blowing up their own pipeline, it was like Caitlin Johnstone, who's very off off Broadway, said, well, we should to win this war, we just have to wait till Russia just blows up all of its own infrastructure.

• 1:23:37Speaker 07

  So now we blow up the pipeline. It might have been a proxy. It might have been the Poles. It might have been the Brits. Who knows? But US naval activities above the pipeline the month before are suspicious. But the Russians didn't blow up the bridge. They didn't blow up the Kerch Bridge. They didn't blow up the goddamn pipeline.

• 1:23:55Anthony Pompliano?

  So use the pipeline as kind of an example. What does the US and NATO gain from that? And what is the perceived loss to Russia? And is it literally just keep Russia and Germany from becoming closer by doing that?

• 1:24:09Speaker 07

  Russia, Russia was rumored to be on the cusp of saying, look, we're going to deal with Germany. You know, there's very few countries in the world who've actually signed off on this anti-Russia thing. Russia, Russia has been dealing with most of the countries in the world the whole way.

• 1:24:25Anthony Pompliano?

  Well, India, I think, basically said, look, we need the fertilizer. We need the oil. We need a bunch of this stuff and...

• 1:24:31Speaker 07

  And we don't have anything against Putin.

• 1:24:34Anthony Pompliano?

  China as well.

• 1:24:35Speaker 07

  And so it's really US and the people we can bully and it's a small number. It's not Italy. It's not, there's a big Macron is not exactly on board.

• 1:24:43Anthony Pompliano?

  When I went down a rabbit hole on this, I don't know, maybe six ish months ago, and I think I even wrote a quick piece on it. One of the things that just blew me out of the water was that, I think it was Germany, maybe some of the other countries that normally would have been dealing directly with Russia. Now we're taking the stance, we will not buy Russian oil. And so they were buying Chinese oil, which was really just Russian oil.

• 1:25:11Speaker 07

  Getting from Russia.

• 1:25:11Anthony Pompliano?

  That had a Chinese flag on it and was marked up 2X. And so when you like unpack all the virtue signaling and the posturing and the marketing messages and like just strip all that away. Is Russia one of the only countries in the world? And by, you know, kind of association, I guess, Ukraine, that whole region because of the oil, because of the natural gas, because of their impact on fertilizer and wheat and all this stuff? They just have to be an interface for global trade with many, many countries around the world, regardless of what they do?

• 1:25:44Speaker 07

  Yeah. Well, so they, they supply the world with something 40% of the wheat. They're the swing supplier along with Saudi Arabia. And I guess the US, if you want, you want to throw in the fracking, but I think the fracking story is starting to peter out. And so, so one of our big swing suppliers, we're now operationally at war with. The other swing supplier has been acting very ornery to us and been talking a lot with Putin. So I think that it's possible that the Arab world's about to align with the, with Asia rather than with the United States. So I don't know if that was happening in, in the wars because of that, or if we boned

• 1:26:27Speaker 07

  it and the war is causing that, I'm not sure. China is opaque. This call I got right before you, your Zoom call, some guy called me from China and was trying to tell me stuff about China, but I couldn't understand him. And, and so the fact that I can understand nothing about China is what scares me because I've, I've attempted to figure out what China's up to and what their role is. There's this implicit, you know, China's got various alliances with, with, with Russia, but it's such a vague sort of implicit thing. It's not, it's, they're not in plain sight. And so I, I don't know what China's role is, but you can bet that they're in it deeper than we're seeing.

• 1:27:11Anthony Pompliano?

  How does Russia and Ukraine end?

• 1:27:15Speaker 07

  Uh, one of two ways. Either we have a huge conflagration.

• 1:27:20Anthony Pompliano?

  That's a big word. What is that? What does that word mean?

• 1:27:24Speaker 07

  World War.

• 1:27:26Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay.

• 1:27:26Speaker 07

  Um, which may or may not involve nukes. Actually, Mearsheimer says that he thinks a nuke going off is the only way to really stop this thing. He thinks if a nuke goes off somewhere, we will then go right to the negotiating table and say, okay, enough is enough. He says, but when he was asked, how do we get out of this one? In a recent podcast, he said, we can't, we're screwed.

• 1:27:48Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay.

• 1:27:48Speaker 07

  That was his answer.

• 1:27:49Anthony Pompliano?

  Let's unpack that.

• 1:27:50Speaker 07

  So then.

• 1:27:52Anthony Pompliano?

  Let's unpack that real quick because I think that when you say a nuke going off, that does not sound like a US nuke going off. That sounds like a Russian nuke going off.

• 1:28:02Speaker 07

  There's nukes all over the world.

• 1:28:03Anthony Pompliano?

  Mm hmm. You think if one goes off, or at least the thought process would be if one goes off, regardless of the country of origin, everyone runs to the negotiating table.

• 1:28:13Speaker 07

  That's Mearsheimer's sort of base argument. I don't think he's saying it will work. I think he's saying is that could work.

• 1:28:23Anthony Pompliano?

  Because basically that's the prisoner's dilemma. That means that everyone.

• 1:28:27Speaker 07

  It is absolutely the prisoner's dilemma. That's I've used that analogy talking to people. The other thing is that um, is that if you listen to McGregor, Douglas McGregor, you listen to Mearsheimer, you listen to these guys, McGregor and Black, McGregor seems to be the best source, Scott Ritter, who is a controversial character. They say, you know, if you turn on the news, you hear that Ukraine's kicking ass. And that's why we have to give more weapons because we're so close, we're on the two yard line and we just have to push them over the end zone and solve this problem, right?

• 1:29:06Speaker 07

  McGregor and a few others are saying that Ukraine's getting slaughtered. That the media is completely and utterly wrong. And here was an interesting scenario. So when this war first started picking up speed, and it was a very strange thing. The first thing that happened is we heard the war was coming.

• 1:29:27Speaker 07

  And even in the press room of the White House, there were reporters saying, "What's your evidence?" The guy said, "Well, I just told you." Jake Sullivan said, "Oh, I just told you." He says, "That's not evidence. What's your evidence?" And the press wasn't buying it. And then, and then there was back and forth, like the, the, the, uh, the Brits said something's gonna happen, the Chinese said nothing's gonna happen, one of the ministers of something or other, and Ukraine said, "We're not seeing evidence they're gonna attack." And so it was this chaos, and at one point, some Russian put out, said, "Could you send us the dates that we're supposed to attack, so we can plan our vacations?" Right? It was chaos. And I think there was, um, there was, there was, I think at one point,

• 1:30:09Speaker 07

  Zelensky said the US was stirring up trouble, was, was stirring up, uh, uh, uh, stress and tension necessarily. So I think in the early days, the only one who had a taste for war in Ukraine was the US. And I think everyone else was trying to wiggle out of it. And, and the US just wasn't gonna let it happen. And then come, the war starts, and the footage was very telling. And I kept saying to my wife, "This doesn't look like a war." And she said, "What are you talking about?" And, and, you know, you'd show bombed out buildings and stuff. I go, "But you can't see the war. That's a bombed out building. I don't know what that is." And so what I did in my year in review, I, I actually sort of insulted myself.

• 1:30:52Speaker 07

  I say, "Well, Mr. Smartypants, or there's no, or what, what, what about all these horrors?" And I showed eight photos of just wiped out buildings.

• 1:31:02Speaker 07

  And then I said, "Yeah, those are horror stories, but, uh, but they are in order, A, B, C, D, E, F, G, whatever." Um, uh, Ukraine, 2016, Ukraine, 2022, uh, uh, I think one of them was, uh, Baltimore, one of them was Detroit, one of them was, uh, one of them was somewhere in the Middle East. And I said, "See how easy it was to convince you that there's a horror story?"

• 1:31:29Speaker 07

  And I said, "They were just showing us pictures of shit that you couldn't say, "That's evidence there's a war." And in fact, some of the footage of Mariupol, the destruction looked like it had long since passed and it was decaying buildings and stuff. And the explosions were, you know, M-80 to dynamite-sized explosions in the middle of a street, hitting nothing. And then you'd see a car on fire. You'd see some mother screaming about how awful it is. But the really big explosions were too far away to know what blew up. And so, there was just, I was looking for the "show me the smoking gun" of this war, and I couldn't find it. Now, what I'll tell you is, is I think the blowing up of the pipeline in the Kerch Bridge

• 1:32:14Speaker 07

  caused Putin to change, and I think he's inflicting horrific pain on Ukraine now. So the war did start. But there was even images of, you know, guys with Russian tanks talking to civilians. Now, there was a great news we got by a guy named William Arkin, who I discovered relatively late, in which he wrote about the evidence that Putin was not inflicting civilian casualties and was not trying to destroy the infrastructure because he believed that he would have to rebuild it. And so, he was attempting. And so, at the very beginning of the war, Ritter says, "Here's what Putin's gonna do," before it started, really.

• 1:32:57Speaker 07

  He said, "Putin's gonna suck the Ukrainian military to defend the cities. Then he's gonna do an end run and get to the military targets he cares about. And he's gonna avoid urban warfare at all costs." He got slaughtered due to bad decisions made in the Chechen war. And the casualties caused him so much political problems. And so, he was avoiding casualties at all costs. And there were all these stories coming out, and then it turns out they wouldn't hold up. Like the Buka massacre. You find out that there's bodies lining the street, all those dastardly Russians, and you find out those pictures didn't start showing up until three days after Ukraine had control of Buka.

• 1:33:41Speaker 07

  And so you got the Azov guys, who are a bunch of these ruthless Nazis, who are willing to kill anybody. I mean, they really are like Colombian drug lords. They're happy to litter the side of the street with it. There was a, um, there was an explosion in a train station, got a lot of press. Fifty people died. Oh, that's dastardly Russians. And I showed a picture on Twitter of the missile. And I, it was intact. And I said, here's a picture of the missile. Let's discuss this. I just left it at that. And it turns out that I had misread the situation. It's a two-stage missile. When I first discovered right away, within a minute and a half, the military guys jump in and they say, it's a two-stage missile. That's the first stage. That's the jettison. That's not the explosive

• 1:34:25Speaker 07

  part. I go, okay, I stand corrected. And then, um, and then some guy says, but those missiles have been used by Russia for at least five years. The only guys who used those are Ukrainians. And I said, okay, that's getting interesting. And then someone says, those are unguided missiles. So if you find the first stage, you find the second stage, you can actually calculate where it was launched from. And it turns out, traced right back to Ukrainian-controlled territory. Ukrainians were bombing Ukrainians, which they have been doing for a decade now. There are an estimated 15,000 dead ethnic Russians in the Donbass region, because they got slaughtered by the Western Ukrainians. This has been

• 1:35:07Speaker 07

  going on without anyone in the West giving a goddamn. Where was your yellow and blue Ukrainian flag while that was happening? I didn't know about it. And they were using weapons provided by CIA, NATO, you name it. And so we have been fostering a civil war in Ukraine for 10 years.

• 1:35:28Anthony Pompliano?

  One of the things that happened in the last 24 hours, and I saw this, and I was like, oh, and I'm going to talk to Dave. I can't wait to hear his, uh, his response, is, uh, there's this guy, Max Blumenthal, I believe is how I pronounce it.

• 1:35:41Speaker 07

  Yeah, Max Blumenthal. He's one of the several dozen that I cite as willing to talk about the other side. Yeah.

• 1:35:47Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay. So he tweeted-

• 1:35:48Speaker 07

  Aaron Matei. Aaron Matei.

• 1:35:51Anthony Pompliano?

  He tweeted about 24 hours ago and he said, after months in Ukraine, training soldiers, retired Colonel Andrew Milburn of the Mozart Group mercenary firm gets sauced on camera and spills the beans. Ukraine is a corrupt, fucked up society run by fucked up people. And he just quotes there. And then he says Ukrainian soldiers, quote, kill dudes who surrendered, quote, and then commit, quote, atrocities.

• 1:36:20Speaker 07

  It's been going on for years.

• 1:36:22Anthony Pompliano?

  Blumenthal goes on to describe, uh, the Mozart Group is among the largest PMCs in Ukraine. New York Times profile of Milburn painted him as driven by the same pro Ukrainian spirit that has put yellow and blue flags flying across the Western world, yada, whatever. So that is a retired Colonel Andrew Milburn from the Mozart Group, talking about how Ukrainian soldiers were killing people who surrendered. And again, I don't know this. This is me reading what Blumenthal is tweeting. And then there's a clip where he was on the Team House podcast, uh, and he's openly saying it. So unless that is not Colonel Andrew Milburn or somehow the video is doctored, it appears that is what he's saying. But then 12 hours

• 1:37:04Anthony Pompliano?

  ago, Blumenthal tweeted and said, Dan Rice, a US Army veteran advising Zelensky tells CNN that Ukraine urgently needs cluster munitions to, quote, increase the base lethality, end quote. And he complains about EU states that signed anti-cluster bomb treaty and promises Ukraine's army will clean up unexploded munitions. And then he goes on, he says, Zelensky's US advisor and lobbyist was granted an uncritical platform by CNN's Aaron Burnett to appeal for Washington to authorize illegal cluster munitions to Ukraine to, quote, win the war, end quote. My takeaway from these, uh, two collections of tweets is that there is more to the story. It is not

• 1:37:47Speaker 07

  A huge amount.

• 1:37:47Anthony Pompliano?

  black and white, one way or black and white the other way. And what it always comes back to, and I've talked about this a bunch on the podcast with various different guests, is

• 1:37:57Anthony Pompliano?

  War is a nasty, nasty, complex, horrible situation where there are no winners. And I think what we're seeing-

• 1:38:08Speaker 07

  In fact, if you look at some of the losers, you say, how's Japan doing after World War II? How'd Germany do after World War II? I think the losers end up being the winners in some twisted way.

• 1:38:17Anthony Pompliano?

  Well, and what I think we're starting to see, and again, time has a very interesting way of doing this, is that more details are coming out that are just highlighting it's not black and white. And so for the average person who does not have a lot of time on their hands, does not care enough to go investigate, and doesn't have, quote-unquote, "a dog in the fight", what ends up occurring is they now are starting to say to themselves, "Well, what the hell's going on? Because it doesn't seem like the story initially is the full story. It may be part of the story, but it's not the full story." I think that's really what you were highlighting in the piece that you wrote, is just like, there's a lot of shit going on here that isn't being covered, and maybe we should be asking why?

• 1:39:03Speaker 07

  Well, then, there's all these things that show up, like, for example, we find out that there's 36, actually, I've seen both the number 36 and 46, bioweapons labs in Ukraine. US bioweapons labs in Ukraine. Why do we have 46 bioweapons labs in Ukraine? And so, you say, "Oh, that's just conspiracy theory. Those are just old Russian labs that were decommissioned." I go, "Well, I read about those in the book Demon in the Freezer many years ago." And they were terrifying, because they were these rickety old buildings, and they were rusty padlocks, and there were a bunch of heroin addicts who were looking to sell germ warfare materials on the black market to get some cash.

• 1:39:47Speaker 07

  And so, when the Soviet Union fell apart, one of our biggest concerns was going there and buttoning those things down fast. Well, it turns out that we did button them down fast. They're not left over. And in 2005, there's some non-Luger thing that okayed us setting up the bioweapons labs in Ukraine. And so, I would say, "Oh, do I really know that they're there?" Well, then, Victoria, fuck the EU, Newland.

• 1:40:12Speaker 07

  Admitted they were there and that they were struggling to get control of the materials to get them back to the US. And I go, what kind of materials? They think there were, well, things like modified coronaviruses to kill people. Let's start there. And, um, and so, uh, and so there's just bad shit in this story. This story stinks to high heaven. And, and what bothers me, what bothers me is the people, the, the Eric Hoffer group, the fanatics, he calls them, who just sign off on this and get suckered into it. I could be dead wrong. Go prove me wrong. I pray I'm wrong. I want to be the good guys. But right now, I am convinced we're the bad guys. And, and if you go back through history and you say,

• 1:40:55Speaker 07

  show me where in history, there were really good guys. It's very hard to do. Humans are brutal. Humans, humans are bad people. I mean, there, there, there's nothing worse than a human. We cannibalize each other. We, we kill each other. We, we, and, and, and if, if somehow the CIA is no longer doing shit like this. I'm reading a book right now called Poisoner in Chief. What a horror story. What a horror story. If, if, if somehow the CIA is no longer bad guys, tell me what year they became good guys. Cause I'd love to know the year that someone said, okay, let's stop being bad. Because the shit they

• 1:41:32Speaker 07

  were doing in the 50s and the 60s was horrific. Dr. Mengele level horrific. And so the question is, what makes you think the US are good guys? I see no evidence we are. We are good domestically so far. I would say that's slipping very quickly. The fact that there's still guys who have not stood trial and are in solitary confinement after January 6th is evidence that we have real authoritarian blood coursing through our veins. That's a horror story.

• 1:42:05Anthony Pompliano?

  Is the US the best country in the world to live in? Or do you think that there's other places?

• 1:42:11Speaker 07

  Yes, yes.

• 1:42:12Anthony Pompliano?

  So it's like even with the, the black eyes and the bad stuff and all the things you're highlighting?

• 1:42:15Speaker 07

  Well, they're not hurting, for the most part, they're not hurting their own people. They're trying not to. Again, if you read, if you read the, the real Anthony Fauci, you read, you know, Poisoner in Chief, we are hurting some of our own people. Um, pretty gruesomely, but um, but for the most part, we have a great existence. So I don't want to tear down the system because our system is the best system. I mean, there's probably countries like, you know, who knows, maybe living in Sweden is much better, you know, but, but, but, but considering all the burden, all, all the baggage we carry. We're, we're still okay, but we're at great risk of not being okay.

• 1:42:56Speaker 07

  It's, I've read a number of books going back all the way, Tony Blankley's book before he died. The West's Last Chance, I think it was, uh, there's a lot of guy, Jonah Goldberg. There's a lot of guys who think that we're on the precipice and that the American experiment, which has been a brilliant experiment, is at risk of being thrown away because we've forgotten what got us here. Now, there's a great story of Chesterton's fence that I used that one last time. And Brett Weinstein drew it to my attention, um, in his book. Um, guy's about to tear down a fence. And, and his friend says, well, do you know why they put the fence up in the first place? The guy said, no, he said, well, you better answer that question before you tear it down.

• 1:43:40Speaker 07

  And it's, it's a great sort of metaphor. It's a great maxim where is, is before you, before you get rid of some longstanding tradition like Catholicism. I'm, I'm an atheist, sort of. Um, make sure you understand what it was and wasn't doing for society. And I don't even know what to call myself now because I'm not religious, but I, I think we're attempting to push religion to the back burner. And I think religion has been a glue that I personally grotesquely underestimated its importance. And there's called the, the Lindy effect, I think it's called. I think it maybe Nassim Taleb pushes this, I don't know, but.

• 1:44:19Anthony Pompliano?

  The longer something is in existence, the longer it'll last.

• 1:44:23Speaker 07

  That's right. And Weinstein's take on this, I had a long chat with Eric Weinstein the other day. It was quite enlightening. Talk about brains the size of cantaloupes. The longer something's been around, the more likely is that it's serving an important purpose, whether it's a physical thing like your appendix, or whether it's, which they're now figuring out what it does. It's not just hanging off the end of your intestines doing nothing. To something social, like Catholicism, or religion, or whatever, don't underestimate the importance of its existence, because it's been around for thousands of years. People who are anti-government, I go, you know, we've been choosing government over non-government

• 1:45:07Speaker 07

  for 5,000 years. What makes you think the choice of non-government is the best choice? So to be a libertarian is one thing, to be a maximalist libertarian is stupid.

• 1:45:20Anthony Pompliano?

  I had a professor in college, who, I forget what exactly the class was, but it's philosophy, or sociology, something like that. And he made the argument one day in class, pissed a lot of people off, a lot of people off, which, you know, kudos to him for even being willing to have the conversation. But he basically made the argument that you can argue that everything about religion is wrong, inaccurate, and is basically fiction, and still argue that it's important for people to believe because it holds together that social fabric. And it's actually the thing that keeps people psychologically in the game. And they believe that, you know, it is better. They believe that there is something

• 1:46:04Anthony Pompliano?

  more positive in the world. They believe that there is something, you know, when they die. And he kind of walked through the whole argument. And again, whether you, wherever you fall.

• 1:46:12Speaker 07

  I made that argument in print. I made that argument in print. I opened the discussion of pro-religion. I think I was inspired by Charles Murray, actually, who's also a polarizing figure. I said, "Look, I'm a pro-choice atheist, and I refer to myself as a pagan with a noisy sword. But I'm now going to write in defense of religion." And I wrote about four or five pages defending the gluing effect that religion has had. And that I am benefiting from the Judeo-Christian ethic.

• 1:46:44Speaker 07

  That I personally am not actively involved in, but I'm benefiting from it. It's sort of like hammering Silicon Valley for being a bunch of douchebags, but forgetting that, by the way, your fucking phone came from there.

• 1:46:55Anthony Pompliano?

  Well, you're tweeting it on your iPhone.

• 1:46:57Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 1:46:57Anthony Pompliano?

  As you say, this idiot.

• 1:46:59Speaker 07

  Zoom didn't, Zoom didn't come from Peoria, Illinois, right?

• 1:47:03Anthony Pompliano?

  The last thing I want to talk about is FTX. You have a whole section in, in your end of year roundup and your main point is just the FTX story is not a crypto story. It's a geopolitical story. Unpack a little bit in terms of why is this on your radar? And why do you think it's so much bigger than maybe people are giving it credit for?

• 1:47:25Speaker 07

  Well, so as soon as the story broke, which I, you know me, I know, the only thing I know about crypto is what I learned from doing podcasts with you and Marty Bett and, and, and various devout hodlers who've been attempting to, who knock on my door with the Bible underneath their arm, trying to convert me.

• 1:47:43Anthony Pompliano?

  By the way, you mentioned earlier index, the index rise in the nineties.

• 1:47:47Speaker 07

  Right.

• 1:47:48Anthony Pompliano?

  And one of the things people have yet to connect, but I think is important is passive indexing is very similar to hodling. It is the continued accusation of an asset that you believe will be worth more in the future than it is today. And so there's more similarities than differences.

• 1:48:05Speaker 07

  My, my, my detraction of crypto, of Bitcoin, forget crypto. There's what 20,000 cryptos, 19,990 something of them will have to die. You know that, I know that, right? You're not going to have 20,000 cryptos running around. This is like all the banknotes in the United States from all the different banks across the country back in the mid 19th century. They all died.

• 1:48:31Speaker 07

  That's not to say that Bitcoin dies, or it's also not to say that you know which one will survive. But I do, during the FTX collapse, I did learn something about the difference between how Bitcoin works and, and I don't need to understand it.

• 1:48:48Speaker 07

  I do probably to become a hodler. You guys call them hodlers. I think hodler makes more sense, but that's just me.

• 1:48:58Speaker 07

  The reason that I doubt the hodlers is because I do believe to the depth of my soul that you guys either are going to be absorbed like the Tea Party wing of the Republican Party becoming Republicans again, or you're gonna have to do a battle of the bastards and you're gonna have to survive. I believe that at some point you'll be absorbed by the banks, or you will be, and therefore it'll become pretty generic and it won't be what people right now are enjoying, or they're going to destroy you, and I believe they have mechanisms to destroy you despite, despite the total autonomy that you can achieve by holding your own keys and things like that. Because I think they can make it so unpleasant for

• 1:49:43Speaker 07

  anyone who tries to use crypto, that if they decide that crypto's not in their interest. Now, if they decide it's in their interest, then it's a different path. I'm not sure it's a win still.

• 1:49:57Anthony Pompliano?

  Which path do you think is likely?

• 1:50:00Speaker 07

  I'm torn. I don't know.

• 1:50:03Anthony Pompliano?

  I can tell you're torn. Every time I've talked to you, you are, you're one of the only people I know who I think you're standing at the fork in the road and you can clearly identify the two paths.

• 1:50:13Speaker 07

  I'm like Tom Hanks in the movie Castaway, standing in the fork of the road at the end of the movie.

• 1:50:19Anthony Pompliano?

  You won't pick.

• 1:50:20Speaker 07

  No, and I'm waiting for an event. You know, I had lunch with Larry Lepard, who's a big Bitcoin enthusiast, and I really respect Larry. Hi Larry. And I could be converted, but I don't know. People say, what price would convert you? And the answer is not about a price. There's not some, crypto has no inherent value that I can price it in. Even gold has such a thing. So gold, you know, the favorite thing gold is that it's always been able to buy a fancy suit. The problem with that statement is that what's a fancy suit in ancient Rome? It's a rag with a, it's a toga, right? So that doesn't

• 1:51:01Speaker 07

  help me. What gold also has bought since the dawn of time is a month's worth of manual labor, and that hasn't changed at all.

• 1:51:13Speaker 07

  And that's the better metric. So gold does have a valuation metric that you can stick to. Um, but that's not to say it won't pick one up because it is the becomes the currency of the same and the currency of the realm and the currency of whatever. So, so I, I don't think it has to be tangible to be the, the go-to currency. Uh, it has changed over the years too, by the way. At first it was going to be used to buy pizza and you go, ah, not really. It's, it's really more of an asset. So there's been a drift in this story. I am waiting for some moment where it just clicks in my skull that says it's real. They're going to win.

• 1:51:53Speaker 07

  Time to buy. And, and I'm just, I'm waiting. It's going to be, it's like porn. I know when I see it, you know, every night maybe, but yeah. And, um, and so, so that's my view on crypto. Um, the FTX story, as soon as it broke, obviously I paid some attention because it was exciting. And you had that 24 seven, um, that 24 seven Twitter spaces where kim.com was fighting with some other hodlers. They were trying to keep track of what was going on, um, in the FTX collapse, which was great. And then all of a sudden out of the blue, they have as a guest,

• 1:52:33Speaker 07

  Hunter Biden. I go, whoa, what the hell is that all about? Right? So I had spotted the connection, the connection of, of, um, the FTX token, was it FTT or something? I think it's called, um, and Ukraine very quickly. And I recognized the geopolitical component of the FTX collapse very quickly. So within a day, I think. And, and so I put out a tweet. It was a hail Mary tweet that said, before this story is over, there's going to be, there's going to be hodlers washing up on beaches around the world. And that turned out to be true. So there have been some prominent holders who have found themselves

• 1:53:16Speaker 07

  literally dead on beaches around the world. And, and one of them was said that he was about to be framed and the Mossad was going to get him and then boom, he ends up dead. And so there've been some, and I don't know how many, because I don't know how to keep track of them itself. But there was enough to say, oh, that was a good tweet. Um, so it appears to me as though FTX was never meant to be a legitimate operation. It wasn't like they started it and they had a good heart and they knew what they were doing. And, and, and then they got behind some eight ball, right? And that can happen, right? I think some of the stable coins, they started out that way, but I, you can spot a problem with the stable coins. As soon as they start giving away stable coins, open and kind of go, well, now you're

• 1:54:00Speaker 07

  underfunded. You just gave away the, the reserve of your stable coin. And, and then I heard that they were holding, you know, crypto as assets for the stable coin. I go, oh, okay, this is just nuts. So I think the stable coins, I think there's going to be a bunch of problems going forward even, but they've, they've been sort of, have started to get dealt with. I've not been able to understand what that will mean to Bitcoin holders. I don't know. And I asked Marty and I asked guys like you, and I get kind of a guarded optimism, but I'm not sure. It's not just a self-preservation optimism. But I, it seems to me if the stable coins really get the crap kicked out of them, if Tether goes, I, I think there's going to be a period of chaos. And that might be the battle of the bastards.

• 1:54:45Speaker 07

  That might be the moment where I go, okay, that, that's kind of a bottom and they're surviving and they didn't need Tether and they didn't, right? But, um, so, um, quickly I picked up the connection of FTX to Ukraine, which is really what got me paying close attention. And then I started finding videos of guys who were off, off Broadway describing the thing. These are not the stories coming out of Glenn Greenwald and stuff. These are guys standing in front of their camera describing what was happening. And I started to pick up the, you know, Gabe Bankman-Fried and Laura Bankman-Fried. I started to pick up the different players. I go, holy shit, this is crooked as shit.

• 1:55:24Speaker 07

  And to make a long story short, it looks to me like FTX was never intended to be anything but a crime syndicate and that it was intended to launder money. And the losses we hear quoted, 10 billion, is that close?

• 1:55:37Anthony Pompliano?

  Uh, that was the total number of assets, I believe, on the platform. I don't know if they've come to a conclusion as to how much is lost, but let's say up to 10 billion, I guess, is the way to describe it.

• 1:55:46Speaker 07

  Okay. So I think the best model is that it was used as a platform to launder money. And so what we, we know the losses. What we don't know is the flow rate through the FTX system. And so, for example, um, the, the great model is that Biden gives Ukraine money. Ukraine somehow with the aid of, of FTX was laundering money back to the DNC and to various PACs that had funny, friendly, fuzzy names about fighting pandemics and, and fighting all sorts of things, but it was just basically shoving money back into the DNC, which then

• 1:56:28Speaker 07

  caused Biden to give more money to Ukraine again. So it really appeared to be a round trip of, of taxpayer money somehow using FTX to get to Ukraine. Ukraine's national bank was involved and then it was ending back in the DNC. And, and pretty recently, uh, the press secretary, what's her name? You know her name? I can never remember it. Pierre or something, Karen Pierre or something.

• 1:56:53Anthony Pompliano?

  KJ, JP, I think is the initials, right?

• 1:56:55Speaker 07

  Yeah. Um, she was asked, are you going to give the money back to help make people whole who got, who lost their life savings? And she pled the fifth. I'm going, oh, so you are a skanky whore. I got it. Um, and so, no, they're not going to give the money back. And so life savings ended up in the DNC. So if you, I'm on a jury and you take an AK-47, you go into the DNC's office to wipe them out, I'm hanging the jury. I'm hanging it. I'm not convicting that bastard. That, they're gonna have to do a new trial because I'm not letting them. I, I'm, I don't care. If, if the DNC stole my life savings, I'd be looking to get even.

• 1:57:37Speaker 07

  I don't know how I would dedicate my ample brain to find a way to make the DNC pay for that. And so I think that now, one of my favorite parts of the write-up I did is I so, so then the bizarre part is you got Sam Bankman-Fraud um out in the on the streets and in the digital world doing interviews and doing and as a guest on that on that that Twitter spaces spilling his guts. I'm going, who are your lawyers? Who's telling you to do this? And and and he was doing this, this, this, I'm just, I'm just a kid who didn't get it. And I didn't really understand

• 1:58:22Speaker 07

  what was happening. And I didn't know we're co-mingling funds and blah, blah, blah. So, boy, genius turns turns out to be, you know, so I referred to it as a as an episode of Leave It to Beaver, where the bee's got himself into trouble again. And in the end, I said, look, you know, without Lassie, Timmy would have a life expectancy of about a week. Who's watching out for you? And I think I think he could be now called, I've referred to him as as Sam Bankman- Epstein. I think he could have a life expectancy of a nap pretty soon. Um, I think there's, I think it's a much, much bigger scandal that they're trying to put away. I think it's kind

• 1:59:04Speaker 07

  of an Epstein-level scandal they're trying to put away. And I don't have the details, but it just smells smells the holy hell of of this. And and the fact that the Republicans are not beating up the Democrats on this tells me that it's crooked. I know that that I know that, for example, Mitch McConnell, you want to cause me to switch parties, Mitch will do it. Mitch McConnell, who is truly the most despicable of Republicans, in my opinion. And and it's not a short list of despicable Republicans.

• 1:59:41Speaker 07

  Completely refused to fund anything in Arizona while Kerry Lake's in a brawl with, with what's-her-face Hobbs. Uh, what's her- Katie Hobbs. Now, speaking of, you know, rotting empire, you know, Katie Hobbs was in this close race with, with Kerry Lake, and who was in charge of overseeing the election? Katie Hobbs. She oversaw her own election.

• 2:00:05Speaker 07

  She was the head of the election commission to oversee her own election, and she refused to step down. The ballots were rigged to get jammed the machines. They were an inch too wide. And the whole story is just crazy. But meanwhile, Mitch McConnell's refusing to fund, refusing to fund Kerry Lake. Meanwhile, FTX is funding Katie Hobbs, and Mitch McConnell's getting money from FTX. So, this is a dirty world. And what I can tell you is, if I were to say, you know, this election wasn't riddled with smoking guns, I, I could easily imagine the whole thing was fucked up. But it wasn't like the 2020 election where it was so garish

• 2:00:50Speaker 07

  that you go, the whole thing is, just stinks of a rotten corpse. Um, but all the guys who attached themselves to MAGA lost. What, what, you know, maybe it was tactically bad, or maybe it was a way of saying, if you touch the MAGA story, we're gonna destroy you. Both parties. Neither party wants MAGA. Republicans don't want them either, just like they didn't want the Tea Partiers. So, um, so I think that's the FTX story. I think FTX is a money laundering scheme that's much darker, more sinister than just some idiots from MIT who are having

• 2:01:33Speaker 07

  orgies. They said, by the way, you know, it sounds awfully pizza-gate-ish to me.

• 2:01:39Speaker 07

  Which I'm actually a believer in. Um, so that's, that's my FTX story. What's wrong with this story? Tell me, tell me what the counter argument is.

• 2:01:48Anthony Pompliano?

  I don't know if there is anything wrong or counter argument, or even if we have all the details to, uh.

• 2:01:55Speaker 07

  Yeah, I don't think we have the detail.

• 2:01:56Anthony Pompliano?

  Put, put together a, uh, a counter. I'm in this weird place, right? Where, um, I've talked to some of the people who are involved in this. Uh, you know, on the podcast or, or, uh, conferences over the years.

• 2:02:08Speaker 07

  Did I see you on CNBC or Fox or something? Where did I see you at?

• 2:02:12Anthony Pompliano?

  Oh, I went on CNBC for a three minute segment that turned into a 20 minute horn locking with, uh, our boy Scott Wapner.

• 2:02:19Speaker 07

  Yeah. Oh, Wapner. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I saw that. That looked unpleasant to me.

• 2:02:23Anthony Pompliano?

  We, we had, uh, well, look, it's, uh. Actually, I haven't talked about this yet. So 20 minutes on national television with someone who is not there to be your friend, uh, in the interview. Cause that's his job, right? I don't think he was doing anything outside of, you know, he's trying to ask tough questions or whatever. People forget, like, that's not fun.

• 2:02:41Speaker 07

  How, how do you think I'd respond under those conditions? Would I just lose my shit and rip them a new one with everything I got or what? Cause you can't do that.

• 2:02:49Anthony Pompliano?

  I, I.

• 2:02:49Speaker 07

  You really had to keep your shit together, which you did.

• 2:02:52Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. And, and, you know, uh, I think Scott would say this as well as I, I just probably have more command of, uh, the technologies in the market. And like I'm in the business, right? Like that is what I do on a day to day basis. This is one of many things that he has to pay attention to. And so, uh, from that standpoint, you know, I probably have an advantage, but also I'm on his turf and, uh, I don't know what the questions are. So a little balancing there. Um, I, I always say that it's not about how you act on the, uh, uh, the current situation. It's always can you get your point across and, uh, be invited back? Right? The, the invitation.

• 2:03:24Speaker 07

  I don't know if you're gonna get invited back. I don't think you're gonna get invited back.

• 2:03:28Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah.

• 2:03:29Speaker 07

  Maybe if, maybe if, if there's another turn in the, the crypto plot, you might.

• 2:03:34Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, yeah. The, well, in 2018, look, I, I, I used to go on all the time. And, uh, Kevin O'Leary, who now is somehow, you know, uh, one of the, one of the players in the whole FTX thing. And has been out there kind of talking through various parts of it. Uh, there's this, you know, classic video. He literally says to me, you know, how much of your money's in this? And I tell him and he goes, I forbid this. And he's yelling and screaming at me and he's got the finger point, the whole thing. And you gotta remember, some of it's entertainment, right? Obviously, that's why people watch. And I always cite, if you remember Bill Ackman and Carl Icahn calling in to CNBC Live together, yelling and screaming at each other, and Carl saying, Billy came to see me, and I told Billy he was an idiot.

• 2:04:18Speaker 07

  Icahn won that, as I recall, right? Icahn kicked his ass and then snuck out the back door with his money.

• 2:04:24Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, well, and the part I love about it is, as they're doing that live, entertaining debate between billionaires on national television, you hear the traders in the background. And each time one of them scores kind of verbal points, you hear them kind of yell.

• 2:04:38Speaker 07

  Your cheers. Yeah, I remember that. It was great. It was like when Santelli did the Tea Party rant, right?

• 2:04:46Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, there's a couple of these throughout the years where I think you can point to and say, look, this is obviously has an entertaining component to it, outside of what is somewhat of a dry topic for most Americans and people around the world. Now, when it comes to the FTX stuff, what is, a part of where maybe I'm perplexed, is very obvious that there was public coverage of one side of the political spectrum receiving donations from FTX, Sam, however you want to kind of characterize the players and organization. But then it's come out that actually there was money that was being donated to both parties.

• 2:05:23Speaker 07

  That's right. At least a half a dozen to a dozen Republicans got money.

• 2:05:28Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, and so you get that. And then I saw, there was a story that was written, I think, Beto in Texas, he'd received like a million bucks or something. And then like the day before the election, he gave it back. But it was before the blow up. And just like, there's a lot of these details and stuff that you're just kind of like, I now want more information before I come to, hey, here is my like, official opinion on it. Because it just feels like every day we get more information. And you're just like, what is going on? Right? I found myself more than any story over the last two years, asking myself, what is going on here with this?

• 2:06:05Speaker 07

  Very much so, very much. But it really looks dirty as shit.

• 2:06:09Anthony Pompliano?

  Well, what I don't know is how much of it is because I'm in this industry. You know, our media business had a, one of the advertisers was FTX US, regulated US-based exchange, right? The whole nine yards. There's been fallout from this. Other companies that I was an investor in or advertised, they have been affected. And so some of it is definitely just like, if you're in an industry and something like this happens, naturally, you're going to hear a lot about it. You're gonna, it's going to constantly come up in conversation. But then I talked to friends that are completely outside of kind of the Bitcoin or crypto industry, and even they're talking about it. Like, okay, this is not just a crypto thing.

• 2:06:52Anthony Pompliano?

  This has definitely kind of escaped that into a much bigger story.

• 2:06:56Speaker 07

  Well, so here's the question I have for you. Is it, is it going to be used to influence the crypto world by the authorities? And I don't know what influence means.

• 2:07:08Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. So what's fascinating about this, and again, perplexing at the same time, right? It's fascinating and perplexing, is that this was not one of the exchanges that was, at least publicly stating, we don't want to be regulated. It wasn't an anarchist, you know, saying, take down the US government. It wasn't somebody who was openly trying to avoid going and talking to regulators or politicians or whatever. It was quite the opposite. And so was it intentional? Maybe was it ignorance and stupidity? Maybe was it a combination of all of the above? Probably, right? You know, whatever.

• 2:07:50Speaker 07

  The ignorance and stupidity, by the way. This, this is, this is, I'm reminded of January 6th on this. I think, for example, the FBI has informants. The informants, I think, believe that because they're tied to the FBI, they're safe. They don't realize that they can be written out of the plot any day. And so, for example, if you are a rabble, if you are an FBI-sponsored rabble rouser at January 6th, that in no way guaranteed you wouldn't be arrested and thrown in jail for five years.

• 2:08:24Speaker 07

  And so the absurd part of the story to me is, is that, that not only did SBF not understand

• 2:08:38Speaker 07

  How shark-infested these waters were. But he, his parents apparently didn't either.

• 2:08:47Speaker 07

  And so his parents, who really do look like they must have somehow been involved because for one thing, they bought real estate off FTX money and stuff like that. They let their son walk into a snake pit.

• 2:09:02Speaker 07

  And so if my model is at all remotely correct, then that is the whole thing. Has been to process money. Which I can't see evidence against that.

• 2:09:15Speaker 07

  Then, then his parents let him play in a very dangerous place.

• 2:09:22Speaker 07

  And, and by the way, his girlfriend looks about 12 years old. He's gotta be a pedophile.

• 2:09:30Speaker 07

  It's a joke.

• 2:09:32Anthony Pompliano?

  Thank you for clarifying that. YouTube's algorithm appreciates it.

• 2:09:37Speaker 07

  Yeah, right. They probably don't pick that subtlety up.

• 2:09:40Anthony Pompliano?

  All right. So I got one last question for you on FTX and then we'll wrap up, which is what do you think happens? What is the, the end result? When we're recording this?

• 2:09:51Anthony Pompliano?

  Sam was arrested in the Bahamas. He's now been extradited back to the United States. He was released on a bond. And is I think, living at his parents' house at the moment. There are two other players. I think Gary Wong is a name one, and then Caroline. They have both pleaded guilty and are cooperating with investigators. How does this play out in, you know, two, three, four, five years? Just what do you, what do you think happens, I guess, to them? Maybe even to the larger bankruptcy case? Like, how do you?

• 2:10:27Speaker 07

  Well, it depends. It depends on how deeply they understood the game they were playing. And so.

• 2:10:35Speaker 07

  A number of paths could be followed. If they're knowledgeable and highly dangerous, they could go the Epstein route. If, if they were suckers, if they were the patsies, and they were enjoying their little fun, they could end up in prison, um, as long as they can't sink any important people. Um, and, and I could imagine a scenario that by the time it's done, after the whole fears died down, that nothing really consequential happened. Let me put it this way. If he's a legitimate huddler of any kind, if he doesn't

• 2:11:16Speaker 07

  have a bunch of money socked away in the blockchain, he's out of his gourd. Right? So he is not broke. There's, there's no way that he had billions and didn't put some shit, basically, into a Swiss bank account equivalent on the blockchain. Is that right?

• 2:11:36Anthony Pompliano?

  I have no clue.

• 2:11:38Speaker 07

  But it would be, put it this way, he, if he didn't, he's sure wondering why now.

• 2:11:44Anthony Pompliano?

  Of course. The, um, do you know the story?

• 2:11:46Speaker 07

  So that would be downright stupid.

• 2:11:48Anthony Pompliano?

  Do, do you know the story of, uh, Dan Bilzerian? You know who that is?

• 2:11:54Speaker 07

  Dan, I know Alex Bilzerian. Dan's the, um, Dan's the actor.

• 2:12:00Anthony Pompliano?

  Uh, yeah, well, actor, I think he was in a movie, yes. Um, he also is a very popular.

• 2:12:05Speaker 07

  So Alex is his nephew, I think, or, or cousin. I know Alex, he's a physicist. He's a sort of a Silicon Valley type physicist.

• 2:12:14Anthony Pompliano?

  So I, I, um, will get the details wrong, so I won't even try. But, uh, long story short is that Dan's father was a corporate raider back in like the eighties, uh, I believe, seventies, eighties, whenever it was. And, um, at some point, uh, front door got kicked in by, uh, uh, federal prosecutors, law enforcement, et cetera. Uh, I believe he did, uh, jail time and, um,

• 2:12:41Anthony Pompliano?

  Then his son pops up, there's a bunch of money and lives a very lavish lifestyle. Son was a professional poker player, right? Or at least was playing poker and talks about that's where.

• 2:12:55Speaker 07

  Which is a money laundering mechanism right there, yeah.

• 2:12:58Anthony Pompliano?

  So again, I don't know, but I think that your point about just very, you know, this story has repeated over and over and I've talked to a number of people who've been around for a long time. And they're like, look, there's, you know, four or five details in every one of these stories that all seem to kind of overlap. And that's not to say that these people know each other or anything like that. It's just like these usually unravel in a very specific way. And it seems like so far this one is following that trend.

• 2:13:27Speaker 07

  Well, so I gotta figure that Sam is in trouble.

• 2:13:33Speaker 07

  I just, I, he's, he got too visible. And whether they say, look, you're gonna have to do 10 years in Club Fed. And your life will not be so bad. There'll be, you know, you can weight lift and you can swim and things like that. But it could be that.

• 2:13:52Speaker 07

  If I'm wrong about how deeply embedded FTX in the political system was, then, then he'll just get hammered. You know, but, but I don't think I'm wrong on that because I think there's way too much evidence pointing to the fact that he was, money was going to powerful, they were even funding the Lincoln Project. They were funding, they funded the, they funded the, the, the, the clinical study that showed ivermectin doesn't work. I mean, they were up to their ass and everything bad. And so, so I really think that, I don't know if Sam knew the game he was in. I don't feel sorry for him.

• 2:14:35Speaker 07

  He had to have known he was breaking laws and doing bad things. But I think when you're hanging out with the cool kids, you somehow think that you're also one of the cool kids. Here's a question I like to ask people rhetorically. We know how much child trafficking is a problem, right?

• 2:14:52Speaker 07

  When was the last time someone got arrested for receiving a child?

• 2:14:58Speaker 07

  Right? These kids can't come cheap. They're not selling these kids in trailer parks. Where are these kids going?

• 2:15:06Speaker 07

  When was the last time someone got convicted of receiving a child?

• 2:15:15Speaker 07

  I can't name them. The one I can go with, I think Denny Hastert got himself in a little bit of trouble, but that could have also been, who did he piss off?

• 2:15:25Speaker 07

  But that was years ago. So if child trafficking is rampant like we hear, and sometimes you see some story where they save, you know, 30 kids out of the back of a U-Haul, right?

• 2:15:35Speaker 07

  If they hadn't intercepted that U-Haul, there'd be 30 wretched, deserving to die people, receiving those kids.

• 2:15:46Speaker 07

  Where are they?

• 2:15:49Speaker 07

  You ever wondered about that?

• 2:15:51Anthony Pompliano?

  No, and you said that was a rhetorical question, so I'll leave it at that, but uh, I think that...

• 2:15:57Speaker 07

  Well, let me put it this way, I don't own any of them, so, you know, I'm safe.

• 2:16:00Anthony Pompliano?

  And I think that uh, asking questions is a good thing. Think that more people should ask questions. Maybe not, uh, not just buy it.

• 2:16:09Speaker 07

  So back to the, just to finish the Ukraine story, I could have a lot of stuff wrong.

• 2:16:15Speaker 07

  But if you think I do, dig into it. Right? Just do your own...

• 2:16:19Anthony Pompliano?

  That is one thing I will give you full credit for, which is, anyone who's watching this or listening to this, if you disagree with something Dave said, go on Twitter, email him, the whole thing, he will, he will read it, he will engage. And if you show him that he's wrong, he'll change his mind, which, which I appreciate as well. You know, very few people will actually go and message you or do the research, but, but I think that you would encourage them to do that.

• 2:16:46Speaker 07

  I would. I'd love to think I'm wrong about the dark stuff. But the problem is that...

• 2:16:54Speaker 07

  Every time I go down a rabbit hole, I find, I don't find rabbits, I find stuff. And so, you know, I want someone to tell me what the Great Reset is. It's real. Klaus Schwab is real. They make absurdly bizarre statements about what the world should be. They are heavily funded, they are globalists. They say things that no one would believe they'd say, because you go, this is, one of the most recent catchphrases was, "There's no reason why life has to be fulfilling." What, what person says that? Like, this was on their website. So what is their purpose? Are these a bunch of eugenicists?

• 2:17:38Speaker 07

  Are they gonna try to bring the population down under a billion? Is that their goal? Because there's no other model. There's no other model. It's either global domination, or, you know, global destruction. You know, maybe it's destruction of the United States hegemon, right? But it's not simple. And I've, I've called out so many people and said, "Please, explain to me what the Great Reset is." Because they, they garishly speak about it. And I've read a lot of books on totalitarianism, I've read a lot of books on propaganda.

• 2:18:18Speaker 07

  And one of the two common things they use is, one is fear, okay, COVID. The second is demoralization. And that's where I put the garishness part. So if they can garishly say, "We're coming through the front door, and you're not gonna be able to deal with it, and we're gonna squash the truckers, and we don't care how bad we look," that's demoralizing. That means that, and, and we know the vaccine's crap. We know the vaccine is somewhere between doing nothing and killing lots of people.

• 2:18:53Speaker 07

  And then the question is, um, why are they still pushing it?

• 2:18:59Speaker 07

  It's, it's, it's almost like, like when we diss the Russians, we don't care what you think. We're gonna do it. That I, you can, you're welcome, by the way, you have my authorization to delete statements. I won't give you, I won't give you guff to keep this thing on YouTube.

• 2:19:18Speaker 07

  I, I, I, I won't hold it against you if I, if I watch the game, game films and say, oh, he took that part out. I'm okay with it. Because that's the world we live in.

• 2:19:30Speaker 07

  And it's a sick world. And, but it's also a world that every other country and every other period in history has experienced.

• 2:19:39Speaker 07

  And somehow in the United States, for various periods, we felt that we were,

• 2:19:45Speaker 07

  we were the good guys. And I think we have a great existence here.

• 2:19:52Speaker 07

  But I don't think we're the good guys. I don't think we're the worst guys. We've got a lot, lot to, to shoulder. I mean, United States is the policeman of the world, which I've now been convinced that I at least understand why we are the policeman of the world. I used to have this Monroe Doctrine view. But if the US ever stopped projecting military power, globalization would cease that day. Be gone, that day. Because the thing that allows ships to travel 12,000 miles to deliver goods and services is that there's people going, you know, if we in any way cause that to stop, United States military is gonna come and kill us.

• 2:20:36Speaker 07

  And that's what has allowed globalization to get to where it is today. It's the projection of US force. We're the only truly blue water navy in the world.

• 2:20:48Speaker 07

  And so I understand it, but I think we're abusing it. I think we're abusing that power. It's we should walk soft and carry a big stick. We somehow stomp around and smack people with it. It's different now.

• 2:21:03Anthony Pompliano?

  Where can we send people if they want to reach out to you?

• 2:21:06Speaker 07

  Well, they can always find my email. If they can't, they're too stupid. I really, if the barrier is knowing that I'm a Cornell professor in the chemistry department, if that's not enough to get my email, then I don't want to talk to you. Otherwise, people send me emails. People call me. I talk to people. I get cold calls. That's okay. My actual contact point with the world is Twitter, at David B. Column. I have, you get a bunch of these mirroring accounts that look like you that aren't you? Do you get those?

• 2:21:45Anthony Pompliano?

  Tons.

• 2:21:46Speaker 07

  Yeah. What are they?

• 2:21:48Anthony Pompliano?

  Bots.

• 2:21:50Speaker 07

  But what are this? What's the purpose?

• 2:21:52Anthony Pompliano?

  Uh, from what I've seen, friends have sent me screenshots. They try to scam them. I got them on Telegram, on Instagram, on Twitter, or whatever. And they're basically strike up a conversation as if they're.

• 2:22:02Speaker 07

  And I've got this crypto for you. Actually, one of my friends followed up on one and they said they were trying to sell them some hex coin, a shit coin, right?

• 2:22:09Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. Or the, uh, the classic, uh, send me one, I'll send you two.

• 2:22:14Speaker 07

  Yeah, I know. My son, someone tried to scam him. I said, okay, here's what's coming next, just so you know. Called it to a T. The guy sent him a check for too much money. He said, look, just cash it. Send me a check back for the difference. I said, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, don't do that. That's a scam. My wife got hit by a scammer. Let me tell you ever so quick story. I get a call from my wife saying, you know, someone hacked our computer, our router, and they're emptying my, our bank accounts. Says, I'm talking, you gotta get home right away. And I go, no, get off the phone. What do you, she's having a phone with a guy from Apple. I go, no, you're not. And I couldn't get her to hang up on the guy. So first I, I reach out to the banks and I make sure there's no activity there. And so I said, uh, somehow put a flag on the account.

• 2:22:58Speaker 07

  So I went to all the accounts, put a flag. And then I get, I, I called the neighbor because I'm, I'm, while I'm doing this, I said, get Candace off the phone. Run, run next door, get her off the phone. She's being scammed. I get home, she's still on the phone. She's with a guy that she thinks is from Apple.

• 2:23:15Speaker 07

  And I, I said, Candace, and I said, give me the phone. I said, and I talked to the guy and I said, here's the deal. If you're legitimate, you'll understand why I have to ask my wife a couple of questions. And I went and asked, I said, did they send you a number to call? And she said, yes. She's, and then they, they, they, they said, they, they helped her. They helped her lock down her L L Bean charge card. And I go, oh, that's a problem. Um, and, uh, and, and then she says, no, but, and I looked at the screen. They had control of her screen. And I said, but they only have control of your screen. And the guy was talking it through and says, okay, we're gonna lock this down. We're gonna do this. The guy's telling, he sounds real nice. I said, okay.

• 2:23:56Speaker 07

  Um, you're a scam artist, but I'm gonna give you one shot at convincing me you're not. And he says, well, I'm just trying to help your wife with a real serious problem here. And I go, that's not a good answer. I said, you're a scam artist. She says, well, you're insulting me. And I go, now I know you're a scam artist. Because a real I T guy would completely and utterly sympathize with me. And so we're done. So I hung up. And then about 30 minutes later, they called my wife back, thinking I might, might've gone back to work.

• 2:24:27Anthony Pompliano?

  Wow.

• 2:24:28Speaker 07

  And I said, look, um, dude, don't call us back. And if, if I, and I know this may sound like a hollow threat, but, um, but if you do, I'm gonna come and find you. I said, I said, I have high ranking tech friends. I will find you. So don't call us back. And, uh, my wife was so violated by it. And, and, uh, they scammed Cornell. They, they sent, they sent an email, looked like it came from H R. And it said, login and do something simple, something trivial. And you try to log in and you didn't get in. So most people said, oh, Cornell website fucked up.

• 2:25:08Speaker 07

  They took your login attempt, went to the H R window, changed direct deposits of people's paychecks to banks in Malaysia or something.

• 2:25:21Speaker 07

  And so you didn't find out you've been scammed until your paycheck didn't show up. A lot of people don't notice their paycheck doesn't show up for quite a while because they're not balancing their books or something. So that's when Cornell went to the double, double level login. They said, okay, time to get serious. They ended up reimbursing about six faculty.

• 2:25:39Anthony Pompliano?

  Wow.

• 2:25:39Speaker 07

  For, uh, for having lost a paycheck. So it's getting to be tougher. I know you're more techie than me, so I just, it's getting to be a tough world to negotiate. Everyone's trying to scam me, everyone's lying. Their looks are moving, they're lying.

• 2:25:54Anthony Pompliano?

  You, you reduce 50% of the attempts just on answer the phone and don't respond to text messages.

• 2:25:59Speaker 07

  I tell my wife, I said, you never, ever call back a number or reach back to a number they give you. But then Todd Harrison, you know Todd Harrison? He's from former Morgan Stanley did a, he did a, I got an email from him and said, I'd like you to take a look at this. And I'm going, oh, this is bullshit.

• 2:26:18Speaker 07

  And so I went into my email address book and I independently sent Todd an email. And said, I just got something that they want me, you said you want me to look at, cause he could have. And it, and his response was, yeah, something I thought you'd be interested in. And I, I clicked on it and it didn't do anything because I was on a Mac and it was a few years back. I go over to Twitter and just, Todd, he says, I'm not emailing anybody.

• 2:26:43Speaker 07

  And what had happened is someone got ahold of his email box, sent out all these messages. And then every incoming messages email box got sent to trash and deleted.

• 2:26:55Speaker 07

  So they had complete control.

• 2:26:56Anthony Pompliano?

  Wow.

• 2:26:58Speaker 07

  And, uh, and I'm going, this is, this is a tough world. This is going to be tough to negotiate. The older I get, the dumber I get. And, uh, they're going to dupe me and I, you know, they emptied my 401k or something, my retirement account. I'm not going to be happy.

• 2:27:14Speaker 07

  Sam Bagman Freed.

• 2:27:17Anthony Pompliano?

  Dave, I always enjoy talking to you. If anyone has not read your year in review, I highly suggest they go print it out, sit down, get a little hot chocolate, maybe, sit there for 16 hours and read the whole thing.

• 2:27:31Speaker 07

  This one's smaller. I've got a third part I haven't written, but I'm not sure I'm gonna write it. It's not COVID. I'm not sure people want to hear about COVID.

• 2:27:38Anthony Pompliano?

  I, I, I found it fantastic. So, thank you so much for taking the time to write these every single year and thank you for, for always coming on and, and talking through things. I, I always enjoy it and I think people do as well. So, thank you.

• 2:27:49Speaker 07

  Well, our last one did really well in click count and, and I thought it went really well. So, I'm hoping this one stands up to that standard. And I always enjoy the chat, even if you forgot to record it.

• 2:28:03Speaker 07

  I've had that happen. I've had people forget to record.

• 2:28:06Anthony Pompliano?

  Of course. I've never done that, but you know. Dave Callum, ladies and gentlemen, thank you so much.

• 2:28:12Speaker 07

  Thank you.