#1289 Dave Collum Says Disaster Is Coming In 2024

Dave Collum is a Professor of Chemistry at Cornell University. In this conversation we discuss his year in review of 2023, which includes financial markets, bitcoin, digital totalitarianism, political landscape, climate change, biological males, and more. ======================= Base is making it their mission to bring a billion people onchain. But what exactly is Base? It's an Ethereum L2 offering a seamless experience for both builders and users. With near-zero gas fees and rapid transaction speeds, Base is shaping the future of the onchain world. Base is a canvas for everyone, with hundreds of apps in the Base ecosystem, whether you're an emerging creator, a seasoned developer, or someone exploring the onchain space for the first time, Base is designed to bring your ideas to life. So, if you're looking for a platform where the future of onchain is being built daily, Base is your destination. Join in and make onchain the next online. Learn more at ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠base.org⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ and follow along on Twitter at @BuildOnBase to see cool things to do onchain, everyday. ======================= Trust and Will has simplified the process of creating and managing your will or trust online. They leverage a data-driven, design-first approach and amazing customer support to help you protect your legacy from the comfort of your home starting at just $159. Sign up today for 10% off using ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://trustandwill.com/pomp⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ======================= Pomp writes a daily letter to over 250,000+ investors about business, technology, and finance. He breaks down complex topics into easy-to-understand language while sharing opinions on various aspects of each industry. You can subscribe at https://pomp.substack.com/

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

• 0:02Anthony Pompliano?

  What's up everyone? This is Anthony Pompliano. Many of you know me as Pomp. You're listening to the Pomp Podcast, which is my effort to find the most interesting people in the world and sit with them for hours while I ask questions in an effort to learn. So it would mean the world to me if you would subscribe to the show on your favorite audio platform, watch episodes on YouTube, and tell your friends and family about the podcast. My goal is to help millions learn from the world's most interesting people. So let's get into today's episode. This episode has become an annual tradition. It is a conversation with Dave Collum, professor of chemistry at Cornell University. Dave puts together a year in review every single year. This year is almost 200 pages and it is definitely worth reading.

• 0:46Anthony Pompliano?

  Dave and I sat down and we talked about many of the different themes, including his investment portfolio and how he sees financial markets, why he divorced his equities in 1999 and married gold and cash. And then we talk about things like the physical metal market, why he sees the US stock market in deep, deep trouble and potentially headed towards a major correction. And then we talk about a number of other topics that he covered. Now Dave has no shyness at all in his body. He's willing to talk about the things that most people don't want to discuss and they even think may be taboo in society. I don't agree with everything that Dave writes or talks about, but it sure is interesting to listen to how somebody who's obviously a highly intelligent person thinks about the world and many of the different developments that have occurred recently.

• 1:29Anthony Pompliano?

  Other topics include why he thinks climate change is a scam, why he thinks that writing about certain topics is essential to American democracy and freedom, how we can think about biological males competing in women's sports. And then we even get into things like why we are already being ruled by algorithms and how authoritarian CBDCs, digital IDs, facial recognition software, and carbon budgets all are marching us towards digital authoritarianism. I really enjoyed this conversation with Dave as I do every single year. This one is a doozy, so I hope that you enjoy my conversation with Dave Cullum.

• 2:06Speaker 01

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

• 2:30Anthony Pompliano?

  Today's episode is brought to you by Base. Base is making it their mission to bring a billion people on-chain. What exactly is Base? It's a layer two offering a seamless experience for both builders and users. With near zero gas fees and rapid transaction speeds, Base is shaping the future of the on-chain world. Base is a canvas for everyone with hundreds of apps in the ecosystem, whether you're an emerging creator, a seasoned developer, or someone exploring the on-chain space for the first time. Base is designed to bring your ideas to life. So if you're looking for a platform where the future of on-chain is being built daily, Base is your destination. Join in and make on-chain the next online. Learn more at base.org or follow along on Twitter at BuildOnBase.

• 3:13Anthony Pompliano?

  Again, that's at BuildOnBase to see cool things to do on-chain every single day. Today's episode is brought to you by Trust and Will. I've gone through a number of different changes in my life over the last few years. I got married, I had a kid, and I had to start thinking about how could I ensure that my wife and my child would be okay if anything ever happened to me? That's where Trust, Wills, and Estate Planning come into play. Now, most people, what they do is they get introduced to a friend, an uncle, or someone in their local community. It tends to be someone who's really expensive, a lawyer, an accountant, or somebody who does estate planning, and they just simply are using a one-size-fits-all template and just telling you, "Pay me thousands of dollars and I'll use the same thing for you as the guy down the street." But that's not what Trust and Will does.

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• 4:40Anthony Pompliano?

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• 4:48Anthony Pompliano?

  All right, guys. Bang, bang. I have Mr. Dave Cullum back again. It's going to be a spicy conversation, as I think we've had multiple times. But Dave, I thought the first place that we could start with your year in review is on the financial markets. You've got all the weird stuff. You've got the conspiracy theories. You've got all the craziness in there, just like every other year. But the financial markets really, I think, tell a story that weaves many of these other things in there together. And what a lot of people may not know about you is you had this epic investing run up until about 2009. And then you started to change your mind about how financial markets worked, about assets that maybe you wanted exposure to or didn't want exposure to. Help us understand over the last couple of decades, like, how has your thought process about investing, especially

• 5:31Anthony Pompliano?

  the macro market, changed? And then, how is it being expressed today in the portfolio?

• 5:37Speaker 02

  So I actually should preface this with one of the most cunning emails I got after publishing this thing. I get a lot of support from a good friend who's a famous money manager in Europe. And he said, I think you've lost your edge in investing. And I think it's because you're focusing on all that other crap. And what I think he has backwards is two things. One is that I'm hunkered down for the apocalypse. And so if I can get a 6% return, then I can say a huge win because I'll take 6% all day for the time being. Where what I do will either work or not is when we do have the next serious downturn, which

• 6:21Speaker 02

  I think is going to be a whopper, and how I do during that, right? That'll determine whether I've been smart or stupid. But he also has it backwards in the sense that I'm sitting on my hands like crazy, right? So I've got my position. And now I'm just waiting for the markets to, you know, game day to start. And so what do I do? Well, I focus on the other crap. And that's the way it's what else am I going to read? I can read all the overvaluation crap I want. And it's not going to change my mind at this point. I'm just waiting for the recession and the serious sell off and what I think will be exceedingly painful, period.

• 7:04Speaker 02

  So in any event, so by way of investing, I started out 100% bonds 1980. And there's people say, well, it would have been nice to be in equities. Well, at bonds had about a 12 to 15% return for that decade. So it by no means was a bad move. Eighty seven crash. I was chatting with a senior colleague in the coffee room and and we were talking about it and he said, you know, and I knew nothing about investing. When I was a kid, I thought I wanted to go to Wall Street, but I'd launched since not paid attention. He said, yeah, I don't own equities. And I sort of looked at, I said, you know, you're right. So post eighty seven crash, I moved heavily into equities.

• 7:43Speaker 02

  And I was a raging tech bull, which, which is incomprehensible to the people who know me now, incomprehensible. And I was buying, you know, I didn't buy dot coms. I looked at eBay, did some math and said, no, it's overvalued too much. And, uh, but I owned Dell and I own WorldCom. I got, I got into WorldCom when it was a tiny little company in, in, in Mississippi. And I got out in 99, just so, so that was quite a feat. That was, uh, that would turn out to be just sort of raw luck. I was fear of the markets. So in any event, so I became a tech bull probably in early nineties and I really believed, I mean, I was really Kool-Aid swelling, rocking and rolling. And, and then it wasn't so crazy either.

• 8:29Speaker 02

  And then it got crazy. And in mid 98, I had studied the structures of markets enough. And I moved half my equities out. I just, I just went to safe haven and said, there's just something wrong here. And, uh, and then almost to the day, we sort of marched our way into the Asian crisis. And I said, you know, you're either a genius or an idiot. I'm not sure which, because you left half exposed and you got half out of harm's way. And I swore I'd get the rest out if it came back and it came back. So by mid 99, I was selling my Dell and Warner Lambert and WorldCom and, and, and, and rational software and all, all these companies, BMC Software.

• 9:12Speaker 02

  My old roommate in college was Goldman's Software. He started their software group, got named Rick Sherlin.

• 9:20Speaker 02

  And so I was getting some pretty good information out of him and then I just I emptied my portfolio completely out of equities by mid 99 and the Nasdaq was rocking making me look like an asshole and I went into gold, I went into gold cash and I actually went into the prudent bear short fund which I've done twice and done well twice and I will never do it again because I'm just, I shouldn't be shorting, it's just, it's a fool's game. But um, so I was buying gold from 290 down to 270 and then I couldn't take any more pain, but I had a standing off at the local coin shop said, "Look, you get a couple ounces

• 10:02Speaker 02

  of gold, I'll pay you cash for it." For about the next, I don't know, seven years, up to about 457 an ounce, I bought gold and funny story, at one point he said to me, I was actually at 457 an ounce and he said, "Don't you think this is the top?" He knows I'm gonna buy it, so he doesn't care. I said, "No, how many guys are buying gold from you?" And he said, "Four, total." And I said, "And the other three are friends of mine, right?" He said, "Yeah." I said, "I sent them to you, didn't I?" And he said, "Yeah." And I says, "That sound like a mania to you?" And he said, "No." And uh, so in any case, and then I, so I carried the gold all the way up to 1900 in the early 2000s, the best

• 10:46Speaker 02

  analysis I ever did is I bought Philip Morris, the analysis was right. So, yeah, the fact I made 700% of WorldCom, I'm not proud of it because I didn't know what I was doing. But Philip Morris, I knew what I was doing, I really did it right. And so I did well by that and the various tobacco stocks. And then I also went into energy, I tried to go into commodities, I talked to Jimmy Rogers' partner for about two hours, I talked to a market maker in the Rogers' commodity fund, it was too sketchy for me, I don't like sketchy and it would have been fine. So I just went into fidelity commodity equity,

• 11:26Speaker 02

  so I just started buying, you know, the funds that had all the big cap oils and stuff. And so, so although I actually had years in, at least one year in the 90s where I made 100% plus return.

• 11:45Speaker 02

  And that's the, that's the exposure to the market. And this is where it's crazy. It shows you as a maniac, I was 150% exposed. And so I made like 150%. And so, so I, um, but my best decade was, was the, the 2000s. And it was not the best decade in terms of absolute numbers, but while, while equity investors were getting ravaged by a couple of serious bear markets, um, I compounded 13% a year. Through, from January 1st to 2000, to January, to December 31st of 2009. And that kind of got me on a bit of a map. People sort of, I, I wrote about it and people noticed it and said, oh, wow, that's different. Um.

• 12:29Speaker 02

  And then I wrote about the subprime crisis on May 6th, 2002. Now, I wasn't seeing this. I don't do spreadsheets. I was just picking up from guys like Bill Gross and Josh Rosner and guys saying, look, we, we got a, we got a subprime crisis brewing here. They're, they're really, you know, General Electric's going way out on the risk curve. This is nuts. And, and you know, the, the, the, the Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were looking sketchy. And I wrote about in 2002.

• 13:01Speaker 02

  I told my class, I, I occasionally blurt shit out to the class for no reason. And in March of 2007, I, I turned to the class. I said, the banking system's about to collapse. And the indicator was two things. One is the market ABX index was dropping. That was the derivatives market. And no mainstream press wasn't watching it, but the bloggers were saying, wait a minute, this thing's just going down, down, down. What's going on in there? And there's, I don't know if you know this woman, Tanta, a woman named Tanta. She was blogging on it. Her name was Doris Dungy. And the old veterans will know this. Uh, she was seeking alpha or something. And, um,

• 13:42Speaker 02

  and she was talking about, she says, you don't understand the chaos underneath the surface in the pipes of the system, what's happening. And that's when, you know, they were selling squares and cubes and stuff and, and you know, CPDOs. It was this crazy time. And so, um, I would have, I did have a prudent bear short for that, for that downturn, but, but I would have been bolder, but I didn't trust counterparty at that point because I was really a Doeman Golmer at that point. And so, um. So what amazed me is it really took two more years after I could hear the market crack. And this is what people don't understand. They they hear this cracking noise and that's the market breaking and they think, well,

• 14:24Speaker 02

  okay, but nothing happened. So we're fine. I go, no, that's the first of many, many noises that you're going to hear over the next few years.

• 14:34Speaker 02

  So I was confident. I was so liquid and at the bottom I bought some more tobacco, but not much of anything because I was convinced there was another factor of two in the downturn and and because we had done so much damage and what what I didn't see coming and the best I can tell no one on the planet saw coming was thirty trillion dollars. Right? So there's people said, oh, I saw it. I said, they'd do anything they have to. I go, show me your blog where you said thirty trillion. Because I remember when they bailed out, you know, the Bear Stearns for thirty billion. And it sucked the oxygen out of the room. It's like, holy moly, what just happened? Wow, that's scary.

• 15:18Speaker 02

  And that's just chump change, right? That's just a bad day in some regional bank now. And and and so I just and and I'm not and and and of course you'll hang out of the gold because because because if they're going to dump thirty trillion, but but something somehow the inflation didn't catch and it's because they were basically shoving it into the Federal Reserve as reserves and so it wasn't getting into the pause of the people. And so it wasn't going direct, as they say.

• 15:49Speaker 02

  So I really miss the inflation thing. I thought inflation should have gone wild. And so I was basically liquid gold. You know, I I had the the energy till about sixteen, which I overstayed my welcome there. Started going back in twenty, thanks to Jesse Felder. And thanks to kicking Exxon out of the Dow. I said, you kick Exxon out of the Dow, replace it with Salesforce.com. I'm buying Exxon. That that's real straightforward. And but not a big, because big enough that I care, but not big enough to to really to really, you know, it's not life changing and

• 16:30Speaker 02

  And um, and so I've been, you know, sort of compounding four or five percent a year for through a decade where everyone else is partying like crazy. And so, so I've got people saying, you know, you're such an idiot, you know, when are you going to admit you're wrong? But, but there's one metric on Wall Street that, that is never going to be broken. And that is that, that, that the valuations of the market will mean regress. And, and the markets are, yes, absolutely. Yes, I do.

• 17:01Anthony Pompliano?

  Now, so, um, one of the ideas that I see circulating online, and I, I don't know yet, uh,

• 17:10Anthony Pompliano?

  all of the nuance surrounding it, but, but I think the main idea is QE and what they did in 2009 broke the market. And now you have this world where anytime there are going to be these market drawdowns, they rush in, they're gonna, you know, kind of outlaw bear markets, outlaw recessions. Um, and because of that, the historical valuation metrics are harder to use to evaluate today what is overvalued and what is not overvalued. So how do you kind of balance that the macro environment may have changed, the tools they use may have changed when you're using those valuation metrics?

• 17:48Speaker 02

  Um, well, so, so to make the assumption that the valuations are never coming down means that you will own investments. Let's say we're 150% overvalued. So you're making, so the markets are priced to make 40% of what you would if the markets were priced at fair value. So, um,

• 18:09Speaker 02

  there's a plot in my year in review, I've got an even better one that Ron Gray sent to me, um, that shows the S and P over the last hundred years corrected for M2 money supply, which is a far cleaner inflation metric than, and I don't think he's published that. That's the funny thing. I think he just sent that to me. I'm, I'm not sure. And I don't know if I've never seen, I've been watching for it. I've never seen anyone else publish it. But, but what it shows is, is, is that if you correct the markets for M2 money supply, which seems like a stunningly clean way to correct for inflation, um, over the last hundred years, the markets have drifted downward.

• 18:47Speaker 02

  Slightly. Now, so the conclusion that I drew from that is that, is that all you got were dividends. So now, back at the 100 years ago, markets were returning 6.5% yield, dividends, and now they're returning 1.5%. So, so that, so, so if you want to say the markets are going to stay up at this price, you have to say, and therefore I'm going to get a return of about a third of what I would have normally gotten. Now, he sent me a, a modified version of the plot in which he did the total return.

• 19:23Speaker 02

  And the total return turns out to be, over 100 years, 3.79%. That is the dividends, right? So that's it. So, so my claim that it's all dividends, that's what the average dividend was over that period. Now, the interesting thing is that, um, that Buffett, in his faith, iconic 1999 Fortune article, said that the, after you're all done, and by the way, his, his, uh, Grice's plot does not include taxes and fees and shit. It's just the market index. So you take a, a 3.79% return over 100 years and start pulling that other shit out of there. You're hurt.

• 20:02Speaker 02

  I mean, you're really hurt. Um, Buffett said the most you can ever hope to get by the time you're done unwinding everything, but he didn't include taxes, was 4%. Now, everyone says, oh, Warren Buffett knows everything, but then they ignore that 4% part. And, um, and so that's about right. That's what Grice's plot shows. And, um, and, and that's what Ben Graham said years ago. And Ben Graham said, look, stocks and bonds are going to return the same over a long period. Period. Um, Ed Macquarie followed up on that, same thing. So people have an expectation, which as you know, since you suffered your way through this damn thing,

• 20:42Speaker 02

  as you know, for the last 40 years, the markets have been on a royde rage. So, so the recency bias is not from 2000, it's not from, it's not from 2008 or 9, it's not from, it's not from 2000, it's not from, it's, it's not from 1987, it's from 1981.

• 21:01Speaker 02

  And it turns out the most stunning statistic from 1981 is that the market valuations, this is getting to your point, the market valuations, not the, which are inherently inflation corrected, because it's the price divided by something that attract like GDP or sales or revenues or Tobin's Q or whatever. Um, okay, Schiller, um, it, it turns out that they compounded a little over 3% a year for 40 goddamn years. That means you had a three, three point something percent tailwind from the low of 81 where you couldn't give that shit away to the high

• 21:42Speaker 02

  where people would buy any piece of shit that, that moved. Um, so, so, so then the question I asked rhetorically is what happens over the next 40 years when that 3% turns into a negative 3%? And it will. I just don't know when. But it will. I mean, there, there's a, there's a, there's a sort of a, if you go back to, you know, ancient Rome or something, you'll find there's a, there's a margin of return that's modest, but it's above inflation. You know, that's what you demand. You're, you're not going to ask for inflation payment. You're going to ask for something a little above. And, and, um, and if, if you're priced to get almost nothing, then you'll get almost nothing.

• 22:23Anthony Pompliano?

  So you essentially in the letter say that you divorced equities in 99 and you married gold and cash, right? Um, when you look at that, uh, there's a whole new generation of people who actually agree with your thesis and say, you know what? I want to hold some cash to spend and I want to hold, uh, some sort of asset that will benefit from this inflation that has, you know, sound money principles. They seem to be going towards Bitcoin, not gold.

• 22:53Speaker 02

  Right.

• 22:53Anthony Pompliano?

  Each time we've talked, you've had a little bit varied view of Bitcoin. How do you think about it now?

• 22:59Speaker 02

  Well, I know an awfully large number of smart people who are enthusiastic about Bitcoin. What keeps me away from Bitcoin, people don't understand a couple of things. One is I'm a bit of a Luddite. And Bitcoin is a digital asset. And I don't even trust the damn cloud, right? I don't trust, I have trouble with that. I've had cloud storage screw me up and, you know, I password problems and stuff like that. So, so I find, and at one point I couldn't get stuff out of box. I put a bunch of important stuff in the box, I couldn't get it out and they said, oh, by the way, you're over your limit and I gotta pay for more storage. I'm going, to get my shit out? Are you kidding me?

• 23:43Speaker 02

  And so, um, so Bitcoin, I know I can hear all the Bitcoin guys going, oh, but they can't touch us. I go,

• 23:51Speaker 02

  I kinda don't, first, first and foremost, I don't need the half of having to worry about the tech behind Bitcoin. Now, I think if I spent huge amounts, I'm reading about it, I would come to terms with it, but it's still a digital asset to me. It's still something that I could imagine somehow, when they finally suck me, if I go into Bitcoin, one could argue that's when you guys should sell. Right? And every hodler out there seems to want me to go into Bitcoin. I'm like the holdout or something. I don't know what it is, but boy, they all go at me. And they're civil. I think the hodlers are, you know, I think they understand that I'm sympathetic.

• 24:31Speaker 02

  Um, the second thing is, is I am confident that at some point you guys either gonna be absorbed by the state or do battle with the state. And that's a capital S state. That's not, that's, and, and you have it yet. Right? That day is in the future sometime. And, you know, once in a while you hear a Yellen or, you know, Christine Lagarde or someone say something that's sort of a shot across your bow and you guys flip her off and, you know.

• 25:01Speaker 02

  But, but at some point, I think you're gonna have to do battle with the state. I think it's gonna be epic. It's gonna be Battle of the Bastards, I call it. And, and,

• 25:11Speaker 02

  You guys are gonna win or lose? I'm not interested in participating in that battle right now. It hasn't caught my attention. Now, Lynn Alden made one of the more interesting cases. She kind of presented it as the equivalent of stitching diamonds in the hem of your clothes, escaping some totalitarian regime. And you have your codes, right? You have your codes. And that I'm more sympathetic to, except I'm too old to be running from. You know, I'm the old guy sitting in the middle of Kiev going, fuck you, I'm not moving. Right?

• 25:52Speaker 02

  So.

• 25:52Anthony Pompliano?

  So, uh, one of your big themes is that the totalitarianism is increasing all around us.

• 25:58Speaker 02

  It is.

• 25:59Anthony Pompliano?

  And to a degree, it's already here, right? Especially in this kind of digital, um, overlords. So it's surprising to me that.

• 26:07Speaker 02

  I know.

• 26:08Anthony Pompliano?

  You are sympathetic, but also you don't want to buy it.

• 26:12Speaker 02

  Well, so the other problem is, is I wouldn't go, there's, there's, it'd be very hard for me to picture going in deeply enough to be life-changing. So as I, you know, I did this great analysis of Phil Morris. I made a lot of money over the years. It was not life-changing. If all those, I, I, I bet on, I bet on Russia's the RSX index. Two days before, I had owned it for several years. I wasn't alone. Grant Williams was interested in it too, and copying these guys. But two days before it went south, I said, I'm, I'm taking a flyer on it. And I bought it. And then it went to zero, right? It might come back. I don't think so.

• 26:54Speaker 02

  I, I think by the time it comes back, JP Morgan will find a way to steal my RSX. But, um, but, but at the same time, there's no way I would have gone deep enough into it to really make a killing, because I don't, I don't do it that way. I average in over time, so I could average into Bitcoin over time. Um, people say, what price would interest you? It's not about price. It's, it's, it's about, it's about the, the, the battle with the state and the annoyance of having to worry about my codes and shit. It just, it's just not. It's not interesting to me. I'm sort of gonna hang with gold and I have physical gold.

• 27:34Speaker 02

  And so it's, I'm, you know, Bitcoin light by that model. I'm a godler.

• 27:42Anthony Pompliano?

  So let's talk about some of the topics that you covered.

• 27:46Speaker 02

  Okay. And there's a, there's a third, there's a third one that I haven't completed writing on, which is the darkness. It's total dark lord shit.

• 27:54Anthony Pompliano?

  I saw that in January 2024, the third part will come out. So.

• 27:59Speaker 02

  If, if I can finish writing and it's so painful to write, I don't know, but go ahead.

• 28:03Anthony Pompliano?

  All right. Digital totalitarianism. You have a section, you say, we are already being ruled by algorithms and our future is offering up authoritarian CBDCs, digital IDs, facial recognition software and carbon budgets, all enabled with AI. It is a march towards digital authoritarianism. Is there any way to stop it? Or is this just like a foregone conclusion?

• 28:25Speaker 02

  I don't think so. So, so the, the troublesome thing is, is that,

• 28:33Speaker 02

  is at the basal level, not even humans trying to get us sort of level, but just the, the creep of, of every time you use your credit card or every time you go through security at the airport or whatever, you're, you're, you're handing it a, a decision over to an algo. And it's going to say yes or no. It's always binary. Yes, let them through. No, kill them, you know, whatever. And, and every time you put in your credit card, it says, yes, you, you get to buy that item or no, you don't. And, and, and I gotta confess, I'm annoyed when I have to go find my phone to log into some website.

• 29:12Speaker 02

  Because it, they want to do the double, double password shit. And, and I go, you know, I, this site's not that important to ask me to do that. My bank account's fine, but this site's not worthy. And so, so.

• 29:27Speaker 02

  We are going to increasingly ask computers to make decisions for us. So my wife has health problems, as you know, and, and I have to go through all these health portals and, and I'm reading my own lab reports and shit. And I, I made a joke, I thought it was funnier than shit, about how you're gonna do your next colonoscopy using a robotic gerbil fitted with a GoPro camera that you run off your iPhone.

• 29:54Speaker 02

  But medical care is getting like that. And, and so we're really, we're, every time you hand over the, one time I got, I was on a, a help call, I was at, called to a helpline. And, and I'm really sympathetic to what it's like to be on the end of one of those, right? Because everyone's always pissed off about something. And I lost my shit. Because I kept saying, look, I don't understand this word that you're using. And then I got off the phone after having lost my shit. And I thought, were you talking to a computer?

• 30:28Speaker 02

  Because it felt like it was circling around. And, and I realized, I said, you, you're talking to AI computer. And, and I, I don't want to talk to an AI computer. I don't want to read a blog, not knowing if it's written by AI or a person. Right? I don't want to read AI blogs. I think there are times where an AI write-up on something would be instructive. But we can end up in a point where everything online is just AI. And by the way, it turns into gibberish fast when it's just AI. Someone mentioned that recently, where they said, when AI is feeding off of AI, it spirals out of control real fast. Now, they might fix that. But that's, I'm right now reading Michael Malice's book called The White Pill.

• 31:13Speaker 02

  It's, it's a stunningly good book. It's about the Soviet Union and how awful it was. And, and you're left with this, do not let that happen here. It's, so, so here, here's the, the short story of, of this book, just to get your attention. We know that Stalin killed 40 million.

• 31:31Speaker 02

  What no one knows, or very, very few people know, is how, what transpired while 40 million people were getting killed. He didn't just line them up and shoot them in ditches. It was, society completely imploded on itself. And it just turned, it just, it just went completely toxic. And somehow was created by first Lenin and then Stalin, but, but, but, but the message is very clear to me. Don't let that happen here. And you can see it happening here. Now, we're miles and miles from that. Maybe the US and the Western world doesn't have the Russian DNA, like cultural DNA, to ever go there.

• 32:16Speaker 02

  But it's possible, and I'm, I'm infuriated with the current administration who seems to have no respect for the Constitution. And, and you can say, ah, he's just a right winger, you know, no, no, I would be appalled. I, you know, I didn't support. I, I went totally negative on George Bush when he got us into Iraq, you know, no, I'm not just a right winger. But, but this administration is, is, is totally throwing the basic principles of who we are under the bus.

• 32:46Anthony Pompliano?

  What are some examples?

• 32:48Speaker 02

  Uh, the border. Let's start with the border. So they're just letting people flood through the border. I'm not against immigration.

• 32:56Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, let's unpack this because I think that, um, there's a big portion of the audience that, uh, they understand kind of what's happening, right? They see the videos online, et cetera. Why do you think it's happening? Do you think it is, uh, a conspiracy that, you know, they've come together and they said, hey, we should do this because, you know, I've seen theories that, uh, it'll increase the number of people who vote Democrat. All the way to, uh, the other extreme, which is like, no, this is a complex problem. People are incompetent. And therefore, rather than try to come up with a solution, they just say, screw it. Let whatever happened, happens. And that leads to, you know, hundreds of thousands of people come across the border every year. Like, which?

• 33:35Speaker 02

  That one, I, that one I don't believe.

• 33:38Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay.

• 33:38Speaker 02

  I don't, I don't, I don't even, I don't even see a token of it. Right now, if you listen to that liar press conference, uh, press secretary Karen, what's her name?

• 33:50Speaker 02

  She's out claiming right from day one, they tried to get control of the border. There's not a shred of evidence, not a shred. So, so no, they, they welcomed everyone. They could shut off the border. They could have done it. They fought Trump the whole way when he tried to do it. And so, uh,

• 34:07Speaker 02

  there's, there's a benign interpretation. One benign interpretation is that someone's watching Peter Zeihan and saying, we need more people. And Zeihan is, you know, this demographer who's a neocon of a higher order, but he's a demographer. And he says, look, our, I wear at 1.6, you know, population replacement, which means we're going to have trouble. We're going to have a terrible time, but not as bad as other countries, but we're going to have a terrible time. And so, so one could argue that someone has a twisted view of how to solve that problem. That's the most benign. It looks to me like it's an attempt to destroy the concept of a border. So it's, it looks to me like it's a globalist move. And, and, and if, you know, there's two nationalists in the world

• 34:51Speaker 02

  who are really devout nationalists that, that, that you can name. Uh, there's more, um, but, but, but there's two really stand out. And the two are, are, are Trump and Putin.

• 35:04Speaker 02

  And, and, and who's getting the most guff, right? Trump and Putin. And, and so I would say that, um, I would say that, um, that the United States stands between the globalists, the guys who really do want to have a borderless world for some reason that I don't quite understand, except for power. Power is everyone seems to want.

• 35:27Speaker 02

  And so you destroy the borders, right? And you get, you know, I used to laugh off the Soros arguments, but then he starts, you know, he's been helping place DAs and stuff. And, you know, the January 6th to me was one of the most heinous periods. Post-January 6th was the most heinous periods of, of American history. I, that we've locked people away for years. For having gone to a protest and I can hear people screaming going, no, no, they did this, they did that. No, they didn't. Those were feds in the crowd. The, the, the, the crowd, nothing was going to happen without the feds intervening at January 6th. Nothing bad, nothing really bad was going to happen. And, and then, you know, there's 40,000 hours of tape and they won't, they still won't release it. But whenever they do, you go, holy shit, that guy didn't do anything. And you got how many years in prison, right?

• 36:12Anthony Pompliano?

  So I don't know if you know who this person is, Felix Somari.

• 36:17Speaker 02

  I know the name.

• 36:18Anthony Pompliano?

  The Raven of Zurich. This took me months to track down.

• 36:25Anthony Pompliano?

  And for those that don't know, uh, he was very well respected and he was able to call a number of market tops bottoms throughout the world wars.

• 36:35Speaker 02

  Right.

• 36:35Anthony Pompliano?

  And, um, uh, became sort of a trusted confidant of many bankers, economists, et cetera. And in the book, he has this, uh, story when he was a young kid, he's like 12, 13 years old. Uh, there's a shoemaker that he's talking with and the shoemaker, uh, has an accent. And he's, you know, a shithead 12 year old, right? He starts making fun of the, of the guy's accent. And his dad basically slaps him and says, you know, hey, we don't do that here. And in the book, he claims that from then on, he was immune. I think the exact quote is, I was immune to the virus of any nationalism.

• 37:07Speaker 02

  Right.

• 37:08Anthony Pompliano?

  And so I think.

• 37:10Speaker 02

  Nationalism doesn't require though.

• 37:15Speaker 02

  We have states, right?

• 37:17Anthony Pompliano?

  Yes.

• 37:17Speaker 02

  I don't sit there and look at the guys in Pennsylvania, say, oh, those fucking Pennsylvania douchebags. It's just a way of organizing society.

• 37:25Anthony Pompliano?

  So break down the difference between what I think some people see as like, uh, nationalism driven by hate and a zero sum game. Versus kind of more the organizational things, the, the pride of being from a nation, the, you know, what I would consider much more innocent view of the importance of nationalism, not so much a zero sum game, but maybe actually a positive sum game.

• 37:48Speaker 02

  Well, so, so, as you, I've, I've read a lot of anthropology, for example, I, I love history.

• 37:57Speaker 02

  As society got bigger, right, we went from, you know, a dozen guys running through some jungle in Borneo to, uh, across the savanna, to, to bigger groups like 150, you start picking up structurally different societies. By, by necessity, right, so that pure anarchists just don't get it. Uh, the, the, you, you have to somehow start building structure. And I think there's kind of a natural evolution of structure. And so, at, at this point, the, the, the, the, the nation state is kind of the natural, um, structure for the current world. And now, the globalists might say, yes, but we're heading away from the current world, and therefore, we should go to a globalist world.

• 38:41Speaker 02

  But it's also a world that they want to run. And that's, you know, it's like, it's, I have a quote in there where some says, you know, you know, you know, follow people who are trying to find the truth, you know, be wary of those who actually think they found it. Um, and so, um, so the nation state still, to me, makes sense. And, and, and, um, I, I don't want some guy in Brussels telling us to not eat meat, for example, which is the stupid shit stuff that they're already pushing, right? So, all, already, the, the globalist view of the world is looking so stupid.

• 39:22Speaker 02

  So stupid, evil, some combination of the two, that I don't want anything to do with it. Uh, it just doesn't make sense. I, I actually think in some sense, one of the reasons why I'm a pro-choice guy, but Roe v. Wade, in some sense, makes sense. Because I don't see there, why there's, why, why Mississippi should necessarily have to follow same moral values as California.

• 39:45Speaker 02

  They're really different populations in a profound sort of way. And I know that Roe v. Wade happens to be a highly charged issue. But there's still little sort of states' rights mentality in me, and I don't think we should. I think there's a lot of things that should be at the state level. But I see things happening on a daily basis that that seem so evil to me, like now there's two states that have tried to keep Trump off the ballot. The woman in Maine, I did a tweet the other day that got a lot of support.

• 40:21Speaker 02

  I said, "Should she be tried for depriving both us and Trump of our civil rights?" You know, there are crimes in which you deprive someone of their civil rights. That's how they convict some people and stuff. And I said, "If she takes him off the ballot, that's depriving me of my civil rights." And so I think she should be convicted. If, if, if it turns out the story that we're being told is correct, right? It always comes back to that. For all we know, it's a fake story, for Christ's sake. For all we know, a robot wrote the damn thing. And, but, but, but it was truly unbelievable to me that the Colorado Supreme Court, for example, could take him off the ballot.

• 41:03Speaker 02

  These are, these are supposed to be super learned judicial people. And I think a five-year-old could explain to them why they made a mistake. I mean, I think, I can explain it. I used to go home from faculty meetings and talk to my, you know, son, who was like seven. Say, "Thomas, here's the setup, boom, boom, boom, what do you do?" And he'd say, "Here's what you do." And I go, "Yeah, my colleagues don't seem to see that part," you know? And so, so the fact they took him off a ballot is, to me, truly extraordinary. And, and it's, and then you have to say, but it can't even be for the reason that it appears to be, right? It's, it's not.

• 41:47Speaker 02

  There's something else altogether. They're trying, if it was a Republican court, I'd say, well, they're trying to generate support for the guy. Cause it sure as hell, I'm, I'm voting for Trump, period. I want to see him get in there and go Green Goblin. I, I, I've just lost my shit at this point. I, I, I want him to get in there and cause trouble.

• 42:06Anthony Pompliano?

  There's context here that I think if people haven't read the year in review, they need to understand. In 2016, I think you say you begrudgingly voted for him or cautiously.

• 42:15Speaker 02

  Very reluctantly, cautiously.

• 42:16Anthony Pompliano?

  Um, and then in 2020, you were kind of agnostic. Explain a little bit as to why were you cautious or, you know, kind of reluctant in 2016? Why agnostic in 2020? And now I hear both in the letter, but also, uh, from you, it sounds like a much more kind of hardened heels dug in on voting for him. What, what is that evolution like?

• 42:37Speaker 02

  Well, so the first evolution was I, I had been aware of Trump, the developer, Trump, the narcissist, Trump, the, so in 16, um, in 16, when he ran, I said, this guy's just Looney Tunes, right? Now, I actually had read, um, an article written in 1984 about him as a developer. It was really interesting because everyone found him beyond annoying, but he always got the deal. He always got, they'd say, you know, everyone wanted that piece of real estate. Somehow Donald got it. And I can't understand how he did it. And people would say, you know, after a while, you just say, Donald, just tell me what you want. Just, just, and that's how he works. Right? And, and I, I watched the

• 43:20Speaker 02

  documentary recently and they, he built a huge office complex one time and he didn't get any of the signatures. Wife gone, oh, that's so criminal. And I go, that's chutzpah. I, I, that's, no, that's, that's not just criminal. That's a guy who, who really, and, and the, the concrete workers were on strike, but his, his, his building was getting concrete. He go, oh, that's because he's in with the mob. He's such a bad person. I go, he's getting the job done. Right? And so there's always two that those sort of two sides to Trump. And um, and I watched him knock off 13 Republican candidates. I'm going, boy, that was impressive. The way he did that, even though someone referred to it as incompetent. And I go, he just knocked

• 44:05Speaker 02

  off 13 people, right? Now he's going against Hillary, right? No one else could have done that. That's not incompetent. It's extraordinary. So, uh, I could have voted for Bernie over Trump. Because I thought, ah, he's generic. They'll neuter him. He can't do any damage. Although I'm not positive that's true. So Trump gets in office. You'd be hard pressed to name something he did that was really bad. You really would be hard pressed. You can always a liar. I go, oh, no one ever lies in DC, right? Trump's a bullshit. Biden's a liar. They're different. Trump will say, I caught a fish this damn big. And Biden will say, I graduated from this college, first of my class, and he didn't graduate from that college, right? One's a

• 44:49Speaker 02

  lie. One's bullshit. Um, and so I had no trouble voting for him in 2020. But I wasn't sure I wanted more the chaos. I was thinking if they Dems could come up with a candidate and bring us back to earth a little bit, that would be okay with me. And then watching what they've done to him over the next four years, I go, okay, let's elect him. He knows where the spoons and forks are. He knows, he knows, when he first got into office, he couldn't build a cabinet. He couldn't, he didn't know who to trust. He couldn't trust anyone from either party. Neither party wanted him in there. He now has his war, war cabinet. And I want to see him do it. Now, it could get ugly. But it's not his fault. Not in

• 45:34Speaker 02

  my opinion.

• 45:36Anthony Pompliano?

  So I have heard, uh, stories through the rumor mill of people who either worked in the administration or, uh, know Trump, that when he first got into office, uh, there would be situations where, you know, he's sleeping at night, and he would get a phone call. And so the staff member would come in and say, you know, excuse me, President, I'm sorry to wake you up, but, uh, there's a general on the line in Iraq, Afghanistan, wherever. And basically, they were calling and they needed the president's approval for, you know, a strike, very similar to Obama having to give the final order to go after Osama bin Laden and things like this. And supposedly, Trump would be like, was he a bad guy?

• 46:14Speaker 02

  Right.

• 46:14Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay, we'll kill him.

• 46:16Speaker 02

  Right, the simplicity of it. I mean, there's, there's, and he's not stupid. If you watch his documentary, you watch the things he did, people think, wow, you know, he's totally uncontrolled. He went to military academy. He was a leader at the military academy. I mean, he's not, he's not, he's not the loser he appears to be. He's idiosyncratic. That's, that's different. And so, um, and you would be hard pressed to, you know, so that for me, one of the drop dead issues that allowed me to vote for him the first time was he said, we have to get along with the Russians. And I said, he's dead, right?

• 46:58Speaker 02

  And then, of course, they hang Russia collusion all over him and they got nothing. They got, you know, the, the, the Durham report gave a little bit to everyone, but when you got to the bottom line, he explicitly says, we found no collusion, period, none. And, and the, I think it's treasonous to make this shit up the way the Democrats do. I, I, I think that if you really, I don't know what the formal definition of treason is, but in my skull, I have a definition of treason. And when, when you're, to me, it's, it's pretty close to a coup d'etat when you're doing the shit they did against him. And, and, and it looks to me, to me, the Biden administration itself looks like a coup d'etat in its, in the reverse sense. I mean, they're doing shit. Like when Biden was told by

• 47:43Speaker 02

  the Supreme Court, you couldn't cancel student loans. He just tried to find another way to do it. I, what do you do when the president ignores the Supreme Court? They can't just have to rule on him every day. At some point, they gotta be able to say, no, no, Joe, Brandon, whatever your name is, stop. And, and I don't care how many right wing Supreme Courters are, that's sort of the bottom line for me. And so, um, and, and so I, I, I think the Biden administration has been truly horrific. And I think the January 6, um, Stalin-Lenin show trial component of January 6, um, is a horrific chapter in history, horrific chapter in history. And I have friends who say,

• 48:25Speaker 02

  you know, you do the time, the crime, you do the time, right? And I go, well, first of all, show me the crime. Second of all, you know how I defend a January 6 person? It turns out your brain chemistry changes in a mob. Temporary insanity. You could get psychologists who'd say, yes, temporary insanity plays. But there wasn't shit done. It was feds in the goddamn crowd doing the shit. And so I see things that are so, so non to Tocqueville, so, so anti to everything, everything that, that, the sort of fundamental principles that we used to think we stood for. Maybe I was just dead wrong. Um, there was some bad shit at the turn of the century in

• 49:10Speaker 02

  the United States. It was happening, some really non constitutional things.

• 49:15Speaker 02

  And so, so that's, that's what's got me angry. And the problem is, is it's, it's not making me happier. And it's, it's also, I don't see where it's getting me closer to some sort of solution. So that's the problem.

• 49:32Anthony Pompliano?

  Let me ask one last question on politics and we'll go on to some of the other topics.

• 49:37Anthony Pompliano?

  It sounds like you believe Trump will win? Yes or no?

• 49:41Speaker 02

  Oh, I don't know. No, I think they'll rig the election.

• 49:44Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay.

• 49:45Speaker 02

  They did, they did the first time. 2020 was rigged. 2020 was rigged.

• 49:50Anthony Pompliano?

  Explain your logic for, for having so much confidence in that now.

• 49:54Speaker 02

  Well, first and foremost, I think there's plenty of evidence.

• 49:58Speaker 02

  Second of all, most importantly, the one that I go, look, look at both parties, by the way. No one wanted him in the White House, correct? Neither party wanted him in the White House. They did everything imaginable to impeachments, indictments, you name it, to keep him out of the White House. Is there any chance? They said, oh, but we can't rig the election?

• 50:23Speaker 02

  You want to bet on that one? No. It's insane to bet on that one. Of course they rigged the election. They've been rigging it for years, but it's kind of a capture the flag rig. Whereas, you know, you know, dinking around over here, ah, they stole Pennsylvania from us, you know, shit like that. This was a wholesale rigging, under the guise of the COVID lockdown and the mail in ballots and all that shit. And Carrie Lake has a great case for the rigged election. And if you, you dig into the Smartmatic voting machines, it turns out through a series of shell companies, they traced to Beijing. I mean, it's just, it's a colossal mess. And, and the problem is, there's, there's no evidence they're gonna ever run a clean election.

• 51:08Speaker 02

  They'll run a clean election when they don't care which side wins. Then they'll let it be clean. But we know we all hate these guys, right? We know we'd vote every last one of them out of office. But they have a 97% reelection rate. That's not rigging. That just shows you the hopelessness. The Democrats' super delegate model is an abomination, right? The, the fact that 30% of the goddamn delegates come from insiders who get to just vote however they're told to vote. That's just staggeringly. But, but it turns out that if you look at the structure of political parties, they're just non-for-profit organizations. The only way you'd stop the Democrats from doing what they do

• 51:53Speaker 02

  and the Republicans from doing what they do, I think, if you, let's say you wanted to stop it. I think you'd have to charge them with some sort of RICO charge and say, "You fundraised under false, under pretenses." Pretenses means false, it turns out, I just kind of realized that. "Under pretenses, you, you, you, you committed fraud by raising money the way you did." That's, that's how I would go at them if, if, if. Now, on the other hand, who wrote the book? God damn it, I can never remember the name. Someone wrote a book about the legality underlying the, the, the court actions, underlying the 2008 to 9 crisis.

• 52:34Speaker 02

  And they talked about all the cases that, that they built against Wall Street guys. And some, some appeals court would spend three hours looking at the data and throw it out after they'd spent months building a case against them. So no one went to jail, right? Nobody. Couple of little guys, couple of, couple of Indian guys from the hedge fund, right? Yeah, get the Indian guys, why not? We don't care about them. Um, and so, uh, and so I, I just see criminal treasonous levels of behavior from a system that I don't remember showing that.

• 53:13Anthony Pompliano?

  Let's talk about climate change, which is another topic, topic that, uh, I think you explicitly said climate change is a scam, uh, in the letter. Explain what, uh, what you think's going on there.

• 53:27Speaker 02

  Well, I have to go back a few years. I've got an email trail, which I've got people pestering me about it. And I'm saying, look, all my friends believe it. The scientific community believes it. I don't know where you're going with this, right? I actually was sitting with the Secretary of Energy one day and told him I was agnostic, and he flinched. I said, it would take me 10,000 hours to figure it out, so I'm not qualified to cast a vote. Um, my brother and some other guy pestered me into digging into it. And I finally, out of frustration, I said to the other guy, his name is David Walker. I said, as far as I know, there's no credible scientists who don't believe this story. And I have to sort of go with the science, right? It was pre-Fauci. Um, he said, oh, yes, there are.

• 54:12Speaker 02

  I said, send me names. So I expect him to send me names of people from Sheboygan State College of Fine Arts, you know, and things like that, and that they're not going to be credible. And they could know, but, but if I'm going to overturn a globally accepted theory, it's going to take more than some guy from Sheboygan, right? And, um, he sends me about 20 names of people who were at elite institutions. So I go, okay, but they're probably a bunch of climate scientists who said this model sucks or that model sucks, and therefore, you know, we got to redo them. And, and the deniers are turning that into, therefore, there's no climate change. So I start Googling them, and that's not what they're saying.

• 54:54Speaker 02

  So you hit guys like, you know, right away, you hit Richard Linsden, former head of the National Academy of Sciences, geophysicist at MIT, says it's the biggest hoax in history. And you go, whoa, whoa. You find out the American Physics Society put together an elite panel of a dozen guys, said, you're charged with looking into this, and they all came out deniers. They all said, this is just crap science, just total crap science. From that group emerged Freeman Dyson, right? That guy's one of the legends of physics. Will Happer, I think, was on that committee. I'm not positive, but, so I can name for you Nobel Prize winners in physics.

• 55:34Speaker 02

  That say that it's totally a farce. So a guy like Richard Kuhn and wrote a book and I think he thought he could have an effect. It's not about science, but he was on the committee. And so he wrote a book and what he does is he kind of tries to tightrope walk where he says, you know, man influences climate, but then he proceeds to torch it. Now he's internally inconsistent because he says, he says, there's not a snowball's chance in hell that the scientific community has the capabilities of predicting the temperature 100 years from now. And here are the 10,000 fucking reasons why. Here are all the things they can't account for. You know,

• 56:17Speaker 02

  physicists at Stanford says the air bar on their numbers, five times the number, you know, there's that the former founder at Greenpeace says this is a complete farce. The guy who ran the NASA satellite program monitoring temperatures said it's a farce. You find out that some of the big climate change guys are compulsive liars, pathological liars. And, and then you start picking up the little tidbits like, you know, the melting glacier. Oh, Dave, look at the melting glacier. And you find out that underneath that glacier 1200 year old trees, which means they grew there 1200 years ago. And therefore the glacier is not melting after a million or 10

• 56:58Speaker 02

  million or 100 million years. It's just going back and forth oscillating. You know, I saw a headline that said it, you know, they hasn't been to this warm in 600 years. I go, let's rewrite the headline. It was this warm 600 years ago. And, and then, you know, you see the picture of starving polar bear. If there's anyone watching this who doesn't have the image of that starving polar bear on an ice floe, it looks pretty emaciated. And you find out the world's expert on Arctic mammals says that the polar bear population has tripled since the seventies. The world's experts on the Great Barrier Reef say the reef oscillates back and forth and it's

• 57:37Speaker 02

  not climate. The increasing salinity of the, of the, of the ocean turns out didn't hold up. They got blown out of the water last year. This year's winner, the Nobel Prize in Physics said that it's such a farce. They came in account for clouds. Clouds, you know how important clouds are and influencing the earth's climate and the sun's radiation and, and so, um, what you find is, I, I got to sit down with, uh, Constantine Tyson for about an hour this, this fall. He's the guy who gave the talk at the Oxford Union, and if you haven't watched it, you really gotta watch it. Um, and, and I said to him, I said, "When you started digging into climate change, how long did

• 58:21Speaker 02

  it take you to figure out that it was a farce?" And he said, "Oh, a couple hours." It's that bad, actually. And so, what you discover is the 97, and Michael Crichton picked out this one, the 97% consensus number, which they all cite, lying their asses off, you lying motherfuckers. If you're a climate person and you cite that number, you're a lying motherfucker. That came from a ridiculous study of a bunch of papers, where they took several thousand papers, looked in the abstract, which I'm okay with, and they threw out all the papers, which the abstract wasn't definitive, and, and said, "What percentage of the, the

• 59:06Speaker 02

  abstracts that made a definitive statement, um, said it was a crisis?" They said 97%. Well, it turns out it was 77 out of 79 papers, out of thousands of papers that they threw away most. Crichton pointed out, he said, "So my 0.4% of the sample size was used to come up with 97% of the, the 97% number." So they're lying, pathological lying. If you're a climate scientist, you quote that number, you're a liar. I'm calling you out. You're a shithead. Okay, I'm that angry at it. And I called the guy, there's a debate here, and I walked up afterwards, I said, "You know you're lying about that number. You cited it. You know you're lying." And he was hamming and hawing like crazy. And

• 59:48Speaker 02

  I said, "You gotta stop doing that." So I'm calling out the serious climate scientists and saying, "If you don't clean up this, if you don't clean up this community, and if you don't start challenging shit, we're just gonna throw you all away. You're just gonna end up on some dusty with all the vax guys who've supported Fauci."

• 1:00:07Speaker 02

  So, yeah, so I, and by the way, Coonan's statement about how manmade climate change is real, but not a problem, and then he proceeds to make the case you can't possibly predict it. He's contradicting himself because he should never say manmade climate change is real if you can't possibly make the prediction. So then, so I saw Thomas Sowell talk about it the other day, and he, he, he points out a very important one. He says, that one alone, I'm waiting for an answer, I'm not getting it. And that is, if you look at, you know, 300,000 years of the CO2 content of the ice, which you can get out of Greenland ice cores,

• 1:00:48Speaker 02

  and the temperature, which you can get various ways, um, which I believe they know how to do it, that the, um, there's an 800-year lag. So you take the two curves, which they correlate beautifully visually. If you look at this play, you go, look at that, CO2 correlates with the climate. Well, there's an 800-year offset. CO2 rises 800 years after the temperature rises. And they're trying to say CO2 is causing the temperature to rise, when in fact, no. What happens is the temperature rises, the oceans degas, the CO2 comes out of the ocean, the CO2 content goes up. And they just lie. They just ignore that. And then they, you know, the, the, the Middle Ages. So Happer, I saw a Happer interview the other day, and

• 1:01:32Speaker 02

  I, I, I did a climate change podcast with a guy who's been following this shit since 07. I said, here's the, here's the killer question. I said, do you know, and this guy, I think is honest. I said, do you know any solar physicist who believed the manmade climate change story? He says, no, not a one. He's been doing podcasts writing about it since 07. Not a single solar physicist believes the climate model. And so Happer starts talking, makes this, they're now changing all the numbers from the past. They're just going back and rewriting the numbers and backfilling. And so what was called the medieval warming period, when it was warmer than it is now, they're trying to rewrite

• 1:02:12Speaker 02

  those numbers to make it cooler. So he says, he says the numbers from the past are now changing.

• 1:02:21Anthony Pompliano?

  You see so many people convinced, or at least saying publicly one thing, but you're coming to a different conclusion. What is the information? Or what is the data that you think could convince people to see it the other way? That are not in the scientific community? Or do you think that this is one of those arguments where logic is, uh, logic succumbs to this like fake morality? And people then believe, oh, to be a good person, I have to believe this thing regardless of what the evidence suggests?

• 1:02:59Speaker 02

  So it's, it's both categories. Um, I think, I think there's sound thinking people that have simply never asked. And if you threw the data at them, I've given several talks on it. No one has ever come up to me and challenged anything I presented. Um, and, and, um, so I think there's people I could convince. If you give me an hour, I could convince them. I could just show them shit after shit after shit that just doesn't make sense. You know, scandals, which the scientists claim they admit they lie because they got to keep the narrative going, that sort of thing. Um, then there's the group that, have you read Eric Hoffer's The True Believer?

• 1:03:40Anthony Pompliano?

  No, I have not.

• 1:03:42Speaker 02

  It's a brilliant book. I know we all get told what books to read, but this is a brilliant book. It's written in 1953 and it's about mass movements. So it's kind of an early version of Matthias Desmet's more recent book. Um, which is also a good book. Um, and, and the true believers are, are sort of the standing army, the people, the, the foot soldiers in, in movements. And they, they, um, typically in these movements, you've got early thinkers, the guys who put forth an idea like, uh, like in the social justice shit, the early thinkers were guys like Herbert Marcuse and his wife and stuff like that. And they put out the idea sort of in the abstract and then, and you get the movers and the shakers.

• 1:04:27Speaker 02

  And what happens is the army. It's not a very flattering view, but the guys who sort of run the ball, really carry the ball, blocking and tackling, are typically serious losers, as described by Hoffer, who have very little to show for their lives. And he says, what that does is tease them up for two things. One is that they say, "Well, anything would be better than what I'm experiencing." That's how you get people to sign off on socialism and things like

• 1:05:05Speaker 02

  that. And by becoming part of a movement, you become more important. You become the true believer. And you now have a sense of purpose. So I threw out a few barbs about climate change in my class, and they landed like bricks. My brother pointed out, he says, "It's like telling some Muslim that Mohammed's a pedophile. It just doesn't work. It's not gonna work." And then I realized, yes, because the kids in my grad course now have been told by every authority figure since daycare, right to the present, that it's a crisis.

• 1:05:49Speaker 02

  What it is, is it's a $150 trillion grift. And everyone who wants a piece of that pie, and when you have a $150 trillion pie, there's a lot of people want a piece of that pie. They'll all sign off on it. I got colleagues, you know, my opening three paragraphs in my grant proposal to DOE is about climate change. Right? They're not gonna come out and say, "Look, climate change is bullshit, but I want money." There are no unfunded climate deniers. There are no funded climate deniers. Darwinian selection has cleaned the scientific community absolutely pristinely out of all the people who would question it. Because they no longer have money, they no longer therefore publish papers, they

• 1:06:34Speaker 02

  no longer have a say. So they no longer have a seat at the table. Which is exactly, by the way, what they did with COVID and the vaccine.

• 1:06:45Anthony Pompliano?

  When you see the oil companies getting added to like the ESG index and Tesla being taken out, is that is that just a signal that even the people who would not normally be associated with ESG, they're really good at lobbying, they're really good at spending money?

• 1:07:00Speaker 02

  They're just grifters. They're just grifters. That's Larry Fink trying to get Vanguard money, right? The ESG, or they're globalists, right? Again, the climate change guys want to tell us what we can eat, what we can't eat. They want to have our phone have some app that tells them we've used up our carbon allocation for the year or for the month, and you can no longer buy steak because you've used too much carbon. It just, it just, these are people, they've, there's polls that say that some like 60% of college kids nowadays are basically socialists. They have no understanding of what socialism has done throughout history. Not a shred of an understanding

• 1:07:44Speaker 02

  of how, not only has it not worked, but it kills people by the countless numbers. Now, capitalism has bad days, but usually that's when capitalism is turning into socialism, right? Or fascism, actually. So when capitalism goes bad, it turns into fascism because they commented on the machinery of government. And then they go destroy the hodlers.

• 1:08:09Anthony Pompliano?

  Another topic that you write about is biological males competing in women's sports.

• 1:08:16Speaker 02

  I haven't written yet, but yes, I'm going at it.

• 1:08:19Anthony Pompliano?

  Well, you at least mention it in the first part. Talk a little bit as to, less about,

• 1:08:29Anthony Pompliano?

  maybe how we got here, but where do we go from here? Is the, like, one of the concepts that I'm really interested in is, there's a number of things. Immigration at the border, whether it is, you know, biological males competing in women's sports leagues, all these things, they have momentum. And to reverse momentum.

• 1:08:48Anthony Pompliano?

  There's only a couple of ways to do it, right? There's some kind of awakening. I think, you know, kind of the lockdowns were an awakening for some people and they literally picked up and they moved to other states. Like, like, there's gotta be some extreme external thing that forces it. Or, there also can be one or a very small group of people with the backbone, the courage, the leadership skills, the communication skills, etc., to stand up and, you know, basically educate folks and say, hey, look, this is not what I agree with. I'm in a leadership position. I'm gonna change it. But outside of those two things, like, how else can the momentum be stopped and potentially reversed?

• 1:09:24Speaker 02

  Well, so the challenge, there is I'm not optimistic, is because they can come up with new things to screw us faster than we can debunk. And I don't like the word debunk in general, because it assumes that you already know the answer and you're gonna collect the data to show the answer. And, um, but, but, but, so, so let's say we win. I think, I think that the transgenders in sports is gonna die a natural death, because it's so stupid. It's, it's insane. So, so when I write about it, I'm gonna write about two things. First, I'm gonna, I've, I've, I've got notes and shit on all this. First of all, I'm gonna point out that if you're

• 1:10:08Speaker 02

  a legitimate transgender, I, you have my sympathy, because it's a tough world. And, and it's hard enough to be a teenager. You can be the captain of the football team, and you still have self doubts, because you're 16 or 17 years old, 18 years old. And, and you can be the hottest chicken on the planet, you still think your ass is fat. And, um, and, and so, it, it's in an age bracket where self doubts are just everywhere. And the problem is, you have these adults who themselves are suffering from, you know, transgender by proxy. And, and they're telling you, oh, your problem is that you're actually a female, and, and we can make you happy.

• 1:10:53Speaker 02

  And so it's a sucker bet. So, so, so, so, um, the two things I'm gonna go against is one is doing medical interventions on teenagers. Um, I'm already seeing that's starting to collapse because I think the, um, I think the liability insurance for the medical system is now starting to soar because the, the hospitals that are doing transgender surgeries and injections and stuff are starting to get their asses sued off. And I want to see them destroyed because I don't think you should ever let a, a, a pre-adult make that call and you say, well, what about their parents? And I go, uh, you know, we don't let parents tie their kids up in the basement and beat them either. If we get wind of it, society will

• 1:11:35Speaker 02

  step in on that one, too. And so, you know, and, and they say, what if they think they're, you know, they really feel like they're a woman? I go, well, you know, when someone says, you know, I'm fat and they're anorexic, we don't let them identify as fat. We say, no, get them fucking help. And so, so this idea that someone who thinks they're female, and then you get, you know, middle schools with 50 transgenders in one middle school. This is not a medical problem. This is a social movement, right? And which is fine. It's a little embarrassing when you're in a fraternity years later and your friends find out you spent time in dress and, you know, eighth grade. But, um, but, but when

• 1:12:16Speaker 02

  we're sterilizing them and doing bad things and, and, and, you know, the, the horror of horrors is the fake vaginas. I think those people are spending the rest of their life in extreme agony is my understanding. They just don't work. And, and it's the, the adults doing it, I think are, are, you know, when the Swedes first started doing, I think it was the Swedes, they spent several years working with the person to make sure that they really were a good candidate for some sort of transgender treatment. And, and now it's as little as an hour chat with a shrink and next thing you know, you're getting injections. And maybe these injections don't hurt you, but I've read just too many articles saying

• 1:13:00Speaker 02

  that, you know, sterilizes you and it's not reversible and you have to keep doing it. And, and so there, there's just, there's just no way we should be doing this to kids. And, and they say, well, but if you don't do it young, then I go, I don't care. I just don't care. I, I just, I, I, I think that doing something such an intervention...

• 1:13:22Speaker 02

  On a teenager, and I think we're gonna look up 10 years from now, and there's gonna be a bunch of adults who transitioned. And they're gonna be saying to their parents, "Where were you when I needed you?" "You needed to be my parents. You need to say, 'Whoa, whoa, whoa, slow down.'" "Go ahead, wear a dress to school, that's great. Go ahead, let your hair out, you know, braid your hair, I don't, I don't care, but no, we're not going to castrate you." And so, so there's that, and then there's the sports, you know, women in sports. When, when Title IX showed up, there were two noticeable things. One is women started getting opportunities in sports they didn't get, and, and a number of men's sports were destroyed.

• 1:14:05Speaker 02

  So I happen to have been a gymnast in the old days, and most gymnastics teams got wiped out, wrestling programs got wiped out, because they needed to somehow find a way to equate the two, two gender sports. And the lawyers on the campuses concluded it was money spent or something. And so they wiped out men's sports to bring them down, and elevated women's sports. Now, I've also coached two collegiate sports, both gymnastics and taekwondo, and both have women's components, and I see what sports do for women, and it's phenomenal. It's phenomenal. Taekwondo especially. Taekwondo's way better for the women than the men. It's not because it teaches them to be killing machines. It teaches you to have composure when someone's smacking you.

• 1:14:52Speaker 02

  And to say, "Look, if it doesn't actually hurt me, it's, it's not a problem, right? If, if they actually damage me, it's a problem." But it's not a problem that someone's in my personal space, I have to deal with them. But you learn, that's what it teaches you. When I used to taekwondo, I was a little older, and I, I used to go right into range and use all defense. I'd spar against the Cornell kids, and they were good, they were second in the nation. And I'd go right into range, I'm smack away and defend. And, and, and it would drive them nuts, actually. They go, "He's in my face," constantly, and I would just block. And then I'd wait, and then all of a sudden, they'd be, they'd kick me six, seven times, I'll score a point. I'd see

• 1:15:34Speaker 02

  an opening, I'd smack them. And, and it worked pretty well. And, and women learning that. Now, now you've got this thing where women have gotten their sports, and now you're saying, "Oh, now let's guys compete now." Let's let guys compete. So I, and what I'm stunned by is the entire female sports establishment is not standing up and saying, no, no. And Riley Gaines, I think she, I think she probably triggered the beginning of the end. She's been doing battle and she said she had so many people behind closed doors without putting their names on it, saying, I support you, keep up the fight. And at one point, the head of the NCA said that, and she says, I'm fighting you.

• 1:16:21Speaker 02

  Why would you say that? I'm fighting you. I asked a three-time Olympic medal winner

• 1:16:29Speaker 02

  what her views were, and I watched her tighten up. And I realized I just asked her a question that almost wasn't fair. Because if she answered it honestly and somehow it got out, she'd be kicked off the team.

• 1:16:44Speaker 02

  And that shouldn't be happening. But I think we're getting to the point now where women are bailing out of sports. There was a jujitsu championship where tournament, there's tons of these things. Where, where, where something like all the weight classes were won by dudes. And I'm going to call them dudes because I don't give a fuck.

• 1:17:08Speaker 02

  And, and, and there were actually divisions that were all dudes. But at some level, I think some of these guys who are the most appalling cases are actually guys who are trying to destroy the idea. So when the weightlifter says, I'm a dude, I'm a chick, and then he breaks the world record.

• 1:17:28Speaker 02

  He's, he's jamming it in their face. So I'm not sure that they're all bad. I think they're doing, doing, doing the right work. So.

• 1:17:38Anthony Pompliano?

  Well, Zubie is.

• 1:17:40Speaker 02

  You must have been an athlete. I can see, I can see it in your face. You're chiseled. What, what sport you do?

• 1:17:46Anthony Pompliano?

  I played football, basketball and baseball in high school.

• 1:17:49Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:17:50Anthony Pompliano?

  And I mean, look, there's also, I don't think people quite understand the difference of athleticism, even between in, I think it was college.

• 1:18:03Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, in college, certain sports would play other sports in their sport. And without passing judgment, you know, there are certain sports where the people are bigger, faster, stronger, more athletic. And yes, they can use those, those components to make up for the lack of, you know, finite or a kind of nuanced skill. So if you take a football team and you go and you play soccer, right? Of course, the soccer players are better at all of the skills that are needed for soccer. But if you play for a certain amount of time, there's a good chance that some of the football players may actually be able to score quite often.

• 1:18:43Speaker 02

  Because there's.

• 1:18:43Anthony Pompliano?

  They're just bigger, faster, whatever, right?

• 1:18:46Speaker 02

  One of the most famous lacrosse players of all time was Jimmy Brown, the running back.

• 1:18:51Anthony Pompliano?

  Yes.

• 1:18:52Speaker 02

  And I can't, he used to put his thumb on the ball. It turns out I knew the head coach. And, and, but he, can you imagine being a midfielder and having Jimmy Brown running at you with the ball? You would just send up a smudge mark, right? So, so it turns out the women's Olympic hockey team practices by playing against prep schools.

• 1:19:17Anthony Pompliano?

  Yes.

• 1:19:17Speaker 02

  Boys prep schools.

• 1:19:19Anthony Pompliano?

  Yes.

• 1:19:19Speaker 02

  Right?

• 1:19:20Anthony Pompliano?

  Now we've seen this, I think, Clay Travis, I think I saw he's the guy who issued like a million dollar bet. He said, I'll pick, you know, the best men's high school team and they'll go play a WNBA team or whatever. And so like, again, that is the extreme, you know, somewhat zero sum. I'm really trying to make a kind of a bombastic, you know, point by doing this. But to your point, we actually can just look at what the teams are doing themselves. And I don't think that it's a positive or a negative, right? I have a daughter. I don't think that there's certain sports that I would want her to play if I knew, you know, like, what is she going to go play football? Right? She was like, Hey dad, I'm going to go sign up to be the running back.

• 1:20:04Anthony Pompliano?

  I would be like, ah, you know, let's make some different choices here, right?

• 1:20:08Speaker 02

  By the way, we're not going to do transgender surgery on you either, right? Um, now, in fact, I'm.

• 1:20:15Speaker 02

  My son was a pretty good skater when he was real little and I sort of waved him away from hockey because I decided that the hockey culture was kind of toxic, the parents were toxic. But I don't think I'd want a kid to play football as much as I understand, you know, the head risks are there that are serious enough that, you know, probably 75% of them now on Bitcoin. So, you know, we know they're demented.

• 1:20:45Anthony Pompliano?

  When you start thinking about 2024 and beyond, there's a lot of problems in the world.

• 1:20:52Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:20:53Anthony Pompliano?

  What is, what's the positive view? What passes your filter as like, these are things that are going right?

• 1:21:00Speaker 02

  Well, again, Crichton's very good on this one, too. If you remember back in the 60s, it felt like the world was collapsing around us. You know, the Vietnam War was going on. To the older generation, they were watching their kids. All of a sudden, they discover free sex with birth control. They discover drugs. Rock and roll sounded awful to them, you know, Elvis Presley wiggling his hips. And, you know, so they went from Bobby Darin and Neto Nocello to the doors very quickly. And, uh, and so, and yeah, the civil rights violence in the cities and stuff. And so, um, double digit inflation, soon thereafter.

• 1:21:41Speaker 02

  So, you know, there's always tough times. And so you have to remind yourself that this is not that different. Again, Michael Malice's book reminds you how bad it can get. There's nothing in the United States, nothing in the United States that approximates what the Soviet Union was doing to its people. Um, anywhere, pick the worst place, Camden, I don't care. There's nothing. Um, and, um, and so I have to remind myself of that. Um, I do think we're heading into a period of

• 1:22:18Speaker 02

  To Balt. So, so, you know, the Great Depression lasted what, a decade? I argue at ASSE, I got in an argument with a Stanford economist, I think it was Stanford. I said that the Great Depression didn't end until after World War II. He said, well, you know, and I talked about restricted consumption and things like that. And he said, yeah, well, you know, but, but it turns out the GDP showed, showed that the depression had ended during the war. And I spent some time pondering it and I said, no, no, no, no, no, no. Cause your GDP was a false GDP. You were creating shit and blowing it up. Right? So if you create, to me, gross domestic product needs a depreciation rate component built into it.

• 1:23:02Speaker 02

  So if you make a blender the last 40 years, your GDP is better than if you make that same blender, but it only lasts five years because it breaks. And that's one of the missing, um, so you didn't produce the wealth making the chintzy blender that you didn't making the good blender. And, and so during the war, the depreciation rate of everything was phenomenal. We're making battleships are getting sunk and we were making planes were going down and we were weapons and, you know, ammo and it was just very costly. But so I don't, I, you can't count that as GDP. And here's a GDP point that you might have picked up, you might not have. Tell me that's Robert Gordon's book.

• 1:23:43Anthony Pompliano?

  Um, that you suggested this to me two years ago.

• 1:23:47Speaker 02

  Did you read it?

• 1:23:48Anthony Pompliano?

  It's one of the best books. I, I've told tons of people about it. For those that don't know, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, and it basically makes the argument that was it 1870 to like 1940, I think is the timeline. Um, there's tons of, uh, innovation. There's tons of GDP growth. My favorite example, well, two of them, uh, one is the elevator and the importance of building urban density by one simple invention.

• 1:24:13Speaker 02

  Running water, electricity.

• 1:24:15Anthony Pompliano?

  I was gonna say, the second one is every home is completely disconnected, you know, in 1870. And by 1940, they're all connected, uh, roads, electricity, you know, uh, phone lines, the whole thing.

• 1:24:26Speaker 02

  Orville Wright lived long enough to see jets.

• 1:24:31Speaker 02

  Wrap your brain around that, right? People talk about Amazon being pioneering. Amazon was not pioneering. The Sears Roebuck catalog was pioneering. Sears Roebuck catalog was Amazon. Yes, it took a couple of weeks, not a day. And it wasn't anywhere near as big, but we went from guys buying, you know, flour out of barrels in country stores all over the country. To ordering shit and having a train deliver it to you. Sometimes you could order prefab houses and stuff. Right, there you can order all the car parts you needed from the Sears Roebuck catalog. And, uh, and so that was just Amazon. And Amazon's just a more digital version. And, uh, the other thing that's really interesting is there's, remember the part about primary versus secondary inventions?

• 1:25:16Speaker 02

  So electricity would be primary. And a vacuum cleaner or, or a dishwasher or something would be secondary. The best decade for secondary inventions was the 1930s. Right in the middle of the Great Depression, we invented more secondary inventions than any decade. So we created wealth during the Great Depression. And, uh, and, um, here's where we're going to get, we're going to be lied to in a very big way. And I, I hinted this, I kind of talk about it a little bit this year. Where as the boomers get older, we're going to spend a fortune on healthcare. And that's going to go into GDP.

• 1:25:57Speaker 02

  When in fact, it is the cost of keeping up a rapidly depreciating asset. So we're, we're, it is the cost of struggling to keep an asset that's trying to go to dust, from going to dust. That's not gross domestic product. That's depreciation. But it's going to show up as GDP.

• 1:26:19Anthony Pompliano?

  When you think about the national debt, uh, we're at 33 trillion on our way to a gazillion. Um, we could try to grow our way out of it. That, that is a

• 1:26:31Speaker 02

  Not gonna happen.

• 1:26:31Anthony Pompliano?

  That is a, uh, it is a option, but I know you don't think it's gonna happen. What, what would have to change in order to be able to do it?

• 1:26:40Speaker 02

  I think we're already past the fail-safe point. So I think we already have the commitments. You know, the social programs and the social security and the military. We'd have to drop our military to zero. And Kennedy might do that, but he's not getting in the White House. And what do we grow? The debt grew last year 10%. So that's a death spiral. There's not a shred of evidence that the political system has any sort of backbone in it to stop that spending. We spent 200 billion on Ukraine. What? If I were Powell, I'd be livid. The guys who say Powell's beholden to the administration.

• 1:27:25Speaker 02

  I go, Powell, I would think would want to wring the neck of the administration as he's trying to get control of monetary policy. And their fiscal policy is completely out of control. And so I think we're past that point. I think you could, you know, there's a town in California that had a water problem. It's a good example of a more general principle. And they said, we got to cut consumption 20%. There's no question you can cut 20% consumption of water anywhere. There's no question you can do it. At the end of the year, they had cut 3%. And so people don't, we don't do it. We will drive the car off a cliff like Thelma and Louise and clean up the pieces later.

• 1:28:08Speaker 02

  And so what I can't picture is how it resolves. So it will resolve, right? It doesn't just stop. It's an infinite loop, right? It will resolve, but I can't picture. They say, well, we're going to inflate it away. And I go, have you noticed how mad people are at inflation right now? We're just warming up if that's the model. We are just warming. I just, I went to get a roast at the store yesterday. Now, I'm not sure what the roast was they tried to sell me, but I said, yeah, I'm looking for a roast, a pretty big one. And I point to one, I said, tell me that one right there. How much would that cost?

• 1:28:53Speaker 02

  And he puts on the scale and he says $240.

• 1:28:59Speaker 02

  I go, what? I said, I think we'll have a boneless turkey instead. Um, and, uh, and, and, you know, the inflation rots societies and it's, it's making people grumpy. And there's people going to the store and I, I, you know, remember five years ago, you'd see some article that would say, you know, 50% of the population doesn't have money in the bank to cover a $400 emergency. Where are they now?

• 1:29:31Speaker 02

  Right? They, they're, they, they don't have, they don't have a penny. They, they swallowed that $400 in, in six months, that margin of error. So paycheck to paycheck is not even true anymore. Now it's paycheck to credit card to debt to whatever. It's not like you can refi your house.

• 1:29:52Speaker 02

  Right?

• 1:29:54Speaker 02

  So we've milked that, that we've milked that lactating cow down to bone dry.

• 1:29:59Anthony Pompliano?

  One of the, um, most interesting stats, uh, and I wrote about it, uh, the other day is I basically said the financial markets are like, uh, the crouched lion, right? They, they kind of sprint from faraway land, get close to the prey, crouch down, inch closer. And by the time the prey realizes they're there, it's over. Um, and it feels like financial markets have been doing that, but probably the best example is single family homes in America have been going up even though interest rates are over 5% and mortgage, you know, 30 year, uh, fix went over 8%. And it's on a national level at least, exactly the opposite of what everyone told you was going to happen.

• 1:30:38Speaker 02

  Well, I think so. I think it's a broken market though. So there is no price to, so, so there's like, uh, they call it a tight housing market, but it's only tight because those who want to sell and those who want to buy can't, can't see eye to eye. So there's no price discovery. And so the people who have the 3% mortgage. Simply won't sell because they don't want to then end up with a 7% mortgage. And, and so, so, but at some point, people have to sell. Boomers, again, rapidly depreciating asset. They're rapidly depreciating houses are going to be sold by rapidly depreciating boomers. And, and who's, who's going to buy those McMansions? Not Barry Sternlicht.

• 1:31:23Speaker 02

  And, and, and I did a pretty good job, I think, this year of laying out the, the, the rise of the, the permanent capital purchasing of houses and how they, they made a business model out of buying single-family homes, which is a terrible business to rent single-family homes. By getting them on fire sale in 08, 09, by, by hiking rents like crazy. By getting the capital to leverage the shit out of it, you know. I, I read somewhere that, that, that Blackstone or Blackrock, I can never keep those two separate.

• 1:32:00Speaker 02

  Was getting money at 0.15%.

• 1:32:04Speaker 02

  So you take a terrible business, you lever the shit out of it, you make a razor-thin profit margin on a hugely levered portfolio.

• 1:32:12Speaker 02

  And then, well, what would hurt this business model? Well, rates rising.

• 1:32:18Speaker 02

  And rates have risen. So I, I figure that we are about to see explosions all over the real estate market. And why they are not yet audible is unclear to me. But they have to, because the cost of buying a house just doubled.

• 1:32:38Speaker 02

  And so you either have to buy half the house or pay half as much or something, but it just doubled. And you know what it's like to buy a house? You sit down with a Realtor, they say, how much money do you have? How, what's your annual income? This is how much you can afford. And your wife says, that's what we're buying.

• 1:32:55Speaker 02

  And, and, and so, so if the Realtor says...

• 1:33:01Speaker 02

  That quantity of is what you can afford divided by two Dow.

• 1:33:06Speaker 02

  Because everything costs more than than who's, you know, uh, round numbers, the real estate market has to cut in half.

• 1:33:15Anthony Pompliano?

  Will they ever let that happen? Or will they step in?

• 1:33:18Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, no, no, no, they have to let it happen. No, because then we'll have an inflation problem. Remember how Twitter used to be loaded with people saying, oh, I'd love inflation because that'll make my mortgage cheaper? How's that working out for you guys? Is your mortgage any cheaper? The answer is no, because you're because your wages are as sticky as your goddamn mortgage.

• 1:33:38Anthony Pompliano?

  So I had a guy, Joe McCann, um, he's a former macro trader, worked at a place that you would know. He's got a partner who worked for a very well-known billionaire investor, uh, managed, you know, hundreds of millions of dollars, about billions each individually. They now run a fund, um, that's focused on the crypto market. And one of the things that he said to me is he, his friend said to him, and now it's kind of become his calling card, that essentially the government and the Fed is in a precarious position. It's either full-blown depression or dog coins to a trillion. That's, you know, that that's kind of their, uh, their optionality. And so a full-blown depression actually sounds way worse than dog coins.

• 1:34:17Speaker 02

  But cri- crypto is highly inflationary.

• 1:34:21Anthony Pompliano?

  Correct.

• 1:34:22Speaker 02

  The introduction of crypto, that's just a lot. It's not if you own it, right? It's an inflation hedge if you own it. But it it's highly inflationary to the system because what's it worth that two trillion? Is that a round number? Good guess?

• 1:34:34Anthony Pompliano?

  Something like that, yeah.

• 1:34:35Speaker 02

  Call it two trillion. That's two trillion that didn't exist. That came from zero, right? That came from scratch. Ah, there's some upfront cost buying servers and stuff like that. I remember when guys were mining crypto on their telephones. That was how easy it was in the olden days when when only nutballs like Max Kaiser were buying it.

• 1:34:55Speaker 02

  But, um, yeah, I turned it down at 10.

• 1:35:00Speaker 02

  Ten bucks a coin.

• 1:35:04Anthony Pompliano?

  And there's a there's a difference between like Bitcoin being kind of, you know, digital gold, whatever. And I think, you know, macro investors are saying, okay, cool. If I see gold, this is the digital version. Like, I can wrap my head around that. What he was really talking about was like, the craziness, the absolute insane insanity of Dogecoin going up to, you know, $50 billion or whatever. Right. And it was kind of this, you know, uh,

• 1:35:26Speaker 02

  But that doesn't, that doesn't create the wealth, right? That's that in itself is a fictional, it's just a, it's not wealth creation, it's wealth aggregation. It's just shifting wealth.

• 1:35:38Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah.

• 1:35:38Speaker 02

  And and it's at some point, you have to create wealth. It's at some point, the entire system is based on wealth creation, AKA Robert Gordon's book, not just, you know, Nvidia is going to be out of on a milk carton at some point, right? Nvidia Nvidia's price five times with Sun Microsystems, was priced at before it did a 95% swan dive. Nvidia is going to be laughable. It's going to be hysterical. It's going to be, it's going to be a chapter of, you know, what not to do books.

• 1:36:09Anthony Pompliano?

  So you think Nvidia is going to be one of the poster children for Great Crash?

• 1:36:14Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:36:16Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:36:17Anthony Pompliano?

  There's a lot of people disagree with you.

• 1:36:19Speaker 02

  I know. That's why it's so pricey. Right? At the top, let's, let's say the market. So, so as you know, I make a case for a 40 year secular bear market. A four deck, multi decade bear market. Now, that's a saying won't go up and down. People will be able to trade it. But if you think, well, that could never happen. I go, don't tell the Japanese. They're still underwater 35 years later. And another detail of the Japanese market is, let's say, if you own the Nikkei. You owned 14 of the 20 biggest companies in the world. How could that go wrong, right? How could that possibly go wrong? Well, the guys on the US market now own the Mag 7.

• 1:37:05Speaker 02

  And, um, and even Buffett turned on sort of US equities this year. He, he kind of said, nah, you know, 40, some number of years from now, the US will not have the biggest companies. And so, um,

• 1:37:19Anthony Pompliano?

  I thought he said never bet against America. Is he changing his mind?

• 1:37:22Speaker 02

  Yeah, yes, he appears to have changed his mind because he's looking at the craziness. Um, if you, instead of owning the Nikkei, you just started buying it. You're some 22 year old Japanese kid who just got out of University of Tokyo and you started averaging down. Took you 20 years to break even. 20 years to break even. Now you're doing okay now. But, but when the, the boomers have to sell their equities. And they're talking about this big wealth transfer from boomers to their kids. I go, their kids have to buy the fucking stocks that the kids are supposed to get rich on.

• 1:38:05Speaker 02

  The boomers have to sell them to someone's and, and therefore, you know, it's, it's,

• 1:38:11Speaker 02

  it's not going to be a wealth transfer without, without a depreciation of the ticker price.

• 1:38:18Speaker 02

  Because there's no one to buy it.

• 1:38:21Speaker 02

  And, and, and so I, I think we are going to have, I, I talk about, about, about 10 tailwinds that we had from 1981 to the present. And then I kind of cover how those will now be headwinds. And it's not to say it'll happen today or tomorrow or next year, or even this decade. But I'm confident that somewhere over the next 40 years, you're going to look up and say, you know, we haven't moved anywhere. Because we're sitting at 150% overvalued. And if you're 150% overvalued and you tread water, inflation adjusted, you just tread water and say, okay, I'll just buy and hold and wait and let, let the market come back to fair value slowly. 35 fucking years.

• 1:39:08Speaker 02

  Thirty-five years of treading water. You want to go straight down, it's like sixty-eight percent or something. You wanna, you wanna, you wanna, you wanna stretch it out over fifty years, you can get a total gain of about twenty percent. Compounded, it's like point five percent over fifty years. Once you are up at these nosebleed levels, there's no safe route home. Period.

• 1:39:34Anthony Pompliano?

  Golden cash, that's it.

• 1:39:36Speaker 02

  Well, and then you've got to somehow beat inflation. So we're in treacherous waters. Someone will do well and they will be deified as the investor of the decade. And it might be a holler, might be a godler, might be, uh, might be some guy who found a couple of small companies that are just gonna rock. My worst investment ever was I, I, I received shares of LabCorp of America in a, in a merger that eventually, I didn't know what they were. I knew what I owned, but I didn't know what they were. And so I sold them and they're up hundredfold. That was the worst move I ever made was selling LabCorp of America.

• 1:40:17Speaker 02

  So, but I've done well. I'm, I'm, if I can tie inflation, I'll do fine. I'm in good shape.

• 1:40:26Anthony Pompliano?

  All right. I've got two last questions for you before I let you go. One, name three investors that you're impressed with right now that people may not know. Who are the people that you pay attention to what they're talking about, uh, what they're doing? Um, when you've got a question or an idea, you, you call and talk to them. Who are, uh, uh, three people that just may surprise folks?

• 1:40:49Speaker 02

  Well, I don't know if they're gonna surprise, because, um, a guy I get a lot of useful information from is Jesse Felder. Um, I get a lot of useful information off a guy who just appeared on my radar about a year ago. It's, but it's not about investing. It's more about macro is, is Peter St. Ange. He's on Twitter. If you're not following him, you should. Peter St. It's Prof St. Ange, O-N-G-E. And, uh, brilliant macro analyses, snarky as shit, does one a day, very entertaining, rising star. Um, and, uh,

• 1:41:35Speaker 02

  Who do I think really has, you know, I have money with a couple of guys. A small cap investor who I like a lot is Eric Sineman. I like the guys at Horizon Kinetics. I haven't given them money yet because I think there's going to be some serious whooshing. The mistake, I'll tell you what the mistake I made in 08, 09 was. So liquid.

• 1:41:58Speaker 02

  I was so convinced, you know, Einhorn, I think at least he says he invented the phrase. But if, what's a 90% correction? Well, it's an 80% correction and then cuts in half.

• 1:42:11Speaker 02

  And, and so, so if, if, if you buy because it's dirt cheap because it's dropped 50 and then it drops to 75, you just lost half your money. Now, better than buying it at the top. But this, I started to talk about what's the top? The top is some Tuesday afternoon at 2:03.

• 1:42:33Speaker 02

  The Nikkei hit its peak.

• 1:42:36Speaker 02

  And the peak represents period of maximum optimism as evidenced by the price. And the precise moment when the justification for optimism is zero, 0.0.

• 1:42:50Speaker 02

  You're about to go in through the valley of death for the next 35 years. And, um, and no one knows it. So it's like Father Guido Sarducci's coming in and going planet. You remember, you know, that, you know, do you remember that skit from SNL where he's talking about, he's talking about, uh, how you get older and then you get younger. And he says, and you meet this young chick, he's speaking in his Italian accent. And, and he says, and says, you're 20 and she's, she's 18 and she's really hot. Next thing you know, you're 22 and she's 16. And he says, now you're in a bigger trouble. And, and in some sense, the markets are like that. You know where you're at, but you don't know which direction they're going. Now I'm confident that, um, the markets have big downside.

• 1:43:36Speaker 02

  As expressed by either serious price drop, or seriously long period of just suck ass. And to me, time is my enemy, not price. I would love to have a massive correction. I'd love to have a three-year drop into the Great Depression.

• 1:43:55Speaker 02

  What I don't want to do is, what would suck would be, our last really correct, serious correction was 1967 to 81. We lost 75% inflation adjusted. And it took 14 years. Losing 75% is a bitch. Giving up 14 years of your investing life, a third of your investing life, really,

• 1:44:18Speaker 02

  to get nothing, to lose that 75%, that kills you. That's what killed the Nikkei investors, time. Time, time is your enemy. So time's your friend in a bear, bull market, and time's your enemy in a bear market. I'm predicting a multi-decade bear market where time will be your worst enemy. And I don't know, I think the markets could be uninvestable. I did a spaces with George Noble. What an honor. And I said, I thought the markets would be uninvestable. He asked me to explain, I said, the Nikkei. And he says, well, you could short. I said, no, you couldn't, took too long. You'd burn your money to a crisp trying to short the Nikkei, because it didn't just drop like a stone. It just worked its way down over about 15 years. You go broke trying to short that thing.

• 1:45:04Speaker 02

  So I think the markets could become absolutely uninvestable, besides the occasional lucky person who can cherry pick. But that, that's in the scene to lab, you know, fool by randomness moment, right? That's where there are going to be, in a sample size of 10,000 money managers, there's going to be some who flip the coin heads 10 times in a row. It's statistical. So there will be winners. Are they because they're geniuses? I gotta figure Druckenmiller had a special touch. I think David Tepper has a special touch. Dalio, who I think is a hoser. But I read his book. And, and it was very good. It was kind of fourth turning with a greater military and economic component.

• 1:45:47Speaker 02

  But he sees us going into a period of great stress and violence. He's, we're right on the cusp of a, of a, you know, 15, 20-year cycle.

• 1:45:59Speaker 02

  And so

• 1:46:00Anthony Pompliano?

  My last que- my last question is, you put the books that you read each year at the end of the letters, so people can go check those out. But if you had to pick one or two books throughout your life that really stand out as having the biggest impact on the way you think, the way you see financial markets, or even think about some of the other topics we've talked about, what are like the one or two books that you would suggest?

• 1:46:24Speaker 02

  Um, that's kind of an obscure one called Banking in the Business Cycle, written in 1937. I actually read the original, but then they reprinted it. So you can buy it probably on Amazon by Phillips and McManus, I think. And it was about what really created the Great Depression. And it was an Austrian view. The Price of Time is a modern book that everyone should read. And if, you know, Edward Chancellor is considered God in this world of, you know, credit and crisis. And, and, and he says that when interest rates get to 2%, you always have a crisis. Well, they went negative. So, you know, I think Edward's probably watching

• 1:47:08Speaker 02

  the tickers with interest. The Great Crash in 1929 is a classic. I think I really like Robert Gordon's book, which we talked about. I really like The Great Believer, The True Believer, which we talked about. Sleep Right There, The Mystery of Capital by Hernando de Soto is about international markets and international economics, and why Africa's never going to be a hub of financial, of wealth creation. I'm trying to think what

• 1:47:48Speaker 02

  else. I should put together this list. I have at least a dozen years of it, of books. My big advice is audiobooks. When your wife sends you to the store, she's actually asking you to read for 10 minutes each way. When I'd commute 12 minutes to work, it's 24 minutes of reading. I can get through about 25 books a year just in the car. And, and so, and you can always get through the book. And I encourage people to read history.

• 1:48:27Speaker 02

  I read about the Middle Ages. Middle Ages are great, by the way. Ah, World Lit Only by Fire. Great book, very snarky, very funny. Yeah, but I've read about Roman history and I've read probably half a thousand books in the Middle East. Um, nothing stuck. Um, avoid books that, um, too many names, too many foreign names. I started to read Gordon Chang's book about China and it was just too many Chinese guys. Um, whereas Michael Mouse's book about Russia is not. So he avoided that trap somehow. And so I'm, I'm a big, I'm, I'm partway through it right now, but it's unbelievable book.

• 1:49:10Speaker 02

  Ah, how about you? You tell me. Had some.

• 1:49:15Anthony Pompliano?

  Um, I would say books over the last, I don't know, year or so, um, that I would really suggest, I mean, I got a whole list here of, uh, ones.

• 1:49:28Speaker 02

  Give us, give us no coin or the book. If you had one book, you said, look, I'm, I got one, one pitch. What's the pitch? I'm gonna read Lynn All this book.

• 1:49:39Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, in terms of like, uh, just a book to read about crypto stuff, uh, or Bitcoin, um,

• 1:49:44Speaker 02

  There must be one that's the Bible.

• 1:49:45Anthony Pompliano?

  Broken Money. It's either.

• 1:49:47Speaker 02

  So that's my next book. That's my, that's my next book, actually.

• 1:49:51Anthony Pompliano?

  Or, uh, Saifedine, uh, The Bitcoin Standard. I would say those two are the, the, uh, the books. My buddy Jason Williams, he wrote one, uh, called Hard Money You Can't F With. Um, that's pretty good, too. I like those two. Um, let's see, books, uh, this year, uh, Barton Biggs Hedgehogging. You ever read that?

• 1:50:10Speaker 02

  I think, I, I think I read that one. That's got, that's about 15 years old, I think. It's got some age on it.

• 1:50:17Anthony Pompliano?

  And the, uh, The Raven of Zurich is a good one. Um, I really like this, uh, it's called Rules for Aging, Roger Rosenblatt. It's kind of like, uh, you know, um, pithy things that you can do in your life to make it better.

• 1:50:28Speaker 02

  Here's one for you. Millionaire Next Door was very good.

• 1:50:32Anthony Pompliano?

  Oh yeah, that is a good one.

• 1:50:33Speaker 02

  I I once stood and listened to a guy who I might call kind of a digital friend. I don't know what you call him. Where he gave a talk on 10 stupid books and that was one of them. And I asked him, I said, you didn't read it, did you? There's no way you read that book. He just thought it sounded stupid. And um, it's about saving. It's about the psychology of saving. So I I think if you don't understand that what it's really about is saving, not about, not about investing. It's about saving. So so you may have noticed, I had an expensive year. I bought my wife a car and I had to do some shit around the house and I still saved 25% of my gross salary. Right. And so when my kids were in college, I still had a net savings when my kids were in college.

• 1:51:17Speaker 02

  And uh, and that, that is the same. One time I said to my dad, I think I should be saving more. He started to rip into me. I said, well, I, no, I'm saving between 25 and 30% of my gross. He said, oh, never mind. Right. He backed off. He thought I was not saving anything. I said, no, but I had to, I had to be able to do better. I was living on a low salary, got some big raises, should have been able to live, should have been able to save a huge percentage of that, but your, your, your life expands to fill your wealth, right? You somehow find a way. So if you can save 25% of your gross, the rest is noise at some level.

• 1:51:59Anthony Pompliano?

  I uh, I could not agree more. Where can we send people to find you on the internet if they want more Dave Collum?

• 1:52:05Speaker 02

  Well, I do try to answer emails. They're getting, this time of year, it's, it's a bit of a nightmare. Um, but I try to answer them. Um, and um, it's how I met a lot of people. I don't cold called an email, like to Rickards or something like that. And, and, and they'd answer back, ah, you know, uh, some very famous guy. I just had an email exchange with Jeff Sachs. And he says, thank God we're not university presidents, right? And I'm going, no kidding. Um, and then I'm at uh, um, I'm at Twitter at David B. Collum where my pinned tweet is my year in review.

• 1:52:42Anthony Pompliano?

  I appreciate your time. Everyone looks forward to this every year. And we will do it again in 2024, my friend.

• 1:52:50Speaker 02

  Adios.