299: Dave Collum Explores Big, Dangerous Ideas

Dave Collum is a Professor of Chemistry at Cornell University. He is a popular staple of FinTwit and writes one of the best annual summaries at the end of each year. In this conversation, we discuss the COVID-19 crisis, the economic crisis, the role of the Federal Reserve, the 2020 Presidential race, his Jeffrey Epstein theory, Gold & Bitcoin, and how Dave would invest his time and money as a young person today. =============================== Pomp writes a daily letter to over 50,000 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 pompletter.com

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

• 0:00Anthony Pompliano?

  What's up everyone, this is Anthony Pompliano. Most of you know me as Pomp. You're listening to the Pomp Podcast, simply the best podcast out there. Let's kick this thing off. Dave Collum is a professor of chemistry at Cornell University. He's a popular staple of FinTwit and writes one of the best annual summaries at the end of each year. In this conversation, we discuss the COVID-19 crisis, the economic crisis, the role of the Federal Reserve, the 2020 presidential race, his Jeffrey Epstein theory, gold and Bitcoin, and how Dave would invest his time and money as a young person today. I really enjoyed this conversation, and I think you will too. Don't forget, I write a daily letter to over

• 0:42Anthony Pompliano?

  50,000 investors about business, technology, and finance. I break down complex topics into easy to understand language while sharing opinions on various aspects of each industry. You can subscribe at pompletter.com. Again, pompletter.com, or go into the description and you can click the link there. Alright, let's get into this episode with Dave. Anthony Pompliano is a partner at Morgan Creek Digital. All opinions expressed by Pomp or his guests on this podcast are solely their opinions and do not reflect the opinions of Morgan Creek Digital or Morgan Creek Capital Management. You should not treat any opinion expressed by Pomp as a specific inducement to make a particular investment or follow a particular strategy, but only as an expression of his opinion. This podcast is for informational purposes only.

• 1:27Anthony Pompliano?

  Alright guys, bang, bang. I've got Dave here. Thanks for doing this. Yeah, my pleasure. You are very well-known on Twitter. You are the king of hot takes, which ended up not being so hot and actually ended up being more accurate than not. But for those that don't know you, what is your background? How do you get to be a professor at Cornell?

• 1:51Speaker 01

  Well, it's a little twisted. So as a kid, I was not a wonderful student. I had bursts of activity that were good, but I, you know, sort of sex, drugs, rock and roll, a lot of sports, stuff like that. I would not have gotten into Cornell if it were not for the fact that my grandfather controlled every penny into the university, best I can tell. He was the vice chancellor of the Board of Regents and the national alumni president. So, you know, that kind of gets you in the door. Majored in bio, was gonna go to vet school, the med school, and then decide last minute to do chemistry. So, took my bio degree, went to Columbia, went, became a chemist. Thought I was gonna flunk out, got

• 2:33Speaker 01

  pretty close, actually, because they made me take some graduate level physics course, and I didn't have calculus, shit like that. And, uh, and then got lucky in my PhD project, Miracle on Ice, 1980, beating the Russians, right? So I got my PhD in about two and a half years, and no postdoc, and got an unsolicited interview from Cornell to come back. And, uh, so I went on a series of interview trips and came back at the ripe old age of 25. So even though I'm not that old, I'm 65, I've been here for 41 years, 40 years. And, uh, and, uh, and then, huh, and then how do I get to, you and I talk, and that's a ridiculous

• 3:16Speaker 01

  question. Somehow, I started paying attention to markets as an aging boomer, and started to realize that they're more screwed up than I thought they were supposed to be. So I was a wild bull in the tech period, and then I started doing valuation analyses, which weren't hard, because they had no value. And, uh, and then, uh, and then became a bear. And once you go bearish, it's very hard to come back. It's a, it's a, it's a kind of a one-way street, because once you start looking at the world as, through the, sort of, the darkness. And so, I tried to hedge inflation, got into energy. The inflation never should have. Energy did really well, and eventually took back a chunk of it. But,

• 4:00Speaker 01

  uh, got into gold at, you know, 290 down to 270. I can't even remember what got me into gold. And then, uh, so I had about three decades, which things worked. Sort of brilliantly for an uneducated fool. And then, and then the last decade, I just, I've existed in an incomplete disbelief that, that it's a rational market. And so I've been on the sidelines. I've done okay, but, uh, but I didn't catch the wave. I think, I really sincerely, someone asked in, in your question on Twitter, you know, why is he still bearish? I, I think the markets have literally been screwed up for 10 years.

• 4:41Speaker 01

  And, and I think in, in 09, they got, they reached about fair value and you go, well, you know, no, they were dirt cheap. No, they'd fallen countless tens of thousands of feet, but they weren't cheap. I had dinner with, um, what, another one of those, how did you get here, Dave moments? I had dinner with Mark Spitznagel and he said, yeah, they were cheap. They were below fair value for about a week. Uh, Grantham said the same thing. So, so I was not alone and I just didn't believe that they would bounce and then not plummet. I thought we were going to do a total repeat of, say, the 30s. And what I didn't see coming, and I've never met anyone who did, was a Federal Reserve

• 5:23Speaker 01

  that would, uh, that would do, have sex with sheep in, in plain sight to, to save the system, no matter what the cost. And so for the last 10 years, the Federal Reserve, Kevin Warf actually said, it's unfortunate they treated every single day as though we're in an emergency. I think that was a pretty good way of putting it. So, so I just, I missed the last 10 years, you know, gold's done well lately. And so I, I, you know, if I don't screw up, I'll retire at tremendous comfort. But, uh, but I can't buy something, I, I don't, there's traders everywhere now. I can't buy something that if it goes bad, I, I would, I wouldn't be able to forgive myself. That, that, that's the filter I put everything through.

• 6:08Speaker 01

  If, if I make this decision and it goes bad, um, was, was it, was it still a good decision? If the answer is yes, then I'm fine buying. And so buying into these markets, if it had gone bad on me, I wouldn't have forgiven myself. So, so I have people hammering me saying, you know, you're just an idiot. You know, you're just wrong. When are you going to admit it? I think I'm still right, actually. I just think it's taken longer than I could have imagined because it's amazing what, you know, $30 trillion will do. Yeah.

• 6:39Anthony Pompliano?

  One of the things that's very interesting to me is you have a day job that has nothing to do with finance, at least on the surface, teaching organic chemistry. What are the overlaps that you see between that world of kind of very science-driven and very kind of, I think, different than mainstream thinking and the financial markets? Why do you have an interest in both of those two things?

• 7:03Speaker 01

  I think the most important thing that I took away, so when I was, I was always contrarian, right? I was just always contrarian. And, and you know, sometimes being contrarian just does make you wrong, but I, um, when I, when I got to Cornell at the ripe old age of 25, having really smashed some PhD records, I realized I had to move on. I moved into a field that everyone said was dead. I had so many people say it was dead, right? We know what that's called. That's called the bottom, right? And I kept saying, you know, no one's been in this field for like 20 years. You think it's possible? There are some important questions now to answer. So I went into it and I barely survived tenure. I mean, maybe it was easy, but, um, but it sure as hell was risky as hell for me.

• 7:48Speaker 01

  I mean, it was just so contrarian. And it took probably 15 years to get going, but I ended up going into a field called organolithium chemistry, which turns out to be as complicated as any field of wet chemistry. If there's chemists listening, I think they would agree. And it's very, and I had a very famous chemist saying, you'll never figure this stuff out. And I said, I think I can. And he says, you know, we went back and forth and, and I did, in my opinion, I did. It's still an empty field in some sense. There's users everywhere, so it's a profoundly used field, but the people willing to sort of dig in and wrestle with the python to understand the stuff, they, they barely exist.

• 8:33Speaker 01

  And so, uh, and so in that sense, I'm not a leader because people didn't follow me. But for 41 years, I survived doing this, getting funding from NIH, even though National Institutes of Health, even though people would say, how do you connect that with health? I go, well, I not only can, but I'm getting phenomenal scores. I mean, the, the, the study sections can see the health. I do collaborations with pharma. The, the health relatedness is very real. During that 30 to 40 years of doing this particular area of chemistry, I found that in essentially every project we ever did, someone was profoundly wrong. And so we'd study something that people would say, "Well, we kind of know how that works."

• 9:17Speaker 01

  And we'd study, and we'd go, "This is not even close." And when you looked at the answer, you'd go, "Makes total sense. It's just not what anyone thought." And that has been going on for four decades. And I can't even get it right myself. And so I will start a project, and I'll think, "Oh, I've been doing this for five years. I don't know what's going to happen." And then it won't happen. And so what it taught me, the most important thing, is it taught me that experts with massive resumes can all be wrong. And I thought of something about two years ago. I'm not going to go into it, but I had an idea about two years that I swear to God, you could ask a thousand PhD chemists what's the answer, and they would all agree.

• 10:02Speaker 01

  Without fail, all agree what the answer is. And I'm sitting in a seminar one day, and all of a sudden, just clicked. I said, "No, that's wrong. Not just not quite right. It's wrong. It's backwards." And then I went and asked about 200 chemists the question, and without even a chalkboard, I could convince them they were wrong. And without, with one exception, they all got it wrong. And on this list were Nobel Prize winners and stuff. And so it's one of those things where if you have faith that the experts can be just dead wrong, being a contrarian just isn't in there. What was it? What was the idea?

• 10:41Speaker 01

  Well, the idea, if any chemists are listening, the idea that when you do a reaction of three particles, this is real basic stuff, A and B and C, you bring them together to make a single molecule, A, B, C. What they say is that you never do that in a single step. You never bring three particles together simultaneously. Do you have any science background? What's your science? Any science? Internet. Okay, okay, so you're an expert like me then. Um, and you never bring them together simultaneously. You always bring two together and then one more. And I, you could get a thousand chemists to agree with that. And you say, why? And the answer is always something about the probability of them colliding simultaneously.

• 11:25Speaker 01

  And that turns out in scientific terms is to be an entropy problem. It says, anytime I say probably going ahead, clarify, I say entropy, you mean? And they go, yeah, turns out entropy is more favorable for the, for the simultaneous one. It's what's called entropy, which is heat. But, and it's, it's a boring problem. What makes it interesting is that thousands upon thousands upon thousands of chemists would all get it wrong. It's one of these things that no one would even question. And so I question things like, I found myself, I, I gave a talk to a thousand money managers on the Roth IRA about, I don't know, eight years ago. And I presented an argument that the Roth IRA was mathematically flawed and that no one should ever use it.

• 12:11Speaker 01

  And I stood up there and it was in Vegas. It wasn't the seminar with, uh, wasn't a meeting with Colin Roach, who I'm a big fan of. And I watched the seminar, finally, your interview with him the other day. Um, but, but I, I gave the talk and I said, it was a half hour talk. And I said, if I'm wrong, someone out there tell me. And no one, no one was able to correct it.

• 12:33Speaker 01

  And, and why a chemist sitting in Ithaca, New York is finding a gigantic pothole in the Roth IRA is beyond me. I don't know why.

• 12:41Anthony Pompliano?

  It's fascinating. Um, let's talk about, uh, the virus. So this thing has decimated the world, uh, both on the healthcare side and the economic side. I want to start on the health side first. You obviously have a background in science. Uh, you've been watching this play out, uh, you know, on Twitter and in the headlines, et cetera. What's your general sense of to what's happened? Um, and kind of where we are with the virus, uh, right now?

• 13:08Speaker 01

  Well, I've spent the entire pandemic thinking in two weeks I'll know. It's just been in two weeks I'll know. So I first, at first caught, you know, there's always something coming out of the Chinese wet markets, right? There's always, those guys will eat anything that wiggles, right? And, uh, and so what caught my attention is the minute they shut down Wuhan, I said, oh my God, we just shattered the supply chains, right? So I started reaching out to friends. I got, I got an email from Einhorn, who's been so generous with his time, and Stephen Roach, who's been so generous with his time. And we started sort of swapping war stories, trying to figure it out. What, what did it mean? But I was convinced that you can't shut down a major region of China without destroying the global supply chain.

• 13:52Speaker 01

  Now, it hasn't been as bad as I thought. I thought we'd, but, but, but I ran into tons of people who said, we're not getting the chips we need, we're not getting this, we're not getting that. There could be a delayed reaction. There's even theories out there, they said they shut everything down so no one would be demanding the supplies. Right? What an interesting thesis that is, right? And I'll entertain any idea until I shoot it down. So in any event, um, the guy who I think got it right was again, one of your former interviewees, Jim Bianco. He was on it fast and furious and so we're swapping a lot of emails, mostly One Direction, mostly him just telling me stuff and me going, I agree. Um, and, uh, and I think it's been devastating.

• 14:36Speaker 01

  And it reminds me, it's like, uh, it's like someone put a stick of dynamite in a turkey and blew it up and then someone else came along and said, put it back together now, right? It doesn't work that way. So I think we destroyed the global economy in a very big way. And I think that the people who think we're just going to reassemble it are just, are, are dreaming. Now, I could be wrong, but I, it certainly is a strong opinion. Bianco said one day on Twitter, and he got crap for it. He said, you know, 90% recovery is a disaster. And people said, what are you greedy? What are you? And, and I had to chime in and I said, 90% recovery means 10% drop in GDP. That's a disaster.

• 15:19Speaker 01

  And so, uh, and so, yeah. So I think, I think we're going to have lots of missing jobs that don't ever come back. You can't run a restaurant at 50% capacity. You can't run a movie theater if everyone has to watch with masks on. And so the only way we come back is everyone just says, screw it. And they at the world, which by the way, I think they've collectively are trying to do. Right. One of the questions I've been trying to understand is why about two weeks ago, all of a sudden, with no change in the biomedical story, all of a sudden it just became a now we're going to open up. And I'm going, what was that? Right. There was no, you know, all clear signal that was put out there.

• 15:59Anthony Pompliano?

  Do you think it had to do with just it literally got warmer in various areas? So like literally it's just springtime hit?

• 16:06Speaker 01

  Maybe it could also be, remember Arab Spring, remember what caused Arab Spring? Some Tunisian guy lit himself on fire, just one flammable Tunisian.

• 16:18Speaker 01

  And that triggered, and so it could be something like the, that blonde, relatively hot,

• 16:27Speaker 01

  hairstylist who said, I'm not closing. And it could be as hell. Yeah. You know, the, the shot at Lexington and Concord, you know, who knows what? But it just changed. It just changed. And, and all of a sudden people stopped wearing masks, except in logical places. So you see him at the store, but not walking down the street. So there's just this sea change that occurred. It was, it was like people were just ready. There were a lot of people who were critical saying, that's really selfish to do that. And I'm going, these people don't know how they're going to feed their kids. There's nothing, nothing selfish about that. And so it's really just that they were the paycheck and criticize people who are, who, who lit. And we know, what was the stat, something like 40% of the people couldn't put $400 together if they had to.

• 17:11Speaker 01

  Right. Those people now can't, can't put 50 cents together.

• 17:15Anthony Pompliano?

  Well, I think you're bringing up a couple of issues, right? So the first is, uh, one of the things that I'm personally interested in your opinion, right? Is you spend all day looking at science and you come from a mindset where, uh, there's a hypothesis. You test it and see they're correct or it's not, and you move on. You kind of rinse and repeat that process over and over again. What we saw with the virus was a number of people who they put forth these models that I'll call them hypothesis, right? Because no one really knew what was going to happen. But they were they were trying to predict how bad could this be? And you'd see models that said, you know, worst case, base case, and best case type situations. What I think now has transpired is we've got, you know, a month or two months of data

• 17:59Anthony Pompliano?

  in the lockdown, and people are saying, wait a second. You're telling me that, you know, an order of magnitude less people have actually died than you originally said? Right? And there's almost like this shock and awe factor of people were anchored on such big numbers. You know, millions of Americans dying. And now all of a sudden, they see the numbers. And by the way, there's people who have died, right? There's a lot of people who have died, actually. It's just nearly as much, and it looks actually like a small number compared to what the original predictions were. And do you think that like the psychology of that plays into people just being like, look, open the damn, you know, economy up?

• 18:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, you lied to us, I think is another way of putting it. I don't know if this is true yet. So one of the things I will be watching for and have been thinking about is, is if the shutdown really did heroic things to stop the spread. Well, first and foremost, you're gonna have to explain why other regions of the world are in a killing field. Right? So we're not, I heard Mexico has three times as many cases, you know, BFD. It's still not a big number. And, and, you know, China supposedly also stopped having cases. But everyone said, ah, China is just a bunch of liars, you know, we can write them off. And then all of a sudden, you go, but maybe they're not. Right? Maybe the damn thing has stopped. Maybe it ran its course in China.

• 19:15Speaker 01

  And so now, um, so, so the other problem we have is, I've been talking to a lot of biochemists. One of my former students is a biochemist at Harvard now, and he, uh, and I spent hours on the phone chatting with him about how the virus works and how it, you know, gets the RNA into the cells and the incubation. This guy's glued to it. And he was pretty nervous about the whole thing. So I can't say that the, uh, that the serious biochemists weren't nervous about it. But I was waiting for the numbers to unequivocally, unambiguously exceed anything normal. So when it was at 5,000 or 10,000, we're still sub-flu numbers. Now I think

• 19:58Speaker 01

  we're above flu numbers, but there's a, there's a, there's a problem with the data being so bad. So the data is bad at two levels. First of all, what's the comorbidity? At this point in time, some 87-year-old guy crashes his motorcycle, they're calling it COVID. When some guy dies of a heart attack because he had COVID, is it really a COVID death if he had gotten simply a mild case of flu, he would have died? And so, so you don't know how to count. Second of all, I've, I've heard there's over 90 different tests. Now, I got tested because I've been feeling crummy for a while. And I said, why not? My son had, and so we said, why not? We went and got tested, and they did it all wrong. They did

• 20:40Speaker 01

  it all wrong. They, you know, if you do the, the nasal test, they're supposed to jam it back there to the point where you feel like an Egyptian mummy in the making, right? And there's a name for when they pull the brains out through your nose. And, and they just swabbed it around her nose, and that was it. I go, that's not going to test for anything. But 90 different tests, you know, you got Elizabeth Holmes probably running tests out there. And so I, it's going to be garbage data, right? They're all testing for different markers. You can have Corona-flavored RNA in there, and it's testing positive, and who, is it four base pairs, five base pairs? And, and, and that my, my former student said, you know, they don't yet have a good one. And I went, really? We're doing a lot

• 21:25Speaker 01

  of statistical analysis. Then you got that guy, Neil Ferguson, who's out there bullshitting to, to, to, to, to oppress his, his, his 38-year-old girlfriend. But it's even worse than that. Turns out she's a sort of a, as I understand it, a professional activist. So he, she's out there, you know, with all these big causes. All of a sudden, you know, Neil, Neil wants serious action out of this chick now. And so, uh, and so his, his numbers that apparently got entire nations to change their policy was because he wanted to get laid, right? I mean, how many times has that destroyed a nation, by the way?

• 22:05Anthony Pompliano?

  Well, so what you're talking about is Neil Ferguson from Imperial College basically created a model that literally said, you know, in the United States, there are going to be like, I don't know, 5 million people were going to die. I mean, some ridiculously high number. And then it comes out that now he has corrected it. Did he correct the number or the model that now shows lower numbers? But then it came out that he wasn't social distancing. He was basically having an affair with a woman and there's all these kind of implications to it. But what ultimately brings us to is this idea of bad data, right? And so from pretty early on, I was in the camp of, hey, this is real, right? You'll love this. I called my father who's, who's in his 60s and I said, hey, man, I don't want to have the debate, right? All I'm going to tell you is wash your hands a little bit

• 22:50Anthony Pompliano?

  more. Don't go shaking people's hands. Stay inside a little bit more and take some vitamin C and kind of just, just chill out, right? You don't, you don't got to believe that this is going to kill you, but just kind of chill out and take it at least a little bit seriously. And before I even finished, he literally hit me with, I take a multivitamin. I'll be fine. Right? It's kind of.

• 23:09Speaker 01

  Were his pants hiked up to his chest? And was he bitching about the government is the question?

• 23:14Anthony Pompliano?

  Of course, right? And, and so, you know, it was kind of one of these things where when you look at it, you say, the data has always been wrong. So I took it seriously, but also you can say at the same time, the data's been wrong. And it's because the financial incentives are off, right? All of a sudden, if I'm, if I'm at a hospital and you say to me, hey, if you just check this box and say this person died of COVID, whether you know that to be true or not, whether they tested positive or not, you're going to get $8,000, $10,000. Or hey, if you put them on a ventilator, they get, you know, I think it's tens of thousands of dollars. You literally are using financial incentives from the government to change the statistics and it completely throws off how we can analyze what's actually happening.

• 23:56Speaker 01

  Well, I saw, to give credit where credit is due, I think the people early on, like Chris Martinson, who was documenting it daily.

• 24:05Speaker 01

  Excuse me, I think he's doing a great job and I think he's doing a great service and, and he was obviously very, very nervous about this virus. And I don't think he was wrong because it was an unknown. It's sort of like when it's 1999 and you're worried about your tech stocks and they're not crashing, doesn't mean you're not right. And so what Chris was picking up on was huge risk. And there's no question there was huge risk. So I think the people who dismiss risk eventually become some Darwinian smudge mark on the road. So, so I'm a big believer that when you see risk, so, uh, so I, I had this funny situation where I was, I was doing podcasts and the markets were going up and the virus is getting crazier and I'm going, this isn't making sense to me.

• 24:50Speaker 01

  So the markets were just crazy and I'm going, you know, they talk about, you know, you, you smart guy, money manager guys, you know, how everything's forward looking. I go, these guys couldn't find their ass with their hands, right? These guys are stupid. This, we've got a global pandemic, we got supply chain problem and they're not selling anything. So I did a podcast with, uh, Jelly Donut. Now I, I did a ton, but the funny thing about this one was, this is the one where it got famous right away because the first podcast was Einhorn because he used the jelly donut model, you know, economically. And he got Einhorn to do it. Now I've been trying to get Einhorn to do other podcasts like Real Vision. He won't do it. He says, I feel bad saying no, Dave. Um, so in any event, so he got Einhorn, so he got him on the map.

• 25:33Speaker 01

  And so I did the Jelly Donut podcast and, and I talked about the things I've gotten right in the past, the tech stocks and buying gold and all this stuff. And then the other thing I did that was probably the best thing I ever wrote was a 2002 email to a friend at Goldman. And I said that there was a subprime crisis coming. And it was about a five page email and I said that, that, that, that, that, that General Electric was taking on risk and General Motors was taking on risk and the banks were taking on risk and that the subprime mortgages were picking up, which by the way, go all the way back around 98, 99. It really started early. And that I thought the banking system was going to collapse. I said so.

• 26:15Speaker 01

  And the only mistake I made in the damn thing was I thought JP Morgan was gonna go down. And that was precisely wrong, right? But, but I called it and then, and then at one point, I think it was a Kudrowski, right? One of the great early, early bloggers said something in tweet one night said, you know, if you're early, you're wrong. And I sent him my 2002 write-up. I said, was I wrong? And, and by his model, I was, I was wrong. And he said, no, you're splendidly correct on that one. So it was a big call. You can be early. So in any event, so I did, talk about this at Jelly Donut. And this was something

• 26:53Speaker 01

  like February, probably 15th or something. And I said, I, this is, I said, I see a minimum 50% correction in these markets. That's, that's without even the virus getting involved, right? This is just based on valuation. And, and then Business Insider picked up on it. And they wrote, you know, one of these, you know, I actually made a joke about this once came true, where they said, you know, Ivy League professor who called the subprime crash, calls a 50% correction. It was just, it was the cheesy thing that we all see, right? On the Yahoo homepage or something, right? And Business Insider did this. And, and it

• 27:34Speaker 01

  took like the day that the podcast got uploaded, the thing started tanking down. And so I've gone, oh, that's the funniest goddamn thing I've ever seen here. So, but then the Fed has rallied it back. But now I think this rally is gonna fail. I'm not a technical guy. So I hate to use terms like that because they, they pervaded markets, right? Everyone uses technical language to talk about stuff that we should be talking about using valuation language. When was the last time someone made some reference to something being cheap? Not relative to something else, but just flat out cheap. Show me something that's, show me something that's not a great risk of losing all its revenue, that's got a P E of eight, that's got no debt, right? These are hard to find.

• 28:15Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah.

• 28:15Speaker 01

  They're there, but they're gonna get cheaper at some point, in my opinion.

• 28:19Anthony Pompliano?

  You said it earlier, right? And I think this was one of the things that cracked me up is we saw the airline stocks, for example, go from, I think it was United went from like 80 bucks to $20. And I literally wrote something and I said, just because it fell from 80 to 20 doesn't mean that it's cheap. It actually, you have to remember that, you know, they did, I think it was like $8 billion in revenue last year, and the market cap was now five and a half. And it was like, look, it's, you know, trading below the revenue last year. And I said, yeah, but they're not doing eight and a half billion dollars revenue this year.

• 28:48Speaker 01

  Year, or the following year, or the following year. Right. It's just awful. I've been writing about share buybacks since I walked back and checked. I've been writing about share buybacks from at least 2012. And I went back and looked at all the different things I said, I've been railing on them. But this year I went bananas on Twitter because I could see as they were, as they were cranking up the burr, right, the burr, to bail everyone out. I said, they're gonna bail out the goddamn airlines. And these guys have taken every penny that they have and put it towards these pump and dump buyback schemes. And that's all they are. People return capital to the shareholders. They don't do that. They don't return capital.

• 29:32Speaker 01

  Buy a pizza with that capital. Try to do that with that capital, right? They take assets on their balance sheet that have a return and buy shares which have a return. And if you've got, if you've got a company that's got a 10% return and you take assets to have a 5% return, it's a good buy. But if your assets are returning five and your company's like on the triple Q and you got a, you got a PE of one, a PE of 100, excuse me, 90 is actually the number. You're returning 1% on your company. And so, so share buybacks have turned into a reach for yield. So by following these idiots.

• 30:12Speaker 01

  Driving yields so low, it meant that assets on the balance sheet served no purpose. Back in the seventies and eighties, companies loved assets on the balance sheet because they would, they could get fantastic rates, right? So, so Powell, Powell, Greenspan, the whole enchilada, they took out that model. So what it did is a bad incentive. The incentive for the companies was to minimize the cash on their balance sheet. And to maximize the debt, which they could get dirt cheap and buy their shares and pump them up and get their options. The whole thing has been a complete Madoff scheme. Now, I understand the theory of share buybacks and how they can be good. It's just no one was doing them right.

• 30:54Speaker 01

  And so at some point, yeah, I understand the theory of sex, but we're talking about a prostitute. We're talking about raffles. We're talking, right? It's just the wrong.

• 31:02Anthony Pompliano?

  What would you change about the way that they're done to basically get the positive aspects of share buybacks captured and get rid of all of the negative aspects from the debt and things like that?

• 31:14Speaker 01

  I'm a free market guy, so engineering anything doesn't sit right with me. I'd hang the CEOs from the nearest bridge by their ankles like Mussolini, but um, a couple of things.

• 31:26Anthony Pompliano?

  Most of them left. Most of them already left.

• 31:28Speaker 01

  If the system wasn't so deeply corrupted, then what I would do is I would never let a CEO be chairman of the board. I wouldn't let him load up the board with his friends. I wouldn't let them, I wouldn't let them swap chair positions with each other. I would, if you really want an incentive program, here, here's a scheme. No one's ever come up with this one before. I said, you, you, you have a cattle call for CEO. You would get, big company, you'd get all sorts of people apply, right? And you say, you're going to run the company for three years for free. If you do a real good job according to these valid metrics, not share price, not this,

• 32:09Speaker 01

  you know, you know, cash flow, you know, growth in, in, in, in the business. You guys know how to measure these things. Then you get the job and we'll pay you this. Right? And so you give them some five years. I don't know, but you let them work for five years for free as an assistant CEO and or or you say, or you hire a real CEO and you say, here's your shares. You get shares in this company. You can't cash them in. You can't, you can't hedge, right? They have right to kind of say, no hedge. You can't get for 10 or 15 years. Build us a goddamn company that you know, 15 years from now will pay you handsomely

• 32:50Speaker 01

  for your efforts. Right? And that's what shareholders should do. Now, I one time had a chat with Bogle. The argument I made to Bogle was, I said, you know, indexing means that there's no adult supervision. So in the old days, when IBM had a defined benefits plan, IBM had a vested interest of their, the guys managing that plan to stick their noses into GE and say, Jack Welch, you're cooking the books. Right? But instead, we went to this defined contribution plan, which I get. But now there's no adult supervision. Now you got the ETFs and you got the, you got the, the indexing and stuff. And so there's no person that isn't, you know,

• 33:33Speaker 01

  maybe the head of CalPERS or something maybe cares to stick their noses and say, you crooks shouldn't be giving the CEO so much goddamn money and so many options. We're going to sell your shares. The only guy like that is Buffett. Right? You got the occasional Buffett who might say to a C to a company, I'm selling my shares publicly. If you don't change, right? He could do it. He can be an activist shareholder for the good of a company. I'm not a Buffett fan either, although I respect his ability to make money like no tomorrow.

• 34:04Anthony Pompliano?

  A lot of people forget, he started out as somewhat of an activist investor.

• 34:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, no, no, he, he build, he builds wealth in the sense that he put in, he helped put in good management. He otherwise accumulates wealth.

• 34:18Anthony Pompliano?

  So I guess part of this is, what do you think about the buy, the bailouts? Right? So I think I threw a grenade into, into Twitter one day when I said, you want to stop all the bailout nonsense, literally just create a rule that if you're the CEO of a company that gets bailed out, you can't operate a publicly traded company for 10 years.

• 34:36Speaker 01

  Oh, absolutely. Something like that. You know, the problem is, though, I also don't like the idea of getting in there. And so I think he's the Badger model where if you're going to lend money. To companies, you charge them a punitive rate. And, and so here's a great example. So Carnival Cruise Lines and the various cruise lines are the epitome of the bailout disaster. Now, I don't think the ballots have been as bad as they, they looked like they were going to be, but they're not done yet. So I think the real serious graft is being hidden. And because, you know, they say, well, look at how much money we gave to Joe Sixpack. They're going to get 12,000. I heard this was worth going to get $12,000 a piece. And there's this many of them and you do the

• 35:19Speaker 01

  math, you go, that's not $6 trillion, dude. Somewhere out there lurking is a lot of giveaways. So what happened with Carnival? Well, Carnival, besides being a serial buybacker on debt and all the crap they do, they're domiciled in the Caymans. And so they don't pay tax. They pay something like 0.8% taxes. When one of their cruise ships hits the rocks, we pay the cost to go yank them off the rocks and save them and stuff. So it's just a disaster. The average pay supposedly, I haven't documented this, but it seemed like a credible source. The average pay, because they're going to the third world and hiring these guys who can barely speak English to, to, to, to work on the ship. The average

• 36:02Speaker 01

  pay is something like $2.50 an hour. And they have to sign up for, you know, 14 hour days, six day weeks. It's just, and if one of them gets sick, they drop them at a port and leave them. That's it. So Carnival is an insidious program. Now, what happened? Well, so they obviously, they, they were going to be excluded from the bailouts. But something happened. So, so JPO announces his bailout program. And what, what was happening at the time was a bunch of hedge funds had gotten together as a consortium and said, we will lend you money at 15%. Now, these guys are swashbuckling highway robbers too,

• 36:43Speaker 01

  but that's the going rate, right? That's what happens when you, that's the Badger model. And then all of a sudden, what happened is JPO shows up and, and all of a sudden, they're left at the altar. Now, I don't have a lot of sympathy for the hedgee's who are that good, you know, the singers who can really, you know, rape and pillage pretty well.

• 37:04Speaker 01

  But that's intervening in the market forces and all of a sudden, next thing they know, Carnival's not interested and all of a sudden, next thing they know, they're getting money out of the banks at way, way lower interest rates. So, did they bail out Carnival directly? I don't know, but certainly the banks all of a sudden found it in their goodwill to give Carnival lots of loans.

• 37:26Anthony Pompliano?

  But I think this is part of the problem, right? And a lot of people hear the airlines are going to go bankrupt, right? And they think airlines are going to stop flying. They think that the cruise ships are going to stop. All these companies are going to, you know, basically like literally evaporate, all the jobs go away, etc. And all I continue to hammer on, it sounds like you're in the same bucket here, is there's an equity and a debt market. That market is made when the buyer and the seller in the market agree on price. The problem is that the airlines, the Carnival cruises, all these people think that their company is worth something that it's not, and they're running to the government because the government's the idiot in the room. The government, literally, if you look at the airline bailouts, like 66% of the money that they gave in the bailout is a grant. I don't

• 38:11Anthony Pompliano?

  know a single-

• 38:12Speaker 01

  Let me get my brain around this. You're saying the government's dumb money. I have to think about that. Yeah, you know, a great example of this, by the way, I've been thinking about this one, and I realized, let's go back to one that really looked like carnage for job loss. That's Arthur Andersen, right? So, they get obliterated, but then you sit back and you put your feet up and you ponder and you realize is that the demand for accountants did not drop at all. There were, what, 30,000 accountants in that facility? I don't know, I'm just guessing. And the business that they were doing dissipated to other firms and those guys went off and worked at the other firms. And so, my brother was arguing what a criminal thing it was to blow Arthur Andersen out of the water. And I said, they

• 38:57Speaker 01

  committed so many crimes that you gotta do it. You gotta blow them out of the water. Now, if Carnival gets blown out of the water, almost literally, someone will buy up the ships and run the operation better and quit, you know, taking on debt to do buybacks and stuff like that.

• 39:14Anthony Pompliano?

  Well, but the thing is just the investors, your point of somebody was going to give them debt at 15% and then all of a sudden the government swoops in, right? In all of these different markets. And if you look at, you know, United, Southwest, all these companies, they're literally two thirds of the money that they were given was a grant. The government got nothing in return.

• 39:35Speaker 01

  Right. That's a giveaway. That's a giveaway to people who I would like to hang from the neck until dead. And that's the problem I'm having with it. Now, another one, here, remember when Greece went down the tubes, right? So this drives me crazy. So I can remember years ago when Bush was president or something, we'd sent $30 billion to Brazil to bail out Brazil. And it clicked, you know, I was a total neophyte, as opposed to now a fractional neophyte. And I thought, you know, that money's never going to get to Brazil. Let's go straight to the banks. And so we're giving Brazil the money, which by the way, won't make it and it'll be given to our banks and so we're just bailing out the idiots who loaned Brazil money. Right?

• 40:18Speaker 01

  Just like, you know, 100-year, you know, Argentinian bonds, right? How long did that, they take to default? What, about six months? So, so these bailouts are always just to bail out the big money. And I'm a capitalist, so this is not, this is not Bernie Sanders ranting about the big guys. I'm a big fan of the big guys who create wealth. We gotta have big guys. I want someone who can create incredible wealth. I do get a little nervous about the monopolies. I guess they do get big. But usually monopoly is protected by government. So if you find a big monopoly, if you dig under the surface, you'll find that they're using the machinery of government to maintain their vice grip.

• 41:02Speaker 01

  And so, so in any event, I, yeah, I think it's awful that these guys are getting bailed out. And so, so Greece, Greece goes down the tubes, right? Greece should have done what Iceland did. So Iceland said, screw you, we're not paying. We admit that we let fishermen become bankers. And that wasn't the smartest move. We're not paying. And I remember the European bankers were upset about this. But, but it was the right thing to do. They just defaulted. Greece didn't default. Greece handed over all its assets. You go, why? Why would Greece hand over all its assets?

• 41:43Speaker 01

  And the answer is because one or two or a small handful of key people in Greece, who have the authority to make the call, got bribed. Now, I don't know if they got bribed, but I'm sitting there and I'm the head of Greece that's going down the tubes and stuff like that. And someone comes along and says, by the way, some guy from the BIS or something, says, you sign off here, we'll give you 10 million in the Cayman or what's that? Monseca Freca, the Panama Papers account? And you hand over all the goods, you'll come out fine and we know you're a dirtball, so you'll do it. Or we'll whack you if you don't, right? We'll do a Clinton approach.

• 42:22Speaker 01

  And so they just handed over, right? The Greek people didn't hand it over. The Greek authorities handed it over. When Germany attacked Czechoslovakia in 1939, the BIS got a request from Czechoslovakia to transfer all the Czech gold to Germany.

• 42:45Speaker 01

  And they did it. The BIS said the papers were in order. They did it. They got a lot of guff for it. But they were saying, we are not a political organization. They said, send the gold. We send the gold off to Germany and went, right? So that's what they did with the Greeks. The Greek heads of whatever, the guys in power, sent all of Greece's assets to the European banks.

• 43:13Anthony Pompliano?

  So, speaking of authorities, what? How does this change when you get to bailing out the state and local governments? Like, they're notoriously bad capital allocators.

• 43:23Speaker 01

  Oh, that's an awful problem because...

• 43:29Speaker 01

  It's always do it for the children, right? Metaphor. Do it for the children. Well, let's do it for the pensioners. The problem I have with that is, is that I hate the fact that we're bailing out states that acted so recklessly and irresponsibly for so many years. And so my brain kind of cramps over the moral hazard problem there because if there was a way I could get to the people who are reckless, again, off the bridge, by their ankles, off they go, right? Mussolini time. But there's nobody to get to. And so it's that debt has the name, it's called odious debt.

• 44:12Speaker 01

  Odeous debt is debt that was brought on by an authority in which it was so odious, so it was done. Usually it's a head of some sort of government head, that it is considered invalid, right? So the states have a pile of this odious debt. And the problem is, how do we make the people whole? Now, the problem is, again, places like California, they got firemen who were getting 200,000 a year pensions. I don't feel like I should have to make them whole, right? I don't like that, making them whole. I'm paying a ton of taxes in New York State. I do not need to pay, you know, by proxy, Illinois

• 44:54Speaker 01

  or California state taxes too, to bail them out. And so I don't have a good solution there. We screwed up badly there. And I just don't, it's one of these, like you have stage four cancer, what do you do? And the answer is you die.

• 45:08Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. So what happens in that scenario, right? Because I think that is part of the analysis is, if you let an Illinois, let a California just go bankrupt, right? You just say, look, you screwed up, you took risk, and now it's time to pay the piper. What happens in that scenario?

• 45:25Speaker 01

  But who's the you that screwed up, right? That gets back. So, you know, there's so many people in Illinois who themselves are guilty of nothing. So they screwed up by electing idiots. Well, we've all done that. So I just don't, I don't have a good answer to that. And at the same time, I find it so repugnant to also have to bail them. And so, uh, and so I, no, I don't have a good answer. I don't mind dissolving a company, right? I don't mind shareholders. Oh, you own those shares, you know, you, the guys who, who thought Jack Welch was God at GE, they eventually ate it. They eventually got what they deserved because they were, they were ignoring the data that was showing that Welch was massaging his

• 46:08Speaker 01

  earnings quarter after quarter for decades. And, and they didn't, they, they just, that, that's the risk of being a shareholder, right? It's like owning, you know, Philip Morris and being shocked when you find out that they get sued for, for, for causing cancer, right? Now, I made a fortune on Philip Morris betting that they wouldn't hurt him, but, um, never lie.

• 46:31Anthony Pompliano?

  If, if the Fed is gonna just print and print and print and they're gonna divert the money to everyone from the airlines to the states to you and I may get bailed out and not even have an excuse for why we got bailed out.

• 46:43Speaker 01

  God, I wish I could build up for something.

• 46:45Anthony Pompliano?

  Does the, does the national debt matter anymore? Like, is it even debt if they'll never pay it back?

• 46:52Speaker 01

  Well, this gets us back to your, your conversation with Colin. Um, uh, I have come to the conclusion, people don't understand inflation. I do believe, so when people, Colin, I, I would have loved to have had a threesome with you guys. I know it sounds weird, but I would have, um, because there's things I thought I would like to have brought up to him and he might even watch this and then we can call or something. But, uh, um, uh, there, the, the national debt will continue to grow, as he said, and people's debts grow with GDP. And so he's kind of nonchalant about that. And

• 47:32Speaker 01

  no way am I gonna criticize Colin because he, he, I think he's really smart. But, uh, but there, but the debts are growing relative to something they should track. So normalized to GDP, normalized to various things, they're growing, right? And that just doesn't work. And dollar values, who cares? But in, in, in something where the denominator should erase the, uh, the, the debasement of the currency part of the problem.

• 48:00Speaker 01

  Then, then, then when you're growing your debt, you know, as a percentage of your GDP over many, many years, you, you are asking for trouble. And, um, and then the, there's the, the, what we used to call Pollyanna's, um, Polly's, where they're shorthand, um, who say, well, yeah, but we're the reserve currency. I'm about, for now, right? You don't get to keep reserve currency status if you act like idiots. So, uh, at some point, demographics are going to kill us. We're going to, the boomers are all going to be demanding money. The, you know, millennials can't buy the houses. The boomers want to liquidate. There's, there's a catastrophic mess coming.

• 48:45Speaker 01

  We're on this the other night on Twitter, right? The average McMansion not only is way over designed for a family, right? So like 3.8 people per household in a McMansion. But, but they're made like crap. They're not solid. I lived in a farmhouse, that was solid. And, um, and I happen to own one of these things that's not made very well. Even though it's made out of supposedly good materials. But, but, but the cost of keeping it up. So I could, in theory, hand my house over to my kids. They couldn't afford to keep it because they couldn't afford my taxes or 25K a year in New York. And I think a housing's cheap. If this house was in, this house was in San Diego, it'd be a $30 million house. I mean, it's just an extraordinary house.

• 49:30Speaker 01

  And, and, and I'm replacing windows that are 30 years old and skylights that are 30 years old and roofs and stuff. And, and, and it's, you know, you, it costs a lot of money to own a big house. And, and, and so the millennials, the, the, the next generation doesn't have that kind of money. There are people who do, but the bell curve is not looking very good. There's an awful lot of people who are having trouble really getting their careers going. And, and, um, employers are not under pressure to pay up big bucks, you know? So, you know, if you're a surgeon, you're fine. If you're a, you know, if you're a Wall Street, you're probably fine.

• 50:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, so I don't think the next generation can buy out the previous generation. That's the key.

• 50:15Anthony Pompliano?

  So let's talk a little bit about the Federal Reserve in terms of they're taking all kinds of drastic actions. As you said earlier, they've pumped stock prices back up and you don't think that that rally will last. But just how do you think about the actions they've taken and should they have done something differently? Or do they have another option, even though we don't like what they've done?

• 50:40Speaker 01

  You know, there's a million metaphors out there now, some of which were one point were original. The Fed's actions have not been particularly good, in my opinion, since Greenspan, since Greenspan started. So, you know, for Greenspan to bail out the 87 crash in retrospect, I think it was kind of stupid. Like, that crash should have been a sort of a, yeah, wake up, you can't just pump markets. And then, and then, and, you know, did he actually do anything that would save it besides some psychological ploy? Probably not. And, and he pretended to be, you know, highly conservative, but every time there's

• 51:21Speaker 01

  a crisis, he jumped in. I don't criticize him for the LTCM bailout bailout because it wasn't him. He got the players together and said, you guys got to write some checks. Again, the friend in Goldman, I said, what's going to stop you guys from screwing up again? And he said, nothing. And so Greenspan reached a point where he started to believe his own press agent. He got very narcissistic. He, he really did start to believe he was God. And so, so he went out on a high and he engineered it. And we had a lot of room because we came from an interest rates of 16% down. He got to ride that way. He got to ride the

• 52:05Speaker 01

  greatest bull market bonds in the 20th century. And that makes him look real good. So then Bernanke takes over and Bernanke got handed a loser. And he's an academic, so he had all his theoretical approaches.

• 52:21Speaker 01

  To his credit, he went further outside the box than I think anyone could possibly go outside the box. I don't think Bernanke's public presentations of what happened in the Depression are correct. I don't know whether he doesn't understand as I understand it, or whether he just is willing to lie. I think it must be the latter, but he blames Fed actions in the 30s that caused the Depression. And in my opinion, it was very clearly Fed mistakes in the 20s that caused the Depression. It might have been Fed action in the 30s that failed to save the day. But all you need to do, you want to know how, you want to see the boom-bust cycle, the

• 53:02Speaker 01

  best boom-bust cycle you ever see, boot up a plot of the Dow from 1900 to 1940. And what you'll see is, you'll see the boom-bust cycle, it goes up, and then it comes down, and then it recovers. You can draw a line right through the boom and the bust, and it's this beautiful sort of slow, methodical dependence. And, I gotta get my phone to stop ringing. It's one of my buddies.

• 53:29Speaker 01

  And so Bernanke claims it was the 30s, it was the 20s. There was all sorts of, they lowered reserve requirements, they lowered interest rates, they were trying, one of the claims is they're trying to get gold to shove back to England after World War I and stuff like that, but they blew a gigantic bubble. It wasn't just an equity bubble, it was a credit bubble, it was a consumer credit bubble. So the Depression was a beautiful example of a purging of the excesses of the 20s, the roaring 20s. So Bernanke professes not to understand that, in my opinion. And same with Friedman, for that matter. These guys, I think they swirl their own Kool-Aid, they drink their own piss.

• 54:17Speaker 01

  Volcker is a hero, but I don't view him as so altruistic. I think Volcker recognized what the system needed. So, so all these guys are in charge of making sure the banks are fine. Right? That's it. That's it. The banks hold all the money. They make all the money. They create all the money. They run the world. There's, there's no alternative model that makes sense to me, right? You can have presidents of countries. They don't care. They will pick the president if they have to, right? As, as, as who was it said that? Ah, Dudley last year said that if we have to, we worry about who's president. Um, but so Volcker recognized that what the system needed was a purge. So when Volcker hiked up the interest rates to, to, to, to put a lid on inflation

• 55:01Speaker 01

  expectations. Um, and I've had central bankers tell me that that caused inflation and I've been trying to wrap my brain around that one. Um, but then what happened? He started bringing back down again and, and, and he started apparently sat the big bankers down and said, you guys got to behave yourself. We're out of control here. And the bankers didn't listen to him. And so he jammed him back up again. And, and so he had to show the banking system that he was dead serious. And that seemed to break the fever. So then Volcker set the stage for Greenspan to have a party. So then you go past, let me jump back to Bernanke and, and he gets credit for saving

• 55:43Speaker 01

  the world. Um, he saved the world from a raging inferno that was the creation of the Fed, in my opinion. So at some point, it's like giving him credit for stop eating his wife. I, I don't, it's, you know, the arsonist fireman fighter, you know, firefighter combo. Um, the, the crack whore who keeps getting crack. And, and so at some point, You have to purge the system. Volcker recognized, he was the last one to recognize that. And ever since, ever since then, we've had Fed chairs who were, who were basically saying, not on my watch, just not on my watch. So Yellen sat there treading water best I could, she didn't squat.

• 56:27Speaker 01

  You know, she started hiking rates from what, zero?

• 56:32Speaker 01

  And so she was just following Bernanke's cue. I don't think she knew anything. Long comes Powell, who looked like maybe he gets it. Then all of a sudden, you know, the markets dropped 18% or something and, and Mnuchin and Powell, you know, established the Powell put.

• 56:50Speaker 01

  Was also, you know, there was trouble in the leveraged loan market. So they were actually more worried about that. But the, the bottom line is that they're never willing to let someone projectile vomit. They're just never willing to let this and say, sorry, guys, you screwed the pooch. The CEO screwed the pooch. Now we gotta live with it. They, and therefore now we have bigger and bigger problems. So I blame them. And the fact that there's an even bigger problem, COVID was unanticipatable.

• 57:17Speaker 01

  But we'd be a lot better off if we didn't go into it with the world's biggest, historically biggest corporate credit bubble of all time. And so if you look at the bailouts, buried in there, that $6 trillion is a lot of money to deal with corporate credit. And if there wasn't a corporate credit bubble, that wouldn't have to exist.

• 57:40Anthony Pompliano?

  Who's holding all the corporate credit, right? It's the pensioners.

• 57:44Speaker 01

  That's the problem, right? But also what, so what does that do? So what it does, it gives people a false sense of wealth. So if, if you perceive you're rich, and I don't really want to go here, but let's say you've got a gazillion dollars worth of Bitcoin. It alters your thinking. So, so I'm sure you own a lot of Bitcoin. There's no way you don't own a lot of Bitcoin. The perception of wealth alters your thinking. If Bitcoin is legit. It's a legitimate altering of your thinking. If Bitcoin turns out to be what its detractors think it is, then you have made personal decisions that were monstrously bad, probably.

• 58:28Speaker 01

  Now, once you get a bunch of money, it's really hard to not drop your guard. It's really hard to not say, "Well, you know, I can afford that boat now. I can afford a bigger house now." And so the boomers are all being handed these inflated assets now. They're saying, "At one point, they thought they'd never retire. Now they're saying, 'You know, now I can afford to retire.'" Well, watch, you retire, they're gonna throw a toaster oven in the pool. You are gonna die. And so it's the false read that everyone's being given by the perception that the corporate debt problem isn't a problem. It is a problem. And you can have a global debt problem. It is a problem.

• 59:12Speaker 01

  And if you want to know how to create a global debt problem, let's do a Gedankenexperiment. Let's say every country, they get together at Davos, they say, "You know what? We just should give everyone free healthcare. Just everyone, just everyone. By the way, we should promise all the retirements and everything." They'll walk out of there. Everyone will perceive they're stinking rich now. And they will have done nothing to improve our ability to create wealth. Not one shred of what they just decided increases our ability to create wealth. Therefore, that's a global debt problem.

• 59:50Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. You mentioned earlier this idea that the global reserve currency only gets to be the global reserve currency if you're not an idiot about it, basically. You also are a big proponent of gold, precious metals. You've done very well on those in the past. And then you mentioned Bitcoin. How do you see these three things kind of colliding? And how does this play out moving forward? Like, do you see the dollars as a global reserve currency? Does gold have a place as a global currency or store of wealth? And then what do you think about Bitcoin and all of that?

• 1:00:26Speaker 01

  I don't think gold's ever going away. It's been around for 5,000 years. There's memes about gold that I don't buy, and there's memes about gold that I do. And I think the 5,000 year history is a real one, right? So I don't think, if we ever get to the point where gold is perceived as not worth anything, I'm buying much, much more.

• 1:00:52Speaker 01

  But it never will get there. And in fact, I think central bankers value it, but they don't want us to value it. They want us to value their currencies. But when, you know, when Greenspan was asked, why don't you sell your gold then? By Ron Paul, actually, he said no. And so everyone knows gold is like this bedrock that you do not want to pull out from underneath. And that's why, you know, when Venezuela or something goes down, the first thing we do is we send, you know, we send airplanes in there to pick up the gold and take it back to Europe again, or the United States.

• 1:01:26Speaker 01

  The, whether it's good to own or not is a separate question. Because if 20 years from now, I can buy less with an ounce of gold than I can buy now, then it was probably not a very good thing to have. But it will, I don't think it'll go to zero ever. Bitcoin is a great experiment. I'm not a believer in it, but I'm, at some level, I'm rooting for you guys. I figure Bitcoin goes nuts, gold will too. So you and I can, you know, buy entire apartment complexes together and start a new venture capital system.

• 1:02:02Speaker 01

  So I have no trouble imagining that Bitcoin goes completely down the tubes. And I've never been able to convince myself that it was, that that was not one of the risks. I also think that it could survive and do well. There's varying opinions about how, what it has to become to survive and thrive. And I've gotten different opinions from different people. If it has to become a real currency, it's got to settle down, right? You can't wake up and find groceries cost 10% more today because of Bitcoin. That's why, by the way, why I don't consider gold money.

• 1:02:45Speaker 01

  Or should I say a currency? Um, I, I, I don't like getting into the gold bug discussion about gold being real money. Cause I go, you know, if gold tanks, things cost more, right? And you say if the dollar tanks, I go, yeah, but it doesn't act that fast. So if I, if I wanted to know that something was going to cost the same six months from now, I, I would hold the dollar, not gold. And I would not hold Bitcoin either. And, uh, and so I think it has to settle down. So I think Bitcoin at some point's got to flush the speculators out. So it's got to become boring. Um, and it has to survive, uh, sovereign states going at it. And I know you've heard this a million times.

• 1:03:28Speaker 01

  I know your listeners are, you're, you've got crypto in your name, your company, right? This, it's a, it's a subsidiary of Morgan Creek or are you just part of Morgan Creek?

• 1:03:39Anthony Pompliano?

  Yes, a subsidiary.

• 1:03:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, right. That's a mouthful. Um, did you, were you into Bitcoin and you tied up with Usco? Or, or were you with Usco and, and you sort of spun off a Bitcoin subsidiary?

• 1:03:54Anthony Pompliano?

  The, uh, the former.

• 1:03:56Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:03:56Anthony Pompliano?

  We were doing, uh, we were doing a bunch of mining and, and the general thought process. So here's a question for you, uh, on this. So Gary Cohen, right? Who, uh, is somewhat controversial in, in finance versus crypto. Uh, but, uh,

• 1:04:12Speaker 01

  Very controversial. I mean, think about that.

• 1:04:14Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. So, so he's got a view, um, that, uh, a cryptocurrency is likely to become a major global currency, but it won't be Bitcoin. Jim Bianco, a cryptocurrency will be the next global reserve currency. It won't be Bitcoin.

• 1:04:29Speaker 01

  Yeah. They, guys, are they saying that it will be a sovereign crypto?

• 1:04:34Anthony Pompliano?

  So that's part of the discussion, right? Is, uh, if you ask Jim, uh, I don't know what he would actually say. Does he think it'll be that high a state?

• 1:04:42Speaker 01

  That's not a crypto though.

• 1:04:44Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay. So,

• 1:04:45Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:04:46Anthony Pompliano?

  You had to pick. In the future, is the next global reserve currency backed by a state, whether it's digital or not?

• 1:04:54Speaker 01

  Fascinating question.

• 1:04:56Anthony Pompliano?

  Or do you buy into the argument that there can be separation of state and money and the next global reserve currency will just be a separation, whether it's Bitcoin or something else?

• 1:05:03Speaker 01

  Well, I think the separation of currency and sovereigns will be over the dead bodies of a lot of sovereign leaders and the bankers. And since I just made the case before that the guys who make the money and hold the money run the world, that you're asking, are they going to lose control of the world? And that's, so you're up against some pretty tough hombres. And my biggest concern about Bitcoin would be is that in a world that appears to be getting increasingly oppressive within the democratic societies, right? So we've all looked at, oh, it's a democracy. And next thing you know, you look at me, I'm not sensing the democracy that I use.

• 1:05:47Speaker 01

  You know, you look at the 2016 election, you go, Hillary didn't really beat Bernie. You know, she kind of just mowed his ass down. And then you look at the Russia collusion and you go, God, they were trying to take Trump out of the kneecaps. So you get a sense that the democracy is struggling a little bit here, right? And that we're not, we're not getting to vote for things as much as we think. It is hard for me to picture that in that world, that if you outlaw crypto, that the average person will say, screw you, I'm still using it. And if you don't get the average person, it becomes a, it becomes a sort of an off off Broadway currency. And, and then it might have a role, but it certainly isn't, that's not your home run. That's not your home run.

• 1:06:32Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, so I agree with that. The one caveat to it is, let's say the US, right? If you kind of go through the game theory, the US says, you know what, we're going to ban ownership of Bitcoin. So if you're a US citizen and you hold this, you're in breach of the law and we're going to throw you in jail, we're going to find you, we're going to confiscate it, we're going to do whatever. Does that open an opportunity for Russia, China, and other superpowers to say, wait a second, we want to get off that US dollar system. It's super expensive. There's tons of control the US has. If they are going to ban ownership of this, we should actually adopt this together as kind of a rest of the world.

• 1:07:06Speaker 01

  That's an interesting model. I gotta say, I hadn't thought about that, but the problem is they don't want to give up the sovereign control of it either. So it gets back to would that be a crypto? And then, of course, you get the, you get the real nightmare scenario of Mark Zuckerberg running, you know, Libra, or what was it? Libra? Libra? The other problem with, with the cryptos right now is there's, what, 5,000 of them? It reminds me of the car dealerships. Nowhere near the numbers, but the car dealerships in the 20s, there were some like 250 of them, or 230 of them, or something like that. Most were going to die, right? And so the question is, how do you know in the dot coms, right? How do you know which dot com was going to die?

• 1:07:52Speaker 01

  My friend Goldman, he was the founder of Goldman's Software Group. Now, that's, that's foundation level, right? That's really amazing. And he was there when Microsoft was taken public and all these. And, and I asked him, I said, was Microsoft always an obvious winner? He said, no, no, no, no, not even close. He said, there were a number of occasions where you could easily imagine going to zero. And so it was by no means a lock. It's really easy to see a company as a lock after the fact.

• 1:08:25Anthony Pompliano?

  I'm going to give you a framework that I use to think about all the different cryptos. Again, no promise that this is accurate, but it's just what I've kind of way into. But it's the idea that when we look at companies, let's say in the dot com, we always think about revenue, technology, kind of your mo, you know, all of those different things. It's very much a what did you build type defense in order to be a survivor. Money's a little different. And actually, what I think is money is a belief system, right? That's why people believe gold has value. They believe dollar has value. And so in some weird world, I've convinced myself that we get one shot at the separation of state and money.

• 1:09:09Anthony Pompliano?

  If it doesn't work with Bitcoin, people basically will never believe in the second, third, fourth.

• 1:09:13Speaker 01

  This is like, if you're gonna shoot at the king, you better kill him.

• 1:09:20Anthony Pompliano?

  To some degree, right? Because ultimately, what you get is, you know, it's kind of like if you're in Venezuela, right? And all of a sudden, your currency fails and the government shows up and goes, oh, just kidding, that one didn't work. But like, here's our next one. Like, ah, I'm good, right?

• 1:09:33Speaker 01

  We'll go with the dollar instead, right?

• 1:09:36Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. So I don't know. Look, it's fascinating. I probably shouldn't say who it is, but somebody in the financial media who's very well known said to me, it's the one asset that he could bring 10 of the smartest people in finance he knows into a room, ask them what they thought, walk out. When he comes back, five will be on one side of the room, five will be to the other, and they'll literally think the other five are complete idiots.

• 1:10:00Speaker 01

  Right, right. Where I would say they're all probably idiots, so.

• 1:10:06Anthony Pompliano?

  So I want to talk a little bit about politics real quick. You mentioned Trump and all that kind of stuff. What is your general outlook right now in terms of Biden v. Trump coming up in November?

• 1:10:19Speaker 01

  I don't think that's what the pairing will be. I think Biden will be taken out.

• 1:10:23Anthony Pompliano?

  Who do you think replaces him?

• 1:10:25Speaker 01

  Cuomo. I think they're set up for it now. I think all the data points to that. So, so when, when, if you looked at Republican primaries over the last number of elections, the, the, the putative or presumed nominee, you could pick them out in the primaries. And what I noticed is like when Romney was, was nominated, all these guys were on stage. And now these are all carefully orchestrated and all their handlers say, no, no unfair to this. They're watching. This is like a face off in lacrosse, right? How do you keep it from getting dirty? And, um, and at the same time, in the Romney was in the middle,

• 1:11:05Speaker 01

  that tells you the first hit. Secondly, his suit was slightly different color. And I'm going, there's no way that they let one of the guys have a different color suit. But right there in the middle went black, white, blue, right there in the middle. And I go, holy crap, they're drawing your eye right to Romney. And when Bush got nominated, it wasn't even a choice, right? And then I saw it again with Jeb.

• 1:11:33Speaker 01

  And, and, and what happened with Jeb though is that no one saw Trump coming and Jeb showed an unbelievable inability to handle Trump. So no one saw the glass jaw. It was going to be a Clinton-Bush president run, right? It was really straightforward. And so, um, so, so we're not getting to pick them. I'm not sure I can remember what your question was. Trump v Cuomo. Yeah. So, so what, what are you seeing now? Well, first of all, Biden is not in sight. Trump's, I would say the, the COVID problem has been his biggest challenge because,

• 1:12:14Speaker 01

  because spontaneous utterances don't work well at all. He's a fighter. He's a brawler. He's a bully and this doesn't lend itself to it. So I'd say handle it poorly. Then he started to look like he got his legs on the ground for a while. And next thing you know, you know, the media's still able to turn him into an idiot again with, you know, Lysol in the veins and stuff like that. And, uh, and I think we're going to find that some of the stuff he said earlier, I'm just going to look pretty intelligent that he got massacred on, you know, like remdesivir or something, you know, and, and him, that the media's killing him on taking hydrochloroquine and stuff like that. I'm going, you know, we might find that's the one. So I don't think there's a way, no one. But, um, what

• 1:12:58Speaker 01

  we're watching is Biden, Biden should have been beating the Tara of them. There's no chance that if Hillary was running against Trump, that she wouldn't be on every Sunday talk show and her can man, pain manager on every talk show and her handlers on every talk show. And they would be going to them day and day and CNN would be all over it. And there is not a sign of Biden. He is, you know, breakfast at Bernie's. He's, he's sitting propped up like a corpse with his sunglasses on, right? And they don't, he's not even out there defending his candidacy. And for all I know, he's not lost his marbles, although it sure looks like he has. So I gotta figure they're hatching a plan to get him out of there.

• 1:13:42Speaker 01

  It could involve bringing, was it Tara Reid in, it could involve, could involve, for all we know, the Democrats were releasing all the Biden garble videos, right? And at some point, they'll do something like, I don't even understand it, we'll call it a brokered convention, I'll pretend like I know what that is. And, and they'll, there'll be a recruit Cuomo, because they're not going to Bernie, where are they gonna go, Kamala Harris? Right? They're gonna go after Elizabeth Warren, they're nowhere in sight, so there's no evidence of anyone but Cuomo. And he's on every day, and New York could be, you know, a killing field, he'd be on every day. And so I think it's Cuomo, and he just babbles coherently.

• 1:14:24Speaker 01

  And it doesn't freak me, because I don't want Bernie as president, I hated Hillary with a passion.

• 1:14:33Speaker 01

  Obama was fine, I didn't care about Obama, you know, I don't know why people hated Obama, I, I honestly don't like his politics, but that's separate. I, the guy I thought was very impressive in his own way. And, um, and, uh, and Cuomo, I, I look, he's kind of old school, he's got skeletons in the closet, he was involved, various things happened to do, you'd call graft, but oh my God, no one's ever done that before. And, uh, and you could imagine a Trump Cuomo battle being a pretty fair octagon fight, right? Who do you think wins that? Well, it'll, it'll depend on where, where it goes from here, I mean, Trump, Trump's stock can go up and down like Bitcoin, right? And, uh, and, and so Trump could totally shoot himself in the foot.

• 1:15:18Speaker 01

  If, if this whole thing rallies, then Trump, Trump, I think, could win, and if, if, if he could easily blow it and Cuomo wins, I wouldn't be freaked by Cuomo president, that wouldn't bother me, you know?

• 1:15:29Anthony Pompliano?

  I feel like he is a candidate, exactly what you're talking about. The other side isn't completely scared of him and therefore says, hey, I may not agree with the politics. Hey, I may not think that he's the best candidate, but I would be okay with it. It's less kind of pushback. The one thing I keep going back to, though, is it just feels like the political landscape has changed. And the one, you know, it just happened again recently where Trump is willing to do things that other people don't understand yet, right? So when he's literally posting the memes and the videos, the doctor video of him as the president in Independence Day, right? And he's saying, you know, the invaders are coming, but I will save you, or, you know, whatever the hell the thing is. And it's his

• 1:16:14Anthony Pompliano?

  face superimposed. He's just willing to go to a level where, you know, Bloomberg tried to do this. Well, Bloomberg basically was paying people to, you know, put pictures on Instagram. It's not authentic.

• 1:16:25Speaker 01

  He was awful. It reminded Bloomberg being brought up reminded me the Republicans trying to sell various candidates, hoping that one of them would get legs. And every week we'd find out some candidate was doing really great and they'd be gone within a week. So, yes, I think Trump is so capricious. There's a great article or interview, I can't remember what it was, where someone who was, maybe it was a Bannon interview, where he talked about when he lined up the Clinton rape victims right before the presidential debate. And I thought that was just genius. I'm thinking, holy crap. That is like, you

• 1:17:10Speaker 01

  know, you might as well take Fredo and shoot him out in the boat, right? That's serious stuff. I, by the way, I had a bigger effect on the presidential, I tried to influence presidential campaigns. Really funny. So I was on Ron Paul's homepage as an endorser. That didn't seem to play out as well as I would have hoped. And that was in 08. And then, and then Juanita Broderick shows up on Twitter and she, she says something like, Hillary, Bill, you know, you raped me. And Hillary, you know, you tried to destroy me.

• 1:17:48Speaker 01

  And a bunch of people said, oh, that's just a troll. It's not her. And some media guy said, I made a few phone calls. That's her. So I taught her how to pin a tweet.

• 1:18:01Speaker 01

  And she pinned that tweet and it went bananas, right? So I got screen grabbed. Someone who doesn't believe me, I can share the screen grab from shit. She said, thanks, Dave. I did it, right? I use that in my annual survey where I show that I said, this, this is how you influence an election. You teach what need a broader kind of pin tweets, right? And, uh, uh, I'm gonna predict a future president. You want one, you want one for a future 30 years from now? Who? Savante Myrick. Who's that? The, the, the mayor of Ithaca.

• 1:18:38Speaker 01

  Really? A Myrick was the youngest mayor in the country. He was something like 26 years old. He's funny. He's articulate. He's very Obama. He's light-skinned African American. The only reason I say that is because you still got a bunch of bubbas out there who don't want to vote for real black guys, right? It's as appalling as that seems. You know that's true. Um, and he's our, he's, he's Cornell educated. When he was a kid, there was a period when he and his mother and his family were homeless. He has the story. He's, I've had conversations with him. I'm impressed by the guy. And I asked him, has, have the

• 1:19:22Speaker 01

  national politicians shown any real interest yet? And he says, no, I'm not trying to believe it. I think that might be a canned answer. He was on Meet the Press. He was on CNBC the other day. And so I think this guy is, he's so much better than the Democratic candidates we're seeing. I'd put him up now instead of these clowns, right? Anyone can beat Beto. I'd take out Beto. Um, but, uh, but, uh, so this guy's gonna be good. And, and so I said that on Twitter. I said, this guy, someone said, what's he mayor during spring break or something? And I said something very favorable and I got followed by a woman named, I think

• 1:20:05Speaker 01

  her name was Leslie Myrick. And I'm going, that's gotta be mom.

• 1:20:13Anthony Pompliano?

  Buy in favors, buy in favors.

• 1:20:15Speaker 01

  Thirty years from now, Savante Mirak, you know, mark your calendars. He's gonna, he's gonna get, he's gonna at least get to Congress.

• 1:20:23Anthony Pompliano?

  I, I always say that the person I could see running and winning, who would be the wild card is The Rock. Because he's got three.

• 1:20:32Speaker 01

  Rock.

• 1:20:33Anthony Pompliano?

  Well, here's, he's got three things, ready? If we get into a world where it's literally a popularity contest, he's the most recognized actor in the world. Two, he's got the physical stature. There's tons of studies that show just, you know, if you're 6'6" and literally got muscles to your ears, right? You just look like you should be the leader. And then three is, he's just enough intelligent and just enough charismatic where you could imagine, you know, him going up against, let's say, somebody like a Trump, who's a bully. He's standing up there and Trump, you know, kind of comes at him and he literally goes, "Ha, ha, ha," and puts his hand on his shoulder and goes, "Shut your candy ass up," right? Just, just kind of, just very much can, can diffuse those situations, which actually, you know, if you read like a Scott Adams book about, you know, how he looked at Trump, like, that's part of Trump.

• 1:21:18Speaker 01

  Oh, Scott Adams' analyses of Trump are phenomenal, aren't they? You know, he, he tears it right down to the studs when he analyzes Trump. And I think it drives Trump haters crazy because he does a wonderful job. Scott Adams is, is amazing. Like, he gets, he can get pretty wackadoodle. I mean, he, he can really go outside the box, but his analysis of Trump and how, how, how good he is. And I think he, I think he said he was a good convincer, or he used some word like that, and, and he described how Trump uses English language to his, to describe it. Most people think he can't speak English, and they don't realize you're getting duped.

• 1:22:01Anthony Pompliano?

  He, he uses. Weapons-grade persuasion, I think is the term.

• 1:22:04Speaker 01

  Weapon-grade persuasion, that's exactly right.

• 1:22:07Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:08Speaker 01

  And so, yeah, Adams, Adams predicted Trump way in advance. I saw Trump coming, so I watched him and I I wrote an analysis of the election that worked out really well, in part because I, I, I paid, I gave Trump more credit early on than most people would, so he wasn't just a novelty. So I started watching and, you know, I take all these notes and shit and keep track of links. And so when, when he finally won, I was, I was sort of poised, I go, oh, I know I won now. And mostly, they were mistakes made by Hillary. Mostly, they were mistakes. She, there are a couple of fatal, fatal mistakes she made, you know?

• 1:22:47Speaker 01

  They seem, at some level trivial, but I don't think they were. And so, uh, but yeah, I, it was fun watching that election, I gotta confess. I, I'm not a big Trump fan. I'm Trump tolerant. But I, I love the disruption. I love the fact that he went against two parties simultaneously and won.

• 1:23:08Anthony Pompliano?

  My, my, uh, my whole takeaway from the last, really, five years, right, including the, the election running up to it and him as president, is, uh, he has done more positive damage to politics than we probably understand right now. Meaning that he basically walked in, threw a grenade in the room, and walked out and said, I don't care which party it hits, right? I'm basically gonna just disrupt this whole thing, and it will change the way that, uh, campaigns are run, that politicians, you know, think about their, uh, communication strategies, all that stuff.

• 1:23:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, Lewandowski described, described when he finally realized what Trump was made of. He, he, he, Trump made one of his first big apparent blunders, and Lewandowski starts talking to him, saying, well, we're gonna do this and this and this to repair this, and Trump said, screw that. And Lewandowski, that's when I realized that he was not your normal candidate.

• 1:24:05Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, and, and look, part of it is, you know, the, the thing that you have to be, uh, intellectually honest about, right? Is the guy says dumb stuff all the time. He shoots himself in the foot every day, and it, it's almost like he's got thicker skin, right, than everybody else.

• 1:24:20Speaker 01

  Narcissist.

• 1:24:21Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah.

• 1:24:23Speaker 01

  He's the thickest-skinned narcissist I've ever seen. What is he? I've been, I've been, I'm going, he's a narcissist, but he doesn't care.

• 1:24:32Speaker 01

  What is that? Right? And, uh, and, uh, and then here's the, here's the shock though. So the shock was is that Trump sent this fantastic warning shot across the bow of the two parties to, to straighten up. And the first example we got, the first evidence we got is the Democrats and they just completely screwed the pooch. They needed, you know, all they had to do was find another Obama and they couldn't come close to that. Right? I thought Warren was gonna get it. I thought they were gonna sort of leave her in the shadows and keep her from getting bruised up and knocked out and stuff and then sort

• 1:25:13Speaker 01

  of have her do a sort of a rally like a Jimmy Carter thing. And, and, and then she just, she started looking shrill and Clinton-esque and, and, and it just wasn't selling. It just wasn't. By the way, I used to chat with Elizabeth Warren late at night and it was so wicked. One day I was supporting her on Twitter and the, the Washington bureau chief of The Guardian says, can we chat? And I said, sure. And he calls me. He says, I'm writing an article about Elizabeth Warren and what it is that appeals to people. I've noticed that you've been a supporter. So I, so I told him this story, but I said, I'm also a supporter of Ron Paul and it blew his circuit. He wrote an article in The Guardian

• 1:25:56Speaker 01

  about my support for Ron Paul and Elizabeth Warren. That is such a lot of bipolarity. You cannot, you cannot, you know, that's only two ideas that are in conflict in the same head. And I told him, I said, I think they're both honest. I'm not sure that's true now, but I, at the time I thought she was. I thought she was very sincere. And that's better than everyone else.

• 1:26:20Anthony Pompliano?

  So, speaking of honesty, you mentioned Hillary Clinton and, uh, um, I listened to your podcast with, uh, with Marty Bent, which was fantastic. And you gave your, uh, your Jeff Epstein, uh, theory. What is the, uh, what's the latest, uh, thought process on Jeffrey Epstein and that entire situation?

• 1:26:41Speaker 01

  Well, it really hasn't changed because it all went away, which is a classic case. The classic picture was this guy from, same as Burge or something on Twitter. I don't even know who he is, but he's got a popular Twitter feed. He showed a picture of the Ark and Raiders of the Lost Ark being put in the warehouse, right? The hopelessly lost Ark. And he said, "We won't be needing this anymore." And it was the Epstein case, and that's exactly what happened. So I'm still reasonably comfortable with the idea that he's not dead. I think the analysis of the corpse coming out of the building was very good.

• 1:27:24Speaker 01

  I think the profiles of the guy coming out didn't match Epstein at all. The nose shape, the ear shape, I thought that was pretty good. And on top of that, I mean, there's, I think, all the suicide switch or something where you say, "Look, get me out of here alive or I'm releasing the info." And he had more dirt on the global elite than anyone. And so the question is, you know, why would he not have used it? So I think if you find Jizzeline Maxwell, who I call Jizz for short for obvious reasons, and if you find her, you might find him. But we can't find her either because, of course, we're not looking. You know, we'll find OJ's wife's killer before we find Jizz Maxwell and Epstein.

• 1:28:09Speaker 01

  But I don't think he's dead. I think he's in witness protection, probably had some nose jobs and shit done.

• 1:28:15Anthony Pompliano?

  Where do you think he is?

• 1:28:17Speaker 01

  Oh, it's a big world. I don't know. You know, I just don't know. Where is she?

• 1:28:22Anthony Pompliano?

  Well, that's my point. Is this like a remote island? No one can find him? Or is this hidden in plain sight?

• 1:28:28Speaker 01

  Plain sight. Well, you know, when the most famous, powerful people in the world will all lose their asses if he gets discovered. He's not going to get discovered, right? So all you have to do is make him, and he'd have to hack up his face a bit and make it different. But you could do that. You could, you know, look what they do to the Hollywood stars who get face jobs. Mickey Rourke, go look at Mickey Rourke and tell me you'd recognize him in a lineup. Right? Or Caitlyn Jenner, right? There we go.

• 1:28:58Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah.

• 1:28:59Speaker 01

  Epstein's probably a chick.

• 1:29:04Anthony Pompliano?

  That's a pretty wild theory. I think that uh.

• 1:29:07Speaker 01

  I'm just throwing stuff out to explain.

• 1:29:09Anthony Pompliano?

  Put it this way, there's more than a 0% probability that that could be true.

• 1:29:15Speaker 01

  Oh, I think it's, I'm actually rather comfortable with the idea. And then they're never, you know, there's none of the other guilty parties have ever been challenged, right? And, and, and so that that's, I'm gonna read one of the Epstein books. I was actually the other day thinking about finding one and there. What you don't want to do is get one that's a whitewash. So I gotta find the right one. I can, I, I think Whitney Webb's is coming out, but, but she's kind of. I really like her, but she's, there's kind of a schizy quality. And so she, she tends to throw the puzzle pieces on the table and then. And doesn't assemble them all. And I kind of like the fact that she can see the puzzle pieces, but don't, doesn't know how they fit together.

• 1:29:57Speaker 01

  But um, yeah, I think the Epstein connectivity was so profound. And I have no doubt that he had huge connections with intelligence. That, that, that story is so easily made. And so he's, he's in a safe house or something, or a safe island or whatever. And, and you know, whatever happened to the Panama Papers, right? 25,000 accounts in the Caymans. That lasted what? Three days? Maybe. These things go away. What hap- let's free John Corzine, right? Where's he? We knew he was a crook.

• 1:30:31Anthony Pompliano?

  Speaking of uh, these uh, shining light maybe on the darkness of the world. Zero Hedge uh, went out on the top, man, right before all the.

• 1:30:43Speaker 01

  Right at the top.

• 1:30:44Anthony Pompliano?

  I mean. I, I continue to periodically tweet, don't forget, Zero Hedge would be having a, literally a field day right now in the last eight weeks.

• 1:30:54Speaker 01

  And by the way, their tweets on the COVID. Are getting, are getting these massive warnings on Twitter when someone else posts the link. Someone told me all their links. No, they're not. They're the COVID links. So it's, it's, it's some people in authority who want to make sure that alternative views of the COVID virus are not getting out there. These are not wacky ideas. Some of them are remarkably benign and somehow you put COVID and zero hedge together on the same, the same webpage and it gets a, it gets a warning that says this could have malware and it has none of that. Zero hedge is way better than the mainstream press, way better. You got to filter, right? They have, they have some pretty wacky stuff there, but there's

• 1:31:38Speaker 01

  also a lot of stuff that's showing up there that's either coming from powerful people who are, you know, ghostwriting the stories. Yeah. So I, you know, I think, I rarely see zero hedge look dead wrong. Sometimes they seem like they got it a little off, but rarely dead wrong.

• 1:31:57Anthony Pompliano?

  I, um, I continue to think that this, uh, this whole idea of, uh, censoring ideas that don't agree with the institutions is, uh, not only one, the dumbest idea I've ever heard, but two is a direct attack on science. It's a direct attack on the truth, uh, simply because, uh, it just the COVID crisis, we've seen the institutions been wrong over and over and over again. And if you can't question what those people are saying, or you can't question other types of, uh, thought processes, you, you basically make no progress.

• 1:32:32Speaker 01

  Well, and it, so let's take it all the way to the deep state. Um, that there, it, it appears as though you, you can make, you can go very deep in the COVID crisis to, and find theories that you can't refute. And there's, there's a gob of them, right? And so, um, something to have to do with China, you know, whether it's a bioweapon. To me, whether it's a bioweapon is not that interesting because, uh, because we all make bioweapons, apparently, and one got out and we blew it. And, and I think, I think there, there's

• 1:33:15Speaker 01

  some potentially deep information about what we knew and when we knew it. Or, uh, or a funny meme the other day was something about Biden. It said, what did he know and when did he forget it?

• 1:33:27Speaker 01

  And so I, I, there's a lot of stuff in the COVID that don't, that don't add up. And, and they're just, the math, the math doesn't add up. Why was New York a disaster? Why, why was LA not? Um, and, and, and it's just not obvious to me. Um, I wouldn't be shocked if the numbers were being way overcounted, way undercounted. I heard Mexico's way undercounting. Um, as you mentioned, hospitals have a tremendous incentive to designate a COVID, a patient as a COVID patient. So here's a story for, this is a true story. This happened to me. My wife, uh, this is what we've done to the system. This is a great example. Actually, I'm going to write about this one.

• 1:34:08Speaker 01

  My wife, about, uh, six years, no, no, no, seven or eight years ago, uh, one night, uh, did, slipped and did a header in the kitchen and I woke up to her, you know, started giving a yell out. And I put her to bed and the next day, uh, the next day she slept all day and you go, well, that's kind of a warning. But my wife has tremendous health problems, massive health problems. And so it, it was within the noise. The next day she calls, she says, I really ought to go get an X-ray. And so it turns out we take, I take her to the hospital and I said, should I call an ambulance? She said, no, just, let's just drive to the hospital. And, uh, we get there and it turns out she had a double fracture in her neck. And partway there I'm going, boy, she is awfully vibration sensitive. This is a problem.

• 1:34:52Speaker 01

  So it's not a long drive, but I'm going, this is creepy. And so, uh, and they missed it at first and, and the doc, when she, he took the brace off her and said, there's no break, you're fine. And she sat up and she put her hand, held her head like, with her hand like that. And he put the brace back and I came back and said, you had a double break. Turns out it was a 40% fatality probability, the break she had. Now, really weird, tangentially, my mother did a header, broke her neck and died. So they would have been really weird. They would have been stringing me up. Um, so in any event, about two weeks ago, she was gardening and she did, this is a funny play on words. She did a face plant.

• 1:35:34Speaker 01

  Um, and we didn't think much about it besides the fact that her face, we were picking a piece of mulch out of her face. Um, but then the next day, she was talking about how much it hurt and I was watching her. And then at dinner, she was doing this. I go fuck, we're taking you to the hospital tonight. And, and it seemed much less traumatic. I still put her in a car, right? You could say, when are you going to learn this? We go to the hospital. I can't go in. She's terrible at talking about her health problems because she's had so, she's had 59 surgeries. She doesn't like to tell anyone that number.

• 1:36:16Speaker 01

  And I want to go in because I want to tell them how complicated her neck is. She's got two fusions. She's got a heel on the, the break that's not, that didn't work well. And then they won't let me in. I pick her up three hours later after getting a call saying, come get your wife. And all she got was that it was negative. They did a CT scan negative. She never talked to a doctor. They literally took her and did a CT somewhere out there in the, in, in possibly India where they're reading later night CT scans. Some guy said nothing there. No way to really transmit this information to the guy.

• 1:36:58Speaker 01

  And she gets a negative like it's a pregnancy test. And the next day I call my GP and I said, this is just appalling. He got me an orthopedic. We got her in, he fiddled with her, jiggled with her and, and she did not have a break. But that's what we've done to our healthcare system. Now here's what's going to happen to our healthcare system that's worse. Private equity has been buying up hospitals. Private equity, of course, we know does one of several things. One is they, they try to make a lot of money, which means it's probably not going to be in our best interest. Second of all, they will strip mine the damn thing and load it up with debt and screw the hell out of it. Pay themselves big things and then sell off the shell.

• 1:37:43Speaker 01

  And then because it's a shell, and, and I blame the Fed for that. And you go, how do you blame the Fed for private equity selling shells of companies? The answer is because there's so much stupid money out there. When money, when capital's precious, people don't buy shells of companies. They do their due diligence. Now there's dumb money out there. They buy, yeah, yeah, we'll buy the hospital. We're buying up three a day, right? And they'll sell off the shells of the hospitals.

• 1:38:10Speaker 01

  And then, and now, now what's going on? Well, the hospitals are all going bankrupt because of this COVID thing. So the PE guys are coming up and buying them on, on fire sale prices. Then what we're gonna goddamn do is if they don't turn them into a shell and bankrupt them, they're gonna milk profits and we're gonna get national healthcare out of this to pay the PE guys. Tell me that's not a nightmare. It's gonna happen. It's gonna happen. And I don't know who I'm gonna string up and hang off the goddamn bridge for that one. But I'm gonna find someone. If I get liver cancer, there is a list of people who are in a world of pain. Your real job, your day job, is education. Uh, how does that change coming out of all this?

• 1:38:56Speaker 01

  Oh, so the question is what's going on with colleges? Um, I have been on a bit of a crusade to say we should be graduating half as many people from colleges we are currently graduating. Uh, there are majors that should be minors, there are minors that should be courses, and there are courses that should be history. Notice the pun there. Um, you cannot pay a quarter of a million dollars and major in sociology. I, I just, if, if this podcast gets to our sociology chair, there's gonna be a bitch session. I don't care. You cannot, it is a non-extinguishable debt, a quarter of a million dollars to major

• 1:39:36Speaker 01

  in sociology. And so, um, and, and at the same time, the cost of college is just soaring, although maybe not going forward. Um, and the question is why? What I can tell you is my department, which is chemistry, runs leaner and meaner than when I got here. Less staff per capita, less support per capita. And we're, we're pretty close to the top. And so I gotta figure that's general. And so the question is where is all the money going? And I think it's a lot of unfunded mandates. So when you're accepting federal dollars, you have to do all sorts of stuff, which includes having teams of diversity,

• 1:40:16Speaker 01

  who's having accounting things and all sorts of, you know, all sorts of stuff. And so colleges are just so much more complicated than they used to be. Meanwhile, you know, the the cost of dorms and stuff are going up because the kids, there's a, there's a, oh, an arms race going on. So if if one school's building fancy dorms, that's where all the freshmen are gonna go. Uh, there's an arms race that's gonna appear in medical school soon. NYU just just declared free tuition. No tuition for all med students from here on out last year. No tuition. Now imagine you're sitting at Columbia as a first

• 1:40:57Speaker 01

  year med student, and all of a sudden the headline says NYU has no tuition as of the stay and you're going, I turned down NYU. I can't believe I turned down NYU. So what's the best med school in the country right now? NYU. Because it's the only place you go free. And so that's gonna keep happening. Then what's gonna happen to that? Well, what's gonna happen to that? Then society's gonna say, okay, now that you're not paying a fortune, you get to work cheaper now. You get, we get to send you places. We get to send you to, you know, Sheboygan where we need more doctors, right? Then somehow, this could be the beginning of a more socialized, socialized medical care, curiously enough. So I don't

• 1:41:41Speaker 01

  know, I don't know where academia is going, but we're, we're way too expensive. Um, you should not be studying English literature with a 500 English SAT. And they're out there. Um, my son went to a four-year college, two, a two-year college in the Adirondacks that offered four majors. They were all very pragmatic. It was a great program. Um, he went to a four-year college after that to get a, finish a four-year degree, not a famous place, but uh, he studied event management and now he works for the CFR. Um, so, so I think college has to be much more pragmatic. And the problem with that is, is there's a lot of majors and stuff out there that aren't pragmatic.

• 1:42:24Anthony Pompliano?

  You think that the way the education is delivered changes, right? That this is kind of-

• 1:42:29Speaker 01

  Technically speaking?

• 1:42:31Anthony Pompliano?

  Well, just there's a lot of kids sitting at home right now saying, you know, "Hey, I'm calling into my Cornell class and I'm paying all this money." One, should I even be in college if I'm not going in person? And then two is, you know, does the cost change if the experience changes to some degree?

• 1:42:50Speaker 01

  Well, the experience definitely changes. Right now, we've got a problem with things like lab courses are a farce, right? We pretend to teach them, they pretend to learn, that's it. We're laboring over what to do with lab courses if we can't open up. I just don't think you can keep playing the game that a lab course doesn't require going in the lab.

• 1:43:12Speaker 01

  We made the emphasis laboratory, right? Who says freshman chemists have to go in the lab, right? You could just learn chemistry. The labs, I remember, stinking pretty badly anyway, so, you know, who cares? Not sure a big loss there.

• 1:43:28Speaker 01

  I do think there's a real social upheaval when people finally figure out that you can do something online and then the question is, what is the role of elite?

• 1:43:39Speaker 01

  I'm told Harvard Law School now, it takes about four hours to do the work. If someone's from Harvard Law School disagrees, send me an email, I don't care. I'm glad to hear it, but I had a student who went there, he said it takes about four hours to do the work. That's not the paper chase, which was a famous movie book years ago where it was just cutthroat and killer. Now, it seems like a finishing school, if that's true, if that's true. So, you know, business schools are really about just getting the sheepskin and being able to say you have an MBA. That seems so wasteful. I don't think you should have to take, what is it, seven years to get a law degree?

• 1:44:18Speaker 01

  This Frank Abagnoli, who was the famous imposter, he passed the bar without going to college. I think a four-year degree that includes a major in law, that then you take the bar would be fine. But that law schools right now are cash cows, right? That's where the business school's a cash cow.

• 1:44:44Speaker 01

  You know, medical schools are cash cows because they have, because they have clinical treatment facilities. So they're hospitals and med schools. Med school used to be in Ithaca, but we didn't have the bodies to work with. So to run a med school, you have to have a lot of indigent people.

• 1:45:03Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. The thing that I think is really interesting is there's two things at play, right? So one is this COVID thing kind of exposed a lot of shams in society. One of them immediately becomes, hey, do I have to go in the classroom or kind of just watch online? If I could watch online, how does that change my expectation? I do think there's a lot of value to the social experience, right? Which I think, you know, some people still for sure desire and seek out. But the other piece of it is the business of the school, right? And so, you know, one of the things I've said is like, look, a lot of these schools, they've got massive asset management firms, right? I mean, look, these endowments are billions and billions of dollars. And part of what I think people are asking

• 1:45:47Anthony Pompliano?

  is just, does any of that change, right? Does the way that they allocate capital change? Does the way they invest change? Does the way that the federal government interacts with the schools who have large endowments change? Like, like, what is the impact to the actual business of the school? And I don't think people know yet, right? Like, I think-

• 1:46:04Speaker 01

  Well, here's the problem, though, and that is, if you can find a way that that huge wealth is distorting the system, then you have a case. But, for example, I'm sitting in a building called Olin Hall, created by the Olin family, Olin Chemical. Next door is Baker Lab, which is George Fisher Baker, who was a JP Morgan peer, to the extent they exist. Across the hall, across the street is a building built by Seth Klarman. Next door is a building built by John D. Rockefeller. Bill Gates is down the street. Duffield of PeopleSoft is at the end of the road. You know, it's just, they're everywhere. These

• 1:46:49Speaker 01

  are all buildings that were built with money that was not tuition money.

• 1:46:55Speaker 01

  Now, some of the money actually is tuition money because you often don't get the full donation. In fact, shocking, like smaller amounts now. But, um, but in any case, every dollar that one of those rich bastards gives us, like Cindy Weil gave us, Weil Hall, um, is money that a kid doesn't have to pay for, and the state doesn't have to pay for, and the taxpayers don't have to pay for. So it's, it's like, you know, the Hughes Foundation. So the question is, is, is that efficient? Are we squandering money because of that? It's possible, but, you know, and if you look at a school like MIT right now, they're, they're doing amazing things. Stanford's doing some amazing things. Cornell's doing amazing things, different areas.

• 1:47:36Speaker 01

  Um, and, and, and so it's not obvious to me that the big endowments are, are, are, are to be criticized. Because Harvard, for example, um, you get so much aid to go there. Harvard, I heard rumor, um, said they were going to shut down in the fall because the amount of money it costs to teach the undergrads from their cash flow. It's cheaper for them not to teach undergrads. And, and so, so it's a subsidy for them.

• 1:48:16Speaker 01

  Um, and, and so I, I think, you know, we could get rid of a lot of colleges, replace them with tech schools, various, you know, I, the, the guy who was fixing the elevator a year ago, I was talking to, and he was still an apprentice, but he said after five years he gets real pay. Said how much? He said over a hundred. Right? Should you become an elevator repair guy or major in sociology? Right? That's the question.

• 1:48:44Anthony Pompliano?

  Uh, I think a lot of people, the argument of, hey, there's a big separation, uh, at the higher education level of like, the elite schools have a degree material, serious impact, and, and how the economics there makes sense, and, and you

• 1:48:58Speaker 01

  Can measure what goes in and what comes out, but there's just too many schools, right? Which is a whole nother. If a school can't develop an endowment, one could make the argument that that they're putting out students who are not extinguishing the cost of the school. Right? If a school's product is educated people, if if they're impoverished, you know, is it was it really worth it? I know there's humanists who are going to go, but you have to have humanities. Well, Harvard has humanities, Cornell has humanities. They are a, at some level, kind of a social program that you can afford to have if you were a financially powerful school. Right? In the olden days, schools just weren't expensive.

• 1:49:40Speaker 01

  And so you could actually, and by the way, someone who came to Cornell 100 years ago and majored in philosophy or something like that, they came from wealthy families. They came from families where you could afford to do that. And so it's a very complicated mathematics to understand colleges, but I do. We're not wallowing in money. People think the endowment Harvard. I sat with the the the assistant provost of Harvard in the middle of the financial crisis, sitting in my office, and he really got pretty honest with me there. He says, he says, we don't know how we're going to make payroll.

• 1:50:20Speaker 01

  And I know Cornell had that problem. And what it is, what people don't understand about the endowments is it's not a big Harvard's endowment is not a big 40 billion pot of money. It's not a 40 billion pile of of of equities. It's this exceedingly complex cordon off piles of things, some of which are liquid assets. They might be, they might own timberland in Siberia, right? You can't just liquidate that stuff. But a lot of it's like, for example, my salary is paid by the endowment. And so they can't just take the money that they would have paid me. So I it defers the cost of me.

• 1:51:01Speaker 01

  And there's all sorts of activities on campus that are paid by the endowment, you know, the lacrosse coaches and endowed coach, you know, things like that. And that pays for, that all pays for things that we either could not afford or would have to use tuition dollars to get.

• 1:51:22Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, your point also about kind of the trade schools. I've got a buddy who, he started to roll up a bunch of electrician businesses. And his idea basically was, look, that's a skill that's not going to get automated away by robotics or anything. And actually, it's a undesirable skill for most people. So there's not a lot of people who wake up every day and say, I want to be electrician. It's a very technical skill. And so actually, his belief is that the supply of electricians will dwindle, but the demand will stay the same or actually go up as we build more. And therefore, you will actually kind of have an expanding margin business. And so he's been rolling these things up.

• 1:52:05Anthony Pompliano?

  And you look at it, and you're like, look, part of the problem is the trade schools, right? And the lack of them. And there's just not that many people with those hard technical skills that are needed because everyone either wants to go, you know, kind of be educated in other things or go be a software engineer now.

• 1:52:21Speaker 01

  The other is imagine you take a smart guy and you send him off to one of these trade schools. And in the process, you teach him accounting and business and things like that. But meanwhile, they're also learning the plumbing and the heating and the stuff like that. You take a Harvard smart kid and you put him in a trade school and that guy's going to come out and do stuff. And so one of the really difficult things is they talk about the sort of the financial benefits of a Harvard degree. What's very difficult to tease apart, they try, they don't, they're not oblivious to this, but it's hard to tease apart is what happens if you take a Harvard smart kid who didn't go to Harvard, right? And what, they would have probably gone off and done some pretty cool stuff.

• 1:53:06Speaker 01

  And so, you know, and we, you know, Gates didn't finish Harvard, right? And so, um, so they can go change the world. And one of the problems that when, when you, when you graduate with a lot of debt is, are you going to change the world? Or are you going to go get a job in a cubicle to pay off your, your student loans? And how many of those guys, like if Gates had come from a poor family, let's say, and he went to Harvard, he'd bill up student debt. How many of those guys would you have to divert from starting the next Microsoft to the next PeopleSoft or whatever? And instead send them to a cubicle? To maybe become CEO of a company we couldn't give a damn about?

• 1:53:46Speaker 01

  How many of those diversions does it take to have a measurable impact on our economy? And the answer is trivial number. Right? And so I, I think that, uh, I think, I think hobbling a generation with debt is a disaster. I think giving free college is a disaster because I can also see kids squandering opportunity. So I think there's got to be blood on the page. I don't know how much. I don't know how to do it. I think the Democrats have it, have the idea right and the method wrong. I think, uh,

• 1:54:23Speaker 01

  I think we gotta learn how to make stuff, right? We, we gotta, we gotta, we gotta, I think what Trump had dead right has had right the whole way is to, to sort of bring manufacturing back to the US to, to, to quit outsourcing. Cause when you pay other people to make the stuff, the cash flows that direction. We just can't keep doing that. Yeah, someone like Kyle Bass, he would say that too. He hates Trump, but he would say that's correct. So. I, uh, I, uh, did a conversation with Kyle and he didn't hold back at all for sure. No, he, he, he does not hold back. He's been actually a nice resource too, because when I ask him a question, he doesn't. He doesn't hold back.

• 1:55:07Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, for sure. I really enjoyed the conversation. It was fantastic.

• 1:55:11Speaker 01

  About what was going on in China and the COVID? Is that what you talked about or was it earlier than that?

• 1:55:16Anthony Pompliano?

  This was earlier than that and he was still, this is around the Hong Kong protest and all of that.

• 1:55:23Speaker 01

  Been pretty bearish on China.

• 1:55:25Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, I've got four questions for you to finish up. Two of them came from the audience that I thought were really good and then two I ask everybody. The first one from the audience was if you were in your early twenties, what would you invest your time and money in right now?

• 1:55:39Speaker 01

  I saw this on Twitter. I went through all the answers on Twitter. Whoever asked that question was a good one. First and foremost, I tell young guys to not worry about the shit that I worry about. That it could, it going down that rabbit hole is it's in your twenties is not the time to do it. It's, it's leave it to the old guys to bitch about the government.

• 1:56:03Speaker 01

  And, and there's also a question, what do you invest in?

• 1:56:07Speaker 01

  And, and it's a little more ambiguous to me because what I try to do is I say, look, open up a 60 40. That no one, no one has the cahones to balance a portfolio by selling the winners and buying the losers. So what I tell them to do is I said, look at the end of each year, look at how lopsided it has gotten and switch your allocation over. And, and, and so you don't sell and you just move your, if, if bonds are light, go with bonds, right? And, um, and, and then, uh, and then the problem is, is one time I was in the middle of a podcast. I said, you know, someone who can do this, you know, send it to me. What would happen if you started buying the Nikkei in 1989?

• 1:56:50Speaker 01

  If you started, now, if you're a 55 year old businessman and you're in the Nikkei in 89, you went to your grave without getting even, right? You were in a world of trouble and that's what the modern day investors don't seem to see. I, I think that's where Hussman's dead, right? We are in so much risk right now. But what happens if you bought the Nikkei starting in 1989? You just bought it all the way down and back up. It took you 22 years to break even. That's a long time. So I'm a little torn with the idea of just, just start averaging it and don't worry about it.

• 1:57:26Speaker 01

  I would say, do you find a good financial advisor? And they're rare because they all think they're good. Um, I've got some sights on a few for when, when I finally turn out to be right, you know, the blind nut finds the squirrel occasionally.

• 1:57:44Speaker 01

  Then again, Eric Sineman was gonna get, is gonna get some of my money. There's a group called Manning and the Pier that's gonna get some more. But I really would rather not handle my own money. But I reached a point where I said, I can't turn this over to the, to the street.

• 1:58:04Anthony Pompliano?

  When people ask me about evaluating financial advisors, I tell them, look, the first question that I would ask a financial advisor, just show me your personal returns for the last five years. What are you, what are you personally doing? Cause, cause that's gonna tell me everything I need to know. Cause you're not gonna look after my money any better than you're looking after your own.

• 1:58:20Speaker 01

  Well, I wouldn't have said to give you some money, for example. I think he's been really good. I want to see the returns of someone through the boom. Because I, I called Harvard's problem because during the boom Harvard was clearly getting hedge fund returns. And I said, when this thing goes to hell, they're gonna get hedge fund returns too. And so I want to see a person who during the wild and crazy euphoria is underachieved.

• 1:58:53Speaker 01

  I, I, I, I don't, I just don't think there's many traders out there. And you know, Taleb would say, look, in a Gaussian curve of 10,000 traders, there's gotta be some winners. So don't be deceived, fooled by randomness. And, uh, and so I, I, I like to see, I like to see guys who have muted returns, which is why Madoff was so criminal. Because Madoff played into precisely the kind of thinking that you should be, you should have. You say, I just want someone that gives me solid, steady returns. And that's what he gave. That's why Madoff, yeah, it was a get rich scheme. Yeah. You know, by me, these guys could, they, they got what they deserve. But Madoff's clients just wanted steady returns. And that's exactly what he gave them.

• 1:59:37Anthony Pompliano?

  We look, it's Howard Marks, right? It's

• 1:59:39Speaker 01

  Howard Marks has got a head on his shoulders.

• 1:59:42Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. And I forget exactly the quote, but basically his whole theory is, look, I never want to be the best return, right, in a year because that means I took so much risk that if I was wrong, I would have been in the bottom of the returns. Right? I kind of want to just be above average year after year after year, and I'll end up in the top 5% of all asset managers over a long period of time.

• 2:00:02Speaker 01

  If you said, you gotta take all your money and do something with it, I'd probably just buy Berkshire.

• 2:00:08Anthony Pompliano?

  Even today, after it hasn't

• 2:00:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, I'll tell you why. Because I gotta figure that they're so loaded down with goddamn companies that are stable companies. I've never really looked at them carefully, but they do call out the herd occasionally. They dumped a bunch of the airlines, for example. Buffett could die, and as we talked kind of about earlier, the companies that he bought still exist. And I gotta figure that, that even though they had a disastrous attempt to find an heir apparent about five years ago, where the guy committed some fraudulent shit and got fired, I gotta figure there's people in the queue there who know how Buffett thinks and knows how to do it.

• 2:00:53Speaker 01

  I, I think next bull market, which is going to come after the next bear market, I think we're just, I think this rally is so fake. At some point, there will be bargains. And I think that you will have to buy equities that pay you to hold them, not pay you because of some promise of the future. I think you want to buy some company while avoiding dividend traps pays you dividends. I think you want to be able to say, look, this company, no debt, steady business, 5% dividend, I'll take it.

• 2:01:34Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, it's possible for sure. The second question was, what mistakes you've made in your life that taught you the most?

• 2:01:42Speaker 01

  That's another great one. I don't know how to define a mistake. And the reason is, and I said this before, I send everything through a filter. And I've done this for most of my life, where I say, if this goes very, very badly, will I forgive myself? And that keeps me out of Bitcoin, for example. And when people say, oh, just buy a little, I go, well, then it'll just do jack shit for my return, too. So, you know, the idea of owning 3% gold is insurance policy. Oh, yeah, yeah, buy yourself a $5,000 insurance policy. See how your wife does on that one. So, so I have to go with, if I blew this

• 2:02:25Speaker 01

  one, will I forgive myself? And then what happens is, are they mistakes? Right? I'm not sure you caught a mistake. So, investing wise, I fought the Fed. And I think it was a legitimate thing to do, but I totally misunderstood the utter insanity that they would inflict upon us. And so, and I'm not going to stop fighting them now, because I think they've got us hanging off a precipice. But I paid a price for fighting with that. And Tepper tried to tell me, Tepper said, you know, I'm buying what the Fed's buying,

• 2:03:05Speaker 01

  but Tepper has skills I don't have, Druckenmo has skills I don't have. So if you try to imitate those guys, you're going to be, you're going to be the smudge mark. You're going to be the loser. And I go, oh, yeah, by the way, we liquidated that. And so, what are the mistakes I've made? I really have so few regrets. And I've tried to think about that. I've tried to think about what my life's big disappointment was. And it's so hard to identify one. And it's not that I didn't blow something. I can rewrite history. Um, you know, I played lacrosse in high school and I compared myself to peers on

• 2:03:49Speaker 01

  the team. And, uh, one southpaw attackman was clearly better than me. A guy older than that was better than both of us, in my opinion. A defenseman used to beat the shit out of me every day. And I was a gymnast, too. So I was a small lacrosse player and a gymnast. I just liked gymnastics better. So I went to gymnastics. I grew to six feet. Bad idea. Um, found out later that the, that the guy who was the southpaw was a three-time first team All-American in college. The guy who was way better than him never played college ball. So we'll never know what he was, but he was, he would have been a legend. And the defenseman played, uh, he was

• 2:04:30Speaker 01

  a long snapper for the Cowboys for 12 years. And so I, I, I made the mistake of a relative comparison. I said, well, this is not my sport. These guys are clearly, and there was another defenseman that I had no trouble with. He went to Georgetown and played, right? I, so I, I made a mistake of using a relative calibration that was wrong, but, but I liked gymnastics better. I liked it better than lacrosse. I wanted to do gymnastics 12 months a year. And so I did it. Is that, I can look back and say, I should have trained this. I wish I'd gone to crosshanded putting, you know, I mean, there, there's, these are big life's big disappointments. Um,

• 2:05:10Anthony Pompliano?

  You've lived a good life. I don't think you can call those disappointments.

• 2:05:14Speaker 01

  Yeah. And it's, it's a world according to today, right? It's, it's, it's such a weird and twisted route. And, and when I, when I sort of go through a biography, um, I go, God, that's so goddamn entertaining in some way. So I, I just, I don't have remorse. My, my mother was a serious alcoholic. Like passed out cold noon alcoholic, quart of gin alcoholic, right? I don't think it hurt me. I don't think it hurt my brother. We became very independent. And, and my dad held everything together well. And so it, you know, I, I guess I'm probably a little more sensitive to alcohol consumption, but I

• 2:05:57Speaker 01

  I don't know. I, you know, if you'd asked my brother and I when we were in high school, you know, what would happen if your dad died, right? I think we both would say we'd be fine.

• 2:06:09Speaker 01

  We, we, he was financially stable. We knew there'd be money. We also knew we didn't need my mother. I mean, she, she had our, we, we loved her. She, she was a victim of this horror disease. Um, and she all, she always loved us. There was never a doubt about that. So there was just no scarring. Um, I was told someone I had to be scarred. And so I read a book, Adult Children of Alcoholics. I was like 1.5 for 21 on the checklist. The checklist, you know, can't finish a task, you know, a lot of failures. And I'm going, no, no, no. And the ones that came out with 1.5 was like overachieving things. Yeah. Okay. But maybe I'm just an overachiever, right? Maybe I'd just like to achieve that. That does happen, you know, loons, right?

• 2:06:55Speaker 01

  Um, so I don't control that. And I don't, it doesn't, I don't think about having a tough childhood or anything. I, I don't, it just, you know, in some sense, the independence was great. Mom's passed out. We can go get shitfaced ourselves, right? We can go get stoned. We can go, you know, do things. We can go, you know, get in trouble. I was hitchhiking at 12. Um, my mother would say, you know, I, when she had a license, I'd say, can I have a ride? She'd say, you got a thumb, don't you? We'd hitchhike. And, and those were great days. Those were phenomenal days. And, you know, we played sports every day after school. And it was just, I have such fond memories of childhood.

• 2:07:39Speaker 01

  College was phenomenal. I worked my ass off, but, um, and, uh, you know, do, done this job for 41 years without losing federal support. That's, that's, any chemist will tell you that, that, you know, that's, that's, that's, that's like Madonna, right? You know, that's like still cutting albums at 60. And, uh, and, uh, now I, I haven't been able to think of a big mistake.

• 2:08:09Speaker 01

  That, that, that I really had to learn from.

• 2:08:15Anthony Pompliano?

  If the only thing you could think of is that you fought the Fed, you're in good company.

• 2:08:23Anthony Pompliano?

  What, uh, what's the most important book that you've ever read?

• 2:08:28Speaker 01

  Oh, Jesus. The most important book, since I'm an atheist, I can't say the Bible.

• 2:08:36Speaker 01

  Most important book I've ever read, uh, there's kind of a genre that I like. I like the neuropsych.

• 2:08:44Speaker 01

  I, I like history. Um, it's the most important book.

• 2:08:52Speaker 01

  I finished one recently. I'm getting a little putty headed in my old age. I finished one.

• 2:09:01Speaker 01

  I just finished a book that I'm gonna have to read again by Peter Boghossian, who's the guy who faked all the, the, the, the, uh, the, uh, the, uh, grievance studies papers, you know, the guy who committed the fraud and submitted them and gendered dogs at dog parks and stuff like that. I chat with him occasionally and, uh, he wrote a book about how to have difficult conversations and it could be a profoundly important book. I give it a plug. And he talks about all the ways we bomb conversations and, and, you know, words that are, uh, and going into it not knowing what, what the goal is in the conversation. I gotta read it again, but that could be one of the more important ones.

• 2:09:44Speaker 01

  Um, the book that Charlie Munger represents, uh, uh, recommended was from the genre of the, uh, of neuropsych, the book Influence. So it's a 1996 book, I think, and, and Charlie, um, said that's the most important book and, and I, I, that grouping is good, learning about biases and cognition and, and how, how the brain works.

• 2:10:11Speaker 01

  Well, the most entertaining was Unbroken about Luis Amperini. That was a phenomenal book. Uh, Ghost Soldiers was a phenomenal book about saving. I do all nonfiction. The fiction I've read makes me projectile vomit. So I have all that. You gotta read the chyroner.

• 2:10:30Speaker 01

  It just doesn't work for me. So I want to get to the end of a book to feel smarter. Maybe it's to uh so that when I'm having a conversation with someone, I can molest them with my wonderfulness or something. I don't know. You know, it's who knows what it is, but I I I don't like. I don't like any other book and finding out that someone killed someone, right? I'm trying to get through US history through the biographies of presidents. And uh and and some of them are a little tricky to find good books on. But uh uh audiobooks, how's that? I'm gonna answer that question saying audiobooks.

• 2:11:09Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, I I uh I find it very difficult to read these days because I'm so attracted to audiobooks.

• 2:11:16Speaker 01

  Oh, love them. Oh.

• 2:11:19Anthony Pompliano?

  I just feel like I'm cramming uh information in my head.

• 2:11:22Speaker 01

  You commute? Do you commute?

• 2:11:25Anthony Pompliano?

  I do not, but I listen to them when uh when I go run or work out.

• 2:11:29Speaker 01

  Right. Um, yeah, I'll tell you a mistake I made after being in great shape up to about forty five, I quit working out. So I'm in wretched shape and that that arguably a big mistake, but I haven't learned from it yet. I'm still in wretched shape. I got I used to work out like twenty four hours a week and uh and then I had some health problems that got in my way and then I just I couldn't rally back and now it's just like. So.

• 2:11:54Anthony Pompliano?

  Last question for you, then you get to ask me a question. Believer in aliens or not?

• 2:12:02Speaker 01

  You mean anywhere or having visited the earth?

• 2:12:06Anthony Pompliano?

  Let's do both.

• 2:12:07Speaker 01

  Uh statistically, somewhere certainly. Um, guy named Manfred Eigen, who's a Nobel Prize winning physicist. I did some quick math and and said, if you look at just the odds, that there is just overwhelming odds are out there. I I don't think they can get here. I I think that uh, you know, maybe, oh, the other thing, this is what uh someone made this case. Was it a Rogan interview or something? By the, oh, here's what my like, I want to get on Rogan. No offense, I want to get on Rogan. Um.

• 2:12:41Anthony Pompliano?

  We can try to help.

• 2:12:42Speaker 01

  What's that?

• 2:12:43Anthony Pompliano?

  We'll try to help.

• 2:12:44Speaker 01

  Well, I I got a connection with him on Twitter, but he's so far I'm sending the phone. He's not calling.

• 2:12:50Anthony Pompliano?

  Did you see the news uh today? He uh he signed a exclusive. Licensing deal with Spotify. So later this year, his content previously has not been available on Spotify. So now it's going to be available, but later this year, he's going to go exclusive to Spotify.

• 2:13:09Speaker 01

  It's like Howard Stern move.

• 2:13:12Anthony Pompliano?

  Yes. So my guess is Howard was actually the, the contract numbers that I used. So they gotta be paying him a hundred mill a year, right? Rogan's gotta be bigger than Howard Stern at this point. And Howard Stern, I mean, back in 2004, signed a five-year, $500 million contract and he's still doing it.

• 2:13:32Speaker 01

  So fascinating. Rogan's so fascinating. So, uh,

• 2:13:38Speaker 01

  one thing I wouldn't want to do is spar Rogan. I, I used to have a good back kick, but Rogan, I look and I go, he would break me in half with his back.

• 2:13:48Anthony Pompliano?

  That's how I'm going to get him to bring you on. I'm going to say, listen, Dave said that, uh,

• 2:13:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, I, he, he, he's got to scare. And what I was told after the fact, when I noticed it, I said, holy crap. Someone said, yeah, he's known for it. And I go, okay, that, that makes sense because it, it sure as hell looks lethal. I mean, he, he would just snap you like a pretzel with that back kick. And I love back kicks. Oh my God. When I was doing Tech with that, it just back kick was it, you just, you can end a match fast with a back kick. That guy goes down. Um, what was the question you asked?

• 2:14:23Anthony Pompliano?

  Eulens, you said, uh,

• 2:14:25Speaker 01

  Eulens, right. Um, I don't think they can get here. Some, some podcast or something said, what? It's possible they're here. They said, imagine you're an ant and you walk, and maybe this is Scott Adams or something. Imagine you're an ant and you walk across a highway. You would have no idea that, that that was a sign of intelligent life because you're not qualified. You just don't have the brains to understand. He said that the highways could be all around us. Right? And, and we just can't see them because we're just, the idea that we've hit, hit the limit of intelligence is certainly false. It might be true, but it's only because we blew something badly.

• 2:15:08Speaker 01

  And, and so, but, but my current thinking would be, I don't think they can get here. I think the universe has separated us enough that, uh,

• 2:15:17Speaker 01

  That I don't think, and they, they sure as hell, I don't think they're here now. I, I know, I don't, I don't think the UFOs are. Here's the question I have is why are we seeing, and I bet you've noticed this, why are we seeing all these reports coming out of official sources of UFOs? Have you spotted that?

• 2:15:35Anthony Pompliano?

  Yes. So there, there's two things that are very interesting. One is all the UFO things that recently came out, those had been leaked before. Now they're just being confirmed.

• 2:15:45Speaker 01

  They're coming out of the air force.

• 2:15:47Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. So it, it's a little weird that you would choose now to confirm that stuff. Um, but okay, that's fine. The second thing that I think is very interesting is, uh, the whole idea of a space force. I feel like that's kind of been flying under the radar. Like we've literally set up a, a government.

• 2:16:06Speaker 01

  Have it? I mean, I, I, I gotta figure we just have it. We're just codifying it somehow, right?

• 2:16:12Anthony Pompliano?

  Well, they, they, uh, look, I, I saw a picture of the person who's supposed to lead it, right? That they got out there. He's, you know, some general or, or whatever, you know, a person. And so this whole idea of like, wait a minute, if, if we don't have any idea or any knowledge or any information on anything being, you know, out in space, why the hell are we creating a space force?

• 2:16:31Speaker 01

  Right. So, you know, you could ask, why did we go to the moon?

• 2:16:37Speaker 01

  And the answer to that question is so that we could develop what it took to bomb the hell out of the Russians and, and sell it to the American people. So I think, I, I think a, a space force is to give some flair to something that they want to spend a lot of money on. And want to have a good cover for. I think the idea of, uh, the release of the, the UFOs from official sources tells me they're trying to distract us for something. I, I, I, I don't know what. You could imagine, I'm a, I'm kind of a fourth turning guy. And you could imagine that the, the people in power are getting nervous at the, the temperament of the average person, right?

• 2:17:21Speaker 01

  The, the, the average person's mad. Um, for those who don't know the fourth turning, you know, it, it's the idea that, you know, there's an eight year cycle broken into roughly four 20 year cycles. And that the fourth turning is the bad one, and that's where bad stuff happens. And then, and then when at the end, you have green shoots and things sort of. And if you look at the US history, it follows a perfect eight year cycle. So you go back to the depression, you go back to civil war, you go back to the revolutionary war. And the one they don't mention in the book, you go back to the sale of witch trials. And, and so they wrote the book in 96 and said, if all goes according to plan, the next fourth turning should arrive pretty much on schedule around 2010.

• 2:18:05Speaker 01

  And you sit there and go, holy shit. And in it, in the book, they say things weird, weirdly prophetic things where they say, you know, the trigger could be anything from a financial crash. And they said a tea party? And I'm going, what did you mean by that? Right? A tea party? Yes, we have one, but how did you know that? Right? It's like Ras, it's like, uh, not Rasputin, who's the guy? Nostradamus, it's like Nostradamus prediction. And, uh, but I think if you say, when did the fourth turning appear? If you buy the model, when did it appear? You say, well, it's the financial crisis, right? And I go, no, actually, I think the fourth turning was, or because of our failure to deal with the financial crisis correctly.

• 2:18:50Speaker 01

  So we desperately needed to hang bad guys by their balls. We desperately needed, and every other financial crisis, we rounded up the rascals, possibly a tiny frac shuffle, but enough of them where we could say, look, we've, we've cleansed the system and average Joe can say, okay, I'm fine. You got the bad guys. Now we can move on. And we all came out of it, all the way up to the top of Wall Street came out of it going, shit, we did nothing. John Corzine, what a great example. That guy should have been hung. And, and we got nothing. And, and oh, a great book by, um, Oh Christ, Jesse Isinger, I think, called, it's about the, Jesse Isinger's book, it's new, pretty new.

• 2:19:33Speaker 01

  It's about what was going on. I read every crisis book. I thought, there's no, I can lip sync all what a credit default swap is, right? It's so boring. Isinger talked about what was going on in the Department of Justice and in the regulatory agencies during the crisis. It was a completely, refreshingly new view. So I recommend that book, and it's an audiobook, by the way. And, so it's a great book. And, and what happened was, is that we went at a couple of these guys and failed. Now we went, we got a couple, and then the appeals court just completely overturned, and Rakoff, I think, was the judge, was pissed off because he said, "We spent months and months and months putting this case together, then some goddamn appeals court spends a couple of hours looking at the date and overturns it."

• 2:20:19Speaker 01

  And so what happened is, the spine of the justice system wasn't helped by Holder being in charge. The spine was just ripped out of it. And so they, they started settling for the, "Oh, we'll just find him," and they were happy with that. They don't care if the shareholders pay. But even a nitwit knows that when the shareholders pay, you didn't get the right guys. You got the shareholders. And so I think that we are still very, very much butthurt by the failure to get anybody. And so this crisis has a lot of risk in it. Because now we're really hurting the little guy in a very unusual way, and it still looks like we're bailing out the big guys.

• 2:21:02Speaker 01

  And so, so at some point, we could have a serious shitstorm, the kind where you, you didn't see coming, the kind of violence in the streets sort of thing.

• 2:21:12Anthony Pompliano?

  The thing that I do think has some credence to it, I do not, you know, and to be clear, I don't think the virus was a response to this, but if you go back five months, six months, there was protest all over the world. Right? And all of a sudden, everyone get inside. Now, again, I don't think that the virus had, had any connection in terms of doing that. But what I do think is that it's how quickly we forget, literally, you could go down the list of all these places who had this social unrest. And now that we start to get towards a financial crisis in the United States and globally, I continue to say that $1,200 stimulus check, that's a bribe to keep the social unrest at bay.

• 2:21:53Speaker 01

  Right, and it's a tiny, tiny, tiny fraction of the total money that's been allocated. So if you see ways that the money's being wasted, send it to me because I'm trying to collect up all the stupid stuff that they're really doing. I've got a great article about the wasted money from a previous bailout where they laid it all and they said, "You really want to know where the money went?" They went bang, bang, bang, bang, bang through it. I want to write that chapter this December. And so I'm trying to collect it. What's interesting is they've been able to hide the kind of really nasty levels of greed in this one. And I think what happened in '08, '09, by the way, when they bailed out all the banks,

• 2:22:35Speaker 01

  and I get that you had to save the banking system, I do get that, but afterwards then they should have hung the people from the bridge. I think the reason that guys like Blank Fine and all the bankers gave themselves huge bonuses, which was so tasteless, it was so, such bad optics. I think they thought the system was doomed. And they were just saying, "We're going to take one more wad and run. Get out of here." And then all of a sudden they look at me and go, "Wait a minute, we still have jobs, there's still money? Holy cow, we didn't even need to do that." Right? So I think it was...

• 2:23:07Anthony Pompliano?

  Part of it this time that is pretty interesting is, one, they almost learned from the last crisis. So you don't see the, you know, you don't see Paulson going in front of a panel of people asking hard questions, right? So you kind of, kind of, none of that has happened.

• 2:23:24Speaker 01

  Okay, let's get into this before we go. What bothers me so much about this crisis is it's providing cover for all the bad behavior. It's just, it is breaking my heart that bad politics are being covered, bad economics are being covered, everything's being covered. And as you know, I'm willing to go into dark places and ponder stuff. Aristotle said, "An educated man can entertain an idea without endorsing it."

• 2:23:55Speaker 01

  And I can endorse them, right? I can endorse the idea that Epstein may not be dead. I can endorse the idea that the Vegas shootings were all screwed up. I wrote about that and I had a fasting lunch with Einhorn's mother and father. There's a connected world for you. And she said that my write-up on the Vegas shootings was so haunting. Because every shred of it was right. So I can endorse weird stuff.

• 2:24:25Speaker 01

  I don't know, I don't know if it's possible or not, but could you take a normal sort of a flu-like thing? And turn it into a massive storyline to achieve? Because, because again, if you know you gotta bail out a corporate debt bubble. You go, okay, let's, let's make hay out of this because we're gonna have to do it. We gotta get people to sign off. So, you know, you let the Japanese hit Pearl Harbor so they can go to war. You let, you know, you sink the Lusitania so they can go to war. This happens all the time. And so, um, so I don't really know if, if it could be that good, but here's a question I like to ask myself and I like to ask others. Think of big sample sizes that you can name.

• 2:25:07Speaker 01

  For which people are not dying. So let's start with Ithaca. Forty thousand people, no dead people. Not a dead person, right? I go, God, you know, for a profoundly virulent strain of awfulness. No dead people.

• 2:25:25Speaker 01

  Then you say, okay, okay, maybe that's Ithaca. The, I think it was the NBA or the NFL tested. All of their staff, the entire thing, secretaries, recruiters, everything. Thousands of people from what, 26 cities or something, right? This is a pretty interesting sample size. Point seven percent positive on antibodies. I'm going, how is that possible? The, um, here's one I really like this. Think of all the famous people you know, and they're not not just famous people, but their famous positions. So for example, we don't know all the congressmen, but there's 535 of them and one of them dies. That's a headline.

• 2:26:06Speaker 01

  Hundred senators, fifty governors, right? You go on and on. Heads of state, you know, ambassadors to countries, professional athletes, Hollywood famous starlets. There's thousands. Name one who's died.

• 2:26:26Speaker 01

  Can you? It's a real interesting problem.

• 2:26:28Anthony Pompliano?

  Well, I'll give you one.

• 2:26:29Speaker 01

  You Google it, you get bullshit.

• 2:26:31Anthony Pompliano?

  I'll give you one even better. The recent stat I saw was if you compare Florida and New York State. So Florida actually has, I guess, like two or three million more people than New York.

• 2:26:42Speaker 01

  They're old guys.

• 2:26:44Anthony Pompliano?

  And they're old and all this stuff. And New York State has many, many more deaths. I forget the exact number. But if you look at the headlines, you would think that Florida, they had the beaches open, you know, they weren't paying attention, they weren't taking it seriously, right? Kind of that whole narrative. But the data is actually showing that Florida has fared better than New York.

• 2:27:06Speaker 01

  Sweden or Sweden. So here's the problem. If we get to the end of this thing and this, this is it. So we've declared we're going to open and we crawl our way out and there is no second wave and there is no killing field. There is no anything. And by the way, those sample sizes I was talking about bother me because, because, because if you needed to pull off kind of a hoax, and I don't mean to say that it's all a hoax, but rather amplified.

• 2:27:36Speaker 01

  It could be one of these things where it's like, well, you know, I don't know anyone, but it must be other people do. You know, and, and, and so it'd be easy to convince someone that, well, you don't know, but, but they're out there. There's eighty-five, ninety, whatever thousand who have died from this. We have four nursing homes in town. No one died in there. I don't know how this can be happening with the storyline that we're getting. And so then the question is, can you go so far as to say that maybe they're amplifying it? So there's three levels. One is that they're just human stupidity. So maybe we responded badly under some set of conditions. There's opportunism.

• 2:28:18Speaker 01

  So once it hits, they, oh, boy, now we can get, you know, cheap loans out of the Fed. And then the worst one is the one where you create the effect. And this could be, for example, um, uh, get Trump.

• 2:28:35Speaker 01

  Right? How many people out there, how many authorities are out there are promoting to maintain sheltering? Because they know it'll hurt Trump in, in November. Now, those people, again, they're on my hit list. Those are people who are so immoral. They don't realize how sociopathic they are. They don't realize that they're throwing, and, and how many people are thinking, well, you know, the good news is we're gonna get Trump if this goes this way. And therefore I'm supporting sheltering. Look, you are a sick, sick person if you want to do that. Because we are caught, we are destroying lives as we're, as you and I, we're gonna be fine, right? If you own Bitcoin, you can buy and sell me.

• 2:29:17Speaker 01

  But, but, but these people are suffering badly. And there's a thing called deaths of despair. And supposedly, there's a lot of them in any given year, and they're deaths that are ultimately tied to poverty, right? Whether it's opioid deaths or things like that. The question is, are they gonna spike? And it, the glamorous one is the suicide, right? The guy loses business, jumps off a cliff or whatever. But they're just deaths of despair where just your life goes to hell. One, one minute you're employed, the next minute you're homeless. And, and how do you count them? And, but, but there are academic papers, I hate to use that phrase. People have studied deaths of despair to try to get their brains around how, how serious this problem is.

• 2:30:01Speaker 01

  We're gonna have a lot of that.

• 2:30:03Anthony Pompliano?

  Did, did you see the video? Um, I tweeted it, I think yesterday, where, uh, there was a cop who showed up, uh, two cops showed up to a gym in New Jersey. So obviously, New Jersey's still in shelter in place. Uh, a gym owner basically said, look, I had enough. I, I'm not playing this game anymore. I'm opening my gym. And he put the word out. A bunch of people had showed up. Uh, there was zero social distancing going on. There was a couple of people with masks, right? But for the most part, they were violating all the rules. Cop had a mask on and, uh, and he walks in the, in front of the gym. And you could tell it was kind of some kind of, either the gym owner, the police, some- Somebody tipped off somebody because there was a lot of media there, right?

• 2:30:44Anthony Pompliano?

  And so they're all filming this and the cop walks into the middle of the whole thing and he says, uh, you know, basically everyone shut up. Uh, everyone gets quiet and he says, listen, I am here to formally tell you that you are violating the executive order to stay sheltered in place. You guys have a nice day though. And he walks.

• 2:31:03Speaker 01

  Well, so it's not like cops are normal people too, right? And so I, I, I, I think, I think somehow society often just said, that's it. Part of the thing that reminds them to do that is because they walk into the store and there's the guys work in the store. And they're not flopping over and, and they're not getting hazard pay. And they're not, so, so they go, this guy's working. And why is a store essential? We couldn't find an optometrist. Explain to me why if my glasses are broken, that's not essential. So I think this, we're done.

• 2:31:40Anthony Pompliano?

  Look at the police department. I mean, one, one of the most interesting stats I didn't see while he talked about was at one point it was like 18 or 19% of the NYPD was calling in sick. Right? And, and, and part of it is, look, they've got the vacation time. Some of it's probably just fear of, hey, I'm not going to work and getting, you know, this thing. None of them actually are sick, right? But you start talking about, um, a job where literally your job is to go interact with people to shake hands that, you know, do all these things. And I, I saw on, I think it was Seattle, a cop basically was sitting in his car in his uniform. Uh, and it sounded like he just had enough and he put out his phone and he recorded something and he said, look, if you are a police officer,

• 2:32:19Anthony Pompliano?

  remember your job is to protect and serve the people. You cannot, you know, violate the constitution and blah, blah, all this stuff. What he gets put on paid leave, right?

• 2:32:29Speaker 01

  Right, exactly. And, and, and, and I think people are now watching that. So I think that was ultimately. Probably what led to this gigantic sort of paroxysm, to use a Stockman term, where society just said, "We've had enough," and it happened in about a three-day period. It was so fast. And I think it could be something like that blonde hairstylist or something, I don't know. But then the questions of, let's say, we open up and then nothing else happens.

• 2:33:03Speaker 01

  Everything I know about herd immunity says, "If we had to have it, we don't yet have it. And if we already have it, we didn't need to shut down." So there's a real paradoxical problem here. And if it reappears, then we're screwed royally.

• 2:33:19Anthony Pompliano?

  I'll leave you with my biggest fear coming out of all of this, which is, you get one shot to educate and train a population to do quarantine the right way. If there is a second virus, not coronavirus second wave, like a real, the two, five million people, whatever it is, are actually gonna die, I believe that it will be nearly impossible to lock down the United States a second time, because people will be so anchored on this experience.

• 2:33:53Speaker 01

  My other fear, though, is every time there's any kind of thing coming out of China or Africa, we're gonna shut everything down. We can't keep doing this. This would be like trying to accrue wealth while bulldozing your house every five years. Right? So we can't keep... Now, I don't think we'll do this again. So I agree with you. If this is a false start, then the next one we're all gonna die from, because people aren't gonna buy it. I've been trying to figure out what the optimum is. So it started way back when, where I'm thinking, "Okay, so what I can tell you is if they shut everything down and nothing happens, we have a problem.

• 2:34:37Speaker 01

  If they shut everything down and we all die, we have a problem." Somewhere in the middle is the best outcome. I don't know how many dead people we need and how convincing a case we need. Somehow, I think people to be okay are gonna have to say, "We're okay, but we had to do it. I get it. I've sacrificed. Let's move on." Right? It's like when your kid gets killed fighting in World War II. Whereas if your kid gets killed fighting in Vietnam. And you're going, you know, they're both horrible, but one is worse than the other. We somehow need to be able to come to terms with what we have just sacrificed.

• 2:35:19Anthony Pompliano?

  Well, and look, and part of the really sad part, right, is we'll never know. Because at the end of the day, if we hadn't done the quarantine, the shelter in place, we'll never know what the impact would have been.

• 2:35:33Speaker 01

  See, I disagree though, because I think the sheltering puts it off. So I think, remember, there was a mission creep here, where first they were gonna shelter us so that we didn't overwhelm our healthcare system. Then all of a sudden, it became clear we overwhelmed almost nothing. You know, the horrible pictures out of New York. My wife's been in New York hospitals. They're overwhelmed on a good day. And so, so I'm not sure. And on a bad flu, they get overwhelmed. And so, so then all of a sudden, it turned into now we're gonna shelter just so no one dies. And that's not what we signed off on, right? And, and so, so I do think that if, if sheltering hammered the virus down, we have to have a second wave.

• 2:36:18Speaker 01

  I will not be able to come to terms with the idea that we can go, we can hide from it and come out and it's gone. This is, remember the movie 28 Days, the zombie movie? What was amazing about this, they all ran out of energy. It was the most realistic zombie movie. They all ran out of energy, right? You can't just keep running around forever. The virus can run around forever. And so, so I think that if we all come out and it doesn't flare back up. Then it's going to be shown to be a knee jerk reaction that was totally inappropriate. It's forgivable in the sense that we didn't know, but it's going to look like a screw up.

• 2:37:00Anthony Pompliano?

  I mean, that's Drunken Miller's whole perspective, right? I think he came out and he said, look, he thinks that in hindsight, again, to your point, with the information we had, it probably was the right decision. But in hindsight, when we get information, people will look back and they'll basically say this is one of the worst public policy decisions that was ever made. Now, again, hindsight bias and or hindsight is, you know, 2020, but but hearing him say that of all people, I thought was pretty interesting.

• 2:37:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, he's he's so good. Um, if I had to sort of send a message to the future and say, okay, next time, next time. The first thing I would do is I would go very local. So I'd say, first of all, I say, the governors have the ultimate say. And and and and even more local than that, maybe where where where there's much more authority for if you're going to say, look, of course, we had students that made it very complicated. But but for a town to say, look, we got no cases here, we can keep working. And to have a governor say, you can't work, that was insane. Some guy wrote an article to his governor from South Dakota or something. He said, we've had six deaths.

• 2:38:08Speaker 01

  And he named their ages. He says, it was a doctor. He said, they're, you know, 59, 69, 72, da, da, da, da, da, da. He says, we've lost this many jobs, thousands, tens of thousands. He said, he said, you have to open this up. He said, this is an insane calculation you're doing here. And and I've been told that up in Maine, a friend of mine is up in Maine, says that you wouldn't know there was a pandemic up in Maine. So they're kind of doing this. We all live by New York standards. A lot of us were were were New York City standards.

• 2:38:46Speaker 01

  And I think the message there will be no shelter where you have to shelter. I'd stop interstate travel. That would make sense. So say, look, just stop crossing the borders, right?

• 2:38:58Anthony Pompliano?

  So I'm going to leave you with one stat before we go, which is, I believe that this is still true. The average death or the average age of people who have died from COVID is higher than the average age of people who die in the United States.

• 2:39:15Speaker 01

  Well, here's a weirder stat. The fatality rate of nurses in the United States, which admittedly not are all dealing with COVID, but the ones who are dealing with COVID are all nurses, is tenfold lower than the average, uh, the average fatality rate of the country as a whole. So the nurses have, and here's a stat for you. In a typical year, 800 doctors die of the flu. How many doctors have we been reading about or hearing about on CNN or whatever? How many have died of this? They'd be headliners, right? Their faces, they'd be heroes. They'd be, we'd be, we're not hearing about the, they, they're there, I've seen them. Not 800.

• 2:40:00Speaker 01

  So I, I worry that underneath this thing is, is politics.

• 2:40:07Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah.

• 2:40:08Speaker 01

  And not just late appearing, but, but appearing earlier than, than they should have appeared.

• 2:40:15Anthony Pompliano?

  You, uh,

• 2:40:16Speaker 01

  Fauci?

• 2:40:17Anthony Pompliano?

  Do what?

• 2:40:18Speaker 01

  You trust Fauci?

• 2:40:21Anthony Pompliano?

  I think that he is, uh, if I had to put a category, you have to put him in a politician's bucket because he is serving as, uh, the mouthpiece or the megaphone for an entire community.

• 2:40:37Speaker 01

  Since Reagan's first term, he's been, he's been a politician since Reagan's first term.

• 2:40:44Anthony Pompliano?

  So what I will say is, uh, I don't believe that, uh, he is like maliciously going up there and saying, uh, I know one thing in my head, but I'm saying something 180 degree difference. But if you're on that podium, you're a politician, right? And so there's, there's, there's massaging of the message. There's, you know, kind of, uh, let's highlight this data, not this other data. All that stuff goes on across both aisles. Anyone who gets up on that podium, they're all the same, right? For the most part. Uh, and, and so, um, the fact that it is a doctor, uh, I don't think is, uh, you know, absolves you of those sins to some degree.

• 2:41:27Speaker 01

  So the question will be, will, will the politics that inspired us to open up? Prove to be greater than the politics that were inspiring us to stay sheltered. Which was more, which was a stronger political force, right? Which was more political.

• 2:41:43Anthony Pompliano?

  So I gotta go back. I don't want to say who I think tweeted this very early on, in case I'm incorrect, but somebody who has got a pretty big following on Twitter and I'll send it to you afterwards if it ends up being right. And I, I, I think I remember him saying when they were starting to lock down China. He said something to the effect of quarantine would never work in the United States because people are too kind of religious or too much of a zealot toward the American freedom and ideals. And so I think that what ends up prevailing in these situations is what was the default? It's less about, you know, lockdown versus reopen up. It's much more about the default is always open up and therefore that undercurrent kind of rises.

• 2:42:29Anthony Pompliano?

  And ultimately, look, you know, Egypt, what was the uprising? People needed to eat, right? You know, you kind of get into this game of, you know, I, I've said multiple times on Twitter, the number one thing that a governor should have done on day one is said, shut down your businesses. I'm going to suspend taking my salary until you reopen your business. We're all in this together. I won't ask you to do something I won't do.

• 2:42:53Speaker 01

  Right.

• 2:42:54Anthony Pompliano?

  Not one of the 50 governors did it.

• 2:42:56Speaker 01

  That would have been a politically good move, especially for Cuomo.

• 2:43:00Anthony Pompliano?

  I mean, imagine, imagine if he had done that on day one. People would have loved him.

• 2:43:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:43:08Anthony Pompliano?

  So.

• 2:43:09Speaker 01

  That, that's an interest, that's an interesting idea.

• 2:43:12Anthony Pompliano?

  That, and then the other one.

• 2:43:14Speaker 01

  CEOs who did stuff like that. There were a couple of CEOs who did some stuff. I can't remember it, but something like that.

• 2:43:20Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, look, it, it's a thing where I believe, right? And again, this is a hunch. The political or the politicians who end up.

• 2:43:30Anthony Pompliano?

  Sending very quickly, moving forward are going to be people who have an overlap of skills, both in influential leadership of people. So no more of the kind of authoritative leadership, but much more, hey, I'm not going to tell you that you're you're being legally forced to stay inside, but I'm asking you as a responsibility of as an American citizen, save your neighbor by staying inside type stuff. And then two is command of the social platforms, right? Their ability to speak directly to their constituents. Trump, AOC, right? I mean, there's there's people on both sides of the aisle that have that ability. But I do think that that next kind of class of politicians are going to be very, very talented at it.

• 2:44:14Speaker 01

  So what's the silver linings? I'll start. It knocked AOC off the news. It knocked climate change out of there for a while. I was getting pretty tired of hearing about that. It knocked a lot of the social justice crap. You know, you're sitting there trying to figure out if your pronouns right and and and and everyone else is saying, excuse me, I just don't want to die. Right? So I think there's some silver lining. Any other silver linings that jump out at you is like, you know, it made us more efficient at it. It online communication, but I'm not sure that's a silver lining. It might ultimately be kind of a numbing effect. So what do you think?

• 2:44:58Anthony Pompliano?

  I would go with one, much more focus on nationalism. And a lot of people I think look at nationalism as binary. It's either nationalism or globalism, but just reminded people that, hey, you can't go help the rest of the world if that if you're not taken care of at home, right?

• 2:45:16Speaker 01

  Put on your oxygen mask first.

• 2:45:19Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. So like, I think that was definitely one lesson out of this. The second is a complete revival of this idea of technology and science and building and just, hey, wait a second, we were coasting for a while there. We suck, frankly, as a as a as a country on many, many levels because we fall asleep at the wheel, right? And I think that this

• 2:45:44Speaker 01

  Local. So a lot of local communities kind of pulled their shit together and realized that, you know, I remember after nine 11, there was a story about a pilot who went on. It was one of the first flights. The pilot went on, he said, When, when those doors go closed, it's just us. We're gonna make sure we get there. And it was, in some sense saying, you know, some terrorists can't, can't do damage to us because it's just us. And so, uh, so I think in some sense, communities have picked up a sense of community, realizing that there are some things that you have to do local. And I'm kinda hoping that, there's gotta be people who can't get food now.

• 2:46:29Speaker 01

  There's gotta be tons who can't get food because they were barely getting food before. And, and I'm, I'm kinda hoping communities pick up where, where churches left off, right? I've actually, I'm the only atheist in history to write about the merits of, of religion. Um, but I, I think we've picked up a renewed sense of community.

• 2:46:51Anthony Pompliano?

  I, I, I also believe, um, out of 08, 09 crisis, there was a complete disdain for Wall Street and the banks. Coming in this crisis, there will be a very, very deep disdain for government. I think a lot of people are gonna come out of this and they're basically gonna point and say, "Look, the virus didn't shut down my business, you did."

• 2:47:16Speaker 01

  Right.

• 2:47:17Anthony Pompliano?

  And, uh, I think it's gonna be people from both sides of the aisles, right? That, uh, that say, "Look, I vote Republican, Democrat, Independent, you know, whatever it is." And they're just gonna say, "Look, at the end of the day, you took my livelihood from me." Right? And, and, and some percentage aren't coming back.

• 2:47:32Speaker 01

  Big deal, too. That's a big deal.

• 2:47:35Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. So, all right, where can people find you on, uh, on the internet? Where, where can they go read and, and listen to all of your intel?

• 2:47:43Speaker 01

  Brain, if someone wants to send me an email, they can. Uh, my email box is becoming unwieldy, but they can. Um, you can find me, um, the only rational place to find me is, is, uh, at Twitter, which is a David B. Column. My, uh, my pinned tweet is my annual year in review, which somehow seems to have played a role in getting me onto these, this, on this different plane.

• 2:48:10Speaker 01

  That it started out as just a few thoughts to a few friends, garage band blog. And now it's gotten pretty big. And so, yeah, David B. Column at Twitter. And then, you know, podcasts and stuff, right?

• 2:48:27Anthony Pompliano?

  So the annual letter is fantastic. I highly suggest anyone to go read it.

• 2:48:33Speaker 01

  Well, thank you.

• 2:48:34Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. So listen, we will, we will do this again.

• 2:48:36Speaker 01

  I don't want anyone to write it. It's really like passing a bowling ball through your urethra every year.

• 2:48:45Anthony Pompliano?

  All right, my friend, we will do this again.

• 2:48:48Speaker 01

  Okay.