#1468 Dave Collum | Financial Disaster Is On The Horizon?!

Dave Callum is a Professor of Chemistry at Cornell University. In this conversation we discuss his 2024 year in review, bitcoin, gold, stock valuations, frontier justice, cancel culture, Elon Musk, government spending, healthcare administrations, and much more. ========================= Ledger has been trusted for 10 years to secure 20% of the world’s digital assets. Their latest devices, Ledger Stax and Ledger Flex, feature secure touchscreens for safer, easier crypto management. Go to ledgerpomp.com to take control of your digital future ======================= Meanwhile is the world’s first licensed and regulated life insurance company built for the Bitcoin economy. Protect your loved ones with sound money built to manage life’s uncertainty and a broken financial system. Their BTC-denominated Whole Life Insurance policies allow HODLers to pass more BTC on to their loved ones and a tax-advantaged way to access BTC for liquidity during their lifetime. Visit their website at https://meanwhile.bm/ to join the waitlist for a policy and to learn more. ======================= This episode is brought to you by Bitdeer (NASDAQ: BTDR), a global leader in Bitcoin mining and high-performance computing for AI. Led by a seasoned management team, Bitdeer is driving innovation with its proprietary SEALMINER ASICs for Bitcoin mining and has a massive 2.5 GW power portfolio across three continents. Learn more about Bitdeer at www.bitdeer.com ======================= Pomp writes a daily letter to over 265,000+ investors about business, technology, and finance. He breaks down complex topics into easy-to-understand language while sharing opinions on various aspects of each industry. You can subscribe at https://pomp.substack.com/ ======================= View 10k+ open startup jobs: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://dreamstartupjob.com/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Enroll in my Crypto Academy: https://www.thecryptoacademy.io/

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

• 0:02Anthony Pompliano?

  What's up everyone? This is Anthony Pompliano. Many of you know me as Pomp. You're listening to the Pomp Podcast, which is my effort to find the most interesting people in the world and sit with them for hours while I ask questions in an effort to learn. So it would mean the world to me if you would subscribe to the show on your favorite audio platform, watch episodes on YouTube, and tell your friends and family about the podcast. My goal is to help millions learn from the world's most interesting people. So let's get into today's episode. What's going on guys? Today I've got an amazing episode with Dave Cullen. Dave is a professor of chemistry at Cornell University, and he writes a absolute mammoth document at the end of every year. Calls it the Year in Review. The 2024 Year in Review is almost 250 pages, and it dives into all the things that Dave saw this year,

• 0:47Anthony Pompliano?

  what he's thinking, and where he thinks the world is going. In this conversation alone, we talk about Bitcoin, gold, stock valuations, frontier justice, cancel culture. We talk about Western Spring, Elon Musk, government spending, healthcare administrations. Start about the merits of price gouging, the RFK's True Plant, the Baltimore Bridge, creative destruction, portfolio breakdown, and much more. This covered as much content as I have covered in two hours in a very long time. I'm excited for you to listen to the conversation, and I promise you that if you listen to the whole thing, you're going to come away thinking more independently, more critically, and you're going to have a lot more questions than you do answers, which is the whole point of consuming great content on the internet. So here's my latest conversation with Dave Cullen.

• 1:30Speaker 01

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

• 1:53Anthony Pompliano?

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• 2:37Anthony Pompliano?

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• 3:22Anthony Pompliano?

  Again, that's meanwhile.bm. Go check them out today. Today's episode is brought to you by NASDAQ-listed Bitdear. They trade under their stock ticker, B T D R. They're led by a seasoned management team. Bitdear is a global leader in Bitcoin mining and high-performance computing for artificial intelligence, and they are backed by technological innovation and a massive 2.5 gigawatt global power portfolio. Recently, Bitdear launched its own Bitcoin mining ASICs, named the Seal Miner, to target what Wall Street analysts project to be a multi-billion dollar annual market. Their proprietary Seal Miner ASICs are redefining efficiency and performance, and they are backed by the industry's most advanced chip roadmap, with two more groundbreaking models set to launch in 2025.

• 4:06Anthony Pompliano?

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• 4:18Anthony Pompliano?

  All right, Dave, I thought a great place to start this conversation is everyone is just super excited. They're exuberant. There's euphoria in the market when it comes to stocks and various asset prices. And I think that the folks who've been around for a while, they say, wait a minute, a market crashes around the corner. There's no way that P multiples can be this high. Everyone is way too exuberant. The MAG7 is overvalued. A crash is coming. But the question I have is, do you think that the Federal Reserve broke the market and has outlawed or banned these market downturns and recessions?

• 4:47Speaker 02

  Well, I think they broke the market, but I don't think they've outlawed recessions and equity corrections. So, yeah, they broke the market. Here, I've been thinking a lot about this. The fact that private equity can rape and pillage means monetary policy is too loose. It's too loose because that should not be profitable. Destroying companies should not. Well, so they go, they buy a company, they sell off assets, they take on huge debt, they pay themselves huge bonuses, and they sell off the company with a 47% probability those companies go bankrupt. That's in another book for you. We always swap books, don't

• 5:29Speaker 02

  we? Next book for you is The Plunderers by Gretchen Morgans and Josh Rogger. I'm sure you've read it. I guess he was working. So when it's profitable to destroy companies, the money's too loose. When my dad was, when I was young, he went into a new business, he was a contractor, he went into some subset of that. I asked him why, and he said, you mean besides, I can make money? I said, yeah, why that one? He said, because it's got a big capital outlay. And anyone who has the quantity of capital needed to do this business, I can compete with. If the, if, what I can't do is compete with a guy who can get in on

• 6:09Speaker 02

  a dime, undercut my prices, put us both out of business. So, so, limited access to capital is a moat for good businesses, man. And private equity guys should be hung from their chads. I now call them chads in election season, hung by their chads until dead. And some, some private equity guy called me, you get, you get spam calls?

• 6:32Anthony Pompliano?

  All the time.

• 6:33Speaker 02

  Sell your shit?

• 6:33Anthony Pompliano?

  All the time.

• 6:34Speaker 02

  Okay, so I've, I've now taken answering an unknown number. I say, my, my answer is, I pick up the phone, I, instead of saying hello, I say, if you're trying to sell me, if you're trying to sell me an investment product, I'm going to hunt you down like a mad dog.

• 6:52Anthony Pompliano?

  Is that legal?

• 6:53Speaker 02

  Private equity guy, I don't know. You mean hunting them down? No.

• 6:59Speaker 02

  The other thing, I think it is switching over to, we're going to have a lot of phone sex.

• 7:03Anthony Pompliano?

  You think so?

• 7:04Speaker 02

  I've thought about that. I've wanted, I have wanted to get a call from someone and start having phone sex with them. Say, can I find them myself while, while we talk? You know, and just take it from there.

• 7:14Anthony Pompliano?

  Are you hoping it's a private equity guy?

• 7:17Speaker 02

  Well, if it is, the problem is they'll like it.

• 7:21Anthony Pompliano?

  All right. What about stocks? Hold on. Let's, let's talk about the stocks though, right? Cause the private equity, they're doing this, the, you think that capital is too cheap while they're doing, or able to do this. Obviously cheap capital pushes stock prices higher. One of the things that I find interesting is PE ratios are definitely up. I think that I saw, we are somewhere in the ballpark of 28, I think. And

• 7:45Speaker 02

  Yeah, I don't buy those numbers at all.

• 7:46Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay.

• 7:47Speaker 02

  I don't buy those numbers at all.

• 7:48Anthony Pompliano?

  Explain that one second, but the, the thing that I also saw is that the free cash flow margin for the largest publicly traded companies in the U.S. is up like 500% since 1970. So it's been increasing. The businesses have been getting better, more capital efficient, that they're kind of more attractive from the way that they operate, the free cash flow that they're able to drive. The question I guess is, how do you start to look at, hey, these businesses are better than they used to be, but the multiples are up? Like the, the historical comparison, to me, the historical comparison has become harder when you have better businesses today than you did then.

• 8:25Speaker 02

  I don't think they're better businesses. Let's start, let's start with Facebook. If Facebook died today, who cares?

• 8:32Anthony Pompliano?

  True, but, well, first of all, I think, I think a lot of people would care.

• 8:36Speaker 02

  How many billion is that?

• 8:37Anthony Pompliano?

  I, I think a lot of people would care, uh, but more importantly is, uh, they're driving a lot of profit. And they do it in a more capital efficient way.

• 8:46Speaker 02

  I, there's a great plot that gets mis- misrepresented. There's a plot that shows capital intensive businesses and how they perform in the markets and capital unintensive businesses, how they perform in the market. And as you just said, the capital unintensive businesses have soared. The capital intensive businesses have, have done, done nothing. What that means is the guys who are blocking and tackling and creating wealth, AKA Robert Gordon, as we talk about every podcast, are getting the crap kicked out because it's very expensive to actually create wealth. The capital unintensive businesses where you're slopping pixels around, you're slopping money around, you're slopping stuff around that really creates no wealth whatsoever.

• 9:27Speaker 02

  And maybe my definition of wealth is wrong, but the fact of the matter is, is there anyone listening to this podcast? Who really is enjoying the fact that they have to always reset their password, always login and always have to do everything and download a fucking app every fucking time. You want to do something and, and it tells you your password, it's not the right password. You know it's your right password. And then you go to do something. I spent, I tried to, I tried to renew my password. 11 attempts to upload the photo. And then, and I find, guys, I call, they, I go down to CVS, I gotta take it there. They, they give me a photo. And then I upload it successful. Now I still can't get to the finish and my IT guy walks in and I'm having him figure out

• 10:06Speaker 02

  why my printer is printing double side when the box is checked to print single side. He doesn't know, but he defaults and everything and gets rid of it. Right? So this is the annoying world we live in. So then I said, well, by the way, I can't get my passport. He says, I got mine in a, in a week. And, and, and I boot it up and I'm doing it. And he starts doing his phone thing. He says, you're not at a government website.

• 10:29Anthony Pompliano?

  You're uploading somewhere else.

• 10:30Speaker 02

  I don't think, yeah. I want to find a person who did that. And beat him with a bag of oranges. I just want, I want to get even with that guy. I want to get, I want frontier justice to come back.

• 10:46Anthony Pompliano?

  All right, so this is a big.

• 10:47Speaker 02

  I'm ready to hit a bell tower.

• 10:48Anthony Pompliano?

  This is a big theme. You do a year in review every year. I enjoy reading it. I know many other people enjoy reading it. This, just to, for those that are watching, is only part one. This is a fat one. I thought I was going to run out of ink in the printer if I printed the whole damn thing.

• 11:05Anthony Pompliano?

  If we go into that year in review, at one point, you talk about the island of snakes. I think it is, right? There's a bunch of snakes on the island, snake island.

• 11:14Speaker 02

  Snake island.

• 11:15Anthony Pompliano?

  And you are going, you want to take a bunch of people who have done really bad things to society and put them there and say, we'll see you later.

• 11:21Speaker 02

  Right.

• 11:22Anthony Pompliano?

  Explain frontier justice and why you think bringing that back potentially could have a positive impact.

• 11:29Speaker 02

  Well, so I've been thinking about this. We were watching a TV show from 1720 Hudson Bay. The show was not made then. That's what it was about. And some guy was a total dick. And I realize this is not realistic. Because in 1720, some outpost in Hudson Bay, if a guy's a dick, someone's going to take him out. He's going to turn the corner. No one's going to be looking and he's going to get clubbed over the head.

• 11:55Speaker 02

  Right? And so, so you have to learn how to not piss off people or you did not survive. So that's, that's the social animal. We don't have that consequence anymore. And so like, look at the squatter story, right? You can't get rid of squatters. What I would like to do is go into the squatters with the Louisville Slugger and smack them a few times and say, if I ever see you in this neighborhood, you are going to die.

• 12:22Speaker 02

  That's what I want to do at this point. That's, I've just had enough of this kind of bullshit. If Mershon tries to throw Trump in jail, dox the guy, right? Post his fucking address. I, I, I just, I, I've just had enough of this stuff. You can, I, I, I was listening to the, the sentencing. My guess is they won't sentence him to anything, so they'll, they'll come to nothing. But I'm, I'm, I'm growing so tired. I was thinking about, I got canceled in 2020. I was thinking about that, coming into work today for some reason. And what I posted was, was a post to QTR where I defended the police. I said, look, I don't know why the guy was in that. It was a war zone. Um, um, and, and, uh, and, and, and he, he shouldn't have been there. He's an old man. It's the guy who got pushed over in Buffalo, right?

• 13:07Anthony Pompliano?

  I remember.

• 13:08Speaker 02

  And I said,

• 13:08Anthony Pompliano?

  Like the town square.

• 13:10Speaker 02

  Yeah, right. And it says, it, it, it's kind of self-inflicted when you're poking riot police. And he actually turns out he was skimming their equipment. He'd been a pain in the ass all week and it turns out he was a grifter. But I didn't know that at the time. I just saw an old guy being stupid. And I said, it's kind of self-inflicted. And next thing I know, the entire fucking Cornell campus wants to get me fired. Now, I just shut up. I had trustees calling me, chatting with me. David Einhorn reached out. We spent hours on the phone. My brother-in-law was a trustee. We spent hours on the phone. And, um, and so I had big backers, but it was an unpleasant experience. I, the next time, I'll come out swinging. The next time I'm gonna write an op and say, you fucking pussies.

• 13:52Speaker 02

  You spent $70,000 to pay my fucking salary and this is all you got? Right? So, so, um,

• 13:59Anthony Pompliano?

  Do you think that,

• 14:00Speaker 02

  So I'm kind of looking for fights now.

• 14:01Anthony Pompliano?

  Do you think that public discourse has changed? Obviously with Trump, uh, winning the popular vote, there's been a, a kind of a vibe shift in America. Um, but I also think that

• 14:10Speaker 02

  Who used that phrase? Someone invented that shit. Who invented that phrase?

• 14:13Anthony Pompliano?

  Vibe shift? I don't know, but it's perfect.

• 14:15Speaker 02

  No, someone, there was one person who came up with it. It was a prominent person. I remember thinking, that's a good way to describe it.

• 14:22Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, I think it's perfect. So, uh, what I do think though is America's also fed up with the cancel culture. For the most part.

• 14:29Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 14:29Anthony Pompliano?

  Right? When, uh, when you see the hit piece. People don't even read it anymore. They're like, ah, shut up. Uh, when you see, uh, someone trying to go and get somebody canceled, um, people are like, ah, shut up. Except I do think one of the risks are, uh, the left extreme has been the cancelers for a while, but now there seems to be a faction of the right that is starting to, uh, use some of the same thing. And so I wonder how much a cancel culture is not left or right, but just who's in power.

• 14:57Speaker 02

  Well, that's an interesting point. That really isn't it. In fact, one of the things I've labored over is when Trump gets into power officially and he's got his A-team, which I really like the looks of, including people who others are appalled by, like Rubio, right? I totally understand why Rubio is not a popular pick. What I've encouraged people to consider, and this is in part two, by the way, um, is, is assume that Trump and his inner circle vetted Rubio pretty carefully and asked the question, why did he pick Rubio? Right? Cause he's not obvious. And I think my guess is if I had to write a plot, I'd say, look, um, this is what we're gonna do, is what we expect out of you. If you can't do it, I'm gonna fire

• 15:42Speaker 02

  you in a heartbeat. Don't take the job if you can't do it. What do you say? And Rubio's a chameleon probably, right? So he said, yeah, I can do that. So the question is, do I want to see Trump go out there and move the country forward? And do I want to see him exact some revenge? And, and I think the constructive thing is to move the country forward, but I've had a lot of podcast hosts, which when I ask them, they say, we, we've got to clean up some of the mess that was created though. We can't just let this go. And so, uh, so, my, my, my, uh, as you read in there, my, my 23 and me traced me back to an inbred

• 16:24Speaker 02

  tribe in the Neander Valley, uh, which means I'm a, I'm a, I'm a, I'm a, I'm a Neanderthal. And, um, so I would love to see some of these douchebags get what's coming.

• 16:38Speaker 02

  But it will be distracting. And if he really wants to get something done, he's gonna have to stay focused.

• 16:44Anthony Pompliano?

  All right, before we get into

• 16:45Speaker 02

  So I'm torn.

• 16:46Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, before we get into new administration and things that they're gonna do, let's cover a couple of things on the economy first. Gold outperformed the S and P. I think it's the first time in history where gold and the S and P are both up more than 25%. And I think that there's a lot of people who look and say the S and P performance over the last two years is unsustainable. How do you reckon with gold and the S and P doing so well, gold outperforming the S and P? And then two straight years of, you know, 20, 25% performance of S and P?

• 17:21Speaker 02

  Well, if you go back to the Buffett's 1999 Fortune article, he lays out in luridly clear detail. I've read it probably six times. And, and he says, what dictates the performance of the markets? In a long term, is what is happening to the long interest rates? And he says, it's not about GDP, it's not about wars, it's not about pandemics. I haven't, by the way, in 09, I said pandemics and wars don't have an effect on markets. Boy, that was kind of foreshadowing, wasn't it?

• 17:54Speaker 02

  And, and he says it's about the direction of interest rates, long-term rates. And he said from 1967 to 81, when the markets were inflation corrected, went down 75%. Which, which in, 75% is bad, 14 years is worse, right? 14 years is a third of your investment life. And so if you spend 14 years climbing down into the valley of death, you've just burned a lot of time, duration is what you guys like to call it. And so, and then he said, the GDP during that period was better than the GDP from 81 to 99.

• 18:36Speaker 02

  But from eighty-one to ninety-nine, interest rates went from way the fuck up there to down. And he says that's why the markets did well. So, what happened? Well, from eighty-one to the present, interest rates went from, or recent years, interest rates went from seventeen to zero. It's almost as though they were smart enough to know, they said, "We've got seventy percent. We can squeeze four decades of gains if we bleed the seventeen percent down to zero." Almost like they knew what Buffett was saying. I doubt they did, but almost like they did. And now we're at the bottom. Now, nitwits on Wall Street, which I repeat myself,

• 19:24Speaker 02

  like to say that low interest rates are bullish. Because you say, "Well, if you can't get it in the bonds, you gotta buy the stocks," right? That sort of thing. No, low interest rates are bearish unless you got the attention span of a fruit fly. Because now, you're at the end of the rope. You've run out of slack. You now have one direction. So, in a secular investing world, low interest rates, the game's over now. And if we have turned the corner in these very long wavelength credit cycles, it's not necessarily going to go to seventeen again, but it might, given all the debt and everything. If we've turned the corner, as a lot of guys, market guys think, we're looking at a very bad, bad couple of decades for equities.

• 20:09Anthony Pompliano?

  And

• 20:10Speaker 02

  And you can say, "They're not going to correct." What I like to ask people rhetorically is, so I think we're two-hundred percent over fair value, historical average value. And I can show you twenty-five metrics that sort of support that. The simplest one is to take the Case-Shiller. Eighteen eighty to two thousand twenty-five. If you set as a baseline, the average from eighteen eighty to nineteen ninety, it's just channels, just like channelingstocks.com, right? And it averages around twelve. When it was cheap in eighty-one, it was six. Good place to start a bull market. In fact, I don't think we needed Reagan. It was going to start no matter who got elected.

• 20:54Speaker 02

  And so, that's your baseline at twelve. It's thirty-eight now.

• 21:00Speaker 02

  Right? So what happens if we regress back to the mean? We gotta drop 70%. Now, people say, oh, that would never happen. Right?

• 21:11Speaker 02

  Okay, to those who say that, I'll ask the following question. Name for me an asset class that got way overvalued. It didn't find its way back to cheap. They don't exist. It's a truism. They can't exist. It might take a while.

• 21:27Anthony Pompliano?

  How long does it stay quote unquote overvalued? Until you say it's a new regime? Is that a 10 years, 20 years, 30 years? Like, what is the?

• 21:36Speaker 02

  Nothing, nothing. Here, so, so, so I also, as you know, I went through the consequence of being overvalued. So valuation, as I said, any valuation metric is the price divided by something that on a track. And what's really critical, they're both inflation sensitive. So inflation doesn't get you out of overvaluation at all. So you inflate the, the price, you inflate the earnings. They both track inflation. Therefore, we could be 200% over fair value. Fair values should be historical average value.

• 22:10Speaker 02

  And, and, and, and, and you can inflate your ass off and you're still 200% over average value. It doesn't get you out of that mess. So if you have a stock like, the example I really liked was when it came out of the dot com. Buffett said that he, he actually regretted hanging on to Coca-Cola. We know how much he loves that stock. And the reason was is because, because at the end of the 90s, Coke got up to around a P E of 50. Now Coke at a P E of 50 means it has a 2% cash flow.

• 22:43Speaker 02

  And he could get 5 and a half percent out of a 10 year bond. Why would you own Coke at 2% cash flow when a bond will give you 5 and a half percent? You say, well, the price might go up. Yeah, and then the price will go back down. You say, okay, let's say Coke doubles its earnings. What at the top of the next 20 years, where are the odds Coke's going to double its earnings? Zero, right?

• 23:03Anthony Pompliano?

  Why? Why zero?

• 23:06Speaker 02

  It's basically a royalty trust.

• 23:09Speaker 02

  Right. Coke's gonna double. It's gotta, it's, it's, it could double its earnings by acquisition, but that's not legit doubling earnings because acquisitions cost money. So you're just expanding the size of the footprint. You're not actually doubling your earnings. That's, that's, WorldCom did that. How'd that work out for investors, right? So, um, so, so let's say they double their earnings. Now they're priced. So that's almost impossible to imagine. Buffett should have known this is what he said. Now they would be priced for return 4%.

• 23:43Speaker 02

  Right? You can't get out of that. Your overvaluation is a dead end. So if you own a company that has a PE of, of 100, and, and you somehow think you're going to grow your way out. So your, your price for return 1%. Say, well, I'm going to double the earnings because it's a growth company. It's bullshit.com, whatever. So you double your earnings, you're now priced for return 2%. And if you say, well, I'll double them again. Well, it's priced for return 4%. Double them again. Price for return 8%. How long is the market going to wait for it to return 8%? Not long.

• 24:15Anthony Pompliano?

  What, what's interesting is there's this chart that just came out of Uber's operating profit. And, you know, for years, they're heavy, heavy losses. The losses start to subside. They get to break even. And then the chart just continues and there's just very methodical growth. And now they're profitable from an operating profit metric. What's interesting to me about that is, and I tweeted this saying, this is a classic playbook from a venture capital standpoint. That's what the venture capitalists want to see, right? Is they want to fund tons of losses for years and years. And then eventually you flip it. It becomes profitable. And then it prints money. They made a bunch of money. They're happy, et cetera. We talked about private equity investors earlier. The tech industry has now been doing this for, you know,

• 24:58Anthony Pompliano?

  decades, but really in the last, call it 15 or 20 years, there's been substantial amount of capital that's been put into that market. These companies are starting to come public over the last five years or so. There's been a lot of critics who have come out and said, hey, I actually don't like these companies. Right? We think that these companies are bad businesses. They're just surviving because of the venture capital. They're overvalued. You know, name your critique that people have thrown at them. How do you think about those types of companies, which definitely fall in that growth category? Some of them do seem to be, you know, reaching a point now, Palantir, Uber, et cetera, where they're becoming attractive businesses.

• 25:34Speaker 02

  Oh, Palantir is such a hot button. I'm staying off that one.

• 25:39Speaker 02

  There is no question there are companies who are going to scrape up a lot of profits. Again, back to the Buffett article, he says, when you take the market, I don't know how to pick the Palantirs. I don't know how to pick the Ubers, right? By example, how many companies exist that still call themselves dot com?

• 25:59Speaker 02

  You say, I invest in Amazon. You say, I don't say amazon.com. It has a dot com on the end because that's their website. How many companies are still dot coms? The answer is none, right? There were a ton of them that went to shit. And so you can focus on Amazon and say, oh, they did really well. Okay, there is one example. But, but at the expense of vast numbers of other companies that that are no longer with us, and if you are an indexer, you own those two. And the question is, is the world really a better place that now everything has to be purchased online? And I don't think it is. I think Amazon's business model might be

• 26:41Speaker 02

  to wipe out absolutely every last brick and mortar and then build brick and mortar.

• 26:48Speaker 02

  I think, I think they're

• 26:49Anthony Pompliano?

  They're already doing it to a degree, right? They're already doing it somewhat in terms of, obviously, they've got the grocery stores and there's a number of businesses, especially a lot of D to C clothing companies, right? They kind of, everything's online, everything's on, everything's online, and all of a sudden they start opening up physical stores. So that makes sense. If we look at the Mag 7, there's this great chart that shows about 2008, 2009, there becomes this bifurcation or separation in the market. And pretty much since 08, 09, until today, the Mag 7 has just been on an absolute domination, you know, trend. They are destroying the rest of the S and P.

• 27:28Anthony Pompliano?

  Why do you think that's happening? And is that a sign that the world is shifting to this kind of capital light, digital first, you know, type company? Or is that something where there is this, you know, amazing crash on the horizon that people don't really see?

• 27:45Speaker 02

  So I'm not a believer that crash is repair damage. So I do not believe that, you know, what's the best example of crash? 1929, but it was the 29 crash that did the damage. The best example is 87, that was a blink of an eye. Right, a blink of an eye. So if we had a crash of 50% tomorrow, that would be a headline moment. The dip buyers would show up. Next thing you know, there'd be headlines saying, if you just held on, you'd be in the black buy, you know, two years from now. Right? Never, never, never, never sell. What I'm saying is, is if you listen to Buffett, and I'm not a Buffett fan. I think he's a fucking hoser, but he's a brilliant hoser.

• 28:28Speaker 02

  And, and, and, and what he said in that article, by the way, is the most you can hope to get out of equities overall, after all the fees and everything that you can't see. And he wasn't clear about the what you can't see. He says, there are so many things you can't see. He said, the most you can hope to get is 4%. Real. Got him Ron Grice looks at the S and P from 1925 to the present and corrects for inflation using M2, seems like a clean way to do it. I think we've probably talked about this in the past. He gets 3.79% total return correcting for M2. Capital gains, he gets a loss from 1925 to the present correcting for M2.

• 29:10Speaker 02

  So hedging inflation, equities work fine as long as inflation's not nuts. Right? So the analogy I like is shovels and bulldozers move dirt. Equities and gold hedge inflation. Don't pick the wrong tool for the job. Right? And so when, when, when you need to move a little dirt, you use a shovel, you use equities, whatever. When, when inflation gets bad, the equities will make you suffer badly. And so, so, so right now, there's, there's not a guy sitting on Wall Street right now who knows what a bad market looks like.

• 29:52Speaker 02

  We've been in a, we've been in a 45 year bull market. We've been in a 45 year, you know, the pitch. Here it is again. This is a repeat by the third time. In 81 PE was six interest rates for 16 or 17. The Russians sold us resource, started selling resources for pennies. The Chinese sold slave labor and the boomers hit the market with their wives. So the demographics were phenomenal. From 81 to the present, valuations, which should not trend unless you're willing to say the cash return on them is trending the other way. Cause if you're sitting at a valuation of 30, you're you're getting 3% return. There's no way around that. That's, that's what it's gotta

• 30:37Speaker 02

  give. You can't get more money out of the system than what you create. And, and the valuations, which should not trend, compounded 4% a year for four decades. When that reverses, duck.

• 30:54Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay. Let me play devil's advocate and really not even devil's advocate as much as I actually believe what I'm about to say. 2008, 2009, Ben Bernanke and the rest of the crew, they come up with a genius plan to literally press a button and create money.

• 31:10Speaker 02

  You don't believe the genius part.

• 31:13Anthony Pompliano?

  Uh, and then you, they put that money into a select few banks or financial institutions, uh, bank accounts and let them go buy assets in the market. This idea of creating money and creating lots of money. First it was, you know, hundreds of billions. Now it's trillions of dollars at a time. Took them 15 years or so to perfect the playbook. Covid happens and they are sitting there saying, put me in coach. I've been, I've been practicing. I've been practicing. I'm good. I'm ready to go. Give me some game time.

• 31:48Speaker 02

  Yeah, I blame them. I actually, I put, I put that on them 100%. Yeah.

• 31:52Anthony Pompliano?

  Let me get up to bat, coach. Coach puts them up and they hit a grand slam first at bat. They slammed trillions of dollars. They got the politicians, uh, printing money as well. They got interest rates down, the emergency cut. I mean, just, you couldn't draw it up better. They hit a grand slam market, V recovery, right back to all time highs before the end of the year. So now. We went from, hey, we're hitting, you know, batting practice in 2008, 2009, trying to figure out our swing, till we know we can hit grand slams. Any market downturn that we face moving forward, they're going to get right back up there and they're going to hit grand slams. They're going to slam interest rates to zero, they're going to print trillions, if not at some point, tens of trillions of dollars.

• 32:37Anthony Pompliano?

  And I find it very hard to see a world where we will experience in my lifetime, an 18-month or longer bear market recession, whatever you want to call it. Unless there is total destruction of the US dollar, there's default, you know, there's some like existential kind of blowing up of the system.

• 32:58Speaker 02

  Right. But out, you know. Those, those tend not to be important either, in my opinion. Those tend to not be, that's, that's all, I don't look for wars or things to, to, to, to shake the markets back to the foundation. So first and foremost, there are listeners who are listening to you going, if you saw my fucking grocery bill, you, you'd eat shit and die right now. They, they would, there, there, there are enormous numbers of people who do not know how they're going to pay their bills. And so the markets in theory can keep going up, but at some point, what happens? Populism. Who'd we elect? Trump. We, we mowed, we mowed those lefty commie dogs down. Uh, second of all, look around the world.

• 33:42Speaker 02

  Democracies are collapsing all over the world. Trudeau, Romania, England, Germany, they're throwing the bums out. This is Western spring. Something's happening in the world. Thirdly, um, but I don't know, someone asked me in a podcast, I think it was yesterday, I really got to stop doing podcasts on a, on a day by day basis. Um, where, where did they hide the inflation? And I don't have a good answer to that. So again, back to, um, on Grice's chart, that there's M2. M2 shot up everywhere for a hundred plus years. Where do they hide the inflation?

• 34:24Speaker 02

  And, and part of it is, has to do with China's making things for dirt cheap, which they'll never do again. Right? That's over. Um, and if Trump, you know, brings in, brings stuff back here, inflation's gonna get bad. But when they solve, when they, I blame the Fed for the lockdown. If they hadn't behind closed doors said, uh, yeah, we'll cover your ass, they couldn't have locked down. So the Fed owns the lockdown, in my opinion. They said, no, it'll cause inflation. That'll be a problem. Don't do it. Wouldn't happen. Um, and so what happened? So they, they, they went direct at BlackRock's request. And, uh, and then we got massive inflation, finally. The inflation that has scared me for a very long time.

• 35:09Speaker 02

  And in my opinion, it's way worse than they, they report. The Baath Commission fucked up the inflation metrics. Our dashboard is telling us we're doing 55 and when we're doing 75. Our dashboard is telling us our tire, tires are fine. Even though they're flat, our dashboard is telling us that the engine's fine, even though it's overheating. So we're getting bad reads on everything because they fucked up all the reads, right? You know, the inflate, the, the jobs numbers are like 3 million out of whack, right? I mean, we, they, they have, they have caused everything that would tell us that we have problems. To, to refuse to tell us we have problems. Now, here's what I think will happen.

• 35:53Speaker 02

  We will have the next thing where they want to be put in the game. And inflation will go nuts. Undeniably nuts. And then they'll say, we can't do this anymore. They've run out of slack. They've run out of the, the, the system. And, and you know, the Fed, I don't know, recently, four or five years ago. There was one Fed Governor, Rivlin, I think, said, said, you know, no one knows there's inflation, therefore there can't be inflation. I'm going, you're a fucking moron. Um, but what she's really saying is without the inflation expectations, things are pretty safe. Well, the inflation expectation is now built into the system. Watch union activity.

• 36:35Speaker 02

  Watch what, if, if you're gonna build a house three years from now.

• 36:41Speaker 02

  And you said, give me an estimate to the contractor. How much is that guy going to add to assume an inflationary three years? He's going to put like 30% on that fucking house. That's inflation expectation. Right before he could say, well, I don't even have to account for inflation because it's tame. Right? I don't think it ever was tame. Go to Chapwood, go to Shadow Stats. Inflation, you know, inflation's been some handful of percent higher than they've been telling us. And they're happy to lie to us about that. Right? Boskin Commission, which came up with a new way to lie to us. Um, um, actually published their new inflation metric on the social security website,

• 37:22Speaker 02

  which is where they most would like to lie to us because they've inflation correct. So I believe that they are now about to be boxed in by inflation. And therefore your model put me in the game, coach. You say, well, dude, both you blew off both your knees now. You can't go back in the game because it's not going to work.

• 37:44Anthony Pompliano?

  You think that there

• 37:45Speaker 02

  You're 45 years old.

• 37:46Anthony Pompliano?

  You think there's a world where the Fed's playbook that they've perfected over the last, you know, decade and a half, they will do it one more time. It'll be so bad that then everyone says, no way.

• 38:01Speaker 02

  I, I think, I think, I think it they, they might just starting it might, might cause the trouble. So it might be that they'll do it and cause terrible problems. By the way, I don't think you can inflate your way out of the problems we have either. Can you add this a legitimate question? It's not a rhetorical question to trap you or anything. Can you name a country that inflated their way out of debt?

• 38:26Anthony Pompliano?

  Not, not

• 38:27Speaker 02

  Cause I can't.

• 38:27Anthony Pompliano?

  No, not out of debt, but, um,

• 38:30Speaker 02

  Well, we have debt.

• 38:31Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah.

• 38:32Speaker 02

  Israel might be an example, but here's the problem. I'm reading a book about Israel and I don't want to talk about it because I don't want to get killed. Um, it's by John Mearsheimer. I will recommend, I'll recommend the book. It's called the Israel Lobby. And I was told by a Canadian intelligence guy who said, look, all these things you're trying to understand. Read this book, it'll help you. And, uh, so for all I know, we bailed out Israel to get them out of their mess.

• 39:04Speaker 02

  But it's the best example. It appears as though they he based the shit out of their the shekels. And then um and then and then spent some time suffering. And then somehow got it together. But but it's very, very hard to know where that money flowed from to help them.

• 39:21Anthony Pompliano?

  A huge part of um the debt, I think, is the politicians have been spending like idiots. Um, and I don't think it's just the politicians. I think just in society in general, we have lost our minds when it comes to expenses. You know, I always joke, a business, basically, we make more money or we can spend less money. Uh, we have no concept of spending less money. You use a couple of examples in the year in review, but the one that I thought was uh, most interesting is um, it's true in schools, but it's also true in healthcare, where the physicians. There's been moderate growth, but the administration kind of class of the healthcare system has exploded. And I think that I saw somewhere um for schools, very similar, the number of students has increased like 5% or something.

• 40:07Anthony Pompliano?

  The number of administrators is like doubled, you know, in that same time.

• 40:10Speaker 02

  Here's an example. Here's an example. Um. Ithaca High School has what are called typists. Now, they're not typing, right? That's just the the name of the line. They're doing some administrative thing. When you went to school, what was your administration look like when you were in high school, right? Maybe four guidance counselors. You know, vice principal, principal, couple of secretaries, the main office, a nurse. Right? Couple of janitors. At the guy's cool with graduating classes of maybe 400. 22 typists.

• 40:44Speaker 02

  Right? Uh, so so um, and this is in the digital world, right? This wonderful world that you say, you know, we're going digital. We got more bodies than we're supposed to have. Um, so so.

• 40:59Speaker 02

  I don't think the digital world is helping us that much. I really, I don't believe it. I think, I think, um, I think that,

• 41:08Speaker 02

  I don't know what your world's like because it's so different than mine, but I do so much shit myself that used to be done by someone else. And I'm, I'm being asked to go online to do shit and, and, and, and it's, it's just, it's a wretched experience. So.

• 41:23Anthony Pompliano?

  My favorite is, uh, you go to, you know, CVS or Duane Reade, you gotta check out for yourself. You go to McDonald's, you gotta order for yourself in the kiosk. I, every time I always say the same thing because they always have somebody there. You know, they're kind of monitoring the five or six, uh, different kiosks or whatever. And I always say the same.

• 41:39Speaker 02

  Idiots like me who can't figure out how to do it.

• 41:41Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. Well, I always say the same thing. I say, uh, this greatest business ever. You got me working for you while I'm paying you to buy, uh, items. And they always laugh and then I walk out and I say to myself, I wasn't joking. I mean, it's crazy.

• 41:53Speaker 02

  Well, how do you like it when you buy, say a cup of coffee and the person turns the cash register and there's an 18% tip box?

• 42:01Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah.

• 42:01Speaker 02

  Right? And you go, I, you didn't do any, you know, if someone waits on my table, I get the tip. What they're doing is they're, it's, they're, they're adding the cost of that labor onto the tip. And that's why I'm torn when I don't give the tip because they got, you didn't do anything for me. You just gave me a cup of coffee. But it's also true. There's, they're probably paid even less because the tip is making up the difference. And so I'm, I'm torn on that. And I have two kids who have degrees in hotel management. I talk to them about, you know, what should I do when I'm asked to tip?

• 42:34Anthony Pompliano?

  What do they say?

• 42:36Speaker 02

  They say no.

• 42:37Anthony Pompliano?

  They say no.

• 42:38Speaker 02

  But I don't think they understand the modern economics.

• 42:40Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah.

• 42:41Speaker 02

  Of the fact that this person might be paid six bucks an hour.

• 42:44Anthony Pompliano?

  I always do it, but I say, I say to myself, uh, I hope it goes to the person, not the, not the company.

• 42:50Speaker 02

  Well, so that, that's one of the reasons why I pay cash when I tip.

• 42:56Speaker 02

  Is that I think the odds of them sticking their hand in the cash thing and pulling it out and getting to take it home. But, but then you get this stupid thing where Trump comes up with it and then Harris comes up with it. Because she didn't have an original thought in her entire life, best I can tell. Um, to, to people get tips to be tax exempt. It's just a payment.

• 43:16Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah.

• 43:16Speaker 02

  Why, why does getting tipped get you tax exemption? I, it makes no sense whatsoever.

• 43:23Speaker 02

  It sounds like you're helping the little guy. That's what it sounds like. People get tipped are down the food chain.

• 43:29Anthony Pompliano?

  Of course.

• 43:31Speaker 02

  Right. So it's a, it's a blue collar sort of.

• 43:34Anthony Pompliano?

  One of the things I've been saying to people is, um, if you put a president in the White House, who measures the health of the US economy by the level of the stock market, there are very high odds the stock market will continue to go up because he will throw everything he's got at it.

• 43:49Speaker 02

  Are you listening to what he's saying though now?

• 43:51Anthony Pompliano?

  About?

• 43:53Speaker 02

  The stock market? He's downplaying it.

• 43:58Anthony Pompliano?

  He, um, he is, but then he's also saying that interest rates are too high. And I think, I think that what he is doing is he, uh,

• 44:07Speaker 02

  Expectation.

• 44:08Anthony Pompliano?

  He's playing the, the classic, uh, let me talk about how bad of a job, you know, I'm walking into how hard this is. Look at all the problems, whatever. And then four years later, he can claim a victory. Now, one thing that I haven't heard a lot of people talk about that.

• 44:21Speaker 02

  But he needs, he needs the correction to appear soon.

• 44:25Anthony Pompliano?

  Of course, of course.

• 44:26Speaker 02

  Right. So he needs the carnage to appear soon enough where you can say, look at what I inherited from Biden. The longer it goes. So I don't think you're going to see Trump trying to pump the markets up. When he, when he took over in 16, by contrast, he spent four years trying to get reelected. He doesn't have that now. He's worried about legacy.

• 44:45Anthony Pompliano?

  So, so this is going to be my point. I do not hear a lot of people talking about the fact that Donald Trump knows in four years, he can't be president again. And so, he can throw the kitchen sink. He's 78, 79, whatever he is, years old. And so there's an element of kind of like, whatever I do in the next four years, I'm going to be remembered for. And whatever the long-term pain is, whatever, uh, you know, the, the stock market performance after I leave it, all that stuff is not going to be associated with me. If I want people to think I was the greatest president of, uh, in history, I could throw the kitchen sink at, make sure the stock market's higher, the economy's rocking, jobs are filled, you know, all this stuff. And so it makes me wonder, even if all the metrics.

• 45:26Speaker 02

  You're at too low a level. You're at too low a level.

• 45:28Anthony Pompliano?

  All right.

• 45:29Speaker 02

  So I think he, sorry for wiggling. My brother said, stop wiggling. I said, fuck that. Um, I think he is looking at a higher plane. And that is, I think he sees the United States in big trouble. And I think he, he, he, this, maybe this is fantasy.

• 45:48Speaker 02

  But I think he sees a country that is in desperate need of repair and that to be a great president, he's going to have to fix that. And he's going to have to, and that's not pumping the stock, right? And that's not pumping the economy. So, so, so I think within a week of him getting inaugurated, we're going to see fireworks. Right? I think he's, he, he's not coming out of the gate slow.

• 46:11Anthony Pompliano?

  In what, in what way?

• 46:12Speaker 02

  Well, for what? Day one, I think he'll probably pardon all the J sixes. Let's start with an easy one. He should, put it this way, I will be so disappointed if he does. But I also think, for example, if, if Musk is given advisory power that I'm hoping, did you read Musk's biography?

• 46:31Anthony Pompliano?

  Yes, I did.

• 46:32Speaker 02

  It, it, is there anyone more qualified to cut costs than Musk?

• 46:36Anthony Pompliano?

  Oh, I think that he is, uh,

• 46:39Speaker 02

  Off the charts.

• 46:40Anthony Pompliano?

  Uniquely positioned. I'll even give you an anecdote for you. So, um, I went and I was meeting with somebody, um, that works at, at X, at Twitter. And, uh, he happened to be, uh, working there before. He was there, uh, during the cuts intimately, you know, in the room, saw a lot of the stuff, whatever. The stories that he told me would blow your mind because we all know he cut 80% of the staff.

• 47:05Speaker 02

  The guys who tried to short Tesla, if they had an advanced copy of that biography, they would have never fallen into that trap.

• 47:13Anthony Pompliano?

  I see. I, I don't agree with that. You know why? Cause I think that so many of them, you know, everyone talks about like Trump derangement syndrome, the like Elon derangement syndrome. It, it got them. It didn't matter. What they would do is they would go through the book. I know some of these guys, right? They would go through the book and they would tell you how it's all bullshit, that Walter Isaacson is exaggerating, he got paid under the table, Elon's lying, you know, blah, blah, whatever. Um, I, I saw, uh, recently, uh, Matt Levine at Bloomberg, who I, I really, really respect. I think he does a fantastic job of breaking down pretty complex things in a simple language, et cetera. And he put it perfectly. He said, Musk works 100% of his time on SpaceX. Musk also works 100% of his time on Tesla. He also works 100% of his time, right? Like, that is the, the public facing.

• 47:57Speaker 02

  And he's tweeting 24 hours a day.

• 47:59Anthony Pompliano?

  So he, he went through it, he talked about Twitter, whatever. And he goes, and then by the way, he recently became one of the top players in the world at Diablo 4. It's like, you know, video game or whatever. And he spent 100% of his time on that. So you go through all this and you say, wait a second, like, how does he do it? And he's like, you know, there's theories that, uh, the video game, he paid someone to do it. Or there's theories that, you know, he's really good at delegation, or there's theories that, you know, whatever.

• 48:21Speaker 02

  I thought about that. I wondered.

• 48:23Anthony Pompliano?

  What, what, whatever, whatever the thing is, right? He has convinced people that he works really hard. But really, if you look at, why has he been so successful? In my mind, it's because he has one of the greatest, uh, bullshit filters in all of business. He's able to.

• 48:41Speaker 02

  His biography where he's looking at a $1.5 million refrigeration unit to be purchased from Boeing. And he says, fuck it, goes to the Walmart and grabs two air conditioners and cobbles them together.

• 48:53Anthony Pompliano?

  Of course.

• 48:54Speaker 02

  And, and so, so, and, you know, as, as I've said to people, you know, he buys Twitter, overpays by some people's reckoning, although it's, it's nothing for him. I mean, it's a lot of money for him, but he's probably going to get it back. But, but if you said he's going to go in and fire the, fire the leftovers, you would have said, oh, 20%, 25%. He fires 90%. He, so, so if there's a person who has the capacity to go, so, so day one, here's what I'd love to see. Let's just pick a, I want to see Pyrrhic victories. They don't, to, to actually cut your way into a balanced budget of any kind is not possible at this point. I, I do not believe it's even theoretically possible.

• 49:38Anthony Pompliano?

  Because, because there's only like 13% or whatever, that's like non-defense, non-discretionary, you know, or discretionary spending or whatever.

• 49:45Speaker 02

  Well, he can cut defense.

• 49:47Anthony Pompliano?

  Well, hold on, so there's a couple of issues here. So this whole idea, there's $2 trillion annual deficit. Uh, I've heard estimates, you know, Howard Lutnick told me that he thinks Musk is good for 500 billion right out of the gate and potentially more over time. But my understanding is that 87% of the budget is defense and/or non-discretionary spending, which only leaves 13%, that if you cut 100% of it, it'd only be a 13% savings. I don't, I don't know true, not true. I think that actually your comment about fireworks, one of the fireworks that people are not ready for is there is going to be some executive power used, whether they actually can or not, they're going to go to the court and

• 50:29Anthony Pompliano?

  they're going to say, we can override this stuff. We're going to go and we're going to get rid of all of this waste that is occurring. And I think that's going to be one of the biggest court battles of 2025 is how much power does the executive branch actually hold in terms of government spending?

• 50:43Speaker 02

  So let me ask you this question. So there's a couple of things here. One is so, so the Pyrrhic victories, what would be a trivial one? I happen to have dinner with a lawyer who knew about things like the Chevron deference story and how profound that could be. And he said, we're just waiting right now. And that's where regulators who essentially have prosecutorial power, no longer can just do that. It's, it's more important than Roe v. Wade, in my opinion. But we're waiting to see what the consequences are. The wife turns out to be a woman who, who ran a not-for-profit, who organized 600

• 51:27Speaker 02

  not-for-profits for disaster relief. Right? She said, and I said, I guess I shouldn't mention FEMA to you then. And she said, oh my God, she started dropping F-bomb. She said FEMA, and I've written about FEMA being worthless, destructive. She's absolutely positively confirmed that. And she said, we train our people to spot FEMA people to avoid them. And, and, and so FEMA is 29 billion. It's a drop in the bucket, but day one, gone, gone. And you say, whoa, you know, what, what will happen? Nothing. They don't do anything. You weren't listening. Read my lips, right? They don't do anything. They're worthless. So I would love to see day one FEMA gone, wiped. And then you look up and

• 52:10Speaker 02

  say, well, you know, the one thing FEMA did is this. I say, okay, go do that then. Fine. Have a ball.

• 52:15Anthony Pompliano?

  But even, even that, so like, this is a great example, is

• 52:21Anthony Pompliano?

  I think that there are good people who work at FEMA, who actually want to do a good job, etc. She says no. She says no. Okay, so that's even a bigger deal. But let's just, let's just say for the sake of this argument that there are good people there that want to do a good job, etc. There's this massive bureaucracy. Did you pay attention to what happened in the mountains of North Carolina? Yes, I did. Okay, so one of the stories I heard that just pissed me off beyond belief, that I think really, really resonated with a lot of people, is there was a guy and his son, I think, you know, guy's whatever, 40 years old, something like that, and his son was a teenager. And they got in their private helicopter. They flew over the mountains and they saw a husband and a wife

• 53:04Anthony Pompliano?

  that were on the mountain next to their home waving down people. And he landed. He said to his son, "Get off. Stay here with the husband. I'm gonna take the wife to, you know, the disaster relief headquarters or whatever, because the helicopter can only hold two people. I'll be back." He takes the wife and he lands, lets her out, and the police say to him, "If you go back on that fucking mountain, we're gonna arrest you." And he says, "My son's up there. Do what you're gonna do. I'm gonna get my son." And so he loads up his helicopter with a bunch of supplies, flies back, lands, and he's gotta tell the husband,

• 53:48Anthony Pompliano?

  "I'm taking my son. Here's a bunch of supplies. I'll come back for you tomorrow, because if I take you back to that disaster relief center, they're gonna arrest me." And I think about that and I say to myself, "Wait a second here. How is it that private citizens in that situation were able to get supplies, equipment, etc., to these people faster, more efficiently than the disaster relief?"

• 54:13Speaker 02

  I wrote about this about, uh, after Katrina. Okay. I wrote about the merits of price gouging. I defended price gouging. I kind of, um, I got onto it by name Mike Mungawitz, who's an economist. And, and I, I, I actually gave a talk at an investment meeting on the merits of price gouging. Explain. And I pointed out that, that it's a fictional thing, right? So, you know, during a time of disaster, your neighborhood pharmacy is not going to price gouge. Your Walmart is not going to price gouge. There was a claim they did, but it turns out it was photoshopped. You could actually see it was photoshopped. But Walmart immediately started apologizing.

• 54:57Speaker 02

  Bottom line is you, you want some guy to load a bunch of generators in the back of his truck and go down there. And if you arrest him for price gouging, he's not going down there the next time. And he's taking risks to go down there. So, so this price gouging idea is just crap. You don't have to buy it if you don't want. Well, we also call it surge pricing. Right. So, uh, what did they do? Well, FEMA caused the deaths of many in Katrina. FEMA, FEMA directly caused the deaths of many in FEMA because people tried to go down there and they cut them off. It's a turf war. So the idea that FEMA has good people is wrong. According to the woman, she said, it's a reverse Darwinian selection. Anyone who's worth a shit can't stand being there. They leave.

• 55:42Speaker 02

  So it, she said, it's a DEI nightmare. It's a hierarchical nightmare. It's, she said, it is surreal to see the FEMA headquarters when they set up. Now, my wife was in the Adirondacks for Hurricane Irene, where it was a disaster. I included that in my write-up. Now, up in the Adirondacks, they take care of themselves. Everyone has a chainsaw. Everyone knows how to swing a hammer. Every third house has a backhoe. I go up there two weeks after Irene rips through there and floods the shit out of the North Country and they've rebuilt all the roads already. They've done everything. They fixed everything. They're already jacking up their houses again. And, uh, and, and, and, and, and my wife helped run a, a relief center that they set up.

• 56:28Speaker 02

  And about two weeks later FEMA shows up, puts up a banner, takes a photo, puts literally, literally a Band-Aid on one guy's finger and then leaves. So FEMA line them up, shoot them, I don't care what you do, get rid of FEMA, right? The problem is the federal government has a ton of agencies like this, a ton. And so that's why I want to release Elon, say, start cutting. We will undo some of the damage you do. I want you to go in with a chainsaw and start cutting. And when we find out there's something we needed that you cut off, you cut off a limb, we'll stitch it back on if we have to. And so that's what I'm, that's, and that might be Fantasy Island for me, right?

• 57:11Speaker 02

  That might be, I might just be dreaming that that's going to happen, but I don't want anyone to stop them.

• 57:16Anthony Pompliano?

  Well, part of, uh, what I think is so interesting here is, um, we're going to find out who actually had, who, who actually has, uh, true power. He's got, I think 200 million followers on Twitter. How much is like sunlight truly disinfectant? And, uh, we saw the one bill that was going through and he started tweeting about it, him and Vivek and, and you know, uh, they were able to show, look how crazy this bill is, well, here's all the stuff in it, whatever. All of a sudden there's pressure, the politicians cave, come back, they get something else approved. And what cracked me up was, um, everyone who did not like what he was doing, started saying, oh, who elected the billionaire to run the country, blah, blah, blah, whatever.

• 57:58Speaker 02

  Hey.

• 57:59Anthony Pompliano?

  But what I kept thinking to myself is, wait a second here, this is the will of the people. All he's doing is he's telling everyone else, look at the craziness of what they're doing. And everyone is getting upset, right?

• 58:11Speaker 02

  So the beauty of Elon is the fact he's on the spectrum means, you know, there, there is the deep state Elon, right? Every company's ever done is deep state. But I also believe the deep state desperately needs them and they can't control them. So it's one of these things where it's a, it is a wild creature. It's like a camel or something where the one hand you need them, on the other hand, they'll bite you if you turn your back on them. And so I think Elon, Elon could be a great force for good and I'm hoping he is. I hope he doesn't turn out to be a wolf in sheep's clothing. Again, his biography paints the same picture of him that

• 58:54Speaker 02

  I'm now portraying of him. I think Trump's a team, every single one of them, they're young, they're brawlers. They each have a personal reason why they don't like the system that existed before they got in there, whether it's Bhattacharya or Tulsi Gabbard or, or, you know, RFK is talking about making America healthy again. You wait till he's confirmed now, so it's gonna be fuck that healthy shit, we're going after pharma. Right? He can't go after pharma now. He's trying to make America healthy again. So I'm saying, oh yeah, I'm fine if he wants to make, you know, broccoli, the vegetable of the, of the country, right? But that's not what he's spent 35 years chasing.

• 59:34Speaker 02

  That's what he's been spent the last six months chasing, trying to look harmless. And by the way, all the bullshit Trump puts out there, I mean, actually taking over Greenland, there's some logic. I'm not sure about Canada. Panama Canal is profoundly logical. Apparently that's a big issue. I think the Greenlanders might even like to be a US protectorate at this point instead of Denmark.

• 1:00:00Anthony Pompliano?

  Let's talk, let's talk about each one of these three. Why do you think Greenland makes sense?

• 1:00:04Speaker 02

  What's, what's happening here? While we are talking about Trump naming the Gulf of America, we're not talking about his appointments. Now, who's it providing cover for? Well, first of all, it's providing cover for Trump. It's also providing cover for the other team that's probably gonna have to let this shit go by. And they don't want this on the headlines that they lost and Kennedy got in and Tulsi got in. And so they'd like to be talking about other topics too, if these appointments are gonna get made. Now, one other thing, two other things. One is recess appointments. You can make an appointment at recess. And, uh, and so I think he can make these appointments, whether they like it or not.

• 1:00:44Speaker 02

  Two, there's some goddamn arcane law, which I can't remember the name of, where, where they can pass a law to spend money and the president can say, yeah, fine, but we're not spending it.

• 1:00:56Speaker 02

  And so he may have the power to say, look, here it is in the budget, but it's just sitting in a bank account right now.

• 1:01:04Anthony Pompliano?

  That'd be powerful.

• 1:01:05Speaker 02

  That's a fun story. That's a fun story.

• 1:01:07Anthony Pompliano?

  Do you think he's naming the Gulf of, uh, Mexico to Gulf of America to get around all of this drilling stuff?

• 1:01:14Speaker 02

  Could be. It also could be, there's a certain logic to it because it really does bridge the two Americas. And I, I don't see why you'd have to change the name, but you know, history's filled with abrupt changes and crap like that.

• 1:01:26Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. And it's the argument that I saw that, uh, again, you, you, you don't know how much of this is, uh, his thinking or not, but if Biden's going to put all this stuff in and say, hey, you can't do certain things with drilling in the Gulf of Mexico, and he just renames it to Gulf of America. He says, well, that, that law is, uh, no longer, no longer makes sense.

• 1:01:46Speaker 02

  It could be somehow in the Gates contract, right? The other thing I would like to know is if there's a way to take, I think Biden's administration, I hesitate to say Biden because we know he's got no brain left. Um, but I'm going to say Biden. Um, I think all these things that are being passed that are sort of what's called Green Goblin strategy to destroy the joint on the way out, right? Um, they might be negated, A, simply, right? It might be trivial to negate him, but if, let's say it's not, I, I think you take him to court and you're saying not of sound mind and body.

• 1:02:22Speaker 02

  I think you say the guy was demented.

• 1:02:25Anthony Pompliano?

  Well, he can't stand trial.

• 1:02:27Speaker 02

  No, no, but forget that. You just say the signature that put this into place is not a valid signature.

• 1:02:32Anthony Pompliano?

  No, that's what I'm saying. If, uh, somebody already determined you're not fit to stand trial, then how are you fit to sign a contract?

• 1:02:38Speaker 02

  Yeah. And you know what you do for, for the next four years? You fight in court and what's going on? None of the shit that he wanted to do. That's what's not going on. None of it's happened.

• 1:02:48Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, that makes sense. Um, Greenland and the Panama Canal, let's start with those two. Uh, you think they make sense?

• 1:02:56Speaker 02

  Yeah, Greenland's got 20,000 people. They're proximate to the Western, they're in the Western Hemisphere, right? Denmark has done nothing with it. Being under the United States umbrella might appeal to the Greenlanders, right? They might say, hey, you know, we'll get welfare and all sorts of crap, right? I don't know what the resource play in Greenland is. I've heard stories that underneath that sheet of ice is a wealth of resources. And I'm sure that there are people who are appalled by that thinking, but that would explain why Greenland's at bigger stakes than than they say. It's quite possible the Ruski's are going, oh shit, they're gonna get Greenland. I can't believe it.

• 1:03:41Speaker 02

  Panama Canal, I think it's just, Panama Canal is for us is what Ukraine is for Putin. We can't let someone get control of it. I've heard that there's trouble. I've heard that we're at risk. And so for us to go down there and say, look, we gave the canal back. Sorry, that was stupid. We're taking it back. You know, if you don't like it, meet Mr. F-15 over here, F-16, F-whatever. We're taking it, right? And that would not be irrational. I, my, I've become a bit of a dove in my old age here, you know? I think we fight way too many wars and I know you're ex-military and I bet you think so too. But I think sending some submarines down to the canal to make sure that that we take

• 1:04:26Speaker 02

  control of it again. Again, I'm not up to speed, so it's possible that's just a red herring and that we haven't lost control and it's a stupid thing.

• 1:04:34Anthony Pompliano?

  I think right now, control, you know, it's kind of like, if you have a car and you let your kid drive it, but they gotta bring it back. It's still your car. You know, I think there's a little bit of that going on right now. From what I understand, it's like the US is definitely a heavy presence still and, you know, all of that. I think the concern from what I've read is it's more about the influence from the East and specifically China, starting to go. I mean, look, there are a number of different stories.

• 1:05:09Speaker 02

  Yeah, I've heard it's China that's the problem.

• 1:05:11Anthony Pompliano?

  I've heard a number of different stories about, for example, software in the cranes in US ports. Have over the air update capabilities and backdoors etc. And there are very real national security concerns around that software. Because if somebody in China could shut off the cranes in our ports, that'd probably be bad.

• 1:05:36Speaker 02

  Yeah, right.

• 1:05:36Anthony Pompliano?

  Right? So there's all these things and you go.

• 1:05:39Speaker 02

  They already, China could shut off so much of what we do. I mean, you know, that's true. I don't know it as in factually know it. But put it this way, you would have to, to be safe, you would have to assume they have the capacity to do so. The ship that hit the bridge in Baltimore, right? That's a great example, you know, there's, oh, you know, what's the story there? Well, the ship lost, you know, power and it went off course. They hit the bridge and knocked the entire bridge over. And, and then, and then it gets absurd. I actually thought the thing backed into it. I kept looking at the video going, it looks to me like it cleared the pile and it backed into it. Um, but, but, but then, then it turns out wiped out a huge port, a really important port.

• 1:06:23Speaker 02

  And, and then you find out that the company that, that owns it is Chinese. You find out that it's actually a company that's known for a super high tech, remote monitoring and control of the ships. And you go, and that they, they lost power. And then they, they talk about the FBI retrieving the black box. I go retrieving the black box. It didn't sink. You walk in the ship and they give me the fucking black box, right? And then the question is a ship that's supposedly under this, a high tech ship. They don't have a black box. That shit's going straight to the cloud. Right? There's not a black box. Why, why would you ever have a black box again? Right? And, and so the whole story's crap.

• 1:07:04Speaker 02

  Looks to me like a beta test of hacking a ship, which supposedly are very hackable. And they sent the ship into the bridge and say, oh yeah, that worked. That's pretty cool.

• 1:07:13Anthony Pompliano?

  Do you think they'll ever rebuild the Baltimore Bridge?

• 1:07:17Speaker 02

  I am told that that bridge was built because you can't send toxic and dangerous things through the tunnels.

• 1:07:26Anthony Pompliano?

  No, no, no. No, no. You're answering, why is the bridge there? Do you think with all of the environmental permitting, with all of the bureaucracy, etc.

• 1:07:37Speaker 02

  We will fall in loss.

• 1:07:38Anthony Pompliano?

  Do you think that we will ever rebuild that bridge?

• 1:07:40Speaker 02

  Don't you think it's possible that when the federal government decides it's time we need a bridge, that they're just gonna say, screw that and do it?

• 1:07:48Anthony Pompliano?

  No.

• 1:07:49Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 1:07:50Anthony Pompliano?

  Because, because, because in LA, there's no water in the fire hydrants.

• 1:07:58Speaker 02

  LA still exists?

• 1:07:59Anthony Pompliano?

  There's no water in the fire hydrants because I didn't know how big a smelt fish is, but I've been down my rabbit hole. Big as my hand. A little tiny fish.

• 1:08:11Speaker 02

  Smelts are tiny.

• 1:08:12Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, little tiny fish.

• 1:08:14Speaker 02

  Like anchovies.

• 1:08:16Anthony Pompliano?

  Ensured that there was no water in the fire hydrants. How much of the brush, all the things that people know that you should do to protect against this stuff, how much of it didn't get done because they were held hostage by the environmentalists and kind of the extremes in that whole process? And then you want to tell me you're gonna go build one of the largest bridges in America in the ocean? I don't know.

• 1:08:44Speaker 02

  Well, except for the fact that the not doing what the thing they failed to do in LA, the consequence has not yet shown up. To rebuild the bridge, the consequence predates the process. So now that LA's burned to the ground, the rules may change immediately. The bridge, now that it's in the middle of the drink, the rules may change immediately.

• 1:09:06Anthony Pompliano?

  You want to know what my prediction for LA is?

• 1:09:09Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:09:11Anthony Pompliano?

  They will rebuild and there will be, the biggest fights are going to be over racial segregation.

• 1:09:22Speaker 02

  Oh, I would have no trouble imagining that, but there it's going to be an unbelievably complicated story. The other thing that clicked this morning when I retweeted a meme and I said, wait a minute, that's not funny at all. How many people who are not on radar died in LA that we're not hearing about? How many illegals? How many kids? How many trafficked kids that came across the southern border? Right?

• 1:09:48Anthony Pompliano?

  Did you see the Weather Channel clip?

• 1:09:50Speaker 02

  I don't know.

• 1:09:53Anthony Pompliano?

  On Twitter, there's it's horrific and incredibly sad, but the Weather Channel is panning over the destruction and they zoom in on a house and there's human remains. You know, at least it looks like human remains.

• 1:10:08Speaker 02

  Oh, I didn't see that.

• 1:10:09Anthony Pompliano?

  Sitting right there and and the camera guy doesn't realize at first and all of a sudden he like zoom, you know, kind of like moves the camera in a way where it looks like he like realized what was happening on live TV. And, you know, right before this, I went and I looked, they're saying that it's about 30,000 acres of land that's been burnt. They're saying there's over 10,300 structures that have been destroyed. They're claiming at the moment of what they know, there's at least 10 people that are dead. I've got to imagine the number is much, much higher than that.

• 1:10:41Speaker 02

  It's got to be 10 times that minimum. I mean, there's so many people who are not on a radar.

• 1:10:45Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. So you get that. Then you've got the estimates right now are like 135 billion dollars of damage.

• 1:10:53Speaker 02

  Zero percent containment of the fire.

• 1:10:55Anthony Pompliano?

  Crazy.

• 1:10:56Speaker 02

  With supposedly arsonists running all over the place. By the way, if you were a foreign national that got shipped over the southern border to cause trouble, now's a good time to cause trouble.

• 1:11:09Anthony Pompliano?

  Do you know who Joshua Steinman is? Does that name ever come up?

• 1:11:13Speaker 02

  No, tell me.

• 1:11:14Anthony Pompliano?

  So Joshua Steinman is he was previously on the National Security Council, you know, served in the military and now runs a company that is fully focused on protecting critical infrastructure from cyber threats. Right? So, you know, I made a small investment in the company. Really, it's just a, hey, I like this guy. I want to, I want to back Joshua. But the company Galvanic is fully focused on, you know, the equivalent would be water treatment plants and various, you know, critical infrastructure. How do you make sure that adversaries aren't able to hack them, et cetera? You know how some people on Twitter have something they tweet all the time? And as they tweet it, they see news stories and they just like keep reminding you of the same phrase, right? And it's their worldview.

• 1:11:59Anthony Pompliano?

  Joshua Steinman's phrase that he continuously tweets over and over again is one question. How many foreign sabotage teams are already in the United States?

• 1:12:09Speaker 02

  Oh, I've asked that question so many times. Now, the really interesting question is, who opened those borders knowing that that would happen? And why?

• 1:12:24Speaker 02

  So those borders were opened up by, you know, Biden administration of some kind. Right? Just generally speaking. There is no chance that they didn't send foreign nationals who are basically hit squads across that border because if, if they didn't, right? If our adversaries didn't, they're of no risk because they're just too goddamn stupid.

• 1:12:49Anthony Pompliano?

  Well, and I think that there's two categories, right? There are what I'll call a true terroristic threats. And it's very clear that there's a lot of-

• 1:12:58Speaker 02

  And then there's the MS-13s and things like that.

• 1:13:01Anthony Pompliano?

  So-

• 1:13:01Speaker 02

  Right. MS-13s are recapping.

• 1:13:03Anthony Pompliano?

  I called a buddy of mine, well, I called a buddy of mine who, um, he's got a house in Hollywood Hills. And, um, or kind of like, uh, the, you know, in, near the canyon. And, um, I said to him, how's it going? And he said, well, earlier today I was fighting a fire with my hose outside my house. So I said, that wasn't fun. Uh, but he said, but, he goes, uh, this real problem with these, uh, these gangs looting. And I said, what do you mean? He, this is what he described to me. He said, what you see is a car of young, usually Latin women, pull through the neighborhood, going incredibly slow, looking out the windows, et cetera. They will pull over and they'll stop. Three, four, five minutes later, all of a sudden, here comes a car of young, usually Latin men,

• 1:13:49Anthony Pompliano?

  fully, you know, decked out, ski mask, the whole thing. They'll jump out, they'll run, they'll hit a house, they'll come back. He's like, three minutes, man. Back in the car, band, they're all off. And he's like, and the women are serving as lookout for the men.

• 1:14:02Speaker 02

  Right, and the problem is, these are houses that have been emptied because they might burn. And so these houses are in pristine condition, they're million, gazillionaires, whatever you want.

• 1:14:16Speaker 02

  And so, and this is like these professional squatters and stuff, back to the, you know, when you have a person squatting in your house, I started to talk about this, again, there's a thing called squatter squad, where they go in and they clean them out for you, and there's sort of an implicit, you're gonna die if you don't get out, so it's time to get out. But that doesn't work on an MS-13 squatter.

• 1:14:38Anthony Pompliano?

  Well, those guys are not gonna be worried about a Louisville Slugger. The connection between national disaster and looting is not just a foreign, you know, kind of gang member affiliated thing, right? If you go back to Katrina, I know guys personally who were in the National Guard, they got deployed to Katrina, and they said, "We're gonna go help people," or stuff, whatever. They were walking around Walmarts with their M4s because there was cash being kept in the back because the bring trucks couldn't come and pick up the cash, millions of dollars, right? And so they had to protect, because there's looting, there's all these issues, whatever. So like, I don't think that this is a purely American thing, I think this happens all over the world, whatever. But I do think that usually a national disaster like a hurricane, nobody, you know, press a button and the hurricane happens.

• 1:15:23Anthony Pompliano?

  But, in this case in particular, is this the first time that we're seeing, oh, wait a second, are there people, and there's now videos online of, you know, what it appears to be, and what is being reported by the police as potential arsonists, who are getting arrested for starting these fires? Do they have a connection to the people who are then are going and robbing the homes? We're gonna find out.

• 1:15:45Speaker 02

  Right, so you say, "Let's go hit this neighborhood," and so you start a fire upwind of the neighborhood. You force everyone to clear out, and then you take the neighborhood.

• 1:15:52Anthony Pompliano?

  So here's a question that I asked on Twitter. If the fires were started by arsonists, not proven yet, but let's say if, what do you think the proper punishment should be?

• 1:16:06Anthony Pompliano?

  Death.

• 1:16:08Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:16:09Anthony Pompliano?

  So this.

• 1:16:10Speaker 02

  The only problem I have with the death penalty, the only problem I have, two problems. One is it's, um, we get it wrong, right? So there, there really are cases where some black guy spends 20 years in jail on death row and you find out he didn't do it. Um, the second is, is it costs a ton of money to execute a person because of all the checks and balances. It's cheaper to just throw them in jail and not worry about it. Now, the interesting thing is that, um, if you, you wanna be, if, if you're innocent, you wanna be on death row. The reason is because there's organizations trying to get you out. Once you are no longer on death row, they don't care about you.

• 1:16:51Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, it's, it's interesting. It's like, uh, obviously if they don't get you out, it's not good.

• 1:16:57Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:16:58Anthony Pompliano?

  But they're working to, uh, to do it. I never thought of it that way.

• 1:17:01Speaker 02

  Yeah, because you've got whole organizations who think it's immoral to, to whack you. And I, I just, I don't have, I don't have a need for the death penalty. I don't, I don't, no matter how bad you are, I, I don't have any. I, by the way, spoke with a guy, uh, in the Adirondacks, you go through Tupper Lake, there's this humongous institution that looks like it must have been some asylum at the turn of the century or something. It's huge. It looks like it holds, you know, 2,000 people. And I ran into a guy who works there and I said, what's in there? And he said, it turns out there's relatively few people. There's more staff than people. The people in this facility are, are those who because of various ailments and stuff

• 1:17:44Speaker 02

  are considered not qualified to be tried in a court of law. Because of traumatic brain injuries or whatever, and he says, the horrors behind those walls are extraordinary.

• 1:17:56Anthony Pompliano?

  I could only imagine.

• 1:17:58Speaker 02

  Right, but they're not, they can't be put in a normal prison and stuff. And so they have these guys in this facility.

• 1:18:06Speaker 02

  And and they're often sort of low IQ functionally, you know, there's, there's, there's just various characters who were deemed not capable of defending themselves in court. And by the way, that's well spent money. Two, twice, two staff per person to keep that guy off the street. That's well spent money. That'll save society a lot of pain.

• 1:18:29Anthony Pompliano?

  Of, of course, um.

• 1:18:32Anthony Pompliano?

  We have the incident in New Orleans. We have the incident in Vegas.

• 1:18:38Speaker 02

  Vegas, there's a good one.

• 1:18:39Anthony Pompliano?

  What, I want to.

• 1:18:41Speaker 02

  Oh, that's a different one. I was talking about the Vegas shooting in Paddock.

• 1:18:44Anthony Pompliano?

  No, no, no, I'm talking about the, the Cybertruck.

• 1:18:48Anthony Pompliano?

  One of the things that I remember when I got out of the military in the early 2010s, being a topic of discussion was certain gangs, both American originated and foreign, were sending their members into the military to get trained. And then they were coming out.

• 1:19:08Speaker 02

  Oh, damn.

• 1:19:10Anthony Pompliano?

  And the reason why, and, and in particular, I remember specifically, uh, somebody showed me a video, uh, in California, and I'm not an expert on California gangs or gangs in California, but I believe that there are two gangs, uh, the Norteños and the Ceranos. And, uh, the reason why they know that some of the gang members, uh, had military training is because there was videos of them literally shootouts where they were using military tactics. And so whether that.

• 1:19:41Speaker 02

  Yeah, probably hand signals and everything too, right? The kind of the.

• 1:19:44Anthony Pompliano?

  You, you say hand signals is the elementary. I'm talking about how do you go hit a house? How do you clear the house? How do you, how do you pie around the corner, right? I mean, just like the actual tactical use of weapons, et cetera, um, on this. So the reason why I say that is, uh, that's not hard to imagine. I, I assume that happens in many areas, you know, around the world. Obviously you get into the whole contractor world, whatever.

• 1:20:07Anthony Pompliano?

  But now what we start to see is those two individuals, both in New Orleans and in Las Vegas. That feels like this is a bigger story where you have a special forces guy. You've got somebody who's in the military for a long time, deployed overseas, whatever. How do you? You kind of sift through all this.

• 1:20:29Speaker 02

  Well, so one of them, it gets to the question of what the hell are the comments section in podcasts? I was, I read comments. You never know when someone's gonna say, oh, by the way, this is a really cool video. Right? Um, but, but I mixed up, I mix up those two events. I, I, because I've been busy and I have trouble and I have trouble remembering which one is which. And, um, one of them, a reporter goes in the house after the FBI supposedly went there.

• 1:20:59Anthony Pompliano?

  New Orleans.

• 1:21:00Speaker 02

  That was the, that, that was, that was New Orleans. And she's, first of all, going, what is a reporter doing in a crime scene? Right? And she goes through the house and the door had been bashed open supposedly. And she's walking through the house and she's going, oh, you can see bomb making materials here and you can see recipes for bombs over here and you can see that the crime is open over here. And I'm going, this is a poorly written TV show, right? This is insanity. And first of all, if the FBI had been there, every last thing in that fucking house would have been bagged up and taken away. Let's start with that. And they wouldn't leave bomb making materials with a door bashed in, right? There's just nothing about it. And then someone posted, some said, oh, by the way, that chick, her name is such and such.

• 1:21:44Speaker 02

  She's Mossad. Now, if that's true, this plot thickened very quickly.

• 1:21:53Speaker 02

  So, but there's something wrong with all these stories. The assassination against Trump are just total nonsense. If you try to interpret them literally, they're just total garbage, especially the second one.

• 1:22:05Anthony Pompliano?

  Do you think that Trump should have the inauguration in public?

• 1:22:09Speaker 02

  Oh, that's a good question. I'm not sure he should be in public ever again. I don't know how you protect the guy if, if the deep state wants him.

• 1:22:18Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:18Speaker 02

  And, and by the way, I'm a big believer in MKUltra. So all you have to do is get some guy who's nuts, who's been brainwashed to, to go cap him. Um, so you don't even need a clever, um, you no longer need a clever, uh, conspiracy, you know, you don't, you don't, it doesn't have to be organized. You just need one guy who's willing to be self sacrificial. And, um, and so, yeah. I don't, I don't know. I don't have an answer to that question.

• 1:22:47Anthony Pompliano?

  Speaking of Trump, let's go back to him coming into office. Um, do you think that he reignites inflation?

• 1:22:53Speaker 02

  I don't know. I think inflation might reignite anyways. But if you bring manufacturing ashore, that will reignite inflation, right?

• 1:23:03Anthony Pompliano?

  Explain that.

• 1:23:05Speaker 02

  Well, it's going to cost more, right? You don't buy a six pack of tube socks for 10 bucks that are made in the United States. Right? Right now, with the globalization, I mean, the guys who want to onshore manufacturing are forgetting about the basic principle of economics is that you, the free market goes and finds the cheapest place to do stuff, right? And so if China can do, make, you know, they no longer make. Remember post-war Japan? This is the pattern every time. So Japan comes out of World War II. What do they make? They first make trinkets. Made in Japan was like a, meant it was crap. Then you start noticing it's, the stuff's getting better. It's getting more sophisticated. Next thing you know, you know, those Toyotas are pretty good cars, right?

• 1:23:50Speaker 02

  Oh, Sony just invented a Walkman, right? And so, so you go through this hierarchy of improvement. So China started out making bullshit, right? Dirt, cheap trinkets, stuff you buy in the dollar store or whatever. And now they're making shit that we don't know how to make, right? It's at that level. And so, um, so if you bring, if you bring manufacturing stuff on shorts, it by definition will cost more because you are artificially shutting down the mechanism by which, by which you find the cheapest price. Now here's the problem with offshoring it.

• 1:24:27Speaker 02

  The revenue and income and wealth creation and accumulation is somewhere else, which means we have this big trade imbalance and this big debt. And so it's lining the pockets of people in other countries and elevating their quality of, of life and their standard of living. Because that's where it's being made, that's where the profits are being made. Then we get cheap goods, but we're buying increasingly, we took on debt to buy them because we weren't making it here. And by the way, the digital world that you like, that's not being made here either. That coding is not being done here. I didn't even know why they care about this visa issue. They can just offshore the whole thing.

• 1:25:09Anthony Pompliano?

  One of the big Trump policies that he promised on the campaign trail is the strategic Bitcoin reserve where the United States would hold the 200,000 Bitcoin that he has and it would buy more Bitcoin. Do you think that he'll do it?

• 1:25:25Speaker 02

  Um, I don't know. Trump should be taken seriously and never literally. So you can't, whatever he says, there's, there's, there's an art of the deal component to it. Everything he says, best I can tell. Um, I have a question for you. There's, there's a quote by a person named Williamson, and I don't want to go deep into Bitcoin because you and I are on the other side of each other on this, but I'm by no means hostile to you guys. I totally support all your principles.

• 1:25:56Anthony Pompliano?

  We're sound, we're sound money allies.

• 1:25:59Speaker 02

  That's right. That's right. I have a ton of gold. You have a ton of Bitcoin. We'll swap a few occasionally, right?

• 1:26:04Anthony Pompliano?

  I don't want to go.

• 1:26:06Speaker 02

  Fuck you.

• 1:26:10Speaker 02

  Um, and there's a woman, someone said, you know, at some point, will the energy cost of a transaction of Bitcoin, is it going up with, with the growth of the Bitcoin? Is that, is that a natural component of Bitcoin?

• 1:26:26Anthony Pompliano?

  No, I think it's been the opposite. So one of the interesting things is, um, let's just take, you know, energy used per transaction. Um, if you were able to drop the energy cost, obviously, uh, that will be.

• 1:26:40Speaker 02

  No, I'm just talking quantity of energy.

• 1:26:42Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah.

• 1:26:42Speaker 02

  Quantitative energy. Forget the cost.

• 1:26:46Anthony Pompliano?

  What actually has happened is we have been able to make Bitcoin more efficient. So each block, without getting into too much details, each block of transactions, um, you know, say one megabyte of, of transactions fit in there. What has been developed is something called the Lightning Network, which allows you to make tons of transactions and fit, you know, all those transactions into that block that you otherwise couldn't. And so each block is becoming kind of more dense with transactions, if you think of it in that way.

• 1:27:15Speaker 02

  Got it. Got it.

• 1:27:16Anthony Pompliano?

  And so, um, I actually think that part is not really that, uh, exciting. Like it's already kind of happened, right? I think the energy side is the more interesting one. I'll give you two ideas. Um, a guy reached out to me. And I don't know if it's possible or not, but he said, listen, you know, one of the the benefits of Bitcoin is that you can actually monetize energy at the point of creation or the point of consumption.

• 1:27:41Speaker 02

  Right, right. Stranded energy is a good way to think of it. I like it.

• 1:27:45Anthony Pompliano?

  So gas flaring, et cetera.

• 1:27:47Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:27:47Anthony Pompliano?

  He said to me, well, why don't we just launch a bunch of satellites with solar power, miners, use Starlink, and now you can bring the monetization of space solar energy back down to earth?

• 1:28:05Speaker 02

  Has anyone done the cradle to grave energetic cost of doing that?

• 1:28:10Anthony Pompliano?

  I have a couple of people who have sent me.

• 1:28:12Speaker 02

  By the way, cradle to grave is a bitch of a calculation. And that's where the, that's where the, the alternative energy guys lie their ass off.

• 1:28:20Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. Well, so there's a couple of people have sent me different calculations, not the full calculation you're describing. And one of the big issues is the heat, right? That these miners create. And so then you get into like, well, do you have to do some sort of like internal, you know, kind of sealed?

• 1:28:37Speaker 02

  Cooling.

• 1:28:37Anthony Pompliano?

  Cool. You know, do you like immersion cooling inside of the equivalent of like the next ISS? What? Again, I'm not a smart enough to figure that out, but I thought that was very interesting of, okay, so now we've got multiple technologies coming together. You've got Starlink, you've got Bitcoin, you've got solar, whatever, right? So that brings me to artificial intelligence, which feels like with the rise of AI and AI agents and kind of all this stuff, money is going to have to become digital. So whether it's stable coins and it's just, you know, dollars on.

• 1:29:11Speaker 02

  Oh, it is going to become digital. There's no question.

• 1:29:13Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. Is these technologies are all coming together because, you know, if you take Tesla, they've got the robotics, they've got the artificial intelligence, machine learning, they've got Bitcoin on their balance sheet. Like these companies really are starting to kind of push this stuff together. And so there's two questions that I think are interesting. One, for people like you and I, how do we know what we see, read or hear is real?

• 1:29:39Speaker 02

  Oh God, yes. That's the million dollar question now, and it's actually getting harder and harder with each passing year.

• 1:29:46Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, I mean,

• 1:29:47Speaker 02

  Now that, remember the title, read my title. What's my title? You got it right there. What's the title?

• 1:29:53Anthony Pompliano?

  What is a fact?

• 1:29:54Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:29:56Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, I mean, look,

• 1:29:57Speaker 02

  That's the problem.

• 1:29:57Anthony Pompliano?

  I was reading a book recently, and it was making the argument that human intelligence is more complex and unknown compared to machine intelligence. And so no matter how many innovations we make on the machine intelligence side, we're still not getting closer to the kind of general intelligence. Because we don't know enough about the human intelligence component. And there's things in the book that I thought were interesting. There were things for a guy disagreed with in the book, whatever. But one of the things that was a great reminder was the exact wording that Alan Turing used when he created what now is known as the Turing test. Right? And for those that don't know is there used to be a, I think it was a game where there was a referee or a judge.

• 1:30:38Anthony Pompliano?

  There's a man and a woman that couldn't see each other and the referee couldn't see either one of them. And he tried to guess who's the man, who's the woman? And I think the man was supposed to deceive the judge, the woman was supposed to help the judge. And so the whole idea was like, can they figure out who the man is and who the woman is? And Alan Turing used that as inspiration to come up with the idea of if you have a human and a computer both submit a piece of paper, you know, or a writing, can I tell which one's created by the computer, which one's created by the human? And that was the Turing test, the original Turing test. I don't know about you, but I reached to the chat GPT rights. I got no clue. I couldn't tell you.

• 1:31:17Speaker 02

  Yeah, I know. There's people who claim they can see that it's chat GPT. I was going to teach a writing course, Cornell has freshman writing courses. And the idea is, look, you learn to write, but we'll offer any imaginable topic. You can dust a F ski, science, whatever, but you're going to write papers and they're going to edit your papers, right? And I was going to teach a freshman writing seminar. I got clearance from both sides on personal finance.

• 1:31:45Speaker 02

  And I figured it would be real beets and carrots, you know, savings, 401Ks, different than Roth and regular IRA, which I have a serious bone to pick with the Roth IRA, things like that. And just talk about, you know, the cost of college even, you know, how do you think about, you know, how do you think about, you know, paying back these loans? And how do you think about saving? How do you think about the cost of owning a car? How do you, right? All these things. And, um, and then ChatGPT showed up and I said, fuck it, I'm not doing it. Because I didn't want to be editing a bunch of papers written by a fucking computer.

• 1:32:23Speaker 02

  I could just go search it myself by that, you know, it just didn't inspire me. I find Grok really useful. So do I. By the way, we've, we've probably talked about, um, I did a debate with Steve Keen on climate change. And I happened to, and I don't know if it's in this part or in the next part, but I happened, I write about climate change. And years ago, I gave up on it and said, no, it's a total grift. I think it's a hundred percent grift. But I went to Grok and I said, in very straightforward language, I said, Grok, could you, could you please provide a list of 20 prominent scientists who think that climate change is not a crisis? And Grok fired out 20 names. I knew at least maybe 18 of the 20. And it

• 1:33:07Speaker 02

  even gave some information about what each one thought. And then I changed the question just a little bit. And I said, Grok, could you give me a list of 10 scientists? 10 solar physicists who think climate change is a crisis? And Grok said, there are no definitive statements by solar physicists saying climate change is a crisis. The solar physicists, the guys who understand the sun cycles, the source of all this heat that we're supposedly worried about, there's not a single solar physicist of any consequence whatsoever who thinks it's CO2.

• 1:33:45Speaker 02

  That should rattle the cage of, you know, their climate change cultists will just their heads will explode. They'll find some reason to ignore that fact. The solar, there aren't even solar physicists on the IPCC, which is the Bible report. The solar physicist said, dude, there's fusion going up in that ball of flame up there. Right? That's the source of all the cycles you're seeing in the temperature of the earth right there. That's it. Period. QED. It's not about CO2. It's not about any of that shit. Um, and, and so I find, I find Grok really useful because oftentimes, you know, you Google something and you, you get all these links. You're clicking, trying to find one that doesn't have the bullshit.

• 1:34:28Speaker 02

  You go to Grok and it provides you a couple of paragraphs. So it's a, it's a great improvement in searching, in my opinion, especially if you're clueless of where to start.

• 1:34:37Anthony Pompliano?

  Completely agree. So

• 1:34:39Speaker 02

  But, but at the same time, it also is in the middle of this, and I gave this example, I just gave you in the debate on climate change. It was, it was great. But I referred to AI is squeegeeing the drippings of the internet, the drippings off the floor of the internet. It was just, you, you don't know what you're getting. Right?

• 1:35:02Anthony Pompliano?

  I also think that AI and the second point is, um, coming for people's jobs that previously thought their job was safe.

• 1:35:11Speaker 02

  Oh, absolutely.

• 1:35:12Anthony Pompliano?

  Right. Like people knew the self-driving cars, whatever. Like there's some easy, low-hanging fruit. Okay. This is what this technology does. Here's a job it could replace. I don't know, man. Artists.

• 1:35:23Speaker 02

  Well, the problem is technology always comes for people's jobs.

• 1:35:26Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah.

• 1:35:26Speaker 02

  So creative, here's the problem with creative destruction. Creative destruction

• 1:35:33Speaker 02

  is a good thing, but what you have to get out of it is each generation has to sort of amortize, right? You have to pay the cost of that generation, make something out of it before the next generation comes.

• 1:35:48Speaker 02

  So for example, we went through blockbuster videos, right? And, and that was great. The question is, it obviously was an important stepping stone to the digital world. But, but the question is, can you afford for creative destruction to be fast? Because you'll, you'll build and destroy a lot of stuff. If, if, if the gen- and this hit me one day when I, I moved into labs that were pretty new because the old labs were unsafe. I move in and, and um.

• 1:36:22Speaker 02

  We were talking about hiring some new kid and that we'd put him in labs who were six years old. And they said, um, well, we have to renovate them. I said, no, no. You can't do a lab renovation and get six fucking years out of it. You gotta get 30 or 40 years out of it. Right? And, and, and, and that's when it sort of clicked that, that if, if you think creative destruction can't be too fast. Every two years bulldoze your house and build a better one. And see how that works out for you. You have to, you have to get the benefits of that generation. I think we're accelerating through a lot of generations of stuff.

• 1:37:02Speaker 02

  One could even argue that what it means or for is don't put out the incremental new generations that fast. And that may be a consequence of bad monetary policy, for example, might be easy money allows you to build the next generation, which is not a good enough generation to justify bazillions of dollars, but you did it because money was cheap.

• 1:37:24Speaker 02

  So if you say, no, we're going to keep developing, now we should strike. Now we should build better houses, right? And I, the cheap money causes a lot of things to happen that you don't even know or necessarily do to cheap money.

• 1:37:39Anthony Pompliano?

  I agree. The last thing on AI and robotics and automation that I think is fascinating is going to drastically change the world. Is we have essentially normalized the use of automated kamikazes with these drones.

• 1:37:56Speaker 02

  Oh, oh, who, who talked about that? Someone?

• 1:38:01Speaker 02

  Did you see the interview of Tucker Carlson with the CIA, ex-CIA guy?

• 1:38:06Anthony Pompliano?

  I did not.

• 1:38:08Speaker 02

  And, and it was really interesting because he talked about the CIA and you go, I know he's lying about a percentage of this. Some of the stuff I go, what he just said, I do not believe. He says, I know of no example of, and you go, well, I'm sure it happened. So you're bullshitting us. But at the end, he talked about the total game change of, um, of drones and how it's, how, the, the risk it poses to, to militaries that are based on, there's a zillions of dollars of investment where a drone can just wreak havoc.

• 1:38:40Anthony Pompliano?

  Just forget the military for a second. I'm not saying that this is true. I'm not saying that, uh, I know one way or the other. I think we should ask the question. Yesterday, it was reported that, uh, I think they are called, uh, skimmers. The, the planes that fly over the ocean and, and grab some of the water. Uh, if I,

• 1:38:58Speaker 02

  Right, from LA.

• 1:38:59Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. If I understand correctly, uh, a drone hit one of them and took it out of commission.

• 1:39:05Speaker 02

  Oh, god damn it.

• 1:39:07Anthony Pompliano?

  And, um, again, I've seen a million drone videos. So, you know, there's helicopters, obviously, in the news, whatever. Like there were people trying to capture footage, like all this stuff. It's like,

• 1:39:18Anthony Pompliano?

  again, I, I don't know what's true, what's not true, whatever. But I do think that as more of those accidents, and I've clarified as an, you know, accident right now, uh, happen, I think more and more people are going to ask themselves, well, was it one of our adversaries? Or was it just,

• 1:39:33Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:39:34Anthony Pompliano?

  somebody taking photos, you know, because they wanted to go viral online. Um, and so I did,

• 1:39:39Speaker 02

  And it could have been the latter, whereas the former, people were going, hey, we could do that too.

• 1:39:44Anthony Pompliano?

  Of course.

• 1:39:45Speaker 02

  So if they didn't learn, if they didn't learn from that story, they sure as hell have it now.

• 1:39:49Anthony Pompliano?

  So that type of stuff, I think is, um, you know, frankly, uh, makes things much, much more complex than, than maybe we thought. Another thing that's happened, um, since we talked last year, that I thought was, uh, pretty noteworthy is the rise of prediction markets.

• 1:40:06Anthony Pompliano?

  And those seem to be one, much more accurate than people thought. And two, they seem to be drastically.

• 1:40:17Speaker 02

  What's the big one? Polymarket? Polymarket's the big one?

• 1:40:19Anthony Pompliano?

  There's two that I pay attention to. So polymarket is the bigger one, but they're not available in the United States. Uh, Kalschi is the one that is available in the United States. Um, that I spend most of my time looking at for like domestic based things.

• 1:40:32Speaker 02

  Kalschi, how do you spell Kalschi?

• 1:40:33Anthony Pompliano?

  K A L S H I.

• 1:40:37Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 1:40:38Anthony Pompliano?

  And so, um, I wonder. While everyone has been talking about the creators, the internet people are going to replace the media. Is it actually the prediction markets that replace the media? Right? Or maybe they don't replace, but they augment in a way that the, the, uh, media can't.

• 1:40:57Speaker 02

  Well, then the question becomes is how much money does it take to rig the prediction? So we know, for example, the elect, you, you, you had to be brain dead to not realize that polls are worthless. Right? The political polls are worthless, just like they're about as valuable as, uh, fact checkers. Right? And, uh, and, and as, as I said, my year in review, and when I, when I have a discussion with someone and they say, well, I Googled it and you're wrong. And I'm going, you know, how many fucking deep state fact checkers did you have to read to come to that conclusion? Right? Um, how much money would it take to rig the polymarkets?

• 1:41:32Anthony Pompliano?

  I, I think it is much harder than people think.

• 1:41:36Speaker 02

  Okay. I don't know how big the money is. I don't know how big the money is.

• 1:41:40Anthony Pompliano?

  There are, um, I, I'll give you a good example. How much money do you think is being bet on Kalschi? For the temperature tomorrow in New York City?

• 1:41:56Speaker 02

  Oh my God. Uh, I don't know. I would think it would be tiny, but go ahead.

• 1:42:02Anthony Pompliano?

  I looked yesterday. It's like 28 million bucks.

• 1:42:06Speaker 02

  Wow. That's irrelevant too, right? That's just, that's just people who are just betting.

• 1:42:11Anthony Pompliano?

  One city trying to pick what is the highest temperature of the day. $28 million wagered.

• 1:42:19Speaker 02

  So why?

• 1:42:21Anthony Pompliano?

  There's a lot of cities in America.

• 1:42:23Speaker 02

  Why would you do that? Let me ask you this. Why would you bet that? Is that is I've always wondered why you couldn't get rich sports betting because I have to be as better than average, right?

• 1:42:32Anthony Pompliano?

  Well, there's, I forget the name of the book with Billy Walters is considered the best sports better of all time. He wrote a book. You should read it. It's fascinating because he pretty much.

• 1:42:42Speaker 02

  It's a call.

• 1:42:43Anthony Pompliano?

  His name is Billy Walters. So you just search Billy Walters book. It'll come up. But he basically tells, here's how I did it. And I mean, he was a, you know, quant hedge fund before quant hedge funds, right? They were crunching the data. They built all the technology, whatever. And then actually, part of the difficulty, according to him, is how do you put the bets in? If you're a hedge fund, you go, you buy the stock and you're right or you're wrong.

• 1:43:11Speaker 02

  Yeah, right. So there was no market.

• 1:43:12Anthony Pompliano?

  With the betting. Well, he's just like, we had people all around the country that literally were calling them and saying, okay, go bet, you know, bet $300,000 on horse six, go, right? They walk up to the counter and they would do it. And so you read the book and it's a lot about risk and kind of all that. But it's fascinating when you start to.

• 1:43:32Speaker 02

  There was someone who went to went to a casino and monitored their roulette wheel, maybe. And they figured out which one, because of the, I was sitting on the floor, whatever, had a bias built into it. That they're not perfectly unbiased because it would require a perfect symmetry.

• 1:43:55Anthony Pompliano?

  Well, there's two, there's two different stories I've heard. The one that I know Ed Thorp, obviously, beat blackjack by counting cards. And then I believe with the roulette, roulette wheel, if I remember correctly, I think he put something in his shoe that was like a timer.

• 1:44:14Anthony Pompliano?

  And he somehow figured it out. And then I can't remember if it's Billy Walters or somebody else that they took the roulette wheels, found where they were made, ordered them, brought them, you know, to like

• 1:44:27Speaker 02

  Oh, and then analyzed them.

• 1:44:29Anthony Pompliano?

  And they analyzed and realized that there was some, you know, something was going on with the wheel and they had, again, one percentage, you know, whatever the thing was.

• 1:44:38Speaker 02

  That's all you need. That's all you need.

• 1:44:39Anthony Pompliano?

  But he put a hundred million dollars through it. That's all you needed, right?

• 1:44:43Speaker 02

  Yeah, you gotta put a lot of small bets and just keep banging away on it.

• 1:44:47Anthony Pompliano?

  Correct.

• 1:44:48Speaker 02

  I, by the way, also read at your advice, witness to a prosecution.

• 1:44:52Anthony Pompliano?

  What'd you think?

• 1:44:53Speaker 02

  That it's, well, today's a good day to talk about it because today we're about to be a witness to a prosecution, right? I don't even know what Mershon did, but um, yeah, as you know, it was about, it was about Michael Milken and the prosecution of him. And, and you don't know if it's all true because it was written by a friend.

• 1:45:14Anthony Pompliano?

  His lawyer.

• 1:45:15Speaker 02

  But you, you can't, friend slash lawyer, but you can't help but say, boy, that really is yet again, what happens when the long arm of the state, capital S, decides they're gonna get you. And it's a, it's a horrifying tale. And, um, and, and if, if the state decides they're gonna hurt you, they're gonna hurt you. And it, the laws don't matter, that, that nothing matters. They are going to get you.

• 1:45:43Anthony Pompliano?

  You want to know what, uh, the Trump sentence is live?

• 1:45:47Speaker 02

  I do want to know.

• 1:45:49Anthony Pompliano?

  Donald Trump was not punished for criminal conviction in the hush money case. The New York judge declined to sentence the president-elect to prison time or impose fines after jury found him guilty of 34 felony counts. And then, um, depending on who you read, a number of people say, uh, at some point, he said something about, quote, cement his status as a convicted felon.

• 1:46:12Speaker 02

  That'll be overturned at some point, but the key was today. They'll be arguing for years in the court about whether that should be all thrown out. But as I said, I think it was before we started filming, but as I said to you, what I would have liked to have seen is is four years of community service.

• 1:46:29Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, well, he got sentenced to nothing. There's no penalty. There's no fine.

• 1:46:33Speaker 02

  Well, four years of community service has humor quality to it.

• 1:46:36Anthony Pompliano?

  Of course, he's gonna go do four years of community service. He's gonna serve in the White House.

• 1:46:40Speaker 02

  That's right. That's exactly right. That's exactly right. That's exactly right. That's why I thought I thought Mershon could actually contribute in an amazingly positive way by saying something about lawfare, some some political comment about saying, oh, this just is not a direction we should go. Now, he was a douchebag, I think, during the trial, so I wasn't expecting it. I was just hoping he might. Maybe he did. Maybe he did. We'll read about it later today on Zero Hedge.

• 1:47:14Anthony Pompliano?

  Before I let you go, can you give us a quick, we've only got two minutes or so, but can you give us a quick overview? What's your portfolio looking like entering 2025?

• 1:47:26Speaker 02

  What doesn't change much. My portfolio changes in decade cycles, so I'm not a trader. I'm really not a stock picker either, so I try to get big picture ideas, right? It's like a little Peter Lynch in the sense that he spotted a trick with regional banks, and so he bought the shares of 128 regional banks, right? And and and so I try to predict sort of big swings, and right now, I'm my largest position is variance of cash, you know, two-year Treasury flavor, short duration.

• 1:48:05Speaker 02

  And, you know, return about 4% or 5% sort of thing. And my next biggest position is gold, and gold's probably 27%, I think, and then a smattering of other things. I believe when the selling starts, all boats sink, right?

• 1:48:22Speaker 02

  Everything gets sold when when you when you get into one of these sort of disinflationary sell offs. And I don't think I think you want to be way out of the splash zone. So I think you could own a stock that has a P of 10 and a dividend yield of 3%. And that PE can go to five. And my prediction is, based on our discussion of monetary policy and how I think we could be at the end of a four decade, five decade cycle, I believe the age of the V-bounce may be over. I think the V-bounces were a consequence of this excessive monetary policy because it was always, there's always dip buyers, there's always dip buyers. And I, I think the best model, even though models never work in this game, the best model would

• 1:49:06Speaker 02

  be the Nikkei. That it gets knocked down, tries to get up, gets knocked down. I think the investor will, will have his soul ripped out, sort of one piece at a time over a long period of time. And I'm hoping that we'll be offered buying opportunities. And I don't worry about two-year treasuries, for example, so, because I don't think if there's an opportunity to buy cheap in six months, it's a good one. I think it'll be, I think it'll be like the 29 crash. And it's now 1930, and you think you're, you think you're bargain hunting, and you're not. And so, so, two-year treasuries are good for me because they, they make me

• 1:49:50Speaker 02

  think for two years before I do something. I like, if I had to go along something right now, I think I'd go along platinum. It's been dead money for a long time. I think the EV story's bullshit. It turns out, turns out there's a lot of platinum inside hybrids. I think the pure EV story's got a long ways to go. And, and I think the death of the internal combustion engine is premature. And so, platinum, I think, could make a run. It's not, it's the only metal on the planet that hasn't done a, but I hadn't done it yet. Just, just for the record, I'm, I haven't. I'm waiting, waiting for something to say, okay,

• 1:50:32Speaker 02

  now's the time to move. And I'm hoping in the next five years, in 09, I made the mistake, I was positive there was another having left. We were at historical average valuation at the bottom. You don't crush everything the way we did, and stop at the historical average. Unless the central bankers put thirty trillion dollars in. And that's the part I didn't see coming. We had another halving in us if if they had let the system run. And if I'm right that they can't do it again.

• 1:51:10Speaker 02

  Because they're now boxed in by inflation.

• 1:51:15Speaker 02

  The mistake I made was not asking the question, okay, we're at fair value. You've got another halving, but how much should you own at fair value? I just looked at the halving. And so I bought a couple tobacco stacks with nothing, nothing of consequence. This time, I think I will sort of ask the question, what should you own at the various stages? And try to be a little bit more, try to adjust a little more analog fashion. My exposure to the different asset classes. And so what I'll do is make new mistakes this time. And, uh, and, and, uh, but I'm, if we do a 20% correction, 20% doesn't correct anything. To call it a correction bothers me.

• 1:52:00Speaker 02

  If if you go down 20% and then come back in a year. The word correct implies, if you look it up in Merriam-Webster, it implies that you fixed something, right? You didn't fix anything. If you go right back up. And so to correct, we got to drop 50% off this market. And if you want to say, no, we won't do that, then say, okay, so your cash flow is going to be half the norm. And that's going to suck balls too.

• 1:52:28Speaker 02

  Right? So if you want to fly around it in the stratosphere, fine, but your cash flow is going to suck and you can't. You know, you can't keep growing and growing and growing. It's just, it just, there's nothing in the history of markets that says that's sustainable. There's nothing in the history of markets that says I can predict when it'll stop.

• 1:52:50Speaker 02

  But it will stop, in my opinion. And I don't want to be near it when it does.

• 1:52:53Anthony Pompliano?

  That's fair. Where can we send people to find you on the internet?

• 1:52:57Speaker 02

  Well, on the internet at David B. Column in real, real time, I'm under my desk half the day. David B. Column on Twitter, my year in review is my pinned tweet. As I've told you, I was talking to a private equity guy who I'd harassed to no end, said, "You guys should all burn in hell." I mean, I was really rough on the guy. And then we chatted, and I said, "Start reading it." I said, "When you get bored, stop reading it." Right? And I said, "If you maintain your interests, it's 250 pages, keep reading." He was a young guy, so he had some learning to do. It was clear that he was a prairie dog or in a cubicle somewhere, trying to get me

• 1:53:41Speaker 02

  to give him money so that he could get rich and I could get poor.

• 1:53:44Anthony Pompliano?

  David B. Column on Twitter, 2024 year in review, what is a fact? There's a hell of a lot of information here. I appreciate it very much, and we'll do it again in the future.