The Tucker Carlson Show - Dave Collum： Financial Crisis, Diddy, Energy Weapons, QAnon, and the Deep State’s Digital Evolution

00:00:00.000 Very few college professors do what college professors are supposed to do, which is kind of break through outside campus into the conversation among smart people about what the world is about.

00:00:13.780 And in other words, they don't kind of influence the broader culture directly.

00:00:18.260 And you do, and you're an organic chemistry professor.

00:00:24.800 Are you allowed to do this at Cornell?

00:00:28.120 Are you allowed to kind of opine on economics, social policy, foreign policy?

00:00:33.920 Like, what are your administrators saying when you do this?

00:00:41.680 I don't know if it's generally true, but Cornell's not giving me any golf.

00:00:46.480 The only problem I had with Cornell, and we talked, you know, we had breakfast and we talked a little bit about, I think my colleagues wish I would shut up.

00:00:54.500 But they don't tell me to shut up, although, you know, they've told me to stay on.

00:00:59.100 I have kind of an intellectual Tourette syndrome.

00:01:01.440 Stay in your lane.

00:01:02.500 Well, I'll be in the middle of class, like in March of 07.

00:01:07.420 In the middle of class, no warning, I blurt out the banking system's about to collapse.

00:01:11.420 I had written about it in 2002, but I turned, I said, I think it's about to collapse.

00:01:17.900 This is an organic chemistry class?

00:01:19.380 An organic chemistry class.

00:01:20.800 And they looked at me, and I just said, look, I think the entire banking system's going down the tubes now.

00:01:25.120 And it took another year, year and a half to-

00:01:26.960 Did they say that's not a related discipline?

00:01:28.820 What are you talking about?

00:01:29.160 No, no, no, no.

00:01:29.640 No one gave me gut for that.

00:01:30.820 What was entertaining about that particular Tourette's-like outburst is that I had the same kids in an honors thesis course two years later.

00:01:40.880 In the first lecture, one lecture a week, the first lecture, I said, didn't I warn you?

00:01:45.640 This is February of 09.

00:01:47.600 I said, didn't I warn you that the banking system was going to collapse?

00:01:50.600 I said, they said, yeah, you did.

00:01:52.360 And I said, did your econ professors tell you that?

00:01:55.220 They said, no.

00:01:55.880 And I said, what are those assholes made for?

00:01:57.560 I said, yeah, you did.

00:02:27.560 And he had cut his teeth on mortgage-backed securities, and he spent two hours talking about the catastrophe that we were in the middle of in February of 09.

00:02:38.760 And so, yeah, I do occasionally go off the rails, but no one gives me grief.

00:02:44.980 I got canceled in 2020.

00:02:46.420 The closest you and I, I've been following you for years, but the closest you and I actually came to actually meeting, but we didn't, was in 2020.

00:02:56.620 I got canceled during the height of cancel season, right?

00:02:59.600 Remember how it was happening all the time.

00:03:01.420 And the probability of me ending up being interviewed by you was pretty high because I got canceled.

00:03:07.680 I was written up in the federal list and places like that.

00:03:09.720 What were you canceled for?

00:03:11.380 Oh, it was a real crime against humanity.

00:03:13.560 I supported the police.

00:03:15.400 Oh, okay.

00:03:16.420 It was one of those.

00:03:17.620 Remember the guy got knocked over in Buffalo?

00:03:19.560 Yes.

00:03:19.800 A friend of mine I was doing a podcast with that Saturday posted that late one night and said, said, I think this is just appalling when the old guy got knocked over by the riot police.

00:03:32.320 And I watched the video a couple of times.

00:03:33.980 I said, well, Chris, his name is Chris Irons.

00:03:36.700 I said, we can talk about it on Saturday, but I have no idea what he was doing there.

00:03:43.520 So this is in a tweet when I said, I said, he was poking riot police with something that looked kind of like a taser or something.

00:03:51.440 It turns out in retrospect, it was a skimmer.

00:03:54.580 And, and, and so I said, it looks like kind of a self-inflicted problem to me, right?

00:04:00.960 I didn't say he deserved it or anything like that, but it is self-inflicted.

00:04:04.320 If you poke a riot policeman and he knocks you over, right?

00:04:07.400 That, that, that's pretty much, you know, it's a Darwin award.

00:04:10.040 Bears and riot, riot policemen shouldn't be poked.

00:04:12.560 Turns out, um, what I learned that night was the cancel culture is not organic.

00:04:18.640 It was, it was incredibly astroturfed.

00:04:21.760 The speed with which it happened was staggering.

00:04:25.560 Um, it was automated within, within 20 or 30 minutes, um, email boxes all across the administration

00:04:33.640 were filling with complaints.

00:04:35.860 Um, it, it, it went everywhere.

00:04:37.700 I had to lock down my Twitter feed fast and, and things like that.

00:04:41.020 Um, and, and then Cornell was on sort of a war footing trying to figure out what to do.

00:04:45.700 Now they're trying to figure out what to do just because they wanted the fire to be put

00:04:50.040 out.

00:04:50.220 Right.

00:04:50.500 So they weren't against me in that sense.

00:04:53.800 Um, it was during the lockdown.

00:04:55.840 So, um, I didn't, I didn't actually, uh, I, there was the advantage of everyone was locked

00:05:02.380 down, but I wasn't sure Antifa wouldn't show up and we know that's not organic either.

00:05:08.300 Right.

00:05:08.880 And so, uh, and so, uh, and so I slept with some loaded guns and I was emotionally ready

00:05:15.340 to blow someone's brains out.

00:05:16.720 How many tenured professors in Ivy league schools have guns at home?

00:05:21.080 I don't know.

00:05:21.960 Just you.

00:05:22.660 I would not, well, there's probably more.

00:05:24.380 We have natural resources department, stuff like that.

00:05:27.080 And those guys probably use the resources available.

00:05:30.660 Um, but the, the one mistake Cornell made, they made two mistakes.

00:05:35.440 First of all, um, it turns out the guy was a grifter.

00:05:38.560 The whole thing was faked and there's, there's video footage of him telling people he's going

00:05:43.440 to go get knocked down and people yelling at him for doing that.

00:05:47.060 Um, it turns out the blood that came out of his ear, I've talked to physicians.

00:05:50.740 They said it would never come out like that.

00:05:52.800 Um, there's pictures of him on the gurney talking on a cell phone behind the ambulance.

00:05:57.380 The press couldn't find him in any of the hospitals.

00:06:00.300 He made a lot of money on GoFundMe.

00:06:02.300 So he, he grifted his, while he was supposedly in a coma, his Twitter feed, which had all

00:06:08.080 sorts of fuck the police kind of comments, um, was being scrubbed very quickly.

00:06:14.060 And, and so, uh, so the turn of the whole thing in retrospect was a grift.

00:06:17.960 So I was dead, right?

00:06:19.700 Um, Cornell was on a war footing trying to figure out how to just stop this.

00:06:22.980 There's graffiti all over the campus and stuff.

00:06:24.820 And so they made two mistakes.

00:06:26.460 One is, um, at no point did someone from Cornell reach out and say, how are you doing?

00:06:30.340 Right.

00:06:31.780 Right.

00:06:32.180 Cause I got, North Carolina got canceled and he killed himself, right?

00:06:35.240 I wasn't going to kill myself.

00:06:36.680 It was unpleasant.

00:06:37.900 I would admit that.

00:06:39.100 How long had you been at Cornell at that point?

00:06:41.200 Oh, that would have been 40 years.

00:06:43.600 40 years.

00:06:44.420 Right.

00:06:44.760 Plus four years as an undergrad.

00:06:46.440 So, you know.

00:06:46.980 So you spent 44 years at Cornell at that point.

00:06:49.040 So not a newcomer.

00:06:50.240 No.

00:06:50.560 Oh, and, and by the way, the guy who was the provost at the time was a friend of mine.

00:06:55.920 He, he was, um, he, I knew him from the day he got to Cornell.

00:06:59.580 He's now the president and it's useful.

00:07:02.720 So when I, when I, when I told, I, I knew I was coming here and I asked a trustee, um, I'm going to be talking to Tucker.

00:07:10.200 Is there anything, anything you'd like me to somehow get out there?

00:07:13.740 Not that I'm going to be there talking, man.

00:07:15.700 Um, but I, I would be stupid to miss it.

00:07:18.320 And I sent a quick email to the president and said, is there anything?

00:07:21.320 And he gave me a couple of bullets, but they were obvious.

00:07:23.160 They were the obvious things.

00:07:24.120 And, um, the second mistake they made is eventually they put together some, uh, and, and the Daily Sun was doing what I called the Daily Column, where, where they'd publish an article about what an asshole I was, right?

00:07:37.900 And they'd write an article about the football team and get the NSA, by the way, did we mention Colum's an asshole, right?

00:07:42.980 That sort of thing.

00:07:43.600 So, um, so they, they finally wrote a letter denouncing me and it was signed interestingly by the president who I didn't wrote.

00:07:54.120 I didn't really like that much, that president, uh, the provost, who's a friend of mine, which was ironic, the chief of police, which was super ironic, and a couple other administrators who was missing was one of our deans, the dean of arts and sciences, who didn't sign it.

00:08:08.760 He would have been an obvious signer.

00:08:10.580 And he once said to me, what good is tenure if you don't have free speech?

00:08:14.940 Now, they weren't trying to hurt me.

00:08:17.400 They were just trying to put out a fire and it put it out.

00:08:20.040 So to, to, in that sense, they did the right thing.

00:08:22.500 Did they call and tell you they were going to denounce you before?

00:08:25.000 No.

00:08:25.560 And, and by the way, I know a number of trustees at this point and, and they all said they should have just shut up.

00:08:31.080 So that was a mistake.

00:08:32.800 Um, more recently, a guy named Rickman, I think it was, you know, made that statement about it being exhilarated that Israel got attacked, right?

00:08:40.820 And he shouldn't have said that, right?

00:08:42.160 That was stupid.

00:08:42.680 But, um, but what people don't understand is that universities are a funny combination of free speech and academic freedom.

00:08:51.300 We're supposed to foster speech.

00:08:53.260 And that means dumb speech.

00:08:54.640 That means sometimes hostile speech, right?

00:08:56.680 And you know that drill.

00:08:57.400 And, and then the president denounced him, same president, the one I didn't really like, the one who denounced me.

00:09:03.860 And she said, this is only the second time I've denounced something.

00:09:06.220 A faculty member said, and I go, yeah, I was the first.

00:09:09.060 Hate to brag, but we're pretty confident this show is the most vehemently pro-dog podcast you're ever going to see.

00:09:16.340 We can take or leave some people, but dogs are non-negotiable.

00:09:19.780 They are the best.

00:09:21.440 They really are our best friends.

00:09:22.620 And so for that reason, we're thrilled to have a new partner called Dutch Pet.

00:09:26.740 It's the fastest growing pet telehealth service.

00:09:30.120 Dutch.com is on a mission to create what you need, what you actually need.

00:09:34.400 Affordable, quality veterinary care anytime, no matter where you are.

00:09:38.080 They will get your dog or cat what you need immediately.

00:09:42.700 It's offering an exclusive discount, Dutch is, for our listeners.

00:09:45.700 You get 50 bucks off your vet care per year.

00:09:48.700 Visit Dutch.com slash Tucker to learn more.

00:09:51.560 Use the code Tucker for $50 off.

00:09:53.860 That is an unlimited vet visit.

00:09:57.000 $82 a year.

00:09:58.200 82 bucks a year.

00:10:00.220 We actually use this.

00:10:01.340 Dutch has vets who can handle any pet under any circumstance in a 10-minute call.

00:10:07.940 It's pretty amazing, actually.

00:10:09.020 You never have to leave your house.

00:10:10.300 You don't have to throw the dog in the truck.

00:10:12.720 No wasted time waiting for appointments.

00:10:14.400 No wasted money on clinics or visit fees.

00:10:16.560 Unlimited visits and follow-ups for no extra cost.

00:10:18.940 Plus free shipping on all products for up to five pets.

00:10:23.300 It sounds amazing like it couldn't be real, but it actually is real.

00:10:26.820 Visit Dutch.com slash Tucker to learn more.

00:10:29.820 Use the code Tucker for $50 off your veterinary care per year.

00:10:33.360 Your dogs, your cats, and your wallet will thank you.

00:10:37.340 It's pretty obvious now that this country is getting weaker than ever, meaning the population

00:10:42.540 is unhealthier.

00:10:43.740 That's what Maha is about, trying to counteract this long-term trend that's culminated in a

00:10:48.740 disaster.

00:10:49.300 Americans are so unhealthy, we can't staff the military.

00:10:51.520 And it's really, really sad.

00:10:53.200 Why is this happening?

00:10:54.020 Maybe because sick people are easier to control.

00:10:56.920 Whatever the reason, there are answers to it.

00:10:59.900 One of them is Joy and Blokes.

00:11:01.760 They are revolutionizing supplements with smart supplements that are personalized for you.

00:11:06.380 They're based entirely on your genetics, your biomarker data.

00:11:10.160 They're not guessing.

00:11:11.760 So they use labs, advanced labs, that measure up to 110 key biomarkers.

00:11:17.260 Then their clinicians design a precision supplement plan that's updated as your body changes.

00:11:23.380 So it's not just off-the-shelf vitamins.

00:11:25.580 It's much more precise and therefore much more effective.

00:11:28.300 So there are about 3 billion possible combinations.

00:11:32.180 And the effect is you get exactly what you need and you get nothing that you don't need.

00:11:36.900 You also get 60 to 30-minute consultation, depending on how much time you need.

00:11:42.240 You get access to expert-guided hormone care, including testosterone optimization for both men and women,

00:11:48.500 longevity medicine, cutting-edge peptide therapy, and you get it all from home.

00:11:52.840 Right now, new customers get 50% off all diagnostic labs, plus 20% off all products and therapies.

00:12:00.120 You also get a free 15-minute health coach consult.

00:12:03.020 And the effect is the desired effect.

00:12:05.020 Stronger, sharper, more energy.

00:12:07.340 You get it right away.

00:12:08.760 Go to joyandblokes, J-O-Y, and blokes.com, slash Tucker, Root Cause Medicine.

00:12:14.820 It's the way health care ought to be.

00:12:16.780 You may have noticed this is a great country with bad food.

00:12:20.880 Our food supply is rotten.

00:12:23.020 It didn't used to be this way.

00:12:24.580 Take chips, for example.

00:12:26.300 You may recall a time when crushing a bag of chips didn't make you feel hungover,

00:12:31.780 like you couldn't get out of bed the next day.

00:12:33.980 And the change, of course, is chemicals.

00:12:36.320 There's all kinds of crap they're putting in this food that should not be in your body.

00:12:40.600 Seed oils, for example.

00:12:42.420 Now, even one serving of your standard American chip brand can make you feel bloated, fat,

00:12:49.900 totally passive, and out of it.

00:12:52.580 But there is a better way.

00:12:53.680 It's called masa chips.

00:12:55.020 They're delicious.

00:12:56.200 Got a whole garage full of them.

00:12:57.540 They're healthy, they taste great, and they have three simple ingredients.

00:13:02.020 Corn, salt, and 100% grass-fed beef tallow.

00:13:06.720 No garbage, no seed oils.

00:13:09.060 What a relief, and you feel the difference when you eat them, as we often do.

00:13:13.080 Snacking on masa chips is not like eating the garbage that you buy at convenience stores.

00:13:17.940 You feel satisfied, light, energetic, not sluggish.

00:13:22.320 Tens of thousands of happy people eat masa chips.

00:13:26.320 It's endorsed by people who understand health.

00:13:28.580 It's well worth a try.

00:13:30.120 Go to masa, M-A-S-A, chips.com slash Tucker.

00:13:33.000 Use the code Tucker for 25% off your first order.

00:13:35.620 That's masa chips.com, Tucker.

00:13:39.560 Code Tucker for 25% off your first order.

00:13:43.000 Highly recommended.

00:13:44.600 What about the then provost, now the president, who is your friend, who denounced you?

00:13:49.000 Did that affect your friendship?

00:13:50.220 No, not a bit.

00:13:51.220 They were just trying to put out a fire, and I was ready for the fire to be put out.

00:13:54.060 What helped is several trustees wandered in the president's office and said, don't even think about doing something stupid here.

00:14:02.440 So I had—one day I put out a tweet talking about how lovely Cornell is.

00:14:07.580 Cornell is a phenomenal institution.

00:14:09.600 So my loyalty to Cornell is tainting my vision, but Cornell is not like the other ivies.

00:14:15.660 It's not Harvard.

00:14:16.280 It's not Princeton.

00:14:17.020 It is—it's in the middle of this idyllic setting with—we have 200 gorges.

00:14:23.020 The people at Cornell are self-selected.

00:14:25.240 They're the ones who want to live here, right?

00:14:26.760 If there was a college in your neighborhood, it would be filled with people who love the outdoors.

00:14:33.340 It would be filled with people who like this way of life, right?

00:14:35.680 Cornell has that.

00:14:37.700 And so—and by the way, it's ranked number one in a critical category.

00:14:42.460 It has more top 10 ranked departments than any school in the country.

00:14:47.100 And that's because we have so many different things going on here.

00:14:51.240 So it's a very special place.

00:14:52.560 So the letter denouncing you was really just kabuki.

00:14:55.700 I mean, it was just—

00:14:56.180 It was kabuki, yeah.

00:14:57.000 It was trying to just put out the fire, and it did.

00:14:59.500 And it—I paid a price.

00:15:04.200 I lost a consulting gig at Pfizer because of it, because I was now a Nazi, you know, and—

00:15:10.940 Wait, Pfizer didn't stand by you?

00:15:12.960 I had consult—I had consult there for 20 years, and they were going to Zoom consulting.

00:15:17.360 And Pfizer doesn't need a controversial consultant either.

00:15:20.600 So they just cleared the deck as well.

00:15:22.860 So I don't hold it again.

00:15:23.580 I hold against—what I hold against Pfizer is the vaccine.

00:15:27.200 I don't hold—the guys I can tell with at Pfizer were great guys.

00:15:30.940 And Pfizer, they were trying to get their job done right and stuff like that.

00:15:34.600 Why do you, as an organic chemist, why do you hold the vaccine against them?

00:15:39.900 Because I think it killed a lot of people, and they knew it.

00:15:44.820 I read the—so I started writing about COVID right away.

00:15:47.960 You can imagine, right, as scientists.

00:15:49.160 I started networking.

00:15:50.360 I started trying to figure it out.

00:15:51.320 I'm in a group called Doctors for COVID Ethics for four years, where we had every major anti-vaxxer

00:15:57.200 on the planet go through this group.

00:15:58.660 Wait, so you're a consultant to Pfizer.

00:16:01.880 You're a pretty famous—one of the most famous organic chemists in the country.

00:16:07.020 So if you say the Pfizer COVID-vax killed a lot of people, it can't be dismissed as crank talk.

00:16:12.780 Well, it could be because I'm not a vaccine expert.

00:16:16.320 I'm an organic chemist.

00:16:17.580 So I have certain technical skills that probably help me burrow, and it's the genetics major.

00:16:23.700 As an undergrad, that helps me.

00:16:25.080 I don't use the biochem or the genetics, but it allows me to sort of read stuff.

00:16:31.820 But you think it kills a lot of people?

00:16:33.740 Well, the Pfizer papers, which are papers written about the clinical trials and the VAERS database,

00:16:40.180 show a huge number of problems, right?

00:16:43.100 And so the Doctor for COVID Ethics, we had every famous anti-vaxxer.

00:16:48.120 One of the first ones I went to, it was Bobby Kennedy, and we had—you name it.

00:16:52.640 You name an anti-vaxxer.

00:16:53.880 You name the Malones, the Ryan Coles, the Ryan Artises.

00:16:58.300 You can go on and on and on.

00:17:00.580 They all went through this group.

00:17:03.000 And we talked about things.

00:17:06.160 Three or four years became the—

00:17:07.700 Is anyone keeping track of how many Americans were killed by it?

00:17:11.120 Well, it's very hard because, first of all, every flu death got absorbed into the COVID stats.

00:17:17.920 So flu disappeared, which can't be true.

00:17:20.620 And if it did because we were locked down, then how did we all get COVID, right?

00:17:23.860 So there's now studies coming out from other countries because we have too many people who will look very bad when this data comes out.

00:17:35.800 But the Japanese, for example, have come out and said some very strong things about what didn't happen.

00:17:41.040 The head of the Japanese medical system, I think, came out and said that you could correlate the number of deaths with the number of shots, right?

00:17:48.880 And so now that the gag order has been released, scientific studies are making it into the literature.

00:17:56.480 And there's already thousands.

00:17:58.520 It's got to be one of the great man-made disasters of our lifetimes.

00:18:01.860 The lockdown, too.

00:18:03.500 I think you mentioned or someone did in one of your podcasts about the travesty.

00:18:09.600 Maybe it was Walter about the travesty of locking down.

00:18:12.940 And you tell me how old a kid is, and I can tell you what subjects he does not or she does not know.

00:18:22.860 So if you were studying trigonometry the year that everything was locked down, you don't know trigonometry at all.

00:18:29.840 We pretended to teach them.

00:18:31.280 They pretended to learn.

00:18:32.500 Nothing happened.

00:18:33.600 And do you see that now?

00:18:35.240 Well, you could see it going through the system.

00:18:37.200 So, for example, our first-year grads who were taking organic chemistry during lockdown, when they showed up, they were very weak in organic chemistry.

00:18:44.760 Yeah, you could see it.

00:18:46.080 So think of the poor kid who's five years old trying to learn how to read and write and everything through a mask, right?

00:18:55.840 And there's imprinting periods, right?

00:18:58.000 There's periods where you learn to read and write or you're kind of in trouble.

00:19:02.020 And so it was disastrous.

00:19:04.080 It was absurd.

00:19:04.880 And the whole thing was done by Fauci.

00:19:07.200 And our Zoom group, by the way, had Scott Atlas.

00:19:09.900 And so I asked Scott, I said, Scott, was it malicious?

00:19:14.980 Fauci and Birx, did what they do was malicious?

00:19:17.280 And I think it was.

00:19:19.600 I mean, I think there's evil forces behind those two.

00:19:22.080 But he took a different tact.

00:19:23.620 He said, you cannot fathom how stupid those two are.

00:19:29.360 That was his answer.

00:19:30.280 He said, Fauci never gave a scientific argument.

00:19:32.640 Never.

00:19:32.960 And he said, one day, this is astonishing.

00:19:34.660 He said, one day, this is all recorded.

00:19:37.140 So I'm not, you know, talking behind his back.

00:19:39.880 This is, there is a recording on the internet with this.

00:19:44.620 He says, one day he walks in with a scientific paper that Atlas had read.

00:19:47.960 And so he's thinking, whoa, Fauci's actually going to say something scientific.

00:19:52.640 Fauci went to say encephalomyelitis.

00:19:57.200 Now, if you work at the 7-Eleven, you might stumble on that one.

00:20:01.220 But if you're head of the entire health organization, you shouldn't.

00:20:05.840 And he said he botched it so bad it was unintelligible.

00:20:08.440 And Atlas said, come again?

00:20:09.960 What did you just say?

00:20:10.680 And Fauci wouldn't repeat it.

00:20:12.180 He said Birx was yanking shit off the internet, making pie charts, having not a clue what it meant.

00:20:18.980 Not a clue.

00:20:20.300 That's terrifying.

00:20:21.480 Now, here's the Chris from Atlas, though.

00:20:23.640 He didn't speak up, I don't think.

00:20:26.760 Fauci.

00:20:27.900 Atlas.

00:20:28.660 I think he sat there.

00:20:31.060 Can I ask you to back up just a moment, though?

00:20:33.040 So you're describing now incompetence, but you alluded earlier to malice.

00:20:36.720 What do you think the dark forces behind Birx and Fauci were?

00:20:40.300 Well, I think they, first of all, they love the fact we're talking about whether it came out of a lab in Wuhan,

00:20:46.500 because that way we're debating whether to blame the Chinese or not, right?

00:20:50.700 When, in fact, I think it came out of a lab probably in North Carolina.

00:20:54.040 A number of guys have tracked both the disease and the vaccine back years before it showed up on our dinner plate.

00:21:07.480 I think low level of malice would be...

00:21:11.480 Wait, you think it came out of a lab in North Carolina?

00:21:14.280 Yeah, Ralph Baric.

00:21:17.080 Yeah, he, you can follow, a guy named David Martin has followed the patent trail.

00:21:23.580 And an artificial organism can be patented, not a natural one.

00:21:28.280 Yes.

00:21:28.660 And this, you can follow the patent trail on COVID.

00:21:32.080 And you can follow the vaccine patent trail.

00:21:34.940 So if it gets, watch, you get moved around, move from point A to point B.

00:21:38.860 If it was created in North Carolina, how did it get to Wuhan and what was that?

00:21:43.700 Because we were funding, we were funding research in Wuhan because we were not allowed to do game of, game of, sorry, I keep tapping the table.

00:21:51.560 Oh, it's all right.

00:21:52.500 This is a topic that deserves some table tapping.

00:21:54.300 Well, I've done podcasts where I have headphones and I have four, three Boston Terriers, soon four, and they snore.

00:22:02.620 I can't hear them because my headphones are noise dampening.

00:22:05.680 And then I listen to the podcast and hear this humongous amount of snoring behind me.

00:22:10.280 So I'm aware of background noise.

00:22:11.720 You didn't bring the Terriers this morning.

00:22:12.800 I didn't bring the Terriers, no.

00:22:14.060 So, but you, I just want to flesh this out a bit.

00:22:18.360 You think it was created or begun in North Carolina, then brought to Wuhan for?

00:22:25.100 To be elaborated, to be studied, to be.

00:22:27.680 So I think we took everything offshore because it got, gain of function got banned in the U.S.

00:22:34.140 But I don't think we banned it.

00:22:35.960 There were something like 36 bioweapons labs in Ukraine of U.S. origin.

00:22:42.700 Yes.

00:22:43.040 So why is Ukraine perfect?

00:22:44.360 Ukraine's perfect.

00:22:45.180 To run a bioweapons lab, you need first world infrastructure.

00:22:50.640 Yeah.

00:22:51.240 And third world people to test shit on.

00:22:55.340 Ukraine's pretty much got that, right?

00:22:58.100 Because Fauci, for example, in the United States, when he had to do clinical trials,

00:23:02.700 when one of his lower rank, they'd go to foster care.

00:23:09.300 They would do clinical trials on foster children.

00:23:12.380 What?

00:23:12.860 Yeah.

00:23:13.140 You got to read Kennedy's book.

00:23:15.140 Yeah.

00:23:16.280 He did an estimate.

00:23:17.980 They used an estimated 13,000, 14,000 foster kids to do clinical trials.

00:23:22.900 They said the kids would figure out they're getting sick and they wouldn't want to take the meds.

00:23:28.680 That's so, that's like not saying.

00:23:30.100 So I think Fauci's been doing damage to people and killing people for many, many years.

00:23:34.580 So we made a pledge only to advertise products that we would use or do use.

00:23:40.460 And here's one that I personally used this morning.

00:23:43.300 It's Liberty Safe.

00:23:44.760 There's a huge one in my garage.

00:23:46.320 It is the company that protects your valuables.

00:23:49.580 High-end safe lines represent the pinnacle of American-made.

00:23:53.560 They're made here in the U.S.

00:23:54.960 Pinnacle of American-made security and craftsmanship.

00:23:57.600 They're more than just safes.

00:23:58.960 They are a safeguard.

00:24:00.160 They've got seven-gauge thick American steel, and they're beautiful.

00:24:06.320 Any kind of pink color you want, polished hardware, we have one.

00:24:11.280 They're really good-looking.

00:24:12.360 They do not detract from a room.

00:24:14.700 They enhance a room.

00:24:15.860 I keep my father's shotguns and all kinds of other things in there.

00:24:18.980 You can keep jewelry, money, anything else that you want to keep safe.

00:24:22.140 When you put your belongings in Liberty Safe, you can just relax.

00:24:26.980 Safes come equipped with motion-activated lighting, drawers for storage, locking bars, dehumidifiers,

00:24:32.020 and up to 150 minutes of certified fire resistance.

00:24:35.220 You can customize them any way you want.

00:24:37.280 They are the best.

00:24:38.740 We highly recommend them.

00:24:39.860 Visit libertysafe.com to find a deal to learn about how you can protect what matters most to you.

00:24:45.940 Demand the best.

00:24:47.040 Liberty.

00:24:47.280 Ontario.

00:24:48.200 The wait is over.

00:24:49.700 The gold standard of online casinos has arrived.

00:24:52.540 Golden Nugget Online Casino is live, bringing Vegas-style excitement and a world-class gaming experience right to your fingertips.

00:25:00.140 Whether you're a seasoned player or just starting, signing up is fast and simple.

00:25:04.380 And in just a few clicks, you can have access to our exclusive library of the best slots and top-tier table games.

00:25:10.880 Make the most of your downtime with unbeatable promotions and jackpots that can turn any mundane moment into a golden opportunity at Golden Nugget Online Casino.

00:25:20.320 Take a spin on the slots, challenge yourself at the tables, or join a live dealer game to feel the thrill of real-time action, all from the comfort of your own devices.

00:25:29.000 Why settle for less when you can go for the gold at Golden Nugget Online Casino?

00:25:33.380 Golden Nugget Casino.

00:25:34.300 Gambling problem?

00:25:35.220 Call Connex Ontario.

00:25:36.540 1-866-531-2600.

00:25:39.520 19 and over.

00:25:40.420 Physically present in Ontario.

00:25:41.800 Eligibility restrictions apply.

00:25:43.420 See GoldenNuggetCasino.com for details.

00:25:45.900 Please play responsibly.

00:25:47.280 You don't want to be passive and tired and dependent, do you?

00:25:51.040 Of course you don't.

00:25:52.700 You want to be strong and self-sufficient.

00:25:54.860 That's the goal, and our friends at Beam can help you.

00:25:57.300 They understand that real strength does not come from drugs.

00:26:00.540 It comes from inside you, internal motivation, internal strength, health.

00:26:06.440 That's the key.

00:26:08.240 Bigger.

00:26:09.440 So we partner with Beam because they have the same values that we have, that Americans have.

00:26:13.140 Hard work, accountability, free will, independence.

00:26:16.140 Be strong.

00:26:17.040 Don't be dependent.

00:26:18.740 Not until you're really old, anyway.

00:26:20.140 Beam can help you achieve that.

00:26:22.280 This great U.S. company is offering our listeners a new bundle, the American Strength Bundle.

00:26:27.440 And it comes with top-selling creatine and protein powder that delivers what your body needs to perform, to recover, and to stay strong.

00:26:34.320 No junk at all.

00:26:35.640 All natural ingredients that actually taste good.

00:26:38.660 You will love it.

00:26:40.180 You can get 30% off this bundle at shopbeam.com.

00:26:43.600 This is not in stores, just on that page for people who listen to this podcast only.

00:26:50.000 They're encouraging you to be weak.

00:26:51.860 Don't let them.

00:26:52.560 Go to shopbeam.com slash Tucker for 30% off.

00:26:55.960 Be safe.

00:26:56.700 But to do clinical trials on foster kids, I thought after the Second World War, when both the Japanese and the Germans were doing things like that.

00:27:04.120 Nuremberg Code?

00:27:04.640 Well, exactly.

00:27:06.020 It was codified there for scientists, but for the rest of the world, and certainly American culture, we were taught that testing potentially dangerous drugs on people without their full consent, or on the weakest among us, or euthanizing mental patients, all that was bad.

00:27:24.440 Right.

00:27:24.980 I thought that was one of the big lessons of the Second World War.

00:27:27.900 Well, as we both know, there are no rules.

00:27:32.700 Well, that's, boy, is that the truth?

00:27:34.180 There are no rules, right?

00:27:36.080 There are none.

00:27:37.840 There are rules for us, you and me, but there are subjects for which people could be thrown in prison.

00:27:47.380 You know, a great example would be Diddy.

00:27:51.620 So what happened with Diddy?

00:27:53.720 I think what happened with Diddy is Diddy had a bunch of very incriminating tapes.

00:27:57.660 I think, you know, Epstein, Light.

00:27:59.380 And I think they arrested him to round it all up, all the data.

00:28:05.720 I think they did it to get all the data away from Diddy because he was being sued in civil court.

00:28:10.980 And the guilty party said, we got to get it out of there before the civil court gets it.

00:28:18.100 And so they arrested him.

00:28:19.600 What did they just convict him of?

00:28:20.940 Nothing.

00:28:22.440 They could have put him away for 20 years based on what he did to Justin Bieber.

00:28:27.560 Right?

00:28:28.040 They didn't even get him on any of that.

00:28:29.560 So it's a classic, it's a classic case.

00:28:32.140 I know I sound like a nutcase, but you've had a lot of nutcases on your show.

00:28:37.380 My brother is trying to dial me back.

00:28:40.220 He's, Dave, they're going to think you're a nutcase if you talk about all the things you think about.

00:28:43.380 And I go, well, I think that ship has sailed.

00:28:45.500 You know, as I said to...

00:28:47.020 Well, I thought that was the whole point of academic research was the, you know, the predicate for it, the basis of it is free thinking.

00:28:54.540 Well, but according to Douglas Murray, I'm not supposed to talk about it unless I'm an expert.

00:28:59.560 Well, you are a demonstrable expert in your area.

00:29:03.900 I mean...

00:29:04.220 Which is not Diddy.

00:29:06.380 It's not Diddy.

00:29:07.620 You're not a tenured professor of Diddy studies at Cornell?

00:29:10.740 We could have it.

00:29:12.100 You know, we do have subjects and...

00:29:15.120 So you think the point of arresting Diddy was to shut down inquiry into what Diddy was doing?

00:29:22.200 Get the data, right?

00:29:22.920 Well, that's clearly the point of the first Jeffrey Epstein arrest.

00:29:27.380 Hunter Biden's laptop.

00:29:28.140 Tell me your view of Hunter Biden's laptop.

00:29:30.340 Well, Sidney...

00:29:32.580 What's her name?

00:29:33.920 Lawyer.

00:29:34.340 Come on.

00:29:34.960 Sidney Powell.

00:29:36.040 Yep.

00:29:37.200 Elite lawyer.

00:29:38.600 Now down a few notches because she worked for Trump and that always gets you in trouble.

00:29:42.760 Yep.

00:29:43.020 Said that if Hunter Biden's laptop were ever released...

00:29:47.820 No, if Anthony Weiner's laptop were ever released, the government would fall.

00:29:53.940 Weiner's laptop had kill switches in it.

00:29:56.620 I mean, it was filled with crap that wasn't supposed to be there.

00:30:00.780 We never get to see it.

00:30:02.840 Supposedly, nine cops watched the videos on Weiner's laptop.

00:30:10.060 They had to keep leaving the room because they couldn't stand what they were seeing.

00:30:13.200 And all nine are now dead.

00:30:17.220 And there's names and faces and deadness, right?

00:30:20.140 They're real people.

00:30:21.380 Now you can say, well, maybe they died for other reasons.

00:30:23.180 I go, but it's still nine cops.

00:30:25.500 And, you know, it's like the five cops who died after January 6th, right?

00:30:31.560 The four of them were suicides.

00:30:34.420 Out of, according to AI, there were about 80 cops really in the thick of things.

00:30:39.600 Four of them died from suicide.

00:30:41.480 I don't need any more information to wonder what the hell's going on there.

00:30:46.420 That's one of those standalone observations where I go, that's not right.

00:30:50.360 The math of that doesn't work for me.

00:30:53.520 I've got pictures of Ukrainian.

00:30:55.800 See, I'm going off topic.

00:30:57.100 I've got pictures of known Ukrainian operatives with, you're not going to believe this, with the QAnon shaman guy.

00:31:04.700 I think I have the horns on January 6th, at January 6th.

00:31:06.960 What is that all about?

00:31:09.480 I've got videos of-

00:31:10.700 That seems totally normal.

00:31:11.920 Yeah, yeah, totally.

00:31:12.980 I've got videos of-

00:31:13.660 With the National Guard, 100 yards away, not doing anything?

00:31:16.480 It's totally normal.

00:31:17.360 I've got videos of John Sullivan, right?

00:31:20.240 The guy who was supposedly Antifa, but Antifa said, no, he's a Fed.

00:31:24.780 Don't talk to him.

00:31:26.260 Who then filmed Ashley Babbitt getting shot.

00:31:28.760 This guy's getting around.

00:31:30.600 What's your image of an Antifa person?

00:31:33.220 Lost soul, tattoos everywhere, right?

00:31:37.220 No meaning in life, right?

00:31:39.080 Yeah, and no path forward, really.

00:31:41.000 I mean, these are nihilists.

00:31:42.420 These are society's drugs.

00:31:43.580 If they're real, that is.

00:31:44.820 If they're legit.

00:31:45.220 If they're real.

00:31:46.060 But I mean, if you look at the mugshots of Antifa arrest, or the people who came to my house, Antifa there.

00:31:50.840 I mean, these are, you know, obviously I disagree.

00:31:53.920 They threaten my family.

00:31:54.880 I don't like them and all that.

00:31:56.100 But you also feel like these are like one step above homeless.

00:31:59.280 Like these are-

00:31:59.840 Right.

00:32:00.480 Losers.

00:32:01.240 Yeah.

00:32:01.340 Right.

00:32:02.180 And so if he's Antifa, it's really odd that he was a nationally ranked cyclist.

00:32:12.160 Are you serious?

00:32:13.780 What I know about nationally ranked anythings is their lives have purpose.

00:32:18.820 Now there's a mugshot.

00:32:19.780 You follow this Patriot Front story.

00:32:22.080 I'm really, this is, now the helmet's on, the leash to the jungle gym is on.

00:32:26.420 The Patriot Front guys, those guys who'd stomp around looking like neo-Nazis who also were buff and had no pot bellies and covered their faces and get arrested and they're handcuffed with their backpacks still on and their, their, their, their megaphone still over their shoulders.

00:32:39.980 And, and, and, and then I saw mugshots of them.

00:32:45.260 Not a single tattoo.

00:32:47.140 Yeah.

00:32:48.160 No tattoos.

00:32:48.940 These are neo-Nazis.

00:32:49.980 Not a single tattoo.

00:32:51.660 They didn't have like Waffin SS lighting bolts on their cheeks.

00:32:56.120 No swastikas.

00:32:57.460 You know.

00:32:58.360 Right.

00:32:58.940 So, so, so we are in this big, Walter Kernish, we're in this made for the internet plot.

00:33:08.660 Walter is great in his description of the, I've been tracking the Mangione story.

00:33:14.060 It's not the right story.

00:33:15.900 There's something wrong.

00:33:16.700 And I, Walter laid it out.

00:33:20.420 Now what Walter didn't say is who's behind him.

00:33:25.060 That's obviously the question.

00:33:26.260 I mean, you can look at all of these different stories, particularly the acts of violence, which are because they are acts of violence are, you know, examined much more closely than any other kind of act.

00:33:35.600 And, and it like doesn't, it doesn't make any sense.

00:33:39.600 I mean, the, the shooting of Trump a year ago in Butler, Pennsylvania just doesn't make sense.

00:33:43.140 Oh, I wrote about that too.

00:33:44.480 Everything.

00:33:45.020 Do you know what I just read the other day?

00:33:46.700 The guy who shot Thomas Crooks, right?

00:33:51.600 There were bullets flying all over that place.

00:33:53.820 But it was a catastrophically poorly set up defense of Trump.

00:33:58.660 But the guy who shot Thomas Crooks was the same guy who organized the protection of Trump.

00:34:07.580 And they said, oh, you know, he didn't get convicted of anything.

00:34:10.420 And other guys didn't, I go, well, so the guy who was in charge of making sure that after the assassination was done, he popped the assassin.

00:34:16.920 He's somehow not getting prosecuted.

00:34:19.900 Why am I not shocked?

00:34:22.520 So you're saying he was the Jack Ruby figure here.

00:34:25.220 He was the Jack Ruby figure.

00:34:26.700 Yes.

00:34:27.340 So, so what was odd about that story?

00:34:30.420 Well, first of all, all the news agencies were there.

00:34:33.940 This was a totally irrelevant rally in the, in a relevant place, Butler, Pennsylvania.

00:34:41.620 And there's a stranger story there.

00:34:44.160 And again, I just pick up these shards and sometimes they fit together into a story.

00:34:48.140 And sometimes it's just put it in your head, keep it there until you get more detail.

00:34:54.620 There's a guy sitting behind Trump named Joseph Fusca.

00:35:00.900 Fusca is his last name.

00:35:03.700 I've seen him before many times.

00:35:06.540 He was by the QAnon guys, which are a bunch of whack jobs.

00:35:10.180 Said to be, you're not going to believe it.

00:35:14.000 Said to be John F. Kennedy Jr. waiting to come back and save the world.

00:35:19.900 And I'm going, oh, you guys have lost your minds finally.

00:35:22.680 You've really gone.

00:35:24.300 It doesn't matter that that's a total crock.

00:35:28.020 Fusca is this guy.

00:35:29.680 And they said, no, his name is Fusca and whatever, you know, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

00:35:33.200 But, but he's one who supposedly is JFK Jr. in disguise.

00:35:35.980 Fusca was there sitting right behind Trump.

00:35:40.600 I go off all the rallies.

00:35:42.980 There he is.

00:35:43.940 Who is he?

00:35:44.420 I don't know.

00:35:46.040 And what's really interesting, Trump gets shot.

00:35:48.360 Everyone's reacting and Fusca's not.

00:35:51.520 And then there's two pieces of footage.

00:35:53.580 When you say you've seen him before, you've seen him in photographs before?

00:35:56.260 Oh, he had been talked about.

00:35:57.760 I've dug down some deep rabbit holes and find this guy.

00:36:01.520 So one of the things you discover, you know this as well as anyone.

00:36:04.180 You, you think you're going down a rabbit hole and you discover Gobekli Tepe.

00:36:09.260 You get down the rabbit hole and you go, this thing, that this, there's a, there's an entire ecosystem down here that people don't know exists.

00:36:18.260 Once you, once you, it's like, it's like once you, you, you ask, how did Kennedy get killed?

00:36:22.900 And you go, oh boy, you know, that, that's troubling, right?

00:36:25.400 And then building seven, which you talked with Ron Johns, who, by the way, was in our Doc Zoom group, right?

00:36:30.180 When I'm talking, we had everyone, we had everyone.

00:36:34.360 Once you go on one or two of these and you go, I, I, I can't trust anything.

00:36:39.900 And I'm, I work in a field where you're supposed to be able to get the facts and say, now, here's an odd story.

00:36:46.880 A friend of mine is binding all my annual reviews that I write.

00:36:49.900 I write one blog a year.

00:36:51.100 And I've been thinking about why.

00:36:54.500 And, and I, can, can you just pause and describe what that is?

00:36:58.080 That, that's really the reason I wanted to talk to you was because your, your interview is, you know, well-known among people who are paying attention.

00:37:05.200 What is it?

00:37:05.740 And why do you do it?

00:37:06.860 So the people trying to wreck our civilization want you to be passive.

00:37:11.120 They want you weak so they can control you.

00:37:14.880 Weakness is their goal.

00:37:17.380 No, thanks.

00:37:17.820 Our friends at Beam, a proud American company, understand that our country can only be great if its people are strong.

00:37:26.720 And that's why they've created a new creatine product to help listeners like you stay mentally sharp and physically fit.

00:37:32.880 People like to mock creatine.

00:37:34.640 CNN doesn't like creatine at all.

00:37:37.200 But people buy it because it works.

00:37:39.920 Beam's creatine can help you improve your strength, your brain health, your longevity.

00:37:43.660 It's completely free of sugar and synthetic garbage that's in almost everything else that you eat.

00:37:50.200 Of course, you don't hear about it too much because, again, a population that is strong, clear-minded, and physically capable is a threat to tyrants.

00:38:00.380 That's why they want you playing video games.

00:38:02.420 To celebrate American strength, actual American strength, Beam is offering up to 30% off their best-selling creatine for the next 48 hours.

00:38:11.100 Go to shopbeam.com slash Tucker.

00:38:13.840 Use the code Tucker at checkout.

00:38:15.920 That's shopbeam, B-E-A-M, dot com slash Tucker.

00:38:19.100 Use the code Tucker for up to 30% off.

00:38:21.380 It's built on core values, integrity, results, no BS, Beam.

00:38:27.060 We strongly recommend it.

00:38:28.300 So, I stopped paying 100% attention to chemistry and started on the side looking at markets when I became a boomer with some wealth.

00:38:39.120 And I started paying, and I became, it was a tech bull.

00:38:42.320 And then, by 98, I realized the markets were in trouble.

00:38:46.180 I'd read enough books, read enough blogs, read enough articles.

00:38:48.820 And so, and then that naturally led me to politics, because if you don't understand politics, you don't understand economics.

00:38:58.940 And, and around 07, I wrote a, I used to, on this chat board I was at, I'd write a summary at the end of the year.

00:39:10.600 And part of it was to, to, to make sure that my fairly extreme views weren't costing me serious pain and suffering.

00:39:16.940 And, and, and, and instead of getting 200 clicks, because this group is about 200 of us talking, it went to like 4,000.

00:39:27.920 I go, what happened?

00:39:28.560 They said, oh, I put it on my blog.

00:39:30.520 Someone told me that.

00:39:31.500 So, so in 09, I, I decided to do it seriously.

00:39:34.380 I said, 30 years of investing.

00:39:35.900 So I wrote a, this, this thing.

00:39:37.840 I said, 30 years of investing from, from the cheap seats was the title.

00:39:42.720 So, and it went wild actually.

00:39:45.780 And part of it was because, because I'd been highly successful as a rank amateur through the nineties as a tech bull.

00:39:56.420 I made 700% on WorldCom and then got out.

00:40:00.620 I made 700% on Dell, Warner Lambert.

00:40:04.280 I thought I was a genius.

00:40:07.000 And, and so I had years where I made over a hundred percent without leverage.

00:40:11.140 And, and, and, and, and then I got out and I got out due to Y2K, which turns out to be a grift.

00:40:19.560 Yeah.

00:40:20.080 It took me decades to figure that out.

00:40:22.620 I thought I just blew it, but no, a Silicon Valley selling software and hardware.

00:40:27.380 And I can make that story, but it's not worth it.

00:40:29.620 Um, and then, and then, and then, so, so I started paying attention to politics and then I just went deeper and deeper down rabbit holes.

00:40:39.440 I see, I know I'm reading about Putin into 2012, trying to understand what's going on there and stuff like that.

00:40:45.220 So, um, so I, I just kind of naturally go down rabbit holes.

00:40:49.640 Now what you can't market a blog worse than writing one a year, right?

00:40:54.180 That's about as bad as you get, and I don't charge for it.

00:40:56.680 So there's that.

00:40:57.760 And, and, and then I realized though, um, the reason it works for me is if I wrote a blog once a week, most of them would be garbage.

00:41:08.920 Because imagine how many blogs I would have written about how Trump and Elon are best friends.

00:41:14.220 Right.

00:41:15.360 And now it seems irrelevant.

00:41:17.420 I'd be writing about how Trump and Elon are enemies.

00:41:19.820 And then a month from now, it'll be irrelevant because they'll be best friends again.

00:41:23.460 You're right.

00:41:23.700 And so you could, I could not write a weekly blog.

00:41:26.940 And so what I do is, is I, by writing once a year, it gives me a long time to think about.

00:41:32.560 So I get the idea and then I sort of watch and go, oh, look at that.

00:41:35.700 That's a puzzle piece right there.

00:41:37.760 So it essentially is book length.

00:41:41.480 250, 300 pages every fall.

00:41:46.460 And, and you can't.

00:41:48.240 And you don't charge for it.

00:41:49.560 And I don't, and I, you also can't write it in March.

00:41:52.940 That's not a year in review.

00:41:54.900 So I usually end up with about 700 pages of links and notes.

00:41:58.340 And if, if I see something, we talked before about, about using trite metaphors, you know, how we both hate it.

00:42:04.400 And, but once in a while, I'll see a way to insult a person.

00:42:07.800 I'll go, oh, I'm saving that.

00:42:09.480 Right.

00:42:10.040 Now, the other reason it's really great.

00:42:11.960 I think.

00:42:12.260 Where do people find it?

00:42:13.240 Uh, it's published at Peak Prosperity.

00:42:15.340 And, and it's my, it's my pin tweet.

00:42:19.120 So it stays up there all year.

00:42:20.760 And then until I publish the next one.

00:42:23.400 Um, and it gives me the chance to collect the information, to ponder what's going on that year.

00:42:29.960 And then, and some things become irrelevant.

00:42:32.400 So I don't write about them.

00:42:33.260 Some things are not, some things become trite.

00:42:35.460 Right.

00:42:36.420 But I think my analysis of the, um, 2016 election, for example, is really good.

00:42:42.300 The prophetic line.

00:42:45.460 I was watching BET.

00:42:48.880 Please don't get me to explain why I'm watching BET and black entertainment today or something, whatever.

00:42:55.120 And some burly black guy's talking about Trump.

00:42:58.340 And he says, forget the messenger.

00:43:00.140 Listen to the message.

00:43:00.940 Listen to the message.

00:43:01.360 I'm going, holy moly.

00:43:02.980 Right.

00:43:03.080 Turns out he was the head of the end of, of the, uh, uh, uh, new Black Panther Party.

00:43:09.740 I go, Trump just got endorsed by the Black Panthers.

00:43:15.020 So I, and then I saw Jimmy Brown, the running back say he will be a president of the people.

00:43:20.760 And, and all of a sudden, and so I wrote, it might just be a flicker, but I think the black community is moving to the right.

00:43:30.640 And boy, was that ahead of its time.

00:43:33.920 And so, uh, what I won't do is write about something that I was writing about.

00:43:38.280 Why?

00:43:38.960 Yeah.

00:43:39.180 The other problem I face is that I don't write about stuff.

00:43:43.240 I'm an expert.

00:43:44.040 I write about stuff that I know nothing.

00:43:47.480 And so when I wrote about, I've been following Putin, but when the Ukraine war came, first thing I noticed, I bet you noticed it too.

00:43:55.940 It wasn't a war.

00:43:57.040 It was a police action and they weren't killing people.

00:44:03.280 They were moving troops across the border.

00:44:05.780 They were talking to Ukrainians.

00:44:07.740 They were, and I kept saying to my wife, this is not a war.

00:44:09.740 And you'd see some grandmother going, ah, this is just really terrible.

00:44:12.560 You know, and I'm going, that's not a war.

00:44:14.000 You want to see a war?

00:44:14.940 Look at Baghdad day one.

00:44:16.560 Right.

00:44:16.820 That's a war.

00:44:17.580 That's what a war looks like.

00:44:18.660 Right.

00:44:18.940 You'd see an explosion from 20 miles away.

00:44:21.340 You wouldn't know what blew up.

00:44:22.920 Right.

00:44:23.580 Like my wife thought I was nuts.

00:44:24.840 I go, it's not a war.

00:44:25.580 It's not a war.

00:44:25.960 Well, it became a war because as you and I both know, NATO wanted a war.

00:44:30.040 And so it morphed from being a police action, which I think Putin was trying to throw a fastball past NATO's chin and saying back off on this whole NATO thing.

00:44:39.800 Yes, that's correct.

00:44:40.300 And, and so when I wrote about that, I found about 20 to 40 guys who are trying to get it right, which includes you and includes guys like Max Abramson.

00:44:53.860 Do I know that?

00:44:54.400 Do I have that right?

00:44:55.460 Glenn Greenwald, the guy who died.

00:44:59.280 What's his name?

00:45:00.120 The guy who got killed by the Ukrainians.

00:45:02.220 Gonzalo Lira.

00:45:02.640 Gonzalo Lira.

00:45:03.720 The American who was murdered by the Ukrainian government.

00:45:05.360 And we could have gotten him out with a phone call and we chose not to.

00:45:07.880 100%.

00:45:08.240 Because the narrative was Putin's bad.

00:45:10.740 Ukraine's a bunch of really nice guys, super nice guys.

00:45:13.980 It's a democracy.

00:45:15.220 What a crock of shit.

00:45:17.240 That was a lie from head to toe.

00:45:18.820 We wanted a war.

00:45:19.840 We still want a war.

00:45:20.580 I have, I have intelligence friends too, not like you, but I have them.

00:45:24.660 And, and I was talking to one the other day.

00:45:26.520 I think he likes to talk to me because he can talk to me about these subjects.

00:45:30.040 And in his universe, I'm the only guy he can talk to for which he's, he doesn't have to worry because everyone else in his world is connected to everyone else in his world.

00:45:43.320 So I think he likes to have real honest conversations.

00:45:45.300 One day we're on the phone.

00:45:46.560 He says, do you do signal?

00:45:48.340 I go, yeah.

00:45:49.020 So we went to signal.

00:45:50.040 He said, someone was listening to us.

00:45:54.080 Boy.

00:45:55.220 There's a lot of that.

00:45:56.280 There's a lot of that.

00:45:57.240 Yeah, I know.

00:45:57.780 So there's always a narrative.

00:45:59.280 There's always one narrative.

00:46:00.260 And we're now in an era where you only get to talk about that narrative.

00:46:03.040 You know that.

00:46:03.620 I know that.

00:46:04.240 You and I, we're just mutually.

00:46:06.400 Yeah.

00:46:06.880 And, and the, the penalties for straying from the story.

00:46:09.960 You get fired.

00:46:10.560 Are real.

00:46:11.020 Yeah, totally.

00:46:12.000 I mean, whatever.

00:46:13.380 I, there's been no age in human history where telling the truth, the real truth is rewarded.

00:46:19.140 So, so, so, so, so where you first really won me over.

00:46:23.560 So you and I agree that when you were young, you were a punk.

00:46:27.860 Yeah.

00:46:28.560 The fact that you're so proud of the metamorphosis is great.

00:46:33.720 It may have come before this, but where I noticed it was the Las Vegas shootings, where

00:46:40.380 is, we kind of talked a little bit at breakfast.

00:46:45.200 Here's the funny story.

00:46:46.540 They interviewed that night a guy named Mike Kronk.

00:46:49.760 And Mike Kronk tells you.

00:46:50.600 The night of the shootings.

00:46:51.560 The night of the shootings.

00:46:52.340 That was 2017, maybe?

00:46:54.300 I can't remember.

00:46:55.020 Ish.

00:46:55.620 Yeah.

00:46:56.840 And Mike Kronk told this story.

00:46:58.760 He didn't look very emotional, which I found a little odd.

00:47:01.280 I, by the way, think all the shootings within an error bar are not what they appear to be.

00:47:07.380 I'll take it all the way back to Columbine if you want.

00:47:11.380 But Mike Kronk talks about his friend getting shot three times in the chest from hundreds

00:47:16.620 of yards away.

00:47:18.960 And, and later, a marksman said, not possible.

00:47:23.420 Too much spray.

00:47:24.960 A sniper would be required to hit a guy three times.

00:47:28.180 And, and, and the guy was just doing this, right?

00:47:32.660 And Mike says his friend stuck his fingers in the bullet, his own bullet holes to stop

00:47:38.900 the bleeding.

00:47:39.460 I'm going, now you're lying.

00:47:42.340 Why is Mike lying?

00:47:43.560 Right away.

00:47:44.400 Red flag.

00:47:45.040 Why is Mike lying?

00:47:45.940 And who is he, by the way?

00:47:47.240 Well, that's a great question.

00:47:49.200 So Mike, um, then finishes how they put him on a cart and wheeled him out.

00:47:54.480 May I just ask why?

00:47:56.040 I'll tell you.

00:47:56.820 Why did you know he was lying when he said his friend put his own fingers?

00:47:59.840 Because you don't, you don't get shot three times in the chest and provide your own healthcare.

00:48:05.160 Fair, fair.

00:48:06.260 Right?

00:48:06.520 We thought this through when we started this podcast a year ago and we decided we're never

00:48:10.100 advertising anything that we or people on our staff don't use.

00:48:14.300 Period.

00:48:14.860 We're only partnering with companies that we agree with and endorse actually in our personal

00:48:21.120 lives.

00:48:21.880 So we want to announce a new partnership with a survival company we trust most.

00:48:26.060 Last Country Supply is the name of our collaboration.

00:48:29.200 Last Country Supply.

00:48:30.600 I have a big surplus of survival food from that great company.

00:48:34.540 If you get a bucket of food with a 25-year shelf life, 2,000 calories a day, potatoes,

00:48:41.200 rice, bread, drinks, you feel a lot better.

00:48:44.220 Let's say there's an EMP attack or civil disturbance and you don't know what could happen in the

00:48:49.400 future.

00:48:50.280 You are prepared and you are protecting your family with Last Country Supply products.

00:48:56.640 So head to lastcountrysupply.com to shop for our new collection, Bulk Up Now.

00:49:01.080 There is no scenario where you will regret being prepared.

00:49:05.640 So then, like YouTube, you see it rolls over 15 seconds and then it goes to the next YouTube.

00:49:11.880 And we're watching Vegas like you watch 9-11, right?

00:49:16.300 Right.

00:49:16.580 It was really 500 people.

00:49:18.500 It is the biggest shooting.

00:49:19.980 It's probably Gettysburg.

00:49:21.980 Yes.

00:49:22.420 Right?

00:49:22.640 When was the last time you heard a gun antagonist say, remember Vegas?

00:49:29.640 We got to get rid of guns.

00:49:31.720 Never.

00:49:32.240 Right.

00:49:32.420 And you know why.

00:49:33.900 So it rolls to the next interview and it's Mike Kronk, new network, same guy.

00:49:38.920 He tells the same story.

00:49:40.160 Now he's looking a little more emotional and his story changes just a little, just a little

00:49:44.920 around the edges.

00:49:45.700 And then it rolls to the next interview and there's Mike Kronk again.

00:49:51.080 And I go, why?

00:49:52.140 You got 22,000 people and why are you interviewing Mike Kronk?

00:49:55.580 And then there were oddities that were always showing up like some lady walking through the

00:49:58.680 crowd saying you're all going to die tonight and they carted her away and things like that.

00:50:02.940 Yeah.

00:50:03.260 Yeah.

00:50:03.680 Weird stuff.

00:50:05.460 And so I tried to figure out who Mike Kronk was.

00:50:08.860 He's just some hick from Alaska.

00:50:11.140 Right?

00:50:11.440 He's just some hick from Alaska.

00:50:12.560 After the fact, I looked and just picture him holding an elk by the horns, you know,

00:50:18.700 that he shot.

00:50:20.300 The next day, the head of the police said, there's no way one guy did it.

00:50:25.640 The following day, he said one guy did it.

00:50:27.740 It takes a long time to show one guy did it, right?

00:50:29.900 That's something you don't know.

00:50:31.640 There's a lot of debris before you figure that out.

00:50:36.140 There's now a documentary called Route 41.

00:50:39.500 So I dug into this.

00:50:40.600 What I noticed is you stayed with the story for about two weeks, maybe, and you were bringing

00:50:46.840 it up.

00:50:47.140 Ann Coulter jumped in.

00:50:48.760 You know, Paddock was making money.

00:50:50.480 How?

00:50:50.940 Playing video poker.

00:50:53.060 That's the way he's making a living.

00:50:55.220 That's like saying I'm a professional crackhead.

00:50:58.140 And then what happens is there was shooting all over the place.

00:51:02.920 There was shooting everywhere.

00:51:04.480 In the city that day.

00:51:05.520 In the city that night.

00:51:06.680 And so now there's, if you don't believe me, there's this documentary called Route 41 and

00:51:11.360 they got stuff I didn't know about, but they also got stuff that I, so it's kind of an

00:51:16.760 answer key for me to use academic terms.

00:51:19.440 And if you watch Route 41, you will see there were shooters everywhere.

00:51:23.320 There are cop cameras showing shooters.

00:51:25.520 And then remember the guy got shot in the leg up on the floor where Paddock was?

00:51:29.240 Yes.

00:51:29.900 The hotel employee.

00:51:30.360 Some guy named Jesus or something, right?

00:51:32.120 Exactly.

00:51:32.280 Some illegal with two social security numbers.

00:51:35.180 Hello.

00:51:36.780 And then afterwards, reporters tried to get to his house.

00:51:41.640 His house was being protected by cars.

00:51:45.500 They had no license plates.

00:51:47.640 And then all of a sudden he goes to Mexico.

00:51:49.900 And when asked, well, where'd he go?

00:51:52.060 They said, well, he was planning a trip to Mexico.

00:51:54.040 So when I wrote him, I said, oh, by the way, Jesus, when you get back, could you stop in?

00:51:57.900 We've got some questions for you, right?

00:52:00.260 And then he comes back and he does one interview on Alan DeGeneres.

00:52:05.660 And Alan introduced him saying, and he's there with a handler I had already seen.

00:52:09.580 I'm going, wait a minute.

00:52:11.180 That guy, I've been seeing that guy a lot, that other guy.

00:52:14.600 So Jesus is looking at his feet.

00:52:16.800 His name isn't Jesus, but it's something like that.

00:52:19.700 Alan introduced him saying, this is the only interview you're going to do.

00:52:22.760 And you've got to get it off your chest.

00:52:24.340 I'm going, oh, shit, here we go.

00:52:26.220 And then the handler's doing all the talking.

00:52:29.100 Jesus is looking at his feet.

00:52:31.640 And then we never hear about Jesus again.

00:52:33.340 Probably he's in some shallow grave somewhere because he's too inconvenient.

00:52:37.000 I tried to interview him at the time.

00:52:39.100 Really?

00:52:39.780 Yes.

00:52:40.180 Couldn't get to him, could you?

00:52:41.140 He drove to Mexico from Vegas.

00:52:43.480 Right.

00:52:44.420 Two of them.

00:52:45.420 Yeah, probably with an escort.

00:52:47.040 Yeah, then he came back.

00:52:48.640 And yeah, I tried my hardest.

00:52:50.120 Now, Alan works for the company that owns Mandalay.

00:52:54.540 His handler.

00:52:55.560 Yeah.

00:52:55.980 No, no.

00:52:57.540 Alan DeGeneres.

00:52:58.580 Oh, Alan DeGeneres.

00:52:59.400 I'm so sorry.

00:53:00.340 Yeah.

00:53:01.020 And so they're buttoning it down.

00:53:03.300 Now, what you see from Route 41 video is there was just an enormous amount of chaos.

00:53:08.380 There's enormous numbers of shooters.

00:53:11.080 Even that night, you were seeing videos from cab drivers saying they're shooting over here,

00:53:16.440 they're shooting over there.

00:53:17.540 And there would be some chaos, but there's way too much.

00:53:21.220 There's guys who took audios and said, here's, here, bam, bam, bam, bam, bam, bam.

00:53:26.360 They hear that, that, that, that, that, that, that.

00:53:27.620 And so you could hear multiple guns, the whole thing.

00:53:29.720 So then what happened, Mike Kronk, I start reading trauma surgeons saying there's something

00:53:35.220 wrong with the story.

00:53:37.040 You know, if you get hit with, you know, what was it, AR-15 or something?

00:53:40.140 Yeah.

00:53:40.800 And a .308, a bigger deer rifle.

00:53:43.080 You're going to die out there.

00:53:44.280 You're going to bleed out right there.

00:53:45.460 Even if it doesn't hit a major artery, you're just going to turn your leg to jello.

00:53:48.400 Three chest wounds from a rifle?

00:53:49.780 Yeah.

00:53:50.040 Yeah.

00:53:50.240 So, so what would he look like?

00:53:52.680 And so then I saw an interview of a, of a young woman and she's sitting there in a chair

00:53:57.320 in the hospital and they're interviewing her.

00:53:58.840 I'm going, you look pretty perky.

00:54:00.440 And, um, and, and then Mike Kronk with a news crew goes in and interviews his friend.

00:54:06.700 Now, first and foremost, we know HIPAA says you ain't bringing a news crew into a hospital

00:54:11.100 room.

00:54:12.360 Second, we know three shots to the chest.

00:54:14.580 He'd be in the ICU.

00:54:15.720 The only way you'd know he's alive is that there'd be a beeping on the screen and he'd

00:54:21.920 have hoses coming out of every orifice and he would look dead.

00:54:27.120 And so they take the news crew and they interview his friend.

00:54:29.560 He's got a nasal cannula, a nasal cannula.

00:54:33.900 So I'm sitting there thinking, oh, so you're, you're talking with three holes in your chest.

00:54:37.400 What are you sticking your fingers so the air doesn't come flying out of your chest holes?

00:54:41.180 Right.

00:54:41.580 And then I notice the screen's not even plugged in.

00:54:47.340 Now, what is Mike Kronk now?

00:54:50.000 He's a state senator from Alaska.

00:54:52.840 In Alaska.

00:54:53.640 I think he's a state level state senator.

00:54:55.740 What?

00:54:56.160 Yeah.

00:54:57.120 Who's the chief of police?

00:54:58.580 He became governor of Nevada or something.

00:55:02.280 Right.

00:55:02.920 I mean, so, so again, so there's a guy named John Cullen who did an analysis of the shooting

00:55:12.120 and his conclusion.

00:55:13.460 A relative?

00:55:14.380 A relative?

00:55:15.360 Yeah.

00:55:15.820 No, no, no.

00:55:16.500 No, no.

00:55:17.080 This felt different.

00:55:18.100 John worked for Oracle.

00:55:19.260 He's some on the spectrum code head.

00:55:21.100 He also analyzed the Butler shooting.

00:55:23.740 The audios of the Butler shooting.

00:55:25.880 He's an on the spectrum code head.

00:55:27.480 He's on the spectrum code head.

00:55:28.660 He sort of bears down and grabs on something a little too firmly, I think, but he brings

00:55:33.760 As on the spectrum code heads.

00:55:35.200 Yeah, I know.

00:55:36.580 And he, there was pretty good evidence that a lot of the shooting was coming from helicopters

00:55:40.860 behind the Mandalay.

00:55:41.980 And he tracked the transponders turning on and off behind the Mandalay.

00:55:46.720 The story was that Mohammed bin Salman was on the top floor.

00:55:51.460 The crown prince of ruler of Saudi Arabia.

00:55:53.300 Yes, yes, a guy who lots of people would like to kill.

00:55:57.580 And his theory is, is that the Saudis tried to flush him out of there and on the way out,

00:56:03.340 they would cap him.

00:56:05.500 Now, they blew it.

00:56:07.240 If that's the story, they blew it.

00:56:08.760 I think the helicopter idea is not bad.

00:56:10.900 But I did a couple of podcasts with John and I said, John, but what about all the shooting

00:56:14.640 on the ground?

00:56:15.220 And John was kind of dismissive.

00:56:16.480 I go, you can't dismiss it.

00:56:18.080 You can't let that stuff go.

00:56:19.760 Your model's got to include that.

00:56:20.960 But it occurred a year later, Mohammed, remember when Khashoggi got killed?

00:56:33.580 What was his name?

00:56:34.700 Jamal Khashoggi.

00:56:36.260 Now, a non-Kashoggi is one of the most famous CIA guys on the planet.

00:56:40.640 Jamal Khashoggi is the one who got diced up and fed to the camels.

00:56:44.160 Now, he's a New York Times reporter.

00:56:45.420 I think he was also CIA.

00:56:46.640 Washington Post columnist.

00:56:48.580 Yeah.

00:56:48.720 And he was killed in.

00:56:50.240 In the embassy.

00:56:51.520 In Istanbul, I believe.

00:56:54.200 Okay.

00:56:56.620 Supposedly, on the anniversary of the Vegas shootings, supposedly Mohammed bin Salman had

00:57:03.580 a party, locked the doors and showed a video of him getting sliced up and said to the royal

00:57:09.940 sitting in the room, don't even think about it.

00:57:13.500 Now, when I wrote about Khashoggi, everyone was having a cow for Khashoggi, right?

00:57:17.880 When he got killed, I'm going, we're killing tens of thousands of Yemenis.

00:57:22.680 We killed 5 million people in the Middle East directly and indirectly due to our post-9-11 responses.

00:57:29.560 Yes.

00:57:29.840 Right?

00:57:30.020 And I called him ODK, one dead Khashoggi.

00:57:33.420 I said, it is insane to worry about one dead guy in a region of the world where people

00:57:38.820 die for no reason all the time.

00:57:41.460 Who was at war with his own government, the Saudi government?

00:57:44.400 I mean, I'm obviously not for vivisecting people, but I also think, yeah, there's a scale of evil

00:57:53.040 and starving kids is worse than what happened in Khashoggi.

00:57:57.420 I agree with you.

00:57:58.560 Right.

00:57:59.240 So, you were the only mainstream guy who I watched steadily on the story, staying with

00:58:06.540 the Vegas shootings, noting that there's something wrong.

00:58:09.120 We got very hassled by law enforcement.

00:58:11.460 I'm sure you did.

00:58:12.760 Yes, which was, you know, I worked at Fox News, obviously, at the time, and big supporters

00:58:18.200 of law enforcement.

00:58:18.880 I've always been a big supporter of law enforcement.

00:58:20.740 We've never gotten hassled anywhere.

00:58:22.260 Just the opposite.

00:58:23.120 Oh, you work for Fox News.

00:58:24.060 Oh, my gosh.

00:58:24.540 Of course.

00:58:25.100 Slow down.

00:58:25.720 The official law enforcement is what got you.

00:58:27.800 Man.

00:58:28.720 I mean, they blocked our camera position.

00:58:30.920 Oh, yeah.

00:58:31.640 They were totally opposed to us doing that.

00:58:34.220 I've never had that experience.

00:58:35.560 So, let's stay on the shootings just briefly.

00:58:38.080 Uvalde.

00:58:38.700 There's problems all over that shooting.

00:58:40.180 Remember that shooting in Texas where the guy got in?

00:58:42.620 I knew the mayor.

00:58:44.800 Yes.

00:58:45.060 There's problems all over the place because, first of all, there's something like 800

00:58:48.720 law enforcement guys within reach of the damn thing.

00:58:51.300 And there's a ton of like 5,000 people.

00:58:54.980 And then they didn't go in for 78 minutes or something.

00:58:59.340 I go, excuse me, you show me 10 cops, eight of them have kids.

00:59:06.420 Right now, I'm reading a book called The Moral Animal.

00:59:08.940 It's about human behavior.

00:59:10.160 Yep, yep.

00:59:10.660 And out of those eight, eight would have gone in and said, I don't care what you say.

00:59:15.680 I'm going in.

00:59:16.880 Of course.

00:59:17.140 You give me a soccer mom.

00:59:18.740 She's going in.

00:59:19.880 Right?

00:59:20.240 100%.

00:59:20.420 And then there was the mom who did go in and her story was incoherent.

00:59:27.260 Her story.

00:59:27.720 She came out and she said this and then she said this and it was not consistent.

00:59:31.400 And I'm going, that's just a narrative thrown on top of it.

00:59:35.500 So what are we looking at here?

00:59:37.080 So.

00:59:37.780 Kayfabe.

00:59:38.620 What does that mean?

00:59:40.140 Kayfabe is something Eric Weinstein wrote about.

00:59:42.420 He was asked to write an essay with a bunch of other scholarly types.

00:59:45.320 And he said that politics, it was kayfabe, it was professional wrestling.

00:59:51.360 And there's all these layers, there's all these tricks.

00:59:54.880 It's way more sophisticated than people think.

00:59:57.600 The way you get, the way you engage the audience and you have some reality and some non-reality

01:00:03.440 and things change.

01:00:04.560 And he talked about politics being kayfabe.

01:00:06.960 I don't think anything you see can be interpreted literally and at face value.

01:00:14.540 Now.

01:00:15.440 What would be the purpose, however?

01:00:18.580 Well, as I was telling you, a friend's binding all my annual reviews and I will probably make

01:00:26.760 $1,000 off this.

01:00:28.340 I mean, this is not getting rich.

01:00:29.860 Um, I'm paid probably 0.001 cent per hour pay for this task.

01:00:37.320 I had to go back.

01:00:38.320 I've been proofing the drafts from previous years.

01:00:42.020 And what I noticed about 2013, 14, 15 is something's changed.

01:00:47.980 And what's changed is.

01:00:53.300 You could get facts.

01:00:55.700 And you felt like you were getting facts.

01:00:57.580 And the stories would break and they would stay that way.

01:01:01.080 And, and they wouldn't be shifting around.

01:01:02.940 And you could say, okay, here's what happened in here, here.

01:01:05.380 And this piece fits in here.

01:01:07.220 And, and, and now you can't.

01:01:10.240 Now it's like, and we talked about using tripe metaphors.

01:01:13.740 Here's one, but I really like it.

01:01:15.320 It's like when your GPS starts randomly rerouting you.

01:01:20.080 And our GPS just keeps ranting, rerouting, rerouting.

01:01:23.720 I go, I'm not taking that right turn now, you know?

01:01:26.540 So you just boot the GPS and you break out your gazetteer and you figure out where you're

01:01:30.180 going, right?

01:01:31.260 And so we, our GPS is rerouting us constantly.

01:01:35.400 And, and one of your guests, Mike Benz, who I occasionally chat with briefly, who's very

01:01:41.960 impressive.

01:01:43.260 And as, as I've said, I don't know everything about him.

01:01:48.280 And I don't mean just in a casual way.

01:01:51.020 I think he's, I think there's a complex story there, but right now he's saying the right

01:01:55.440 stuff.

01:01:56.860 He made, he gave a talk one day where he talked about how around 2013, the so-called deep state,

01:02:05.340 which is a term I've tried to figure out where it came from.

01:02:07.560 And then I think the guy who gets the most credit is kind of Peter Dale Scott, who wrote

01:02:12.440 about drug trafficking, Berkeley professor, and he called it deep politics.

01:02:16.300 But I think it predates that, but that's where I get it from.

01:02:19.740 He said the deep state realized they were losing control of the narrative.

01:02:25.800 They had underestimated the internet and social media.

01:02:29.500 And as a consequence, they had to get a hold of it completely.

01:02:33.000 And so then this is where we're at.

01:02:34.660 Now we thought Trump was going to save us.

01:02:36.440 We thought Elon was going to save us.

01:02:37.980 Um, my Twitter feed is a dumpster fire.

01:02:42.480 So instead of taking away data, they provide excess noise.

01:02:47.940 So now, so now instead of trying to suppress the signal, you just increase the noise.

01:02:54.020 I think that's, uh, very deep.

01:02:56.660 And I think it points to the, what's happened, what's happening.

01:02:59.680 I would think that's clearly true.

01:03:00.960 So what is the fact that was the title last year's writeup.

01:03:03.360 What is the fact?

01:03:04.140 Yeah, it's, it's impossible.

01:03:09.360 You can't actually control the, you can't restrict the flow of information across the internet.

01:03:14.820 So you throw debris out there.

01:03:16.320 Yeah.

01:03:16.960 Right.

01:03:17.180 So it's just, it's like the, the, the pilots who, who throw the debris out the back of the plane so that the guided missiles don't know what to hit.

01:03:25.620 Of course, exactly right.

01:03:26.800 Right.

01:03:27.300 And, and they also throw out debris so that, so that then they can prove that it's not true.

01:03:31.680 So you feel like an idiot.

01:03:32.980 QAnon was clearly that.

01:03:35.040 QAnon.

01:03:35.600 Yeah.

01:03:35.860 QAnon.

01:03:37.060 What was QAnon?

01:03:38.140 I don't know.

01:03:38.940 I don't either.

01:03:39.700 I, I avoid, you know, I'd be listening to something and it would have useful information and all of a sudden then it would show the whole and here's Trump and his generals are going to save the world.

01:03:47.680 No, I agree.

01:03:48.620 For Christ's sake.

01:03:49.220 But the interesting, I never knew anything about QAnon.

01:03:50.740 I never paid any attention at all.

01:03:51.940 I have a good friend who I really admire is much smarter than I am, who, because he is smarter than I am, took like a year to look into QAnon.

01:04:01.300 What'd he get?

01:04:01.760 I don't fully understand it, but here's what I understand is that, you know, some of the predictions at QAnon came true.

01:04:10.960 I mean, it's a sophisticated thing.

01:04:13.060 It's not just.

01:04:14.080 Oh, I think it's a bunch of ex-spooks.

01:04:15.960 For sure.

01:04:16.780 It's not a, you know, bunch of college kids on 4chan or whatever they claim it was.

01:04:22.880 These are guys who are probably pissed that the system went bad.

01:04:26.100 It was, the point of it, it's unclear, you know, who's behind it.

01:04:29.840 I have some theories, but people I know, actually, but I don't know if they're true.

01:04:35.380 But what I, what is obvious to me is that it was, it's a control mechanism.

01:04:41.540 Trying to siphon off some of that energy and move it in a less.

01:04:44.600 Siphoning off the energy.

01:04:45.640 That's exactly right.

01:04:46.280 Less dangerous direction.

01:04:47.680 Right.

01:04:48.120 Focus on Wuhan, right?

01:04:51.100 Focus on the lab in Wuhan.

01:04:54.040 That's siphoning off the energy.

01:04:54.500 It's all American politics.

01:04:55.820 Like, have a race war.

01:04:57.300 Leave us alone as we loot your country.

01:04:58.520 That's right.

01:04:58.880 That's right.

01:04:59.280 It's, it's, there's a meme out there.

01:05:00.800 There's a joke where the king and his, his right-hand man, his chief of staff are looking

01:05:06.040 at the angry towns people.

01:05:07.620 Some have pitchforks and some have torches.

01:05:09.920 And the king says, don't, you don't have to worry.

01:05:12.080 You just convince the guys with the pitchforks or the enemies of the guys with the torches.

01:05:16.300 Right.

01:05:17.320 Well, so you said that a couple of times.

01:05:20.960 Focus on Wuhan.

01:05:23.300 I've, I've fallen for that, for that squirrel.

01:05:26.020 Squirrel.

01:05:27.240 Wuhan thing.

01:05:28.320 Squirrel.

01:05:29.360 Why?

01:05:29.980 A blind nut finds the squirrel.

01:05:33.160 That's funny.

01:05:34.960 That's real.

01:05:35.520 I'm stealing that.

01:05:36.420 Sorry.

01:05:36.720 I'm just making, making a note.

01:05:37.980 That's an original.

01:05:38.900 I like that.

01:05:39.200 I never know if I heard it and forgot where I got it, but that's an original.

01:05:42.860 A blind nut finds the squirrel.

01:05:45.680 What is that distracting us from?

01:05:46.640 I think it is great.

01:05:47.500 You put me in an asylum overnight.

01:05:51.240 An asylum overnight?

01:05:52.360 Yeah.

01:05:52.560 Yeah.

01:05:52.820 My, my, my hotel's a former asylum.

01:05:55.320 Is it really?

01:05:56.140 Yeah.

01:05:56.540 You didn't ask?

01:05:57.360 No.

01:05:57.920 Oh yeah.

01:05:58.200 It's a former asylum.

01:05:59.280 I said, you finally got it right.

01:06:01.900 Well, I think there's, there's wisdom here.

01:06:04.040 There is wisdom here.

01:06:04.920 What are they distracting us from by having us focus on Wuhan?

01:06:08.500 Well, huge amounts of grift.

01:06:10.600 You had, you interviewed Catherine Austin Fitz.

01:06:14.660 Yes.

01:06:15.420 I've been blessed.

01:06:17.540 This smart woman.

01:06:18.800 So I come out of nowhere.

01:06:19.760 I have no credentials beyond those that I can create.

01:06:24.200 Right.

01:06:24.680 And I think one of the ways you created is by being truthful.

01:06:28.200 Yes.

01:06:28.580 And I know truth is everything to you.

01:06:30.520 I try to make it that.

01:06:31.700 And, and, and, and actually in this book, The Moral Animal, they say the reason we self

01:06:37.180 delude is so that you can be truthful and deceive your opponent.

01:06:42.260 That's what self delusion is.

01:06:43.920 Yes.

01:06:45.040 And, and, and I practiced a lot of that.

01:06:48.500 I've been adopted by some people who didn't have to adopt me.

01:06:53.440 And so, for example, I'm tight with Steve Hanke, who's a famous economist.

01:06:59.040 And, and Catherine has been very supportive.

01:07:02.360 And, and, and there's several dozen who, who somehow have decided that, that I'm worth

01:07:09.800 their time and, and, and help me.

01:07:13.740 And, and, and so they're, they're useful to chat with.

01:07:16.840 They're useful to, but, but Catherine's story, and a lot of people think Catherine's nuts,

01:07:21.500 right?

01:07:21.760 But, but she talks about the huge amount of resources that have been siphoned off in the

01:07:28.800 tens of trillions of dollars of resources that have been siphoned off.

01:07:32.720 I know Catherine Austin fits, you can disagree with her.

01:07:34.940 She's not nuts.

01:07:35.860 That's not true.

01:07:36.860 She's not what?

01:07:37.560 Nuts.

01:07:37.900 Oh, no, I don't think she is nuts.

01:07:39.380 No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.

01:07:41.160 She's a grounded person.

01:07:42.140 She could have things wrong, but that's totally different.

01:07:46.560 And I had a friend, another friend who I think is phenomenal, tell me that she's nuts and don't,

01:07:51.160 don't, don't get near her.

01:07:52.520 And I said, no, I don't think so.

01:07:55.580 And, and, but we all can get sucked down into the rabbit holes to the point you can't get

01:08:02.040 out too.

01:08:03.060 There are days where I wish, why don't you just go play golf?

01:08:06.460 Yeah.

01:08:07.040 Or right now I'm on a, my house is hanging off a hundred foot cliff looking west over

01:08:12.520 Kuga Lake.

01:08:13.540 I can literally throw rotten fruit off my deck and drop it down into the drink from, I'll

01:08:19.000 show you afterwards, I'll show you photos.

01:08:20.460 It's the view is such that if there are places in the country where the view would cost $20

01:08:24.660 million, not in Ithaca, of course.

01:08:26.020 Um, and, uh, and, uh, and I have people come and visit, they should, it's beautiful.

01:08:35.740 I can't remember why I said that.

01:08:37.840 That's probably saying that people dismiss, um, you know, the, the, the few who are just

01:08:45.660 committed to pursuing truth, no matter what, as crazy.

01:08:47.980 And you gave Kath Ross and Fitz as an example, and, but you said you can actually go crazy

01:08:53.360 by looking too carefully into what actually happened.

01:08:56.680 So the lake I'm on, turns out, broke the small, New York State smallmouth bass record

01:09:00.660 about three years ago, broke the New York State largemouth bass record last year.

01:09:04.260 And I used to fish all the time when I was a kid and I haven't fished it.

01:09:08.920 What's wrong with this picture?

01:09:10.820 Well, if you've got smallmouth bass there, I think you need to fish it on a fly rod.

01:09:14.400 I know.

01:09:14.660 It'll totally change your life.

01:09:16.200 It's not a fly rod.

01:09:16.960 It's a deep lake.

01:09:17.800 It's a, um.

01:09:18.600 But you can catch them on the surface with a popper.

01:09:20.540 And if you do, if you catch a sizable smallmouth on a popper on a fly rod, you know.

01:09:24.460 I'm an 18 foot deep shoal guy.

01:09:27.680 Sinking line.

01:09:28.600 But, but so, you know, my wife thought that I had fish removed from my thumbs because she never

01:09:33.080 saw a picture of me that didn't have a fish hanging off my, my hand.

01:09:36.380 Um, but I haven't fished it.

01:09:38.740 Because you're absorbed in trying to figure out what's happening.

01:09:41.420 I'm absorbed in raising kids.

01:09:42.260 I'm absorbed in other things.

01:09:44.120 My wife has issues I got to help her with.

01:09:46.060 Um, and, and, and I, I have this fear of buying a boat.

01:09:52.520 But you, as someone who has taken, you know, ample intellectual energy and intelligence and

01:09:59.960 focused it on trying to figure out what are we watching?

01:10:02.220 Right.

01:10:02.720 Which I think is like a fair way to describe what you're doing.

01:10:05.840 Like, what is this?

01:10:07.100 What's the truth of it?

01:10:09.280 Has that been worth doing?

01:10:13.480 That's the question.

01:10:15.600 That is the question.

01:10:17.360 And, and there was a time where I thought if I could get to the truth, then, then that

01:10:22.660 would help in some way.

01:10:23.580 But now it's not as clear.

01:10:25.760 Tell me.

01:10:26.500 What?

01:10:26.860 Well, you know, now, first of all, what is the truth, right?

01:10:30.020 The truth is now becoming very ambiguous.

01:10:33.240 Last year, I wrote about the history of World War II.

01:10:35.720 I did a mini Daryl Cooper.

01:10:37.480 Yes.

01:10:38.540 And it started when I read a book by Diana West, who would be good if you interviewed

01:10:42.700 her.

01:10:42.960 And it was, it's this all revisionist history of World War II.

01:10:48.040 And you go, well, why would you want to read that?

01:10:50.220 Well, it turns out, I think the story we got about World War II is all wrong.

01:10:53.540 I think that's right.

01:10:54.760 And, and then I read about FDR and FDR's right hand man was a Soviet spy.

01:11:00.120 Certainly was.

01:11:00.660 Right.

01:11:01.220 And, and therefore.

01:11:02.520 Confirmed.

01:11:02.960 We should have been, one can make the argument we should have sided with Hitler and fought

01:11:07.140 Stalin.

01:11:08.400 Patton said that.

01:11:09.220 So, and, and maybe there wouldn't have been a Holocaust, right?

01:11:12.160 You know, there's, but, but, but, but Stalin was awful by any metric and we, we, we weren't

01:11:17.500 his ally.

01:11:18.440 Um, the story is that there were a few missing American soldiers at the end of World War II

01:11:25.120 in Russian territory.

01:11:26.180 New.

01:11:26.520 15 to 20,000 were missing.

01:11:28.800 And we left them there.

01:11:30.700 And then you read about Pearl Harbor.

01:11:32.400 We all sort of know the Pearl Harbor story is not what we're told, but I dug into that and

01:11:36.740 you find out the, we knew to the morning that Pearl Harbor was going to get to Stalin who

01:11:41.020 was going to be attacked.

01:11:41.840 He wanted us to take the Japanese office flank and, and FDR's right hand man was okay with

01:11:47.880 that because he was a Soviet spy.

01:11:49.140 Right.

01:11:49.560 Then I read about FDR and the great depression.

01:11:51.480 You find that, that every single penny he spent trying to help the, the forgot Amity

01:11:56.020 Schlaes, the forgotten man was spent to buy votes every last penny.

01:12:00.180 He was a sociopath and every, the only thing he could do was lie.

01:12:04.640 He was a compulsive liar.

01:12:06.720 His, his inner circle had to constantly cover for his lying.

01:12:10.480 And, and, and, and, and the only thing he's used for now is every time you want to grow

01:12:15.180 government, you cite FDR.

01:12:17.860 And, and so, so I, I read a half a dozen books that sort of went at these different angles

01:12:23.160 and wrote about it.

01:12:24.620 So I start out knowing nothing and then I write about it and I try to write to learn, which

01:12:29.880 is the most terrifying part of AI, by the way.

01:12:32.320 If you take out the writing, you take out, you take out the thought.

01:12:37.280 Completely agree.

01:12:38.500 The other thing that scares me about it, boy, they're a squirrel.

01:12:45.620 AI is going to make the system very unforgivingly brittle.

01:12:48.420 I'm not worried as much about the authoritarian slant that Elon occasionally talks about, which

01:12:53.360 might be just to fake us out, who knows.

01:12:54.960 Um, I am worried that we're going to reach a point where, you know, when everything, everything

01:12:59.640 computer does is binary.

01:13:01.040 So you go to the grocery store, you slip your credit card in, it says you're good to go

01:13:04.860 or didn't work.

01:13:06.360 Swipe it again.

01:13:07.300 Didn't work.

01:13:07.980 Sorry.

01:13:08.300 You're out of here.

01:13:08.880 Right.

01:13:09.340 They debank people.

01:13:10.500 This is a big problem.

01:13:11.660 What happens when everything is so AI'd up that, that, that there's no person anywhere

01:13:17.280 with an earshot who can help you at all.

01:13:20.800 No one who can say, okay, let me, let me get this for you.

01:13:23.520 Right.

01:13:23.960 There's been a misunderstanding or there's some sort of human nuance required.

01:13:28.480 Happened on the other day on a credit card request talking to the lady and it kept sending

01:13:31.360 me in these loops and she finally straightened out.

01:13:33.040 But what happens when the code is being written by computer?

01:13:35.620 So there's no human who understands the code.

01:13:38.900 So the system will be very brittle, be very unforgiving.

01:13:41.920 Forget about whether it's used nefariously.

01:13:44.300 Forget about whether someone uses it as an authoritarian tool, which is very real possibility.

01:13:49.260 And I worry about that a lot.

01:13:50.720 But just the fact that no one will know who's driving the cab ever on anything.

01:13:57.360 And, and also now you're taking out the intellectual part.

01:14:00.000 So when I write, when you write, when I write a scientific paper, the project's not done until

01:14:05.720 I've written it because that's where you, you, you lay it out.

01:14:08.400 And if you can't put it on paper coherently with no internal contradictions, you're not

01:14:14.000 done.

01:14:14.380 You're not done understanding it.

01:14:17.420 You're not done understanding it.

01:14:18.740 So the idea that-

01:14:19.060 So the writing is understanding.

01:14:20.400 I, so I think people who don't write for a living or aren't forced to write regularly

01:14:24.600 don't understand.

01:14:26.140 This concept is a hard one.

01:14:27.580 It's process.

01:14:27.660 It's, but the, it's through writing, or I would also say speaking, you know, public

01:14:32.780 speaking, that putting concepts into words makes the concepts intelligible to the person

01:14:40.020 who's articulating them.

01:14:41.080 Like you don't really understand something until you've been forced to write about it.

01:14:44.520 It's like a comedy shop.

01:14:46.160 You go, you know, the, the great comedians will go down to the cheapo comedy shops to

01:14:52.660 practice, to figure out what works and what doesn't work.

01:14:56.180 Right.

01:14:56.480 And then they go on Johnny Carson.

01:14:58.460 Exactly.

01:14:59.120 And so, so when there's no writing, there's no thinking.

01:15:03.520 Right.

01:15:04.060 So I've read about Maui, the fires.

01:15:06.820 I wrote about that.

01:15:08.760 Very clearly a land grab.

01:15:11.720 You may remember how many kids died.

01:15:14.060 No.

01:15:14.720 Do you remember the USA article said 750 kids are missing?

01:15:18.740 Yep.

01:15:19.160 Right.

01:15:19.840 When a kid's missing after something like that, they're dead, but they're not missing.

01:15:24.660 They're dead.

01:15:25.340 Maybe a couple found their way.

01:15:27.000 Someone drove them out of town, but they're dead.

01:15:28.880 Try to find anywhere a statement about dead kids.

01:15:31.500 Now you can't find it.

01:15:32.760 You go to Wikipedia, you, you search the word child.

01:15:36.080 You search the word, you read it.

01:15:38.060 There's no mention of dead children.

01:15:41.260 There were 750 kids missing according to USA Today.

01:15:44.000 Then all of a sudden the governor saying, well, you know, we're worried about land speculators.

01:15:49.340 So we're going to buy the land up so that the speculators can't get it.

01:15:52.500 And I go, so you can sell it to your friends.

01:15:55.560 Right.

01:15:56.380 Is it possible?

01:15:57.200 Maybe they mowed down Lahaina because they want to put up resorts and things.

01:16:03.320 Right.

01:16:03.760 But what also was out there was this idea of directed energy weapons starting the fires.

01:16:09.520 Now, I think that was a dead end.

01:16:12.140 I don't think directed energy weapons were used, even though there's a, it's, they're called DEWs.

01:16:16.440 Even though there's a DEW facility on Maui, you don't need that.

01:16:21.280 And there were videos.

01:16:22.700 I go, I think those are fake.

01:16:24.240 So I found nothing, but I used it as an excuse to read up on DEWs.

01:16:29.860 And I was reading RAND reports from 40 years ago.

01:16:34.040 What is a directed energy weapon?

01:16:35.880 It's basically Star Wars.

01:16:38.140 And so it's Reagan's Star Wars.

01:16:40.360 And everyone said, oh, that's just science fiction.

01:16:42.180 I go, well, Gorbachev seemed to want to get rid of him every chance he got.

01:16:46.360 So Gorbachev took him very seriously.

01:16:48.860 So it turns out what you do is you put something in space.

01:16:52.100 Then it shoots some sort of energy, guided energy down to the surface of the earth.

01:16:56.920 The different frequencies have different efficacies.

01:17:00.920 And so some are really good at hitting a target.

01:17:04.280 Some broaden out like microwaves are different than some sort of ultraviolet laser.

01:17:09.380 I'm not very good at this stuff.

01:17:11.940 And then I started reading about how what they do is they use a pulse of one laser to punch a hole through the atmosphere.

01:17:17.300 And then the second pulse would go through that hole.

01:17:19.720 I mean, it's really clever stuff.

01:17:21.620 This is 40-year-old RAND reports.

01:17:23.880 What do they have behind the paywall 40 years later?

01:17:29.820 Now, the best, I think, evidence of a DEW being used, and I was reading about fires in different places where trees were burning that shouldn't have burned and cars.

01:17:42.080 I wrote about it.

01:17:43.260 If someone wants to go read it, that was a couple years ago.

01:17:46.220 So the best evidence of a DEW.

01:17:49.500 So if you've got these, you've got to test them, right?

01:17:52.560 It's like why you need, you know, bioweapons labs in Ukraine.

01:17:57.260 You've got to test them.

01:17:59.420 You can't use lab rats.

01:18:00.600 You look at the Quebec fires, satellite imagery of the Quebec fires.

01:18:09.520 Very mysterious.

01:18:11.360 About 26-ish fires started simultaneously.

01:18:15.940 How do you know?

01:18:16.460 Well, if a fire starts and then another one starts, it'll be downwind.

01:18:20.160 So you'll see, it'll look like the Hawaiian Islands, right?

01:18:22.500 Right.

01:18:22.680 Boom, all at once.

01:18:27.180 26 fires.

01:18:28.800 In a crudely buckshot pattern, there was 350 miles in diameter.

01:18:38.300 Boy, that's a determined arsonist.

01:18:41.260 Or at least 26 of them.

01:18:43.420 Yeah.

01:18:44.260 In the middle of nowhere.

01:18:46.000 Yeah, with helicopter, I mean, there are no roads, so.

01:18:48.580 But, no, a cell phone can't do it, you know, nothing, right?

01:18:52.680 They're in the middle of nowhere, and all of a sudden, they all start simultaneously, and

01:18:55.340 I'm going, okay, that probably was them testing out their weapons.

01:19:00.480 And we have a lot of wars to test weapons, right?

01:19:04.040 So your basic overarching theory is around 2014, 15, it became clear to the people running

01:19:14.480 the world that you can't keep information under wraps anymore because the internet is

01:19:19.500 impossible to control.

01:19:20.960 And so you had to flood people's brains with extraneous and misleading information.

01:19:28.700 And shut down people.

01:19:29.900 They booted the President of the United States off Twitter.

01:19:34.680 Yeah.

01:19:35.420 How is that possible?

01:19:37.840 Because he was a racist?

01:19:40.040 Shut up, racist.

01:19:40.840 That's what they told me.

01:19:41.900 Shut up, racist.

01:19:42.420 He was racist, right?

01:19:43.120 He was a racist.

01:19:44.880 Right.

01:19:45.280 You know, so many, something like 70,000 got booted off Twitter.

01:19:48.840 My sister-in-law, she had a Twitter feed.

01:19:51.860 She can't get it back.

01:19:53.840 You know, somehow, I don't know how I survived that.

01:19:55.900 What was her crime?

01:19:57.140 She must have said something favorable about Trump or something.

01:19:59.960 I don't know.

01:20:00.340 So, but the control of information, the shaping of people's understandings of the world around

01:20:08.880 them, that's the whole game right there.

01:20:11.560 So, I used to say the internet was democracy's greatest hope and worst enemy, and that it

01:20:18.900 was a battle.

01:20:20.200 I don't think we're going to win it.

01:20:22.580 And the reason I don't is because it's too powerful.

01:20:26.060 And so, whoever has control of it will then have that power.

01:20:33.060 So, it's only a battle for who gets control of it.

01:20:36.480 Control of information.

01:20:37.900 Control of the digital world.

01:20:39.660 Yeah.

01:20:39.820 So, if you see voices out there dissenting from the-

01:20:44.780 I hear voices, darling.

01:20:46.660 If you see or hear voices that are dissenting from the official storyline, they're going

01:20:53.140 to have to be silenced or eliminated, I mean.

01:20:55.560 Well, look at what happened.

01:20:57.440 Look at the ambushes that occurred when Thomas Massey, who I think is great, Rand Paul, who

01:21:04.560 I think has matured immensely, and who is the third Republican, who stepped away from the

01:21:11.820 narrative.

01:21:12.680 And all of a sudden, the attacks were relentless.

01:21:16.200 Now, that could just be Trump being Trump.

01:21:19.080 It wasn't just Trump attacking them, though.

01:21:20.880 I know.

01:21:22.320 Marjorie Taylor Greene.

01:21:23.400 Marjorie Taylor Greene, who, by the way, is nowhere near as stupid.

01:21:26.680 I mean, she's not even stupid.

01:21:28.080 Oh, I know.

01:21:28.420 She ran a construction company.

01:21:29.900 Oh, I know.

01:21:31.280 And her, she just doesn't have whatever that normal, the fear that controls people in D.C.

01:21:37.520 We're like, I can't-

01:21:38.520 But how do you turn on Thomas Massey?

01:21:40.640 Marjorie Taylor Greene, at least, played a role in kayfabe that you can imagine drawing

01:21:46.460 fire.

01:21:48.220 Massey's this guy, you know, who built his own house and fixes his own car, and he's an

01:21:55.980 engineer.

01:21:59.420 He's an archetype of who we ought to be.

01:22:02.180 As a country.

01:22:03.240 As a country.

01:22:04.320 I so vehemently agree with that.

01:22:06.600 And they turned on him.

01:22:07.760 Yeah, well, I haven't.

01:22:11.740 We know why they turned on him.

01:22:13.200 I texted with him this morning.

01:22:15.100 No, I mean, you know, you could say I disagree with Thomas Massey, but if you think Thomas

01:22:19.900 Massey is the problem-

01:22:21.360 You are the problem.

01:22:22.500 I couldn't agree more.

01:22:24.180 I couldn't agree more.

01:22:25.320 Just because, first of all, he's a decent man, which always matters to me, and I think

01:22:29.000 it should matter to all of us.

01:22:30.560 You could, you know, give Thomas Massey a routing number, and he's not going to take a dollar.

01:22:34.560 He's just not.

01:22:35.700 He's not going to-

01:22:36.200 He's the only one without a handler.

01:22:37.960 That's true.

01:22:39.240 And I think we should admire that, even if you think that all members of Congress should

01:22:42.740 be required to have handlers.

01:22:44.100 It's okay to live in a world where one doesn't.

01:22:46.580 That's what I find so-

01:22:48.320 Well, it's not okay to live in a world where everyone else does.

01:22:51.400 No, I agree with you, but I just find what's so interesting, and there's a religious quality

01:22:55.620 to all of these conversations that I find so striking.

01:22:59.280 It's like, it's okay if you have, you know, all this power, all this money, if you run

01:23:05.180 the U.S. government, or whoever you are with a lot of power, you know, you can afford to

01:23:10.840 have some percentage of the population not play along.

01:23:13.480 You don't need, it doesn't need to be an Albanian election in 1982.

01:23:17.300 Like, you can have some dissent.

01:23:20.340 Unless you're an authoritarian state.

01:23:22.960 I guess that's right.

01:23:24.180 I mean, but even in an effective authoritarian state, in Saudi Arabia, in the Emirates, these

01:23:29.620 are, you know, basically theocracies.

01:23:32.000 They don't agree with that, but they, you know, these are Islamic states under Sharia

01:23:35.760 law.

01:23:36.640 You can kind of dissent.

01:23:37.980 It's okay.

01:23:38.840 You just can't do anything really threatening, of course.

01:23:41.300 Right.

01:23:41.620 But more dissent is allowed in Abu Dhabi than in D.C.

01:23:45.700 I just find that just absolutely incredible.

01:23:47.680 Like, what is this?

01:23:48.520 Why can't they allow Thomas Massey to just, like, have his own Massey views?

01:23:52.640 He's a vote.

01:23:53.920 He's a vote, okay, but you've got hundreds of others.

01:23:57.380 Like, I just think it's weird.

01:23:58.900 There's this desire to make sure that nobody sings off the song sheet, like, and that person

01:24:04.720 must be killed.

01:24:05.800 And I, wow, I just, I don't enforce that among my own children.

01:24:10.140 So, do you know what I'm talking about?

01:24:16.580 No, I absolutely know what you're talking about.

01:24:18.140 It's bizarro.

01:24:18.860 We used to allow opposing views.

01:24:21.660 Yeah, I mean, look, if someone is really a threat to the system, well, I think that should

01:24:26.520 be allowed, personally, because the people only don't.

01:24:28.860 It depends on in what way, but yes.

01:24:30.400 In what way.

01:24:31.540 I have a very wide strike zone for that.

01:24:33.660 But I get it if the system is like, I'm sorry, you're an actual threat.

01:24:36.680 We have to kill you.

01:24:37.360 Okay, systems exist to preserve themselves.

01:24:39.240 I understand that.

01:24:40.360 What I really can't even comprehend is someone out there in a place I've never been and never

01:24:45.660 will go among 350 million people is making a noise that I disagree with.

01:24:49.400 I must crush him.

01:24:50.460 What is that?

01:24:51.600 That's just weird to me.

01:24:53.760 Why are you going to the effort to shut down all dissent?

01:24:58.880 I don't know.

01:25:00.040 But that's what's happening.

01:25:02.640 Oh, I know.

01:25:05.720 Not to swing the topic yet again.

01:25:08.220 Let me get back to the universities.

01:25:10.280 People don't understand universities.

01:25:15.400 There are people who do, obviously, but the average person doesn't.

01:25:19.540 So people are going to say, I'm talking my book.

01:25:22.860 Let me take this opportunity with your gargantuan following to explain how universities work.

01:25:30.160 Well, let me just say before you begin that I'm amazed by the broadness of your thinking

01:25:34.700 right or wrong.

01:25:35.420 You're certainly thinking thoughts that most people don't allow themselves to think, and

01:25:41.860 you are a tenured professor at an Ivy League college, and you still have your job, apparently.

01:25:46.480 So that does say something.

01:25:47.960 It would be hard to fire me.

01:25:49.860 Apparently.

01:25:50.460 I mean, part of the problem is one of the reasons I got canceled is because I twice fought

01:25:54.820 unionizations.

01:25:56.460 Yeah.

01:25:57.960 And the first time was at the request of the dean of faculty.

01:26:00.880 The second time was at the request of the provost, a late night phone call.

01:26:04.320 You got to fight this.

01:26:05.340 You got to put together a team.

01:26:06.520 And that's the now president.

01:26:07.960 And so if they fired me, that group was sort of behind my cancellation.

01:26:12.540 So firing me would have been hard because, you know, witness number one would be, did

01:26:17.240 you ask Colm to fight the unions?

01:26:19.740 And did that lead to, you know, them canceling him and stuff like that?

01:26:26.600 I really think Cornell is great.

01:26:27.880 I think most universities are fine.

01:26:29.740 We needed a fastball past our chin.

01:26:33.640 Great example, Claudine Gay.

01:26:35.440 Shouldn't be president of Harvard.

01:26:37.020 Shouldn't be on the faculty.

01:26:38.040 Shouldn't have a PhD, in my opinion.

01:26:40.540 That is the sign of the rot that has gotten into the universities.

01:26:44.300 But then it's still an exceptional rot.

01:26:47.380 So I don't see people at Cornell that look like Claudine Gay to me.

01:26:51.180 And if you actually look in the whole DEI thing, you say, well, universities are super duper DEI.

01:26:57.220 And I go, you guys are forgetting that a year ago or two years ago, if you weren't DEI, you

01:27:04.140 got destroyed.

01:27:05.660 The whole system was geared up to make sure you paid dearly if you weren't DEI.

01:27:09.660 So you had to have your deans of diversity.

01:27:12.040 And the world was demanding it.

01:27:14.860 And don't forget, this is a world where biological men were competing in women's sports.

01:27:21.200 They still kind of are, but at least it's now starting to dissipate.

01:27:25.660 And that was considered totally normal and was considered rational.

01:27:30.080 And if you fought it, you get fired and things like that.

01:27:32.540 So the universities were simply responding.

01:27:35.540 Now, they'd gotten way left wing.

01:27:38.640 My colleagues were all hired, all hired based on their skills, guaranteed.

01:27:44.060 I would have, I'd remember a case if it was a DEI hire.

01:27:48.100 I remember a case because I would have fought it.

01:27:50.140 I would have screamed.

01:27:50.900 I don't shut up on things like that.

01:27:52.660 We try to find the best person in the world to hire.

01:27:55.160 And we go for that person if we can.

01:27:57.360 And we do pretty well.

01:28:00.720 And so if you were on a campus, you wouldn't see what we're hearing about.

01:28:06.220 I don't think.

01:28:07.120 You'd walk around the campus, you go, everything just looks pretty normal.

01:28:09.540 So you're in the hardest of the hard sciences, though.

01:28:12.100 Do you think that's the problem?

01:28:13.300 If I walked over the art squad, I'd see some Looney Tunes, right?

01:28:17.340 And we're now destroyed.

01:28:19.040 The cost of an education is too high to waste it.

01:28:24.360 And so if you're going to spend $300,000, you can't go into a career that you make $40,000

01:28:31.940 or that you make $25,000 because you're a barista, right?

01:28:37.000 It's just no longer even viable.

01:28:39.160 So you have to.

01:28:40.060 So colleges, if I were president of Cornell, I'd put together an elite committee of people

01:28:44.500 I absolutely trusted and say, you guys are in charge of trying to figure out where we

01:28:49.180 should be in 20 years and how to get there.

01:28:51.200 Because we can't be here in 20 years.

01:28:56.380 It's not going to work.

01:28:58.140 Arts and sciences and this whole idea of this broadly based education was formed prior to

01:29:04.020 the cost and was formed when wealthy people went to college.

01:29:09.580 So you could be frivolous if you wanted.

01:29:12.740 And getting a sheepskin could get you onto Wall Street and be the lead analyst for all

01:29:17.860 the dot-coms, Henry Blodgett style, right?

01:29:20.260 Those days are gone.

01:29:22.580 And so colleges are going to have to tighten up.

01:29:24.780 But my colleagues are, I would say, on average, out of 30 colleagues, I'll say maybe, I think

01:29:33.000 27 of them are left of center.

01:29:36.320 And I can't explain why.

01:29:38.360 Now, when I talk to them, they're totally rational people, totally reasonable people.

01:29:43.180 The way it works as a chemist is you are an entrepreneur.

01:29:46.740 You get a job.

01:29:47.680 They give you startup money to get started.

01:29:49.500 You have to then go raise money.

01:29:51.040 Funding rates are ballpark maybe 15% of the people who get funded.

01:29:56.060 By the way, the ones who never get funded, they've dropped off.

01:29:58.640 So that 15% is people still trying.

01:30:02.200 And I'm going to brag, I put 21 in a row successfully.

01:30:06.680 Do the math on that.

01:30:07.900 That's improbable.

01:30:09.000 But my colleagues are constantly battling.

01:30:12.540 They're putting together this program.

01:30:14.060 They're running research groups of anywhere from 5 to 30.

01:30:18.380 No one pays for that.

01:30:19.980 They raise the money from the federal system.

01:30:21.820 You say, well, the Fed shouldn't pay the money.

01:30:23.360 Well, years and years ago, we decided the way to run a research program in the United States

01:30:28.760 was through universities and federal grants.

01:30:31.860 It was a Sputnik thing.

01:30:33.420 There's other ways to do it.

01:30:35.680 But we set up that system.

01:30:37.520 And if you look at all the startup companies around the country and all the pharmaceutical

01:30:43.300 agents, they all, you can trace their origins back to academic labs.

01:30:48.940 Pfizer discovers far fewer drugs than they buy from some small startup that came out of some

01:30:55.840 biochemistry department or some medical school or something.

01:31:00.020 And so the academic research area is the foundation level starting point.

01:31:06.060 I have a number of friends who are worth a fortune because they patented something.

01:31:10.480 And that's actually good because it would be neutered and not even usable by the free

01:31:15.700 market if it didn't have the patent coverage.

01:31:17.960 And so it made sense.

01:31:19.640 So it puts an incentive system in there, right?

01:31:22.880 Cornell gets some.

01:31:24.080 The investigator gets some.

01:31:25.180 The department gets some.

01:31:26.600 And the world gets a new drug.

01:31:28.920 It's not a crazy system.

01:31:30.340 Now, there's other ways to do it, but that's not how we do it.

01:31:32.880 And we produce the best science.

01:31:35.980 So it worked.

01:31:38.660 Now, the problem is that Trump threw a fastball past our chin and we deserved it.

01:31:45.300 We absolutely deserved it.

01:31:46.780 So he's saying, look, get rid of the guys in sports, which Penn did with Leah Thomas.

01:31:52.080 You know, get rid of the DEI, which a lot of schools are trying to and at the same time

01:31:57.520 ducking, you know, naming them by different things.

01:32:00.880 But the fastball was needed.

01:32:03.680 The problem is, as you said at breakfast, it was the social stuff that Trump was going

01:32:12.780 after.

01:32:13.560 But you don't go after the social stuff with social stuff.

01:32:15.980 You go after it by going after the money.

01:32:18.120 Right.

01:32:18.240 So Harvard's locked down for $9 billion of research funds.

01:32:22.140 And my understanding is it's still locked down.

01:32:24.620 Cornell's locked down for over a billion.

01:32:26.980 But nine, Harvard was getting $9 billion from the feds for research of various kinds.

01:32:31.420 And it's on hold.

01:32:32.360 And it's on hold.

01:32:33.580 And the word cancel versus frozen, I was trying to figure it out.

01:32:37.560 Columbia, I thought it was a cancel.

01:32:38.900 Columbia got crushed.

01:32:39.980 And then Columbia put out a memo that said canceled.

01:32:45.940 Now, I don't know if that's because it's been canceled.

01:32:49.260 But my understanding is the money's not flowing.

01:32:53.380 Now, the problem is, is a trustee said to me, you know, if this goes into 2026, we're

01:32:58.800 in a world of trouble.

01:32:59.940 I said, if this goes into August, we're in a world of trouble.

01:33:03.260 I've got colleagues with 15-person research groups that are all funded by these federal

01:33:09.360 grants.

01:33:09.900 And they do good science.

01:33:11.140 They do good science.

01:33:13.040 There's probably some crap in the humanities, but they suck about $10,000 of grant money out

01:33:18.220 of the system to do that stupid thing.

01:33:19.880 I don't know.

01:33:20.440 And I don't even know if it's stupid.

01:33:23.780 And there's no matter.

01:33:25.760 So now, if you're getting your PhD, there's no one who can give you a postdoc.

01:33:30.900 That's the next step.

01:33:32.020 That step's broken.

01:33:33.180 So the system right now is flatlined.

01:33:37.100 And I really wish they'd gotten rid of USAID, and you told me they did, and they just moved

01:33:42.580 it.

01:33:42.720 Well, that's a problem.

01:33:43.780 But I think the academic research system was working.

01:33:48.420 I think part of the problem from a civilian perspective are the endowments.

01:33:52.240 Now, let me explain the endowments.

01:33:53.660 So let me just complete the thought by saying it's the no tax part that I think drives some

01:34:00.920 of us to want to sort of storm the campus with guns.

01:34:04.640 Because that's, you know, everyone's getting, I mean, the private equity guys are taking

01:34:08.360 all their income as interest, so they're paying half the rate.

01:34:10.940 But for a normal person, you know, you're paying over half of everything you make to

01:34:15.000 the government, and it's being spent on nonsense or given to Ukraine.

01:34:20.120 And then there are these giant hedge funds called university endowments that aren't paying

01:34:26.040 any taxes.

01:34:26.660 And I think that can really drive people bonkers, including me.

01:34:29.460 Well, I understand.

01:34:32.620 There are some subtleties of endowments.

01:34:35.460 Again, it's not to say that you're not 100% correct, but I at least want to say to your

01:34:41.480 listeners so they understand what they're complaining about.

01:34:46.300 First and foremost, there supposedly are rules where the universities are not supposed to be

01:34:53.040 competing with the private sector.

01:34:54.600 And they get around those.

01:34:58.020 But if Cornell builds housing as making money off the housing in town, that kind of breaks

01:35:02.640 the rule, right?

01:35:04.300 But they build dorms and, you know, things like that.

01:35:07.000 So you're right about that.

01:35:09.100 The endowments are a funny game.

01:35:11.520 First and foremost, I looked this up last week.

01:35:18.640 Approximately 50% of all endowments spin off.

01:35:22.200 So it spins off that revenue and Harvard's has been collecting since 1656.

01:35:30.260 50% of the money spun off goes to financial aid, which means making college more affordable.

01:35:38.640 Admittedly, not very affordable for a lot of people, but making it more affordable.

01:35:42.400 So half of the money being spun off is going right back to education of the students.

01:35:48.040 Another 20% support is for academic programs, which means paying for things that would have

01:35:54.520 have to be paid for or we'd have to do without.

01:35:57.200 And I would argue we got bloated.

01:35:59.220 So there's things we should have done without.

01:36:01.480 If you looked at the dining program now compared to what they have now, it's really unbelievable.

01:36:06.360 I'm not against good food.

01:36:07.440 I'm against DEI administrators and administrators in general.

01:36:10.740 Like college should be focused on the professors.

01:36:13.260 I agree with that.

01:36:13.740 And that's where we should have gotten the fastball past our chance.

01:36:16.260 So do any of these schools have more tenured professors than they do administrators?

01:36:20.240 I don't think so.

01:36:21.420 The administrative bloat is a combination of all the problems that drive you nuts and the

01:36:28.520 fact that the interactions between the university and the feds and the states has gotten more

01:36:34.500 complicated.

01:36:35.220 Right.

01:36:35.440 So, for example, you need way more bean counters.

01:36:41.260 And grant writers and...

01:36:42.540 Well, no, grant writers are me.

01:36:44.720 Okay.

01:36:45.000 They're us.

01:36:45.780 The grants are being written by the faculty.

01:36:49.300 And again, the DEI, Michigan's DEI payroll was $93 million last time I read about it.

01:36:55.380 That's a lot of money, right?

01:36:57.180 But just when you get a federal grant, there's so many things you have to do.

01:37:03.820 It used to...

01:37:04.400 They ran it out of a shoebox.

01:37:05.860 Here's your check.

01:37:06.640 Spend it wisely.

01:37:07.480 You know, that's what...

01:37:08.060 It's no longer like that.

01:37:10.760 Now, it reached the absurd point where you're supposed to make statements about how you're

01:37:14.440 going to save the whales and donate organs to Guatemalan orphans and things like that.

01:37:18.380 And I think Trump's going to successfully get a lot of that crap out of there.

01:37:21.840 He would save Cornell a fortune if he could get rid of all of DEI.

01:37:25.520 Now, I do think the original idea of affirmative action makes sense.

01:37:30.980 It basically said, go find people who are being missed.

01:37:36.180 Look into the dusty corners where you normally don't look and see if you find talent, right?

01:37:41.880 There's a famous chemist named Henry Gilman.

01:37:44.480 I thought the SAT was designed to do that.

01:37:47.220 No, it turns out the SAT has problems now.

01:37:50.700 And the reason it has problems is because when Kaplan got a hold of it, and they for profit

01:38:01.100 coached kids on how to do well.

01:38:03.660 And then they made it such that the SAT could be taking three times and you get to use only

01:38:08.880 the one you like, all of a sudden, the cost of maximizing your score on the SAT became prohibitive.

01:38:17.840 And so it's a legitimate argument that someone coming out of the hood cannot take the Kaplan

01:38:23.540 course and take the SAT three times.

01:38:25.840 But you shouldn't get rid of it.

01:38:27.580 You should just be aware of what it's telling you.

01:38:29.620 Would it be possible to design a corruption-free screen for intelligence and, you know, initiative?

01:38:38.680 Shut up, racist.

01:38:41.060 No, but I mean, so the idea was that the SAT was supposed to democratize education.

01:38:47.800 We're just going to locate it.

01:38:48.740 And discover kids who've got double 800s who you wouldn't have spotted.

01:38:52.560 Exactly.

01:38:53.300 Right.

01:38:53.880 And actually, I have a child who got an 800, couldn't get into college.

01:38:58.380 So clearly, it's like the system has gotten so corrupt.

01:39:02.760 But the idea, and Kaplan, you said corrupted it as well.

01:39:07.240 Well, it kind of corrupted the SAT.

01:39:10.500 Right.

01:39:10.720 That's what I'm saying.

01:39:11.400 Now, the GRE, which is the next level, is nowhere near as corrupted it because by then,

01:39:16.020 the students don't give a damn.

01:39:17.400 They don't take the GRE.

01:39:18.720 So it's more legit.

01:39:20.200 But is there, I mean, but the idea of a colorblind, classblind, pure, you know, meritocracy test is, I mean, why give up on that?

01:39:32.200 Here's what I think we should do.

01:39:33.540 I was graduate, I was a graduate, director of graduate studies, which involved admission into our grad program for seven years, record.

01:39:45.500 The only guy who held the four administrative positions in the chemistry department itself.

01:39:49.980 That's pretty good for being the chemistry douchebag.

01:39:51.960 And you learn about things.

01:39:56.160 And I read undergraduate admissions on purpose for a number of years because, and you read, so I might read Manhattan, for example.

01:40:03.820 And you learn about who's applying and stuff like that.

01:40:06.480 And what I think you want to look for is a system where you see evidence that a kid overcame something.

01:40:12.720 And it's not about color, although you could say non-statistically it's about color, right?

01:40:19.760 But a kid from the Ozarks, you know, J.D. Vance, who I find his origin story a little suspicious, I must admit.

01:40:29.420 But so we had a kid who applied and everything was sunshines and skittles, rainbows in his application.

01:40:35.400 And one of his letter writers said his mother died here, his father died here, he was raised by his neighbors, you know, and I'm going, and he didn't mention it?

01:40:42.720 I hope you let him in.

01:40:43.880 Oh, my God, yes.

01:40:46.400 You give me, in graduate admissions, I see some kid from Stanford with a, I see some kid from Stanford with a 3.0.

01:40:53.400 I didn't take him.

01:40:55.000 Because a 3.0 is a kid who accepted a 3.0.

01:40:59.100 You show me, I'll take a 4.0 from St. Mary's College of the Divinity.

01:41:03.660 Because that kid said, here's the, they said, here's the highest you can get to.

01:41:06.640 That kid got there, right?

01:41:08.080 I mean, MIT kids with lousy GPAs are lousy grad students, even though they're smarter than hell, but they're cocky.

01:41:17.060 Now, it turns out, you show me a kid from Stanford with a 3.0 who played football, I take the kid in a heartbeat.

01:41:24.580 You show me a kid from Stanford who, who, who, who is a 3.0, who is in, you know, who is, you know, brilliant violinist.

01:41:33.200 I'll take that kid.

01:41:35.760 Here's my son.

01:41:36.700 My son applies to Cornell for reasons you know he was going to get in.

01:41:41.860 But his resume, I had one son who was underachiever as a kid who's now phenomenal.

01:41:49.020 And the one who was a superachiever, what's superachieving?

01:41:52.700 And we didn't push him because it was a pain in the ass.

01:41:56.180 We were driving all the time.

01:41:58.660 All state orchestra first violin.

01:42:00.240 Gold medalist in the eight-state regional gymnastics championship.

01:42:07.400 Fifth in the nation equestrian.

01:42:10.660 Played lacrosse.

01:42:13.980 Got a resume better than that.

01:42:16.480 So here's what happened.

01:42:18.040 My older son, who could care less about school, just nothing.

01:42:23.020 His teacher was a sweet kid, no attention.

01:42:26.580 At one point I said to a teacher, I said, the only kids he's beating are crack babies.

01:42:30.240 And she kind of blew a snot bubble and said, yeah.

01:42:34.460 He's now phenomenally successful.

01:42:36.200 He's a super dad.

01:42:38.420 I'm so proud of the level of dadness that he is.

01:42:42.060 He's the director of event management at the Council on Foreign Relations.

01:42:46.080 After being the most underwhelming kid in high school, he grew up.

01:42:50.960 He climbed Mount Stupid a little bit late.

01:42:52.860 And fortunately, he was in a family that could help him get over it when the time came.

01:42:56.900 The thing that we get credit for is not breaking him, is not forcing him into a mold that didn't fit.

01:43:07.320 You know who he is?

01:43:08.300 You know the book, Ferdinand the Bull?

01:43:10.020 Of course.

01:43:10.400 Child Story?

01:43:10.940 Yeah, yeah.

01:43:11.520 That book wasn't for kids.

01:43:13.080 That was for the parents.

01:43:15.420 That was telling the parents, your kid is Ferdinand, maybe.

01:43:17.980 My other one was Mike Mulligan's Steam Shovel.

01:43:22.660 Yeah.

01:43:23.580 Right?

01:43:24.000 The more people watched, the faster he went.

01:43:28.480 Ironically, the overachiever got to Cornell and got lost.

01:43:33.500 The underachiever just grew nicely in college.

01:43:37.320 Now the younger one is now a professional.

01:43:40.140 After trying cubicle farming and all that crap that you get by being a business major at Cornell Hotel School, he's a professional violinist in Boston.

01:43:50.200 Better outcome.

01:43:51.480 Better outcome.

01:43:52.300 Bank of Dad's important because violinists in Boston don't make a lot of money.

01:43:57.120 But I'm happy to support it because it's his soul.

01:44:00.500 You know why he's a professional?

01:44:01.480 You want neurobiology?

01:44:03.260 My wife was flat on her back when she was pregnant.

01:44:05.620 She put headphones against her stomach and played classical music when he was in the womb.

01:44:10.940 I know prenatal development's important.

01:44:13.760 By the time he's three years old, his friends are singing B-I-N-G-O and he's listening to orchestra pieces.

01:44:18.500 He'd say, I like this part right here.

01:44:20.200 And you'd hear the second violins come in there and you'd go, right there, I like that.

01:44:24.360 And I'm going, holy shit, this kid's got an ear.

01:44:27.780 He has an ear.

01:44:29.360 Like he developed an ear in the womb.

01:44:33.180 So don't do that to your womb.

01:44:35.480 You'll have a musician in your family if you do that.

01:44:38.120 So I want to ask you here, since you mentioned the struggle, you know, the triumph, but also the struggle to pay for it because the economy doesn't support young people very well.

01:44:50.740 So since you did call the financial collapse of 2008, it sounds like.

01:44:57.080 In 2002.

01:44:58.240 In 2002.

01:44:59.280 So you couldn't get rich shorting or anything.

01:45:02.260 I shorted twice.

01:45:03.660 And it's shortings for fools and pros.

01:45:05.880 And the Venn diagram of those two is almost that.

01:45:08.480 That's exactly right.

01:45:09.700 They're both.

01:45:10.380 I know both.

01:45:11.440 Yes.

01:45:11.700 Yeah.

01:45:11.780 Where are we now?

01:45:14.940 We're in a catastrophic situation.

01:45:17.820 Catastrophe seems strong.

01:45:20.060 Yeah.

01:45:20.740 Well, I think you can make arguments.

01:45:23.140 The economy has a lot of problems.

01:45:24.740 And there's a paradoxical problem with the economy.

01:45:28.880 And that is you can go up to any 7-Eleven and they can't hire.

01:45:33.120 There's help wanted ads.

01:45:34.840 So it looks like an economy burning hot.

01:45:37.160 But if you look at the high end, there's layoffs going everywhere.

01:45:41.260 So there's foreshadowing of real trouble coming.

01:45:45.400 So college graduates, even Ivy League graduates, humanities graduates, not engineers or chemists, but the business guy or whatever, they're having trouble getting jobs.

01:45:54.520 The kind that they're trained for, certainly.

01:45:56.760 Yeah.

01:45:57.120 But there's just, I mean, I know a bunch of them, but you see it in the numbers.

01:46:01.780 Educated 22-year-olds are having trouble getting jobs, but 7-Eleven can't hire.

01:46:07.160 Right.

01:46:07.540 So what is that?

01:46:08.880 Well, so this is a normal sort of, it's a distorted version of, I think, a recession coming or we're in.

01:46:16.640 Now, where it gets complicated is if you don't believe the inflation numbers, which I don't.

01:46:22.360 And you've got Chapwood Index and ShadowStats that give inflation numbers that are probably on average 6% or 7% higher than the official numbers.

01:46:30.880 The official numbers are corrupted.

01:46:32.980 And I don't want to go into it because it's technical.

01:46:35.120 But the CPI is stupid.

01:46:36.440 The CPI is crap.

01:46:37.500 Yeah, I agree with that.

01:46:38.500 Now, here's the problem.

01:46:39.520 If the economy's been growing 2.5% and the inflation numbers are underestimated by 4, it means we've been in a recession the whole way.

01:46:47.620 Yeah, moving backwards.

01:46:48.660 We're moving backwards.

01:46:49.440 And you say, well, that can't happen.

01:46:50.640 The recession's last, you know, two quarters or whatever.

01:46:52.820 And I go, no, the British Empire was in a recession for a century.

01:46:56.720 Right?

01:46:57.320 They just shrunk and shrunk and shrunk.

01:46:59.740 And so, no, you can be in a slow decline.

01:47:05.620 But that's not the catastrophe.

01:47:07.500 Recession means decline.

01:47:09.360 Yeah.

01:47:09.920 Actually, I think it's a stupid word because you play golf?

01:47:14.700 No.

01:47:14.880 Well, if you play golf and you go down into the sand trap, according to the definition of a recession, once you start climbing out, you're out.

01:47:23.460 You ask a golfer if he's out of the sand trap because he's on the upslope of the trap, he's not.

01:47:28.820 No.

01:47:29.500 So, the fact that your economy's now growing again, if it's coming out of a hole, as far as I'm concerned, you're not out until you've gotten past that previous period.

01:47:37.860 Until you're at par.

01:47:38.800 Yeah, so you're at par, right.

01:47:40.440 Now, that's not the catastrophe because they happen all the time.

01:47:42.820 And we've been able to either cover them or fake them or prevent them through very bad monetary policy.

01:47:49.720 Monetary policy.

01:47:50.360 Right.

01:47:50.780 And what's bad?

01:47:54.040 Pumping the stock market is just stupid.

01:47:55.780 But, you know, private equity buys, private equity buys, has bought up 80% of the hospitals, the healthcare.

01:48:07.000 And what they do is they go in and they buy some organization.

01:48:14.440 They strip it of its assets.

01:48:17.240 They load it with debt.

01:48:18.440 They pay themselves huge fees and bonuses.

01:48:20.520 And then they sell the shell of a company, which is now effectively worthless, into the marketplace, like to pension funds, who are not smart enough to recognize that they just bought a piece of crap.

01:48:33.440 And according to Gretchen Morgensen, a 47% bankruptcy rate.

01:48:41.700 Now.

01:48:42.000 Post-sale.

01:48:42.980 Post-sale.

01:48:44.440 Now, as long as it's profitable to buy viable companies, destroy them, sell the shell and make money, money's too loose.

01:48:55.440 Precious capital.

01:48:58.060 Precious capital.

01:49:00.280 If capital is of real value, it's a moat.

01:49:06.420 So a good businessman can get capital, a bad businessman can't.

01:49:09.720 The fact that BlackRock could buy single-family dwellings, which is a terrible business, you really can't make money unless there's a housing boom and you leverage up to hell.

01:49:25.500 The fact that they could get it at an interest rate of 0.15% is a highly flawed system.

01:49:33.540 And that's where the inventory went after 07 to 09.

01:49:36.780 It got bought up by these guys who could lever up and then charge rents to people.

01:49:42.040 So they basically scoop up the housing market.

01:49:45.380 With free money.

01:49:47.020 With free money.

01:49:48.260 Kind of free money.

01:49:49.500 Unlike, you know, credit cards, which are 25%, right?

01:49:53.340 And not just free.

01:49:54.420 I mean, once you factor in inflation.

01:49:56.840 It's a gift.

01:49:57.820 Yeah, it's profitable money.

01:50:01.300 Literally, just taking the loan is profitable.

01:50:03.140 Yes.

01:50:03.500 You don't have to do anything with it.

01:50:04.400 Yes, yes.

01:50:04.940 Right, yeah.

01:50:05.700 So here's what happened.

01:50:08.800 Somehow the market has ceased to respond.

01:50:12.620 And the reason the market's important is because of the wealth effect.

01:50:18.700 And that is that if you own equities, you own a house, and they're soaring in price, your spending habits change.

01:50:30.680 I'm having a great year, for example.

01:50:32.380 So when the bank of dad has to provide some liquidity to the children, I feel okay about it, right?

01:50:38.860 The problem is, is that it's a false wealth.

01:50:44.700 It's not real wealth.

01:50:45.520 It's a false wealth.

01:50:46.680 So what happened?

01:50:47.660 Well, I'm getting tired of seeing these.

01:50:50.520 I see four-year plots of the equity market, and they make various comparisons.

01:50:54.320 I go, don't go back four years.

01:50:56.280 Don't go back 40 years.

01:50:57.380 Go back 120 years.

01:50:58.680 So I follow about 25 metrics of valuation.

01:51:05.340 Valuation is inherently a price of the market relative to something it ought to track, whether it's the earnings, the revenues, the book value, a thing called Tobin's Q, the GDP, which is a fictional number, as I've heard you recently say.

01:51:23.280 But I follow about 25 of them.

01:51:25.080 So you've got to track whether the markets have gotten expensive relative to the thing it ought to track.

01:51:31.100 Now, around 1981, the markets were at the cheapest valuation arguably in history.

01:51:41.800 Inflation was scaring everyone, which is why they were cheap.

01:51:46.820 It turns out that the boomers were just hitting the workforce.

01:51:50.800 So demographics was a huge tailwind starting around then.

01:51:55.620 And most economists agree demographics is huge.

01:51:58.620 Now, I'm disingenuous in that I quote economists selectively.

01:52:03.500 In the next sentence, I'll probably say something horrible about them.

01:52:06.820 And so I'm obviously cherry-picking my data.

01:52:09.100 But economists like demographics.

01:52:12.060 So the boomers hit the workplace.

01:52:13.580 So it was almost guaranteed.

01:52:14.660 I think Reagan was not important.

01:52:16.720 I think he did some very important things.

01:52:18.800 But I think whoever got to be president was going to be at the beginning of a boom.

01:52:24.640 It turns out that China was coming out of the Dark Ages.

01:52:29.860 They started selling labor at slave wages.

01:52:33.580 They were so desperate for capital when they sent their leader, don't make me pronounce his name, to the United Nations when he first started opening up.

01:52:44.640 Was it Deng Xiaoping?

01:52:46.060 Yes.

01:52:46.940 And they had to scrounge to get the money to send them.

01:52:51.800 I mean, they really didn't have any foreign capital.

01:52:53.800 And so I remember when China said, we're going to let our workers keep some of their profits.

01:53:01.020 And it's like, whoa.

01:53:03.480 Russia had, the Soviet Union hadn't collapsed, but they were in trouble.

01:53:06.940 So they were obviously cranking a resource base as hard as they could.

01:53:10.480 And we had our guys in there helping them and stuff like that.

01:53:14.520 And interest rates were at all-time highs.

01:53:16.560 And if you read a 1999 article by Buffett, who I think is a hoser, I think he's much more of a stock jobber, much more of a conniver than he is.

01:53:28.260 He loves to be the mafia don, walk around in a bathrobe saying, I'm harmless.

01:53:33.400 He is not harmless.

01:53:35.360 When we're in a bottom, he breaks all sorts of laws.

01:53:38.940 They do all sorts of insider crap to bail the system out.

01:53:41.960 But he pretends to just like Dairy Queen and Coca-Cola or whatever.

01:53:44.900 He wrote an article in 99 that said, you want to understand secular, big, long, bull versus bear markets, it's all interest rates.

01:53:52.380 He said, it's not GDP.

01:53:53.780 He said, from 67 to 81, everything sucked.

01:53:56.360 It treaded water, not accounting for inflation, and the markets dropped 75% accounting for inflation.

01:54:03.460 So it was a horrible period.

01:54:04.500 He said, the GDP grew faster during that period than from 81 to 99.

01:54:10.820 But interest rates from 67 to 81 went up monotonically.

01:54:16.720 From 81 to 99, they went down.

01:54:19.860 So we started in 81 with interest rates in the high teens.

01:54:24.200 And over the next 40 years, they dropped to zero.

01:54:28.140 That is absolutely the story.

01:54:31.000 So when interest rates are dropping, risk assets go up.

01:54:34.260 Yep.

01:54:34.600 Because they're competing against it as they get cheaper.

01:54:37.600 So bottom line is that we just enjoyed 40-year recency bias.

01:54:43.340 Can you just explain that principle right there?

01:54:45.980 You said as interest rates drop, risk assets go up.

01:54:48.680 Or are you going to buy shares of a stock that, by the way, has treated you like crap over the previous 14 years, or a bond that pays you 17%?

01:54:57.580 Right.

01:54:58.160 Right?

01:54:58.380 So the bonds become less, the fixed income become less and less attractive steadily for 40 years.

01:55:03.820 Now, take the Case-Shiller P.E., which is just one of the metrics, but I happen to like it.

01:55:08.900 It's a kind of an averaged earnings, price earnings ratio.

01:55:12.800 It also doesn't allow you to cheat because it doesn't use the immediate.

01:55:17.780 And forward P.E.s are stupid, but Case-Shiller averages, so I like it.

01:55:21.600 If you take the Case-Shiller from 1880 to 1990, it just channels.

01:55:29.380 It's a valuation metric, and it just goes up and down and up and down, and that's what it should do.

01:55:33.280 It responds to things, but it stays in a channel.

01:55:36.460 It's flat.

01:55:37.680 Valuation metrics shouldn't trend.

01:55:40.900 They should trend for a while, but then they should regress to the mean, unless someone can give me an argument why they should trend.

01:55:46.720 And I don't think there is one, and I've tried to find one.

01:55:48.820 And then in 1990, they just kind of started to take off.

01:55:54.700 And the Case-Shiller, so the Case-Shiller P.E.

01:55:56.880 The Case-Shiller P.E. averaged around 12, 13% for 110 years.

01:56:04.020 Then around 1990, oddly, 1994 in every metric is when things left.

01:56:09.340 I think it was because of a bond problem or something.

01:56:11.400 I haven't been able to quite figure out why.

01:56:14.000 But the valuations went up.

01:56:15.500 Now, here's the problem with valuations going up.

01:56:17.540 And now they're astronomical.

01:56:19.600 So the Case-Shiller P.E. averaged 13, which meant it was priced to return about 8% a year, right?

01:56:27.000 If you think of it as a gas station and you're paying 13 to 1 earnings, you're getting about 8%.

01:56:34.040 And it keeps pumping gas every year.

01:56:36.660 You get about 13%.

01:56:37.820 It's way above where it should be.

01:56:48.280 It's a factor of 3%, 200%.

01:56:51.020 Now, if you assume it's never going to regress to the mean, now you're accepting, crudely speaking, a 2.5% return, not an 8%.

01:56:59.820 Now, if you're okay with 2.5%, that's fine.

01:57:04.600 But by the way, most pensioners, most boomers are not planning on 2.5%.

01:57:08.760 No, they're not.

01:57:09.400 Right.

01:57:09.620 Now, if it regresses to the mean, it's a 70% correction, assuming, if it's fast, assuming nothing else changes, no damage to the economy, all the bad things that happen when you lose 70% off the equity market.

01:57:25.320 Which is a questionable assumption.

01:57:30.840 Another way to think about it, which I think is much clearer, is if you say, look, we'll just grow our way.

01:57:37.540 I think it can go up or down or up and down.

01:57:39.020 You don't worry about the path.

01:57:41.260 You say, if we grow to an ampersand a year, which I just questioned as being valid, but let's assume it's valid.

01:57:46.980 If we grow to an ampersand a year, to get back to historical average of 13, we'll take 45 years.

01:57:56.580 Now, here's the thing.

01:57:57.480 I made no assumptions about good news, bad news.

01:57:59.480 I assume this is going to be like the 20th century.

01:58:03.000 Two and a half percent a year, it'll be 45 years from now.

01:58:06.740 I don't care what path you follow.

01:58:08.260 If we are at the average K-Shiller P.E. and the economy grew to an ampersand a year, the equity markets will have returned capital gains zero.

01:58:21.120 And it doesn't matter if we crash and spike.

01:58:23.720 It doesn't matter if we get to a Dow 40,000, 50,000, 60,000.

01:58:30.620 45 years from now, if we're at the mean, we will have earned nothing.

01:58:35.340 Now, you say, well, that would never happen.

01:58:36.700 And you go, well, if you own the 06, the 1906 high, you were even after something like 40 years.

01:58:48.480 I don't ask from if you own the-

01:58:51.300 You were even after 40 years.

01:58:52.600 If you buy, if you own the top.

01:58:54.960 Yep.

01:58:56.260 People always say, well, how long did it take to get back to the top?

01:58:58.820 That's a favorite question.

01:58:59.880 You go, oh, you know, it took 22 years.

01:59:01.500 Oh, it took 15 years.

01:59:02.840 Oh, it took, I like to ask the question.

01:59:04.320 No, no, no, not how long it took to get from the top back to even.

01:59:10.420 How long did it take to go from that top to the last time that that price was attained, adjusted for inflation?

01:59:19.960 And those can go anywhere from 40 to 75 years.

01:59:25.520 Oof.

01:59:25.820 All you have to do is look at inflation-adjusted S&P and draw a line from a top across the S&P.

01:59:31.840 And you will find that most of them break even in the mid-80s, no matter what year they started.

01:59:37.080 So, you're just answering the question, what the hell is going on with land prices and asset prices?

01:59:44.580 Everything.

01:59:46.100 Everything's mispriced.

01:59:47.800 But is it mispriced?

01:59:49.060 I mean, if I've got excess money, you know, and I need to store it somewhere, and I'm listening to you, I'm like, oh, I think I'm going to buy something a little less volatile, a little more real.

02:00:03.280 Like real estate.

02:00:04.520 Exactly.

02:00:05.380 Okay.

02:00:05.720 Okay.

02:00:07.080 So, the first time, and I know this drives you bananas, the first time homebuyers, not too many decades ago, were on average about 30 years old.

02:00:16.540 Yep.

02:00:17.360 I just read, what's the fact?

02:00:19.260 I don't know, 56 now.

02:00:22.380 First time homebuyers, 56.

02:00:24.200 That's been a massive consequences.

02:00:25.320 Do you want to buy, do you want to buy into that market that somehow seems like it has to regress?

02:00:35.180 Because you can't have people going 56 years without owning a house, right?

02:00:40.380 You personally, I think it was in Turning Point USA, you went absolutely nonstop about how you can worry about Ukraine.

02:00:49.660 But we've got guys, we've got young adults who can't raise families and houses.

02:00:55.500 Yeah.

02:00:55.980 And it creates a very scary political environment where people don't own anything and therefore have nothing to lose and no future.

02:01:03.140 Right.

02:01:04.220 Well, here's an interesting ADHD moment.

02:01:09.800 Monogamy versus polygamy.

02:01:11.800 And this will sound random, but it'll get you to the same story.

02:01:14.380 No, it's a core question, actually.

02:01:16.080 These are the building blocks of the West.

02:01:18.140 Turns out polygamy, monogamy is viewed as favoring women.

02:01:22.380 Mm-hmm.

02:01:22.720 That turns out to be backwards.

02:01:27.980 And it's a simple math.

02:01:29.360 Imagine there's 100 people ranked 1 to 100.

02:01:32.300 Number 100 is Mr. Big Cheese.

02:01:34.800 And on the women's side, hottest chick on the planet, right?

02:01:37.900 Right.

02:01:39.420 Monogamy says number one would marry number one, number two would marry number two in the perfect system.

02:01:43.720 So think of it as just a very simple model.

02:01:46.120 And that what you can't do is if you're at the bottom of the chain, marry up.

02:01:52.720 Right.

02:01:53.280 If you do, then someone else gets pushed down.

02:01:56.020 Of course.

02:01:56.800 Right?

02:01:57.320 So it would be of the interest of the girl working 7-Eleven to be Jeff Bezos' second wife.

02:02:06.400 Yeah, I think that happened.

02:02:07.820 So in fact, you can upgrade your game.

02:02:12.740 And, you know, Elon, right?

02:02:14.940 I mean, the guy's a reproduction machine, right?

02:02:17.580 Yeah.

02:02:17.980 The women are signing off on it because it's better to be with a guy worth that kind of money than broke, right?

02:02:25.600 And so it turns out that you say, well, then why did cultural evolution lead to monogamy?

02:02:32.160 And the answer is, is because it minimizes violence.

02:02:38.780 Right.

02:02:39.440 It's for the men.

02:02:41.760 Of course.

02:02:42.860 So they don't fight.

02:02:44.800 Well, yeah, because in a polygamous system, all the high status males scoop up all the women.

02:02:48.980 Well, now in a situation where men can't provide the home for their families and stuff like that.

02:02:54.140 And so we're going to fight.

02:02:56.260 I've noticed.

02:02:57.600 I've noticed that, too.

02:02:59.440 And so now here's the deal.

02:03:01.200 Let's say I'm right and we're to market top.

02:03:04.080 And if I'm not, I think we're close.

02:03:07.160 One of the things that my peers who were paranoid as hell about this, some very smart guys, they tend not to put numbers on it.

02:03:14.980 I'm one of the few who puts numbers on it.

02:03:16.900 There's a couple others who do, but they just say, oh, the evaluations are ridiculous.

02:03:20.820 But no one wants to be on record that we're going to be, to say it's catastrophically overpriced, whatever correction you get, you say, see, I told you.

02:03:32.340 I'm saying 200% overpriced.

02:03:34.580 Now, how do you get out of overvaluation?

02:03:37.200 You can't inflate your way out.

02:03:38.920 No.

02:03:39.160 Because the numerator, the price, and the denominator, the thing that's supposed to track, both are influenced by inflation.

02:03:48.500 So as your price goes up because of inflation, your revenues go up because of inflation.

02:03:54.160 You're still 200% over historical average valuation.

02:03:57.960 And so you can't inflate away in overvaluation.

02:04:00.780 So what, I mean, is this just a gravity scenario where ultimately it has to revert to its actual value?

02:04:08.920 The best model I have, and they never work because it's always one of these, something will be creatively different.

02:04:14.000 But the best model is in Nikkei.

02:04:16.960 Japan hit a high in 89.

02:04:20.360 It briefly got back to that 35 years later.

02:04:23.520 It's actually below that, I think, if I remember correctly.

02:04:26.700 Inflation adjusts for that, guaranteed.

02:04:28.920 Yes, yes, that's right.

02:04:30.360 I asked someone during a podcast, if you can do this spreadsheet for me, I'd love to get it.

02:04:35.080 Someone did it.

02:04:35.800 I said, what if you started buying the Nikkei at the top?

02:04:38.800 Not own the Nikkei.

02:04:39.600 If you own the Nikkei at the top, you're dead meat.

02:04:42.220 You'd die broke.

02:04:44.120 But what if you started buying?

02:04:46.660 22-year-old graduate of Tokyo University.

02:04:49.620 You started putting yen into the Nikkei in 1989.

02:04:53.520 How long, if you averaged in, did it take you to break even?

02:04:57.480 It's around two decades.

02:04:58.440 Okay.

02:05:00.360 Starting with zero in the Nikkei.

02:05:03.640 So I was on a podcast with George Noble, a Twitter space, actually.

02:05:06.680 He was Peter Lynch's right-hand man.

02:05:09.120 And he said, well, you could, I said, I think the markets will be uninvestable.

02:05:13.380 He said, oh, you could do this and this.

02:05:14.760 And I said, the Nikkei.

02:05:15.660 And he said, oh, you could short.

02:05:16.700 I said, no, you couldn't.

02:05:17.440 You can't short a market that takes 20 years to find a bottom.

02:05:21.840 It's a long time.

02:05:22.900 You can short a market like in 07 to 09.

02:05:25.220 Right, right, right.

02:05:25.720 A volatile market.

02:05:26.820 Yes.

02:05:27.500 You can't.

02:05:28.620 A market in inexorable decline can't be short.

02:05:30.880 So if we're in a top, aren't tops supposed to be euphoric?

02:05:35.600 Remember the dot-com?

02:05:36.860 Oh, yes.

02:05:37.460 Very well.

02:05:37.900 The world was changing.

02:05:38.860 The nifty 50, you know.

02:05:41.760 Webvan and e-toys and pets.com.

02:05:44.760 The roaring 20s.

02:05:45.240 You know, sustainable prosperity.

02:05:47.880 We are supposed to be true believers that the world is wonderful.

02:05:51.420 Do you sense much of the population thinks the world's wonderful?

02:05:55.140 I don't.

02:05:55.640 I don't sense that.

02:05:57.000 And all around us are signs of...

02:05:58.560 What's it going to look like when 70% gets clipped off this market?

02:06:03.420 So I'm immediately going into prepper survival mode.

02:06:06.700 Where are the enduring safe stores of value?

02:06:11.100 I don't.

02:06:12.140 You can't answer that.

02:06:13.400 I bought gold at around 270 an ounce.

02:06:18.400 270?

02:06:19.840 270.

02:06:20.540 Hope you bought a lot of it.

02:06:21.980 I did.

02:06:23.120 But it's worth a lot more now.

02:06:25.120 You think?

02:06:25.960 Yeah.

02:06:27.100 What spot price today, do you know?

02:06:30.040 Ballpark 3,300.

02:06:31.340 Yeah.

02:06:31.660 I bought silver.

02:06:33.000 I bought gold below 270.

02:06:34.620 I'll tell you why.

02:06:35.160 Because my first purchases were actually in a closed-end mutual fund that was trading 27% below net asset valuation.

02:06:42.360 Because people say, oh, it was easy to buy back then.

02:06:44.700 It was cheap.

02:06:45.060 I said, it was cheap because five of us wanted it.

02:06:47.500 Right.

02:06:47.920 Well, of course.

02:06:49.140 Right?

02:06:49.860 And by the way, the top.

02:06:51.740 Some Tuesday afternoon at 2.03 p.m., we will hit a top that will be decades later to be returned to potentially.

02:07:00.500 The top is the point of maximum optimism, which paradoxically is the moment in time where your justification for optimism is zero.

02:07:09.380 So, the bottom is the same thing in reverse.

02:07:13.440 Of course.

02:07:14.560 So, we're not happy now.

02:07:16.600 So, you're saying the herd's not always right?

02:07:18.300 Is that what you're saying?

02:07:18.700 I'm told.

02:07:19.560 Yeah.

02:07:20.200 I'm told.

02:07:20.760 So, let's hold on.

02:07:21.960 Let's just go back to gold for a second.

02:07:23.640 So, you buy-

02:07:24.520 I bought gold net at around 210.

02:07:27.620 Come on.

02:07:28.340 Well, I bought it 28% below NAV when it was 270.

02:07:32.280 Physical delivery?

02:07:33.300 No, that was not physical.

02:07:34.700 But then I started buying-

02:07:35.580 Here's what I did.

02:07:36.520 I bought gold from the local coin dealer.

02:07:38.780 Yeah.

02:07:39.380 And I'd say, when you get ounces, I'll pay cash.

02:07:42.560 And he sold it to me at Spot.

02:07:45.900 And he'd call and say, I got three ounces in.

02:07:48.620 I'd go to the bank.

02:07:49.400 I'd get out $900, right?

02:07:52.240 And I'd buy the gold from him.

02:07:54.600 Cash.

02:07:55.640 I'd buy silver from him.

02:07:56.900 Cash.

02:07:57.240 I could buy silver eagles at Spot.

02:07:59.600 You go on eBay?

02:08:00.880 Holy shit.

02:08:01.620 Those things are like 10 bucks above Spot.

02:08:05.000 And it was for ballpark $4 an ounce.

02:08:10.240 And then I remember it was at $4.57.

02:08:14.040 And I was buying from him.

02:08:15.980 And he said, don't you think there's a top?

02:08:17.460 He knew I was going to buy it.

02:08:18.860 He said, don't you think there's a top?

02:08:21.100 $457 an ounce for gold.

02:08:22.620 There's like, oh, three or something.

02:08:24.780 I don't know.

02:08:25.020 And I said, how many people are buying gold from you?

02:08:28.840 He said, oh, about four.

02:08:29.800 And I said, and the other three are my friends, aren't they?

02:08:32.640 He said, yeah.

02:08:33.640 And I said, does that sound like a mania to you?

02:08:36.680 And so here's the thing I've been on.

02:08:42.600 I'm a big fan of energy, but I think when the selling starts, everything sells.

02:08:48.160 Oh, I agree.

02:08:48.400 You'll be selling your children.

02:08:49.480 You'll be selling, right?

02:08:50.320 Everything sells.

02:08:51.060 So I think the idea of trying to get into any risk assets is so dangerous.

02:08:54.620 I'll take 4% on a treasury, two-year treasury.

02:08:58.120 Some people think, you know, I'll lock it up for two years.

02:09:00.180 Oh, that'll save me.

02:09:02.160 I won't dip by after six months.

02:09:04.820 So at what price would you buy gold again?

02:09:07.900 Well, I've got so much I don't need anymore.

02:09:10.040 If I didn't own any, I'd buy it now.

02:09:11.860 But the Bitcoin guys would say, buy Bitcoin at $117,000.

02:09:14.960 I turned it down at $10,000.

02:09:17.140 I wish I'd bought it.

02:09:18.360 I would have sold it at $50,000 and spent the proceeds on therapy.

02:09:22.780 Why on therapy?

02:09:24.640 Because I would have sold it at $50,000.

02:09:26.780 Right.

02:09:27.120 Good point.

02:09:28.100 And I know I would have.

02:09:30.060 I know I would have.

02:09:30.680 So you don't believe in crypto?

02:09:32.400 I don't think so.

02:09:33.200 The crypto community, I am their number one target.

02:09:36.760 They say, you are a hodler.

02:09:39.440 And I won't buy it.

02:09:40.860 The reason is because I believe that several layers.

02:09:44.280 One is that I believe that the authorities are not going to let crypto take over.

02:09:49.960 Of course not.

02:09:51.300 And by the way, that means that-

02:09:52.980 They're going to lose total control over society?

02:09:54.860 That's right.

02:09:55.020 Yeah, I don't think so.

02:09:56.020 You think the Rockefellers and the Rothschilds are going to hand it over to Max Keiser and Michael Saylor?

02:10:00.040 I don't think so.

02:10:01.140 So you don't think-

02:10:03.180 Here's what I think it actually is.

02:10:04.260 You know, the first paper on crypto was written by three NSA guys.

02:10:07.180 Yeah.

02:10:07.380 That means I think if I were smart and I were going to bring in central bank digital currency, which is an authoritarian nightmare, I would do it the way they did.

02:10:20.940 I'd release the crypto.

02:10:22.440 I'd have guys pumping it.

02:10:23.820 I'd have guys supporting it.

02:10:25.140 I'd let them debug the networks and the kinks and acclimate people to it.

02:10:30.980 And then I'd say, okay, it was fun.

02:10:33.360 We'll take it from here.

02:10:37.400 And in the process, of course, you acclimate people to this new-

02:10:40.680 Digital world.

02:10:41.180 New kind of commerce.

02:10:42.100 Yeah, exactly.

02:10:43.520 No, that's it.

02:10:43.960 And I'd get rid of the ATMs and I would make airport convenience stores credit card only.

02:10:49.120 And I would do all that stuff to change people's habits.

02:10:51.960 Cash is liberty.

02:10:52.500 Of course.

02:10:53.200 Oh, I couldn't agree more.

02:10:54.680 So you just have too much gold.

02:10:58.060 You just don't want any more gold.

02:10:59.300 I just, no, no, it's, I'm-

02:11:01.460 What about real estate right now?

02:11:03.660 I'm long, I own a nice house.

02:11:05.620 I'm long real estate by owning that house.

02:11:07.920 I wouldn't buy real estate as a speculation.

02:11:10.540 If you put a gun to my head, I'd say maybe farmland.

02:11:14.380 But that's been getting scooped up.

02:11:16.260 That's a pretty trite narrative now.

02:11:18.520 Big time.

02:11:19.360 Well, I follow that because I'm interested.

02:11:21.160 And I mean, it's turning for just crazy numbers in anchor.

02:11:26.060 And that-

02:11:26.380 Well, that's a problem.

02:11:27.380 That's what I'm saying.

02:11:28.740 So here's what I, here's what I watched for years and then jumped in.

02:11:31.700 And it's a problem.

02:11:32.680 The modern market, I bought gold steadily from 99 through about 03.

02:11:38.140 And then I bought some more when it was around 1200 in the teens.

02:11:41.180 I said, okay, it's kind of flattened out.

02:11:44.260 I'm going to get some more.

02:11:45.400 So around, bought it around $1,200 in maybe 2016 or something.

02:11:50.560 And, but the modern markets don't wait.

02:11:54.180 If you get a good idea and social media and stuff, it will close up that gap so fast,

02:12:00.580 you won't know what hit you.

02:12:01.300 So I'm bullish on energy long-term, energy equities and stuff, but I think they're going

02:12:06.220 to sell before they become a good buy.

02:12:08.600 And so I just can't commit a lot of money to the energy, even though I think it, I have

02:12:13.060 some mutual funds on uranium-based investments, which I think we got to go to.

02:12:17.320 And now it looks like we are.

02:12:18.500 I actually think AI is not demanding nuclear energy.

02:12:24.440 I think AI is being used as a Trojan horse to bring in nuclear energy, which I support.

02:12:30.380 I think they're using the buzz of AI to say, now let's get the nukes going.

02:12:35.040 People say, yeah, nukes, we need it for the AI.

02:12:38.000 We've needed nukes.

02:12:39.000 It was the obvious next thing to go to.

02:12:43.040 Platinum.

02:12:44.320 For years, I watched Platinum.

02:12:45.560 Owned so little Platinum that if it went to zero, I wouldn't even notice.

02:12:51.780 I mean, trivial, trivial amount.

02:12:54.520 And I've been watching, it's been flat.

02:12:56.440 I mean, flat as in like a flat line, not moving away from $900 an ounce by a few dollars flat

02:13:02.900 for 10 years after dropping.

02:13:06.640 And I go, what's the Platinum story?

02:13:08.360 Well, the Platinum story is I don't trade.

02:13:11.980 I don't trade at all.

02:13:12.720 If I buy it, I'm buying it saying, look, I'm hanging on to it.

02:13:15.940 If it goes down, I don't trade.

02:13:18.940 The Platinum story is I don't believe in the EV.

02:13:22.080 I don't think it's a good technology.

02:13:23.920 I think it'll be here, but I don't think it's going to take over the world.

02:13:26.720 I think the hybrids are going to take over the world.

02:13:29.600 Well, they make sense.

02:13:30.400 They make inherent sense.

02:13:31.440 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

02:13:32.000 They're more efficient.

02:13:32.640 They use more Platinum than internal combustion engines.

02:13:37.340 Yeah.

02:13:37.560 Because their catalytic converters burn colder, so they need more Platinum.

02:13:42.960 Now, here's where it gets real interesting.

02:13:45.680 The Platinum miners are in Russia and South Africa.

02:13:51.400 Russia will therefore have control.

02:13:54.480 South Africa could become a failed state so fast, you don't know what it's at you, right?

02:13:58.180 More to the point, and again, trying to get real facts on this stuff, but the above-ground Platinum supply, the available Platinum supply is something like $3 billion, which is something a medium-sized hedge fund could buy at current prices.

02:14:16.520 It's been in deficit production for at least four years.

02:14:21.180 What does deficit production mean?

02:14:22.580 It means that we're consuming more per year than the miners are producing.

02:14:26.120 Oh, gosh. Okay.

02:14:26.280 Based on the rate of deficit production, that the above-ground supply will be gone within about a year.

02:14:35.520 So, there's no more Platinum.

02:14:37.600 Arguably.

02:14:38.040 We could go to potentially Palladium, but, you know, whatever.

02:14:41.140 Platinum has not gone through a meme phase, so a little bit of trade in me says that meme phase could get spectacular.

02:14:47.180 Platinum could go to $20,000.

02:14:48.680 Because it has industrial uses, you know, it seems kind of natural, right?

02:14:53.260 So, I decided, so I reached out to some technical analysts who draw the squiggles on the curves, and I'm sarcastically occasionally commenting about technical analysis, but I can't do it or don't believe in it or whatever.

02:15:06.600 But I asked a few, I said, look at this plot.

02:15:10.180 Where would you start getting excited?

02:15:12.000 Because it's been flat for 10 years, I don't need to put money in and have it sit there for 10 years more.

02:15:16.320 And a few gave me opinions about what price.

02:15:19.460 I kind of formulated an opinion where I had to start and then hit it.

02:15:24.720 Now, instead of buying it, you know, slowly, I said, in the modern era, you got to move quick.

02:15:30.760 So, I started hitting the buy button.

02:15:33.760 And I'm still not.

02:15:35.440 I face a boomer dilemma.

02:15:37.760 The boomer dilemma is, the good news is, my net worth is good enough.

02:15:42.940 If I don't screw up, I'm fine.

02:15:44.420 I mean, I could retire today, not earn another penny.

02:15:48.020 Fine.

02:15:48.520 I want to leave money to my kids.

02:15:49.880 I will be able to.

02:15:53.060 The paradox is that to commit to an asset requires committing a percentage that's not stupid.

02:16:01.380 If you commit 0.01% of your assets to it, it's not going to make a difference no matter what happens.

02:16:06.640 So, if you say, well, 5%.

02:16:09.640 When I look at the quantity of money I have to spend to commit 5%, it seems huge.

02:16:19.020 But it's only 5%.

02:16:20.640 And so, as a consequence, I go, look, if it went to zero tomorrow, I'd have a bad day.

02:16:28.820 I'd lose 5% of my assets.

02:16:31.960 But it would be too much money.

02:16:33.360 So, I'm fighting this bias about how many dollars it takes to get to a...

02:16:39.900 I get it.

02:16:41.540 So, let me ask you just a wrap-up question, which is, given your description of where we are,

02:16:46.740 and you haven't even mentioned what could be a debt crisis when people stop buying our debt or slow down,

02:16:54.140 but there are all kinds of things to worry about that seem imminent.

02:16:58.720 How does the average person respond?

02:17:00.860 They don't have any money anyways.

02:17:03.900 Yeah, fair.

02:17:05.040 I mean, the average person has no money.

02:17:09.240 So...

02:17:09.920 So, how does the 5% boomer respond?

02:17:13.640 Yeah.

02:17:14.780 Well, years ago, I did an analysis on the 5% boomer.

02:17:17.320 This is how bad it is.

02:17:18.100 This is years ago, actually.

02:17:20.100 And it actually got vetted by Stephen Roach, who's executive director of Morgan Stanley.

02:17:25.680 He looked at my numbers and said, actually, you've overestimated something.

02:17:28.460 You should be more conservative.

02:17:29.460 I invented 5% guy.

02:17:32.760 At that time, he was worth $1.1 million.

02:17:36.480 He was earning $156,000 a year.

02:17:40.240 You also know he's not 22 years old.

02:17:42.620 He's probably a boomer, because it takes a while to get to 5%.

02:17:46.340 At a reasonable rate of withdrawal from a retirement account, Mr. 5% guy, who has to be living the American dream, could take about $48,000 out.

02:18:00.840 Annually?

02:18:01.800 Annually.

02:18:03.600 Without risking going broke.

02:18:08.080 And you know what?

02:18:09.080 They don't know how to live on $48,000.

02:18:10.940 No.

02:18:11.220 And they might have other assets.

02:18:12.640 This is a complicated analysis, but that's a scary number.

02:18:16.760 For a modern life, that's a...

02:18:18.160 Yeah.

02:18:18.540 Well, but the other thing is, if he knew how to live on $48,000, he'd have more than $1.1 million.

02:18:24.020 Good point.

02:18:24.700 And so, we've got a whole generation that has got expectations that are just off the chart distorted, and it's not because of a 5-year or a 10-year recency bias.

02:18:37.080 It's a 40-year recency bias.

02:18:39.580 It's 1981.

02:18:40.740 Let me finish that story.

02:18:42.440 From 1981, the valuation, which should not trend, compounded annually 4% a year.

02:18:51.840 What happens over the next 40 years when it compounds negative 4% a year to get to cheap again?

02:19:01.740 Now, you say, well, that'll never happen.

02:19:03.220 I go, of course it'll happen.

02:19:05.020 Show me an asset class that got overpriced.

02:19:06.760 It didn't become cheap again.

02:19:08.940 Well, if you believe in markets, that's just by definition going to happen.

02:19:12.340 And if there's a way to fake it so it doesn't happen, then it means you're just deluding as to what actually happened.

02:19:17.040 You're not getting a reality.

02:19:18.340 Right, right.

02:19:18.900 And so the bottom line is that the boomer demographic almost by definition was going to generate a bubble, a big mother bubble because of the demographics.

02:19:28.120 Now, I was telling you about how I was reading my old write-ups from like 13, 14, 15.

02:19:34.240 I make a compelling case that the markets were crazy.

02:19:40.800 How do I do it?

02:19:41.320 I use numbers, I use stats, and I use quotes from the most famous money guys in the world.

02:19:46.220 You know, Paul Tudor Jones, Stan Druckenmiller, you name it.

02:19:50.260 These are not lightweights saying these markets are insanely overvalued in 2015.

02:19:56.760 What has happened since then?

02:19:58.580 Straight up.

02:20:00.200 Oh, for sure.

02:20:01.680 Example, Apple, tenfold gain on a growth in revenues of 50%.

02:20:12.140 95% correction brings that back down.

02:20:20.720 Microsoft, 150% gain in revenues, tenfold gain.

02:20:25.620 Doesn't make mathematical sense.

02:20:28.660 Let's go to NVIDIA.

02:20:29.760 There is the winner.

02:20:30.540 Four trillion dollars of market cap being run by a guy who has a very sketchy past.

02:20:39.220 25-fold gain in revenues.

02:20:41.240 You go, now we're talking 250-fold gain in market cap.

02:20:46.900 Yeah, so that's the problem right there.

02:20:48.240 90% correction takes you back to 2015.

02:20:51.260 Do you remember 2015 being depressed?

02:20:53.560 I don't.

02:20:55.700 Stan Druckenmiller didn't think so.

02:20:58.060 Howard Marks didn't think so.

02:20:59.880 All these guys who are considered legends thought the markets were insanely overpriced in 15.

02:21:06.940 And it's been nothing but up.

02:21:10.180 And that will end.

02:21:12.160 I don't know when.

02:21:13.980 And you think that all asset classes are tied to that?

02:21:17.740 I can't say all because that means 100%.

02:21:20.700 But if I found something that I thought was dirt cheap, I'm glad I own the gold from as cheap as I did.

02:21:30.140 Because when it goes down, I go, I'm still up 15-fold or something, right?

02:21:36.580 So it makes it easier.

02:21:40.040 Buying gold now from scratch would be harder.

02:21:43.020 It would be that, you know, the number of dollars to get the percent position, that sort of thing.

02:21:47.420 And I think the debt problem is global.

02:21:53.080 If you actually look at the metrics for the growth in the global debt relative to global GDP, the entire world has become priced much more than 10 years ago relative to what the world produces.

02:22:08.420 So what's a global debt crisis?

02:22:10.280 That's the question.

02:22:10.920 You say, well, you've got lenders and borrowers.

02:22:13.020 It's a zero-sum game.

02:22:13.800 No, it's not.

02:22:14.480 Well, I know a global debt crisis is when the entire world thinks they're going to get shit that the world can't produce.

02:22:22.200 And the way you think of how to create one artificial Gedanken experiment, let's say the leaders of the world got together and said, look, let's just solve this problem.

02:22:29.780 Let's guarantee health care to all our citizens.

02:22:32.260 Let's guarantee their pension, all our citizens.

02:22:35.820 Problem solved.

02:22:36.760 They go, well, but you didn't in any way, shape or form increase the ability to produce wealth.

02:22:40.880 So you now have obligations for which you haven't a clue how you're going to pay for them.

02:22:48.640 Who's going to do it?

02:22:50.500 Are you going to have the Chinese delivering Chinese food to our doors still?

02:22:53.780 I don't think so.

02:22:54.680 We're going to be delivering food to the Chinese.

02:22:58.580 So everything will regress.

02:23:01.720 Forty-year recency bias says it won't.

02:23:03.780 It will.

02:23:06.580 On that dark note, I'm just picturing myself showing up at a doorstep in Beijing with some Kung Pao chicken.

02:23:13.640 Hoping for a tip.

02:23:15.680 I can see now you turn the scanner around and shove the 25% tip in the guy's face.

02:23:24.000 Professor, thank you.

02:23:25.080 I hope this doesn't get you fired.

02:23:26.220 I hope you'll come back.

02:23:27.880 Anytime.

02:23:28.540 You call.

02:23:29.060 I'm in the car.

02:23:29.820 Thank you.

02:23:30.200 Thank you.

02:23:30.260 Thank you.

02:23:33.780 We want to thank you for watching us on Spotify, a company that we use every day.

02:23:38.420 We know the people who run it.

02:23:39.340 Good people.

02:23:40.400 While you're here, do us a favor.

02:23:42.160 Hit follow and tap the bell so you never miss an episode.

02:23:46.400 We have real conversations, news, things that actually matter.

02:23:49.560 Telling the truth always.

02:23:50.740 You will not miss it if you follow us on Spotify and hit the bell.

02:23:54.520 We appreciate it.

02:23:55.080 Thanks for watching.

02:23:55.620 We'll we willре.

02:23:56.360 Bye.

02:23:56.900 Bye.

02:23:57.400 Bye.

02:23:58.220 Bye.

02:23:58.240 Bye.

02:23:58.300 Bye.

02:23:58.760 Bye.

02:23:59.360 Bye.

02:24:00.240 Bye.

02:24:09.020 Bye.

02:24:09.400 Bye.

02:24:09.460 Bye.

02:24:10.720 Bye.

02:24:11.440 Bye.

02:24:13.380 Bye.

02:24:13.460 Bye.

02:24:14.360 Bye.

02:24:15.440 Bye.

02:24:15.520 Bye.

02:24:16.460 Bye.

02:24:17.020 Bye.

02:24:17.580 Bye.

02:24:21.540 Bye.

02:24:21.860 Bye.

02:24:22.520 Bye.

02:24:23.440 Bye.

02:24:23.480 Bye.

02:24:23.520 Bye.

02:24:23.840 Bye.

02:24:24.440 Bye.

02:24:24.500 Bye.

02:24:24.820 Bye.

The Tucker Carlson Show - August 20, 2025

Dave Collum： Financial Crisis, Diddy, Energy Weapons, QAnon, and the Deep State’s Digital Evolution

Episode Stats

Length

Words per Minute

Word Count

Sentence Count

Misogynist Sentences

Hate Speech Sentences

Summary

Transcript