Join us in Phoenix, Arizona as we talk about Bitcoin, Roman trivia, and the College Cartel. Recorded in Tucson, AZ! Bitcoin is a digital asset that can be bought and sold on the Bitcoin network, and can be used to pay for your education, health care, and other forms of education.
00:00:46.000He's done an amazing job building one of the most powerful youth organizations ever created, Turning Point USA.
00:00:52.000We will not embrace the ideas that have destroyed countries, destroyed lives, and we are going to fight for freedom on campuses across the country.
00:02:40.000Okay, so it might be the grandfather or something of the famous one, because the famous Marcus Licinius Crassus is just a really rich guy, and he walks 10 feet over the border with Persia.
00:03:14.000And they said, Charlie, we really think you should do a segment to look into this because it deals with the college scam, the college cartel.
00:03:41.000So since people might not really grasp this, the way science is conducted in the modern world is basically through the medium of journals.
00:03:51.000So if you are a researcher at MIT, you'll have a lab, you'll have a study you conduct on literally anything, whether this is medicine, chemistry, computer science, and you'll do a bunch of work.
00:04:06.000And then you'll compile it into a paper, and it could be 10 pages long, it could be 500 pages long.
00:04:12.000You'll compile it into a paper, and then the way you make it official is basically you will submit it to a journal.
00:04:20.000The most famous journals are Cell, that's a medicine journal, Nature, Science, but...
00:04:26.000There are literally thousands of these journals.
00:04:29.000So you'll have the Journal of Applied Epidemiology.
00:04:32.000I just made that up, but I assume it exists.
00:04:34.000And you'll have math journals and history journals and social science journals.
00:04:39.000I'm looking at a list, for example, that are offered by the company we're talking about today.
00:04:43.000And they have Angiogenesis, JMST Advances, Jewish History, Mathematical programming, mathematical programming computation, mathematical sciences.
00:04:55.000There are tons and tons and tons of these.
00:04:58.000And getting published in these papers is essentially, it's how you suggest your work is legitimate, and it's how you get prestige.
00:05:06.000It's a lot more prestigious if you have a paper in Nature, one of the most famous journals, than to have it in a very obscure one.
00:05:14.000And some are more selective than others.
00:05:17.000So there are journals that are basically open access.
00:05:19.000You can just publish with us, and that's it, and it doesn't really accord it a lot of legitimacy.
00:05:25.000And there are some that, because they're more prestigious and allegedly they have more strict peer review, the research is presumed to be better.
00:05:33.000And so where the Doge taxpayer thing comes in is that there's this whole analysis about the Department of Education, where is this money going?
00:05:40.000And you have some of these numbers here.
00:05:43.000Springer Nature, this company, which is one of the biggest incumbent actors, is effectively funded by the Department of Education because these colleges spend hundreds of millions of dollars on these journals.
00:05:54.000What are they even spending the money on?
00:06:03.000It's listed on a stock exchange somewhere.
00:06:05.000And what they do is they own hundreds, thousands of these journals.
00:06:11.000Including nature, as the name suggests.
00:06:13.000And the main way you get access to these, you can't just freely read them, which is a problem in its own right, because we'd probably have better science.
00:07:26.000And what they get you with also is they'll get you to sign up for packages of 100, 200, 500 journals, and you have to pay for all of them.
00:07:36.000And it's tens of thousands of dollars a year.
00:07:38.000And if you multiply that over a bunch of universities, thousands of universities in the U.S., they're all effectively taxpayer-funded through our student loans, through our grants.
00:07:47.000And the U.S. government itself pays for these, too, because our government agencies will, like the Department of Agriculture, for example, will subscribe to every agricultural journal.
00:08:37.000It can cost you thousands of dollars to publish your own scientific paper.
00:08:41.000And there's even, last year, there was an antitrust suit brought against Springer Nature and some of the other big publishers, where allegedly they just do cartel-like behavior.
00:08:51.000Yeah, like they agree not to, they make it so you can't submit your paper to multiple places so they might compete over it.
00:08:57.000So if there's a really high-value paper, they could maybe bid, we want this published in our journal, but they prevent that through cartel-like behavior.
00:09:04.000And they collude to not pay peer reviewers.
00:09:07.000Well, for example, one of the major reasons we have large language models that are advancing, I owe you another Roman history question.
00:09:31.000but this this is one of the the Springer nature is an example also of like why college is so bad.
00:09:40.000I mean it's like and some of these are very poorly managed publications as well.
00:09:44.000Yeah I mean some of these are the publications that get literally scammed where you write that fake paper that's all like you know feminist biochemistry blah blah blah and you can just trick them.
00:10:00.000You're getting nature-running articles that are just screeching at Trump, and that's part of the journal.
00:10:06.000And, you know, ideally, that's not really related to scientific research, but they use their prestige, which we are paying for, to do this.
00:10:52.000Based on everything I'm seeing about the Springer Nature thing, I think it's time for some sort of investigation.
00:10:57.000Why would the federal government be indirectly funding this, basically this cartel, this syndicate, from poorly managed publications and also all the COVID nonsense that's there?
00:11:07.000Blake, I owe you another question, so stay right there.
00:11:09.000but I think it's time for someone to look into Springer Nature.
00:12:15.000What obscure Roman official often overlooked in modern discussions was tasked with investigating the moral conduct of senators and equestrians during the Republic and had the authority to expel them from their ranks?
00:12:32.000Alright, then I'll ask you a different one.
00:12:33.000What Roman law passed in 18 BCE under Augustus was designed to increase birth rates among the Roman elite by rewarding marriage and penalizing celibacy?
00:13:31.000Informally, what a lot of people do, especially if you just want to be a scientifically engaged normal person who's not working at a university or at the government, you just pirate these things.
00:13:49.000If you're going to be a major university, they kind of have you over the barrel.
00:13:53.000I mean, open source would make a lot of sense.
00:13:55.000Open source stuff, but again, there is the real concern.
00:13:57.000You don't want fake science, and if anyone can publish anything, there will be fake science.
00:14:02.000But ideally, a company like Spinger Nature is supposed to check the science, right?
00:14:07.000Yes, they're supposed to do that, and one of the big attacks on them is they're clearly not doing that much of the time.
00:14:11.000A big scandal that just happened recently, Nature, they published a very important paper on Alzheimer's about 20 years ago, and it recently came out that...
00:14:22.000Basically, the research for this was falsified.
00:14:24.000It was entirely falsified, and literally the last 20 years of research into Alzheimer's may have been a blind alley of completely pointless, and we could have known this all along.
00:14:35.000And hundreds of millions, if not billions of dollars of research from taxpayers was directed towards this blind alley that, in theory, nature should have caught.
00:14:47.000Yeah, I mean, and there's just example after example here of engaging in censorship, They censor stuff in China.
00:16:16.000All right, this one I think you'll get, honestly.
00:16:18.000Which Roman emperor briefly reigned in 193 CE during the year of five emperors and was killed by the Praetorian Guard after trying to buy their loyalty?
00:16:51.000I think that's usually spelled differently.
00:16:53.000Yeah, it is, but it would have some connective tissue there.
00:16:56.000So of all the history stuff, is Rome the stuff you know the best?
00:17:02.000Maybe overall, although if you think in like relative terms...
00:17:05.000You have like bizarre Russian history.
00:17:07.000I know a lot about Russia, but maybe not as much as I know about Rome.
00:17:10.000Someone said to me recently that, and correct me if I'm wrong, I heard this when I was in D.C., that trying to get Vladimir Putin to approve this peace deal would be like the fastest military decision for the Russian government in like 200 years.
00:17:22.000Yeah. They usually move incredibly bureaucratically, right?
00:17:24.000They're bureaucratic, they're slow moving, they don't...
00:17:28.000And they totally do have a history of sort of just being a bit evasive on these things.
00:17:34.000It's very real, but he might be rope-a-doping Trump a little bit.
00:18:07.000You'll get outstanding nationwide coverage because they operate on all three major networks.
00:18:11.000If you have a cell phone service today, you can get a cell phone service with Patriot Mobile with a coverage guarantee.
00:18:16.000But the difference is every dollar you spend supports the First and Second Amendments, Sanctity of Life, our veterans, and first responders.
00:19:08.000And so I first became aware of you by reading Walter Isaacson's book on Elon Musk, which we won't spend too much time on all the inaccuracies.
00:19:15.000But I think it did paint a broader macro vision of, quite honestly, one of the most compelling people ever to live and the most compelling innovator of our time.
00:19:25.000You've known Elon for quite some time.
00:19:27.000And right now he is villain and public enemy number one of the activist left.
00:19:32.000Tell us about your story and how you met Elon and what people should know about him.
00:19:36.000Well, so I met Elon because of PayPal.
00:19:38.000So I went to law school with David Sachs.
00:19:40.000And David Sachs was the chief product officer of PayPal.
00:19:46.000And then invested, we're the first institutional investors in Tesla.
00:19:48.000And we're operating guys by training where I built the company in the 90s.
00:19:52.000So I got deep in operations at Tesla with him.
00:19:54.000And that's really when I got to know him and developed a profound respect for his ability to go deep into the detail, to really operate, understand what's going on, and to his desire, truly genuine desire, to make the world better.
00:20:07.000So I find that to be one of the more unique things about Elon is that he's a visionary, but also he's micro.
00:20:12.000Yes. And it's very difficult to find the macro and the micro combined.
00:20:39.000And what he does is he's able to galvanize terrific engineers, terrific people on a mission because he actually wants to make the world better.
00:21:01.000Why is he only sleeping three hours a night and obviously putting some of his wealth, you know, Not in jeopardy, but just saying I don't really care.
00:22:43.000He has a huge heart for humanity, which I think really is his why.
00:22:46.000Talk about the last five to ten years where it went from Elon, the innovator, to all of a sudden he got more and more involved in, you could say politics, but just kind of some of the cultural issues.
00:22:58.000And I think his purchasing of Twitter, now X, will go down as one of the most monumental and courageous decisions for freedom of speech in the history of the species.
00:23:06.000I don't think President Trump would have had the movement.
00:23:09.000President Trump deserves all the credit, but I don't know if he would have had the movement behind him if X would not have existed.
00:23:14.000We would not have been able to expose the COVID lies or the lockdowns or the open border if it wasn't for a free and open portion of the internet.
00:23:23.000Did you see a moment where really a switch went on, where all of a sudden he saw a sequencing where like, if we don't win back the White House, then these other 100 things that I want to get done for humanity will not be able to happen?
00:23:34.000Yeah, I think it was a, I'd say a progression that began with a belief in free speech, a fundamental belief in free speech.
00:23:42.000And what Twitter had done was corrupted free speech.
00:24:17.000And from there, it went to, wait a minute.
00:24:19.000The problem is deeper than just this one thing, Twitter.
00:24:22.000It has now infected the government, it's infected many of our children, it's gone in many directions, and that he believed that President Trump was the right leader.
00:24:31.000So now fast-forwarding to today, one could make the argument, I would actually make the argument, that going to Mars, having autonomous vehicles, it's going to be far easier than actually getting Congress to cut spend.
00:24:44.000Oh, Joe, I've got to tell you, man, I was just speaking for myself.
00:24:48.000This is the hardest thing I've ever done.
00:25:39.000So Doge was born out of a spirit that our government is wildly inefficient.
00:25:42.000There's programs that should not exist.
00:25:44.000And if I were to kind of read into Elon, who I've had the pleasure to get to know and I have enormous respect for, I think that a switch also went off in his head where he said, hey, if bankruptcy, then no civilization.
00:25:56.000Yes, look, we're at 130% GDP, maybe higher, depends on how you calculate numbers.
00:26:01.000And the reality is, you know, it's a pretty simple math calculation.
00:26:55.000Yeah, Social Security Administration as an example.
00:26:57.000The 40% of the fraud came down the phone lines and do direct deposit.
00:27:02.000So you could get on the dark web someone's social security number, answer six simple questions, and change the bank information from one place to another.
00:27:20.000If you're a senior like my dad, he's 84, he expects his check.
00:27:23.000It doesn't show up for a month, maybe he notices it, maybe he doesn't, maybe it's two months, and it's all going to foreign formal syndicates taking the money.
00:28:35.000Okay, so what happened was there's a $20 billion balance sheet of money owed to the Scottish administration, right?
00:28:41.000Because during the Biden administration, they took, if we overpaid you in some way, it used to be, even going back to Obama, that the Treasury could recoup 100% of the money in, as an example, the retirement program, right?
00:28:52.000If we overpay you, you know, it was an accident, okay, we take the money back.
00:28:56.000They reduced this, the payment plans from, it was three years up until literally through Obama into President Trump's first term.
00:29:03.000They took it to five years and then took it down to $10 minimum payment.
00:29:06.000So the payment plans went out past 2047, which is the end of the system date in the computer.
00:29:13.000When that $800 million went past the system date, the technicians in the field had to write notes in the computer to be able to collect that money.
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00:31:40.000I mean, money must be sent somewhere, right?
00:31:44.000If it's not an account, can we reverse engineer?
00:31:47.000No. I mean, the money, this particular $800 million, I've asked this question, the notes that were taken that relate to these debts were so poor that the auditors included.
00:32:10.000I mean, look, there are, if I remember correctly, about 100 weaknesses in the audit they've identified, and they still give us a clean audit opinion at Social Security Administration.
00:32:18.000It is, I've never seen, like, I have never in my career in 30 years seen anything like it.
00:32:23.000So if you, you're an investor, if you came across a company like this, what would be the first thing that comes to mind?
00:33:26.000And I want to talk about that for a second.
00:33:27.000Because what I find when I talk to bureaucrats, which is not very often, they don't talk to me very often.
00:33:31.000But at least those that have, let's just say, bureaucrat worldview.
00:33:34.000Yes. There is a disconnect of whose money is it.
00:33:37.000If I had to distill the divide that runs this town, it's the patriots, such as yourself and Elon, look at you guys as stewards of somebody else's money that is sent into the system, whereas the permanent bureaucracy, they actually view it as the government's money, and the people just loaned it and then sent it back.
00:33:55.000We collected what was rightfully ours.
00:33:57.000Do you think that is a properly distilled analysis?
00:34:01.000I would break the bureaucratic criterion, too.
00:34:04.000Because everything we found is because people told us.
00:34:52.000Yeah. So looking now, is it fair to say your...
00:34:58.000Assigned tasks as a Social Security Administration?
00:35:00.000Are there any others under your purview, under the kind of Doge umbrella?
00:35:04.000Yeah, so what happened was we mapped the entire system for Social Security, from enumeration, how you get the number, all the way to the end, how you get a payment.
00:36:07.000This was all during Biden's presence, yes.
00:36:08.000And by the way, it continued through the first fiscal quarter of the federal court of 25, right?
00:36:13.000So right before President Trump came in.
00:36:15.000And President Trump has not closed the border, so it's not happening now.
00:36:18.000We were just trying to figure this out.
00:36:20.000We were following the number to complete our map.
00:36:23.000And I would say we accidentally came across this problem, which led us to the border.
00:36:27.000And the people at the border reported, you know, I'd say some of the most disturbing behavior that I've ever heard, where we would, you know, they got so overwhelmed at times.
00:36:35.000They provide people with, you know, I think called the notice to appear or own recognizance release.
00:36:40.000They'd have, they'd get in the system with a court date.
00:36:42.000Once you're in the system with a court date, if you file for asylum when you're in, you can get a form, just filing a form that allows you, once that form is filed, to get...
00:37:07.000and we found in a handful of states, we just sampled a handful of states, we found thousands of people on the voter rolls and many of them had voted.
00:39:37.000This is almost like the Avengers got assembled to try and come help the government.
00:39:41.000And I, okay, I credit President Trump.
00:39:42.000I mean, really, in the end, President Trump, he had the courage for the first time ever, and foresight, okay, this is a really, really, really smart thing to do, to sign an executive order that allowed us to go across databases.
00:39:56.000Otherwise, we could never have figured this out.
00:39:58.000Could never transcend the spear crowd.
00:39:59.000Yeah, they did all silos, so we had to go across.
00:40:01.000They do that intentionally, obviously.
00:40:03.000I mean, look, I will say it might be an artifice of like the 1970s databases they have.
00:40:08.000I wouldn't impute intent, but I will say it's created massive holes for people to commit fraud.
00:40:14.000And that's what we're looking for, right?
00:40:15.000And look, we're doing it with like 2010 technologies and SQL queries because we can't use AI.
00:41:33.000Anyway, I don't want to put you on the spot.
00:41:34.000I just, this is the type of stuff we run into.
00:41:36.000The final thing is this, is all of this would just be, will end up as a very well-publicized Warren commission.
00:41:43.000Okay. If you guys don't get Congress to act.
00:41:46.000Because there's only so much the president can do.
00:41:48.000There's only so many recisions, impoundment act, all that stuff.
00:41:51.000If Congress does not then put forward the president's budget and act upon your discoveries, the audience is salivating to hear marching orders.
00:42:00.000Talk about how important it is that Article I internalizes all of your findings and then acts on it in this budget.
00:42:54.000I speak on behalf of our listeners and our audience.
00:42:56.000The fact that people like you that have a ton of wealth, you guys could be in Monaco or you could be in Fiji, literally, enjoying all of the blessings you guys have earned.
00:43:06.000Instead, you are here in D.C. in these kind of dimly lit office buildings.
00:43:11.000Go until 2 a.m. looking through spreadsheets without AI to still be attacked by the media and be doxxed is the definition of a servant government.