You've had a dynamic where money has become freer than free.
We talk about a Fed just gone nuts.
All the central banks going nuts.
So it's all acting like safe haven.
I believe that in a world where central bankers are tripping over themselves to devalue their currency, Bitcoin wins.
In the world of fiat currencies, Bitcoin is the victor.
I mean, that's part of the bull case for Bitcoin.
If you're not paying attention, you probably should be.
Sorry, I don't fuck up your podcast.
And here's Dave, the most undependable podcast guest in the planet.
I don't know. I think you're pretty dependable.
Yeah.
How are we doing? Error 404.
Error 404, yeah.
Great title for this year's.
Well, I thought it was actually going to be an Error 404.
I almost didn't write it.
I was very close to that.
I quit several times.
And there were a number of reasons potentially why I had computer problems in the summer, which made it hard.
I find the world profoundly confusing, taking my shoes off in case you're wondering.
Actually, I podcast my underwear just to feel special.
And then I got into it with a Zionist
That was no fun and that sucked ball
No, it's never fun
No, those guys are punks
It does feel like everything's breaking though
It does, it really does
I'm bummed, I'm not bummed
But Nick Shirley coming out
I think on the 23rd
Probably too late to sneak into the letter
But I think the year ended with a crescendo of fraud being unearthed.
What do you think of – who do you think he is?
He's a front man, right?
He didn't do that himself.
I've seen the series.
Yeah, apparently he was in the White House earlier this year.
Yeah, right.
That's suspicious, isn't it?
Yeah.
I think the memers – the 2024 election, I gave the memers huge credit for winning it because Trump was getting the crap kicked out of them.
And the populace could just lose heart.
And then Dillian, these guys would go in and come up with a meme and says, yeah, I'm voting for the hillbilly and the felon.
Right. You go fantastic. Right.
And so they just turned every single thing the Democrats did into a farcical mess.
And so I give the memers credit for that election.
And it's on level.
But but they were probably on payroll.
That was probably Trump figuring out.
I got I got to get the memers.
Yeah.
I mean, there was an explicit part of that strategy with the podcast and stuff like that.
Oh, yeah.
The podcast strategy was explicit, but I think it was definitely implicit behind the scenes
and maybe explicit to an extent in terms of tapping the memers on the shoulders explicitly.
But implicitly, they know that people are going to watch these podcasts and put memes
out there.
Well, but I think they might have been on payroll, actually.
You think so?
I hope that's...
Can you hear me?
Wait a minute.
Hold on.
Oh, God.
Is something coming through to you too?
No.
Oh, I was all of a sudden getting a delayed feed.
I did have Twitter spaces yesterday and all of a sudden it started playing.
And I'm getting this voice.
I go, wait a minute.
Is that Logan in there?
Where is that coming from?
So I really don't think – I don't think it's – I'm not even sure we can possibly understand the world in a way that we used to think we did at least.
I mean it was all predicted too, right?
The signal to noise ratio is going to get completely out of whack.
Actually, Carl Sagan predicted in the mid-90s, right about Netscape time, he said that we're going to get to the point where it's just the world's just going to be this mindless bunch of idiots because they're not going to know what's true.
And so he really called it.
Nikola Tesla called the internet in 1926.
He said the world's going to be surrounded by this big basically global brain.
Yeah.
And how do you anchor into reality, if at all?
Well, I saw a meme video. Is there still a meme? Are the videos memes?
Good question.
Depends how long it is, I guess.
Right. Maybe we're living in a meme.
I saw one that someone posted, and he said, all I did was go to chat GPT and said, watch all the videos of person A and person B and make me a funny meme video.
And it was like a minute long, and it was so good.
And I'm going, oh, you got to be here. So I'm going to try like I'm going to try like I got to ease into it carefully to find out if there's some trigger.
But first, I'll start with like Lindsey Graham, give it a big sloppy wet one to Netanyahu.
I want to see if I can get that. If that then we're going to go into sort of the M, you know, our zone and see if I get Lindsey doing other things with Netanyahu.
and then I realized that the fact that I could
potentially do that means that we're all
toast
we're all toast
there could be a Marty Bent
Dave Colum doggy style meme
right?
now that you
be careful what you
utter into existence
it just happened
I just did it
if you do that I will hunt you down
and I will put Lindsey Graham on you
Yeah. Well, and this is something you talked about in the letter, too. It's like these technologies are double-edged swords, but they really accentuate the golden age of propaganda, too.
I'm hoping they're double-edged. I'm worried it's just one edge.
AI, do you use AI more than Google now? Do you skip Google?
Yeah.
So Google at one point looked like it was an insurmountable moat, although I argued with a colleague that that was not true.
his argument was they have 2 million servers
like okay a hedge fund can buy that
so that just doesn't cut it
but they certainly look like they had a moat
now they're fighting for their lives
Google could be the Yahoo
of the modern era
remember when we searched with Yahoo?
yeah
I mean it was very young but I do remember
and so now Google could be the next Yahoo
so I go straight to Grok
instead of Google
Yeah, I think Google does.
I think they're positioned well for AI.
Gemini is really good.
I use Anthropics models.
I use Claude because we're actually like automated.
I can't even keep up with all of these.
I know the name Claude, but I've never – I've really not begun to explore AI.
What I do not want to do is use it to create content.
I still want to use it as a replacement for Google.
I don't create images with it.
I think the images are soulless.
One of the things I've noticed is
I'll read
You know how the Google art
The AI art at first was kind of cute
Now it's just soulless crap
It's just slop
Although watching Maduro
And Trump
In their underwear doing a dance
In the Oval Office
I've got to admit it was entertaining
But
I
I think the problem is that I'll open an article that I think I ought to care about, and I found myself bored.
And I'm wondering if it's possible that my subconscious is detecting the lack of humanity because it's an AI document.
That I can't consciously see it's an AI.
They're supposedly your tells, but they tend to be formulaically written, very well organized.
Let me find the title to this YouTube video. I actually watched it the other day. It's put out by, where is it? I have it in this chat.
How many videos have we done?
This is probably our seventh or eighth, Logan.
And are you real?
I am real. I think I am.
The Art of the Problem YouTube channel, they released a video, I believe, last week or the week before called the AI Paradox.
And what you're describing is like they go into sort of the math behind LLMs.
And if you have like a distribution of potential past that one can go through a human who has the ability to create new creative thought has almost infinite past where LLMs, since they're trained off of thought that's already been thought uttered and put in the text on the web.
They have very narrow paths, which they can actually follow.
Yeah, one time when I was in a zero hedge debate against Steve Keen, moderated by Fleck and Sine, I made reference to squeegeeing the drippings off the floor of the Internet.
But the problem is, so someone took a handwritten, not 10 digits, zero to nine, handwritten, and then put it into an AI program to recursively recreate it somehow.
And they not only degenerated, but they became identical.
And then I realized I had this interesting epiphany.
The markets now are really computers recursively responding to computers, and one could make the argument that it is now generating just complete slop.
Yeah. Yeah. I can totally see that.
And that's like the – I forget what they call it in the AI, like the problem once you get to the point where there's no new data being introduced to the LLMs and they're just using each other's slop as training data.
It completely degenerates to your point.
So I have to teach a double course load this spring. And I used to get fantastic scores. And then we entered the era where anything you say offends someone and they think that that's just unacceptable.
And then that same era occurred when when the students thought that they had the right.
I don't think they have the right even to email anyone that they can get to.
Right. And so they would complain to the dean or to the chair or to to the provost or to the president.
Right. And so I stood up in front. I started sitting in front of the class and say, look, if you Google me, I'm Google toxic, completely Google toxic.
I fought two union movements and they smeared the shit out of me.
So you read about me. I'm just Mao on steroids. Right. And it's now it's even worse.
So and and I said, you know, you could send the chair an email. You could complain.
You could send the dean. You could send the president. But you could also just walk in my office and we can chat.
We'll both be better off for it. And and and then the next day, the chair walks in my office, said he got a complaint.
so I the next day in class I said look you know I don't quite know what to say now someone
complained okay I don't remember saying anything offensive but I do open up with the description
of why I'm toxic and the chair at one point said well why not just start and I said you don't know
what it's like to walk into class with with an internet that says now now it includes you want
you want a good one now it includes the president of the National Jewish Association who I've seen
with Trump on stage called me a Holocaust-denying Nazi.
I called him a pig fucking liar after that.
I didn't actually call him a pig fucking liar.
I once had a lawyer tell me, he said, don't call anyone something that's provable or disprovable.
So call him a douchebag.
Call him a weasel.
Don't call him a liar.
And so what I said was I would never call you a pig fucking liar because I could not defend that statement entirely.
And then I suggested that you take up a hobby like Bukkake, like Harvey Weinstein.
And then I said that alternatively we could have lunch or maybe you could.
And then I put a meme up that says go fuck yourself.
And why was he calling you a holocaust liar?
Because they were going after Tucker and I got caught in the crossfire.
So I did battle with Ted Cruz and Laura Loomer and Mark Levin and Victor Davis Hanson really appalled me.
I thought he was OK guy. He obviously is a whore.
Excuse me. I should use a more vague term.
He obviously is in cahoots with the Christian Zionists.
And I'm not anti-Semitic. I'm not even anti-Israel, although I'm getting closer to the latter because I'm just so fed up with their shit.
They've lost me, put it that way
I was totally agnostic, saying, look, I'm not getting into that fight
Fight amongst yourselves
And then they picked a fight, so I said, okay, okay, whatever
But it took me a while to stop staggering
The blows had me sort of reeling
And it's a little disquieting to watch a senator stand on stage and hammer you
Yeah, it is very odd, the relationship between the politicians and the nation of Israel, specifically
It's not odd, it's very explainable
They're owned
They're all owned
And that's what bothers me
I don't have a problem with supporting Israel the country
I have a problem with the fact that they're doing
They're Israel first, America second
Sorry guys, that's what it looks like
And call me an anti-semi
I'm not an anti-semi
But you may be a pig fucker
I'm sure you've seen the clip of
Greenblatt, the ADL guy
Talking about always monitoring, monitoring US citizens.
Right. Right. And Larry Allison, there's a charmer. And so so you can make all sorts of arguments for supporting Israel. I don't like the ones being made.
So I'm no longer a fan. I'm just you know, I think they whack Charlie Kirk.
I think so
yeah I think the evidence is pretty good
put it this way I believe the evidence is
very good that it wasn't that lone shooter
crap I think the evidence is very
good that Eric is a wackadoodle of
a higher order
and so then all of a sudden
you go I don't even need to know the plot
to know that some big guys
are up to no good and then you say okay
so the wife's laying in a puddle
of blood in the garage the husband
sitting on the couch drinking a beer who are you going to talk
to first? You have no evidence
he did it, but you're going to sit his ass down under the bright lights and say, by the
way, we find your wife in the garage in a puddle of blood.
Why do you think Charlie needed to be taken out?
Interesting question.
It might have even been a showcase.
It might have been saying, don't turn on us, right?
It could have been they actually made sure that it looked bad.
It could be, you know, it seems to me if it was really to win over the youth or deal with
them because of the youth problem, they blew it because I think they've ended up looking
to them.
So there's two questions I keep asking over and over and over.
Did they blow the COVID story?
And did they blow the Gaza story?
So COVID, if their goal was to sort of optimize and get away with the stuff that we shouldn't
know about and make us think that they did the right thing, they blew it.
They completely blew it.
If anyone's listening to this, if you still trust modern medicine, you need a fucking CAT scan.
I consulted for Pfizer for 20 years.
I'm not totally uneducated in this topic.
You need a CAT scan if you trust modern medicine now.
You need a CAT scan if you get another flu vaccine.
They don't do any good, and they can slip in a new technology, and you can find yourself in the ER with a heart attack.
You just don't know.
You don't know.
I mean objectively with the flu vaccine
They've had a negative efficacy
I think that's correct
I think
Have you read Moth in the Iron Lung?
No
You gotta read it
Once in a while I get a book
I go oh that's a must read book
Moth in the Iron Lung
The whole polio story is bullshit
The entire polio story is bullshit
The Moth in the Iron Lung
You can not believe it if you want
But if you read that book
You'll come out believing it
It turns out it was arsenic poisoning
From DDT?
Well, first it starts with arsenic, and then they went to DDT.
Heard something this morning that rattled me a little bit.
FDR got polio when he was 39, and the moth in the iron lung explains why the kids were so susceptible.
So I don't quite know how FDR got it at 39, but what it does is the arsenic and the DDT rot your intestines,
and that lets various pathogens, more than just one virus, get to your spinal cord,
because it goes right past your intestine.
And so the kids were really susceptible
because their spinal cord sticks out a little bit
in the young age brackets.
And poliomyelitis was a paralysis.
It was just a symptom.
That's all it was.
And at the exact same time they started spraying arsenic,
in the exact same place in the world
where they started spraying arsenic, polio showed up.
And they started to sense it.
And they were called anti-arcenicals or something.
They had a name for them, just like in COVID.
So the question is, did they blow the COVID story?
They didn't blow the polio story.
The world still thinks polio was the greatest moment in modern medicine.
I think it was a hoax.
I think people know it.
But if you shoot down that story, then holy shit.
Right?
That's a narrative.
That's the, you know, U.S. saved the world from tyranny in World War II narrative.
You do not want to let that story go.
And I'm even willing to give them that one.
And then I replayed a TED Talk.
I watched it.
Holy shit, that makes sense now.
And then the other question is, have they ever played the October 7th Israel story?
They thought they had moral capital.
They didn't have anywhere near enough moral capital just for what they did.
But is it possible they just said, look, here's the deal.
10 years from now, no one will remember.
And we're going to have what we want if we don't give a shit.
And we've done much worse as a nation.
The United States has done much worse.
Well, then, I mean, did you see Pompeo on stage last week?
No.
Talking about history.
Like, we need to make sure the history of October 7th is written by us.
Who's us?
That's a great question.
But it's, I don't know, it's just very flippant in how we've heard, like,
the history is written by the victors.
And who knows what the actual history is?
Victor Davis Hanson, apparently.
Yeah.
But he was saying, he was saying as it pertains to October 7th, like we're going to write the history.
There's not going to be.
Yeah, but I don't know who the we is.
And all that.
Yeah.
Right.
And by the way, it is completely trivial to make the case that there was a stand on order.
That turned out to be the, I wrote about October 7th.
I wrote a section on Israel.
I left on the cutting floor because I was too punch drunk from fighting Levin and Ted Cruz.
so I wrote about it
I intended to and I thought oh you can kind of
tightrope walk along and you can do it
and if you do it right then no one will get mad
and then I go no they won't
if I say I got gluten in my bagel they'll get mad
get over it
I don't care call me an anti-Semite
because my bagel's got gluten in it
and so I wrote
about it and it turns out
you can make a compelling
case that there was a stand on
order in Israel using Israeli
sources
exclusively Israeli sources
yeah I mean one of them
is in the Bitcoin space now, Efret
oh Efret, I've had a number of chats
with Efret
and she was the first one
boy did she have gonads the size of cantaloupes
she stepped up
like two days later and said
this story is all wrong
well the Egyptian intelligence
told Israel hey it's coming
get out of the way there a problem here the guy who moved the concert to the border moved the troops away from the border By the way if I had asked you two years ago three years ago
whatever, if I had asked you, Hamas drops 800 guys into Israel, how long
would it take for Israel to clean up that mess? You would have said, what, five minutes?
Yeah. I mean, someone described Israel as you can't walk 10 feet without seeing
some young guy with an AR-15.
that somehow Israel just blew it?
There's tons of articles explaining how badly Israel blew it.
No, they didn't.
And once you get inside, you don't run around for eight hours rampaging.
Yeah, that was the weird thing, the response.
It's not weird.
Well, do you believe the stats?
If you want to call that a Holocaust denier,
then I'm going to deny that Holocaust.
You don't know the stats.
It could be as bad as they say.
It could be very little happened.
There's all sorts of – it could be the hostages were living in a Motel 8 getting DoorDash, and they release them.
You just don't know because the lying is so compelling.
And again, I'm sure there's people who are pissed at me.
Fuck you.
I just don't care anymore.
I do not care anymore.
I mean you've been saying that for six years since we've been doing these episodes, maybe seven.
I don't know what we should say.
Well, but I've stayed off of Israel until a Canadian intelligence guy told me, you're trying to understand the world and you're ignoring Israel.
You'll never figure it out if you don't pay attention.
This is a guy who lived in Israel.
And so he gave me some reading material.
And I go, oh, shit.
And so I read it.
And, you know, Mearsheimer, Steve Walt, The Israel Lobby.
That's a must read if you want to understand.
It's a good story.
A guy named Elon Pepe, who wrote a book.
I-L-L-A-N-P-A-P-P-E.
wrote a Palestinian-centric book.
So you say it is biased, no question.
But it didn't seem like a screed.
It seemed like he tried to get it right.
You know, you can kind of smell screed.
And he described the sort of the evolution of the Jewish state starting in the 1920s.
Stuff I didn't know anything about.
and how Jews were moving to the Gaza-Aryan.
We'll just call it Palestine.
They don't like me to call it Palestine, but that's okay.
And it was okay.
It wasn't crazy, but it was causing some tension.
And then there was this one fateful moment,
which Papi didn't make a big deal of,
but I think was a huge deal.
The Brits, it was kind of a British protectorate.
And so the Brits make these stupid rules,
draw stupid borders. They fucked up everything they touched in some ways. They civilized
worlds in some ways. It's kind of a mixed bag.
They took land rules, which in that part of the world is kind of
pseudo Marxist light where the village owned the land.
They changed the rules to private ownership.
The next thing that happened, money flooded from Europe and bought up all the land.
What a shock. A shock phase.
This is the 20s.
This is my shock base right here.
And then all of a sudden, that's when the squeeze started.
Because the European money was way bigger than the Palestinian money.
And did the British change it because of European money saying, change the rules.
We want to go buy it.
And he probably didn't actually go deeply into that topic.
But that may have been an absolutely profound moment in the history of the region.
Yeah. I mean, you mentioned Mearsheimer. I thought his appearance on Tucker last summer was one of my favorites.
He's got balls the size of bowling balls. I mean, he and Walt, on the other hand, is silent.
I think Walt couldn't take the beatings, which I totally understand.
Mearsheimer's out there just fighting. He's like Dave Smith with a Ph.D.
Well, he was big on the Ukraine stuff, too. Right. In the beginning, he's very important.
When I wrote about Ukraine, Mearsheimer was big.
Greenwald was big.
Max Blumenthal was big on both.
So I find about 40 people who are writing honestly about Ukraine.
It's hard to find that many people writing honestly about Israel.
But there's plenty of Palestinians who don't like them, that's for sure.
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Well, there was a big focus on Tucker
in your letter this year.
Why that?
Because I got beat up because of it.
So it would have been a story of just how fun it was,
but then what happened is it then spun out of control
when I made the mistake of basically paraphrase
quoting George Patton,
in which I said you could make the argument
we should have...
The mistake I said of saying the word Hitler,
I should have said fascists.
A Jewish friend of mine said, Dave, anything but Hitler.
But Patton basically got the end of the war, and I essentially paraphrased him almost verbatim, which he said.
I hate to say this, but I realized that we should have fought Stalin instead.
We picked the wrong guy to back.
We should have fought Stalin, right?
I did a podcast with Dinah West, who wrote American Betrayal.
and in the podcast with her I said well you know the Jews might not agree with this but one could
argue we should have fought Stalin not Hitler and she said well I am a Jew and I do agree
and then she attacked me and I go what's that about well she gets beat up she's gotten beat
up a lot I think she was just scampering away from live live fire I forgave her I was I was
disappointed. Then Victor Davis Hanson
went at me, made three important points, all of which were wrong,
wrong, wrong. Here's a historian who I can demonstrably
show is wrong. And he kept making
them. And he kept calling me out. I go, Victor, I don't trust your
motives now. And then people started sending me emails
saying he's been doing this shit for years.
this is you your opinion on before was wrong i thought he was a great guy
they said no you had that part wrong then some guy wrote a blog picking on victor and it wasn't
a screed again i hate screeds i don't need to hear screeds i like to write them but i don't hear
um and he basically said that victor's arguments were so disingenuous they were just not honest
arguments. So I had to take Victor down point by point by point. Laura Loomer, who is it? Mark Levin,
who Tucker counterattacked pretty hard. I referred to as a rabid. I think I referred to him as human
adjacent and a rabid bobcat in heat, I think I called him, and that he'd be selling falafels on
the street corner if he wasn't pro-Israel 24-7. Ted Cruz, I described Tucker eviscerating him
in an interview. I don't know if you saw that interview. That's a must-see interview. Tucker
just- I watched that one. You would never want to be taken out by Tucker. If he decides to go at
you, you are dead meat because he has the linguistic skills and he has the knowledge base to tear you.
And he made Cruz look terrible.
And so I referred to Ted Cruz as the state senator, the senator from the state of Israel.
And then I referred to Laura Loomer as the master of click baiting.
And then I shortened it to master master baiter.
And then I said, we know what you are.
We're just trying to figure out the price.
And I've heard rumor at $7,000 for every happy ending.
and that is in fact the price that supposedly netanyahu was paying his influencers
that was loosely verified right i think so nor do i care at this point i'm willing to lie if
they're willing to lie i'll lie but but i i'm trying not to lie but but i don't lose a lot of
sleep and someone i picked on gates and my a copy editor all my shit's being bound by bob moriarty
and a copy editor said i don't think you're totally fair with gates and i said well my quote's correct
And then I gave him like 10 points of White Gates is so hateable.
And I said, there is no chance I'm cutting him one millimeter of slack.
Is it Bill Gates or Matthew Gates?
Bill Gates.
Yeah.
He used what I said was he used the word vaccine and reduced population in the same sentence.
And it was unclear what he meant.
Now, I can make the counter argument.
I can say what he's saying is with vaccines, you don't have to have 20 kids to have three survive.
And therefore, you don't have to have 20 kids.
Right. And therefore, you can reduce the population.
But that's it wasn't clear what he was saying.
His father is a famous eugenicist.
The book's on it.
Yes. And so I said, no, not giving him the break because he's also a douchebag.
And so Epstein level douchebag.
And so my copy editor was saying, no, I think it's vague and it's not clear what he's saying here.
And I'm going, I don't care.
He said, reduce population and vaccine in the same sentence, which is exactly the way I phrased it.
But it was much shorter this year because I ran out of gas.
I ran out of time.
And I've run out of patience for not being able to figure out what's truth now.
and I'm trying to figure out
I had to go through 17 years of year and reviews
this year because Moriarty's binding all of them. On his dime, he's paying a copy
editor to copy edit him and prep him. On his dime
and I get the proceeds.
It's an estimated 3,500 pages.
It's got to be three volumes at least.
It's 15 volumes.
so you're going to do individual?
Well, there are 300 pages apiece
except for the first couple of years.
So 9 through 12 is a volume.
13, 14 is a volume.
It turns out 21,
where I don't even know how I did it,
550 pages.
Now, this is not computer printout pages.
This is book pages.
But 550 book pages is three volumes,
but I'm not counting those three.
So it's actually 17 volumes by that model.
And I don't remember.
I don't know how I do it.
I don't.
I get in this writing mode.
And I just get in this zone starting around September.
And then just you can't get through the shell.
I'm just I'm just there.
I'm paying attention to nothing else in my life.
Well, somebody who's severed from writer's block for the last two months, I envy that ability because.
Well, I don't have it now.
So don't envy it now because because I really did.
I was just unable.
And then I realized I said, you have to write about Tucker.
You can't leave that shit out there uncontested.
You've got to write that.
And I said, you've got a great story on finance.
Just leave the other shit on the floor.
And so the stuff I think is fun.
Like what I notice is, I know I'm rambling here, but what I notice is.
Shocker.
I know.
Well, it's better than the guy you sit there and you get monosyllabic answers from and you're trying to figure out a price I'm out of them.
So reading the 17 years, I can see trends that I never would have noticed.
And so I can see like one thing that's really noticeable is in 2015, which I focus on in this year's write up in the finance section.
2015, according to legends of finance, we were staring into the abyss yet again.
I mean, we're talking Greenspan, Sandruck and Miller, Howard Marks, you know, famous, famous guys saying we are so fucked.
How did we do this again? How did we do this already? It's horrible monetary policy.
And by 16, they were talking about the horrors of NERP and ZERP and all that shit and how we are just going to have an apocalyptic finish.
And then I show the returns over the next 10 years and they're ridiculously good.
and the rhetorical question for which I have a very firm belief is
did they get it wrong or are we that much more fucked
and my math and I do in a podcast I challenge people
I said look come at me if you don't agree with what I'm saying
but I think we are so far out over our skis now that
you know it's like oh my god you know there has been an earthquake in California
200 years ago move sell your house
get the fuck out of there
right?
because it's coming
well is that what precious metals are telling us right now?
that's the question
what do you think?
I think something's definitely going on
so you don't think it's just a mania meme thing?
no
no not at all
I think there's a mad dash for these hard assets
by big money
yeah I mean
it's not Dave and Marty
no but I know
you've been on shows with Tom
and you've talked to him.
Tom, Luongo Tom.
Yeah, Tom Luongo.
His whole theory that we're
trying to break away from the city of London
and the Davos.
Tom is so knowledgeable.
I've asked a lot of people about the city of London
and there are some real smart guys who talk
like Tom.
I don't understand it yet. I asked Tom
if there's one book I can
read to get started or something.
But there are some really smart guys
who talk about the city of London. I asked Steve Hank
in two podcasts actually, who's a currency expert.
You are now connected.
Steve was the advisor to two presidents of Venezuela.
You think his phone's ringing off the hook right about now?
And I asked him about the city of London
and this idea that they're sort of a financial powerhouse.
He said, no.
He said, New York's 90% of the world's financial system.
I don't even pay attention to the city of London.
So who's right?
It doesn't mean Steve's right.
It doesn't mean Tom's wrong, but I just don't know.
Regardless if you believe in the city of London theory, I think there's definitely something going on.
I've always said – I've said this for a while.
I think you've been following it too.
I think Japan has always been the canary in the coal mine first to do crazy quantitative easing, monetization of –
So yesterday, yesterday in the Twitter spaces, Japan carry trade came up.
I remember it was about a year ago when both their long-term and short-term rates started climbing.
And now they're 30 or something like 3.5%.
I mean, that's ridiculous.
And after about four days of market turmoil, everything settled down and everyone said, oh, the carry trade is now over.
And I go, no.
No, you don't have a 20-year carry trade where people speculate with free money and then raise rates,
raise short-term and long-term rates that much
and not have teeth flying around the studio, right?
Yeah.
That wasn't it.
So how are they holding it together?
There's got to be a carry trade disaster out there.
I imagine.
That's why I think people are flocking to these.
How are they keeping the balls in the air?
I have no idea.
Is that maybe other central banks flooding the zone
without telling us?
No, maybe there's swap lines that are out there
that we're unaware of.
or maybe it's just they're just hard coding computers to say,
don't wear everything's fine.
I don't know.
I don't either.
But I do know the Japanese carry trade, which, again,
people borrowed at zero interest to speculate on huge scale.
And now those interest rates go up.
There's no way that there's not fatalities.
There should be corpses in the street.
Well, I think that's the big question, particularly with silver.
Like, are these I saw TD had a big silver short trade.
They got blown out.
TD Asset Management?
TD?
I think it was...
My old fraternity brother was CEO of TD Asset Management.
I didn't know he wasn't a douchebag.
I thought he was just like the other 40 clowns I lived with.
TD Securities.
They're all derived from the same.
I think they're all spinoffs.
So he runs a family office now, whatever those are.
And so they got blown out on a silver trade?
What happened?
They had to close.
TD Securities on Wednesday said in a model portfolio update publication that it closed a short silver position after prices hit its exit level at $93.15.
They had to have been hurt by that one.
Yeah.
But the question is, are they magnitudes?
Right?
But remember in 08-09, I wrote about 08-09 in 2002.
And everyone says, oh, too early is wrong.
I go, fuck you.
If I predict the Dow is going to drop 100 points and I'm two years early, I'm wrong.
If you predict the entire world is going to implode into its foundation like Building 7 in 2002 and it takes five years, you're dead right.
So one time Paul Kodrosky said, too early is wrong.
and I sent him my 2002, May 6, 2002,
if you want to be precise,
write up five pages on why the banking system
was going to collapse.
That probably beats Rubini for fuck's sake, right?
And I said, was I too early or was I wrong?
And he writes back to me,
he says, you are brilliantly correct.
And so the only thing I got wrong
was I thought JP Morgan was going to go down too.
But I predicted GE and all that shit.
And it's on the internet.
I posted the email unredacted, unmodified, unedited, on the internet.
It was sent to Rick Sherwin Goldman Sachs.
He can attest to the authenticity if someone wants to really challenge it.
And yet it took five years.
Even though I wasn't doing the math, I was just reading shit by smart guys.
Well, that's – I mean I think that's the big question right now.
Like is this ramp up in gold, silver, platinum, copper prices, uranium streaming too?
Is it a product of something blowing up on the back end or is it a recognition that we're going to this multipolar world and people are simply –
Or both.
Or both, yeah.
Well, so my point that I totally lost track of was that when it finally started to break, one of the early cracking noises where you're on ice, you go –
you hear this crack and you go, what was that?
Right?
I tell, as a parent, I can tell you,
I was terrified my kids would go out on a frozen pond.
I read them the riot act so many times about how you go from being fine to dead in five minutes And in the first cracking were a couple internal hedge funds at Bear Stearns
Now the real estate market had already rolled over
a year earlier.
I told my class in March of 2007, middle class
with like Tourette's syndrome, right?
Just blurted out to them, I said,
I think the banking system's about to collapse now.
And they all looked at me like,
What are you talking about?
I said, yeah, I actually think the system's just going to go kaplooey.
I think we're right now on the cusp.
But the Bear Stearns hedge funds were like this.
Oh, $600 million hedge funds.
I said, who cares?
That's pocket change.
But it wasn't pocket change because the risk is not some event.
Those are triggers.
The risk is the overvaluation.
Overvaluation is always the problem.
The market is not equipped to handle any sort of concussive blow.
And when it's overvalued, it's like a Jenga tower.
Well, that's a big question.
How big is the air pocket between what the values are perceived to be and what they actually are right now?
Well, I think here's the crazy, and this is why I call it the complacency bubble.
I don't think I'm first used the term, but I'm first to squeal at the top of my lungs like a rabid Bobcat and eat.
And I caught the complacency bubble because do you think there's anyone who thinks the markets are stable?
They're in good shape.
They're fair value.
They're not insane.
Well, if we actually have a productivity boom driven by AI and the tariff regime is working out well.
And how many decades will that take?
I have no idea.
That's a theory out there.
Oh, so on the Twitter space yesterday, Brendan Eich showed up.
And that was great because I wanted to talk to Brendan Eich.
We've had phone calls, but I wanted to talk to him.
Brendan, pre-IPO Netscape, founded Mozilla Firefox, wrote JavaScript, founded Brave.
This guy knows Silicon Valley.
This guy knows his shit.
And we were talking about this shit.
Now, here's what I'll tell you is most people, you can hear so many people say the valuations are insane.
Don't give me this insane shit.
Give me a fucking number.
Give me a number.
Don't be a pussy.
Give me a number.
Insane could be 30%.
The number I give is 200%.
And it's real easy to document.
And I'm not pumping my year in review, but I got to say it.
If you read the financial section of my year in review, you should shit your thong.
I left it all in the field this year.
I said, okay, if I'm never going to write this thing again, you better get this financial part right this year.
There's no one who doesn't think we're screwed.
But here's the problem.
They think the Fed's going to save us because they've always saved us.
And I don't think they're going to save us.
I think they're going to stand back and say, okay, they've got their fingers in the dikes.
Forget Liz Cheney. Move on.
Well, you phrased it, I think, like creative demolition, not creative destruction.
That's right.
What do you mean by that?
Well, they've just – I needed a new word.
Creative demolition sounded good.
If you – here are the merits of a bubble, and you know the drill.
I mean, let's hypothetically say Bitcoin's a bubble.
It generated fantastic improvements in technology, right?
The blockchain, the evolution, the working through the details.
And then, of course, it could be, and I don't want to turn this into a Bitcoin podcast, but it could be the foundations of total authoritarianism.
Don't fall for the Catherine Austin Fitt stuff, not Bitcoin, maybe crypto.
By the way, you should check my Twitter feed.
A retweet I did with some guy who claims to have been Europe's first Bitcoin something or other.
And he wrote this very long, it's probably my highest tweet because I did it this morning.
Very long discussion of the mathematics of Bitcoin that I'm not qualified to evaluate, but you are.
And he talks about why the Bitcoin price must mathematically keep going up.
and I know you're going, of course, that's what I'm rooting for,
but he makes the case that it's not mathematically possible for it to keep doing it,
that there's a ceiling coming.
And this guy looks like he's a devout hodler.
If you – I am very sympathetic and like almost wholly convinced of the power law,
the power trend adoption curve that Bitcoin's on.
Clarify that. Clarify that.
Basically what we're experiencing with Bitcoin is similar to the internet network adoption, which followed a power trend, a power law trend.
Right.
And you can put the price on a power trend too.
And basically it's how networks are adopted.
Right.
There's a name for that law.
What's the name for the law?
It's not Godwin's law.
That's calling in Hitler.
there's a name for that
I forget
Goodwin or something
I don't know
the guy's name who wrote the screen
you ought to read it for no other reason
to make sure that he's a nutcase
rather than trying to tell you something important
his name is Justin Bones
B-O-N-S
he says he's Europe's oldest cryptocurrency
that dude's a quack
oh is that right?
I didn't even read the whole thing
I just know that
I just know that he went to a lot of trouble to write this statement.
He was like a big blocker back in the day.
He wanted us, like the whole Bcash, Bitcoin Cash, Roger Ver, he was like part of that.
He's all butthirty to go in his direction.
He's been saying Bitcoin's failed for like a decade now, and it's gone up in pricing.
Well, I wasn't telling you this to tell you you're a douchebag, but rather just to alert you to this existence of this statement.
So in any case, so the silver question is, is it a big enough market to cause trouble beyond just those who are short silver?
Right. And and it could be because the Bear Stearns hedge funds were not very big looking either.
So. So. So, you know, an M80 is not a problem unless you're standing in nitroglycerin and then it can become a problem.
and so I just don't know.
Do you think this really is a, you know, the COMEX, the scheming,
the shit is finally broken and silver is finally price discovering?
Is that sort of the way you describe it?
I mean, I'm not going to pretend to be an expert on like the paper trade
and those theories, but I mean, there's obviously price discovery going on right now.
And I do think it's legitimate.
Central banks.
Yeah, and I listened to the Forward Guidance podcast today with this guy, Alex Campbell.
He was the ex-commodities head at Bridgewater, and he was putting together – he's been putting together a silver thesis for like the last two years.
seems explaining it, you factor in supply above ground and then the industrial use cases
of it and the demand for it as a reserve asset, particularly from China.
Do you think the tier one asset designation, there's not only a tier one asset designation
Basel III, but there's also, there was a decision out of India that said they can now
use it in various retirement accounts that
they're now legitimate so that those accounts can diversify into commodities.
So there are geopolitical moves to bring
precious metals into the investment world.
I think it's not only that too. You just look at the
just the debt system as well.
You need a natural hedge to that
If you're looking at not only the dead system, but SWIFT and the sanctions and the confiscating of sovereign assets.
By the way, those sanctions against Russia could turn out to be the blasting cap.
They could turn out to be the sanctions against Russia and confiscating their assets could have changed the course of history in ways that whichever dildo in the Biden administration, Dingleberry in the Biden administration, came up with that should potentially be scolded.
Yes.
That might have been a disaster.
I think we'll look back and that'll be a marker as maybe the definitive moment, the dollar reserve system as we knew it ended, right?
Yeah, I was in my fourth turning section.
I wrote a fourth turning section.
I went through a dozen – Grant Williams and Adam Taggart were talking about fourth turning.
When I first read fourth turning, it turns out I didn't know that Wall Street was already all over it.
I think it was in 2009 I wrote about Fourth Turning, maybe 2010.
I got an email from a friend, Einhorn, who oftentimes I mention him but won't say who he is.
He said, what do you think of the Fourth Turning?
I said, well, I'm only half done.
There's that.
It says that, now I've got to read it.
Then I got an email about two weeks later.
He said, well, what do you think?
I go, oh, fuck, now I've really got to read it.
And apparently tons of hedge fund men were passing that around and talking about it in a big way.
And it's a pretty good model.
It's holding up pretty well.
And Strauss and Howe really unbelievably prescient sort of predictions in 96 that it would come around 2010.
It would probably be triggered by a financial crisis.
But then the shit would start hitting the fan in a big way.
And boy, did this shit start hitting the fan.
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Did you see this?
Another stat came out today.
The average hiring age last year in the United States?
No, I haven't seen that.
Age of the average new hire last year.
What do you think it was?
Well, what's the old one?
Give me the old one.
I don't know the old one.
Well, you got to know that.
It's got to be a trend, right?
That's a good point.
I would say that in the last 20 years, it's probably gone up by a factor of five.
Last year was 42.
Hiring age? First job hiring age?
Average new hire. It's a new hire.
Is new hire meaning a new job or the person's first job?
I think a new job. You've got job openings. What is the average age?
So they're not hiring the kids then is the gist.
Yes. That was the point I'm getting to. It seems very clear.
there's this generational divide and the young ones are going to slice our throats.
That's going to be a H.L. Mencken moment where he says sometimes you just got to get out the
knives and start slicing throats. I made a strong case about that this year, too, where I said,
look, you've got a generation here who you gave iPhones, turned their brains to mush.
You then got them deeply into debt with student debt that was to get a degree of no value promising them that that's all they needed was a sheepskin.
The debt's not dispensable.
I've several times underscored the fact that the student loan, the student debt, took off like a scalded dog in 2008 and asked sort of a rhetorical question, is it possible that student debt was used as a monetary policy?
And I think that's a good question.
Just like, you know, they said we need a housing bubble to get us out of this thing, right?
They said, look, we'll create a housing bubble and that will liquefy the banking system.
I think they use student debt to liquefy the banking system in 08.
A trillion five.
Yeah, because you take your student loans.
Obviously, you pay for your tuition.
That feeds the middle management of the universities.
Which just brings money.
Loans.
Loans create money.
Yeah.
Right?
Loans create money.
So this generation, meanwhile, the men of this generation have been told that they're evil, that everything's their fault.
If they should somehow make the mistake of going to second base without asking for a signed contract, that they will somehow be prosecuted, that they are misogynists and being a man is a horrible thing.
And so now you've got men who
One of my grad students
Who's a sweetheart of a guy
Very impressive guy
Never dates anyone for very long
But he's not a hound dog
He just, it's just like, no, I don't need it
He says the dating sites are all liberal women
And I said, and that's because
All the conservative women get grabbed off and married
And he said, yeah, probably.
So he was dating a chick who was like super liberal for about six months.
And then he got a job and she started talking about moving with him.
He said, no, we're done now.
And the liberal women are just appalled at the men because the men now don't want them.
And Adam Carolla really said it great.
He said, you got to watch Adam Carolla.
Keep an eye on him.
He's really doing a great job.
He's awesome.
I'm trying to get him on the show.
Oh, that would be a big win.
Way better than Colm, I can tell you that much.
Adam pointed out that, look, we empowered women, which is great, but we didn't empower them to be assholes.
So now they go, oh, now we get to do this.
No one likes that, though.
No one wants you to run around just being a bitch.
We're seeing that in Minnesota with the ICE protest in the last couple of weeks.
Right, the chick who got shot in the face.
Yeah.
So we empowered women to be assholes.
And the fact of the matter is, you know, that doesn't really work well.
One of, if you look at male, female, I have a genetics major.
I love evolution.
So I look at humans through hunter-gatherer lens because that's what we evolved as.
I was walking through to get into the mall with my wife, and she just all of a sudden stops cold and starts fondling a blouse.
I go, guys, don't do that.
They don't fondle shit.
You know, when you go grocery shopping, do you read the ingredients?
You just throw shit in the cart as fast as you get through.
You're hunting mastodon for fuck's sake, right?
You're really trying to get out of that.
Get the kill.
Get out of there.
It's a dangerous place.
Savannah's not a place to hang out.
Get the thing.
Get through the checkout and get out of there.
And your wife's sitting there looking over like this, staring at shit, reading the ingredients.
I go, you don't know what that even means.
You don't know what that shit is.
and so
the women
the way they succeed
historically as hunter-gatherers
they've got a very difficult task
they need to find a spouse
and someone will say
no we don't
I go okay if you want to terminate your gene line
then don't have kids
but you know 4 billion years
all of a sudden it's become a failure
you just broke the branch of your tree
and I'm not saying everyone should have kids
But there is a reason why they gave us a dick, you know, and the way they've got this terrible task of finding a guy who's strong, a protector, a provider who doesn't beat the fuck out of them.
Right. And that's a knife edge that you've got to find.
And the way you do that is you tame the men using your guile, your cunning, because they can destroy you at will.
So you have to destroy their soul somehow.
And tell me, you've been married long enough.
You know what soul destruction can look like on a bad day.
And yet somehow they seem to have lost that.
And they seem like, no, we just treat them like shit all the time.
I go, well, they won't want to hang out with you.
Yeah, and that's a crisis that is building as well in the background.
So now –
When they get to like 35, 40, no partner, no kids, and then 40 more years left of life.
And you see the videos on YouTube and stuff where some chick is hotter than a pistol at 40 and she's going, I can't find a guy.
I go, well, based on your face, it's not your physical attributes.
Let's start there.
So then what happens is this generation who is now beaten like a rented mule, right?
This generation has been beaten down.
They have no chance of buying a goddamn house.
You know how they say we got to lower rates so they can afford houses?
There's a plot in my year and review that shows that over the last 20 years, the average age of first-time homebuyers is not only now 31, but it rose linearly.
Actually, over the last 40 years, I think the plot is.
I can't remember, many decades.
How's that?
It's risen monotonically.
And I'm going, let me see if I got this right.
It's got, the average age is getting higher and higher and higher, meaning people can't afford to buy first houses.
While the interest rates monotonically dropped, and you're telling me lower rates will make houses more affordable.
How is that possible?
The point being is, as you lower the rates, the price of the house not only goes up, but appears to go up higher.
or their jobs are just sucking linearly worse or both.
Yeah.
I mean, people.
Right there.
That's the age of the first time homebuyer.
What's the beginning year?
I can't see it from my vantage point.
What's the first year in that?
1980 or something?
Let me see.
It is.
Here I go.
Look at that chart right there.
Go around.
Look at that.
Right.
That's student debt.
Look at the GFC.
You telling me that student debt took off just by chance?
That's monetary policy for fuck's sake.
That's a great point.
This started in 1981 or 1980.
So for four decades, while rates monetarily dropped,
which allowed us to crank on an economy hard by dropping rates the average age went up You telling me okay now we should lower rates to make housing more affordable
It didn't work for 40 years.
Then you have the home prices here.
Right.
So the home prices outraced the dropping rates.
Now, here's the deal.
So these guys have gotten fucked.
They're now deeply in debt.
They're earning $25K as a barista because they majored in sociology.
They can't get married.
Of course, male baristas are probably gay anyways.
But they can't – they then are now – they're talking about lowering the rates and putting out 50-year mortgages.
Tell me that wasn't a lead balloon.
Holy moly.
That landed like a brick.
You know when the 30-year mortgage was invented?
This is entertaining.
It was.
The 1930s.
Yes.
Right.
After the great to make cars, houses more affordable.
Yep.
Right.
Did it work?
I don't know.
So in any event, so now what we're going to do, why would you, why would you lower rates
so low that they can afford it now?
So that the boomers can get out of their houses without taking any kind of loss.
So they're now going to, by going to super low rates, they're going to make houses stay
way overpriced so that this younger generation can yet again get totally fucked.
because they'll own a house they paid too much for,
and then rates will find a way to climb because they will.
They will.
They flat out always do.
Bonds become very expensive.
They'll get cheap again.
And we're going to hump them again.
Well, I mean, going back to you asked me for a reference point
for the average age of a new hire,
and 2022 is 40.5 years old.
So three years went up a year and a half to 42.
And, like, if you factor that into what you're just describing now,
It's like the younger kids aren't even getting the jobs to even be able to potentially buy a house that's going up.
They don't want to get married, so we got a 1.6 birth production rate, which means our demographics are sliding.
I actually don't have a problem with that.
I think in some sense Japan leads the world by their demographic story being dealt with.
So Japan now apparently is depressing because everyone is old.
But they have muscled their way through the shifting demographics.
So they're the closest to being done with the demographic downswing.
The rest of the countries are just starting it.
Demographics is a big part of economics.
Well, and to think that anybody is going to be able to do what Japan did by weathering the demographic storm is a bit naive.
No chance.
Because they have cultural homogeneity.
Exactly.
In agriculture, that does not exist.
Exactly.
You're not going to have ice battles in the street in Japan.
No.
And God, the fourth turning is rolling.
It's right on schedule.
It is so right on schedule.
How bad do you think it's going to get is the question.
You're going to wish you could move out of the country?
I'm not leaving.
I'm not leaving either.
I'm too old for this shit.
I actually just moved.
I don't know if you know this, but I moved back home to the Philadelphia area.
where I was born and raised. My wife was too.
Getting closer to my roots, back to the Shire.
Is Philadelphia area, is it in the burbs or is it in Philadelphia?
In the burbs.
My son was in Philadelphia.
What part? You get a pen?
Best I can tell, it was in the most ghetto-y part imaginable.
We took the wrong turn and we ended up in the Philly hood pretty fast.
He was probably in Fairmount by North Philly or West Philly.
I don't remember. All I know is I wanted to get him out of there. My son's gay and he was hanging out a rough gay crowd.
You know, too many drugs, that sort of thing. And so so I had a meeting in Philadelphia.
He's a musician. I had a meeting in Philadelphia.
And so I went down to the meeting and my goal was to get him out of Philadelphia.
So I basically said to him, here's the deal. Philadelphia sucks.
living in the ghetto sucks
and I said
why don't you ask
anywhere you want
you would like to live
Aspen, Deer Valley, you name it
ski resort, I don't care
I will help you get there, help you get set up
get out of Philadelphia
and he said okay
my elder said
you are the whisperer dad
that was amazing. I said, well, I pretty much made an offer. He couldn't refuse.
What year was this?
Oh, this is probably 10 years ago. He's now totally settled in. He's now totally behaved,
but I was worried he was going to become a junkie. Actually. It's just the risks were too high.
There are a Philly was the per capita of the country for a while there. So,
yeah. So I wanted to get him out of there. And so now, now he's in Boston. He's in an artist co-op.
You want a good deal? He's got a thousand square foot apartment in a beautiful neighborhood. You can walk around all night there near the convention center, and he pays $900 a month.
Damn. Damn. Damn.
The bank run on the bank of debt is not as bad as it could be, I'll tell you.
I still help him.
Ironically, he's in Philadelphia today because there is...
I shouldn't say this because the auction's not over,
but he thinks he spotted an early Italian violin buried in an auction.
What is the...
What is the auction over?
I don't know.
I just know he went down to see the thing to make sure that he wasn't bidding on bullshit.
I wonder if my wife's been big into auctions as well.
I think I know the auction house he may be at in Port Richmond.
Well, this is literally just an estate auction.
Yeah.
It is not Theresia or anything like that.
This is actually a fascinating topic, building on what we were.
We're in the process of buying a new house.
We're in a rental now.
We've got to furnish it.
It's much bigger than the rental.
We've just been taking advantage of it.
How many square feet?
I don't know square feet.
Six bedrooms.
Six bedrooms?
With an office.
Okay, so you're still banging your wife then.
Yeah, we've got three.
We've had another kid since we last talked as well.
Really?
Yeah.
Jesus Christ.
It's time to tie the tubes, dude.
No, no, no.
Never, never.
You just said we had a fertility crisis.
Somebody's got to go to work.
This is true, but you don't have to solve it single-handedly.
Well, I'm going to try. I'm kidding.
No, but he's a state auction. This is weird.
The kids don't want the parents' heirlooms.
We're getting stuff on pennies on the house.
Oh, no. So when I was a kid, I was a collector.
There's a collector gene, I think.
I think some kids just love to collect.
So I collected coins and stamps.
I collected stamps from age 8 to 12 and sold my collection for $1,400.
That's a pretty good price tag back in 81.
It turns out I sold it at the peak.
It was the peak of the stamp market.
You want to see a bear market?
Look at stamp collecting.
You can't find a stamp collector who's under 80 years old at this point.
There's just 0.0 interest.
I've talked to dealers saying, what would rejuvenate this market?
What would define a bottom in philately, which sounds like sexually active people?
And and they just don't know.
They don't see a generation coming.
So the very high end stuff gets bought because you got boomers with money who still collected.
But but I then bought a house and I went to furnish it.
And I started going to just garage sales and shit because I had no money after I bought the house.
which by the way, after one year at Cornell, I could buy a house back in 1981,
even though interest rates were 17%. Why? Because they were cheap.
And then, and then I started going to barn sales and stuff.
I started seeing something. I go, really, I can buy that,
that 150 year old chair for how many bucks. Right.
And then I was going to buy this Victorian couch and then I decided against it.
And then I bought this Pennsylvania Dutch blanket chest.
I realized I'm a grunge guy.
I'm a painted furniture grunge guy.
I'm not Victorian.
That's way not right for me.
So buying this one blanket chest was kind of a turning point for me.
So my house is filled with high boys and slant front desks and things like that, 18th century stuff.
And it's worth a fraction of what I paid.
But I like it.
Is it because the younger generations don't appreciate it?
Because we're buying stuff.
I like the old stuff because it's built better.
Oh, I can find you a walnut, 18th century walnut desk that is cheaper than the cost of the walnut. That's how crazy it is. And it is because the younger generation A has no money, B is not forming households, and C, the whole country craze, which was huge when I was young.
that the whole building a household was on the back of a country living craze
and so you'd open up you know better homes and gardens and you'd see
you know furnishings with with painted furniture and stuff in it and um and and and so i i was at
a high boy i was i was at a philadelphia antique show um i'm seeing a guy named david scorse she's
a very famous dealer, very famous dealer actually. And, and I was looking at a high boy and I said,
I said, you know, back in, back in, you know, three, three decades ago, that high boy at a
Withington auction would cost three times that. And he says, that's exactly right. Exactly right.
So yeah, you can pick, I see, I see stuff sell at auction. I can't believe I go, oh my God,
My eyes are watering.
We just bought some 15th century,
like original sketches for dirt cheap.
I forget the artist.
My wife's doing that.
I don't know that market.
I now do know the violin market better.
I bought,
I bought my son a 1735 Carlo Antonio Testore violin.
I remember,
I think two or three episodes of you,
you had just bought that.
Right.
And,
and I,
and,
And he went on a, I sent him to Europe.
Actually, he paid for it.
I don't remember quite how.
There's probably some bank of debt in there.
And he traveled Europe for about six weeks.
And the entire housing of his trip cost $2,700.
He managed to live cheap and hostels and stuff.
And he went to every dealer, every auction house,
every museum all across Europe, just a nonstop tour.
and one of the last two days he went to a Terezio auction,
which is the biggest auctioneer in the world.
And there was this violin.
He said, this is the one right here.
And he bought it.
And it's just, it's a great, great violin.
When I buy antiques, what I notice is that the,
your opinion of the antique,
the day you bring it home either goes up or down.
It just doesn't hold fixed.
You think you got the right thing and you go,
oh, look at the blemish.
Oh, that's been repainted.
Oh, that's been restored.
Or you go, oh, that's just a fucking beauty, and this is just – he thinks it's just the greatest violin.
So that's good because he could be full of shit, but at least he's happy about it.
Yeah.
No, that's the – it is – if you're out there, you're listening, and you're looking for durable, good stuff.
As Dave just mentioned, you may not like it when you bring it home, but I think you'll have a good success rate if you spend some time into it.
It was great, and I didn't get to use it because I cut the year short.
But the new president, I think it's of Sweden, was the former CEO of IKEA.
And someone posted the funniest thing.
They said, we're now waiting with bated breath, watching him put together his cabinet.
That's a good one.
That was a good one.
I put out a tweet the other day that got like 20,000, which I stole.
But people think I came up with this.
Oh, yeah, whatever.
And I said, if you're sitting in public and someone sits down next to you, just stare straight ahead and say, did you bring the money?
Did you see Rudy Haven't Seen Sweet?
They went bananas.
He showed footage of Erica Kirk walking on a stage with fireworks.
And he says, you know, if I died, I'd worry my wife got married right away.
I wouldn't expect pyrotechnics.
That's right.
And it just went totally viral.
And so I got the $299,000, and I gave it one last nudge.
I said, can't we get Rudy to $300,000 on this tweet?
But that created, I believe that was the beginning of the Erica Kirk memes.
Because after that, my Twitter feed was just filled with pyrotechnics and Erica Kirk memes.
What is your theory there?
Oh, I think she's totally MKUltra.
Totally.
Yeah.
I think she's – when I say MKUltra, for those who don't know how sick this world is, MKUltra is where they grab you when you're maybe five years old and they brainwash you and they turn you schizophrenic.
They reassemble your personality.
They torture you like a North Korean might in a POW camp.
And then they – it's a born identity, and they train you to do shit.
And I think Erica Kirk was –
Wasn't that confirmed?
Wasn't Ted Kaczynski?
Ted Kaczynski was.
Charles Manson may have been
David Berkowitz
was part of a satanic cult
Kamala was a
I think Kamala was
I was bird dogging that story
and then a person who spent three years
studying MKUltra
Time Magazine
Bureau Head of Europe
her mother got nailed by it
she found out
and so she dropped her job and started studying it
and she said Kamala has all the traits
and the trait I see most that really jumps out at me,
I've seen in many victims, including a couple,
I was on a Zoom call with Kathy O'Brien.
You ought to get some of these guys on your call.
Logan, take notes.
Yeah, I can get you their emails.
So I was on a Zoom call with Kathy O'Brien and Juliet Angle
and what you notice is they have exceedingly flat personalities
and I had long chats with Nick Bryan
who wrote the Franklin scandal, which Nick's one of the most scholarly guys of them all,
studying the shit.
I don't know if they all have it, but I once watched a TED Talk by a chick talking about
why pedophilia is a sexual choice.
It's just a sexual preference.
And I was watching her, and within 30 seconds I go, this chick's been trafficked.
Traffic doesn't just mean you were turned into a hooker.
Traffic really means that CIA-quality brainwashing was involved.
so you watch Erica Kirk and there's just nothing there
there's nothing under the hood that makes any sense
and then it gets really weird
so I was going to write about Charlie Kirk
but it led back to Israel
and I was so sick of fighting the Zionists
I go I don't need to write about Charlie Kirk
and then I had some rabid Zionists on my Twitter feed
saying you don't have any evidence that Israel did it
and I go no I don't have evidence
or if I do, I'll present it on my terms at my time.
And he just kept pestering me.
I go, I don't need to deal with you, you shit.
I just don't need this kind of crap.
I watched Candace Owens' battle.
I go, do I want to spend the next 15 years of my life doing that?
No.
Do I want to be Nick Fuentes?
No.
And so I kind of backed away.
I feel like a pussy.
I actually do feel like a pussy.
You got to decide what to focus your time on, right?
That's right.
So Erica Kirk, everything's wrong with that story.
And I think she knew he was going to be whacked.
I think the marriage was fake.
I don't even think they were married.
They did a podcast together one day and they were taking questions from the internet.
And Charlie says, oh, here's an easy one.
He says, he asked two questions, but the critical one was, what year did you get married?
Now, they've been married for four years.
if I asked your wife what year she got married,
she'd be able to answer that fucking question, right?
Especially four years into it.
My wife has now suppressed it.
It's now a suppressed memory.
She's trying to forget it.
But it is 40 years ago as of this month.
I'm not sure we're going to make it to 41
if she keeps beating on me.
So Erica Kirk gets asked,
what year did you get married?
And she goes like this.
This is exactly how she did it.
She goes, 2021?
And Charlie jumps right in and starts covering for her.
And then she starts going, well, you know, it's so chaotic and, you know, with all the kids and stuff.
And by the way, Erica Kirk's kids are nowhere in sight.
I was saying, where are your kids?
Where are your kids?
They were props.
You think so?
Well, boot up a Google and search Erica Kirk's kids or Charlie Kirk's kids and find one that shows a face.
Everyone says, well, you wouldn't want your kid's face to be on the internet.
I go, well, do it with Candice Owens.
You'll find her kids.
And they're photoshopped away.
There are no pictures.
So there's these family photos where each is holding a kid, but their face is facing the wrong way.
Always, always, always.
There's one that's really telling where his daughter is in the front seat of the car, and she's barely lingual.
She's like three years old.
blah, blah, blah, blah. She's talking, but you know what?
She's at the stage where she's just barely past the stage where only the
parents understand her. And, and, um,
and they're pulling up to the TP USA site and she recognizes it.
She gets excited and she goes, Oh, Charlie Kirk, Charlie Kirk.
Has your young kid ever called you Marty Benz?
No, no, no.
I'll be by my first name when they want to really get my attention.
That's about it. Is that right? Oh, they're ragging on you already.
Okay. But that's different. That's not a three-year-old saying Charlie Kirk,
Charlie Kirk. I, and the kids are now missing.
I think they were a prop.
I think they didn't want to show their faces because you don't want to have to
have them be their kids for the rest of eternity.
And everyone's saying, Hey, you're traveling the world.
You're giving all these talks. Where's your fucking kids?
Who's taking care of the claim is Glenn Beck is taking care of them.
What kind of clown show is this? That's the claim.
Glenn Beck has him.
Right.
Glenn Beck has him.
Oh, yeah, sure.
So I think Erica was CIA or Mossad brainwashed.
She was in Romania when she was 17.
She was running an orphanage.
They got kicked out of Romania for trafficking children.
This story just isn't holding together.
And you watch her.
Her memorial service, she wiped the tears from her eyes eight times.
Eight times.
I watched a video of a woman counting and saying, here we go again, eight times.
First of all, there's no tears.
Her eyes look like an AI, right?
She's got the glazed look.
I mean, this is the MKUltra look.
This is the flat personality.
These guys who've been abused, you can be talking to one of them, and you don't realize you're talking to one person.
There's nine others in that skull of theirs,
and they don't even know about the one you're talking to.
They're all these separate entities.
It's a very complicated story.
They're schizophrenic.
They're induced schizophrenia.
And then they reassemble them and train them like you'd train a working dog.
So Erica Kirk, they spied her and said,
well, this young little damsel is looking like she's going to be a great bit of bait.
So then she goes and wins the Miss Arizona pageant.
So I ask a beauty pageant queen,
Is there any chance some chick who's
in Arizona where you can't swing a bat without hitting a hot chick,
walks out into a Miss Arizona pageant and just wins.
That's like saying, Marty, here's the violin, go win the concerto competition.
These women train their life to win these.
If you think winning a beauty pageant is just being hot in a bikini,
you're out of your gourd, and she wins.
What's that all about?
and so
so then she claims she doesn't drink
and hadn't dated
and then all of a sudden you find out she was on a dating
show
she was on Summer House too
which is like some Bravo
and she also was part of a documentary
that was totally deep state
what if the grid goes down
and her mother's deep state
her mother's completely deep state
to the extent we know who she is
of which her mother, her father, Charlie's parents
None of them have been in sight since Charlie got shot.
None of them.
You can't find him.
So the question I'm watching for, and people who are close to him, I've been watching very carefully to see if they give me a hint of this concern, is how real is Charlie?
Charlie gets grabbed out of high school, no college education.
Some gazillionaire who's a vague person themselves sponsors Charlie.
How many high school dropout types?
And also what I did read about, and they said he wasn't very popular in high school.
Some guy sees a dick and says, oh, let's groom this guy to run the world.
Yeah.
Yeah, to be honest, I haven't been following the theory.
I was pretty caught up in it, exactly when it happened.
But then since then, it's like, okay.
Well, so the problem is that it means that if I'm correct on all this crap, it means it's a big geopolitical event.
It's not just Charlie Kirk getting whacked.
Oh, here's the funniest story of them all.
My brother confirmed these facts for me.
I wasn't going to bother.
Do you know Snake Eyes, the movie?
No.
You're going to love this.
You won't know what to do with this information.
This information will blow your circuits.
It's true.
1996 or 98, can't remember
Nicolas Cage makes a movie Snake Eyes
Yeah, I saw the theory
Let me finish the story
So Snake Eyes, the lead character
is shot in the neck
one of the lead characters is shot in the neck
by a guy named
Tyler the Executioner
Tyler Robinson
It's on
September 10th, which I think
whatever date Charlie was shot
that was the date
And the guy who got shot was Charlie Kirkland.
Some predictive programming right there.
My head explodes.
I don't know.
No, TPUSA was registered as an organization in 2002.
I didn't know that.
Yeah, pretty weird, isn't it?
You want to watch an interesting Twitter feed, TPV Sean, who I have no idea what to make of.
TPV Sean is this sort of British guy.
He's got kind of a Britoid accent.
And what's surreal here, so I have networks on Twitter that are totally independent of each other.
So you got the FinTwit and the HODLers and the various guys.
I also am highly networked with the pedo hunters, the guys who actually go after the pedophiles.
TPV Sean has 307,000 followers.
he follows a hundred people i'm one of them and i'm going what the heck is that about but
but there's all these guys like liz crockin and mike smith and stuff who've been tracking pedos
like crazy full-time job and and i'm all connected up with them on twitter too and so i've got the
the pedo hunting network on twitter and it's interesting because i've besides some hints and
some podcast shit. I've never really gone there. I've been studying it like crazy. I mean,
one of the things I realized when I finished writing my 2025 year in review is one thing
that made it so hard as I went down rabbit holes that I don't think were wrong, but were so dark
that I just couldn't, I couldn't breathe. I couldn't breathe. Yeah. There was, there was a
famous octopus murder where some guy was tracking his brother who got assassinated.
And so I tried to retrace his steps to find out what he was studying. And it turns out it led to
all sorts of assassinations and all sorts of obviously intelligence-based stuff. And then he
ran into two other people who were tracking the same story. He ran them independently. And one
woman had stopped. He said, why?
He said, why? She said,
I just had to stop. I just had to stop.
You could do this forever. I get emails from a guy who's still tracking JFK
murders twice a week. JFK murder.
He sends shit and I go, let it go.
Let it go, buddy. Can we all
agree JFK was killed by what we will collectively call the CIA?
we can probably agree with 98% confidence
that LBJ was in on it
and the details don't matter anymore
at that point
why do you think he was killed
oh there are so many reasons
the nuclear
there's a laundry list
of why you'd want to kill JFK
including him promising
to dissolve the CIA
and
I think a good case has been made
that Nixon was taken out
he didn't fuck up Watergate
and have a scandal
the entire thing was to take him out of office
and
actually the guy
who wrote about that oddly enough
is Nick Bryan who wrote the Franklin
scandal he wrote about that too
and he did some ghost writing
too he wrote some other books
that he wrote that other people's names went on.
Starving author.
But everyone involved was Deep State.
Everyone involved.
The burglars were Deep State.
Bob Woodward, Deep State.
Bob Woodward wasn't a journalist.
He was Naval Intelligence.
So I'm on a podcast with a guy named Tony Schaffer.
You can find Tony all over the internet.
Tony's famous.
You can see him with Rumsfeld and these guys.
While he was on the Zoom call, I'm fact checking him. He's absolutely nailing it. This guy is like Robert Maxwell, but he got booted because he was too mouthy. He was too public.
and I was on the Zoom call
and I asked myself, I'm interested
in child traffic and the influence on
geopolitics because one can
make the argument that all the stupid things
being done are because they're
being forced to do it because they're compromised
right? That was the
theme that I've been following for a couple years now
and he
starts talking about Epstein and I go, yeah, we kind of
have a beat on who Epstein was
I'm more interested
in the dark, weird shit
I said, let me ask you a simple question, Tony.
I said, does the Clinton Foundation traffic children?
He said, oh, absolutely.
The evidence is above the fold true.
I asked him that question to test him.
Laura Silsby got caught.
She got sent to a Haitian prison for trafficking children.
The Clintons had to bail her out.
Well, and this is topical this week with Hillary refusing to testify in Congress on the upstate.
Well, they should do the goddamn Steve Bannon drill and send him to prison.
I think they are trying to hold her in contempt right now.
Right, but they won't send her to prison because that was probably a bad idea too.
Sending Bannon to prison.
Navarro.
I used to chat with Navarro back when he was at Irvine.
He's just an economist.
I'd swap emails.
So what – all this is like zooming out, 2026 in America.
Obviously, we were talking about a little bit, the ice raids in Minneapolis.
seems like we just bombed Venezuela.
Who knows what's going to happen with Iran.
Did we really bomb Venezuela?
I was in D.C. on Wednesday night,
funnily enough, talking to some people.
The tech we used to extract him or attack him.
I had this funny feeling that he was willing to be extracted.
You look at the pictures, it seems very clear
there was some predetermined agreement.
Right.
Well, because for one thing, if you're Maduro,
It's like, okay, let me see if I got this right.
I cut a deal with the Yanks, and they somehow set up something that's got a Ghislaine Maxwell feel to it.
Or I stay where I am where there's no more dangerous career path than being an ex-dictator.
No more dangerous.
And he said, if I stay in Venezuela, I'll get a knife up the ass Gaddafi style.
Which you do not want to go.
You do not want to die from a knife up the ass.
I'm pretty sure that is not the preferred method to go to the light.
and so
so
they
remember we saved the guy
in the Iraqi
hospital
and it's this
we send SEAL team whatever
and they run up and they grab the guy
and we get him out and we tell this great story and then we found out
after the fact that the doctors at the hospital
said hey we got your guy come and get him
he's here just come and get him
and so we just made this
we lie our asses off
we
We, the authorities.
That's why I don't believe anything that Israel tells us.
I don't believe anything our government tells us.
There's no government that has ever, ever failed to optimize the story.
Right?
So if you think you understood what happened on October 7th, you think you understood what happened in Pearl Harbor, you think you understand what happened in the Gulf War.
The Gulf War wasn't even a clean war for us.
People think, well, at least, you know, Saddam attacked Kuwait.
We gave them the nod.
Now, Scott Horton is a little more generous.
He says, no, we didn't give him the nod.
We fucked up.
Our State Department says some shit that was ambiguous, and he took it too far.
And I'm going, okay, it's not like Scott's bashful.
Scott really does call balls and strikes.
But I think we gave him the nod.
It's just a hunch.
And that sounds like plausible deniability in a way.
Right.
And the Somali thing, the Somalis aren't ripping us off up in Minnesota.
They're just friend men.
who's getting all that money?
Right, and then how are they
so easily able to
funnel the cash literally through airports,
TSA security, get it to Dubai?
Right, right.
That's like, I don't know.
Probably military transports.
Yeah.
I mean, who knows, right?
That's like how...
You know how you smuggle?
It turns out the art world has
custom steels where
they don't have to check the packages
because it's rare art.
You don't want to be sending Da Vinci to the Met for some show and have guys –
You can't disturb the piece.
You can't open the box.
That's right.
And so you shove the shit in there.
And so a lot of trafficking and stuff is hidden in the art world.
It's a great laundering.
You know, the guy sold balloon art for $260 million, $360 million, right?
Yeah.
What is his name?
Well, that's money laundering.
Coons.
His name is Coons.
Coons, yeah.
And by the way, I've seen pictures of Coons with some very dubious characters, so I do believe.
I do believe that Coons was laundering money.
Do you think we're at a social tipping point, though, with this generational divide?
What the intentions of Nick Shirley are?
I think one thing's clear.
He's incited these copycats.
Which is good news.
Exactly.
The Zoomer clout maxing out there.
There was one this morning.
Some guy went to some acidic neighborhood in New York that is doing a similar welfare scam.
We've seen it happen in L.A., Philadelphia.
There's a kid running around Philadelphia doing the same thing.
But when you look at the economy, the job market, the inability for the younger generations to make a better life for themselves, form families, buy houses, all that stuff.
And then there's all this fraud being laid bare.
like are we reaching a social tipping point
well are we going to see it stop
are we just going to know how much
are we just going to be getting a doggy style
are we going to be getting it missionary style instead of doggy style
I think
I mean I think
if we're just
being honest with ourselves it's probably that
but I would like to hope that there is enough momentum
When was the last time someone of importance went to prison?
That's a great question.
Denny Hastert.
Yeah.
Diddling kids.
What was that, 30 years ago?
Yeah, but he was already old at that point, wasn't he?
Right.
He must have pissed someone off.
Yeah.
What was he, Speaker of the House at the time?
Yeah.
Yeah, that's a high-level position.
He got Blagojevic, who was what, mayor of, was governor of, or mayor of Chicago or governor of Illinois or something.
But he was a throwaway.
He did a Tucker interview.
It was really good.
Yeah, and he basically explained, like, I was thrown under the bus because I wouldn't go with Obama, right?
Right, right, right, right.
So I think, and then the story I love to tell.
I was on a Zoom call with a couple of generals.
and one of them mentioned a guy named Janda.
These are retired, these are like 80-year-old generals.
And one of them mentioned a guy named Janda,
and I go, Janda, the Undersecretary of Health and whatever?
He said, yeah.
And I said, is he a good guy?
And he go, oh, yeah, he's a really good guy.
And Janda, it turns out, was doing an interview.
I've got the link.
I didn't write about it.
And someone said to him, he was inside the Beltway
after having been appointed in one of these bureaucratic positions,
he's an orthopedic surgeon or something
and his buddy says don't
whatever you do don't go to a private party
he says even if it's at the
vice president's house which I think was Cheney
at the time
and Jenna says why and he says because
you will wake up in a fog
not knowing what happened and you'll have a
Polaroid clipped to your shirt with you and a five
year old
they don't have to corrupt you they
just have to slip you a mickey
by the way why doesn't
someone collect the glasses from the fucking macrons at a restaurant and do a DNA test.
What would that do?
Well, the two questions are, the lower level question is Macron's wife a dude.
So you find out if Macron, yeah.
If you find out that his wife has a Y chromosome, then you answer that question.
Macron has sued Candace Owens.
is what do you bet that nothing comes of that suit
because they don't actually want to go to discovery?
Because a DNA test would go to discovery, right?
If I'm a judge, I'm not letting a lawsuit go by
without saying, give me a DNA test, court sanction.
It's over.
It's defamation or not, depending on your DNA test.
The second question,
and Candace has kind of backed off of this one.
I don't know if Candace is right,
but I think she tries to get it right.
I don't think she's an intentional liar.
at one point she was saying that
Macron's wife is not only a dude but is also his father
well if you're gonna do
the dude thing it's just a minor step if it's some satanic cult family
you've seen pictures of her with him when he was like 14 years old
yeah that's pretty fucked up they started dating
at 15 because she was his teacher right
She was 39, he was 15.
So, you know, it's a fucked up world.
Yeah.
Is that my phone?
Never mind.
Yeah, that's my son.
So that DNA test might show relationship.
Yeah.
So I'm waiting for that.
The other thing, what do you bet?
What do you bet Tyler Robinson's case does not go to court?
By any mechanism you want
I mean it's already been weird
To this point right
There's no way that he shot Charlie Kirk
I think he might have been involved
I could imagine a scenario
Where Tyler Robinson was sent to the roof
To be a spotter or something
Not realizing that they were going to hang it on him
And all of a sudden
So I think his father turned him in
Not because his father
Well I think I saw you
I think his father had to get him off the street
or he'd die.
There'd be a shootout.
I think I saw you tweeting about it. What happened to
John Cullen?
A fascinating question.
His analysis of that
immediate aftermath was very interesting.
I've had him on the show before.
John would
do these podcasts incognito.
I said to him one day in a podcast,
John, you're
incognito, but I'm not sure those
sunglasses and hat are really hiding
your identity. If you're
really work for Oracle, it's not going to be hard to narrow down who the hell you are.
He said, well, yeah, that's true.
So John did a bunch of things, including did a great job on the Las Vegas shootings.
I didn't realize that a lot of shit I was getting about the shooting.
I was getting it was John's stuff.
I didn't realize that years ago when I wrote about it, I didn't realize a bunch was coming
from John.
Then he got into the Butler shooting and he did trajectory analysis.
He's a real geeky guy or connected.
One of the two.
And then he started analyzing some other shit.
Oh, he started analyzing the Kirk thing and started picking up on the Egyptian plane that pulled into the airport and pulled out and stuff like that.
And now they mention the craziness of Candace Owens mentioning Egyptian planes.
And I'm going, that was John Cullen.
So John, all of a sudden, October 13th, tweeted his last tweet without saying goodbye or anything.
I've got John's email.
He doesn't answer.
Other people have his phone number.
He doesn't pick up.
and so John is either A, dead, or B, reassigned.
There is a guy out there on Twitter who says he knows he's still alive
but I don't know if the guy on Twitter knows for sure.
Well, if it's the latter, what was he being assigned to in the first place?
Well, you know, you've got narratives, you've got to pump.
Right?
When I talked to Tucker
he talked about
he talked about shit like this
about, I just lost my train of thought
about these narratives
we got into it quite a bit
might have been off camera, I can't remember
off camera we went dark, holy fuck did we go dark
I don't know, he's still alive
someone said i just don't think you can whack that many people in that short a time
because then people then people will start getting suspicious right like we're not suspicious
um i've become a total conspiracy theorist i've never as you know i've never been bashful about
conspiracy theories because a tweet that not only went viral but i've now seen in two books
I see the street in two books
Where I said
I'm a conspiracy theorist
I believe men and women
Of wealth and power conspire
If you don't you're what's called an idiot
And if you do but you won't say anything
You're what's called a coward
So if you really don't think
Men and women of wealth and power Aren conspiring You need a CAT scan I mean the entire human population is a big conspiracy right Yeah
And so, you know, Klaus Schwab,
oh, he's not conspiring.
Where'd he go, by the way?
Just gone.
It's gone.
He got pushed in the locker,
said, all right, you've...
That's right.
Time to go.
Who's replaced him?
Too many people want to ask you.
Who's replaced him?
Mark Hardy.
Mark Carney, there's a guy who's not only front and center and deep state.
Oftentimes, I think the guys who are real deep state, you don't see as easily.
I think Mark Carney, I think they moved him from a private world economic forum to a head of state.
Well, don't forget, he went through Central Bank first.
Yeah, Bank of England.
Yeah, and then he went to – and I've got pictures of Mark seeing there with Ghislaine Maxwell.
and, you know, it's just, it's one big club
and we ain't in it, as George Carlin would say.
Do we want to be in it, though?
No, no, no.
That was part of my decision.
I did not want to lock arms with Candace Owens
and Dave Smith and fight the Zionists.
Yeah.
And that's the direction I was heading.
My brother nailed it.
He's been worried about me not being wacky,
but rather getting into places I don't want to be in.
He said, would you ever want to trade positions with Nick Fuentes?
I said, no chance.
He said, then be careful.
Yeah.
And I somehow seem to be willing to talk about it, but not write about it.
And I don't, it's weird because writing, you have more control.
This is.
But it's also more formal.
Somehow you get this feeling that you and I chatting isn't as consequential as laying out a document.
Yeah.
which is not true in the digital world.
Yeah, and it's all...
I think about this a lot too.
Sometimes you just want to take the blue pill,
eat the steak, eat the steak again.
I know it's not right now.
It's like, how much should I just focus on my family,
my neighbors?
Well, I don't know how to turn it off
is the problem I'm having.
Same.
But you know this story.
I do probably 90 podcasts a year of which some number of them are repeats, but it's a lot of people.
I don't think I've ever run into a podcaster who wasn't already up to speed on this shit.
The guys who have these chats regularly, you, Mike Ferris, you guys like that, they're all now black-pilled.
Blue-pilled, whatever it is.
I can't remember the pill colors.
Which one is it?
Which is the one where you go?
Red pill is where it's like everything's doing.
Blue pill is just like your normie, MPC.
And red pill is where you see the reality.
White pill is like, hey, the future is bright.
We're going to win.
I like to take the white pill.
Yeah, I know.
While at the same time chewing on the red pill.
Yes, understanding.
But I'm stunned at the number of people who are educated, intelligent,
don't confuse the two.
the Venn diagram overlap
is not that good on those two
and
who are onto this shit
and I go I just don't think that would have been the case
10 or 15 years ago
I just
you know
I don't think most people thought about 9-11
what do you think the percentage of people
think 9-11 screwed up now
what do you think the percentage is
it's probably at 30
which is pretty high
I would say
What percentage have watched Building 7 drop and find it normal?
Zero.
So that's the thing.
I think 30% are aware of Building 7.
Once you're aware of Building 7, it's like, wait a second, what the heck?
Well, the other one that I think is actually bigger is that there's not a shred of footage of the Pentagon getting hit.
Two frames.
Neither shows anything, right?
The official narrative is two frames.
I think Building 7 is bigger than the Pentagon.
But you're saying they snuck a jumbo jet into D.C. and no one caught it on film?
Yeah, no.
That's pretty big too.
I agree. The Pentagon is just as bad.
And then the pictures of Shanksville, I go, you know, Shanksville should have been an unbelievable mess.
I've heard that when you go to a plane crash, it is beyond comprehension.
It's a yard sale. Shit everywhere.
And you look at the Shanksville and there's nothing.
All the luggage, all the plane, the plane's gone, nothing.
Just a big hole in the ground.
I go, so where did all these people go?
Was there ever a real plane?
Well, that's the – my brother and I discovered this a couple years ago.
Because when we were – when I was – when we were in high school, I think I forget if it was in high school or eighth grade, we watched Loose Change, the original Loose Change.
I remember that.
We gave a presentation. I can't find the original Liz Change.
Apparently they have Apple TV and we read it and we're like, this isn't the original Liz Change.
I think they buried the original Liz Change documentary.
The other one that was disappearing a lot was Planet of the Humans by Moore.
Who's the super lefty? What's his first name?
Famous, famous, famous filmmaker Moore.
Oh, Michael Moore.
Michael Moore.
and he went to make a story about climate change
and he discovered that the whole thing was fucked up
and he made diesel engines at the end.
Planet of the Humans.
And so the whole thing was like, holy fuck,
we just had this all wrong, right?
Michael Moore got flipped by looking into it.
I sat down with Constantine Kyson on climate change.
Again, this is still going on,
although it's disappearing now, I think.
The climate change story's going away,
I think, because it's in AI's way.
It is.
But I sat down with Constantine Kyson one day, and he gave the most brilliant talk on climate change.
Just the funniest, most brilliant talk at the Oxford Union.
If anyone's listening, search that.
Oxford Union, Constantine Kyson.
Yeah, debate.
It was brilliant.
I transcribed it, and I realized that it was perfect English the whole way.
A verbal presentation, no-nos.
Perfect English, all it needed were punctuation marks.
and I asked him, I said, when you dug into climate change,
how long did it take you to figure out it was bullshit?
And he said, oh, a couple hours.
That's the same with me.
When someone finally said, look at it,
it took me about three hours.
I go, oh, this story's fucked up.
Oh, this story's fucked up.
And it's going to go away because AI can't afford
to have people saying, oh, we can't have coal-fired power plants.
Well, you see, nuclear power facilities are now ESG-friendly after decades of being –
I'm told.
Although someone – oh, I think it was Brendan Icke yesterday.
I was talking about that Twitter space is where he showed up, and he was saying he doesn't think these small nukes are going to – the way of the future.
He thinks you need the big ones.
I can see that.
And he's a smart guy, but –
I don't see why not at all.
I mean we have small modular reactors on the warships already.
I don't know. I'm just passing along the opinion of a guy who's been there and done that in a very big way.
The host didn't know who he was, so I kept trying to get Brendan to jump in.
The host was picking people who he knew, and I said, got to get Brendan in here.
What basis was this?
Well, I just did a podcast with a guy named Kevin Malone, and Brendan showed up because
Brendan and I swapped DMs just every day almost.
And then I finally got Brendan to jump in, and Brendan and I took over the Twitter space.
It was really, it was really, but it was, I think the host was just awed when he realized,
and I said, for those of you who don't know who Brendan is, you know, and I laid out his
CV and said, he's been there.
He knows this game.
Yeah.
The inventor of JavaScript.
You either love him or hate him for that, depending on.
Well, the funny story I like to tell in a relatively short period of time, I was trolling
Twitter for help with, you know, I needed a spam blocker mostly for Zero Hedge.
And I said, what's the best spam blocker for Firefox?
Because you don't just go to the internet and download shit, right?
I mean, that strikes me as a bad thing to do.
And Brendan chimes in and said, well, this is the one you ought to use.
He wrote Firefox.
So I'm getting – so then one day I'm having trouble with Microsoft Outlook, and I've got the former president of Microsoft troubleshooting Outlook for me.
The former president was Steve Sanofsky.
He was second under Balmer after Gates left.
I think he left because he realized Balmer wasn't going to get out of his way.
or he wasn't going to get the top dog spot because he's no longer a Microsoft.
But so in any event, so I've said they're going, you know,
this is the highest watermark of Twitter you can get when you got the president of Microsoft
troubleshooting your Microsoft-based email program.
At one point I said, you know, I said, Steve, they've completely fucked up the menus now.
They've moved everything. It's like moving Helen Keller's chairs.
He said, yeah, he said, I thought we locked it down in 2007.
and I'm as confused as you.
It seems like they've completely messed up everything,
at least on the operating system side.
Right.
And by the way, this AI battle,
those tech giants are going to kill each other.
This is going to be like Godzilla versus Mothra versus King Kong.
And they're not all going to be left standing.
No.
And the best way it got phrased is they were high profit margin, low capex businesses.
So that's one of the reasons they were carrying the market so well, besides passive investing and stuff like that.
But now they're in lower profits, high capex market.
I mean, right now they're loss leaders, right?
They're subsidizing.
well. They are, the cost of what they're doing is not even, is, is, is, is smaller than the revenues,
the revenues. So their revenues aren't even covering, forget about profits. They're just
sucking up all the revenues plus more of those companies. Well, it's, it's just a user grab
right now. Like I was telling you, I use Claude and I bang it all day. And that's winner take all.
It's winner take all.
I was talking to a friend who is way more savvy when it comes to computer science and understanding how much this compute should cost.
He was like, yeah, it should be costing like $2,000 a day if you're hitting limits.
It's nowhere – it's a tenth of that for –
It's like – I remember one year I made reference.
during COVID, I think it was the year of COVID,
I said Skype lost a 35-0 lead.
Zoom just completely wiped them out.
And now you've got Riverside, you've got others,
but Skype, has anyone Skype?
I think Skype shut down officially.
Okay, well, there's the answer.
And so I think these megatechs
are on this total self-destruction path
I guess it's the passive investing, the mindless robot of Michael Green's fame, just won't let them reprice yet.
What do you think would cause a repricing?
Mike sent me a draft of a paper that had tons of math in it.
I underestimated Mike. I thought he just had this sort of one simple idea. Okay, fine. Good idea. No, he studied it much more deeply. He really understands the math of it. And what was missing from his paper, and I said, what you need is a paragraph that says, these are the things that could cause the flows to reverse.
and I said aim it at the golden retrievers
that famous line in the movie
tell me like I'm a golden retriever
and I said you got it
deep recession
flow of capital back overseas
young people not getting jobs
a slowing of the flow which causes the markets to start toppling
people saying I'm not buying any more of this shit
I mean, there's just – it will find a way.
The free market will find a way.
The other maxim that anyone who's ever studied the history of finance will tell you is once a good idea becomes widely known, it's not a good idea.
And as a consequence, passive investing – I got Jack Bogle to admit there was a problem with it.
I cornered him, and I said, Jack, in the olden days when big money managers actively manage funds,
and a company got out of line,
they'd go in their office and give them shit.
I said, is it possible that the passive investing,
one of the downsides is there's no adult supervision now.
There's no one that's going to go into the CEO's office
and say, you got to get your shit together.
We're going to sell your shares
and we're a big swinging dick here.
And Jack admitted it.
Is that what BlackRock and Vanguard do?
No, no, they just want the flows.
They just want the flows, right?
They just want the money.
They want that. It's all about rerouting the flows through your organization so you get your big off the flow.
And until those flows reverse, boomers retiring.
Right. At some point, the boomers demographic is going to be taken out faster than the impoverished demographics putting it in.
Well, that's retiring or dying. I think that's another thing with the vaccine specifically.
Well, so here's what I believe, but I don't have a good model for it.
I do not believe – people have this image that there's going to be this gigantic wealth transfer from the boomers to the next generation.
And I just – it's almost a religious belief on my part.
I don't think you can do that without the repricing occurring.
What do you mean?
You do it and the children sell the asset right away?
I think the process of the wealth transferring from the boomers down to the younger generation, part of that process will include the repricing.
I don't think we can pass – for example, I don't think we can pass our – let's say you have a house worth $2 million.
You can't pass that house to the next generation.
My kids can't even afford the taxes of my house.
They don't want the house.
They can't afford the maintenance.
You got an expensive house.
You got some big McMansion or something made out of plastic.
They don't want to live.
They've been raised not to want to live there.
They've been told since daycare they have a small footprint.
They don't believe in garish display because they know they can't do it.
Let's start with that.
Yeah, that's a very good point.
It's kind of a sour grapes problem.
The house gets passed down.
They say, hey, I'd rather have the cash.
I'd rather have the cash so the house gets sold.
And no one takes their parents' house and lives in it.
Who the fuck does that?
Yeah.
Except farmers.
Yeah.
We're going to go to multi-generational housing at some point, which at first will feel like a failure, which it already is.
You know, your kid's sleeping on the sofa in the basement.
It will then become an accepted thing.
I'm actually –
Because –
I'm welcoming of that.
Well, you know, the grandparents take care of the kids while the parents work.
They work the fields, the grandparents.
The grandparents also teach the parents how to be parents.
It's part of the reason we moved home.
My mother-in-law, she came and picked up the baby yesterday.
Right, right.
Never give a sucker an even break.
By the way, you want to go bankrupt?
Fastest route to bankruptcy is to be married to a grandmother.
she will drain your bank account into those grandchildren.
Wait, what was that?
Married to the grandmother?
If you're married to a grandmother,
she's going to drain your bank accounts
because those grandchildren are going to get every toy imaginable.
Every imaginable toy.
To the point where your kids are going,
Mom, stop, stop.
You're spoiling the kids to the point,
you know, this is not good.
My wife was going to give the kids a ton of money.
I said, would you please ask Will?
the son what's an okay number for him don't just hand over a lot of money and have him go
i can't believe you just did that mom you know yeah so one time we had a delivery truck show up
at our house and the guy told my wife and my wife actually told me the story which i would have
buried she said the delivery this was right before christmas she said the delivery guy said
this truckload is for just your house
very uh it's giving nature it's good to have you know no it is it is and that's her joy actually
that's her joy in life is is doting on the grandchildren brett weinstein talks about the
evolutionary advantage of having a grandmother that there's actually a chance of the young
surviving because of the grandmother but grand grandmothers are not so our life expectancies
really were designed to get to grandmother, but not further.
They become a liability.
My grandmother's still alive, so the boys, it's their great-grandmother.
Right, but your grandmother doesn't serve as important a person as your parents.
No.
Unless your parents suck and they're crackheads,
then your grandmother might be important again.
Yeah.
That feels good.
I have a village to help with all this.
And to your point about multi-generational housing.
I think my mom's – I don't know how my wife will take this, but I feel like at some point either my mom or her parents will have to move into the house.
Right. And the other thing is it saves. So they provide daycare services, which is a fortune for families. And also you provide the care for the grandparents as opposed to having to lock them up in some home somewhere.
Yeah.
And so it's just and it's much more efficient to run one household. Right.
Yeah. And I think culturally it's good.
Culturally, it's good as long as the people involved are good people.
Yeah. Right. If your father's a satanic pedophile, that's a problem.
That could be a big problem. But that means you probably are, too. So that's even bigger problem.
What? Let's wrap it up with a with a message to Gen Z here. Do you have any hope having
Gen Z's? How old are Gen Z's? There's a kid in your classroom right now.
Oh, yeah. Actually, I do give them messages all through the semester, which gets me in trouble.
they're going to have to cope with
they're totally
screwed up by phones
by AI, by social media
literally their
peripheral vision has shrunk
physically their peripheral vision
that's called neuroplasticity
your brain rewires because all you're doing is focusing
on the phone
they'll sit in class and text
each other so they're not learning
somewhere
out in the world are kids who are not making
this mistake and they will win.
So I tell the class that you gotta find a way
to put your phone away.
I'm not blaming you.
It's not your fault.
There is an entire industrial complex out there
designed to get you to be glued to that phone We raised you it not your fault but you got to find a way to get rid of that phone We are now in a movement where secondary education is now starting to say no phones at school at any point
They're starting to lock them up.
And at one point, they tried just saying no phones in class.
The kids would run into the hall and pop open their phones and not talk to each other.
So what I noticed last year, maybe it's just an aberrant year.
I had 25 kids in a class, sophomores, Cornell kids, right?
These are kids who got into Cornell because not only because they were smart, but because they played football or they were, you know, editor of the yearbook or whatever.
The entire class was shy.
Every last one of them was shy.
There was no kid in there who you say, oh, that's an unruly kid.
I got to got to, you know, because unruly kids can make a class very entertaining.
You know, they bring they bring game and none of them.
I'd make a joke and I voted class clown.
So I can make jokes.
And I don't even bother anymore because I just, I don't get anything.
I get nothing.
Maybe they've been trafficked.
I don't know.
Or I'd stare.
The blank stare.
Yeah, it's like they're on Wagovi or something.
You know, the Wagovi eyes.
And so they need to – I think their work ethic has fallen off a cliff.
So when I was in college, I'd get up.
I'd go to the library at 9.
I'd come back to my fraternity for dinner, and then I'd go back to the library maybe at 7.30, and then stay there until 11, then come home and maybe fuck around a little.
And I did that seven days a week, seven days a week.
Now, I was a little psychotic.
I was not a good student in high school, but I said, okay, now I got to get my shit together.
Now it's big league time.
And it worked really well for me.
And not everyone did that.
But in my fraternity, 11 out of 12 went to grad school.
So 11 out of 12 of the graduating classes I happen to remember went to grad school.
And it included guys like Rick Sherwin, founded Goldwyn Software Group.
Brian Murdoch, who was CEO of TD Asset Management.
I mean, they were good people.
I don't think the kids today really know how to work at all.
They don't know how to read an exam question even.
So if you say, okay, here's the setup.
Bob does this, Joe does this, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
What's the answer?
They literally go to the final line, say, what's the answer, and say, I don't know how to do this.
You go, you know those first couple of lines you skipped over because this is not a fucking email, right?
This is not a how you do an email.
This is a we're giving you information and they don't read it.
They just skip right over it and get to the message, the message, you know, the question.
UCSD test.
They're bringing SATs back.
I remember when we took out SATs, I go, oh, boy, this is stupid.
There's problems with SATs, but taking them out is the wrong solution.
And UCSD is bringing them back.
They did a study of the freshmen.
They gave them a test, and they found out there's something like 40% of the freshmen were not middle school level math.
There's UCSD.
UCSD is not a bad school, supposedly.
So they gave an example.
They said 25% of the kids missed the following question.
6 plus 3 equals 7 plus X.
What is X?
They missed that.
25%.
So I gave that question to my first grade grandchild and he got it.
He had to use his fingers a little bit, you know.
That's a fundamental problem.
It's fixable.
We had a colleague who decided he was going to help the minority students.
So this is not this is not a welcome secret that, you know, if you're black, you get in easier.
Right.
if someone wants to call that racist have a fucking ball you can suck my
rectum I don't care
but also you don't want to bring a potentially talented kid who's not
ready for the big leagues to Cornell and then
destroy them so you do not need
women's studies here the women aren't at disadvantage
you don't need you do need Africana studies
because if you bring a kid to Cornell and you find out he can't be a physics major,
you've got to give him something.
So you have Africana Studies because that kid, you get him through,
you get him the sheepskin, he will do okay
because there's still a demand in society for a successful kid.
He will do okay.
But if you destroy them, you shouldn't have ever accepted them.
So you need Africana Studies.
But one of my colleagues decided that they were failing badly.
And he looked at the stats.
Freshman chem, our monster freshman chem course.
They were occupying C, C- zone.
It was completely.
We'd see a black chem major once every five years.
We were destroying them in freshman chem.
He set up a boot camp.
And he drilled them.
And I said, how bad are they?
He said, I tell them New York to Chicago, 50 miles, 500 miles, 5,000 miles, about a third, a third, a third.
What?
Yeah.
You grow up in the hood.
You don't know this shit.
You can be smart as shit and you can really be trying to get it right, but you don't know this shit.
You are at a disadvantage that seems insurmountable.
So he says they can't add fractions, right?
So he set up a boot camp.
to teach him how to take freshman camp.
So like 100 kids in this class.
And he pulled no punches.
It was like joining the Marines.
And he also turned it into a,
you can beat the white kids.
Now this guy's Asian.
His father won the Nobel Prize in physics.
He's Asian, my colleague.
He got them into this,
you can, this is like, okay,
But you know how to drive to the hoop, right?
You give me an athlete, I can turn him into a chemist.
I guarantee you.
Athletes do great in academia.
You just have to turn on the competitive gene.
And these kids not only went way up the charts in freshman chem, we monitored it.
It carried through to their courses.
We were starting to see graduating classes with five, six, seven black kids in the chem major.
Where was the New York Times?
I told guys who were working on this thing
I said get the fucking
I reached out to a reporter said would you write about it
I go where the fuck is it
because I wouldn't have believed it
so it really is the case it just needed
the right setting but you also
couldn't be a pussy about it
you can say well we can't do this
and you know where he got flack from
the guy running it he got flack from the
minority industrial complex over
in the arts college because
they were not succeeding
and he was invading their term.
You can't do that.
And by the way, we've got language requirements
in arts and sciences.
You might have to take as many as four semesters of language.
At $2 a credit, four credits per course,
that's what, $8, $16, $32,000.
You think that's going to keep going
as student debt keeps becoming a problem?
No. You can't make a kid take $32,000 worth of requirement that they don't want.
But here's the problem. Whenever there's a meeting to discuss the language requirements, all the humanists show up.
I think college has got to go through a massive change.
That's why I was a little bummed Trump didn't want to let the bail of the mail last year.
Well, he did throw a fastball past Harvard's chin and Cornell's chin.
There was some real chaos by his cutoff of funds.
Here's what I presented to Lorne Lister back in 2011 at Capital Accounts.
And at the time, I don't know if anyone was talking about it.
They have talked about it since.
where I said you set up a student loan program where you set up a tranche,
say $100 million to MIT, and you say the deal is they're going to pay it back over 10 years
by paying a percentage of their salary for the first 10 years.
So the kids know exactly what fraction of their salary is going to be committed to it.
and let the free market determine what percentage that ought to be.
So you give me a Stanford graduating class, I'll go, holy fuck,
I could get stinking rich if a couple of those guys hit the ball out of the park.
Mount Jesus Christ of the Holy Mary is not going to do as well.
What would happen?
Well, first and foremost, colleges would produce a better product
because they'd realize that we got to produce a better product.
and many would go out of business,
which I think we're going to see in the next 20 years.
I think we're going to see a big attrition of colleges.
If you talk to people my age with kids,
a lot of us sort of come resigned to the fact
that we don't think colleges are going to exist.
Learn how to fix elevators.
Now, it'll exist,
and it just has to have a much smaller footprint.
There's still a purpose for it.
And by the way, massive online courses,
that whole thing, COVID proved that sucks.
No one learned anything online.
The online shit didn't work. But then I realized, put that debt, those tranches in the endowment.
So now the college really has a reason to produce a product because it's their own endowment.
And if they're stressful, they can really expand those profit margins.
Now, why would that land like a lead balloon? Because then all of a sudden the humanities would be at great risk of going away.
You can't have the Marxist in our university systems getting –
What would you do? You know how many – so here's the English world. The English department, you have, of course, the scholarly shit. You have journalism, gone, right?
You have writing gone. AI is taking that out, which is horrifying to me, actually, but it's true. We have 50-something English faculty. They all going to study Chaucer? Right?
The Canterbury Tell is a classic. You've got to read it.
I know. I know. I know. So my advice to the students is you've got to learn to study.
I tell them about flashcards, why they're so useful. I tell them about studying every subject
every day. The first day of class, the first day of the semester is every bit as valuable as the
last day. You just don't know it. In fact, I freshman year figured out those 30 days between
fall and spring and those 100 plus days between spring and fall, that's valuable time too.
So I would figure out what course I was going to take, figure out what they would ask me to read,
and I would read that shit during the intercession so that I would hit the ground
with momentum at the start of the semester and go to the library at 9 o'clock, day one,
set the routine, don't wait for the semester to catch up to you.
so there's all sorts of things you can do to game the system
and to get an education
and they just have to do it
as you've been describing it doesn't seem like it's very hard to stick out
and be an out performer
you're competing globally now
and so I guarantee the kids in China are not studying Chaucer
they're putting out a lot
When I was an assistant professor, I went to a meeting at DuPont with 10 chemists and 10 engineer assistant professors.
The difference between the two is stunning.
The engineers were so different than the chemists, so stunningly different than the chemists.
And DuPont said we could hire every single Ph.D. in chemical engineering every year.
We're not seeing enough
We're just not getting enough
Yeah, well that's
Talk about fourth turning
Atlas shrugged
Like this competency crisis
That could be on the horizon too
So Trump wants to import everything here
Trump could turn out 100 years from now
To look like a historically important figure
The problem is
That this is multi-generational
That's what Brendan said
He says it's multi-generational
it's going to take several generations for us to turn this super tanker
after several generations of it turning the wrong way
this is not a bring it here
next year shit
I'm looking for this tweet I saw this morning that I actually retweeted
it might have been yesterday
but it was about I think mining majors
Like obviously we have this dash.
Probably none.
Are there any?
So I'm looking for, let me find it.
It should be high school seniors.
Consider checking out a BS in mining engineering.
The entire U.S. graduates 162 mining engineers per year.
Bachelors?
Yeah.
Holy shit.
By the way, start scoping housing in Greenland.
Right.
Mining is a terribly difficult business.
Yeah, so 500 to 600 per year are needed to sustain current operations.
We're producing 162 engineers per year.
And given how much the U.S. expanded mining this year,
it seems like a choke point, so it's going to go up.
And where do you – what happens when you lose the technology?
What happens when there's no one left who knows how to set up a rig,
knows how to set up a – knows how to start a mine?
That's the other worrying thing about AI too.
So if you just allocate the understanding of this work to the machine and you wake up, something happens to the machine.
And no one knows how to fix it.
Yeah.
No, no, that's absolutely terrifying to me.
And also not to mention, the system will be so brittle.
You know, you'll be talking to some AI and there just will be no way.
There will be no mechanism for a human to say, OK, I see your problem.
Let me help you out here.
Let's push away the bullshit.
Let's solve this.
I actually got Social Security this year, and I was shocked to discover last year that I was going to get Social Security.
I go, oh, fuck, I turn 70.
I get Social Security.
Turns out I get a fuck ton of money.
I've not run into someone who gets as much Social Security as me.
I don't know why.
I thought we all got sort of like the upper cap or something.
But my Social Security is like 60K, which considering I didn't know was coming, that's a lot of money.
and so I sign up for it
and they say sign up four months in advance
and then Trump gets into power
and I'm going oh boy this is going to get all fucked up
all the cuts and shit
but I can see it kind of progressing
and then some lady calls me
and the first thing that's amazing is she was competent
she was competent
she says let me help you out
I'm finishing up your application here
I could understand her
and then she says something about
do you have dependents
I go, yeah, my wife. Why? And she said, well, does she get Social Security?
I said, well, she gets a tiny amount. She said, well, she's not eligible to get half of what you get.
I go, what? They said, yeah, she gets a step up to half of yours.
And I go, has that always been true? She said, yeah, I didn't even know that.
So all of a sudden she went from getting almost nothing to $30,000.
and so I go oh wow and then she says is she there I can help her and I said no and so she says give
me her number I'll call her I get home her account's all set up I go where did they find this
person to work for the federal government it's encouraging it is encouraging there is at least
one good good someone said the graft is encouraging oh it was Robbie the Robbie the fire said the
graph was encouraging because it shows you how much
we could save.
It's, I mean, estimates
up to, what, $500 billion a year, probably.
I imagine it's higher.
Oh, it's got to be trillions.
They haven't looked at the military budget yet, if you think there's
not a similar amount of waste
within that. But we do have to keep sending money
to Ukraine.
Yes.
And Israel.
And we do have to
keep... Venezuela
I'm agnostic on.
I totally Dave Smith it in the sense that I do understand that stealing heads of state strikes me as a precedent-setting move that seems a little over the edge.
Did you see the Dave Smith, Dinesh D'Souza crash out?
So was your take on that?
What was that about H-1Bs?
No, that was yesterday.
I didn't see that.
And it was about optional wars.
It really came down to us traipsing around the world, attacking countries for no fucking reason.
Dave Smith, of course, does not like that.
And D'Souza gave sort of a neocon party line supporting it.
And, of course, I side with Smith.
Therefore, I'm so biased that I can't hear the merits of D'Souza's arguments.
Although I thought he did an okay job of defending the indefensible.
I mean, I think when it comes to Venezuela, who knows?
It's still nothing's been determined.
That's the key.
Who knows?
I think I saw this week that he doesn't want the military there, but he's down to have private defense contractors go and make sure that everything's okay on the ground.
What happens when they get caught?
What happens when someone grabs up a handful of them and all of a sudden we've got a hostage crisis?
Yeah, that's the big question.
But, I mean, at least as it stands right now,
nothing's escalated or devolved into complete chaos down there.
So is it about the oil? Because I'm not convinced.
No. Did you read that UAV?
Maybe, I don't know.
So there's a theory that, like, I mean, the waterway is there.
I think it's just to box out China and Russia.
That is certainly part of it.
I think it's also, someone did a great world map.
They showed a world map and they circled the Western Hemisphere with basically a digital crayon and said Trump.
And then they circled a big chunk of the northern rest.
They said Putin.
Then they circled a chunk of the G.
Trump is doing a great job if this multipolar world is unavoidable.
He's basically saying, let's pull in the horns.
Let's move back
My wife's pissed off at Greenland
And I said, well, you know, Empire's grab shit
Yeah, well, we were talking about it
On a podcast
My weekly podcast
With my co-host Matt Odell yesterday
If you go to the game of Risk, Greenland and Venezuela
Are two of the most valuable
Pieces of land to lock down
I always like to take North America
Yeah
You never go to Malaysia
Malaysia's a great place to hang out
But you won't win the game
Yeah And no one wins in Europe I used that metaphor by the way You know no one wins in Europe Right Europe looks to me like it just going to be a perpetual state of disaster I think I mean And that why I think Trump beginning to focus I mean if we if it not a grand stage and there is some sort of logic behind everything like I for packing it into the Western Hemisphere
Europe. Exactly. Exactly. So if it's a Western
Hemisphere thing, then take Greenland, take Venezuela. I don't have a
problem with that model.
Even Dave Smith aside, I say, okay, look, we're just
doing a little ham-fisted, but we're saying the Western Hemisphere is hands-off.
That's my hope.
The cigar boats have nothing to do with drugs. The cigar boats have nothing to do with drugs.
Now the UAV article
I forget who wrote it, it was on Medium
a few weeks ago, essentially
particularly in the water
right to the north of Venezuela
if you have a Cuban missile
like crisis, that's a great
spot to launch UAV
Why haven't we let Cuba back into our
orbit?
It seems to me it would have been real
easy to just say, look, you guys
are dying down here
we won't bully you just just let's let's make up and move on
why don't we do that because they're still communists i don't know i don't know
it just seems like an obvious thing to do
well that was like another theory that this midora thing was a
shot across the bow of cuba yeah i've heard that story too
we're all just getting narratives yeah if we had the answer key we'd probably
you know the famous i actually mentioned this quote to tucker
and he went wild.
I mentioned the quote from Daniel Ellsberg
where he's talking to Kissinger
and Kissinger is about to get top security clearance,
which Ellsberg had.
And he says, Henry, when you get the clearance,
you are going to be shocked at what you see.
And then you're going to be elated.
And then you're going to be at some cocktail party
talking to some three-star general yak in your ear off.
And you're going to realize
he doesn't know what the fuck he's talking about
because he doesn't have it.
And then he says, you're going to stop listening to people
and you're going to become a moron.
And so Tucker's staff is standing there listening to this conversation we're having,
which included satanic cults and shit.
I mean, it was a ridiculous conversation.
And they're riveted, and Tucker starts going through his phone,
and he reads the whole damn quote from Ellsberg.
That quote obviously stuck with him like crazy.
And he just reads it.
He's just so – that's just an amazing quote.
And so I found him to be very endearing.
he was
I'm a big Tucker fan now
and you know
one of the smartest moves he made
had nothing with me
Anna Kasparian
he brings her on the show
and she's his best buddy now
she has taken
Tucker by
showcasing
the left
who have a prayer of having a brain
he's had a sink on too
I believe
He has? I didn't know that
But all of a sudden
They might not like everything he says
But it's not like I hate Tucker time anymore
No
And they realize that they have a
Huge common interest
With Tucker
And so Tucker formed an alliance
With Anna
I think the whole Young Turks crew
He had Sank on it was after the Charlie Kirk stuff
They were talking about Charlie
I love watching the Young Turks
I used to hate them
I love watching them
I do like the schadenfreude of the 2016 post-election sort of meltdown as they realized.
Oh, that's funny.
That was funny.
I got to tell you.
Watching 2016 play out was hysterical.
Yeah.
Well, to your point about Tucker and the Young Turks people, I think you have the horseshoe
theory of populism coming around.
People are starting to realize like, hey.
It's like libertarianism meets from the left and the right and the middle.
Yeah.
And they're saying, wait a second, there's all this fraud, waste, and abuse.
We're in all these forever wars.
We're actually on the same side.
We may have some differences on some policies, but I think –
And Tucker hates the right as much as the left, though.
I mean the right is toothless, at least the –
Well, toothless or bad.
Yeah.
You know, APEC has a grip on both sides.
So I'm still trying to figure out –
One thing that makes Tucker so dangerous is his shtick is getting better every passing day.
So it starts out sort of raw.
And now when you listen to him give a 10-minute talk, you go, I can't argue with a single thing he just said.
He mastered it.
Particularly on Israel, he had that 40-minute monologue.
Right.
That was very well-known.
His monologue, you'd be hard-pressed to say, no, that's not right.
You'd be really hard-pressed to locate something that's wrong.
He occasionally says they're an irrelevant country and stuff like that.
Okay, jump on that if you want.
But I'm not sure why he's picking these fights.
It could be he's reached that stage in his life where he just feels that somehow legacy is more important, that he doesn't want to be on the wrong side of history.
That, and I mean I think there's a demand for this type of sort of frank commentary.
But I don't think he's grifting it, though.
I think it's really coming from the heart on him.
I think the overwritten window shifted.
I think part of the reason it has shifted.
And I think there's – I mean it's shifted wide open now to the point where I think there's plenty of room for people to explore these topics earnestly.
Especially, I mean, the Zoomers.
If you talk to the Zoomers, they are not happy right now.
They're not.
Not at all. You go on a college campus, you can't find a pro-Israel crowd that's not wearing a yarmulke.
And so, but there's also not anti-Semitism like they say, too.
Best I can, I've asked colleagues, are you aware of something that you'd really call serious anti-Semitism?
Besides, supporting Palestine isn't anti-Semitic.
You name a government, I'll oppose it.
You give any government, I'll oppose it, right?
And so – but can you name any – I've asked Kyle.
Can you name any real anti-Semitic things where some kids just walk into class because he's wearing a yarmulke, he gets a crap kicked off or something or whatever gets harassed badly and no one can?
No, kids don't want to do this.
They were raised not to do this.
This generation has been raised to embrace everything.
Yeah, and that's like the weird thing about the whole Israel comment is everything gets conflated to anti-Semitism.
I was like, no, this state in the Middle East has a lot of influence on our politicians.
I just had some questions.
I had a two-hour chat about two weeks ago with a guy who has a Nobel Prize, who's Jewish,
who spent two years in an attic during World War II, hiding.
And it was an amazing discussion.
It was just amazing.
Well, the question I asked, I said, okay, here's a question I have for you.
how do you raise a Jewish child?
And I said, the question is,
you want him to be aware of the past
because it illustrates risk
and illustrates persecution.
While at the same time,
if I raise kids and I said,
look, statistically,
black guys are more likely to kill you
than white guys.
Statistically.
I would raise a bunch of racists.
So how do you do it? He says it's an unbelievably fine line.
But you you if if you're Jewish and you raise your kids under the idea that you will always be persecuted.
You're not I don't think you're doing them any favors. I'm not Jewish. I don't know.
But it seems like you're you're putting a yoke on him. You're dumping this huge guilt on him.
I don't think it's constructive
I thought we were beating the race problem
until Obama got in there
and it became a weaponized
political card
Yeah
The left did a bad job at that
I don't think the right is as guilty
What has the right done
that represents that sort of thing?
Who have we demonized?
What weaponized
social movement or something have we done
that besides illegal aliens, but they are illegal.
Let's start with that.
They are illegal.
The left weaponized maleness.
They weaponized political correctness.
They weaponized anti-Semitism.
I'm not sure that's left.
That might be the right.
I'm trying to think.
Maybe.
We're not white supremacists.
No, certainly not.
I'm just for what is the right
What have we done
Did you say yeah
The left has a good point on that
I mean to some extent
Like the corporate greed
I do think it exists
Are you sure that's right wing
That's the democratic party
Or excuse me
I know
The democrats push on corporate greed
The republicans will say no free market's best
Like corporations
do the thing. It's like, well, we don't actually have free markets because we don't have...
I've got another book for you. Roushir Sharma's
Something Like What Happened to Capitalism. It's not a screed,
but it talks about... There's two themes, and I've been humping this book a lot.
He should be seeing sales improvements. Two themes. One is
we flood the world with capital. Flood it.
And then we try to contain the consequences with regulations,
and it doesn't work.
he says, you can't flood the world with capital like this.
It'll just go bad.
It'll find places to go.
It shouldn't go.
Then he says, also, he says, what I describe, not his words, my words,
is bad interventions with good intentions.
And he goes, and he says, so because of this, they do this.
Here's what happens.
And it's not what he screeds like, you know, you make more,
you get more taxes if you have less a lower lower tax pay you know yeah it's not this right wing
leave us alone and let us do whatever we want it's not that he's talking about the absurdity
of the current capital system in a totally rational way yeah and that's the point i was
trying to make like this whole it's like oh we're capitalism it's like pretending like we actually
live in a truly capitalist or free market society we never have but yeah but it's weirder now than
it used to be. My dad, one time I asked him about national health care.
Because we kind of have it, but it's
ad hoc. So if you're broke and you go to the ER, they're going to treat you.
If you're sick, that's the only place you can go.
So it's an expensive way to treat you. And he said, well, you know,
it makes sense in theory that he says my experience is that every time he
asks the government to spend money for you, they do a horrible job.
yeah I mean we're fighting this out with the daycare
with the daycare with NGOs
I bet there's not an NGO out there that's worth a damn
no I mean
that's I mean you're talking we just need
hopefully all this is a catalyst for dramatically shrinking
the budget but I find that very hard to believe
I don't think we can but I think we're going to have to
hit a crisis of some kind that's going to blow the circuits
office.
I've had a couple guests in the last couple months.
Susan Kikinda,
a couple others.
Ask them, what's your big prediction
for 2026 Civil War?
Do you think Civil War is on the...
We're kind of in one a little bit already.
Yeah.
I want to pull this up.
It's just like the absurdity
of...
I mean, Nick Shirley came out
with another video.
How can anybody look at this?
and think these guys are actually running a daycare center.
No.
Put it this way.
If they sent you and I over to Germany and said,
rip off the German government, would you know where to start?
The cultural barrier would be enormous.
Enormous.
So these guys are just front men.
These are bag men.
This is like the 15-year-old kid on the street corner
is not running the drug trade either.
Yeah, and who are they bag men for?
By the way, there's another sneaky little detail out there that I've been watching
I read somewhere that, you know the famous stats
That there's a sort of a non-statistical repeat of lotto winners
There are a number of people who've run the lotto several times
And then one day I read one where they said it was rigged
And I'm going, wait a minute, let me see if I got this right
Billions of dollars are being won in the lotto
And someone has found a way to rig it
And I'm thinking, oh, my God.
So Joe Sixpack, who has no chance of getting off their butts because they're being beaten down so much, buys a ticket to give them a finitely minuscule chance of busting into the open.
And it's rigged.
So then you go, and this kind of makes a little bit of sense.
and then I read an article about
one by Zorro Trust
I go, what's Zorro Trust?
It's an Epstein company
so the question is, is it possible?
you know how they're audited?
well you say to the auditor, we're going to kill your family if you don't sign off
you don't have to
get the guy compromised with a 5 year old
You just say, look, we're going to off your family.
You see Charlie Kirk?
I did that.
And the guy will sign off on anything.
You'd be out of your mind.
I say, take it.
Yeah.
I don't want to end up with.
I don't want to die.
I don't want to swim with the fishes.
I don't want to end up in Lake Mead in a barrel.
And all of a sudden I realized, what if Joe Sixpack discovered they didn't even have a chance to win the lotto?
It's all a humiliation ritual.
make the taxes
there is that sense
the two questions is did Israel
overestimate
did Israel misplay their hand
and did the COVID vaccine guys
misplay their hand
and it depends on what you perceive
their goal was
Israel you can say look they squeegee
Gaza Strip free of people
10 years from now we've forgotten how it
happened and they've got the
strip
So they win.
COVID, it's a little trickier.
You ask, did they want to test their ability to brainwash us?
Did they want to call the population with a death shot?
There's a million potential reasons for that.
I don't think it's the money.
Actually, if you look at Pfizer's share price,
you look at their dividends and stuff,
there's no evidence Pfizer made a ton of money.
If they did, where'd it go?
Was it – well, I mean the other theory is like it was you needed an excuse to stimulate the economy or the banking system.
Well, so that gets to the theory that I happened to just read what I wrote from a number of years ago just yesterday.
The market – the banking system was going through convulsions in late 19.
Yeah, September 2019, the repo spasms.
The repo spasms.
Then BlackRock said you're going to have to go direct.
and lo and behold, three months later, they're going direct.
And one of the theories is that we put the global economy
into an induced coma in a sort of a medical-like way
to stabilize the patient, right?
Drop 10 trillion, 8 trillion, whatever the number is,
and then let it out of the coma slowly and see if it's okay.
Fix the banking system.
and
I knew I'd gotten that from somewhere
it turns out there was a Marxist economist
who came up with that theory
got a biggie from Italy
who said he thinks that maybe
they did the induced coma model
to stabilize the banking system
because then after that
the banking system stops bashing
until 23
right
and I think the interventions
are getting less effective
I think at some point they're just going to fail.
They're just not going.
And if they start intervening now and all of a sudden the inflation rate soars undeniably, are they going to be able to just say, fuck you, we're doing it?
I'm not sure they can.
I'm not sure they let their credibility get beat up that badly.
Well, luckily, I mean, inflation seems relatively tamed right now.
You sure?
I mean, gas prices are really low.
Yeah.
Okay.
So let's say gas is the thing that they focus on, right?
You're anchoring on gas.
If I were to measure inflation, I'd get 100 guys who run 100 businesses and say,
what's your year-over-year cost of labor and inputs?
How much more does it cost to run that 7-Eleven?
How much more does that plumbing company cost to run?
It's higher.
It's way higher.
What's happened to your car insurance?
What's happened to your home taxes, the taxes on your house?
I think it's way higher.
You want to hear an inflationary thing?
We had a guy who plowed our driveway, and he didn't plow last year,
but he was charging his 50 bucks when he did plow.
We could not get a plow guy.
We share it with the neighbor.
We ended up having to sign a deal that was minimum $1,000 of plowing,
whether we used it or not.
So we went from zero to a thousand in one year.
Yeah.
And there's shit like that out there.
And, you know, some things did come back down.
Lumber came back down.
But but I I would find a hundred people who really know their inputs.
And and just ask them every year what happened and, you know, plumbers, convenience store, restaurant, you know, pick pick pick a hundred diverse.
Just say what happened to the cost of running your business.
That would give you a read on inflation.
The idea of Truflation telling you anything is shit.
I'm convinced that Truflation is an attempt to monetize the CPI.
I read an article yesterday claiming that Truflation was coming in lower than the CPI.
And I go, they're bullshitting us.
They're just bullshitting us.
And the Chapwood Index hasn't been updated in quite a while.
Not at all.
And I think that was coming in too hot
You actually did the math
And said if Chapwood is right
What has happened to the price of things
And it doesn't quite add up
I think Shadow Stats is coming in too hot
Shadow Stats too
Yeah
But it's not
Two and a half percent
You wouldn't notice
Two and a half percent
You wouldn't say holy fuck
I can't believe I have to pay that much
You'd never notice it
I'm looking at ShadowStats right now.
No, no, we just got an invoice for some electrical work.
It came in well below our expectations, but again, this is anecdotal.
Well, I got a plumber in the Adirondacks on a cabin.
He's a plumber by training.
He does electrical carpentry.
He does maintenance, opens the cabin for us.
I got him this year, $25 an hour.
That's.
The guy, I had to get a car back to Ithaca, long story, but I had to get a car driven back to Ithaca, five hour drive, five and a half hour drive.
He said, I'll do it for you.
I do that sort of shit all the time.
I said, how much?
So five and a half hours round trip.
He says, you.
You pay for the rental to get back?
I said, of course.
200 bucks.
I go, no, dude.
I'll pay you three.
There's no way you should charge 200 bucks for a 12-hour round trip.
Right.
So there are places where I talked to the guy who checked our cable coming into the cabin.
And he's like 26 years old.
He owned a house.
Get a house.
I said, how much did you pay for it?
I said, 148.
Damn.
There is cheap real estate out there, but it's in places where most people don't live.
Yeah.
And therefore, it's not a big effect on the overall inflation rate.
And that's like going back to what we were talking about earlier about boomers in the mortgage rate and the price of the homes and trying to manipulate rates lower to make sure that stays high.
I mean, this is.
That's really immoral.
It is, and it's – I mean this is why I finally talk about Bitcoin.
People should be saving their money in Bitcoin or gold or silver or whatever, and not their houses.
I hear the all-in podcast guys banging the table like, we need more supply.
We need more supply.
It's like, no, you just need to stop using your house.
Oh, Powell said we need to build more houses.
And I go, so let me see if I got this right.
You build more houses, so people move in.
Were they living on the street?
Right.
The answer is no.
and therefore now we'll have a commercial real estate crisis, correct?
Because there's already housing for these people.
I mean, just look at Austin, Florida,
because I just lived in Austin for four years.
They expanded supply dramatically.
Do you think real estate is starting to collapse?
Melody Wright says yes.
I'm not sure I can see it.
I think in certain markets, like where I am, like no.
Naples, Florida doesn't sound it
my brother just sold a house
he didn't have any trouble
bring it back
Austin
the prices are falling dramatically
particularly for rentals
because they just built so much supply
during the COVID era
where they had Californians
and people from New York
like myself moving down there
but a lot of us went back
and then they overbuilt
I've thought about where I'd want to live
if I didn't live where I lived.
I haven't come up with a gee whiz.
That would be really my first choice
because I could go there.
There's no reason I can't go there.
I mean, I could retire today.
It's been a good year for you, sir.
It has.
What a ridiculous...
It makes me nervous.
It's so good.
Yeah.
Off camera, I'll tell you how good.
I don't want to get the Gen Zers mad at me
for being a greedy bull.
I noticed one thing you said in your letter
is that you're allocating the treasuries,
keeping some cash in treasuries.
Oh, I'm about 50% liquidity.
Yeah.
About 50% liquidity, 30%, 30 plus percent metals,
and maybe even a little more,
and then just a smattering of equities, normal equities.
Let me check my notes here.
What did you say?
So my risk assets last year, my risk assets, take away cash equivalents.
Bonds can go up or down, but I don't count them.
I just say, look, I got 4%.
And take away my house, which is an expensive house, but it can go up or down, but I don't want to go down.
So just the risk assets, gold, gold equities, things like that.
65% last year.
This is ridiculous.
Then I saw they did a poll.
They asked retail investors with over $100,000 in the market,
what do you expect on an inflation adjusted basis
sustainably going forward?
The retail investors said 11.4%.
And I go, you gotta get medical treatment.
You've gotta get a CAT scan.
You've got a tumor the size of a cantaloupe in there.
And then they asked the pros, and they said, oh, no, no, no, more like 8.4%.
I go, oh, my God.
We have never, ever come close to 8% inflation adjusted.
Never in a year, sure.
But sustainably, not even close.
Buffett puts the number to about four without including taxes.
Well, you had this in the note too. Gold return over 25 years, over 1,200% compared to 700 of the S&P.
Gold ties Berkshire Hathaway over 27 years.
Yeah. And if you're looking for inflation-adjusted returns, like outperformance, I think gold's the best.
Did you see the tables of the MAG-7 and how much they've made? Their revenues?
Some guy gave me guff about Apple, and I pointed out that Apple's revenues have grown 70% last decade while its market gap grew 680%.
You can't do that.
Your market gap has to track revenues, period.
It doesn't have to in the short term, but it sure as hell has to sustainably.
I'll pull it up.
Yeah.
This is actually a pretty crazy chart.
But we've been saying this for five years.
How long can it go on?
As long as it wants.
But if you've got two engines on fire and you're at 35,000 feet, you can take it to 45,000.
But as they say in the flight manuals, you will have enough fuel to get to the crash site.
Look at those numbers.
Start on the left.
There's the revenues.
370% market cap.
The reason I use market cap is because that takes care of all the buyback shit.
That's just the total appreciation of the total value of the company.
Almost double.
Amazon is actually pretty good.
Amazon is really the rock star.
Look at Apple.
70% revenue.
680% market cap gain.
Microsoft, 160% to 830%.
Meta, Meta's actually doing okay, but Meta started from a bizarro starting point.
Look at NVIDIA, 1,200% to 24,000%.
Tesla, oh, Meta, excuse me, I was not going to Meta.
I think Meta by the way companies like that I think they get a ton of money straight from the Pentagon I think they not getting it from clicks And then the other funny thing is look at that tweet below I actually did that same analysis for Dell just one day on a whim
and Michael Dell jumped in on me.
Look at J.P. Morgan, 180 to 470.
Yeah.
This is not sustainable.
Unless you want to argue that 10 years ago, the markets were dirt cheap and they weren't.
The only thing that's going to sustain is that they keep printing money, right?
No, because both of those respond to the printing.
You can't get out of that mess, right?
You can't get a K-Shiller PE of 40 compared to a historical norm of 15.
You print.
You're going to print the numerator and the denominator.
You haven't changed your valuation excess at all.
You flat out have to correct the price.
You have to correct the price.
Unless you want to buy an asset that's PE of 40, price to return 2.5%.
And no one wants 2.5%.
This is actually this chart below this.
Which then you take taxes and fees out of.
This margin debt is pretty...
So I question whether margin debt's driving the market
or whether the market's pulling on the margin debt.
I tend to believe the margin debt's driving the market.
But you could imagine the margin debt going up when the market's going up.
Say, oh yeah, so momentum chasers, right?
All these charts, go to the chart with the horizontal red lines on it.
The chart from hell.
this chart to me blows my circuits.
It's further down, I think.
Keep going down, keep going down.
Keep going, keep going.
You'll see horizontal red lines.
Keep going.
I'll spot it.
As soon as you hit it, I'll see it fast.
You scroll fast, I'll see it.
That one.
Okay, that's the inflation adjusted S&P.
Those red lines are from peaks.
in which you go across and at some fateful day,
some number of years later,
you get back to that exact same price one last time.
Right?
Those red lines are 40 to 75 years long.
So if you own the 29 top,
you are even capital gains, inflation adjusted,
not taxes, not dividends.
you were even capital gains in 1981.
Damn.
Which means if you own,
if you own expensive markets,
you're in trouble.
If you own the top,
you're fucked.
Yeah.
So this explains 50%.
Now,
now here's the question I like to ask.
See that last red line at the top.
Based on those other five,
are we not going to come back and test that 2000 peak one more time?
the AI productivity gains will allow it.
We're going to an age of abundance.
Until they stop and then it'll find its way back.
Because the 20th century had a lot of gains too.
20th century was a pretty cool time, right?
Here's one I love.
The story I love is the Gundlach story where he says,
there's nothing more transformational than electricity.
You can talk about AI all you want.
Electricity is absolutely top of the food,
in terms of transforming civilization.
The electricity stocks did well, as you can imagine,
when electricity started to pick up steam.
They peaked in 1911.
Electricity was just getting started, and they peaked.
So if you're owning AI stocks,
you think you're going to catch these huge gains going forward,
your gains might all be in the rearview mirror already.
Look at that NVIDIA, Tesla.
Yeah, yeah.
You've already got those gains.
Those gains are gains pulled forward from the future.
They're priced in.
You know what?
They're going to do – one year I made reference to the forward 2040 earnings estimates.
Why would you ever use forward estimates?
People say, well, that's because you're trying to project how much the value are.
I go, let me see if I got this right.
Forward estimates, you're completely making shit up, whereas trailing estimates, you actually have numbers.
And you're using the make shit up estimate.
I don't give a damn if you're trying to figure out where they're going to go.
You're making shit up.
And I get pissed off at the guys who talk about corrections.
Look at the Goldman chart.
Go to Twitter and look at the Goldman chart.
This chart really reveals it.
Goldman Sachs?
Yeah, GS.
I just did this yesterday.
Just picked it up yesterday.
Just cash tag GS?
No, not in the year review.
Just go to Yahoo or something.
It's as good an example I've seen of a correction.
All right.
Do five-year Goldman chart.
Right here.
Yeah.
So from 2020, late 2023, the president Goldman is up 200%.
3x in what?
Two years?
Yeah.
How is that possible?
Was it that dirt cheap back then?
Now, let's go to 2025 early.
That correction right there in 2025, did that correct anything?
The term correction implies repairing something, something that's out of kilter.
You fixed it.
If you put your thumb right over that dip, just put your thumb right over that dip,
is there a shred of evidence that that corrected anything?
No.
You could just erase that and just draw a straight line through it.
You go, yeah, of course.
Now you really want to see a cool one if you can find the Dow, 1900 to 1940.
It's an amazing chart.
1900 to 1940.
Search Dow, 1900 to 1940.
I've used it several times.
And I've got this one.
uh
it not the right one Can find the exact chart I mean I have a chart that covers
that time, but not just that. Go for it. Just bring it up for
fun. Just let me see. Bring up the search. Bring up the search.
Do the Google search images and I'll find it.
Keep going down, keep going down, keep going down.
There's one that's just so good.
Keep going down.
Obviously, Google's not picking up my writing.
Now, I hate the semi-log charts.
Those drive me crazy.
There's a purpose for them.
I'm not seeing it.
I'm not seeing a good one.
So what you see is you see this sort of straight line in which it goes way the fuck up in 29,
goes way the fuck down in 32, and then goes back and then just moves forward.
And the whole thumb thing all over again where it just – but this is – but the log, yeah, that's okay.
That's okay.
Now that's a fucking correction.
that's a correction
got way out of whack
got way under whack
came back to normal
yeah
oh that's the log
I hate the log
the 1900 and 1949 logarithmic one
you see it so clearly
this one
that still looks
that's logarithmic still
I can't find it
Let me see if I can find it
Just so I can tell you how to get to it
I showed this to an editor of The Economist
He goes, holy fuck, I've never looked at that
There it is
Where?
1929 and 1940
No, I need 1900
It's got to go back because you got to see the correction.
It's not picking up my goddamn ear in review, that's for sure.
This should do it.
I'll show you.
There we go.
No, it's still logarithmic.
Oh, no, it's not logarithmic.
Oh, that's price in gold.
Grams of gold.
Yeah, I don't like those charts at all.
I'm not finding it at all.
You're hiding it from us.
Yeah, it's in a couple of my year-end reviews.
I've used it twice.
And it's just so compelling where you go, that's what a correction is.
A correction is not something that goes down a lot and then it gets back to a new high two years later.
If we're 200% of our historical average valuation, a correction has to correct price and attitude.
And if you come down 60 or 70%, you've corrected price.
If it bounces right back, you've corrected nothing.
Nothing.
What you've done is you've given investors the sense of invincibility.
The complacency bubble argument I make is that investors think the feds are going to save them.
Someone's going to save them.
It just can't happen.
Well, and I guess a –
For 45 years, that's been true.
Well, a development that would point to maybe the Fed's not coming to save them anymore as a squabble between Powell and Trump.
But that's a minor thing.
The examples I use is Mao killed 40 million, Mao killed 80 million, Stalin killed 40 million.
You think the state's going to protect you?
bad shit happens to the peasants
the only reason they protect you is if they fear you
do you think they fear the peasants right now?
not yet, not enough
not enough
well actually they might
so the Fed has shown in many of their sayings
a number of Fed governors have shown a fear of a recession
Now, previous Fed governors, it's like, fuck, get over it.
They happen.
It's like drinking too much than projectile vomiting.
That's what you do.
Recessions clear out the debris, period.
Now, I can make the argument that some intervention in the 30s might have been productive because when you correct a huge mistake like they did in the 20s, which was a vast credit bubble, that you do huge damage correcting it.
And maybe the banks didn't all have to go under.
Maybe there was some moderate, you know, lend dear rates.
Lend dearly, I think.
Who is it?
Is that Bastiat?
Who's the guy who said that?
And so you save what are otherwise good banks that have a run going at them, but make them pay dearly for it.
Here's what I'd like.
Here's the rule I'd like to put in place.
Tell all the banks, pass losses, every bank, define the C-suite.
I don't know how you do it, but you say, okay, here's the definition for C-Sweeter.
The top 10 most highly paid guys in the company say, if we have to bail you out, you're going to give back five years of all your compensation.
They're going to behave themselves, aren't they?
Yep.
But you never do.
No.
I mean, again, when you're talking about there's no accountability, was the last time anybody went to jail or was actually held accountable?
So one of the books about the GFC, which also didn't correct any.
If you look at the GFC in my year-end review, we got back to historical average valuation.
We didn't get cheap.
We never got cheap.
And we stayed there for about a month.
And I thought I was dreaming, but Spitznagel said it.
Grantham said it.
Others have said it.
We got, should we say, reasonably valued for about a month.
And that's not a correction.
After that catastrophe, we should have done some real damage and we should have gone lower.
And instead, we gave investors the sense of invincibility.
We said they can stop anything.
It's like sandbagging the Mississippi River for Katrina.
And that's like, do they have one more in them after COVID?
I don think they do See that my bet But my bet is and I think the Fed must be terrified that they will try to intervene by dropping rates and the bond market will go the other direction
It's already happened.
And it's already happening.
And so I don't think they dare intervene.
Because if we discover the Fed is powerless, then the markets will really shit a pickle.
but the other thing is
if you look at the last two big recessions
the GFC and the dot com
the Fed started cutting rates
almost to the day at the top
and they stopped cutting rates
almost to the day at the bottom
so people say well Fed cutting rates is bullish
I go no last time they cut rates
it went down 50%
aggressive rate cutting is a catastrophe
yeah
What is the market business that they cut rates in the fall?
Let me see.
I think they're trying to tap the rates, hoping to somehow.
They're trying to bleed a bubble, right?
That doesn't work.
No.
It goes emergent.
Any physical scientist will tell you when he gets displaced, way away from equilibrium, once it starts to equilibrate back, it is out of control.
It is the fires in California.
It's a volcano.
It's earthquakes.
It's avalanches.
It's chemical explosions in the lab.
That's why you want equilibrations to occur steadily.
When the markets get out of whack, you want to let them fix so that you don't have a fatality.
Yeah.
But they've refused to.
They'll continue to try to refuse to, I believe.
But I think they'll have to step back this time.
I think at some point they'll just go out of the splash zone,
and they're going to do an Andrew Mellon moment and just say,
why don't liquidate?
And really, is it really going to affect the bottom of the economy that much?
Most of these people don't own these assets.
No, they'll lose their jobs, though.
Yeah, they'll lose their jobs.
Yeah, it'll hurt them badly.
Yeah.
It always hurts them badly.
Yeah.
Right.
They get hurt coming and going.
The average 70-year-old boomer, median, median 70-year-old boomer, who is by definition on the cost of retirement because they're losing their marbles.
They've got fake fucking knees, right?
Everything's going south.
70 is not the new 60.
70 is 70.
and
the median boomer
has $450,000
of net worth
$410,000 of net worth
that includes real estate
because they probably
have a house now
or a condo
and it's estimated
that about $200,000 of it
is actually investable assets
consumable assets
the most they can afford
to take out
that $200,000 per year
is like
it's like
I did the math wrong.
It's like 4% of $200,000.
3% of $200,000.
Yeah.
I got that math wrong.
I think I fucked up that math.
There's something dead wrong there.
I just had a memory of a $22,000 estimate, and that's just dead wrong.
By the way, the median boomer also, median seven-year-old, also Social Security of $22,000.
22,000 from social security
that's correct
plus 8 grand that's what 30,000
they gotta
live on that
not gonna be easy
you heard it here first
I've gotta run here
it's been a great way to end the week though
well it's always fun Marty
and we'll have to do it again
I'm reading a bunch of books on economics
this year because I think this will be
the year to talk about the carnage in the markets.
I think it'll be...
I think that's why Andrew Ross Sorkin wrote
1929. He's trying to get ahead
of the mess. I think
someone whispered in his ear.
He's front-running the SEO.
Well, I'm not even convinced he wrote the book.
The audio book,
he talked about McKay's famous
treatise, and he
read it, supposedly, and he called it
McCad.
And I'm going, Andrew, you know
better. Either that's an
AI voice that has faked me out. It's a good one. Or
you don't know what you're talking about. And the latter would not shock me in the least.
I would like to think he's smarter than that.
He's a Cornell grad. He once accused me of having
a typo in a tweet, which I said that's not a very
meaty counterattack.
Coming at a typo instead of the argument. Coming at a typo
instead of the argument.
Yeah, I was unimpressed that he used a typo
as his counterattack.
Well, if the market does turn into carnage,
we'll come on another.
Talk about it.
Talk about the book.
By the way, it's not going to be fun to watch.
Roman proverb, the vanquished weep,
the victors do not laugh.
Yeah, don't dance.
Don't dance.
They're trying to hold the nest,
green by the skin of their skinny skin, chinny chin chin today.
They're still beating on my
medals this year trying to get them back in the red.
I think this is...
I think gold and silver headed way higher.
I hope so. Kind of.
I'd rather get 10% a year.
the uh all right we'll catch up i gotta run yes peace love freaks thank you for listening to this
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