#705: The Fed Can't Save Us This Time with Dave Collum

Summary

TFTC: A Bitcoin Podcast

Episode #705: "The Fed Can't Save Us This Time" with Dave Collum

Host: Marty Bent
Guest: Dave Collum
Date: January 19, 2026

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Episode Overview

In this electric, freewheeling episode, Marty Bent is joined by renowned chemist, market commentator, and provocateur Dave Collum for a wide-ranging conversation about global finance, propaganda, societal decay, the failures of institutions, generational tensions, and the new landscape of risk. With characteristic candor, humor, and a willingness to court controversy, Collum analyzes why he believes central banks—especially the Fed—are out of ammunition to rescue markets and society from the mounting crises of 2026. Together, they tackle the roles of AI, media propaganda, asset bubbles, demographic timebombs, and the deep cynicism seeping into public life.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. State of the World—“Everything’s Breaking”

• Both Collum and Bent launch quickly into a discussion about the sense of societal unraveling, typified by confusion, rising fraud, and a breakdown in trust across institutions.
• Collum: “I find the world profoundly confusing.” [00:54]
• AI, propaganda, and information overload have made it “all but impossible to understand the world” in any traditional sense.

2. AI, Propaganda, and the End of Trust

• The rise of AI-generated content and the proliferation of memes have exacerbated signal-to-noise problems.
• Collum references Carl Sagan's 1990s warning about information chaos and Tesla’s vision of a global ‘brain’, connecting these early predictions to today’s predicament.
• “We’re living in a meme.” [04:36] (Collum)
• The pair discuss how AI images and text feel “soulless,” with Collum describing subconscious revulsion at AI-created documents.
• Notable quote: “There could be a Marty Bent–Dave Collum doggy style meme, right?” (Collum, 05:31)
• They also debate whether AI represents a double-edged sword or something more deeply manipulative and one-sided.

3. Collapse of Media Credibility & Rise of the Meme Army

• Collum credits ‘memers’ with swinging the 2024 U.S. presidential election, speculating that some may have been on political payrolls.
• The ability of memes to transform narratives is now dwarfing legacy media's influence.

4. Institutional Decay: From Universities to Politics

• Collum shares personal stories about being labeled “Google toxic,” fighting union smear campaigns, and being attacked online and by politicians, notably after getting caught up in the crossfire of attacks on Tucker Carlson.
• “You could complain to the dean… or you could just walk into my office and we can chat and we’ll both be better off for it.” [11:07]
• Unpacks how academic culture, cancel movements, and weaponized outrage have soured traditional discourse.

5. Israel, Gaza, and the Politics of Narrative

• Deep dive into the controversy over U.S.–Israel relations, media control, and the morality of foreign policy narratives, including October 7 events and the assassination of public figures.
• Collum voices disillusionment with both U.S. and Israeli leadership, raising questions about “stand-down orders” and the way moral capital is spent and abused.
• “I have a problem with the fact that they’re doing their Israel first, America second.” (Collum, 13:40)
• Collum repeatedly underscores the theme: “If you’re not calling out governments, you’re not thinking.” [22:04]

6. Covid, Polio, and Medical Misinformation

• Collum asserts, controversially, that the official polio story is a “hoax,” attributing the epidemic to toxic exposure rather than the virus, referencing Moth in the Iron Lung.
• Extends this skepticism to Covid and the medical establishment: “If you still trust modern medicine, you need a fucking CAT scan.” [15:20]
• The two discuss how the machinery of narrative protects certain "sacred" medical and historical stories.

7. Central Banks, Asset Bubbles, and the Limits of Rescue

• Collum’s financial year-in-review leads to a core thesis: despite repeated warnings of doom by famous financiers since 2015, asset returns have kept soaring—but not because fundamentals are sound.
• “Did they get it wrong, or are we that much more fucked?” [34:01]
• He argues the magnitude of systemic risk is now “orders of magnitude” higher than in previous cycles.
• “We are so far out over our skis now…” [34:01]

8. Gold, Silver, Bitcoin, and the Flight to Hard Assets

• Both discuss the rush for precious metals by “big money,” not retail, as faith in fiat wanes.
• Debate ensues over whether the recent ramp in metals prices signals a systemic blow-up or a move to a multipolar economic order—or both.
• Collum references the dangers created by negative interest rate policies, Japan’s carry trade, and the possibility of worldwide financial accidents that defy tidy explanation.
• “Precious metals are telling us something’s going on.” [35:23]
• “Do you think this is finally the start of real price discovery for silver?” (Bent, 48:52)

9. Social & Generational Breakdown

• Collum paints a bleak picture of Gen Z—socially timid, glued to screens, deeply indebted, economically locked out, and facing a “monotonically” rising age of first home purchase.
• “Younger generations are getting totally fucked.” [63:20]
• Examines the rise of multigenerational housing, growing birthrate collapse, the weaponization of gender and racial identity, and the profound changes in household formation.
• “You gave iPhones, turned their brains to mush, and then got them deeply into debt for degrees of no value.” (Collum, 54:40)

10. Real Estate, Asset Allocation, and Market Risk

• Collum shares his own portfolio allocations (roughly 30-50% hard assets, heavy cash), noting the historic outperformance of gold over equities in many recent multi-decade periods.
• Warns that the U.S. real estate market is kept aloft for boomers to sell out at high prices, dooming the next generation to overpay.
• “You can’t pass that house to the next generation…they don’t want the house, can’t afford the taxes, can’t afford the maintenance.” [120:12]

11. Societal Tipping Points, Corruption, and the Black Pill

• The expose of systemic daycare, welfare, and financial frauds (Minnesota “Nick Shirley” case, copycats) hints at an unraveling social contract.
• “When was the last time someone of importance went to prison?” (Collum, 96:44)
• Collum argues that the ruling class is not yet afraid of the public—an essential condition, he suggests, for real change.
• “The only reason they protect you is if they fear you.” [185:21]

12. Collapse of Higher Education

• Blistering critique of university administration, grade inflation, the failure of DEI policies, the demise of standardized testing, and the rise of “minority industrial complexes.”
• “College has to go through massive change—no one’s learning anything online.” [134:54]
• He predicts a mass extinction of colleges and a renewed market focus on tangible, employable skills.

13. Hope for Gen Z—Work Ethic and Agency

• Despite his infamous cynicism, Collum advises younger listeners: “Somewhere out there are kids not making these mistakes—and they will win.” [124:10]
• Strong advocacy for self-education, work ethic, and reclaiming agency.

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On AI and Propaganda:
  “We’re living in a meme.” — Collum [04:36]

• On Trust in Medicine:
  “If you still trust modern medicine, you need a fucking CAT scan.” — Collum [15:20]

• On the Effect of Fed Policy:
  “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.” — Collum [44:19]

• On Precious Metals:
  “Gold ties Berkshire Hathaway over 27 years.” — Collum [171:33]

• On Passing Down Wealth:
  “You can’t pass that house to the next generation…They’d rather have the cash.” — Collum [120:14]

• On Gen Z:
  “You gave iPhones, turned their brains to mush, and then got them deeply into debt for degrees of no value.” — Collum [54:40]

• On Markets:
  “If you read the financial section of my year-in-review, you should shit your thong.” — Collum [43:29]

• On Elite Power:
  “If you really don’t think men and women of wealth and power aren’t conspiring, you need a CAT scan.” — Collum [104:14]

• On Impending Crisis:
  “I don’t think they (the Fed) do. See, that’s my bet. My bet is…the interventions are getting less effective. At some point, they’re just going to fail.” — Collum [163:26, 187:56]

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Key Timestamps for Important Segments

• 00:54 – Collum on confusion and institutional failure
• 03:52 – Information chaos, Sagan and Tesla references
• 06:07 – AI as a Google killer, replacing search and information trust
• 10:14 – University culture, online smear campaigns
• 13:34 – U.S.-Israel politics and owning of politicians
• 15:20 – “You need a f—ing CAT scan” if you trust medicine
• 21:27 – On October 7 and narrative warfare
• 34:01 – Are we on the edge of financial collapse?
• 48:52 – Is the silver market seeing true price discovery?
• 54:40 – Gen Z, student loan debt, and demographic crisis
• 63:20 – First-time homebuyer age and housing unaffordability
• 120:12 – Inheritance, passing down (or not) intergenerational wealth
• 134:54 – State and future of higher education
• 144:06 – Venezuela, global power structure, and “Risk” geopolitics
• 171:33 – Gold’s performance compared to major equities
• 185:21 – Why the powerful don’t fear the public
• 187:56, 163:26 – On Fed intervention: "I don’t think they do…at some point, they’re just going to fail."

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Tone and Style

The episode is candid, irreverent, intellectually sharp, and often darkly comedic. Collum and Bent engage in free-associative tangents and controversial views, always returning to the core theme: the sense that foundational pillars—financial, social, political—are decaying, and the tools we’ve relied upon (central banks, higher ed, media) are out of solutions. Collum is relentless, acerbic, and unapologetic, with Bent offering measured but incisive counterpoints and questions.

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Final Message to Listeners

• The world is at a crossroads: Don’t trust institutions blindly; focus on reclaiming agency, building real skills, and fortifying oneself for a future of volatility.
• “Somewhere out there, kids aren’t making these mistakes, and they’re going to win.”
• Don’t rely on the Fed, the government, or elites to save you—be your own anchor.

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For further in-depth finance, social criticism, and unvarnished contrarianism, see Dave Collum’s annual “Year in Review” and follow the continuing TFTC series.

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(End of Summary)

Transcript

[A]

You've had a dynamic where money's become freer than free.

[B]

If you talk about a Fed just gone nuts. All. 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. Probably should be. Probably should be. Sorry. How to fuck up your podcast. And here's Dave, the most undependable podcast guest in the planet.

[A]

I don't know. I think you're pretty dependable.

[B]

Yeah. Yeah.

[A]

How we doing? Error 404. Great.

[B]

Error 404. Yeah.

[A]

Great title for this year's.

[B]

Well, I thought it was actually going to be an error 404. I almost. I almost didn' write it. I was very close to that. I quit several times, so. 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, so.

[A]

No, it's never fun now.

[B]

Those guys are punks.

[A]

It does feel like everything's breaking, though.

[B]

It does. It really does.

[A]

And I'm bummed. I'm not bummed, but like 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.

[B]

What do you think of. Who do you think he is? He's a front man. Right. He didn't do that himself.

[A]

I've seen the series. Yeah. Apparently it was in the. In the White House earlier this year.

[B]

Yeah, right. That's suspicious, isn't it? Yeah. I think the memers. You know, the 2024 election, I gave the memers huge credit for winning it because Trump was getting the crap kicked out of him and the populace could just lose heart and then dilly. And these guys would go in and come up with a meme that says, yeah, I'm voting for the hillbilly and the felon. Right. And 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 at some level, but they were probably on payroll. That was probably Trump figuring out, I gotta. I gotta get the memers.

[A]

Oh, yeah, I mean, it was. I mean, there was an explicit part of that strategy with the podcast and stuff like that.

[B]

Oh, yeah, the.

[A]

The podcast strategy was explicit, but I think was definitely implicit behind the scenes and maybe explicit to an extent in terms of tapping the memers on the shoulders explicitly, but, like, implicitly they know that people are gonna watch these podcasts and put memes out there.

[B]

Well, but I think they might have been on payroll, actually.

[A]

You think so?

[B]

I hope that's. Can you hear me? Wait a minute, hold on, hold on. Is something coming through to you too?

[A]

No.

[B]

Oh, I was all sudden getting a delayed feed. I did a 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's 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.

[A]

I mean, it was all predicted too.

[B]

Right.

[A]

The signal to noise ratio is going to get completely out of whack.

[B]

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 Teville Tesla called the. The Internet in 1926. He said, the world's going to be surrounded by this big, basically global brain. Yeah.

[A]

And how do you. How do you anchor into reality, if at all?

[B]

Well, I saw a meme video. Is it still a meme? Are the videos memes. Good question.

[A]

Depends how long it is, I guess.

[B]

We'Re living in a meme. I saw one that someone posted and he said, all I did was go to ChatGPT. It said, watch all the videos of person A and person B and make me a funny meme video. And. And it was like a minute long and it was so good. And I'm going, oh, you gotta be here. So I'm gonna try, like, I'm gonna try, like, I gotta 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. Oh, yeah, we're all toast. There could be a Marty Bet, you know, Dave Collum doggy style meme. Right?

[A]

I mean, now that you. Hey, be careful what you, uh.

[B]

No, it just happened.

[A]

Be careful what you utter into existence.

[B]

It just happened. I just did it. If you do that, I will hunt you down and I will put Lindsey Graham on you.

[A]

Yeah, well, I mean, this is something you talked about in the letter too. It's like these technologies, they're double edged swords, but they really accentuate the golden age of propaganda too.

[B]

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?

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

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. I go, okay, a hedge fund could buy that, so that just doesn't cut it. But they certainly looked like they had a moat. Now they're fighting for their lives. Google could be the Yahoo of the modern era. Right. Remember when we searched with Yahoo?

[A]

Yeah. I mean, I was very young, but I do remember.

[B]

And so now Google could be the next Yahoo. So I go straight to Grok instead of. Instead of Google.

[A]

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.

[B]

Yeah, I don't even, I can't even keep up with all of these. I know the name Claude, but I've never, I've. 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 thing I've noticed is I'll read. You know how the, you know how the Google art, the AI art at first was kind of cute. Now it's just soulless crap. Right. It's just slop. Right. Although watching Maduro and Trump in their underwear doing a dance in the Oval Office, I got to admit was entertaining. But 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 saying it's detecting the lack of humanity because it's an AI Diablo document that I can't consciously see it's an AI. There supposedly are tells, but they tend to be formulaically written, very well organized.

[A]

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.

[B]

How many videos have we done?

[A]

This is probably our seventh or eighth Logan.

[B]

And are you real?

[A]

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 a distribution of potential paths that one can go through, a human who has the ability to create new creative thought has almost infinite pass where LLM, 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. To your point.

[B]

Yeah, I. One time when I was in a zero hedge debate against Steve Keen, moderated by Fleckenstein, I made reference to squeegeeing the drippings off the floor of the Internet. But the problem is. So someone took a handwritten 10 digits, 0 to 9 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.

[A]

Yeah, yeah, I could 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 completely degenerates to your point.

[B]

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 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 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 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 and we'll both be better off for it. And then the next day, the chair walks in my office, said he got a complaint. So the next day in class, I said, look, 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 an Internet that says, now it includes you want a good one? Now it includes the Preservation Jewish association, who I've seen with Trump on stage, called me a Holocaust denying Nazi. I call him a pig fucking liar after that. I didn't actually call him a pig fucking liar. I once had a lawyer tell me, so don't, don't call anyone something that's provable or disprovable. So call them a douchebag, call him a weasel, don't call them 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 your.

[A]

And why was he calling you a Holocaust denier?

[B]

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 Hansen. Really appalled me. I thought he was okay 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 were. Had me sort of reeling. And it's a little disquieting to watch a senator stand on stage and hammer you.

[A]

Yeah, it is very odd, the relationship between the politicians and the nation of Israel specifically.

[B]

It's not odd. It's very explainable. They're owned. They're all owned. Right. And that's what bothers me. Right. I don't have a problem with supporting Israel, the country. I have a problem with the fact that they're doing their Israel first, America second. Sorry, guys, that's what it looks like. You know, and call me an anti Semite. I'm not an anti Semite. But you may be a pig fucker.

[A]

The. No, it's weird. I mean, I'm sure you've seen the, the clip of what's the name? Greenblatt, the ADL guy talking about always monitoring, monitoring US citizens.

[B]

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 whacked Charlie Kirk. Yeah, I think the evidence is pretty. 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, the wife's laying in a puddle of blood in the garage, that the husband's 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 found your wife in the garage in a puddle of blood.

[A]

Why do you think Charlie needed to be taken out?

[B]

Interesting question. It might have even been a showcase. Might have been, say, don't turn on us. Right. It could have been they actually made it, 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 him. 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 could find yourself in the ER with a heart attack. You just don't know. You don't know.

[A]

I mean, objectively, with the flu vaccine, they've had a negative efficacy for many years.

[B]

I think that's correct. I think. Have you read Moth in the Iron Lung?

[A]

No.

[B]

You got to read it. I got to cut 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. 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 makes 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 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 arsenicals 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, us saved the world from tyranny in World War II narrative. Right. You do not want to let that story go. And I'm even willing to give them that one, but. And then I replayed a TED Talk. I watched it go, holy shit, that makes sense now. And then the other question is, if they overplayed the October 7th Israel story, they thought they had moral capital. They didn't have anywhere near enough moral capital, justified what they did. But is it possible they just said, look, here's the deal. Ten years from now, no one will remember and we're going to have what we want and we don't give a shit. And we've done much worse as a nation. The United States has done much worse.

[A]

Well then, I mean, did you see Pompeo on stage last week?

[B]

No.

[A]

Talking about history, like, we need to make sure the history of October 7th's written by us.

[B]

Who's us?

[A]

That's a great question. But it's. I don't know, it was just very, very flippant in how we've heard, like, history is written by the victors and who knows what the actual.

[B]

Yeah. Victor Davis Hanson, apparently. Yeah.

[A]

But he was saying, he was saying, as it pertains, like, October 7th, like, we're going to write the history. There's not going to be.

[B]

Yeah, but I don't know who the.

[A]

We is and all that.

[B]

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 room 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. 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.

[A]

I mean, one of them is in the bitcoin space. Now, Ephrat, who was.

[B]

Yeah. Oh, Ephrat. I've had number of chats with Ephrat 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's all wrong. This story's all wrong. Well, the Egyptian intelligence told Israel, hey, it's coming, you know, get out of the way. Right. There's a problem here. The guy who moved the concert to the border moved the troops away from the border. You know, by the way, if I had asked you two years ago, three years ago, whatever Bide asked you, Hamas drops 800 guys into Israel. How long would it take for Israel to clean up that mess? You would say, what, five minutes? Yeah, I mean, someone described Israel as, you can't walk 10ft without seeing some young guy with an AR15 that somehow the 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.

[A]

Yeah, that's what that was. The weird thing. It's the response.

[B]

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. 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.

[A]

But I mean, you've been saying that for six years since we've been doing these episodes. Maybe seven, I don't know.

[B]

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. A guy who lived in Israel and so he gave me some reading material and I go, oh, shit. So I read it and I in, you know, Mearsheimer, Steve Walt, the Israel Lobby. That's a must read if you want to understand. It's a good start. 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 area, and we'll just call Palestine. They don't like me to call 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 Poppy 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. You know, they fucked up everything they touched in some ways, they Civilized worlds in some ways. You know, it's kind of a mixed bag. They took land rules, which in that part of the world is kind of pseudo sort of Marxist light, where the village owned the land, and 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. My shock face. This is the 20s. Yeah.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

This is my shock face right here. And. 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 Brits change it because of European money, saying, change the rules. We want to go buy it? And Pape didn't actually go deeply into that topic, but that may have been an absolutely profound moment in the history of the region.

[A]

Yeah, I mean, you mentioned Mearsheimer. I thought his appearance on Tucker last summer was one of my favorites of the.

[B]

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 PhD.

[A]

Well, he was big on the Ukraine stuff, too, right in the beginning.

[B]

He's very important. When I wrote about Ukraine, Mearsheimer was big. Greenwald was big. Max Blumenthal is big on both. Right. 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.

[A]

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[B]

Why?

[A]

Why that?

[B]

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. 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 is 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 Fire. I forgave her. I was disappointed. Then Victor Davis Hansen 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. 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 like to hear them. 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's it? Mark Levin. Who? Tucker counterattacked pretty hard. I referred to as a rabid. I refuted to him. 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 a 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.

[A]

I watched that one.

[B]

You would never want to be taken out by Tucker. If he decides to go at you, you are dead. Me? 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 clickbaiting. And then I shortened it to masturbator. 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 is paying his influencers.

[A]

That was loosely verified, right?

[B]

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 I'm trying not to lie. But I don't lose a lot of sleep. Someone I picked on Gates and 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 them one millimeter of slack.

[A]

Is this Bill Gates or Matthew Gates?

[B]

Bill 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's a famous eugenicist, wrote books on it. Yes. And so I said not. Not giving him the break because he's also a douchebag. And so Epstein level douchebag. And so my copy editor was saying, nah, 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 in 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 them on his dime. And I get the proceeds. I mean, how do you. So it's an estimated 3,500 pages.

[A]

So I was gonna say it's gotta be three volumes at least.

[B]

It's 15 volumes.

[A]

So you're going to do individual.

[B]

Well, there are 300 pages apiece, except for the first couple 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 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 there. I'm paying attention to nothing else in my life.

[A]

Well, as somebody who's suffered from writer's block for the last two months, I envy that ability because, well, I don't.

[B]

Have it now, so don't envy it now 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. 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. Reading the 17 years, I can see trends that I never would have noticed. 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, sand Druckenmiller, Howard Marks, you know, famous, famous guy 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 NIRP and ZIRP 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 enough podcasts. 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 had Been an earthquake in California 200 years ago. Move, sell your house, get the fuck out of there. Right, yeah, well, because it's coming.

[A]

Well, is that what precious metals are telling us right now?

[B]

That's the question. What do you think?

[A]

I think something's definitely going on.

[B]

So you don't think it's just a mania meme thing?

[A]

No, no, not at all.

[B]

Glad to hear that.

[A]

I think there's a mad dash for these hard assets.

[B]

By big money.

[A]

Yeah. I mean, I don't know.

[B]

It's not Dave and Marty.

[A]

No. But I know you've talked about, you've been on shows with Tom and you've.

[B]

Talked to him, but Tom Luongo.

[A]

Tom, yeah, Tom Luongo. His whole series that we're trying to break away from the City of London, the Davos.

[B]

I, I, Tom is so knowledgeable and I know, I've asked a lot of people about the City of London and there's some real smart guys who talk like Tom. I don't understand it yet. I asked Tom if there's some, like 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 Hanke in two podcasts actually, who's a currency expert? You want to know 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. Yeah. So who's right? It doesn't mean Steve's right, doesn't mean Tom's wrong. But I just don't know.

[A]

I 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's always been the canary in the coal mine. First to do crazy quantitative easing, monetization of.

[B]

So yesterday in the Twitter space, the 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's saying, oh, the carry trade is now over. And I go, no, no, you have a 20 year carry trade where people speculate with free money and then raise rates, race 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.

[A]

That's why I think people are flocking to these.

[B]

How are they keeping the balls in the air?

[A]

I have no idea.

[B]

Is that maybe other central banks flooding the zone without telling us?

[A]

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 worry, everything's fine. I don't know.

[B]

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.

[A]

Well, I think that's the big question. Particularly with silver. I saw TD had a big silver short trade that got blown out.

[B]

TD Asset Management.

[A]

TD I think it was.

[B]

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.

[A]

TD securities.

[B]

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?

[A]

So they had a 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.

[B]

They had to have been hurt by that one. Yeah, but the question is, are they magnitudes? Right, but remember in 0809 I wrote about 0809 in 2002 and everyone says, oh, too early is wrong. I go, fuck you. If I predict the Dow's going to drop 100 points and I'm two years early, I'm wrong. If you predict the entire world's going to implode into its foundation, like building seven in 2002 and it takes five years, you're dead right. So one time Paul Kudrowski 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 Roubini, for fuck's sake. Right. And. And, and I said, was I too early or was I wrong? And he, he, he writes back to me, says you are brilliantly correct. And so the only thing I got wrong is 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 date 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.

[A]

Well that's, I mean I think that's the big question with like 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.

[B]

Or both. Or both. Yeah, well one. 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, all you go, you hear this crack and you go, what was that? Right. 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 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 syndrome, right? Just blurted out to him, 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 kaplooi. Just. I think we're right now on the cusp. And, and, but the Bear Sterns headphones were like, they said oh, 600 million dollar headphones. They said who cares? That's pocket change. But it wasn't pocket change because it's a. 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.

[A]

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?

[B]

Well, I think here's the crazy. And this is why I call it the complacency bubble. I mean, 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 in heat. And, 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. They're not insane?

[A]

Well, if we actually have a productivity boom driven by AI and the tariff regime is working out well, and how.

[B]

Many, how many decades will that take?

[A]

I have no idea. Yeah.

[B]

Who's.

[A]

That's a theory out there.

[B]

Oh. So in the Twitter space yesterday, Brendan Ike showed up. And that was great because I wanted to talk to Brendan Ike. We've had phone calls, but I wanted to talk to him. Brendan pre IPO. Netscape founded Mozilla, Firefox, wrote JavaScript, founded Brave. Right. This guy knows Silicon Valley. This guy knows his shit. And, 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. I don't, don't give me this insane. Give me a 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 gotta say it, if you read the financial section, 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, you know, you got, they got their fingers in the dikes. Forget Liz Cheney, move on.

[A]

Well, you, you phrase it, I think, like creative demolition, not creative destruction.

[B]

That's right.

[A]

What do you mean by that?

[B]

Well, they've just. I needed a new word. Demolitions. Creative demolition sounded good. If you hear 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 that 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.

[A]

Don't fall for the Katherine Austin Fitz stuff. Not bitcoin, maybe. Maybe crypto.

[B]

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. 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. 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, as it's not. Not mathematically possible for it to keep doing it, that there's a. There's a ceiling coming. And this guy looks like he's a devout hodler.

[A]

If you. I am very sympathetic and, like, almost wholly convinced of the power law, the power trend adoption curve that bitcoin's on.

[B]

Clarify that. Clarify that.

[A]

Basically, what we're experiencing with bitcoin is similar to the Internet network adoption, which followed a power trend. A power trend, Right. And you can put the price on a power trend, too. And basically, it's how networks are adopted.

[B]

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. Goodwin or something. I don't know the guy's name who wrote the screed. You ought to read it for no other reason to make sure that he's a nut case 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.

[A]

That dude's a quack.

[B]

Is that right? I didn't even. I didn't even read the whole thing. I just know that. I just know that he. He went to a lot of trouble to write this.

[A]

Yeah, he's been. He was. He was like a. He was like a big blocker back in the day. He wanted us, like, the whole B. Cash. Bitcoin cash. Roger Ver. He was, like, part of that. He's all but going his direction. He's been. He's been saying bitcoin's failed for like a decade now, and it's gone up in price.

[B]

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 it could be because the Bear Stearns hedge funds were not very big looking either. 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's finally price discovering? Is that sort of the way you describe it?

[A]

I mean, I'm not going to pretend to be an expert on 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.

[B]

Central banks. Yeah.

[A]

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 his. He's been putting together a silver thesis for like the last two years. He was 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.

[B]

Do you think the Tier 1 asset designation. There's not only a Tier 1 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 better.

[A]

I think it's not only that too. You just look at just the debt system as well. You need a natural hedge to that. If you're looking at not only that system, but Swift and the sanctions and the confiscating of sovereign assets.

[B]

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.

[A]

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.

[B]

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. So I think it was in 2009. I wrote about Fourth Turning, maybe 2010. And I got an email from a friend, Einhorn, who oftentimes I mention him but won't say who he is. But he said, what do you think of the fourth turning? I said, well, I'm only half done. There's that. And so I said, now I got to read it. And then I got an email about two weeks later said, well, what'd you think? And I go, oh fuck, now I really got to read it. And apparently tons of hedge funds 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 you know, 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.

[A]

There are cracks in the foundations of your money. Governments around the world are managing record debt the same way they always have by debasing their currencies. And the effects are already showing up across markets. In his report the Debasement Trade, James Lavish explains why the shift is reshaping portfolios, why gold tends to act first, and why bitcoin often follows as the implications become clearer. On January 28, James joins Unchained Live for the Age of Debasement A presentation and Q and A expanding on that research and exploring what this environment means for long term investors. If the playbook no longer explains what you're seeing, this event helps put the pieces together. Register now and get early access to the report@ Unchained.com TFTC that's Unchained.com TFTC sup, freaks? This rip is brought to you by good friends at Silent. Silent creates everyday Faraday gear that protects your hardware. We're in Bitcoin. We have a lot of hardware that we need to secure. Your wallet emits signals that can leave you vulnerable. You want to pick up Silence gear, put your hardware in that. I have a tap signer right here. I got the silent cardholder replace my wallet. I was using Ridge wallet because it secured against RFID signal jacking. Silent. The cardholder does the same thing. It's much sleeker, fits in my pocket much easier. I Also have the Faraday phone sleeve, which you can put a hardware wallet in. We're actually using it for our keys at the house, too. There's been a lot of robberies. They have essential Faraday slings, Faraday backpacks. It's a bitcoin company. They're running on a bitcoin standard. They have a bitcoin treasury. They accept bitcoin via strike. So go to slnt.com tftc to get 15% off anything or simply just use the code tftc when [e-mail] Patented technology, special operations approved. It has free shipping as well. So go check it out. It's completely exact. Did you see this? Another stat came out today, the the average hiring age last year in the United States.

[B]

No, I haven't seen that.

[A]

Average new hire age of the average new hire last year. What do you think it is? It was.

[B]

Well, what's the old one? Give me the old one.

[A]

I don't know the old one.

[B]

Well, you got to know that it's got to be a trend, right?

[A]

Good point. That's a good point.

[B]

I would say that in the last 20 years, it's probably gone up by a factor, by five.

[A]

Last year was 42.

[B]

Hiring age, first job, average new hire.

[A]

It's a new hire.

[B]

Is new hire meaning a new job or the person's first job?

[A]

I think a new job. You've got job openings. What is the average.

[B]

So they're not hiring the kids then, is the gist.

[A]

Yes. And that was the point I'm getting to. It seems very clear. There's this generational divide and the young ones are.

[B]

They're going to slice our throats. That's going to be a Menken HL Menken 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'll liquefy the banking system. I think they use student debt to liquefy the banking system in 08 trillion five. A trillion five.

[A]

Yeah, because you take your student loans, obviously you pay for your tuition. That feeds the middle management.

[B]

It just brings money. Loans. Loans create money. 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 set it great. He said, you gotta watch Adam Carolla. Keep an eye on him. He's really doing a great job. He's awesome.

[A]

I'm trying to get him on the show.

[B]

Adam. Oh, that would be a big win. Way better than column, 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, right? So now they go, oh, you know, now we get to do this. I go, no one likes that though, right? No one. No one wants you to run around just being a bitch.

[A]

I mean, we're seeing that in Minnesota with the ice protest the last couple weeks.

[B]

Right, right. The chick who got shot in the face. Yeah, Right. 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? No, 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. The savannah's not a place to hang out. Get the thing, get through the checkout and get out of there. And your wife sitting there looking over like this, staring at shit, reading the ingredients. I go, you don't know what this 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 would 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 get this terrible task of finding a guy who's strong, a protector, a provider who doesn't beat the fuck out of him, 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 can just treat them like shit all the time. Well, they won't want to hang out with you. Yeah.

[A]

And that's gonna. I mean, that's a crisis. That is. That is building as well in the back. So now when they get to, like, 35, 40, no partner, no kids, and then 40 more years left of life.

[B]

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 review that shows that over the last 20 years, the average age of first time home buyers is not only now 31, but arose linearly actually over the last 40 years. I think the plot, 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 first time. That's the age of first time home buyer. And what's the beginning year? I can't see it from my vantage point. What's the first year in that? 1980 or something.

[A]

Let me see. It is. Where'd I go?

[B]

Down there. Oh, look at that chart right there. Go 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 Fox.

[A]

That's a great point. This started in 1981 or 1980.

[B]

Okay. So for four decades, while rates monotonically dropped, which allowed us to crank on an economy hard by dropping rates. The average age went up. You're telling me, okay, now we should lower rates to make housing more affordable. It didn't work for 40 years.

[A]

Then you have the home prices here, right?

[B]

So the home prices outrace 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 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. 1930s.

[A]

Yes, right after the great 30s to.

[B]

Make houses more affordable.

[A]

Yep.

[B]

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 up again.

[A]

Well, I mean, going back to. You asked me for a reference point for the average age of a new hire in 2022 is 40.402 years old. So three years went up a year and a half to 42. And if you factor that into what you're just describing now, it's like the younger kids aren't even getting jobs.

[B]

Getting the jobs right to even be.

[A]

Able to potentially buy a house that's going up.

[B]

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's old, but they have muscled their way through the shifting demographics, so they. They're the closest to being done with the demographic downswing. The rest of the countries are just starting it. Well, demographics is a big part of economics. Well.

[A]

And to think that anybody's just gonna be able to do what Japan did by weathering the demographic storm is a bit naive. Cultural homogeneity that.

[B]

Exactly.

[A]

Culture that does not exist.

[B]

Exactly. You're not gonna have ice battles in the street in Japan.

[A]

No.

[B]

And. And I. 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 know, you're going to wish you could move out of the country. You're going to.

[A]

I'm not leaving. I'm not leaving.

[B]

I'm not leaving either. I'm. I'm too old for this.

[A]

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.

[B]

Back to the shire is Philadelphia area. Is it in the burbs or is it in Philadelphia?

[A]

In the burbs.

[B]

My son was in Philadelphia.

[A]

What part you get a pen?

[B]

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.

[A]

He was in either. He was probably in Fairmount by North.

[B]

Philly or west Philly, I don't. I don't remember. All I know is I wanted to get him out of there. My son's gay and he was hanging around a rough gay crowd, you know, too many drugs, that sort of thing. And so I had a meeting in Philadelphia. He's a musician. I had a meeting in Philadelphia. 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. Hey, living in the ghetto sucks. And I said. I said, why don't you ask where? 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. My elder son, he said, you are the whisperer. Dad, that was amazing. I said, well, I pretty much made an offer he couldn't refuse.

[A]

What year was this?

[B]

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.

[A]

There are. Philly was the per capitol of the country for a while there. So.

[B]

Yeah. So I wanted to get him out of there. So now, now he's in Boston. He's in an artist co op. You want. 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 900amonth.

[A]

Damn.

[B]

Yeah, that's amazing. Damn right. The bank of Dad's not as. Not as the bank run on. The bank of dad is not as bad as it could be. I'll tell you, I still help him. He's actually. Ironically, he's in Philadelphia today because there is. I shouldn't say this because the. The auction's not over, but he thinks he spotted an early Italian violin buried in an auction.

[A]

When is the auction over?

[B]

I don't know. I just know he went down to see the thing to make sure that he wasn't bidding on bullshit.

[A]

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.

[B]

Well, this is literally just an estate auction. Yeah, it's not. It is not theresio or anything like that.

[A]

Well, this is actually, this is actually a fascinating topic. Building on what we were, that's what like we were in the process of buying a new house. We're in a rental now. We gotta furnish it. It's much bigger than the rental and we've just been taking advantage.

[B]

How many square feet? How many square feet?

[A]

I don't know. Square feet. Six bedrooms.

[B]

But six bedrooms with an office. Okay, so you're still banging your wife then?

[A]

Yeah, we got three. We've had another kid since we last talked as well.

[B]

Really? Yeah. Jesus Christ. It's time to tie the tubes, dude.

[A]

No, no, no. Never. Never. You just said we had a fertility crisis. Somebody's got to go to work.

[B]

You know this is true, but you don't have to solve it single handedly.

[A]

Well, I'm going to try.

[B]

I'm kidding.

[A]

No, he's just like, he's a state auction. This is like weird. The kids don't want the parents like heirlooms. We're getting stuff on like pennies.

[B]

Oh, that. No. So I've been. So when I was a kid I was a collector. There's a collector Gene, I think, I think there's some, some kids just love to collect. So I collected coins and stamps and I collected samps from age 8 to 12 and sold my collection for 1400 bucks. That's a pretty good, that's a pretty good price tag. Back in 81. Back in 81. And I told. It turns. 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 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, Cornell, I could buy a house back in 1981 even though interest rates were 17%. Why? Because they were cheap. Right. And then, and then I started going to barn sales and stuff. I started seeing stuff. 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. And I got. 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.

[A]

Is it because the younger generations don't appreciate it? Because we're fine, we're buying stuff. I like the old stuff because it's built better sturdier.

[B]

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, the whole building a household was on the back of a country living craze. And so you'd open up better homes and gardens and you'd see, you know, furnishings with painted furniture and stuff in it. And so I was at a high boy. I was at a Philadelphia antique show. I'm seeing a guy named David Scorsch who's a very famous dealer, very famous dealer actually. And I was looking at a high boy and I said, you know, back in, back in 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 stuff sell at auction. I can't believe I go, oh my God, my eyes are watering.

[A]

We just bought some 15th century original sketches for dirt cheap. I forget the artist.

[B]

My wife's doing it. That. I don't know that market. I don't know that market. I now do know the violin market better. I bought my son a 1735 Carlo Antonio Testori violin.

[A]

I remember I think two or three episodes. You, you had just bought that, right?

[B]

And I, and, and he, 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 dad 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 non stop tour. And one of the Last two days, he went to a Theresio 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. It just doesn't hold. Fixed. You think you got the right thing, and you look at the blemish. Ah, that's been repainted. Oh, that's been restored, you know, or you go, oh, that's just a fucking beauty. And he. 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.

[A]

No, no, that's the. 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.

[B]

There was a 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.

[A]

That's a good one.

[B]

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 said, say, did you bring the money? Did you see Rudy? Haven't seen. Sweet. That 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, but I wouldn't expect pyrotechnics. I would. 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 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.

[A]

What is your theory there?

[B]

Oh, I think she's totally MKUltra. Totally.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

I think she's. When I say MK Ultra, 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 it's born identity, and they train you to do shit. And I think Erica Kirk was.

[A]

Wasn't it confirmed? Wasn't Ted Kaczynski.

[B]

Ted Kaczynski was Charles Manson. May have been. David Berkowitz was part of a satanic cult.

[A]

Kamala was.

[B]

Kamala was a. I think Kamala was. I was. I was. I was bird dog in that story. And then a person who spent three years studying MK Ultra 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. I was on a zoom call with Kathy o'. Brien. You ought to get some of these guys on your call.

[A]

Logan, take notes.

[B]

Yeah, I can get you their emails. So I was on a zoom call with Kathy o' Brien and Juliet Engel. And what you notice is they have exceedingly flat personalities. And I had long chats with Nick Bryant, who wrote the Franklin scandal, which Nick's one of the most scholarly guys of them all, studying this 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. 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. So you watch Erica Kirk, and they're just. There's just nothing there. There's nothing under the hood that makes any sense. And. 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 Zionist. I go, I don't need to write about Charlie Kirk. And then I had some rabid Zionist on my Twitter feed saying, you don't have any evidence that it's 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.

[A]

I actually do feel like you gotta decide what to focus your time on. Right?

[B]

That's right. So. 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, yes, two question. 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. She goes, 20, 21. And Charlie jumps right in and starts covering for her. And then she starts going, well, you know, 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.

[A]

You think so?

[B]

Well, boot up a Google and search Erica Erica Kirk's kids, or Charlie Kirk's kids and find one that shows a face. Everyone says, well, you wouldn't want your kids face to be on the Internet. I go, well, do it with Candace Owens. You'll find her kids. And they're, they're, they're, 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. She's talking, but, you know, she's at the stage where she's just barely passed the stage where only the parents understand her and they're pulling up to the TPUSA site. And she recognizes. She gets excited and she goes, oh, Charlie Kirk, Charlie Kirk, has your young kid ever called you Marty Benz?

[A]

No, they'll call me by my first name when they want to really get my attention, but that's about it.

[B]

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. 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 them? The claim is Glenn Beck is taking care of them. What kind of clown show is this? That's the claim. Glenn Beck has them, 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. The 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 him 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 MK Ultra look. This is the. This is the, you know, flat personality. These guys who've been abused, you can be talking to one, to one of them, and you don't. They. 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. All these separate entities, it's a very complicated story. They're schizophrenia. They're induced schizophrenia. And then they reassemble them and train them like you train a working dog. So Erica Kirk, they spot her and say, 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 hot in Arizona, where, you know, 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, you know, here's the violin, go win the concerto competition, right? 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 date dating show.

[A]

She was on Summer House too, which is like some Bravo.

[B]

And she also was. Was. Was part of a documentary about. 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 she is. Of which her mother, her father, Charlie's parents, None of them. None of them have been in sight since Charlie got shot. None of them. You can't find them. 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 was 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 him, 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.

[A]

Yeah, yeah. To be honest, I haven't been following the theory. I was pretty caught up in it and exactly what happened. But then, since then, it's like, okay.

[B]

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?

[A]

No.

[B]

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, so 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.

[A]

Predictive Programming right there.

[B]

My head explodes. I don't know what. Now, TP USA was registered as an organization in 2002.

[A]

I didn't know that.

[B]

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 Fin twit 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 100 people. I'm one of them. And I'm going, what the heck is that about? But there's all these guys like Liz Crockin and Mike Smith and stuff who've been tracking pitos like crazy. Full time job. 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 is 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.

[A]

Turn around.

[B]

I couldn't breathe. Yeah, there was. There was a famous octopus murder where some guy was tracking, 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 and he said, why? And she, she said why? And. And 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. Yeah, let it go, buddy. We could all. 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. Right?

[A]

Then what? Yeah, why was he. Why do you think he was killed? The.

[B]

Oh, there are so many reasons.

[A]

Central bank stuff, the nuclear.

[B]

There's a Laundry list of why you'd want to kill jfk, including him promising to dissolve the CIA.

[A]

Chatter to a thousand pieces scattered.

[B]

I think a good case has been made that Nixon was taken out. It wasn't Watergate. He didn't fuck up Watergate and have a scandal. The entire thing was to take him out of office.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

And actually the guy who wrote about that, oddly enough, is Nick Bryant, 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 Woodard wasn't a journalist. He was naval intelligence. Right. 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, these guys while he was on the zoom call. I'm fact checking him. He's absolutely nailing it. This guy is like. 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 him, I said, I'm interested in child trafficking. The affair 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. 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, clinton foundation traffic children. He said, oh, absolutely. The evidence is above the fold. True. I asked him that question to test him. Laura Silsbee got caught. She got sent to Haitian prison for trafficking children. The Clintons had to bail her out.

[A]

Yeah, well, and this is topical this week with Hillary refusing to testify in Congress on the Epstein.

[B]

Well, they should do the goddamn Steve Bannon drill and. And send him to prison.

[A]

I think they are trying to hold her in contempt right now.

[B]

Right. But they won't send her to prison because that was probably a bad idea too, you know, sending Ban into prison. And Navarro. I used to chat with Navarro back when he was at Irvine. He's just an economist. I swap emails. So what?

[A]

All this is like zooming out 2026 in America. Obviously, we've talked about a little bit the ICE raids in Minneapolis. Seems like we just bombed Venezuela. Who knows what's going to happen with Iran.

[B]

Did we really bomb Venezuela? Did we really? No, no.

[A]

I talked to. I was in D.C. on Wednesday night, funnily enough, talking to some people we like, we. The, the tech we used to extract him or attack.

[B]

I had this funny feeling that he was willing to be extracted.

[A]

No, you look at the pictures, it seems very clear there was some predetermined agreement, like.

[B]

Right. Well, because for one thing, if you're Maduro, it's like, okay, let me see if I got this right. I, 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, you know, there's no more dangerous career path than being an ex dictator. No more danger. And he said, if I stay in Venezuela, I'll get a knife up the. As Gaddafi style. Yeah. 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, and so, so they, it's like, remember we saved the guy in the Iraqi hospital. And it's this, right? We send SEAL team, whatever, and they run up and they grab the guy. We get him out, we tell this great story. And then we find 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. No. 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 October 7th, you think what 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 him the nod. Now Scott Horton is a little more generous. He says, no, we didn't give him the nod. We up our State Department said some shit that was ambiguous and, and he took it too far. And I'm going, okay. And it's not like Scott, special Scott. Scott really does call, call, call, balls and strikes. But I think we gave him the nod. It's just a hunch.

[A]

And that sounds like plausible deniability in a way.

[B]

Right? And the Somali thing, the Somalis aren't ripping us off up in Minnesota. They're just frontmen. Who's getting all that money. Right.

[A]

And then how are they so easily able to funnel the cash? Literally through airports, TSA security, get it to Dubai.

[B]

Right, right.

[A]

That's like, what?

[B]

I don't know, probably military transports. Yeah. I mean, who knows, right?

[A]

That's like how.

[B]

You know, how you smuggle. Yeah, you smuggle. It turns out the art world has a custom steals where you. 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.

[A]

You can't disturb the piece. You can't open the box.

[B]

That's right. And so you shove the shit in there. And so. So a lot of trafficking and stuff is. Is. Is hidden in the art world. Art world. It's a great laundering. You know, the guy sold balloon art for 260, $360 million, right?

[A]

Yeah. What is his name?

[B]

Well, that's money laundering. Coons. His name is Koons.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

And by the way, I've seen pictures of Koons with some very dubious characters. So I do believe. I do believe that Coons. Coons. Was laundering money.

[A]

Do you think we're at a social tipping point, though? Whether it was like, generational divide, what the intentions of Nick Shirley are like, I think one thing's clear. Like, he's. He's incited these copycats, like, which is good news.

[B]

Which is good news.

[A]

The zoomer clout maxing out there. I saw there was one this morning. Some guy went to some acidic neighborhood in. In New York that is doing a similar welfare scam. We've seen it happen in la. Philadelphia. There's a kid running around Philadelphia doing the same thing. But when you, like, look at the economy, the job market, 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 on, laid bare. Like, are we reaching a social tipping.

[B]

Point where it's like, well, are we gonna see it stop? Are we just gonna now, how much are we just gonna be getting a doggy style more? Are we gonna be getting it missionary style instead of doggy style?

[A]

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.

[B]

When was the last time someone of importance went to prison? That's a great question, Danny Hastert. Yeah. Diddling kids. What was that, 30 years ago.

[A]

Yeah, but he was already old at that point, wasn't he?

[B]

Right. He must have pissed someone off.

[A]

Yeah. What was he speaking of the house at the time?

[B]

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 the throwaway. He did a Tucker interview. It was really good. Yeah.

[A]

And he basically explained like, I was thrown under the bus because I want to go with Obama. Right.

[B]

That was Right, right, right, right. So. 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, 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, 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. He said, 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 Genesis. 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.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

By the way, why doesn't someone collect the glasses from the fucking macarons at a restaurant and do a DNA test?

[A]

What would that do?

[B]

Well, the two questions are. The lower level question, is Macron's wife a dude? So you find out if Macron. Okay, Macron. Yeah. If you find out that he's got a, that his wife has a Y chromosome, then you answer that question. Macron has sued Kenneth Owens. 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 sanctioned, it's over. It's defamation or not, depending on your DNA test. The second question, Candace has kind of backed off of this one. I don't know if Candice 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. Her. 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.

[A]

Right.

[B]

She was 39, he was 15. So, you know, it's. It's a fucked up world. Yeah. Is that my phone?

[A]

Never mind, never mind.

[B]

Yeah, that's my son. So that DNA test might show relationship.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

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.

[A]

I mean, it's already been weird to this point, Right?

[B]

Well, 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.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

Not realizing that they're going to hang it on him.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

And all of a sudden. So I think his father turned him in. Not because his father.

[A]

Well, I think.

[B]

I think I saw his father had. Had. Had to get him off the street or he'd die. Yeah. There'd be a shootout. There'd be a shootout.

[A]

I think I saw you tweeting about it. What happened to John Cullen? Because his fascinating question, his analysis of that immediate aftermath was very interesting. I've had him on the show before.

[B]

So John sort of would do these podcasts incognito. And I said to him one day in a podcast, John, you're sort of incognito. But I'm not sure those sunglasses and hat are really hiding your identity. If you really work for Oracle, it's not going to be hard to narrow down who the hell you are. And 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 shootings, I was getting. It was John stuff. I didn't realize that years ago when I wrote about it, I didn't realize a bunch of it was coming from John. Then he got into the Butler shooting and he did trajectory analysis. He's a Real geeky guy. And. 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, you know, stuff like that. And now they mentioned the craziness of Candace Owens mentioning Egyptian planes. You know, And I'm going, that was John Cullen. So John, all of a sudden, October 13, 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.

[A]

Well, if it's the latter, what was he being assigned to in the first place?

[B]

Well, you know, you've got narratives. You got a pump. Right? When I talked to Tucker, he. He talked about. He talked about shit like this, about. I just lost my train of thought about these narratives. We. We got into it quite a bit. I might have been off camera. I can't remember off camera. We went dark. Holy fuck, did we go dark. I don't know how 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 will start getting suspicious, right? Like, we're not suspicious. 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 this tweet 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 always called an idiot. And if you do, but you won't say anything, you're always called a coward. So if you really don't think men and women of wealth and power aren't conspiring, you need a CAT scan. I mean, the entire human population is a big conspiracy, right?

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

And so you know Klaus Schwab? Oh, he's not conspiring. Where'd he go, by the way? Just gone. He's gone.

[A]

He got pushed in the locker. Said, all right, you've.

[B]

That's right. Time to go. Who's replaced him? Too many people.

[A]

Who's replaced him?

[B]

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.

[A]

I think Mark Carney, I think they moved him from a private World Economic Forum to a head of state.

[B]

Well, don't forget he went through Central bank first. Yeah.

[A]

Bank of England.

[B]

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.

[A]

Do we want to be in it, though? I don't know.

[B]

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.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

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. And he said, would you ever want to trade positions with Nick Fuentes? I said, no chance. He said, then be careful.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

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, 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. But the. Yeah.

[A]

And it's all. And 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.

[B]

I know.

[A]

But it's like, how much should I just focus on my family, my neighbors?

[B]

Well, I don't know how to turn it off is the problem I'm having Same. But you know the 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. The guys who have these chats regularly, you, Mike Farris, 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? What's the one where you go where.

[A]

It'S like, everything's due. And blue pill is just like, you're a normie. Npc.

[B]

And red pill is where you see the reality.

[A]

White pill is like, hey, the future is bright. We're going to win. I like to take the White pill.

[B]

Yeah, I know. While at the same time chewing on the red pill.

[A]

Yes, understanding.

[B]

But I'm stunned at the number of people who. Educated, intelligent. Don't confuse the two. The Venn diagram overlaps. 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 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?

[A]

It's probably 30, which is pretty odd, I would say.

[B]

Right. What percentage of watch Building 7 drop and find it normal?

[A]

Well, 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?

[B]

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.

[A]

The official narrative is Building seven is.

[B]

Bigger than the Pentagon, but they're saying they snuck a jumbo jet into D.C. and no one caught it on film.

[A]

Yeah, no.

[B]

That'S pretty big too.

[A]

I agree. The Pentagon is just as bad.

[B]

And then, 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, and, and, and you look at the Shanksville and there's nothing, just a.

[A]

Hole in the ground.

[B]

All the luggage, all the plane, the plane's gone. Nothing. Just. It's just a big hole in the ground. I go, so where did all these people go? Was there ever a real plane?

[A]

Well, that's the. My brother and I discovered this a couple years ago because when we were in high school, I think I forget it was in high school or eighth grade, we watched Loose Change, the original Loose Change. And I remember that we gave a presentation. I can't find the original Loose Change. Apparently they had, oh, is that Ryan Apple tv? And like, we rented it and we're like, this isn't the original Loose Change. And I think they buried the original Loose Change documentary.

[B]

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.

[A]

Michael Moore.

[B]

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 at the 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 an 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, no's perfect English. All it needed were punctuation marks. And, and, and I asked, 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, 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.

[A]

Well, you see, nuclear power facilities are now ESG friendly after decades of being, I'm told.

[B]

Although someone. Oh, I think it was Brendan, Ike yesterday I was talking about that Twitter spaces where he showed up and he was saying he doesn't think these, these small nukes are gonna the way of the future. He thinks you need the big ones.

[A]

I could see that.

[B]

And he's a smart, smart guy, but.

[A]

I don't see why not all. I mean we have small modular reactors.

[B]

I don't know, warships already. I don't know that. I'm just passing along the opinion of a guy who has 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 and the host was picking people who he knew and I said, gotta get Brendan in here.

[A]

What basis was this?

[B]

Well, I just did a podcast, this guy named Kevin Malone and Brendan showed up because Brendan and I swapped DMs just every day almost. And, and then I finally got Brendan to jump in and Brendan and I took over the Twitter space. It was really, it's really. But it was, I think the host was just odd when he realized. And I said, for those of you who don't know who Brendan is, you know, and I laid out a CV and said, he's been there. He knows this game. Yeah.

[A]

The inventor of JavaScript. You either love him or hate him for that, depending on.

[B]

Well, the funny story I like to tell in a relatively short period of time. I was trolling Twitter for help with. 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 says, well, this is the one you ought to use. He wrote Firefox. 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 Sinofsky. He was second under Ballmer after Gates left. I think he left because he realized Ballmer 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 at Microsoft. So in any event, so I'm sitting there going, this is the highest watermark of Twitter you can get. When you got the president of Microsoft troubleshooting your Microsoft based email program. One point 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. I'm as confused as you.

[A]

It seems like they've completely messed up everything in Microsoft. I mean, at least on the operating system side.

[B]

Right. And by the way, this AI battle, those tech giants are going to kill each other. This is going to be like, this is going to be like Godzilla versus Mothra versus King Kong versus And, and they're not all going to be left standing.

[A]

No.

[B]

And the best way I 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 high capex, lower profits, high capex market.

[A]

I mean, right now they're not, they're loss leaders.

[B]

Right?

[A]

They're subsidizing all that.

[B]

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.

[A]

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.

[B]

And that's winner take all. It's winner take all. Yeah.

[A]

There's like, I was talking to a friend who is way more savvy when it comes to computer science and understanding how much does compute should cost. And he was like, yeah, like it should be costing like $2,000 a day. If you're, if you're hitting limits and it's nowhere, it's a tenth of that.

[B]

For it's, it's like, it's, it's like it's. I remember one year I made reference during COVID I think it was the year of COVID I said, I said, I said Skype lost a 35 to nothing lead, right? Zoom just completely wiped them out. And now you got Riverside, you got others, but Skype, has anyone Skype?

[A]

I think Skype shut down officially.

[B]

Okay, well there's the answer. And so I think these megatechs are on this total self destruction path and I just. The world, it's just, I guess it's the passive investing. The mindless robot of Michael Green's fame just won't let them reprice yet.

[A]

What do you think would cause a repricing? When does it come for it?

[B]

Well, 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. Now 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, right? That famous line in the movie. Tell me like I'm a golden retriever. And I said, you got it. And so deep recession, flow of capital back overseas, right?

[A]

Young people not getting jobs, the push.

[B]

Young people not getting jobs. A slowing of the flow which causes the markets to start toppling. People saying, I'm going to. No, I'm not buying any more of this shit, right? I mean there's just. It will find a way. The free market will find here. 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. Yeah. 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 managed 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 paths of 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.

[A]

Is that what BlackRock and Vanguard do?

[B]

No, no, no. They just want the flows. They just want the flows, right? They just, they just want the money they want. It's all about rerouting the flow through your organization. So you get your vig off the flow and until those flows reverse. Boomers retiring, right? At some point the boomer demographic is going to be taken out faster than the impoverished demographics putting it in.

[A]

Well, that's retiring or dying. I think that's another thing with the vaccine specifically.

[B]

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 it's almost a religious belief on my part. I don't think you can do that without the repricing occurring.

[A]

What do you mean?

[B]

You do it and the children sell.

[A]

The aspect right away.

[B]

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 I have a house worth $2 million. You can't pass that house to the next generation. Especially 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, 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.

[A]

Yeah, that's a very good point.

[B]

It's kind of a sour grapes problem.

[A]

But the house gets passed down. They say hey, I'd rather have the cash.

[B]

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 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 kids sleeping on the sofa in the basement. It will then become an accepted thing.

[A]

Because I'm welcoming of that.

[B]

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.

[A]

It's part of the reason we moved home. My mother in law, she came, picked up the baby yesterday.

[B]

Right? Right. Never give a sucker and 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.

[A]

Wait, what was it? Married to the grandmother.

[B]

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 the, your kids are going, mom, stop, stop. You're, you're, you're, 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 to have him go, ah, 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.

[A]

Very giving nature. It's good to have, you know.

[B]

No, it is, it is. And that's her joy, actually, that's her joy in life 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 great grandmothers are not. So our life expectancies really were designed to get the grandmother, but not further. They become a liability.

[A]

My grandmother's still alive. So the boy is their great grandmother.

[B]

Right. But your grandmother doesn't serve as important a person as your parents.

[A]

No.

[B]

Unless your parents suck and they're crackheads. Then your grandmother might be important again. Yeah.

[A]

That feels good. I have a village to help with all this. And to your point about multi generational housing, I sort of designed it. 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 not to move into the house.

[B]

Right, right. And the other thing is it, 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.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

And so it's just. And it's much more efficient to run one household. Right? Yeah.

[A]

And I think culturally it's good.

[B]

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.

[A]

Yeah, that could be a big problem.

[B]

But that means you probably are too. So that's even bigger problem.

[A]

What? Let's wrap it up with a, with a message to Gen Z here.

[B]

Do you have any hope having Gen Z's.

[A]

How old are Gen Z in your classroom right now?

[B]

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 there in the world are kids who are not making this mistake and they will win. So I tell the class that you got to 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's not your fault. But you got to find a way to get rid of that phone. We are now in a mood to 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 gotta, gotta, you know, because unruly kids can make A class, very entertaining. You know, they, they, they bring, they bring game and none of them, I'd make a joke and I, I voted class clown, so I can make jokes and I don't even bother anymore because I don't get anything. I get nothing. I go, maybe they've been trafficked. I don't know. And the blank stare, yeah, it's like they're on WeGovy or something. You know, the Wegovy 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 Library maybe at 7:30, and then stay there till 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, you know, 11 out of 12 of the graduating class I happen to remember went to grad school and included guys like Rick Sherwin, founded Goldwyn Software Group. Brian Murdoch, who was, 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, 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 doing? 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 UCSC is bringing it 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. This is ucsd. UCSD is not A bad school, supposedly. So they gave an example. They said 25% of the kids missed the following question. Six plus three equals seven 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. But, you know, that's a fundamental problem. It's fixable. I had a colleague who decided he was going to help the minority students. So this is not, this is not a well kept 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 a 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 got to give him something. So you have Africana studies. Because that kid, to 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 minus zone. It was completely. We'd see a black chem major once every five years, right? We were destroying them in freshman chemistry. He set up a boot camp and he drilled them. And I said, how bad are they? And 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 could be smart as shit and you could really be trying to get it right, but you don't know this shit. It's. You are at a disadvantage that seems insurmountable. So he said, he says they can't add fractions, right? So he set up a boot camp to teach him how to take freshman chem. So like 100 kids in this class. And he pulled no punches. He really. It was like joining the Marines. And. 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. This is like, okay, 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. I reached out to a reporter, said, would you write about it? Right? I go, where the 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 couldn't 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.

[A]

You can't do that. You can't.

[B]

You can't do that. Yeah. And by the way, you know, 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.

[A]

That's why I was a little bummed Trump didn't want to let the. He wanted to bail the mail last year.

[B]

Well, he did throw a fast fall past Harvard's chin in Cornell's chin. There was some real chaos by his, by his cutoff of funds. Here's what I presented to Loren lister back in 2011 at Capital Accounts. And at the time, I don't know if anyone's talking about. They have talked about it since where I said, you set up a student loan program where you give, 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 at the ball out of the park, right? Mount Mount. You know, 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 gotta 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.

[A]

If you talk to people my age with kids, a lot of us sort of come resigned to the fact like we don't think colleges are going to exist.

[B]

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.

[A]

And if there's this, we can really expand those profit margins now what would.

[B]

Why would that not. Why would that land like a lead balloon? Because then all of a sudden the humanities were, would be at great risk of going away and you can't have.

[A]

The, the Marxists in our university systems getting.

[B]

What would you do? You know how many, you know how many. So here's the English world, the English department you had, you have, of course the scholarly, you have journalism gone, right? You have writing gone. AI's 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?

[A]

The Canterbury tells a classic, you got to read it.

[B]

I know, I know, I know. So my advice to the students is you got to learn to study. I tell them about flashcards, why they're so useful. I tell them about, you know, studying every subject every day. Don't. 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, you know, those 30 days between fall and spring and those hundred 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. I go to the library at 9 o', clock, day one. Set the routine. Don't, don't wait for the semester to catch up to you.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

So there's all sorts of things you can do to game the system and to get an education and they just.

[A]

Have to do it as you've been describing. It doesn't seem like it's very hard to stick out and be an outperformance.

[B]

Well, you're competing globally now though.

[A]

That's true.

[B]

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 PhD in chemical engineering every year. We're not seeing enough. We're just not getting enough.

[A]

Yeah, well that's the. I mean that's. Talk about fourth turning Atlas Shrugged. Like this competency crisis that could be on the horizon too.

[B]

Well, 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 supertanker after several generations of it turning the wrong way. This is not a. Bring it here next year shit.

[A]

I'm looking for this tweet I saw this morning that actually retweeted. Might have been yesterday but it was about I think mining majors. Obviously we have this dash.

[B]

Why none are there any?

[A]

So I'm looking for. Let me find it. Should be high school seniors. Consider checking out a BS in mining engineering. The entire US graduates 162 mining engineers per year.

[B]

Bachelors.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

Holy shit. By the way, scoping housing in Greenland. Right. Mining is a terribly difficult business. Yeah.

[A]

So 500, 600 per year are needed to sustain current operations. We're producing 162 engineers per year. And given how much the US expanded mining this year seems like a choke point. So it's going to go up.

[B]

And where do you. 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.

[A]

That's the other worrying thing about AI too. If you just allocate the understanding of this work to the machine and you wake up, something happens to the machine.

[B]

And no one knows how to fix it. Yeah, that's absolutely terrifying to me. And also, not to mention, the system will be so brittle, you'll be talking to some AI and there just will be no way. There will be no mechanism for a human to say, okay, 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 turned 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, you know, 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. You know, I could understand her. And. And then she says something about, do you have dependents? I go, yeah, my wife. Well, why? And she said, well, does she get Social Security? I said, well, she gets a tiny amount. She said, well, she's now eligible to get half of what you get. I go, what? They said, yeah, she gets a. 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 your number, I'll call her. I get home, her account's all set up. I go, where did they find this person who worked for the federal government?

[A]

It's encouraging.

[B]

It is encouraging.

[A]

There is at least one good federal government.

[B]

Someone said the graft is encouraging. Oh, it was Robbie the Fire said the graph was encouraging because it shows you how much we could save.

[A]

It's I mean estimates up to what, $500 billion a year probably. I imagine it's higher when it's got to be trillions. They haven't even looked at the military budget yet. If you think there's not a similar amount of waste within.

[B]

But we do have to keep sending money to, to Ukraine.

[A]

Yes, and Israel and, and Israel.

[B]

Yeah. And, and we do have to keep vet is a whale. 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? Crash out. So what was your take on that?

[A]

What Was that about H1BS?

[B]

No, that was, it was, it was yesterday.

[A]

I didn't see that.

[B]

And it was about optional wars. It really came down to us, 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 and 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, of defending the indefensible.

[A]

I, I mean I think when it comes to Venezuela like I was. Who knows it's still nothing's been. I think I saw, 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 around.

[B]

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?

[A]

Yeah, that's, that's the big question. But opt. I mean at least as it stands right now, nothing's escalated or devolved into complete chaos down there.

[B]

So is it about the oil? Because I'm not convinced.

[A]

No, I, I. Did you read that UAV.

[B]

Maybe.

[A]

I don't know the theory that like, I mean the waterways there and I think it's just a box out China.

[B]

And Russia, that, 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 circle a big chunk of the northern rest. They said Putin. Then they circle the chunk of this head. Gee, yeah, 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 about Greenland. I say, well, you know, empires grab shit.

[A]

Yeah, well, we were talking about it on a podcast, my weekly podcast with my co host Matt o' Dell yesterday. If you go to the game of risk, Greenland and Venezuela are two of the most valuable pieces of land to lock down.

[B]

I always like to take North America. Yeah, North America. You never go to Malaysia. Malaysia is a great place to hang out. But you won't win the game. And no one wins in Europe. I've used that metaphor, by the way. No one wins in Europe. Europe looks to me like it's just going to be a perpetual state of disaster.

[A]

I think, I mean, and that's why I think Trump's beginning to focus. I mean if we're, if it's not a grand stage and there is some sort of logic behind everything, like I'm for packing it into the Western hemisphere. Europe.

[B]

Exactly, exactly. So, so, so if it's a Western hemisphere thing then take Greenland, take Venezuela. I don't have a, I don't have a problem with that model even. Dave Smith aside, I say, okay, look, we're doing a little ham fisted but we're saying the Western hemisphere is hands off.

[A]

That's my hope.

[B]

The cigar boats have nothing to do with drugs. The cigar boats have nothing to do with drugs.

[A]

Now the UAV article, so I forget who wrote it, it was on medium a few weeks ago but essentially like the, particularly in the water right to the north of Venezuela. Like if you have like a Cuban missile like crisis, that's like a great spot to launch uav.

[B]

Why, why haven't we let Cuba back into our orbit? Seems to me it would have been real easy to say, look, here's, you guys are dying down here. We won't bully it. Just, just let's, let's make up and move on. Why don't they, why don't we do that?

[A]

Because they're still communist. I don't know.

[B]

I don't know. It just seems like an obvious thing to do.

[A]

Well, that was like another theory that this Maduro thing was a shot across the bow of Cuba.

[B]

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, he reads it. He just. So he goes, that's just an amazing quote. You know. And so I found him to be very endearing. He was, he was. I'm a, I'm a big Tucker fan now. And you know this. One of the smartest moves he made had nothing to do with me. Anna Kasparian, he brings her on the show and she's his best buddy. Now she has taken talker by showcasing the left who have a prayer of having a brain.

[A]

He said sink on too.

[B]

I believe he has. I didn't know that.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

But all of a sudden they might not like everything he says. But it's not like I hate Tucker time anymore.

[A]

No.

[B]

And they realize that they, they have a huge common interest with Tucker. So Tucker formed an alliance with Anna.

[A]

I think the, the whole Young Turks crew he had sync on. It was after the Charlie Kirk stuff they were talking about. Charlie, Charlie.

[B]

I love watching the young. I used to hate them. I love watching them.

[A]

I mean I, I do like the Sheldon Freud of the 20, 2016 or 2016 post election sort of meltdown as they realize.

[B]

Oh, that's funny. That was funny. That was funny. That was fun. I gotta tell you, watching 2016 play out was hysterical.

[A]

Yeah. Well, to your point about like Tucker and the Young Turks people, I think you have like the horseshoe theory of populism coming around. People are starting to realize like, hey.

[B]

Libertarianism meets from the left and the right in the middle.

[A]

Yeah. And they're saying, wait a second, there's all this fraud, waste and abuse where in all these forever wars like we're actually on the same side. We may have some differences. On some policies, but I think.

[B]

And Tucker hates the right as much as the left now.

[A]

I mean, the right is toothless.

[B]

At least the toothless or bad. Yeah, you know, you know, APAC has a grip on both sides. So I, I'm still trying to figure out one thing that makes Tucker so dangerous is this 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. Well, I mean, mastered it.

[A]

Particularly on Israel. He had like that 40 minute monologue, right.

[B]

That was very well known. His monologues. You'd be hard pressed to say, no, that's not right. You'd be really hard pressed to locate something that's wrong. I occasionally says they're in a relevant country, stuff like that. Yeah, okay, jump on that if you want. But I'm not sure why he's picking these fights. It could be he's reached a 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.

[A]

That and I mean, I think there's a demand for this type of sort of frank commentary.

[B]

Right. But I, I don't think he's grifting it though. I think, I think it's really coming from the heart on him.

[A]

Well, I think the overwinter window shift out. He's been, I think part of the reason 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.

[B]

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. But there's also not antisemitism like they say too. I've asked colleagues said, are you aware of something that you'd really call serious antisemitism besides supporting Palestine isn't anti Semitic? You name a government, I'll oppose it. You give me any government, I'll oppose it. Right. And so. But can you name any, I've asked college, can you name any real anti Semitic things where some kids just walk into class because he's wearing a yarmulke, gets a crap kicked out or something or whatever, gets harassed by. And no one can. The kids don't want to do this, they were raised not to do this. This generation has been raised to embrace everything, right?

[A]

And that's like the weird thing about the whole Israel Company is everything. It's conflated to anti Semitism. Like, no, this state in the Middle east, that has a lot of influence on our politicians. Like, I just have some questions about.

[B]

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 him, 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 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 them. You're dumping this huge guilt on them. Yeah, I don't think it's constructive. It's like 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. They've weaponized anti Semitism. I'm not sure that's left. That might be the right trying to.

[A]

Think maybe.

[B]

We'Re not white supremacists.

[A]

No, certainly not. Just for what is the right, what.

[B]

Have we done, did you say? Yeah, the left has a good point on that.

[A]

I mean, to some extent, like the corporate greed, Like, I do think it exists.

[B]

Are you sure that's right wing? That's the Democratic Party or.

[A]

Excuse me, I know the Democrats push on corporate greed and they'll say, 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.

[B]

I've got another book for you. Rusher 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 one of these screeds. Like, you know, you make more, you get more taxes, if you have a lower tax pay. 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.

[A]

And that's the point. I was trying to make this whole. It's like, oh, capitalism. It's like pretending like we actually live in a truly capitalist or free market system.

[B]

We never have, but. 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. He says, my experience is that every time you ask the government to spend money for you, they do all a horrible job.

[A]

Yeah. I mean, we're fighting this out with the daycare fraud, right?

[B]

With daycare, with NGOs. I bet there's not an NGO out there that's worth a damn.

[A]

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.

[B]

I don't think we can.

[A]

But it's.

[B]

I think. I think we're going to have to hit a crisis of some kind that's going to blow the circuits off us.

[A]

So I've had A couple guests in the last couple months, Susan Kakinda, a couple others ask, what's your big prediction for 2026 civil war? Do you think civil war is on the.

[B]

We're kind of in one a little bit already. Yeah.

[A]

I'm gonna pull this up. It's just like the absurdity, the absurdity of, I mean, Nick Shirley came out another video, but like, how can anybody look at this and like think these guys are actually running like a daycare center and that.

[B]

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. Right? Enormous. So these guys are just frontmen, these are bagmen. This is like the 15 year old kid on the street corner is not running the drug trade either.

[A]

Yeah. And who are they bagman for, by the way?

[B]

There's another sneaky little detail out there that I've been watching. I read somewhere that you know, 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 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 the ticket to give them a finitely minuscule chance of busting into the open. And it's rigged. So then you're going, this kind of makes a little bit of sense. And then I read an article about one of the lottos won by Zorro Trust. I go, what's Zoro Trust? It's an Epstein company.

[A]

Oh, lovely.

[B]

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. Right? That's. You don't have to. You don't have to get the guy compromised with a five 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.

[A]

Yeah, I don't want to work with.

[B]

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. And all of a sudden I realized, what if Joe Sixpack discovered they didn't even have a chance to win the lotto?

[A]

It's all a humiliation ritual, like the taxes.

[B]

Well, there is that sense. That's 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 could say, look, they squeegee Gaza Strip free of people. Ten years from now, we've forgotten how it happened and they've got the strip. So they win Covid. It's a little trickier. Yes. Did they want to test their ability to brainwash us? Did they want to. Did they want to cull 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 and you look at their dividends and stuff, there's no evidence Pfizer made a ton of money. If they did, where'd it go?

[A]

Was it. Well, I mean, the other theory is you need an excuse to stimulate the economy or the banking system.

[B]

Well, so that gets to the theory that I happen to just read what I wrote from a number of years, just yesterday, the market, the banking system was going through convulsions in late 19.

[A]

Yeah, September 2019. The repo spasms.

[B]

The repo spas. Then Blackrock said, you're going to have to go direct. And lo and behold, three months later, they're going direct. Right. 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. You know, fix the banking system. And. 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. They did the induced coma model to stabilize the banking system, which. Because then after that the banking system stops spazzing 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.

[A]

Well, luckily, I mean, inflation seems relatively tamed right now.

[B]

You sure?

[A]

I mean gas prices are really low.

[B]

Yeah. Okay, so let's say gas is the thing that they focus on. Right? You're anchoring on gas. Here's what. 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 7:11. How much more does that plumbing company cost to run?

[A]

It's higher.

[B]

It's way higher. What happened to your car insurance? What's happened to your house, your home taxes, the taxes on your house? I think you'd Way higher as in like you are hearing inflationary thing. We had a guy who plowed our driveway and he didn't plow last year, but he was charging us 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 100 people who really know their inputs and just ask them every year what happened. And you know, plumbers, convenience store, restaurant, you know, pick 100 diverse. Just say what happened to the cost of running your business? And 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, was coming in lower than the cpi and I got. They're bullshitting us. They're just bullshitting us.

[A]

And the Chapwood index hasn't been updated in quite a while.

[B]

Not at all. And, 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.

[A]

Shadow setsu.

[B]

Yeah, but, but it's not two and a half percent. You wouldn't notice. Two and a half percent. You wouldn't say, holy, I can't believe I have to pay that much. Yeah, you'd never notice it.

[A]

I'm looking at shadow Stats Right now, I don't know. We just got a. We just got an invoice for some electrical work. It came in well below our expectations, but again, this is anecdotal.

[B]

Well, I got a plumber in the Adirondacks on a cabin. He's a plumber by training. He does electrical, carpentry, 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 hours drive. He said, I'll do it for you. I do this sort of shit all the time. I said, how much? So five and a half hours round trip. He says, you pay for the, 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. He had a house. I said, how much you pay for it? He said, 1:48. Damn. There is cheap real estate out there, but it's in places where most people don't live, and therefore it's not a big effect on the overall inflation rate.

[A]

Well, 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.

[B]

That's really immoral.

[A]

It is. And it's, it's. I mean, this is why finally talk about Bitcoin. Like, people should be saving their money in Bitcoin or gold or silver, whatever, and not their houses. Like you. I hear the, The all in podcast guys banging the table like, we need more. More supply. We need more supply. It's like, no, you just need to stop using your house.

[B]

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 and were they living on the street?

[A]

Right.

[B]

The answer is no. And therefore now we'll have a commercial real estate crisis. Correct. Because there's already housing for these people.

[A]

I mean, just look at Austin. Austin, Florida. Because I just lived in Austin for four years, they expanded supply dramatically.

[B]

Do you think real estate's starting to collapse? Melody Wright says, yes. I'm not sure. I can see It.

[A]

I think in certain markets, like where I am, like.

[B]

No, Naples, Florida. Doesn't sound it. My brother just sold a house. He didn't have any trouble.

[A]

You gotta, like, bring it back. Austin, like Austin's like, the prices are falling dramatically, particularly for rentals.

[B]

Okay.

[A]

Because they just built so much supply during the COVID era, when Californians and people from New York like myself moving down there. But a lot of us went back then. They overbuilt.

[B]

I've thought about where I'd want to live if I didn't live where I lived. It's. I haven't come up with the 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.

[A]

It's been a good year for you, sir.

[B]

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. I don't want to get the gen zers. Mad at me for being a greedy boy.

[A]

I noticed one thing you said in your letter is that you're allocating the treasuries, keeping some cash in treasuries.

[B]

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.

[A]

Let me check my notes here. What did you say?

[B]

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, which. Which is an expensive house, but, you know, it can go up or down. But I don't. I don't want to include that. So just the risk assets, Gold, Gold, equity, things like that. 65% last year. That's just ridiculous. Then I saw they did a poll. They asked retail investors, with over a hundred thousand dollars in the market, what do you expect on an inflation adjusted basis, sustainably going forward? The retail investor 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, 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.

[A]

Well, you had this in the note too. Gold return over 25 years over 1200 percent compared to 700 of the S.

[B]

And P. Gold ties Berkshire Hathaway over 27 years.

[A]

Yeah, and if you're looking for inflation adjusted returns like outperformance, I think gold's the best.

[B]

Did you see the tables of the Mag 7 and how much they made their revenues? Some guy gave me guff about Apple and I pointed out that Apple's revenues have grown so 70% last decade while its market cap grew 680%. You can't do that. Your market cap has to track revenues, period. It, it doesn't have to in the short term, but it sure as hell has to sustainably.

[A]

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? How long can it go on?

[B]

As long as it wants. But you know it's. If you've got, if you got two engines on fire near 35,000ft, 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, look at those numbers. So start on the left, there's the revenues, 370% market cap. The reason I use market cap because that takes care of all the buyback. That's just the total appreciation of the total value of the company, almost double. Amazon is actually pretty good. Amazon's really the rock star. Look at Apple, 70% revenue, 680% market cap gain. Microsoft 160 to 830%. Right. Meta, Meta is actually doing okay. But Meta started from bizarro starting point. Look at Nvidia 1200% to 24,000% Tesla. Oh, meta. Excuse me, I was knocking 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're 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.

[A]

Well, the only thing that's going to sustain is that they keep printing money. Right, because if you look at.

[B]

No, no, because, because both of those respond to the printing. You can't get out of that mess. Right? You can't. A P a case. You are 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 mark. 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%.

[A]

This is actually this chart below this.

[B]

Which then you take taxes and fees out of this.

[A]

Margin debt is pretty.

[B]

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. This chart to me blows my circuits. It's. It's further down, I think. Keep. Keep going down. Keep going down. It's. It's the. 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 and 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 tops, you were even capital gains inflation adjusted, not taxes, not dividends. You were even capital gains in 1981.

[A]

Damn.

[B]

Which means if you own expensive markets, you're in trouble. If you own the top, you're fucked.

[A]

Yeah. So this explains 50% now.

[B]

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?

[A]

The AI productivity gains won't allow it. We're going to.

[B]

Until they stop in age of abundance. Until they stop. And then it'll find its way back. Because the 20th century had a lot of. A lot of gains too, right? 20th century was a pretty cool time, right? Here's one I love. The story. I love is the Gundlock 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 steep. 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. Go for your gains. Might all be in the rearview mirror already.

[A]

You look at that Nvidia, Tesla.

[B]

Yeah. This gains. You've already got those gains. Those are, those are, those gains are gains pulled forward from the future. They're priced in, they're priced in. They're, they're, they're, you know what they're going to do one year. I made reference to the, 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.

[A]

Goldman Sachs.

[B]

Yeah. G.S. i just did this yesterday. Just picked it up yesterday.

[A]

Just cash tag GS in there.

[B]

Well, just, just. No, no, no, not, not in the year in 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.

[A]

Right here.

[B]

Yeah. So. So from 2020, late 2023, the President Goldman is up 200% 3x in what, two years?

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

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?

[A]

No.

[B]

You could just erase that and just draw a straight line through it and 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 church Dow 1900 to 1940. I've used this several times.

[A]

I got this one. It's not the right one. Can't find the exact chart. I mean, I have a chart that covers that time, but not just that.

[B]

Go for it. Just bring it up for fun. Just let me see if. 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. No, I hate the semi log charts. Those drive me crazy. Right. There's a purpose for them. I'm not seeing it. I'm not seeing a good one. So what you see is as 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. This. Yeah, that's okay. That's okay. Now, now, now that's a correction. Yeah, that's a correction. Got way out of whack. Got way under whack. Came back to normal.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

Although 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.

[A]

I can't find it.

[B]

Let me see if I can find it just so I can tell you how to get to it. Yeah. I showed this to an editor of the Economist. He goes, holy, I've never looked at that.

[A]

There it is.

[B]

Where?

[A]

1929 and 1940.

[B]

But no, I need 1900. It's got to go back because you got to see the correction. It's not picking up my goddamn year in review. That's for sure. For sure.

[A]

This should do it. I'll show you. There we go.

[B]

No, still logarithmic. Oh, no, it's. No, it's not logarithmic. Oh, that's price and gold and grams of gold. Yeah, Yeah. I don't like those charts at all. I'm not finding it at all.

[A]

They're hiding it from us.

[B]

Yeah, it's in one of my, A couple of my year interviews. I've used it twice and. 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 the. A new high two years later. It didn't correct. 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 price. 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.

[A]

Well, and I Guess A, for 45.

[B]

Years that's been true.

[A]

Well, development that would point to maybe the Fed's not coming to save them anymore as a squabble between Powell and Trump.

[B]

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 gonna protect you. Bad shit happens to the peasants. The only reason they protect you is if they fear you.

[A]

Do you think they fear the peasants right now?

[B]

Not yet. Not enough. Not enough. Well, actually, they might. So the Fed has shown in their many of their sayings, number of Fed governors have. Have shown a fear of a recession. Now, previous Fed governors, it's like, get over it. They happen. It's like drinking too much, then 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, was it. It's not Bastiat, who's the guy who said that? And so you save what are otherwise good banks that have a run going on them, but make them pay dearly for it. Here's what I'd like. Here's the rule I like to put in place. Tell all the banks, Pass law says every bank. Define the C Suite. I don't know how you do it, but you say, okay, here's the definition of a C suite, or the top 10. 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?

[A]

Yep.

[B]

But you never do.

[A]

No, I mean, again, when you're talking about there's no accountability. When's the last time anybody went to jail or was actually held accountable?

[B]

So one of the books, one of the books about the gfc, which also didn't correct anything if you look at the GFC in my year in 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 Spitznagle 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. Yeah.

[A]

And that's like, do they have one more in them after Covid?

[B]

I don't think they do. See, that's my bet. 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.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

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.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

What.

[A]

What is the market business that they cut rates in the fall? Let me see.

[B]

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 this place way away from equilibrium, once it starts to equilibrate back, it is out of control. It is the fires in California. California. It's a volcano. It's earthquakes. It's avalanches. It's chemical explosions in the lab. When you are. Wait, 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.

[A]

They'll continue to try to refuse to.

[B]

I believe, but I think they'll have to step back this time. I think at some point they'll just go to the. Out of the splash some and they're just gonna. They're gonna do an Andrew Mellon moment and just say, you know, why don't.

[A]

Liquidate and really like it? Is it really gonna affect the bottom of the economy that much? Since most of these people don't own these assets anyway?

[B]

No, they'll lose their job, so.

[A]

Yeah, it's already happening.

[B]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, they'll lose their jobs. Yeah, it'll hurt them badly. Yeah, it always hurts them badly.

[A]

Yeah, right.

[B]

They get hurt coming and going. The Average, the average 70 year old boomer. Median, median 70 year old boomer who is by definition on the cusp of retirement because they're losing their marbles. They've got fake fucking knees, right? Everything's gone south. 70 is not the new 60. 70, 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, I, I, it's like I did the math wrong. It's like 4% of, of, 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, median seven year old, also Social Security of 22,000. 22,000 from Social Security, that's correct. Plus eight grand. That's what, 30,000. They gotta, they gotta live on that.

[A]

Yeah, it's not gonna be easy.

[B]

Not gonna be easy.

[A]

You heard it here first. I've gotta, I've gotta run here. It's been a great way to end the week, though.

[B]

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.

[A]

He'S from running the SEO.

[B]

SEO. Well, I'm not even convinced he wrote the book, the audiobook. 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.

[A]

And the latter would not shock me in the least bit.

[B]

I would like to think he's smarter than that. He's a Cornell grad. He once accused me of having a typo and a tweet, which I said, that's not a very. That's not a very meaty counterattack.

[A]

Coming at your. Coming out of typo instead of the argument.

[B]

Coming out of typo instead of the argument. Yeah, I was unimpressed that he used a typo as his counter attack.

[A]

Well, if the market does turn into.

[B]

Carnage, we'll come on and talk about it. Talk about the by the way, it's not going to be fun to watch. Roman proverb the vanquished weep, the victors do not laugh.

[A]

No, don't dance, don't dance, don't dance.

[B]

They're trying to hold the NASDAQ 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.

[A]

I think this is. I think gold and silver are headed way, way higher.

[B]

I hope so. Kind of. I'd rather get 10% a year.

[A]

The all right, we'll catch up. I gotta run. Peace of love Freaks. Thank you for listening to this episode of tftc. If you've made it this far, I imagine you got some value out of the episode. If so, please share it far and wide with your friends and family. We're looking to get the word out there. Also, wherever you're listening, whether that's YouTube, Apple, Spotify, make sure you like and subscribe to the show. And if you can, leave a rating on the podcasting platforms, that goes a long way. Last but not least, if you want to get these episodes a day early and ad free, make sure you download the Fountain podcasting app. You can go to Fountain FM to find that. $5 a month get you every episode a day early. Ad free helps. The show gives you incredible value, so please consider subscribing via Fountain as well. Thank you for your time and until next time.