Dave Collum Exposes It All: The Truth No One Will Tell You
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hey hey welcome to the bitcoin matrix i'm your host cedric youngleman in this episode i welcome dave column back to the bitcoin matrix for his sixth appearance to break down the deep state market manipulation and the unraveling of america a cornell professor and one of the most outspoken critics of the financial and political establishment

Colm dives into Wall Street's potential takeover of Bitcoin and why he believes the system is past the point of no return. So I hope you enjoy this rip. Please support our sponsors, affiliates, and subscribe to the Bitcoin Matrix RSS feed and our YouTube channel. And if you do want to get in touch with me, it's Cedric at thebitcoinmatrix.com. And now let's enter the Bitcoin Matrix with Professor David B. Colm. What is real?

How do you define real? You can't jump into cash. Cash is trash. What do you do? You get out. Dave Collum, welcome back to the Bitcoin Matrix podcast for the sixth time, sir. How are you? I'm very good. Well, it's great to see you. I had to interview you. Bitcoin's having kind of a sort of various upheaving changes in its world, right? It's really getting exciting. Talk about things moving quickly. Yeah.

And, you know, it seems like it's almost too good to be true. I worry about that. I worry about that. I worry about that, too. And I have a lot of feelings and thoughts on that. You quoted me one day. You'll remember this, too, I'm sure, where I said Bitcoin is designed to break or bankrupt people who don't know why they own it.

Yeah. And I think that's correct. I stand by that. And the idea that there's those who know why and they'll probably be okay. And those who don't and they'll bone it. I also think that that expression just kind of lends itself to most things. I mean, it's important to know what you have. Right. How to value it correctly. Right.

and have conviction in that value because other people might not see it that way. Well, so I've told people, you know, people made, you know, 400-fold on Microsoft, right? And there's one common denominator, and that is they didn't sell. Right. Yeah, and I one time asked the guy who was at ground zero of Microsoft. It was Rick Sherland. He was at Goldman. He ran the software group. He founded it.

And so he was there when they were trying to piece together Microsoft as this little twinkle of, you know, some twinkle of a Zai startup. And I asked him, I said, was Microsoft always a lock? I mean, did it really look like to you? And he said, oh, no, not at all. He said there were at least three times where it looked like it could go to zero.

So nothing's a lot. And Amazon went through similar. Oh yeah. Yeah. Remember the $12 Amazon cover on Barron's? I think it was. Yeah. Could Amazon, they went from like a hundred dollars to $6 in like eight, nine months. Yeah. And, uh, and somehow you have to weather all that. And I, I don't,

I don't like investments that have that range, that volatility range. If you buy small cap gold miners or something, that's routine. I like the things that are plotters. I like the tortoises. I like buying something like Rio Tinto and having to just kind of chug and plug along, bulldozing useful elements out of the earth. I'm not much of a stock picker either. What about the people...

Who held onto pets.com? Yeah, that didn't work very well, did it? No. In fact, I asked a recent podcast host, name for me a company that still thinks of itself as a .com. So they all have a website, but you never say amazon.com. So the .com suffix is gone, right?

And there's periods of time where all the companies begin with the letter Q and stupid things like that. You know, they tend to not do well. What I like to ask people is when they write the final chapter on the Mag 7, is it going to be a success story or a horror story? And I think it's safe to say it's going to be a horror story, right? Now, again, if you bought, if you bought, which one was it? If you bought the Mag,

The markets in 1921, I think by 1933 you were up threefold, but it didn't feel that way because you went through a much bigger bagger en route to that path. If you bought the Nikkei, I don't know, 1965, you've compounded around 3% or 4%, but it doesn't feel that way.

And so time, time, time equals everything. Time's important. And, you know, you think about time in the market instead of time in the market. But what what do you think of as your safe harbor? Right now, it's not time. Time is not safe harbor. I think time's your enemy. Time is your friend in a bull market. It's your worst enemy in a bear market. So in a bull market, you just patiently wait. You accrue wealth.

And in a bear market, it just slowly but surely eats you like you're strapped to an anthill or something. And so it depends, right? Time was your worst enemy in '67 to '81. You lost 75%, 80% inflation adjusted, but it took you 14 years to lose it too. And you had best have 45 years of investing because 20 years, you don't have any money. You're not doing anything.

And if you have a last 20 years, you shouldn't be hanging off the end of the surfboard. You should be just trying to survive. You should really be hunkered down for the apocalypse. And so you got about 45 years. If you burn a third of that, losing 80%, that's deadly. Duration is what kills, right? If you lost 75, 80% in a year, that would leave you 44 years to recover, not 30.

So the market, if you bought the market in '06, 1906, inflation adjusted capital gains, you were even in something like 1982. It's really scary. I mean, if you own the top, you will, the markets can go up and down from there. There's no way to know what the path is. But if you own the tops, the big tops, and they regress to the mean over time, you'll go to your grave even at best.

The tops take decades to completely grind out. - Doesn't humanity need a store of value that you could buy the top forever? I mean, isn't this, I mean- - Well, so a store of value in theory should tread water. Something like Bitcoin is not a store of value right now. Right now it's a speculative asset that makes you a ton of money. Bitcoin is not an inflation hedge, but Bitcoin is a get stinking rich bet, right?

When it's finally sort of matured, it may be the perfect inflation hedge. And guys like you might be stinking rich at that point or broke. I just don't know. I have a question for you. Something I said to Marty Bent two days ago and he corrected me, but I want to ask you the same question. He corrected me off screen, so I feel bad because I made the statement and then we went to close and then he explained it afterwards. How levered is Michael Saylor?

Not levered at all. Not very levered at all. Okay, so that's what he corrected. I thought Saylor was hyper-levered. No. So under-levered, and they're rejigging this quarter to be lower levered to then lever up some more.

And when they lever up some more, they'll still be under levered. Right. And I the word on the street amongst those who are not Bitcoiners is that he's levered up the kazoo. Yeah, they know it's that's not the case at all. Marty corrected me on that. So I'm now going on. I'm now publicly stating that I've had my chain yanked on that.

Because I believed it. And FASB, the changes to FASB will also impact. I mean, we just saw it with Tesla where they were able to push through 600 million in unrealized gains from Bitcoin holdings. So prior to now, you were only able to impair the asset and take it down to its lowest point in the quarter and never market to market after that. So now with the FASB change, you can market to market and take the unrealized gains or losses back.

to your EPS. So MicroStrategy will actually wipe out probably a year of losses when they release the Q1 earnings in May. And that's where like, where the financial analysts looking at these stocks, if they don't understand accounting, and they're going to miss sort of those sorts of signals.

Well, I don't understand accounting, so I did. But that one's big coming down the pike and that affects, that impacts, you know, Tesla. So I saw something about Larry Fink buying, what, 500 million in Bitcoin? Did I see that? Was that the number? So is that the ETF scooping it up? So it's not Larry Fink, so it's not BlackRock. You know, there's these funny memes out there where they talk about how much of the world is controlled by Vanguard, BlackRock, you know, Fidelity, whatever. And I go, but

But they own it. It's in their name, but they have offsetting liabilities. But they have shareholder votes. Well, they have shareholder votes, yes. So there's a couple of things that happen. One is they have shareholder votes. The other thing is in the olden days, if someone shorted a stock, the person who lent the shares got paid.

And that removed that. So Wall Street had a way of scraping all the profits away from the little guy. And if you think they're not going to do that every chance they get, you're a naive investor. But this idea, for example, that Vanguard owns such a huge percentage of the world, technically they do, but they also have liabilities that offset those, right? I mean, it's... So I don't know how to think about it. I get lost. Yeah.

Something that always stands out to me, something like Nike. I think Nike should be way more valuable than it is. And sometimes when I look at Nike, I say that company's not run as a for-profit organization. It's run as a social awareness program for the most part. Really? Is that right? And that's kind of how I read. It's, what is it, a 400th ranked company in the world? It should be top 50, top 100. It was very big at one point.

And I think a lot of decisions they've made were just not based on economics. By law, they're supposed to. It appears. Sure, sure. And you wonder, like, how does a company get steered in maybe a direction like that? And that's me wearing a tinfoil hat, but it doesn't look like, you know. And so that's where I look at something like a Vanguard and a BlackRock and I go, how are they exercising power maybe differently?

Even something like DEI, I don't think that was emergent from the shareholders. I think DEI is geopolitics. I don't think it has anything to do with financial. I think DEI is, I'll take this right down the rabbit hole. I think a lot of what we've been witnessing is astroturfed attempts to make us self-destruct. And DEI is one of them.

Gender bending, you know, all these things I think are, you know, let's just pick a foe for fun. Who knows who, it's not the Russians. The Russians are too busy trying to, you know, put food on people's tables and stuff like that. But let's take the Chinese, right? The Chinese are not going to defeat us by pulling battleships up to the shore. They're going to sun zoo us and basically get us to destroy ourselves.

And as that Yuri Bezmenov said, he said, we didn't spend much time spying on you guys. We spent most of our effort trying to fuck around with your society. And I think that's what you do. So I think a lot of, like opening the southern border. Why would you open the southern border? Why throw the border wide open? Why did Biden do that? Biden's administration. I can't come up with an argument that's pro-U.S.,

Democratic votes, you know, they already own Smartmatic and, you know, no, they can just rig the election. That's stupid. And there's not even evidence that it would go in the direction of the Democrats. Cheap labor doesn't make sense to me. I understand why you'd want to bring a bunch of smart guys from India who can code, but you also don't have to bring them anymore. They can code from India. And so...

So none of the standard arguments make any sense to me. What makes sense to me is if someone wanted to get us to somehow destroy ourselves, like they did Europe, right? Look what they've done to Europe with their immigration policy. They've really done tremendous destruction to Europe. The question is why? And it's got to be, there's gravitational forces out there that, like black holes, geopolitical black holes that are doing stuff, I think. And so that's where I put the DEI story.

And I think Nike is like an astroturf sort of operation like that in some way. But, I mean, you brought up the Russians and the Chinese and...

I mean, I just read your 2024 year in review. The whole thing? What is a fact? I read the whole thing. Oh, man. It's great. I love the way you write. May God have mercy on your soul. By the way, Bob Moriarty is going to put it in hard copy again. He just emailed me this morning. Are the prior copies in hard copy? It turns out 2023 got put in hard copy about eight months later, which is how to market a book, right? A year in review, eight months later, hard copy. And then he put...

2009 to 2012 into hard copy. So I think he had this idea of producing the archives. And I don't know. The problem is there's no hot links or anything, you know, stuff like that. So go ahead. You read the whole thing. Yeah, I mean, I read all the part about the different presidents over the last hundred years. I thought you went easy on a lot of them.

Yes. And then others I went hard on, right? I went real hard on FDR, right? And it's not because he's a big government lefty. That has nothing to do with FDR being a sick fuck. Yeah, but it definitely lends insight into where we are today. We have elected a lot of bad presidents, yes. Right. Right.

And so you mentioned with the border and even geopolitics. So is there an enemy within? That's the phrase, right? That was, you know, when I read, God, Richard Clark's book about the Bush administration. So when Bush was in office,

I didn't like the way he got Bush Jr. I didn't like the way he got elected. He clearly got anointed. He seemed like a lightweight. The whole thing felt wrong even for a Reagan Republican. And then we got into the Iraq War, and that was just clearly just a bad, bad bit of thinking. And it was also – so Secretary of the Treasury O'Neill quits after some number of years and writes a book called

And I said, I have got to read this book. I've got to find out what was going on in that White House. And he basically came out and said the Bush administration was targeting Iraq from the first day of their administration, period. Then I read Richard Clark's book, who was, oh, he's one of these secretaries of one of these spooky agencies. And his final line in the book was something like about the enemy being within. And it was clear that he really thinks that the enemy

that are problems the phone the call is coming from inside the house uh you know from that sci-fi movie horror movie from the past where someone's calling they said the call is coming from inside the house right to get the out and uh that is a component I did a couple of podcast I did a podcast with Diana West who wrote this revision of history of World War II

And she wrote a couple books, and the second one was kind of an epilogue. And she didn't focus anywhere near as much on the Soviet Union and external forces. And I asked her in the podcast, I said, is that because the forces of evil now are here and that it's no longer about focusing on Putin or Xi Jinping or whatever? Is it Brennan, Clapper, James Comey? She hammers those guys. I mean, she really hammers those guys. And...

At some level, I think that's correct. And that's why Trump's executive order sweeping him out was brilliant. He just swept the core of the deep state

out of power. And do you think that there is a battle between Trump and the deep state and Trump represents the other sort of team? Well, I'm hoping. You know, there's the alternative, you know, there's 8,000 layers of this onion and I'm hoping that's the correct layer. The other possibility is he's just an actor in this big kabuki theater kayfabe moment and that he's playing his role.

Which one are you betting on? I know which one you're hoping on. I'm kind of agnostic. I've almost reached a point where I don't trust anything. And I just look and I go, you're trying to... Walter Kern in a podcast, I really adore Walter. He said something like, if you're watching this geopolitics and you think you understand it, you're nuts. And he's pretty well connected. And so I think...

I think if you add the answer key, there's a famous quote from Daniel Ellsberg, the Pentagon Papers fame. In his book, Secrets, he describes how he was talking to Henry Kissinger, who is not yet Secretary of State. And Ellsberg had top security clearance. And he said to Henry, he said, Henry, you're about to get top security clearance. You're about to see things that will shock you. And then he says, and then you'll be elated.

He says, "Then you'll find yourself at some cocktail party or something, some three-star general telling you something and you'll realize he doesn't know what he's talking about because he doesn't have your clearance." He says, "Then you're going to stop listening to people and you're going to be an idiot."

So are we a couple of idiots? Well, we are definitely a couple of idiots. The question is how high up do you have to get before you can actually get a clear picture and is there such a thing? So the horror story, the section on World War II is really kind of interesting. So for the reader, listener, years ago I copyedited Ben Steele's Battle of Bretton Woods. So I read it very, very carefully.

And in there, he mentioned two things that I remember vividly. One is he described how our Lend-Lease program to Britain was not what it appeared to be. We totally bent him over and gave it to him sideways. We made sure that when Britain came out of World War II, they would no longer be a superpower, period. The deals we cut were awful.

The second thing he pointed out is that Harry Dexter White, who battled John Maynard Keynes at Bretton Woods, New Hampshire in 1944, was a Soviet sympathizer. Now, I hesitate to say spy because even Ben seemed to be a little unsure as to what his role was. But he was handing information to the Ruskies. And it could have been he was thinking, this is for the good of the United States, which means he's a sympathizer but not a spy.

Or he could be saying, "I am with the Soviets, I'm not with the United States." That makes him a spy, right? So that was my first shot across the bow in World War II. Then my brother urges me to read a book called "American Betrayal" by Diana West, and she was very prominent, Lou Dobbs twice a week, you know, that sort of thing. And she dug into World War II and went down rabbit holes and said, "Holy shit, World War II is not what we thought." And she, again, there's some high watermarks that are just mind-boggling. First and foremost,

FDR catered to everything Stalin asked for, including we had a Lend-Lease program for Stalin too that was estimated to be 20 times bigger than that for the Brits. And I was chatting a little bit with Dinah West in view of the public. I got an email from Sean McMeekin who said, "Okay, now you have to read Stalin's War," which was Sean's book.

So I read Stalin's War, which was a more detailed look at what Diana looked at. And then there's just these little weird things that you wouldn't even notice if you hadn't read Battle of Bretton Woods. But like, for example, we were negotiating with Japan right up to Pearl Harbor. So the image is people, someone who's half alert knows we had our foot on their throats and therefore it was not an unprovoked attack. We know that.

And anyone who's paying attention knows that there's a lot of chatter and so we knew something was up, which still didn't make sense because you left Pearl Harbor totally exposed. But we were actually negotiating much the way we did leading into the Iraq War where, you know, we pull our diplomats sort of thing, you know, it was rather explicit. And who was our negotiator? Harry Dexter White. And so you go, oh, that plot's just thinking. And then it turns out Stalin wanted...

us to get whacked by the Japanese because he wanted us to be pulling Japan off its flank. He didn't want to have to worry about Japan. Now, how did Stalin pull this off? Well, it turns out FDR's right-hand man was a guy named Harry Hopkins, who was a complete Soviet spy in the purest sense. And so everything, and he was with FDR 14 hours a day. This guy was his shadow. They used to joke about him being president.

and everything that we ever did was what was authorized by Stalin, including landing at Normandy. And Stalin's goal appeared to be to have the Western powers destroy each other. So if you ask the question, who won World War II? It's a very different question than who beat the Germans. Who beat the Germans? I would argue us, because we gave huge armaments to the Soviet Union.

And we also fought them. And so we won World War II. We beat the Germans. Stalin won World War II. He got half of Europe. We came out of it no better off than we were before the start of the war. He came out of it with half of Europe. And that's what he wanted. The war could have ended. They estimate 42, 43 could have been over. Stalin did not want that thing to end. He wanted us to destroy ourselves. He wanted all of Europe to just eat itself. And he was such a sick bastard.

FDR, to the extent he was naive, had this stupid policy that said, "Look, if we do everything Stalin wants, he'll cooperate." That sounds like a wife who's being beaten by her husband, right? That doesn't work. We kept handing him unbelievable armaments even after the war, which basically funded his rise to superpower. But the most appalling stat

was at the end of the war, and our media in the 30s was very pro-Soviet Union. We had a media that was hyping the Soviet Union the way our media has been hyping Ukraine for three years. And just nothing but sunshine, skittles, rainbows, famous journalists writing puff pieces and stuff like that. And the question is why? Well, it turns out Harry Dexter. Why? Let's start with that. And so... And so...

The entire history of World War II turns out to be, in my opinion, probably wrong. In the big picture, wrong. And so I wrote about this, and then I read New Deal or Raw Deal, which was a write-up on FDR's handling of the Great Depression. And, you know, his big government, we all know that big government starts with Woodrow Wilson, but was taken to a whole new level by FDR.

He's very popular. It turns out what you find out is that both from McMeek and from whoever wrote New Deal or Raw Deal, FDR was a sociopath. He was a compulsive liar. He lied nonstop. He was incompetent, too. So everyone who knew him before he entered politics said he was good for nothing. He couldn't hold down a job. He couldn't do anything. But he had this gift of gab, and he discovered politics. And so...

So he was able to win over the people. They loved him. But he was probably the worst president in history. If not him, then maybe Wilson. And it turns out in the middle of the Great Depression, the book does not— I have a terrible itch in my chest. The book does not spend a lot of time on his bad economic policies.

It does not obsess over right-wing, left-wing economics, which it could have. I actually expected that. It obsesses over just things he did for the wrong reasons. So every single program that he funded was to buy votes. Everyone who got money out of the New Deal was to buy votes and buy power. And if you weren't on his team, you did not get the money.

And who was in the middle of it all, all these three-letter programs to burn capital? Harry Hopkins. And so at the end, Morgenthau, who was his kind of economic brain trust, was frustrated. And he said, we've gotten ourselves deeply in debt. We've got nothing to show for it. Nothing. Now, I forgot to mention a little detail. Diana White discovers from her first book that every time a

A US soldier ended up in Soviet territory, unlike you'd expect out of an ally. So people refer to the Soviet Union as an ally. They were not an ally. We were both fighting the Germans, but they were not allies. When American soldiers would end up in US territory, they'd go straight to a gulag, no matter how they got there. The Russians were capturing American troops as fast as they could. The end of the war, when Churchill, which is worn down,

And Darrell Cooper says Churchill was a bad dude too, but I haven't dug into that, so I don't have an opinion. The official story was there's a dozen or so Americans somehow in the Soviet Union. She said the number's closer to 20,000, and we left them. And there are for decades rumors of Americans inside gulags. And I asked her in the podcast, I said, why? And she said, well,

We thought they were being used as bargaining chips, but it reached a point where it got so protracted that it was embarrassing to both sides. And so they just said, "Forget it." They just walked. They just left them. And Stalin basically wore down the allies and got whatever he wanted, nonstop. So there are many learned people, including, I think, Patton, who felt that we would have been better off siding with the Germans and attacking the Soviets.

For one thing, it probably would have prevented the Holocaust, right? I mean, it probably would have changed the course of the war. Now, I've been asked an interesting question, which is dangerous, but I'll tell you if I'm going to ask it in my year in review, it's not that dangerous, apparently. Was there a tactical reason for the Holocaust? Now, of course, Hitler was a sicko. He was a druggie.

He was surrounded by super anti-Semites. But there's a 2,500 page biography of him that I've not read, but a friend did. He said of he and his inner circle, Hitler was not the anti-Semite. It was his inner circle that was. And so the question kept coming back to me, was there a reason why he exterminated the Jews? And then one day I'm reading Fergus O'Connor Greenwood's book, which he tackles every narrative. He takes every narrative and says...

Here's why I think it's wrong. It's a great book. It's called 180. And he mentions what we know, and that is that the mega banks fund all the wars, right? That's creature from Jekyll Island. And so, but he mentions that the mega banks funded the Russian Revolution. They funded the rise of the Soviet Union. And based on everything I've read, I go, that makes total sense. Yeah, right.

So I'm sitting there wondering if the mega banks, which really boils down to the Rothschilds, I'm wondering if Hitler was looking saying, "Our worst threat is the Soviets. We can undermine this threat by undermining their financial power base, which means exterminate the Jews." And I started pondering that. And so was it just, you know, Stalin killed people randomly. So Stalin really was a random killer.

I was wondering if Hitler had a reason. Forget about good or bad, I'm not endorsing his reason, but I'm wondering if it was tactic. So I'm tooling along with this thing, rattling around in my noggin, trying to figure out how to think about it. And then I find a Soviet, a quote from Putin. And he says, "I hope that future generations will not be held back by the shackles of the Rothschilds." I go, "Oh, wow." That's a strange quote in that context. And, uh,

kind of consistent with the idea that the mega bankers, which happened to be Jewish, it's a fact that I cannot escape. I'd love to call them Iranians, but they're not. And that the Russians viewed them as bad guys too. And so then I finished that deep dive, deep dive six or seven books.

with a book, Day of Deceit, the Pearl Harbor. And we've all heard the rumors that Pearl Harbor was a setup, right? And Day of Deceit teed it up completely. Now, according to Sean McMeekin, Stalin knew they were going to attack Pearl Harbor. If Stalin knew, we knew, right? It's one of those things. Day of Deceit goes into the lurid detail.

of all the things that pointed to the fact that we'd cracked all their codes, we knew everything, we pulled shit away from where it had to be. And the story is painted that we knew the morning they would attack. And the one thing we didn't do was let the guys at Pearl Harbor know that FDR knew. And the author of that book cut FDR slack saying, "Well, in times of war, you have to make tough decisions."

But I'm going, yeah, but he didn't read American Betrayal and Stalin's War and New Deal or Raw Deal. So he cut a sociopathic liar a break thinking it was a patriotic thing to do. And at this point, FDR, until further notice, gets no breaks out of me.

That was a tangent of a higher order, I should add, but I just said it. But that gets to the question of the onion, the lure of the onion. Why? So in this protracted podcast I did with Diana, which Michael Farris set up, I was dying to talk to her, and so it was great. I got to ask her some questions. She wrote an epilogue. There was about a 120-page book, right? It was not a big one. It was since 2013, when the first book came out,

So it's really just an epilogue. She talked about the bad dudes in this country and she went through the Brendon's, Clapper's, Comey's, these guys, and she makes a very good case that they are bad to the core, not just bad pro-US, bad as in... So Brendon, for example, gets accused of voting for a communist when he was a young, stupid, stoned hippie. That is not the story.

Brennan's roots into communism, into bad ideas, go very deep and are protracted and quite possibly go to this day. Comey has very strong roots with... I can't remember the guy's name, Reinhardt or something, who was some Marxist. And Comey's origin story would leave you wondering why he would ever get put in charge of the FBI. And that ended up getting too...

is the enemy within. And so why would, oh, and then, so here's the funny part. So her book, Diana, I'm reading about a third of the way through. And I go, this sounds like McCarthy, commie behind every rock bullshit. So I called my brother. I said, dad, how do I know she's not just McCarthy 2.0, right? Which by the way, I think McCarthy might've been right too. So there's that. And he said, just keep reading, just keep reading. In her book,

And she convinced me. But in her book, she mentions a guy named Stephen Coughlin. She occasionally brings contemporary issues in. She mentions a guy named Stephen Coughlin, who is the GOAT. He's the Pentagon's expert on radical Islam. And I can't even remember the context of this surface, because it's not an obvious connection with World War II. And he went to the Pentagon and said, we've got to understand this if you want to deal with this problem we're dealing with. And they blew him off completely. Well, I happen to know Stephen Coughlin. So I reached out to Stephen, and I said, Stephen,

"Is Diana credible and is her book American Betrayal credible?" And he says, "Oh, profoundly." And he said, "The neocons went bananas on her and she had to go into hiding and she basically went silent for years." And Stephen's a very impressive guy. I've been on a number of Zoom calls with him. So then, so then, oh, I had a thought, it's gone.

So the question then becomes, why have we not heard this narrative? Oh, one other thing. So then we talked about the Soviet archives opening. And I said, they didn't really open, did they? And she said, no, not at all. That's a complete fantasy. And I said, yes, because let me take a guess here. There's a billion pages. Let's start with that. There's a billion pages. Second of all, the Soviet leaders were still alive. They didn't want them opened.

Those billion pages were focused a lot on the United States. We didn't want them opened. No one wanted them opened. So a guy named Bukowski got into the archives with this newfangled technique, a hand scanner back in 1990 something, before people knew you could do this, sort of like an iPhone at some level. And he got some shit out of there. And that was about as good as we got.

Then I run into Bukowski having written an article about American betrayal from Diana saying, this is a brilliant book. So the loop, the circle starting getting closed pretty well. There's this guy named Darrell Cooper again who draws fire from people, but he's read a ton. He's one of these self-historian types. And the question is, why does this remain hidden? And the answer is because what is America's origin story? There are two high watermarks. There's the founding fathers,

and U.S. saving the world from tyranny in World War II. And if you start questioning the latter, you'll start questioning everything. Like the JFK papers. Such as? What do you question about those? Well, I'm sure it was a conspiracy. Let's start there. I'm not sure we're going to get anything. Did you see the strange thing that happened a week before the inauguration where they released tapes?

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Some new footage was released and I looked at a couple of tapes on Twitter. The tape released by the grandson? I'm not sure what I looked at. I looked at a 20-second clip where it looked like a driver might have shot Kennedy. No, no, no, no. They were insinuating that or something? So there's tapes that got released to Alex Jones, whose stock has gone up pretty good lately, which a guy who was the grandson of a guy named Estes, who was a cotton magnate in Texas...

one of the wealthiest guys in Texas. And it's a conversation between him and the head of the DNC from about 1970. And this grandson who talked about how he just tried to live a good God-fearing life and he had these tapes for about eight years and he's releasing them, I go, eight days before the inauguration of Donald Trump who says he's going to release some shit? This seems a little suspicious to me. And he talks about how he got them from his uncle

who had somehow gotten them from Estes, the original. They were just in the family. And the theory was that it was a kill switch. These two guys kind of laid it out and tape recorded it. And it's very authentic sounding. Alex Jones said they ran it through a bunch of programs to see if they could find any evidence of tampering, anything that would be suspicious, and they found nothing. I imagine he has the ability to do such things.

And these two guys are chatting, and one of them was tight with Johnson. And he's talking, calling him Lyndon, and he says, you know, I've been loyal to Lyndon my whole life. And he's going, but I'm having, I'm probably going to take to my grave the doubts about, you know, him asking Mac, some guy named McDonald, to put the whack on Kennedy. And he, these two guys are chatting just in this way that is just so sort of calm and sort of remorseful. And he says, you know, the...

I'm having real trouble with the 17 other guys who got killed in the process. That just seems excessive to me. And maybe you got to do what you got to do. And then he says, you know, Lyndon does what Lyndon wants. He simply, Lyndon's all about Lyndon. He's not going to do anything for anyone else. But they're talking about the whack. And he says, you know, and then Lyndon called the whack, called the hit on Kennedy and

You know, they whack Kennedy and then those other 17 guys die, who I don't know who the 17 are, but you could easily imagine 17 guys disappearing without us knowing much about them. And so that came out a week before the inauguration. And the other suspicious thing about the grandson is he kept, he played too stupid. And so Jones would mention Oliver Stone's movie and the grandson would say he didn't see it.

And he would say, he didn't pay attention. I'm going, you got tapes of your grandfather calling a hit or describing Lyndon Johnson hitting JFK and you wouldn't be paying attention to the various theories about the Kennedy? There was something, he was really saying, I know nothing, you know, don't look at me, Stephen Paddock's brother, you know, who knows. And so again, we're back to the, I don't,

I think the layers of the onion on every story. I've been watching this plane crash over Reagan Airport. There's already odd stuff surfacing. No smoking gun, but things that don't make sense. And so I'm watching to see who died in the crash. A bunch of figure skaters died. I'm waiting to see, oh, by the way,

you know, the wife of so-and-so was in there. I'm waiting for the smoke, for the "that's why the plane crashed" person. But the oddities include, I listed the radio tower footage this morning, you know, from, and I've seen the flight paths, they show the flight paths, and they were, the situation seemed totally controlled right up until two seconds before.

and you sense the panic. Now, they didn't know at first, the guys in the control tower didn't know, were trying to figure out helicopter versus commuter plane, you know, that sort of thing. And if you watch the path, they're going at each other, and you can see the plane veer, and they're telling the helicopter to go underneath it or go behind it or something like that, and you actually see the helicopter veer

soon thereafter, as though we're interception. Now the problem I'm having with it is that I have trouble imagining that a US Black Hawk helicopter wouldn't be able to see a plane. Right? I can imagine a couple of commuter pilots boning something. But a Black Hawk is, and not to mention that once you realize, oh shit, there's a plane, I would think that a Black Hawk helicopter would be able to make a maneuver that would make Tony Hawk proud, right?

and say, this is not a lumbering jet. This is a Black Hawk helicopter, right? And so I'm waiting. I'm watching. I do believe that our intelligence guys, if they wanted to assassinate someone, they'd happily bring down a whole plane to do it. I've heard other people claim that. They said they wouldn't hesitate. Like someone died when the Ruskies supposedly brought down that airliner in Ukraine years ago. Someone important died in that flight.

And I've heard people say they brought it down just to kill that guy. There's a sociopathy that's not imaginable, I think, for some of these guys. And then, of course, there's the, you know, let's keep feeding the public goofy stories. Keep them busy, you know, while Tulsi Gabbard gets confirmed. I don't know, you know. This is going to be an interesting year. We know that much.

This year's already teeing up to be, this is not just we don't know what's going to happen. We're going, holy shit, things are going to happen this year. And my colleagues are paying attention because all their research grants are at risk and things like that. Yeah. I mean, it seems like on every string we pull,

a lot of lies or a different story that you could find but and we never get to what is the real story i mean even if you look at maybe this helicopter crash you'll never figure out what the real story is yeah like the weather balloon that flew across the continental united states now i knew the drone story i knew the drones were ours at first i i thought the best theory was the drones were actually a projection a military-grade hologram i'm willing to let that theory go

But the idea that there were foreign adversaries flying drones over the continental United States and we didn't know who they were, we didn't know what to do, that's just so unimaginable. We should fire the entire military from Colonel up if that's the case, right? But that's not the case. And so what they were doing, we'll never know. Some thought they were actually searching for nuclear material by flying some grid mission across some area where they suspected it, something like that. There's all sorts of theories.

But you don't know. We're being kayfabed. Hulk Hogan is winning. Yeah, that's why I just don't believe the narratives. Someone's trying to get your attention behind you. My IT guy. If I didn't have two IT guys, I'd be a lost soul because everything in the digital world makes me suffer now. They just upgraded my computer. You know why they upgrade our computer all the time at Cornell? I just found this out yesterday.

Because cyber risk is serious, we have insurance against cyber problems. Cornell has a policy, and to get that policy at a credible price, we have to do shit that... So they upgrade, they're upgrading something every two weeks. And every time they do, I have to go into the settings and undo all the bullshit.

And, you know, I had the IT guy in my printer was printing double-sided even though the thing was clicked for single-sided. He's going, oh boy, I don't know. And he undid it. But I was sitting right there and he spent some time trying to figure out why I was, you know, and then they just updated me yesterday. And I found that if I took a window and I stretched it a little bit to make it a little bigger, it would immediately pin to the entire screen. And I go, no, that's not what I wanted.

And you say, why does that matter? Because I had to unpin it probably 75 times yesterday. And then I went to get a passport. And the IT guys in my office said, I can't get a passport. 11 times I tried to upload the photo. 11 times I said, no, photo's not good enough. I go, it's as good as yours. And then finally I called the guy, said, go down to CVS Walgreens, get a photo. They'll check it. It'll upload. And that happened. And then it got stuck. And I show the IT guy, said, it's stuck. I don't know why. I'm so fed up with this shit.

And he looks and he clicks on his phone and he says, "Dave, you're not at a government website. It's for a passport." The good news is, it's probably an expediter. The bad news would be that it was someone who just took all my personal information that you have to give for a passport and got it. But I think it was an expediter that intercepted it. But you know, they tell you your passport, where's the wrong password, and you know it's the right one. You know they're just making you put in a new password.

But they don't say, "Time for a new password." They say, "No, wrong password." "No, it's the right password, you liar." And they say, "Click this box and say log in." It doesn't keep you logged in. Some lady did a rant from her car. Why do chicks sit in their cars and do rants? That's the question. Because they don't do podcasts. And it was a great rant about how I don't want to have to log in for the rest of my life. This is horrible.

I spend so much time trying to negotiate some stupid website written by some jolt-cola-addicted, Adderall-infested code head who doesn't actually know what it's like to use a website. I feel like we've constructed an entire world like that, where no one knows how to use the interfaces that they're responsible for managing or using, and nothing seems to work, and everyone's frustrated. And here's the risk. Here's one of my big risks. We are...

We may not be at a market top. DeepSeek might have actually called the top. I mean, that might have been the market, in my opinion, is 200% over historical average valuation. You get there, it's a Jenga tower waiting for you to pull one more block out. It's a gigantic Jenga tower. So it's shock sensitive. The rubble pile will be enormous. You never get here without eventually without a catastrophe.

Oh shit, where is it going to go? Okay, every other market top of such magnitude was a period of great euphoria, whether it was the roaring 20s, 1929, whether it was '67, we had invented transistors and all this crap.

whether it was 2000, the world really did look like it had changed in a profound way. Or in 2007, where it was not so much a market, but the real estate euphoria where people are going, I got a house. I can't believe I own this fucking house. It's a beauty. You know, Oprah's going, you get a house, you get a house, you get a house, right? This market top, everyone's pissed off. So I like to ask the rhetorical question, what's the bottom going to look like?

Now the right wing is a little euphoric right now, but society was ready to shoot each other, you know, on November 4th. And so the left has now been neutered. They've been punched in the nose and their eyes are all watery and they're trying to figure out what to do. The right is enjoying the fact that the bully has finally been dealt with. And I really think that's true. I really think all of a sudden, like the fever broke.

And someone can say, well, you can't do that. You can't pick on transgender. I go, fuck that. Yes, we can now. Everything seems to have changed. There really was a phase change that occurred in the election. Somehow it's like we're not putting up with that guff. You name it, we're not putting up with it anymore. And I think there's a lot of people on the left who are relieved by that too. I think there was the extreme left causing trouble. But this is not what a top feels like.

But it is a top. Put it this way, it's nearby. We are at Camp 4 on Mount Everest, at least. And we might have gone over it. We might have finally gone over it. Now, in this world of kayfabe and stuff, this is where, and again, I'm not going to

I'm not the guy to talk about this shit because I've read books now and stuff like that. But I would worry, if I were a Bitcoiner, I would worry about the onion layer question. And the question I asked you at the start, you know, the sailor leverage question was an important one for me because I really did think that was sort of a sign of the top. So if he's not leveraged at the level that the people who don't know Bitcoin like to say...

That is a different story. Watching Bitcoin get normalized and stuff, I don't know what it means. We've talked about this every time we've ever chatted. But Bitcoin, one of the miracles of Bitcoin is that it was ours, not theirs. And so I think as it gets absorbed by the system, this is like inviting your uncle to sleep on your couch and how do you get rid of them, you know, that sort of thing. So I don't think the normalization of Bitcoin is necessarily normal.

you know, sunshine skittles rainbows for the hodlers. I think probably, I don't remember what year you started. I ran across Stacey Herbert humping Bitcoin with everything she had at 30 cents a pop. So I'm pretty sure Max and Stacey are doing okay. I think they, as I said to them on the most recent podcast I did with them, I said, I'm guessing you guys don't have trouble paying off your credit card each month. So they must be billionaires, right? Is that a pretty good, pretty safe statement?

You know, I can't presume. I don't know if they held. I don't know if they bought. I wasn't there. I don't see their wallets. You would assume. But I don't like to make assumptions. He was a Bitcoin millionaire by his own claim in 11. I mean, my extrapolation says that he's got to put it this way. If he cashed out, he still had a lot of money. I'm pretty sure.

I used to tweet in my write-up that you probably saw where some guy said, ah, I bought Bitcoin at five cents and I sold it at 50 and now it's eight bucks. I can't believe it. I'm going, oh, that boy's probably already sliced his wrist. Yeah, that's hard for a lot of, I mean, I couldn't imagine going through something like that.

Yeah, I think we are at a weird inflection point with Bitcoin where are we watching Bitcoin eat everything, including the system? Or is it possibly being co-opted in some way and Bitcoiners are getting penned up with number go up and some sort of neutered aspect of Bitcoin down the road? And I say that hesitantly in the sense that I think everything is good for Bitcoin, but I think there are things that...

I think there are some negative side effects to government getting involved in the thing that we want to use to separate money and state. And some unintended consequences could come from this. And I do feel like we went from November to January where it was a complete change in how things felt. But I also wonder if we're just getting rugged in a different way. Because I believe in this pendulum theory. Yeah, a lot. So you just said we got one bully out.

And now the other side is going to see the new person as a bully at some point. And they're going to, you know, and the pendulum swings back. There is zero doubt Wall Street wants to rape and pillage anyone they get their hands on. And they can do that with either party from different ways. Oh, they don't have parties. Taxes or draconian measures. They don't have parties, right. And I wonder if we're going to see sweeping financial surveillance and...

things like that coming out. Well, so I don't think I think I've I think I've been good at suppressing any schadenfreude tendencies. So when you guys are doing well, you guys are doing well doesn't hurt me. You guys doing there could be a level in which the hodlers are and the hodlers are listening to me going. Why the hell don't you own Bitcoin? And and I've explained it a bunch of times but Bitcoin there could be a point where Bitcoin does so well that I do pay the price.

So let's say Bitcoin becomes the currency of the realm, and I don't have it. It's hard to imagine I came out ahead. I have a ton of gold, and it's hard to imagine Bitcoin would wipe the gold out. I have a feeling goldlers will be an attenuated version of Bitcoin. I think the two will coexist comfortably. But when I write a plot of what makes me nervous, one of them is the concern that

that from its origin, and I believe it's still accepted that a couple of NSA guys wrote the first paper. And I could imagine if I were planning way ahead and saying, let's set up a CBDC, crowdsourcing the bugs, right?

Just releasing it and letting it go wild and letting you smart guys figure out how to set up lightning and various things and getting acclimated and stuff like that and saying, you know, let's let the smartest guys in the world develop the system. And then when it's time, we'll take it. And I can't rule out that model. The second thing that bugs me, doesn't bug me, and it could even get me to become a hodler, is that you guys have not been through a big downdraft

of the markets and the global economy. Now, I say that, Bitcoin is interesting because it's the greenest investment community in history. There are some real pros in there and there's a gaggle of idiots that are beyond comprehension naive about how markets work. But revolutions are always started and fueled by youngsters.

But when I say that, they say, oh, we've been down through 80% downdrafts. I'm going, no, that's not the downdraft I'm talking about. I'm talking about when liquidity, global liquidity gets pounded, it will be the first time in Bitcoin's history that that has happened. And so the last time it happened, 08, 09, Bitcoin was a nothing. And they say, oh, what about 2020? If you think 2020 was a downdraft, you really are green.

You're out of your minds, naive. And so the next big downturn, in my opinion, will reveal Bitcoin's durability. And if you guys come staggering off the battlefield bloody but on two feet, that will convince me. But if you guys turn into a CBDC, I will not be happy. And I just don't know. And so Pomp,

I do more Bitcoin hodler podcasts. The hodlers all want me to podcast. I don't know why. When you do a transaction of Bitcoin, does it consume a lot of energy or not? A lot of people claim it. Well, a lot of people claim it does by the time the thing's gone through the network. The claim is the collective energy consumption is high. Is that not true? Well, high again is all relative. Like we're talking about a fraction of a percent of the total human's usage of energy.

And we're talking way less than what Netflix uses in energy or, you know, AI, you know, so, or on par with. And then we're getting into the morality case of, like, who and what should be, you know, used for energy and who gets to decide what's a good use of energy. But I would not classify it as high. And I think it drives energy costs down and it drives energy towards cleaner sources, probably, or even helps, like, deal with things like stranded methane and gas.

if you want to go down that route. So well, see, I think that's the cheapest energy sources. And so those are at some level are the miners you're talking about, though, right? Yes or no. I mean, it's like is the usage of every time you do laundry, is that a high use of energy? Well, that's so, you know, I mean, like you got to tap into the well, here's the question. So let's say I use Bitcoin to buy a pizza when the thing is done registering around the blockchain.

How much energy have how much in sort of current energy pricing? How is it possible that that energy is a ton? And this is a real question. This is not just a rhetorical question. And then it's been absorbed by the appreciation in the mining of Bitcoin. So the system is kind of self-funded.

Yeah, pre-subsized. Yeah, right. And that when someone has to finally start paying energy bills, how much would that transaction cost? Now, POPs seem to say that with the Lightning Network, and again, I'm outside my league,

The stranded energy argument is just the free market finding a way to- Well, transaction costs might go through the roof. There's no arguing on the base layer. Well, if Pop did argue that, Pop did argue against that. And he might be wrong. I mean, Bob Burnett, and I don't want to speak for Bob, might have a very different view on it. But block space is going to be very valuable. Companies and nation states are going to be fighting- Who's going to pay for that? Who's going to pay for the cost of that energy? I buy a pizza, who's going to pay that bill?

you might not be able to buy a pizza on the base layer. I think that's a very unrealistic expectation. So Bitcoin is evolved from being a currency to an asset. You also don't buy, you know, a pizza on the Federal Reserve's node, right? And you don't buy a pizza on Bank of America's node. You buy it on Visa, right? Or PayPal, you know, and so that's layer. What makes Visa cheap is it's just a communication between my vendor and Visa.

Whereas the blockchain is this gigantic, you know, Faraday web of information. A very slow database. I don't even care about slow because I have no trouble imagining coming up with ways to handle the lag, right? But rather that as my one transaction...

fully equilibrates around the blockchain. The question is, how much did the energy cost to get all the nodes into sync with that transaction? I think that's a very difficult answer for me to come up with. I would say that in human relative terms, it's infinitesimal for the one transaction, considering thousands of transactions are going through, if not more, and

Those transactions would be happening whether you got that single transaction in or not. Well, no, no, no, no. Well, no, but each transaction... My transaction would increase the energy consumption of the blockchain, right? That one transaction would contribute, correct or not? No, no, because the miners...

generating the hash power, run the hash power regardless of how many transactions get in, and then the difficulty adjustment incentivize them to increase or decrease the amount of hash power they contribute to the network. Right, but that, so this is the development where there's a profit in mining, which is kind of the subsidizer of the blockchain. But the blockchain itself at some point has to become sustainable.

Yes, and transaction fees, I would argue, will probably go up, not down on the base layer. I'm supporting what you're saying. We have a heated agreement on that.

And that we need layer two or layer other solutions if we want to use this as a medium exchange across the globe for humanity. So one of the ways to do this would be to not sync it up with the blockchain so instantaneously. To do batches. Right. Is that the lightning? Which is sort of what we're doing on the lightning network. Yes. Now, when I hear... And lightning doesn't mean that it's going to be the only solution. I mean, it's layer two. It might not be the only layer two, you know.

We're very early on. Very early. The mining using stranded energy, there's a lot of this metaphorical stuff where they go, "Bitcoin is energy," and I go, "You're bullshitting me here. This is a stupid argument." And that you're using stranded energy, it's just like saying, "Well, I'm going to put a steel mill in Iceland to use the geothermal." I get that.

There was an argument made by Lynn Alden that I really did like. So that's just, you know, the free market finding the cheapest source. Lynn Alden made the argument that what you can do is you can actually create sources of energy, like start some mining operation in the middle of buttfuck nowhere. That would not be profitable, but the blockchainers, the miners...

are paying the cost of that, are subsidizing that energy source in its infancy, sort of like angel investors. And that argument struck me as pretty interesting. Because we have incredible amounts of energy that are untapped.

You can't go and build like a $100 billion or a $5 billion plant when no one lives. No one can run it. You have no infrastructure, no people, no humanity. But if the blockchains are the first in, then you say, well, that'll keep the lights on. That'll keep the lights on. Right. And it also helps you run things at, like, so a lot of grids are built for peak capacity. Right. You know, your grid in Texas has to be capable of running every house and every factory at peak heat, at peak hours during, you know, 3 o'clock in the afternoon on July 6th.

Right. And, you know, so for 60 percent of the year, they're not using that energy. And Bitcoin is the only industry mining that could, you know, give that use that energy when it's not being consumed and give it back. And when I say give it back, like you can't shut a cotton factory down instantaneously. You ruin the machine. Right. It's like an aluminum smelter. Right. Right. You can't turn it on and off. Right.

very easily. It won't be good for the machines. It won't be good for the people working there. A Bitcoin mining farm can be turned off instantly, and those can be contractually obligated. So therefore, surge pricing and stuff like that. Right. And decreases the entire grid cost for the end consumer, and is there in peak usage, can drop their demand for it, and then that way increase supply for the end users, consumers. So there's a lot of interesting things we can do there.

with mining around making energy more affordable, more consumable, reachable. Because also where there are great energy sources to transport that energy, you lose 50% of the energy pipelining it anywhere. So you drop the miners there and you can actually convert and use the energy on site. Is there any doubt at all amongst the hodler community that CBDCs are a nightmare?

Tons of doubt. I mean, when you say doubt, I mean, like, do I fear CBDCs in the sense that they could that? Well, I think we have CBDCs already some form. I think part of what. Give me an example.

I think Tether is a CDC. I think PayPal is a CBDC. I mean, they can shut you off that. They can turn you on and off. Yeah, but to me, the real CBDC nightmare is when they say, you can't buy beer with this currency. You can't buy... We're not far from that. I mean, social score, a credit score, you can't get a mortgage with a credit score, right? So we have all the...

We are at the doorstep. We're at the front door, right? We're at the doorstep. And it's there. And we were talking before about central bankers and Jews and Rothschilds. And I would give some pushback there. I mean, some people believe the Rothschilds aren't even Jews. We could talk about the –

Yeah, I don't even care who the Rothschilds are. They happen to be Jews. And I think it's very interesting now at this point in time that they're raising central bankers as such the bad guys in the sense of like you even see it on UFC and Rogan. And is that their way of rolling out a private CBDC to say, oh, well, you know, don't trust the government and their CBDC. Right, right.

You know, here, use this. Right. Rolled out by Musk and Vivek and friends. I know. And none of that would come through under a Kamala Harris regime. But that might come through under a Trump regime.

And that's where I think like, wow, are we in this moment where we're getting like ultimately incredibly rubbed on all these fronts. In the sense now, in terms of David versus Goliath, you would think that someone in your position would see Bitcoin as winning the fight right now with something like the repeal of SAB 121, where banks can hold Bitcoin and the FASB changes on Bitcoin. I mean, this is all things that are helping Wall Street, you know,

take in Bitcoin, hoover it up, get it out of the hands of retail. And maybe there are machinations there. But it looks like Bitcoin's winning against the state. I mean, it looks like the state is rolling out the red carpet for Bitcoin. That's what worries me, too. But from your point of view, I'd say, well, isn't that the signs you're looking for? No, no, no, no, no, not necessarily. I see that as there's an analogy with January 6th where the bad guys are reading blitz.

until they throw a screen pass. The banks are saying, okay, let them come in. We'll flip the ball right over their heads. ED HARRISON: You could see something like this. I've heard some hodlers or Bitcoiners that raise some doomsday scenarios around like, okay, now the banks can hold your crypto, your Bitcoin, I'll say Bitcoin, not shitcoins, but Bitcoin. Now, that encourages you to not self-custody,

And if they eliminate capital gains taxes on Bitcoin, that encourages you to sell your Bitcoin. And you could imagine and SAB 121 encourages you to borrow against your Bitcoin. And you could see Wall Street having a situation where Bitcoiners are selling their Bitcoin so they don't have capital gains or lending their Bitcoin out. They don't have the keys. And banks in Wall Street, imagine we go up to like 140.

And then we go right down to 60 and all the people who lent out their Bitcoin get a short call and can't keep their Bitcoin. And it moves into sort of other hands. But right now, yeah, it looks like the world is rolling out the red carpet from a government perspective. They're talking about strategic Bitcoin reserves.

I mean, it's funny how we say it sounds like the real estate red carpet in 07. You know, I mean, these red real estate took off, I guess, financially. Right. I mean, the red carpet gets rolled out to the to retail. I mean, something someone pointed out is like when when the Trump administration talks about Bitcoiners, they they don't say thank you for bringing this great idea to our attention anymore.

They don't say thank you for helping save the country. They say, congratulations, Bitcoiners, you're going to be very happy. Right. And it almost seems like, now go in your pen. Well, that's what worries me. Take your winnings. Yeah, no, I get it. That's what worries me. It's really interesting. But, you know, it's like we go from like...

I don't see how you could see Trump going into office, going in there not being co-opted, corrupted, coming out not being co-opted, co-opted or captured. And then the deep state is so scared of him.

Yeah, I know. It's kayfabe. Yeah.

You brought up JFK. I mean, there's a lot of question marks there, ways you could look at that administration. And I wonder, so we try to peel back the onion, but I wonder if maybe nobody knows what's going on and 20 years from now we're going to look back and we'd only be clued in maybe somewhat then and still not get the whole story, but maybe we're not even on the trail. There's a famous... There's a famous...

I'm going to find it for you. I mean, why did Rogan have Trump, Vance, Musk, Vivek? I mean, he's like the Barbara Walters and people try to say Trump. Rogan and Tucker Carlson are independent media. How is that even conceivable? Um...

I mean, that is like the Leno, Johnny Carson, Hollywood movies, politics, all seem to line up always very well. And now Rogan kind of, and Tucker Carlson took that slot. And even UFC, now being the most popular sport in the land,

Talking about anarcho-capitalism and all this. I think it's all so that they could do all the things they want through private industry and get you to buy in how, you know, thankfully it's not the government, it's the private industry doing this to us. Okay, I'm going to read you a Sagan quote. This is scary. Now, you could even ask, how do we know Sagan even said it? I haven't, I just accepted it at face value.

But here's the quote from Sagan from 1995. By the way, I've had some chats with Sagan. He sounds like he sounds. It's creepy, actually, to talk to a guy whose voice is that famous. Here he says, quote, 1995.

I have a foreboding of America in my children's or grandchildren's time, when the United States is a service and information economy, when nearly all of the manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries, when awesome technological powers are in the hands of very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues.

When the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgably question those in authority. With our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what's true. We slide almost without noticing back into superstition and darkness. And when dumbing down of America's most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media.

The 30 second sound bites now down to 10 seconds or less. Lowest common denominator programming. Credulous presentations on pseudoscience and superstition. But especially a kind of celebration of ignorance. He just described the present. He just described the present perfectly. Yeah, I mean, I was on TSA, like trying to go through the airport. And one of the workers there had a tag on. Like, I know nothing. I just work here.

That's unbelievable. And I feel like that's everywhere I go in America. And I went to Europe recently, and I kind of asked an American living there, why do you like living in America? Do you miss America? And I kind of just assumed a little bit, yeah, America's better. And he kind of rattled off just a lot of the reasons why he liked living in Europe. But he was like, things work.

And like, you know, we rail against the state or public servants, but like people who work for the state here, like, like what they do and they don't mind it. And they, they try to be helpful. And I was even going through the airport there or, you know, crossing a bridge that's manned or monitored by someone working the bridge. Like everything did work and people were nicer and families seemed more integrated into society. It seems like people here, like you run into someone with a family, like people hate,

Women with kids. So there's a kind of a delusion of American exceptionalism, which is a term coined by Stalin, ironically, that somehow we are great when one could make the argument that a lot of this greatness has eroded. Now, when I was a kid, my dad was a four-way partner of a construction company with 350 employees. So it was a non-trivial construction company.

And two things. One is we lived in a 600 square foot house, 1600 square foot house, in part because we didn't need more. Nowadays, if you had that company, you would not live in a 1600 square foot house. And the other thing is he didn't pay himself a huge salary. I think it was probably pretty healthy, but he put it back into the business. So there was this whole footprint that was... And I remember, you know, we...

And when you wanted something, you didn't ask for it, you asked for it for your birthday or for Christmas. And that was the time. And so my birthday was April 25th, so things I might need in the summer, like a new baseball bat or something, I'd ask for it for my birthday. And Christmas was winter stuff. But it wasn't just, hey, Dad, I need a bike. That was something that you prayed you got for Christmas.

And a lot of that, and I think it was Charles Murray wrote a book about it. And he said, if you look at society, it was nowhere near stratified. So not only did the CEO get paid 40 times what the average worker got paid, which is now 400 times, but they also lived in a house that was not that distinguishable. They drove a car that was, they might drive a Buick instead of a Chevy, but they weren't driving Lamborghinis. They weren't.

And I remember when my uncle built a pretty big house by that standard. And I remember my father being appalled. Garish display of wealth. He didn't like it. That was greatest generation thinking. So it's quite possible, and I look at our students. You go up to their dining hall, and it dwarfs any kind of food that we had when I was an undergrad at the very same institution. And the kids go to the local, there's like this little restaurant

sandwich like shop built into the building. And they can get lattes and mocha whatever's. And these kids are going from putting it on their tab that somehow gets paid somewhere out of their own personal reach, which could include a huge debt that they don't realize is going to kill them, or parents or whatever.

to having a job in which they're not paid enough living in san francisco which means they can't run anything but a and that the idea of buying a latte is off the charts idiotic i mean i have a coffee pot in my office because i don't want to go down and pay for a coffee and and the book millionaire next door describes that now millionaire next door inflation right but um

The book is really about the psychology of money. It's not investing. It's about the psychology of money. And he talks about what wealthy people act like. And it was like they don't gorge. The guy who's gorging, the guy who has a brand new car and the big house and stuff, that guy may not be the rich guy because he's spending his money.

And I one time did an analysis, I called it a 5% guy. It started with an attempt to figure out how to protect myself in an IRA in case of apocalypse. It was around 2006. And the top five percentile person made $156,000 and was worth $1.1 million.

Now, Steven Roach, in an exchange I had with him, corrected and said, "That's the total wealth. Investment is more like $700,000." That's top five percentile. So by the very definition of top five percentile, that guy's living the American dream. And he's probably a boomer because you're not at the top five percentile in your early 20s unless you're JD Vance.

And then I realized that that guy has saved enough money that if he retired today, you know, that day, at that moment, based on conventional wisdom, he could take about $45,000 a year out of his retirement account, out of those investments. And if he made $156,000, he can take out $45,000 in retirement. He's fucked. If you're really top 5% down earnings, you ought to have more money than that. And they didn't.

And I realized that the American dream was about to get splattered. And so if we have a 50-75% correction, which I think is in the cards, period. I don't think it requires projecting GDP changes. It's arithmetic. It's fourth grade math. I believe that we have to trim the boomers wealth by minimum 50%. Sustainably trim, not just a V bounce.

And more like 70%. And that gets us to the mean, not through it. That doesn't get us cheap. Gets us back to the historical average. The boomers will not have enough. They're broke. And I got in a discussion with a friend the other day, and he was talking about the big wealth transfer. And I go, how are you going to transfer that wealth? He said, well, you know, my generation. They'll pass it down to the next. I go, so, okay, so you got a McMansion. Who are you going to sell it to? That next generation doesn't have the money to buy it.

You can't sell to another boomer. That defeats the purpose of transferring the wealth. I said, same is true with stocks. Same is true with all these assets. And so he started talking about, you know, the kids living in my house. I go, that's the exception. When you die, you liquidate everything. You write checks for the kids. That's how it works. I said, someone's got to buy it. And the next generation does not have the accrued wealth to buy it.

And it all comes back to demographics and inflated asset values and things like that.

I wonder, though, is there a way we can... Normally, though, that kind of devaluation comes through some sort of calamity. Yeah, it will be a calamity by definition. No, no, I don't think it's the war thing. Right. Do you see it? And are we going through now? Are we in war, like a fifth generation warfare? Well, the calamity doesn't come from... War is often the cause of the creation of the setup.

So for example, Israel had a terrible inflation problem. It was after the Yom Kippur War. The US had a problem after World War I. We didn't have a problem after World War II because we got to rebuild the entire globe.

Right. So what's going to be our problem? We don't need, no, we've already done it. We've already squandered it. The problem has already occurred. We've already sent $8 trillion to foreign wars. We've already promised everyone way more than, you know, and there is such a thing as a global debt problem. And some people will say, well, you know, for every creditor, there's a lender. You can't have a global debt problem. Bullshit. I'll tell you how. Let's artificially create one right here, right now. We'll do it right now. Let's say the world leaders get together at the World Economic Forum.

United Nations, they say, okay, we got to fix this problem. Let's promise all our citizens free health care and full retirement payments. Now, to the extent that you've created no new, you just created a massive debt problem. Well, that's what we've done. When the world population thinks they are going to live much better than the world is capable of providing, you've got a debt problem. It's a perception reality gap.

I'd like to go back to Yuri Besmarov. I mean, do you think that was his authentic view or do you think that talk was a psyop in and of itself? Ex-KGB, ex-CIA. Right. Is there such a thing? Right. I know a bunch of intelligence guys. So what do you think of that video? I mean, it rings true. Like everything he says is logical, but like,

It doesn't seem plausible in the sense that if they could pull that off externally, why can't they keep their own house in order? I mean, that kind of thing. No, he was just saying what the KGB's job was. He wasn't saying, you know... Stalin was quoted as saying, we're going to sell the rope to the capitalists to hang themselves. And, you know... Or something like that. Bottom line is, we...

Empires tend to die of old age, right? They just, they do. They go through a life cycle. It's like, why do you die when you're 100? You're old. Things just start giving out. So a great book by, oh God, what the fuck is his name? It's called The Collapse of Complex Societies by, begins with a T, I think. I read it. Collapse of Complex Societies. And it's kind of like a collapse of the Roman Empire-like thinking. Yeah.

Hold on, it's a great book. Collapse of Complex Societies. Joseph Tainter. Tainter, I knew it was a T. And he basically just talks about overreach and too much energy needed. So as the Roman Empire expanded, it eventually just reached a point where it just ran out of gas, basically, ran out of energy.

A complex society is based, I'm going to use chemical terms here, enthalpy. So the scientists will know what I'm talking about. Enthalpy, which is heat. And what enthalpy does, enthalpy and entropy, entropy is order. Complex society is tremendous amount of order where the natural tendency is towards disorder. So how do you go from disorder to order? Well, you put in enthalpy, you put in heat. So fossil fuels...

are the fuel that takes a disordered world and creates buildings which are not natural. They're highly ordered structures that if left alone will go back to disorder. We know that. So the entire civilized world depends on heat to run it. Depends on heat period. That's why I obsess over things like bitcoins, energy consumption, things like that. That's why I obsess over things like alternative energies, which to me look like they all suck.

I think the idea, let's say you have one that's actually net energy positive, which I am not convinced. You can't just be net energy positive. You got to somehow match the energy you get by sticking a straw down in Saudi Arabia and just sucking free energy out of the ground, right? Or sticking, or even fracking, or, you know, Jed Clampett shooting a shotgun into the side of a hill and getting oil, right?

You can't have a razor thin net energy profit and run a complex society on that. So windmills, stupid. I'm worried solar panels have no chance either, although I once asked an energy security analyst who, I'm not talking security as in stock, I'm talking security as in geopolitical security. And I said, cradle to grave analysis, do alternative energies work? And he said, well, he said, there's a guy named David Wei, I think was the name.

And he said he's done the best work on it. He says, no way, no how. Now, nuclear would. And by the way, when deep, deep, deep, deep, deep, what Bill Fleckenshaw calls deep six, when deep six showed up, by the way, deep six was on radar before last week. I've got tweets from Beck sometime back saying deep, deep, what is it called? Deep sleep, deep whatever, deep seek, yeah. Talking about deep seek.

And somehow it just wasn't registering yet, right? There was the don't know. It's like the sixth sense where the guy doesn't know he's dead. And I thought China had a new chip that was going to destroy them. It's possible I just misinterpreted the drumbeat and that it was a new algorithm. But I wrote about China having something that will wipe out Nvidia. And it's either I was hearing about a chip and it turns out the algorithm could cause trouble.

But I don't know why NVIDIA chips can't be used in a new algorithm. So I'm just still confused by it. This is way outside my skill set. Bottom line is, I think we need to go to nukes. Now, what happened when Deep Six hit the wall last week? All the energy miners went to shit too. All the uranium miners. Because everyone was all juiced about the idea that we're going to use nuclear power. Now, I have a theory, which since you said you've read it,

And the theory is we're talking about everyone's all enthusiastic about saying, oh, we need nuclear energy to power AI. And we're so excited about AI that we've got a nuclear power. And everyone's talking about it. And Bill Gates talked about signing and inking a deal with Three Mile Island and, you know, Amazon, all these guys. And I'm sitting there going, what if we've got it backwards? What if we're using AI as a Trojan horse to bring in nuclear energy, which I support?

So I say, we need a reason. By example, Y2K. Y2K was this big scare. Very convincing, in my opinion. I prepped. That's what got me out of the market in 99. Saved me a ton of money. That's what got me to buy gold. That's what got me to short the market in 99. My best decade was the noughts. I made a ton of the noughts because I was positioned. But it was a hoax. Now, people have said, I've talked to CEOs of software companies. They say, no, it's not. We fixed it. And I go, no, you didn't.

Because if you had, there would have been little mini explosions around the world and places that couldn't fix it. There's no way you fixed it perfectly. You send it through a compiler, oops, error. And there was none. Now the guy who pumped the story was a guy named Jaeger. Jaeger pumped the story up until about six months before the turnover, then said, oh, never mind, it's worked. We've fixed it. I'm going bullshit.

Bullshit. And then nothing. So what was it? I think it was a scam to sell hardware and software. Period. So I think that the alternative energies are a big grift. I think it's quite possible that, as I stated, that Amazon and Apple and Google could be the biggest stocks in the XLE Energy Index in 10 years. Right? And so...

And I'm for nuclear energy, so I'm willing to say, okay, do the scam. You've got to get people to not be afraid of nuclear energy, so get them excited about AI, fine. Do what you've got to do. But they're not going to do it with windmills. Windmills are awful, in my opinion. The windmills are truly an abomination. Solar panels, they're such an eyesore, and they're such a resource-consuming...

Solar panels will always be with us, but I think it's because you'll be able to have energy where there's no circuits, where there's no transmission lines. But I don't think it's a way to replace fossil fuels at all. It's a great grift, though. Guys are making a fortune. But here's going to be collateral damage. I think Trump announced he's going to step on the green scam shit, the climate scam shit. I think he's announced it.

And I do believe climate change is a total scam. It's the biggest scam in the history of civilization. I've dug into it. I've done my homework. I could be wrong, but it is not just a passing thought. And Trump's going to step on it. Now, there's going to be collateral damage for several reasons. One is, I think a lot of people know that we need fundamental change, and that will cause in itself collateral damage.

Right? We have to go through the valley of death. We have to get rid of the 200% over historical valuation. We have to get rid of all those government employees, right? We have to find a way to get rid of all the garbage, all the fat that's built up in the system, all the cholesterol in the arteries. We got to somehow find a way. So there's got to be collateral damage. Doing so by big sweeping decisions is going to produce more. You can't just say, okay,

All this goes, you know, wait a minute, you know, you ever heard that baby in the bathwater story? Right? Now, the climate change world is filled with scientists who fall into two categories. Obviously, it's much more complex than that. But in the limit, there's charlatans who should never get another penny for what they're doing. And they're intellectually deficient.

and they're scammers and all sorts of shit. And then there's good scientists who are doing good solid work in the material science and things like that, who are tying their wagon to the story. They will get thrown out with the bathwater, possibly very soon. So all of a sudden your program, which was a viable, scientifically worth doing program that you, in the first five paragraphs of your grant proposal tied it to climate change, you could find yourself broke. The one reason I'm not sympathetic

is because those credible scientists failed to clean up the mess in the field. So you had your chance to say, "Stop listening to climate change charlatans. You are not going to get kidney stones because of climate change. We are not going to be boiling the oceans because of climate change. Sea level is not going to wash away your house. Your house is going to get washed away on the shore because that's what happens, the house is on the shore."

Right? The reefs, by the way, cycle. They're rejuvenating now, right? The reefs are not going away. Earth heals itself unbelievably well. That's what Deepwater Horizon taught us. Remember when the Gulf of Mexico, they had opened the gates of hell? I mean, that was horrifying. A couple years later, you go, it's gone, right? I'm sure there's some lingering effects, but it wasn't the gates of hell. Sure felt like it. So the problem is the climate change community, the credible scientists...

failed to clean up their field. Failed to step out and say, "This is wrong." In fact, they turned on each other when they did. They wanted the narrative to keep going. They... I don't know if they deserve it, but it will be a self-inflicted wound when they get fucked by sweeping changes that take out their programs and take out their research and take out their reason to exist. So, sorry. You did it to yourself. Speaking of science,

I mean, Biden pardoned Fauci. Yeah, that's a complicated story. Hey, Bitcoiners, get your sats off your exchange now. This is not a drill. Thea is the world's simplest Bitcoin self-custody solution. With their module multi-sig vault, you decide how to hold your keys.

Well,

I can't get a clean answer to it. And I've asked people, and I was on a Zoom call three days ago with a couple of J6 prisoners and their lawyer telling horror stories. There's going to be a cleanup of that mess because the J6 prisoners are not just bad guys who got let out of jail. There's guys who have 150 million people who think they're heroes, right? They've got a lobby behind them.

So I think that there will be consequences and it'll be possibly rooting out evildoers in the justice system, hopefully. I do podcasts. I push back and I say, is it possible Trump will get distracted by that and fail to move forward? And almost every host I talk to says, we have to clean up that mess. We have to go back and deal with that. We can never let that happen again. So it's Nuremberg, right? We got to do it.

There could be some prison guards who I would not want to underwrite their life insurance policy because the guy said there were guards in there who were very humane and guards in there who were evil. And I wouldn't be shocked if some of those guys took out a few of those evil doing guards. When you lock a guy up against his will, no matter who he is, you owe that person a certain minimum standard of humanity.

I don't care what he did. If it's so bad you don't, then execute him. Maybe those guards had orders and they're higher up to take him out. I know, I know. Which way is it coming from? That's what we don't know, right? And it's a horror story. The J6 guys, there's not a single person on January 6th who I believe deserved to be in jail till this week. I don't think there's a single person who deserved to be in jail for that period of time.

You say, "What about the guys beating the cops over the head with sticks?" I go, "Shit happens." Mobs turn angry, which by the way, the provocateurs did. And your brain chemistry changes in a mob. And so if I were a lawyer and the court system were valid, which I believe it is not, I'd plead temporary insanity. I'd say tempers flared. And by the way, 30 cops died in the George Floyd riots. How many of those guys were rotting in jail?

How many people are rotting in jail from the George Floyd riots? None. None that I know of. So we do have to clean up some of the mess. We got to do it in a way where we say, don't let that happen again. You know, and Khrushchev took over control of Russia after Stalin. He went public and he said, we can't ever do that again. Do not let that happen again. It's not like Khrushchev was a cupcake, but what Stalin did was so bad.

He said, "Don't let that happen again." We're going to have a cultural revolution if we're not careful. What is your take on the LA fires? Well, it starts with the People's Republic of California being idiots, right? Let's start with that. No one is more qualified than Trump to sit at that table at the press conference and tell them how to fix the problem. There's no presence within an order of magnitude more qualified, close to Trump,

Because he understands regulations. He understands obstruction. And the press made the people at that press conference look bad. If you watch the whole press conference, I didn't watch the whole thing, but I watched at least an hour of it. They kissed his ass the whole way. There were a couple of tense moments and the press glommed onto that and tried to make people who are assholes look even more like assholes. But they had kowtowed. They really had said, look, we get it.

But there's that moment where the woman said, you know, they'll be able to go within a week. And Trump says a week's too long. And a week's not too long necessarily. But it's Trump's way of saying, unless you have a reason to stop them right now, unless you have a reason, they should go in right now. And if she can't come up with her and she said, well, they got to be safe. He said, they'll be safe. What are you talking about? So he was calling their bluff. And so

Will they be able to rebuild? Some people think it's going to take 50 years given all the bullshit. Or, or they finally got the memo and they're going to say, "Okay, do it." And I just don't know which. I'm watching the left. Some are responding okay. If I was a left-winger who had spouted off up until November 5th, if I had the ability to control what I said, I would shut, I would step aside.

Let it happen and stop spewing the garbage that I spewed up till November 5th. So these guys who are still brawling with Trump, I go, you guys are suicidal now. It was one thing to try to drive him out of power, but he's now there. And you've got not only the right, but you got moderate left saying, I'm ready to see some change now too. Because they realize that their party totally sabotaged them.

They said, look, we'll get Harris, you know, okay, we'll accept Biden, at least we'll get rid of Trump. Oh, we'll accept Harris now, at least we'll get rid of Trump. And they, I think they now realize that A, they didn't get rid of Trump, and B, it wasn't even a fair trade. It was terrible thinking. They offered us two potential presidents based on the notion that they could win, paying no attention whatsoever to whether or not they could lead.

If I were a Democrat, I'd be so mad right now. Not at Trump. If you think it's Trump's fault, you're a fucking retard. How's that? It's not Trump's fault. Kennedy could have beaten Trump. Gabbard potentially could have beaten Trump. They didn't want them. They went with a guy who's got no brain and a woman who I believe is the product of MKUltra. I don't know. I saw a clip right after the election. Biden sounded sharp as a tack for a minute. And Jill came out in a red dress.

Biden, they can jam vitamin B in his ass and stuff and get him to sound coherent for a minute. Like you said, a minute. It's a ticking time bomb linguistically. If you ever watch one of his recent speeches, they're these sharp little staccato clips all stitched together. The number of takes they have to do to put together a five-minute speech is outlandish.

I don't think the Democratic Party ever intended to run Biden the second time. I don't think it was ever planned that way. I think the plan was to leave him there, let him draw the flack, let him draw the attention, and then insert the candidate of their choice at the last minute. And one of the evidence, I think, was first of all, they had to ignore the fact that he was gone. I mean, just brain dead gone. But when he blew the debate or when the debate was catastrophic,

If they were really hoping he could pull it off, there would have been hand-wringing, right? Because they went straight from the debate straight to the pundits. And you would have seen hand-wringing, you would have seen guys going, "Geez, I don't know," right? Because they wouldn't have known what to say. And they all said simultaneously, I described it as pounding their fists simultaneously, "Biden must go, Biden must go." I described it, you may recall, as like a skull and bones child sacrifice.

So they knew what they were going to have to say at the end of the debate. So the whole thing is, yes, I suspect that Biden had no chance of ever being the president again. What I think maybe wasn't planned was Harris. And the moment they may have lost it, and I've heard no one else say this, but I think it's still possible, was one day on Twitter. She said, they're going to yet again bypass another black woman. I go, she just beat him with her own stick. And I think they somehow got saddled with her. Meanwhile,

You got a bunch of guys who are maybe potential candidates. Do I really want to fight the wood chipper? Can I wait till 2028 and come out of this? Just take over that. Now, I'm sure Newsom was licking his chops at doing that. Whether we can remember four years from now how bad Newsom has been the whole way is the question. People say, oh yeah, he's done. I go, four years is a long time.

I think he looks like a 1980s porn star, so I don't see why anyone would vote for him. He's got, by the way, according to Peter Schweitzer, he is the most compromised politician with respect to mainland China. He is really bought and paid for. So if the Democrats don't have their heads completely up their asses, over the next four years we'll see a whole new leadership. And we won't see a presidential primary debate

that looks like the Star Wars bar like we did in 2020, right? Beto. We had just total bizarros. And then, you know, the only one up there sane was Tulsi Gabbard and they made sure she got out of there. And then think of the Iowa caucus. Biden was on the far left. He was there for some reason, like adult supervision or something, right? Let's bring in an old guy, put him in there just in case, you know? So there's Biden on the far left looking as important as Rand Paul did to the Republicans.

Harris got taken down to the studs by Gabbard. Two minutes gone. Harris and I got exactly the same number of primary votes, zero. What would the Vegas or PolitiFact oddsmakers have put on a Biden-Harris administration? It would have been 1,001 odds. There was no chance of it at that point. Somehow we end up with a Biden-Harris administration. How did that happen?

So I think the, and by the way in '16, here's one, some of my best foreshadowing. I didn't think Trump would win, but I was seeing change that surprised me. And I wrote a paragraph on the movement, the support coming from the black community. And I mentioned Jim Brown, the running back, saying he's going to be a president of the people. I'm watching this video of this burly looking black bastard

talking about "ignore the messenger, listen to the message." He's urging it. So this is on BET TV, I think, and stuff like that. I'm going, "Who the fuck is this guy?" And it turns out he was the head of the new Black Panther Party endorsing Trump. And so I wrote something to the effect, "It's just a flicker. I could be wrong, but I think the black community is moving to the right." Boy, was that prophetic. Not only did they realize the left was a sack of shit,

They were patronizing, saying, you're not smart enough to get an ID. Boy, would that make me mad. And it became gangster to vote for Trump, right? It was jamming up the man's ass. The man, capital M, man's ass, voting for Trump. They realized voting for Trump was a way of flipping them off yet again. I think the black community is gone. I think they've totally shifted to the right.

And I think they know they've got a cleanup problem too, and it's going to take fundamental family values to do it. And the Hispanic community never was that far left. The soccer moms moved to the right, the youth moved to the right. And so, you know, it could be a pretty protracted period of the left trying to pull them back or the left moving to the right. It could be like Republicans versus conservatives next time, right? I hope, I hope. It's going to take more than one cycle.

to clean up the messes we've created. Yeah, I mean, I go back to what you said in the beginning of the show. It feels like we're going through a wood chipper. And I think it really started in 2014 to 2015 with probably with what was Obama signed around that executive order. I don't know if it was an executive order, but like kind of allowing psychological operations on the American people. I just think things got, and I think the justification there or the rationalization was like, if we don't do it, the Russians and the Chinese will do it to us.

Well, the other thing is the two parties flipped. So Clinton very astutely brought wealth and power into the Democratic Party. What they didn't notice is that we brought the blacks and the rednecks and the soccer moms into the Republican Party. And so now you say, aren't these now mirror images of each other? We now have the sort of unionized worker, the black vote. Something has flipped. Now, here's the thing I don't understand.

I never switched parties. So I went from being a Republican of the olden days to a Republican of the modern day. But I'm now much more sort of aligned with the guy wearing the hard hat than the guy wearing the suit. Well, I went from, I guess, a Democrat of the olden days to I can't stand either party. I think that they're all out to get us. I just, I think that they're just picking us apart.

I think they wanted Harris to run against Trump. I think it's the perfect social, you know, just puts us all fighting over social issues instead of anything meaningful. If there was anything meaningful from Trump's campaign economically, like that all got thrown out and it just became this like muck fest.

And I still think, and then it leaves people angrier than an actual campaign between two reasonable candidates would be. And it just lets them smash us from both sides. And then the truly extraordinary first week may have changed the course.

I think sometimes losing is winning in these races. Well, someone pointed out something important. You know, you let them create problems and then you go and offer to fix it. Or you create problems under that regime and then you offer to fix it. I mean, it's just a wrecking crew coming from both sides, I feel like. Well, some people have pointed out that the four years of Biden was a critical part of the story because we said, okay, we gave them four years to show us how bad they are.

Undeniably. And then we were ready for change. So it's like, basically that four years created the situation where by the end we woke up stewing in our own vomit under a bridge, realizing it's time to check into a rehab program. And so I'm pretty optimistic about Trump. I think Trump matured over the last eight years, 12 years. I think he went from wanting Trump's name on the White House to saying,

I really want to be great. He didn't want to just be everyone's friend. I think he reached the, I want to be great, and he realized the way to be great is to do great things. And so I think he's really, did getting shot make a difference? I don't know. I think you were seeing plenty of that before he got shot. Yeah, I don't think, I mean, I saw what you're saying, I think, before he got shot, but I still don't think, I don't know, I'm going to get crucified for this, but I just don't think the odds of a bullet nicking his ear are very high.

I mean, they're infinitesimal. And the other pattern markers there, you know, especially of him being, you know, wouldn't he be, how would he even trust his security? Well, but it's too close to his head to be an intentional miss, too. You could do a lot on TV. Yeah, I...

What I don't know is why they botched it. Peter Thiel made an interesting argument. You're a 9-11 truther. You know they can pull off amazing things on TV. And if you look at JFK, I mean, you know they can suppress things. I mean, it's just, I'm not saying that. Yeah, but I think they just, they picked a guy to do it, and I think he just boned it.

I think the setup was... And then they just put the... Then they were like, okay, I guess that's it. Poo, poo, pew, pew, we missed. I guess let him and Musk tear us apart. And it was right after that that Rogan rolled out the red carpet for Vance, Trump, and it was literally the mainstream media pivoted huge. I mean, you could look at the coverage of that day that it was on live TV. The photographer that was there. Oh, yeah, yeah, the thing was teed up to be an assassination, in my opinion.

Or to capture that perfect, you know, shot. I think it's too close. I think it's too close. I think they thought he'd get him.

And then there was going to be the blame thing going on. I mean, even simple things. I don't want to get killed for this, but don't you think there would be blood on the back of his head if the bullet went past his ear? I have no idea because I don't know how much blood comes out of a nicked ear and things like that. But I at first did not believe the story, that part of the story either. But it...

But the plot that had to crystallize along those lines never did for me. So I watched and watched and watched. And I said, look, these guys aren't going to miss like that. Something's wrong. But that story just never got legs in my skull. I couldn't piece it together. So I finally concluded that it was a legitimate bullet that hit his ear. We might get the story now because Trump's in power.

But there was no investigation. The investigation was crowdsourced. The best detective work was done by a bunch of guys looking at videos. But the deep state was never going to investigate. That assassination attempt should have a Warren Report level sort of investigation. Yeah, I mean, the way they handled the crime scene was horrible. Horrifying, horrifying.

And I even think the second one was fake. The second one, I think, was totally fake. Well, I mean, Dave, I mean, you're not giving me a lot of faith in the first one. The second one looked farcical to me. Sure. And everything about the second one, it was as ludicrous as the Las Vegas shootings. I mean, the second one was totally fake. And then to start talking about the Iranians, like, oh, there's a twofer. You shoot him and then you bomb Iran, right? Right.

two for one but the ryan ruth story was was pure fiction in my opinion and and i i just don't i don't know what to make of it but i i might be living in a fantasy world but i think trump means well now i think he's serious the he's doing is bold now again could be one of these you know there's theories out there that say they're going to demonize the bad guys

And then the white knight's going to ride in and save us. We're going to think he's a good guy and he's not, right? That's kind of the model. And I'm aware of that model. I'm watching that model. And when he comes out there, when Larry Elson comes out and says, we want to give you vaccines against cancers that are detected by a blood test. I go, no, you're not, right? But the Trump team within 24 hours said, that is not us.

They ran from that. They ran from that like Project 2025 or whatever it was. It was Larry Ellison speaking out of order. And I don't know about you, but I'm not getting another vaccine, period. I'm not getting a flu vaccine, which, by the way, I think has probably got mRNA technology in it. If I had someone in my family who had to be vaccinated, I'd be doing some serious homework before I let anyone touch them.

And if it's looked homeschool versus vaccinate, that becomes a problem, especially if you have to work. But no, it'll be interesting to see if Kennedy gets in. Gabbard's getting no grief at all. I was watching a little Gabbard before we got on, and it's tame so far. Even the attackers are tame. Kennedy, he got holy hell. They really went at him. And my brother said it looked awful, but he said, then I go online and said, Kennedy owned him. I didn't watch it, so I don't know.

Who would you most like to see get into a position of power, Kennedy, Gabbard, or Patel? I'm going to go with Kennedy, but I still think it's all kayfabe. I think I don't want – I just – but, you know, I've listened to a couple of his speeches, and I was impressed by what he had to say down in Nashville.

last summer in july at the bitcoin conference rfk jr and i what he had to say when he joined the trump administration uh the trump campaign i thought was a phenomenal speech i like a lot of his ideas you see shanahan's little speech on twitter yesterday or two days ago so nicole shanahan who would who had primaried funded the primary of a couple of a couple of democrats um

in 2020 to get new Democrats in. So she is clearly a left winger. And then obviously his switch teams, yet another lost liberal. She went out there in absolutely unambiguous terms said, if you don't support Kennedy, I'm going to spend a fortune primary on you and I'm going to get my friends to spend a fortune primary on you. You're never going to see the inside of that rotunda again. And she says, this is a threat.

She was just absolutely, it wasn't obtuse language. She said, "I'm threatening you. I will spend a lot of money." I would kill to see Kennedy deliver on 10% of what he's promising or offering. It's hard to see, you know, Trump was the father of Operation Warp Speed. I don't have a problem with that.

Okay, but I'm just, I'm trying to figure it out. No, it's a simple story. So Trump got duped, right? So the whole COVID story, the vaccine story, dark forces behind it. Trump didn't know that. He knows he's got this pandemic, which started out as the Democrats saying, this is not a problem. This is just bullshit. Go to Chinatown, right? There's a lot of lying going on early. I watched it from almost the first day.

and I thought it was a problem when the Democrats were saying it's not a problem, and then I realized, no, it's not a problem, and now they're saying it is. Trump delegated to Fauci, which I think based on Fauci's position, if you didn't read carefully into his history, was rational. And then once he delegated to Fauci, and don't forget he was drawing fire from Russia collusion and shit. If he had turned on Fauci, can you imagine the political consequences?

So Trump started Operation Warp Speed. They created the vaccine in record time because they had it three years earlier. They had it already. They handed him Warp Speed. They handed him Warp Speed. But to Trump, he did exactly what he was supposed to do. Delegate, let the guy do it. He did it. And Trump just didn't know that he'd been deep stated.

Which could happen again. I mean, we don't know how much he's actually in control. But what we do know is that he knows a lot more about who to trust now than back then. Much more seasoned experience. And he knows where the forks and spoons are, and he knows who the bad guys are, and he knows what not to do. When he put Bolton in his administration, I'm going, oh, God. He was trying to negotiate with the neocons, not realizing you can't negotiate with the neocons.

Now that executive order knocking 51 neocons right out of their fucking positions, that's a brilliant move. He took 51 dangerous guys and took away their security clearance. That was his biggest EO. That was the big one. He just gutted the deep state of their power.

So I'm optimistic. I thought the first week would be entertaining. I did not see what we just witnessed. I did not see that coming. I mean, to not even leave the rotunda.

and sign executive orders. And I was worried he'd cherry pick his way through the J6 guys. I was worried he'd set up some committee. I go, just empty the Bastille, right? Just open the thing up. And he did. I was surprised he didn't do that in the rotunda. He went to the Oval Office to do it. I was worried. That was my, you better do that day one moment. And he did. Holman, gotta like Holman.

These are fighters. He picked fighters. He's got people who not only are fighters, they're pissed. They've got a reason to be pissed. They've all got shark bites in their ass from having to deal with bad people. Right down to Bhattacharya, who, head of NIH, holy shit, what a great appointment for NIH. And so, you know, Rubio, you know. Now, what does Rubio bring?

What I've been urging people to do is say, don't look at Rubio being a bad idea. Assume it's a good idea and ask why. Start from the premise that he's there for a reason, which by the way, wouldn't work with Bolton in my opinion. So there's that. And one of the possible arguments is that, besides Rubio being one of the guys, is that if we're going to be deporting people to faraway Hispanic countries, Rubio speaks fluent South American Spanish. Rat-a-tat-tat. Fluent.

And if he's going to be negotiating with these foreign powers, having a guy who really speaks their language, literally, may be important. Also, Rubio may be a chameleon. I can imagine Trump sitting his ass down saying, "Here's what I need. If you can't do it, I'm going to fire you, day two. Don't take the job if you can't do it. Do you want it or not?" When he invited the pharma guys into Mar-a-Lago, invited the Silicon Valley guys into Mar-a-Lago, and I said, "Oh my God, he's turning our..." You don't know what he said.

He might have said to the farm guys, "Here's what's going to happen. I'm going to jam it up your ass. Here's what you will be able to do. Here's what you won't be able to do. By the way, you're not going to stop RFK. If you do, then you're going to pay dearly and you'll be okay in the end, but it's behind my rules." The act that he did at the Silicon Valley. And can you imagine being a Democrat at the inauguration and looking across the aisle at a trillion dollars worth of Silicon Valley CEOs on the wrong side of the aisle?

Holy moly. Of course, we know those guys are just total whores, right? I mean, they'll go to either side. But some turned earlier, right? Some did turn earlier. But I don't trust those guys. Those guys are the authoritarians of the future. Yeah, Sam Altman, the Zuckerbergs. I mean, Zuckerberg turned real quick. He looks like a 1970s porn star. But not a porn star really. Maybe like an extra. He looks like someone who didn't make the main cast. There's guys I'd love to nominate for a snuff flick. Um...

I love that you're really optimistic right now. I don't even say that pejoratively. I think it's great. One reason I am very optimistic, you know, Trump kept his promise about Ross Ulbricht. Yes. You know, he made the promise. I didn't really doubt him keeping it, but it is still astounding that he kept that promise because of, I think, what that means in terms of freedom and the fight for sovereignty and freedom in America. He's got to clean up the DRJ.

He's got to clean it. The DOJ is the most dangerous part of the Biden administration by far, by far. They totally undermine the most fundamental principles of the United States during that four-year period.

I do hope, I'm optimistic, especially around RFK Jr., maybe getting the poison out of the food system for our kids. Oh, he's going to Pharma though. I got to tell you, he's not just... I hope he goes after Pharma. Let Pharma do great things, make great medicines, but let's keep away from maybe the mandatory stuff and the predatory stuff and this harmful stuff. Well, here's the risk of Pharma, by the way. Pharma may have picked the low-lying fruit.

And pharma, I think pharma may have run out of good targets and that they turned to grift and graft to keep their business model alive. So, for example, I think there's a very large number of drugs that should not be sold and some of them that do absolutely nothing. And if pharma were actually required to put drugs forward that are really good drugs, their market caps might plummet. Oh, yeah. And so pharma...

Pharma, the age of coming up with penicillin may be over. And so we'll see what happens there. But there's some really bad drugs out there. Ozempic's going to kill people. I'm confident. I watch what they're doing. You can't force a person's body to not get nutrition.

And to get skinnier than shit with muscle atrophy and all this stuff without doing damage. Ozempic's gonna be a nightmare scenario. - Well, they just get more patients, more revenue. - Yeah, there'll be drugs created to fight the ozempic muscle atrophy. - And all the other side effects, it's horrible.

Dave, I enjoyed reading your piece, Fact or Fiction. Well, actually it was What is a Fact? Right. I hope we kind of got down to a little bit of what is fact or fiction here. I appreciate this so much. This has been so dope. I'll leave it to you for any parting words and let people know they can find where you work. A couple of parting words. One is speak up. I speak up to my class. I say, look, you're training to be scientists. We have blown the science on climate change. We've blown the science on COVID.

The scientists didn't speak up when they knew. Now I don't blame some of them because speak up or lose your job, that's not a choice you should have to make, right? So, but we as a society have to speak up. Gad Saad said that to me one day. He said, you got to speak up. He says, I have a bodyguard. If I can speak up, you can speak up, right? And second of all, fight against evil. This...

Too many people who've witnessed this battle have actually reached sort of the biblical levels of good versus evil. People who were not religious are going, this is getting to good versus evil levels, right? This is God versus Satan at this point. It's shocking to watch people make that transition. This year I've used my pinned tweet. I do a lot of podcasts, as you know. The only place you can really find me is on Twitter and email.

At some point, I have a near family member, a significant other just had a stroke and he's going to need help. And the bank of dad, that's me, is going to be writing a lot of checks to help this kid. But I'm also going to put out, we're also going to put out a fundraiser.

What I'm going to be asking people to do is to say, look, all those times that I did not ask for Patreon support, I did not ask for subscription support. I write 300 pages a year. I do all these podcasts. Never ask for a penny from anybody ever. I'm going to ask them to donate to some GoFundMe for this kid, 49-year-old stroke victim, vaccine probably.

And think of it as donating to me like a Patreon account. Say, to the extent I appreciate what you do, I will donate. Because there's so many people who need it, right? I can't say, oh, this is the saddest case of what's going on in the world. It's not. I'm saying, donate to him for me. And if you support what I do, drop in five bucks. And I will be pushing it forward.

I'll be pushing it when the time comes. So when you see it, you go, "Oh, I remember mentioning that." The funniest goddamn story, my wife's with him, he's in a rehab facility right now, my son and my wife are with him, and my wife fell and hit her head, and she's a health problem in her own right. They had to scan her. He had a brain bleed. They had to do a CT on her to see if she had a brain bleed. I'm going, "They could be roommates."

nuts. My wife's broken her neck three times. So when she falls, you know, fingers crossed fast. So if you see that, if you see that, think of it as a donation to my Patreon account, not to some guy you don't know. And that's my urge. Thank you, Dave. I hope people do support you. Send me the link. We'll definitely share that. I will do that when it finally gets put out there. Yeah, I'm sorry to hear that. And I hope past recovery.

It's looking slow. Let us know how we can help. Really appreciate it. Send us that link. We'll get the word out. Thank you so much, Dave, for sharing. Thank you for inviting me. You know, not many people have the podium that I have. And I think there's people who appreciate hearing what they're thinking, but they don't have a way to convey it. I did a tweet the other day where I thought it was one of these late night 50-like tweets. It was about not trusting Vance at the election, finding out I'm wrong,

And at this point, finding out I think I was profoundly wrong, right? This seems like an innocuous tweet. I'm sitting at 74,000 likes. I go, "What was that about? You know what it takes to get 74,000 likes?" And what it was is somehow the way I worded it, people said, "Yes." There was some sort of, "You just said it exactly the way I would have said it." And at 74,000 likes for just saying that I was wrong about Vance.

And I might be wrong now. So that's the absurd thing. Vance could be a bad guy, but right now Vance is at the top of my list is thank God he showed up. People, you know, you capture a spirit, you definitely have a voice. And no filter. And no filter. Right now, this morning, Twitter's accusing me of being a spook. I go, that's funny. I must be MKUltra because I'm unaware of it.

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