Full podcast here, and on many other platforms. This transcript was generated by Descript software and lightly edited by Tom Nelson.
Dave: He [John Clauser] won the ‘22 Nobel prize in physics and he comes out and he says, these clowns can't even account for clouds!
Tom: Hi, this is Tom Nelson. And my guest today is Dave Collum. This is not my typical podcast. It runs over two hours and has climate material in the first 13 minutes and the last 20 minutes or so. But in between Dave talks about a lot of other stuff, including COVID. Presidential politics, investing and much more. I've provided chapters. So you can skip to whatever interests you. If you want to hear a very smart guy, talk about a lot of things without much of a filter. This is for you.
Dave: I'm a [Cornell] professor of organic chemistry about, uh, I don't know, about, uh, early nineties, I got interested in markets. And I started reading about markets. And then by, by the late nineties, I realized the markets were all screwed up.
And, and I became a gold bug, and I sold my equities, and I started studying market structure, and I realized that there's a pathological [00:01:00] line going on, and, and so I started, started writing about it, I was going to chat boards and stuff, and then no, no sooner do you start studying markets, and you start studying politics, and then you start asking questions that really have nothing to do with markets, and next thing you know, um, next thing you know, I'm writing, you know, A single annual blog, um, about what each year meant to me and, and they started out, you know, 15, 20 pages and they grew to 300 pages and, and I would talk about everything from university politics to, you know, markets to you name it.
And it, it used to be entertaining. Because, because it just seemed like human folly and, and I always had this feeling that if I could uncover it, I would help deal with the human folly and, and I would say the last couple of years, it's gotten much darker [00:02:00] and more difficult for me because it seems like the human folly is not just human folly, but rather evil forces.
And this year, for example, I'm going to write about, um, the global pedophile ring and how it's influencing geopolitics. It's going to be a big chunk of writing. And, and you can't believe the darkness you run into when you go down that path. And so, and I could be dead wrong. I mean, this one's, this one's a real exploration.
So, but, but it's not fun writing about that. That's not human folly, right? That's sick bastards. Yeah. So
Tom: I have had a great time consuming your content. You're on a lot of podcasts talking for hours about so many subjects and then those, uh, I didn't even know that you did the year in review, but I've been going through those and you wrote, I'm so much into climate
Dave's path to climate realism
Tom: in 2019 you wrote enormously about great stuff about climate, but do you want to talk at all about your path to climate realism?
Dave: Well, so, um, so I was a climate change believer, I think because I had faith that the [00:03:00] scientists were trying to get it right. And, uh, you know, scientists tend to chop away at each other if they think they've gotten it wrong. And the one... The one advantage I have is I'm in an area of chemistry that's very complicated and it's not politicized.
And so, so people really did try to get it right. And it turns out there was so many things wrong. And I realized that credential experts can really completely botch things and, and with their best, with a heart in the right place. Um, but I believe the climate story, one day I was sitting in my office at that point, I was department chair and I was sitting in my office with the department of energy.
And he asked me about. That somehow the topic came up and I said, well, I'm agnostic on climate change and he, he flinched. So he was a believer or at least a narrative consumer. And, and I said, well, it would take me 10, 000 hours to understand the subject. That's sort of a Gladwellian 10, 000 hours. And so I'm not qualified to state [00:04:00] whether I think climate change is real or not, but I, down deep, I believed it.
Right. Then he thought that was interesting. Um, and then I had two people pestering me, my brother Ned and a guy named David Walker who just started emailing me and they said, How do you know climate change is real? And I said, Well, you know, every goddamn scientist I know, and I would ask scientists, they'd also asked a biologist, you know, one day is climate change.
I said, Yeah, the only question we're trying to figure out is whether we're gonna have some sort of phase change, which is just all happens at once, right? I said, Okay. Okay. Um, and, and, and these guys poked at me and said, but how do you know? And so I finally said to Walker, um, you know, I know no credible scientists who don't believe it.
Now that was a statement of fact, actually. And, um, and he said, well, there are. And so I said, send me some names and I'm expecting to get a list of names. Sheboygan State College, you know, not that there's anything wrong with that, but I kind of need more than that to [00:05:00] completely blow a monstrous. global theory out of the water, right?
It can't be some wingnut who's an adjunct professor of who the hell cares, right? And so, uh, so he sent me a list of names and these, these were not lightweight places. It was Caltech, Stanford, Harvard, you name it. Princeton, MIT. And I said, okay, so here's what's going to happen. I'm going to, I'm going to Google their names.
I'm going to discover that these guys actually don't doubt climate change. They've probably scorched some model in their research, and that's how science works. And some nutball denier is going to say, well, therefore climate change isn't real when in fact, no, this is how scientists bang away on models until we get them right.
So I started Googling them and within I would say 45 minutes. I had discovered the first very large lie in climate science and that is that that there's no credible scientists who don't believe it because I ran into Richard Lindzen [00:06:00] who said it was the biggest hoax in history. I go, that's not an ambiguous statement.
He's a, you know, a, a, a, a geophysicist at MIT. With great street creds. And I ran into Will Happer, advisor to presidents at Princeton, who said it's complete crap. And then I ran into Steve Koonin, who said.
It's Koonin kind of walks a tightrope because I think he knows that if he goes full denial, he'll be dismantled. And so he says, I believe it, but you can't predict it, which is a stupid combination of concepts, because if, if you can't predict it, then you can't believe it either. But he, he, Caltech physicist with a great.
Gifted modeling says there is absolutely no way these models can possibly predict the temperature and the climate 100 years from now. So it's not within the capabilities of physics. And for those who doubt that physicists can calculate Um, [00:07:00] the relationship of two bodies relative to each other, you put in a third one, they're lost.
The three body problem has not been solved. So, so a problem with clouds and things like that is really way above the three body problem. And then I found Patrick Moore, these are names you know well, the founder of Greenpeace saying this is a load of crap. And then Willie Soon, who himself is kind of a, kind of a, flamboyant character, right?
So, but he's a Harvard physicist. And then you got the guy at Stanford. I can't remember his name, but he, he's not a climate scientist, but he did, he did, he did an error propagation, Patrick Frank, right? Patrick Frank. He did error propagation. And said, look, I don't know climate science, but I know stats and if you propagate your error, your predictions, your, your, your error bar is five times the size of your prediction.
So this is stupid, right? And you start running into Judith Curry. You said, Oh, by the way, I questioned the narrative and lost every penny of [00:08:00] research support. And you, you, you find guys like, um, And i'm just this is a rehash for your audience. So And then i've you know pielke. Is that how you pronounce his name pielke?
Tom: I say pielke jr. By the way, everybody everybody you've mentioned so far has been on my podcast I think except for Koonin. Yeah, a lot of them. You
Dave: gotta get Koonin. Yeah, so Pielke, um, I think he was the one who showed that there's no measurable increase in in in In important weather events over the 20th century.
Is that is that correct? Have I given it right? Credit on him? Tom:That sounds right. Yeah. Yep. Dave: And there's plots of this. You go. Oh, my God. The hurricanes are not increasing. And then you start going. You know, this this makes sense because they say the temperatures rising, you know, some tiny fraction of a degree a year and then.
Yeah. And to get to the number they predict, it's a tiny amount. And, [00:09:00] and then I'll be talking to some nitwit and they'll go, you know, you can tell it's climate science, it's climate change because, you know, it was hotter than shit last year. And I go. You know, the temperature rose, you know, point or whatever decrease between the previous year and last year.
Do do you really think you can detect that with your with your sweaty ass? I mean, is that really? Is that really? And you know, and in the flood, the flood in your town was really because the sea level rose the thickness of a dime to get there. And, you know, per year since since 10, 000 years ago. And, um, and then you As you know, again, I'm talking to the high priest of climate, climate change denial.
Um, you start running into the lies, you start running into Michael Manns, and you start running into Kehoe, Kehoe [Katharine Hayhoe], and these guys, if they don't like what you say, they block you on Twitter. And, and, and then you find guys saying, look, you [00:10:00] have to lie to keep the narrative going. Um, the guy from Stanford who died, Schneiderman, Schneiderman.
Tom: Stephen Schneider, I think. Yeah.
Dave: Yeah. And he said, you've got a lie. And I'm going, that's not how it works, right? There was a guy this year, by the way. Did you see the guy who talked about how, how much he had to cheese, cheese his papers to get them published?
Tom: Yeah, I think that was Patrick Brown, I think.
Patrick T. Brown.
Dave: Yes! Yes! And he, he's taught, I'm a, I'm a 20 year veteran of journal editing. And he's talking about all the things you have to ignore and all the things you have to hype and all to get the paper published. And I'm going, are, are you aware that you just admitted to committing profound fraud to get a paper published?
And, and he, when, when you read his... His tell all, somehow you got this funny sense that he was like, trying to, to fess up, but not realizing the magnitude of what he was saying, right? [00:11:00] Did you get that same paradoxical feeling?
Tom: I did, yep, I did. I'm trying to get him on the podcast.
Dave: So. Um, so it literally, and you start running into physicists, like I can't remember the guy's name from Northern Europe who was asked to serve on a panel and he said, I knew nothing. So I started digging around. He said about three hours, I figured out it was nuts. And so you start running into others who've had exactly the same transition.
And for me, it was literally a handful of hours to go from being a believer to a holy cow. And then many, many hours to build the case, right? Many hours to really make sense of it. And, uh, and now I just kind of watch it. And I read about, you know, kidney stones and kids caused by climate change. And I go, let me see if I got this right.
So if a kid lives, I live on a slope near a lake. I'm a like, actually. So, so if there's a kid living [00:12:00] down by the lake, which is a couple degrees warmer than the kid living up the hill, five or 600 yards, he's got to get kidney stones. Is that really what you're saying? And they say that, uh, yeah. They say that the Major League Baseball players are hitting 500 more home runs a year because of climate change.
And the press is the funniest one. I bet you saw, you see them all. I follow your Twitter feed. You see them all. The funniest one. We're the guys who said we've discovered that trees use less CO2 than we thought. I can see you laughing already. Then we thought, therefore trees are releasing more CO2 than we thought.
And therefore, the more trees we have, the more CO2 we have.
Oh, my God. Oh, my God. Where does that kind of [00:13:00] logic come from? That's just, that's just, that's like an IQ of 12. Have
Tom: you heard that there's a peer reviewed paper, I believe, where the idea to prevent bad weather is to get crews of 200, 000 people and bury trees?
Dave: That was just recently. They want to bury trees.
I go, let me see if I got this right. Live trees don't include CO2 as well as dead, rotting trees. Right? And then you read about, you know, then you start looking at the repercussions. All of a sudden after, after a while, you realize, oh, this grift is a serious problem. Right? So now they're, they're estimating that over the next 30 years, they're gonna spend $150 trillion.
Now you go, well, I now know why the narrative's surviving and I'm critical of the scientists who, who pretend to believe to get the money.
COVID
Dave: But I just watched it happen with Covid, right. We watch COVID narrative play out and all the doctors who could have said, [00:14:00] look, I, I wouldn't take this vaccine. They had to hide in the shadows.
And I, I had to get triple boosted to keep my job. And I knew I wouldn't have, I wouldn't have. But it was give up my job on a theory that the vaccine is not good. And so I waited. I watch and people didn't seem to be dying. It turns out they were, um, but they didn't seem to be. And so I said, okay, you know, I can't take away the breadwinner of the family because I've got a cockeyed theory about COVID.
And so I got the double and then I'm in this doctor's zoom group that has all the elite. Elite anti vaxxers Bobby Kennedy Scott Atlas, you know, there's a whole there's just a time every Ryan Cole I don't know if you know these guys. I know I'm all here or many and and and so they've all gone through the doctor Zoom group that I somehow got invited to And they couldn't believe I had vaxxed and I explained it and I was supposed to get boosted and they they said you can't boost And I go, well, here's the problem.
I've now taken two. [00:15:00] I had no effect. And now you're asking me to quit my job to avoid taking a third of something that had no effect. So it's getting, it's, it's, now I'm really in a funny bind. So I took the third and I didn't die. So you've got these scientific narratives that are burning in hell and somehow. And this is why it, this is why I feel the shroud of darkness sort of hanging over me now, because this is, this is not just human folly, this, this is, there's a, there's an evil force here. There's a gravitational pull, there's a, there's a black hole of some kind, intellectual black hole, and it's pulling at you, you can't see it, but it's pulling at us, and, and it's no longer funny, and it's no longer, uh, something to just enjoy watching it play out.
And, and, and you're watching society and we've got, and I'm not touching this subject, but the Israel Palestine [00:16:00] crisis has huge potential to explode on us. Now, I wrote a ton on Ukraine last year. And this will shock you. I took Putin's side and, and, and if you read it, if you guys are going, Oh, I can't believe anyone would do that.
Read what I wrote. Putin was in the clear as far as I was concerned, but I won't touch Israel Palestine. There's nothing but pain and suffering getting into that debate. And, and both sides would be mad at me for not defending them. I am sorry. That's the topic. I'm on a personal gag order on that one. But, um, but you realize The media is worthless now, and I didn't realize how worthless it was until climate change, and, and then we went through sketchy elections, and, and just the, the whole media looks like it is just garbage.
Completely and utterly bought and paid for by the trillions of dollars [00:17:00] missing from the Pentagon,
which is estimated to be as many as 10 trillion. You buy a lot of shenanigans with 10 trillion. And so that's my world. Where do you want to take this story? I
Tom: mean, I mean, maybe back to climate. I mean, don't you think that a lot of people last few years have had this feeling of what else are they lying to us about?
Uh, because, and then they start looking at climate. I've talked to quite a few people myself who started looking at climate because they thought, uh, okay, they're lying to us. Let's look at climate now.
Dave: Their lips are moving. They must be lying. Um, I think they overplayed COVID and that will be a catastrophic mistake.
So I think if they had been able to play COVID straighter. Then, then people wouldn't say you can no longer believe anything. So I do believe people are backtracking, and if they're reading my Twitter feed, they ought to be because about every [00:18:00] week I say something like, you know, now it's time to re evaluate climate change, right?
Tom: what's your reception at Cornell? Are you the Antichrist just for your climate views or any
Dave: support there? Um, I wouldn't say support. I wouldn't say support. My, my colleagues. I think they'd rather I shut the hell up. I, I, I got canceled in 2020 pretty seriously for something that was totally innocuous.
In fact, I was right. I defended the police, the situation where it turned out they very much were in the, in the right. This is during the George Floyd riots is some guy actually was a problem, but it didn't, it looked like they brutalized him when in fact he was the problem. And I said something like that, but I wasn't tough on him, but I got my ass kicked.
And, um, I think they wish I would just go back into the shadows and not be a problem, but that's just not in my DNA. Um, and I still get some joy out of being a problem. Um, so [00:19:00] guys who used to be my friends who now are just trying to not engage me in conversation. I have become that long haired hippie in 1968 saying, Do you know how many people they've killed in Cambodia?
Right? And, and I realized they were right. And I realized that they were a pain in the ass still. And I, and I would want to say to him, no, I don't, I don't want to talk to you about it, so shut the hell up. Right. I want to go back to chasing chicks and playing, playing sports and don't, don't give me this crap.
And, uh, and so, um, I think my colleagues know I come arm to the teeth on most of these subjects. So I don't engage when I, without a lot of ammo and I do probably do a hundred podcasts a year. And you'll learn a lot from talking to a hundred different people. So it's not my podcast and [00:20:00] um, and so I, it, it, I come armed to the teeth and so I don't think people want to engage.
I've challenged a couple of the guys who are funded based on climate change. And I say, look, I understand why you're willing to say climate change is a problem and ask for 2 million. That makes sense to me. Right? I, when I apply to NIH for money, I, I try to convey to the study section that I will have this huge effect on pharma.
And I have a great track record of getting funded and I must be, I must be slobbering in the right direction. And, and I can actually document things we've done for, for pharma that made, made things more successful and stuff like that. So I can, I can make the case. But if you can't, you still say, I'm going to save the whales.
That's your opening paragraphs of your grant. This is an important problem. We're going to solve it this way. And then you propose something pedestrian and hope by Cal, they don't notice.
Tom: So [00:21:00] do you want to talk about, I think you've been quoted elsewhere.
On peer review
Tom: You have said elsewhere that peer review is horseshit, that you have an insider's view of what peer review looks like.
Do you want to talk a little bit
Dave: about that? Yeah, I'm not opposed to peer review. So there's people who don't think we should have blind peer review, and I'm not one of those guys. Peer review serves an important purpose. So when I submit a paper, I get a couple of referee reports back. Sometimes I know these are friends.
I can't tell who they are. Sometimes they'll say, I got your paper. What a pain in the ass to read. Um, but your first response to the peer reviewed paper is, is usually one of, oh shit, I can't believe that. And then you set it down, and then you pick it up a couple days later, and you realize they're just trying to help you.
They're just making suggestions. They're just... And then when you're finally done, and you've rewritten it in a way that, that will satisfy the referees and the editor, you realize it's a better paper now. But what is also true [00:22:00] is that the person who read that paper probably spent a couple hours. They may have handed it to a grad student and said, read this, write me a referee report, and then glanced through and edited it, made it, buffed it up, and cleaned it up a little bit, and then submitted it.
And that's that's now some peer reviewers may be way better than that, but my experience is a 20 year veteran of, uh, as associate editor for Journal of Organic Chemistry, um, is that I think most peer reviewers, some guy sat down with a mug of coffee and plowed through the paper and you get to the end and you go, that's pretty good.
And then you start documenting what you want to say, you might have scrawled on the paper typos and I always point out typos so that they know I read it. But, um, the editors don't dig, the editors themselves don't really dig in, except for in very [00:23:00] specific types of journals. And so I read very few papers, went through my office, I relied on the three referees.
If the three referees said, looks good to me, I'd accept it. And so, um, so that's peer review. The problem is, therefore, that when someone says, there's two problems, one they say, well it's not a peer reviewed paper, I go, so what? And the other is saying, well it's a peer reviewed paper, and I still say, so what?
And I guarantee you, if you write a paper, you can get it published somewhere, which therefore means it just got peer reviewed. I mean, anyone can get a paper published somewhere.
Tom: Yeah, so maybe the problem is that people should not think that peer reviewed equals truth with a capital T, that of course it's not, it's never going to be.
Oh,
Dave: there's no chance it equals that. There's no chance. And a clever person who wants to commit fraud, [00:24:00] very difficult to catch. Very difficult to catch. And like, here's a stunner, so I, if you don't...
The Real Anthony Fauci
Dave: If you want to read a horror story, you read Bobby Kennedy's book, The Real Anthony Fauci, and you will be projectile vomiting within 100 pages.
Did you read it? Tom: “I've been listening to it, yeah.” Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, I'm an audiophile. I'm a total audiophile because my reading is too slow and I have too much to read. When you're done with that, then read John Abramson's book called Sickening. And it's a, it's a less biased book. Why do I say Kennedy's is biased?
Well, because Kennedy hates Fauci's guts. He hates him with a passion, right? The reason he does is clearly articulated in his book. Kennedy... Destroys the man completely and if you don't believe it you say, ah kennedy's a whack job Please read his book. Kennedy is not a whack job. Kennedy got vilified because he went against pharma for about [00:25:00] 25 years You will have a lot of vilification over 25 years if you're going against pharma there You might as well go at the gambino family, right?
It's the same thing And so then you read. Um Then you read abramson's book and he will tell you Just horror story after horror story of drugs that got cleared that never should have been cleared and where the problem shows up I think the organic chemists and the biochemists in the basic RD are trying to get it right Where the problem shows up is in the clinical trials when you publish a paper in the New England Journal of Medicine or the B the biochemistry journals Lancet things like that It turns out when you write about a clinical trial, there's no raw data You The editor doesn't get raw data.
You can't reprocess the data. If someone wanted to be a good peer reviewer, they couldn't do it. There's a bunch of bar [00:26:00] charts and shit, but there's nothing that would actually show you whether they just dry labbed it. And it turns out that prominent journal editors, including the head of the editor in chief of the new England journal of medicine, she said, I take no pleasure in saying this, but you can't believe anything in this journal anymore.
That's a stunner. Yeah. That's a stunner. 14 editors wrote a letter to the FDA and said, you've got to clean this up, and the FDA did nothing. So, so the drug you are taking could be very bad for you, or it could be doing nothing for you. The FDA is about as good as peer review now. And a great example actually occurred the same year that the vaccine was cleared, and that is, um, Biogen had a drug for Alzheimer's.
56, 000 a year treatment. This is a cash cow potentially might cost that much to make, but [00:27:00] probably not. Um, why do I say that? Well, I just priced out hearing aids for 7, 000. See these headphones, these Bose, I could buy 25 of these for a set of hearing aids, 25 Bose headphones for one set of hearing aids.
Explain that to me. I don't know. They're 50 worth of hardware. They cost 7, 000. What's going on? Right? So in any event, so the Biogen drug comes up for review and somehow the, the committee review gets it right. 13 out of 14 said, no, no signal 14 said, I'm not sure they cleared it. They cleared it. Now there's viewers I'm sure who, who, who are on Neurontin, it's a big drug for neuropathic pain.
It got, it got. Um, cleared for shingles now, given what I know about the FDA, we have to pretend that it was a valid clinical [00:28:00] study. One of the ways on a painkiller they do is they drug you up enough. You feel the drug and hope the placebo fixes. Yeah, you know, I think it feels better now because I'm loopy as shit.
Um, and Neurontin got cleared for shingles. They went for the big nut, which is generalized neuropathic pain, which would be a huge score if he'd actually solve the problem. So Neurontin gets tested. They get no signal, nothing. So they call in a team of experts and said, take our data, make lemonade out of this lemon, to find a signal in here.
And this came out in a court case, it turns out. And, uh, and they came back and they said, you got nothing. There's nothing here. So they went to the FDA unofficially and said, what do you think of this? And they said, don't even bring it to us. So what do they do? Well, they hire a couple of med school professors to write a couple of papers.
They With no [00:29:00] data, remember, talking about the tremendous promise of Neurontin for neuropathic pain. And then they spread, they get a million reprints, and they spread it around the medical community. It is now a multi billion dollar drug for generalized neuropathic pain off label, that has demonstrably, undeniably been shown to do nothing.
Unless you like the placebo effect, which there is some truth in it, at which point it's helping people because they think it is. My wife took Neurontin and she hated it. My wife has, has chronic pain. She hated it. She, she used to call it Morontin because it made her so stupid. And, uh, but it doesn't do anything.
And, and, you know, I think the FDA has completely and utterly collapsed. And the reason it, by the way, is pharma bought them. [00:30:00] What happened is pharma. So, so someone got this brilliant idea. Well, you know, the FDA spending all this money, testing all these drugs, pharma should have to pay. And they said, we're up with that.
It turns out, now the FDA's budget's all pharma. Guess who owns the FDA now? Interesting.
John Sarno
Tom: Uh, as an aside, uh, have you checked into, uh, John Sarno on chronic pain? The whole healing back pain thing? There's a book that costs 14. 59. I've had intense pain in my life and I read the book. Dave: “Where? Where's your pain?
What kind of pain?” Tom: I had it. I don't have it anymore. In my tailbone, in this case. I had intense pain in the tail, in the tailbone. It was all, uh, in my head. And this Sarno thing cured me. There's just a thousands and thousands of people who went through the same thing. John Sarno. He just passed away in recent years, but he's talking about the mind body connection.
There's tons of [00:31:00] people like, uh, I think maybe Bernie Sanders and Howard Stern and John Stossel. I forget
Dave: who else. All, all, all, all swear by him. Yeah. How do you spell Sarno? S A R N O? S
Tom: A R N O. Yeah.
Dave: And it's about, uh, do you have a title, by chance? The book is
Tom: called Healing Back Pain.
Dave: Yeah. Oh, I thought it was healing back as in returning.
Oh, healing back pain. Back pain. My wife has got chronic back, neck, you name it pain. My wife has had 60 surgeries. That's not an estimate. That's a count. It was 59 until recently. And, uh, and so, um, there's reason to believe, and this might be where Sarno takes, I've read a number of books on, um, on, on neuroplasticity, where you can train the brain wiring to change.
And so, for example, if you take a shot in the head, it takes out a big chunk of your brain, your brain can [00:32:00] rewire. And, and, and, and to create function that got taken out by the wound there, there are people who have profound seizure disorders. They literally take out half the brain, not metaphorically, they take out half the brain to stop the two halves from clashing with each other.
The first time that was done, they must have been going, this is not going to work well. They've had kids had half their brain taken out and graduate from college now What I will also tell you is I see kids which that's believable
Yeah, I was missing the right half
So so it's conceivable that's where he I don't have not having read the book was conceivable That's where he's going is that it's quite possible. The king pain can be dealt with by rewiring The brain and so it's [00:33:00] not it's not in your head. It's that you can train your head to turn it off.
Tom: Yeah. I think he says you're actually feeling the pain.
I mean, the pain is real, but there's no, uh, there's no real physical reason for it. So tons of people who have things that show up on x rays, um, they think that's the cause of their pain and maybe it's really not.
Dave: So my wife broke the world's record. This is a total aside. Um, She fell 15 years ago, round number, and broke her neck.
We didn't know it was broken at first, and then the doc caught it. It was a 40 percent fatality probability. What made it weird is my mother in 99 fell, did a header, just like my wife. broke her neck and died. So it's thinking, Oh, this is getting a little weird. There's getting a little karmic or something here, right?
They should be investigating me at this point. Well, it turns out December 5th of 2022, she was in the bathroom, slipped on water, smacked her head again and broke her neck [00:34:00] again. And then to make a very long story short, the doctor misses. He totally screwed the pooch. His second opinion caught this. It turns out she fell.
Doing something I told her not to do because I said, look, your job is to walk from point A to point B, not to be carrying shit because you got a broken neck and, and you're, you're not up for this and stop doing this. And she's carrying a bowl of jelly beans and she sort of fumbled them and, and, and flinched and fell again, three days later, December 8th and broke it again, not the same break, new break, two breaks and three days.
That's gotta be a record. So she's a mess now. So that's not, that's not, um, psychosomatic pain there. That's real pain. Yikes. Yeah, yikes. Yikes.
Tom: Uh, sorry to hear that. Uh,
RFK Jr
Tom: getting back actually to RFK [00:35:00] Jr., did you want to talk about, uh, him and his position on climate? What do you think?
Dave: Yes, yes. So one of the things about RFK is he's not perfect.
We've got that figured out. I do believe, so you're talking to a Reagan Republican type, right? I hesitate to say it because I figure they're all bad at this point, but you get the idea. I voted right, right of center comfortably the whole way until Bush Jr. went for the second term and I couldn't forgive him for Iraq.
Um, and, um, And, and Kennedy is a lefty, right? So this is not an easy transition for me. But, um, I believe that the one thing about Kennedy is, for the most part, is attempting not to lie. And he's attempting to tell the truth. Now there's been a little backpedaling on some stuff that either he's clarifying or he's backpedaling.
I'm not quite sure which, but it doesn't trouble me because, [00:36:00] because he's under constant scrutiny and so there is going to be some. There's going to be some mishaps along the way and he is going to have to, you know, backpedal some. Um, and climate change is an interesting one. Now, um, Kennedy's views are considered wiggy as long as you don't actually listen to him.
You listen to him, you go, that makes a lot of sense. So if you're getting, if you're finding, if you're learning about Robert F. Kennedy by reading articles about Robert F. Kennedy, you are not getting the picture. I've probably listened to probably 20 hours of Kennedy, and I am fully satisfied that he's a credible candidate.
And one that I can, I would vote for no problem. Um, his, his COVID czar is, is a friend of mine named Eddie Dowd, who I've known for many years, and, uh, he's his economic advisor or [00:37:00] something. Um, and, um. And he was in my doctor zoom group. We got to pepper him with questions, and he was very straightforward, and that's how I find him to be.
So his climate change story is a bit of a mixed bag. I think he still is a believer, but he's a quick learn, and so I'm pretty optimistic that if you shove under his nose the data, he'll go, Oh, dear, like he went down to the border thinking he understood the border and came back and said, The border's got to be blocked off.
This is a mess. He came back completely morphed. Um, he, uh, he got asked, he got somehow in a Bitcoin podcast, I started asking about Bitcoin and I could not believe how much he knew about Bitcoin. He's a very fast learner. So I think of you. I think if you had an hour with Kennedy, you could convert him. And I think it's some point that will be thrown under his nose when he's trying to find a way to balance [00:38:00] a budget or something.
At some point, he'll get that message. So I'm optimistic. Now, at one point, he said he basically sort of I believe in climate change, but He then said the solution should not be a big government solution, which I'm fine with. Let the free market figure out what the problem is and solve the problems that need to be solved.
And so, um, so I think Kennedy does not sign off on these trillions of dollars at all.
Tom: Yeah, so I think, uh, maybe you and I have had the same path in evaluating him, because as of maybe three or four years ago, I thought he was kind of a nut, but that's before I heard him talk. And I too, I've spent tens of hours listening to him, and he sounds very sane on many different issues right
Dave: now.
And tough issues, tricky issues.
2024 Presidential election
Dave: Yeah, no, compared to the others who sound insane, right? I mean, his competition is not very stiff. [00:39:00] There, there's, I can't, there's no one, you know, I, I would have no trouble voting for Trump. And I, I know there's people who are appalled by that, but, but there's, there's facets of that guy that are special.
And as long as you can live with his idiosyncrasies, he's an interesting character. And, um, if, if, if, if they had put Trump against Bernie, I might've voted for Bernie because you can at least control him, I figured. He wouldn't be able to do, despite being a socialist, he wouldn't be able to do much damage.
And, and now, now he's looking kind of crooked. He's starting to look like he's a grifter. And, but he seemed consistent. I was a big Ron Paul fan. I was on his website as an endorser and stuff. So that's really where I come from. Ron Paul would have been the hero candidate for me. Um, there's gotta be others.
I don't quite grasp yet. DeSantis. I know the right thinks he's the savior. [00:40:00] He seems like the Dukakis of the Republican Party to me. There's something not working for me. Um. I could, I, I find, um, I find, uh, Ramaswamy seems, he, he says all the right things for me, but he seems as authentic as a boy band. You know, he, everything's too perfect.
You don't get the sense he's speaking from the heart. You get the sense that he has a brilliant, well rehearsed script. And he says the right things, but there's still something in there. And, you know, there's people who said he was a crook when he was at Silicon Valley and rip people off. I go, well, it's probably Silicon Valley.
Um, so I don't know. I, Kennedy's not going to get near the White House though. That's the problem, right? Uh, hopefully
Tom: at least they'll let him talk, right? If he gets to
Dave: talk. Yeah, that's the key. If, if he can stay at the microphone then, [00:41:00] but they're trying to keep Biden from having to, having to debate anybody.
I, I'm not appalled by Biden. I mean Biden's an appalling guy, right? The guys who say, Trump's an awful person. I go, yeah, okay. Let's look at who he's up against. A guy who's got a, a long history of compulsive lying. I mean, Trump's a bullshit artist. Biden's a liar. So Trump's says, oh, his biggest audience in history.
I caught a fish. This is goddamn big, right? That's Trump. Biden says, I graduated from this college first in my class. He didn't go. Right. And that's Biden. And then you find out that his daughter has accused him of molesting her. You find out that if you, I told you I'm digging into pedophilia, you find out that he seems to have been accused of being a purchaser of fine children.
Um, which I don't know whether to believe, but I threw that out there just in case people spot something. Um, he obviously has accepted [00:42:00] tens of millions of dollars from foreign nationals. That seems to be it. Indisputable at this point. His Ukraine ties and China ties mean that he's probably done things as in his political life that you would consider treasonous.
When you sell, sell us to the Chinese, when you sell us to Ukraine, you're doing you're probably treasonous. Maybe it's too loose a use of that word, but I don't like it. I think Trump, by contrast, does care about America. I think again, you got to be able to get past a lot of idiosyncrasies, but I can, I have no trouble and others can't.
And I understand. So, um, so Biden's a totally corrupted person, I think, and he's demented. What appalls me is that the Democratic Party's
I go, do you guys have no obligation [00:43:00] to try to pick us a leader? Is there no voice in your head that says maybe we should get someone who can? You know, like Obama was pretty good. I mean, I, there's all sorts of crazy issues with Obama, but He didn't seem like a disaster of a leader. Clinton was a leader.
He had his issues, of course, you know, lots of them, lots of dead friends, things like that. But, um, Bush jr. Seemed like a nitwit. Bush seniors shirt certainly had a shit together, um, in a CIA sort of way. Um, but Biden, how can they shove us Biden? So the democratic party is guilty of crimes against humanity for pushing him.
Now, I don't think he's going to be the candidate. Yeah, I was just
Tom: going to ask, what do you think the odds are that he's on the ballot in one year for the Democratic
Dave: Party? They're going to find a way. You know, he'll have a stroke. And by the way, faking a stroke will not be hard for him. I would [00:44:00] say that one could argue he's already had a few.
But, um, I talked to a friend who shall remain nameless, who actually knows these rarified world. And he, um, he says, um, he said, Well, he, he spent some time with, with Kamala and he said, there's stupid and there's Kamala. He said, you just can't imagine, you just can't imagine how stupid she is. Um, so it's not gonna be her cause she's unelectable.
I don't think, I think they'd have to rig every vote to get Kamala elected. Um, he said, Michelle would like to be president. but hates campaigning. So the logical play is to have Biden hang on long enough. So Kamala is never really an incumbent because it gives her strength. [00:45:00] Incumbents tend to be the chosen ones, so they can't let her become an incumbent too soon.
Biden checks out by some mechanism that's not hard to imagine, including dying. And then Michelle rides in on the white stallion. Doesn't have, doesn't have to kiss babies, doesn't have to campaign. Just thank the Lord. Michelle instead of Donald Trump. Thank the Lord. She stepped in for Obama for Biden, right?
And then we get to hear big Mike jokes and you know why Obama's cook died in a paddleboarding accident and things like that.
Tom: So I'm going to have to figure out which of this stuff I can put on YouTube. As an aside, I don't know how much, uh, if YouTube's going to care.
Dave: I don't know either. Yeah. I don't either.
I'll read it. Probably just, just delete what I say as a general policy. I probably destroyed more YouTube feeds than anyone in [00:46:00] history. Right.
Tom: So, uh, do you want to comment at all about the, uh, getting back to climate change, about the CBDC danger, how they're going to use this control our lives. And I think Whitney Webb might have a good handle on this.
Whitney Webb
Dave: I am a huge Whitney Webb fan. Occasionally I ask her for some help on stuff. Um, so as I said, I was writing about pedophiles, in part inspired by a couple things this year, one of which I watched Whitney talking about pedophiles and she burst into tears. If you know Whitney, That's quite an emotional outburst because she's tough as nails and and I said this is the year to write about I've been thinking about it But and you say why do you want to write about pedophilia because I believe that pedophilia pedophilia networks are controlling geopolitics when you see a Politician or a person or a corporate CEO who's doing something that just makes no sense.
That's that gravitational field That's that. There's a force out there drawing this person to do [00:47:00] something that just seems to be so illogical. And, and I think it's Epstein on steroids. So Epstein obviously was a blackmailer. He was trained by Roy Cohn, who was a blackmailer. And so, so, so there's a lot of people who are captured by the deep state.
A term I believe was invented by Peter Dale Scott, who is a great scholar of this crazy crap. He's an authentic scholar. He's not just a good writer who can wing it. He's, he's an authentic Berkeley scholar. Um, and, and, um, I think Epstein is a tiny little pixel of the story. He's, he's, and if you, if you want to get a better read, You have to read about things like the Franklin scandal, which is a pedophile network out coming out of Omaha, and you discover what happens when you, when a scandal starts to unfold [00:48:00] from how high up in the system, the forces come to step on it.
And you go, holy shit, I didn't realize the FBI would squash that, right? I didn't realize that that was coming from inside the White House that would squash that. I didn't realize they'd kill the guys who were investigating it, right? I believe the
way to think about the world is that the people in power are corrupted and therefore they're controlled. I don't know who's in charge, but what I do know is that if they're corrupted and controlled, then their, their actions don't have to make sense to us. Because like when Prince Andrew did the interview about Epstein, I was like, oh, he was so unprepared.
I said, no, someone made him do it. Someone stepped in and say, Hey dude, you're taking one for the team. Do the fucking interview. Right. That's it. And he looked terrible. He wasn't even [00:49:00] ready to look good. And, um, because he was already dead man walking. He's already, you know, Clinton. We already know he's been banging Epstein's chicks for years.
Um, I don't believe they corrupt powerful people as often as they corrupt people and then give them power. I think it's the backwards. Now, when you dig into pedophilia networks, the other thing you discover is they're intimately connected with satanic cults and that's where it gets super dark, but here's what I'll tell you.
If you dig into the stats on pedophilia. You find that no one questions the fact that there's like a million kids a year disappearing. No one seems to question that a hundred thousand kids have disappeared coming across the southern border. You will often see kids getting saved. Not million, a handful.
You will often see traffickers who look like pond scum. [00:50:00] Some South American guy who's a, who's a coyote of some kind. You will never see, first of all, these kids are not being sold into trailer parks. You will They're expensive. So the archetype pedophile that we've all been groomed to believe in is, is the creepy guy with the old van that lures the kid in.
That's not where a million kids are disappearing to. Now some are going to the Congo and, you know, mining cobalt for your electric vehicle and things like that. But so it's a very complicated story, but they're being sold to people of wealth and power inside the Beltway. And you can find examples, you can find documentaries, you can find multi part write ups of people getting caught and having nothing happen to them.
A woman named Laura Silsby, for example, got caught trafficking children twice. And once she had like 33 kids, which turns out for the real aficionados of this stuff, the number 33 has meaning. I've never quite [00:51:00] figured out if it should. It's a, it's a masonic. Number that turns out to be a profoundly important number in the Freemason world, which you have 33 kids, probably just coincidence.
She gets caught with him in Haiti. When there's a crisis, by the way, one of the great sources of children is Ukraine. We are trying to save a country that, that harvests organs and sells kids. Right. We're just really on the wrong track over there. Um, But but she gets caught she makes a phone call into the clinton campaign next thing, you know, she's out She's free.
She got off. You know, how did that happen? Well, the really fascinating part of the story is she um, She works for wait for it the amber alert system the amber alert system So if you want to find a pedophile a high ranking [00:52:00] pedophile if if if I had to find one I would start looking at all these organizations who are charged with taking care of lost children because they don't seem to find many.
It turns out the art world is a great trafficking operation. They have great ways to import the kids. Using art. The art is cover. It's also a way to traffic money. So so if you sell a modern piece of modern art that's not worth a shit for 100 million, you've just laundered it. Right? And so, um, so the art world is filled with problems.
Um, and and then then it comes down to, um, why are we seeing none of the bad guys get caught? And the answer is because And as Cindy McCain said, we all knew what Epstein was doing and she started to say and no one [00:53:00] did anything and then she realized her organization was supposed to do something and she realized she's kind of in a corner and she said no one in position of power did anything and she kind of muffed it.
I'm going, you were in a position of power, Cindy. You're in an organization that would speak up on this sort of thing and you didn't, did you? Um, pedophilia is rampant in Hollywood. It's a real problem in Hollywood and
Tom: you said you will be writing about this in detail
Dave: I'm gonna be writing about this in detail and I could be wrong.
I I have I call my 90 10 rule It's there's a 90 percent chance 10 percent stead right? There's a 10 percent chance 90 percent stead right? so but there's Hollywood actors of amazing fame who appear to be pedophiles. And I'm not going to name them because I don't want to get you booted off YouTube, but there's one who likes to take [00:54:00] photographs.
And in one of his photographs, it says, SRC USA. You and I wouldn't know what that means, but someone figured it out. They said, Google it, you get nothing. Go to DuckDuckGo, you get nothing. Go to, and I don't... Readers, please, I advise you not to do this because it'll probably get you in trouble. It's probably already got me in trouble.
If you go to Russia's handle of Google called Yannicks, and you search it, and I did, it's like want ads for kids. There's some other crap, but there's pictures of kids, and these are not cute kids. These are kids who look like someone's selling them. They don't look happy. And then you got the whole Pizzagate thing, which they say, Oh, that's not real.
Well, if you've read all the emails that came out of Pizzagate, sure looks real to me. And, and, and there's a woman named Liz Crockin, if you want to dig in deep. She's [00:55:00] been a warrior on this, and she's a former ABC News anchor who, who got into it, and now she's full time child trafficking, and she's way out there.
She, she's written six part series on Pizzagate. And, and, and she's made documentaries on missing children, stuff like that. So Liz Crockin would be a starting point, C R O K I N. But I've dug into that this year. And then you got The Sound of Freedom, that movie. That sort of also said, okay, this is the year to move.
When you watch the movie, at first it feels like a feel good sort of movie. You could add Bruce Willis in there, you know, who knows? [Jim Caviezel]. I never know how to say it or write it. I have to look it up every time. Who seems like a sweetheart. If you look at his family structure, he's, he's, he's, uh, he's adopted a ton of kids from, from bad situations and stuff.
He seems to really be living, [00:56:00] you know, the Christian life as he would call it. And he looks horrified by it. He really seems like he believed it. Um, he's really into it. But two, a couple of things didn't work with the movie. One, my wife picked up on right away. He went down into the jungles of Columbia to save one last girl.
And it was a, according to the movie, about a 98 percent fatality guess, right? He was going into a region that you don't come out of, and he somehow got out with the girl. My, and he, his wife at one point in the scene says, go save her. He left nine kids at home. You do not risk orphaning nine Children to save one.
Biology says that your wife says that, right? And it turns out that part of the movie was fiction. And then the other thing is, you never see the pervs. The few you see are the guys with the vans. [00:57:00] And I'm going, those aren't the real pervs. Everything I can figure out, they're not, the real pervs are men of wealth and power.
Men of wealth and power who are trying to get serotonin and dopamine the hard way, right? They've, they've run out of things that, that get their jollies. And so they've just gotten into the dark arts. The Podesta brothers, the Podesta brothers are deep and dark and major league screwed up. All you have to do is search Tony Podesta Art Collection, which was written about in Atlantic Monthly or something.
I mean, and it's kids in cages chained up and stuff. It's just, it's stuff you'd never do. So here's where it gets super dark this year. So I said it was connected to satanic cults. If you'd asked me a month ago, who is the biggest, most Abramovic.[00:58:00]
She's outwardly a satanist. She talks about mixing your blood with semen and mixing it with stuff and drinking it and eating it and she's shows pictures of hers with skinned goat heads, which is the symbol of satan, right? She, she has dinner parties with cadavers on the table that are that their food made to look like cadavers and they sit around and they eat the cadaver, which makes you wonder what do you do when they're not filming?
Because eating a fake cadaver seems too close to me. And, and around the table are famous Hollywood people, and I'm going, you wouldn't catch me dead near a dinner party with fake cadavers. What are they doing there? And then you find out, you know, uh, Lady Gaga was deep into it. So this, this woman is twisted from head to toe, overtly proud of it.
And you go, but you're too deep, Dave. Well, it turns out about three weeks ago, [00:59:00] Zelensky announced that she would be one of his ambassadors. Now, ambassador's a funny term because you think of, well, she'll go to another country. No, she's going to stay in Ukraine. She's Croatian or something. She is being put in charge of their school system.
This is all public ABC News stuff. I go, you just put a Satanist in charge of the nation's school system. How is that even remotely possible? Google it if you don't believe me. There she is, Marina Abramovic, in charge of Ukraine's school system, which by the way, you know what they call when there's a crisis?
They call it harvest season. Because what do you do? Well, World War II, you grabbed all the kids in London, you put them on trains, you get them the hell out of London. In the modern era, you have a crisis in Haiti, you grab a bunch of kids from Haiti, never to be seen again. [01:00:00] That's harvest season. Kids off the border.
There's great videos of people harvesting at the border and you go that makes me want to kill those guys I mean, it's really bad stuff and you can see it you go. I got I can't believe those people exist Right. So the stats on missing kids are so profound and the stats on people receiving the missing kids are so profoundly Absent that something's wrong And there's ex CIA guys, which I don't always trust, because I'm not sure there's such a thing as an ex CIA guy.
But there could be. Could guy, could be the guy who has a heart. I don't know. Who, who talk about the Satanism and shit. There's people out there, there's former trafficked children, who as adults somehow found a way to pull away. And, and the problem is, by the time you're an adult... It's your world. [01:01:00] And, and vast percentage of the trafficked kids die.
They don't survive. Especially the ones who the guys decide they'd like to have sex with at six months. The survival rate of them is zero. And, and, and this is said to be true. So I, I've opened your Overton window so profoundly ridiculously. Uh, that you should think I'm nuts and not listen anymore. Um, they're all going somewhere.
So these, these women who have escaped, the Franklin scandal, by the way, it's got a whole bunch of them who, who came out. And then when they finally came out and, and investigators started putting together the story, the FBI came in and destroyed the witnesses. Destroy. And by the way, when you've been raped as a child and you've been in this trafficking and you're drug addled and you've got multiple personalities, it is not hard to destroy you again.
It's very easy. And by the way, it's not [01:02:00] hard to, I've read a whole book on brainwashing POWs and it's very clear brainwashing a six year old is not hard if you can brainwash a Marine. And so, so the ones who've escaped and gone on to tell about it, okay. Tell a very similar story, and they're just wretched, like having to eat half rotted carcasses of children for punishment.
One, one woman, one guy was interviewing, and the guy's blubbering, he can't take the interview. She's telling him about it, and he's crying in the interview. And she said they gave her a puppy. And then they made her kill it just to destroy her humanity.
And so that's what I'm digging into because if, if that's gotten into the hall and she, by the way, said her number one handler, you know, there's various people who play a big role in your life when you're [01:03:00] in that world was two time prime minister of Belgium. Another one said her handler was was the prime minister of Australia.
Another said, Gerald Ford, George Bush senior. These are big names now. At some point you go, oh, that can't be right, but what if it is?
And so that's what I've been digging into. Uh,
Tom: do you write just the year end review or do you write, uh, other stuff in
Dave: between? Tweets. Tweets.
Rogan
Dave: And I, uh, and podcasts. So it's all oral communication and I formulate ideas. Sometimes someone really, really brings, brings game. I want to get on Rogan. Yeah, I want you on Rogan.
Well, I had a friend who said he can get me [01:04:00] on Rogan, and he had me write up some shit, and he said it was in Rogan's talent scout's desk, and I've had other people say they can get me on Rogan, but so far, I have been in communication with Rogan, although he's pretty much gone out of Twitter, so that's kind of shut down.
But, um, but, uh, that would be my dream podcast. No offense, Tom.
Tom: How about Jordan Peterson? He has a big audience. I don't
Dave: know. Rogan. Um, Peterson would be fun. Um, I think of a list of people I'd hate to debate. He'd be one. Ben Shapiro would be one, right? John Stewart. Yeah, there's there's some guys you would never want to tangle with.
Multidecade bear market ahead?
Dave: I really did get my start in markets and you know, I go to finance meetings and give talks and stuff and Twice this fall. I'm giving a talk entitled the case for a multi decade bear market [01:05:00] And it's not going to help your readers.
The fact that I'm not making it on this podcast, but it is a warning. What really scares me is, is that society seems to be an incredible funk now, right? It really looks like a mess and the economic slash markets have not yet turned. So if you, if we jam unemployment up to 12 percent and we cut people's.
Uh, 401ks and half. I actually have more like 65 percent in my target. Um, they're going to be grumpy. And we're, you're supposed to come off the tops, euphoric, and they get grumpy as it gets bad. We're coming off the top grumpy, right? There's riots in the streets as we speak. So I don't know what's going to happen if all of a sudden...
And, and there's [01:06:00] no mechanism to avoid a housing crisis with, with interest rates at 8%. The housing market is completely broken. Bank of America is 200 billion in the hole. It's 200 billion in solvent. There's just things that are just so not able to be repaired without serious, we've got 8 million, 8 trillion worth of debt that's got to be rolled over in the next year.
Who's going to buy that debt? Not the Chinese, not the Russians. Who's going to buy that then? And what interest rate are they going to demand to put pay? And it's probably going to end up being the Fed and then we're going to have an inflation nightmare. And so
Tom: your Twitter profile, you call yourself the biggest bear.
Uh, how bad do you think reasonably it could get in the next five to 10 years?
Dave: I think we're going to look up 20 years from now and we're going to be at the same price. The markets are going to be at the same price we are now. [01:07:00] If you say, how is that possible? Look at the Nikkei. We have not yet gotten back to the 1989 high.
By the way, if you take an inflation adjusted Dow and you start at a peak, anyone can do this. You take an inflation adjusted S& P or Dow or whatever, you start at a peak, 1906, 1929, uh, 1967, you name it. Um, you start at a peak, let's say the 29, let's take the 1906 peak, that's a good one. Um, and you, you draw a horizontal line, what everyone always asks the question is, how long did it take to get back to even?
That's not the question. The question is, how long did it take to get back to that same price for the last time, not the first time? When did you finally lift off from that 29 peak? [01:08:00] The answer is 75 years later. Anyone can do that. Check. It turns out the 81 low is the same as the 29 high.
Tom: That's a long time to wait. You gotta wait 75 years if you're a young up and comer.
Dave: And, and if you're a trader, and people say, well, you know, you buy the lows, you sell the highs, I go, someone has to own the market the whole way, which means that collective market ownership is going to go, it went 75 years without a budget.
Now, what'd they make? They made dividends. In 1906, the dividends were like 6%. Now they're 1. 5%. Which is yet again, another metric showing how overvalued the market is. At some point, the markets will be, and they're very overpriced. They're 120, 130, 140 percent overvalued by historic metrics. At some point they will be cheap again.
[01:09:00] And. And, and it will be decades from now, in my opinion.
Bitcoin
Dave: And the, uh, Bitcoin
Tom: folks haven't won you over yet,
Dave: have they? No, because I think the Bitcoin guys are going to have to do battle against the state, capital S. They're going to have to do battle against the CBDC crowd. They're going to have to do battle against the guys who do not want a currency that's not under their control.
And they think that their Bitcoin is absolutely impenetrable, and I'm not as knowledgeable as them, but I don't believe it. And there's little hints, like for example, Westphal, someone will steal Bitcoin, right? And the FBI will retrieve it. How, how did they retrieve the Bitcoin if it's so block chained up safe?
I don't know, supposed to not be able to retrieve that Bitcoin. [01:10:00] And so Bitcoin, the idea of a cryptocurrency supposedly was invented in a white paper. So Satoshi gets credit for, for Bitcoin apparently, but we don't know who he is for all we know he's a, he's a group at the CIA. Um, but supposedly a white paper written by three NSA guys was the first paper which they talked about cryptocurrency and they used the word coin in it something like a dozen times or something.
Just the idea of a cryptocurrency and the idea of a blockchain and things like that. And, you know, when the NSA invents the idea, it strikes me as possible that what we're, what they've done is crowdsourced it. So if you wanted to bring digital currency into the world, One of the ways to do it would be to get all the smartest guys in Silicon Valley all juiced up on crypto and just stand back and say, okay, let's see what these guys will do with this [01:11:00] idea.
And, and, oh, that, oh, that was clever. Oh, we hadn't thought of that. Right? So, so they're crowdsourcing, knocking the bugs out is one of my models. And in a sense, I'm rooting for crypto. And in another sense, I'm rooting against it because, because I will have missed it. If they win or I'll reach some moment in time where I will conclude they have won And then I will become a hodler, but for
Tom: now you think gold is a good place to have some of
Dave: your money Uh, yeah, i'm about 30 percent goal and a lot of two year treasuries relatively few equities My house is three times the size.
It needs to be so when I bought it Actually when I bought it, I didn't worry about the price of the house. I did the math on the taxes I said, over the next 30 years is going to be my taxes. Am I okay with that? [01:12:00] And I decided I was, it's a life changing house. I hang off 150 foot, I didn't put foot cliff looking West across Kegal Lake.
It's a spectacular, spectacular existence. We sit out on the deck till midnight in the summer with our laptops. And so it was worth it to me. So I, in that sense, I have a bigger than I should have investment in real estate. So that's a hard asset. And Ithaca real estate is pretty, pretty stable. It doesn't move much, even during crises.
So, it's a small town with two colleges, right? Um, so that's where I'm at. A lot of cash, a lot of gold, a lot of house.
Tom: If we saw maybe a 75 percent correction in the stock market then, maybe would you be interested in equities?
Dave: Well, 08.
And that, and I, I don't blame myself because my reasoning [01:13:00] was good. The outcome was not. So, so I kicked the crap out of my competition all the way up through that decade. In the noughts, while everyone was fighting two bear markets, I compounded 13 percent a year. No one did that. But in the teens, when everyone was partying like it's 1999, I was compounding at 4%.
And no one did that either. And, uh, And the reason was is because in 08 we went below fair value for about a month. It was a one night stand. And I was positive we had huge additional damage to be done because of what the credit bubble that had just burst. What I failed to see coming, and I know not a single person who saw it coming, that's why I forgive myself, [01:14:00] was 30 trillion dollars.
Remember when Bear Stearns got bail for 30 billion and it sucked the oxygen out of the room. Holy shit Really? They just gave they just gave JP Morgan 30 billion to take a bear. Holy moly, right? That's like chump change. That's comically tiny 30 trillion dollars I don't think anyone at the federal reserve could have fathomed that I think they went down that path and just didn't stop So if you had said they're gonna put 30 trillion in I might have said, okay, I should probably own something else, but I own gold and that did well.
So I think I'm still ahead of the S& P indexers. But the teams were not my, my, my great moment. So the mistake I made was greed. We were below fair value. What I should have asked is how much do you want to own below [01:15:00] fair value at this price? Such that I go, and if it goes lower, how much will you want to own this?
So I should have had a, an equity allocation at the different levels mentally better. So I swung for the fence. I said, no, it's coming down here. I'm waiting. And then it rallied. Well, dead cap ounces are common. So. You know, rallies are common. I get your face right. You know, one time I was at dinner with Einhorn and a bunch of hedge fund manager guys, and some young punk was spouting off.
And Einhorn's a very soft spoken sort of man of few words. And, uh, and he, uh, he's sitting there and the guy's spouting off about his tech stocks being such great profit margins. He's gonna get crushed. This boy's gonna get crushed. Einhorn says, he says, you know, you know what, you know, you know what a 95 percent correction is?
You ever, you ever ridden one of those? Do you know what that is? And he says, he says, it's a 90 percent correction thing cuts in half.[01:16:00]
And that's the problem. You correct 60 and then it cuts in half and you go, holy shit, that's what an 80 percent correction is. And in the, in, you know, from 29 on, I corrected 90. Here's one for you. The guys who bought the Nikkei, the guys who own the Nikkei in 89, they're toast. They died poppers. They died bro.
They died way down. But I once in a podcast asked someone to do the math for me and someone did. I said, what would happen if you bought the Nikkei? If you started buying in 89, you averaged down. So you didn't have any exposure, but you started buying. So I'm just going to average down, which is kind of what I just described, right?
I should have various levels. I said, how long would it take for you to be above water to be in the green? 20 years. So if you [01:17:00] average down, it took you 20 years. That's half of your investable life. Because after 40 years. You're supposed to go to bonds and get out of danger, which, by the way, today, being in bonds is great danger.
So, but, but you're not supposed to be speculating after 40 years. So you just gave up half your investing life to break even by averaging down an EK.
Inflation
Dave: How
Tom: much longer can they continue to print money like this until everything
Dave: breaks? Well, so the origin of the inflation, I really don't know why inflation didn't show up sooner.
It did, actually. I mean, if you actually look at valid inflation numbers, it was there the whole time, but I don't know why it didn't show up as a raging inflation. I do know why it showed up as a raging inflation recently, and that's because there's a lot of people don't know this lot do in 2019, miraculously right before COVID showed up.[01:18:00]
I think it was BlackRock. Blackrock, Blackwater, you never know. Blackrock, Blackstone, Blackrock, wrote a white paper to the Fed saying, in the next crisis, your ability to save us will not exist. That won't work anymore. What they did is they pumped money into the banks who put it into their reserves, which means it didn't float around, which means that's why inflation didn't show up.
If I gave you a gazillion dollars, that would be inflationary unless you put it in your garage, and then it just sits there. So what happened is they pumped up the banks, it saved the banks, but it wasn't inflationary because it didn't make it into the economy, it didn't make it into purchasing power.
BlackRock said... You're going to have to go direct, which means you're going to have to stuff money in people's pockets. And then we had the repo madness of, of about a month later, which I think is probably one of these [01:19:00] BlackRock knew it was coming. But the repo rate is supposed to be this tiny little thing that flickers a little.
It was spiking 10%. It was some, it looked like a teenager fishtailing on black ice, right? It was just out of control. A month after BlackRock says, you gotta go direct. And what'd the Fed do? They went direct, turns out, and then Covid shows up a couple months later in earnest, and they stuffed money into everyone's pockets.
So we had this period where people were actually wealthier by not working, then by working, they were by definition, producing nothing. And when you have the ratio of the money, you're being handed to what you're producing, when that ratio goes to infinity. You have inflation. And so they, we got inflation.
Now we have inflation because people expect inflation. That inflation expectation problem is now very real. I have a theory though about Powell. I think Powell's not just worried about inflation. [01:20:00] I think Powell's worried about speculation. I think he's worried about the 130 percent overvalued markets. He knows he created them.
He somehow got to get the get the froth out of these markets And he's got a bond crisis brewing because interest rates are soaring bond bond prices are plummeting And so he's really in a corner, but I think he's got to get the froth out of the market So I think that people think the second the second there's a flutter he'll drop rates I think he's going to let the pain get deeply embedded, you know, dig into the markets like a tick and, and, and, and he's going to correct the markets.
I, and I think that's what he wants to do. Do you agree with that? He should do that. I'm not sure. I agree with the Fed doing anything ever, right? It gets to be complicated [01:21:00] when you've got a committee of numb nuts. Making such big policy decisions who I don't think understand what's going on. I will, for example, who's the world's expert on the depression?
Bernanke. I don't think he based on his public statements. He doesn't have a clue what caused the depression and his public statements. Now he's probably like, so my guess is he doesn't have a clue. But when someone says the depression was caused by policy in the thirties, And forgets to mention horrid monetary policy of the twenties.
They're lying or they're an idiot because the twenties was a massive credit bubble caused by fed generosity. That Helen Keller could see there were congressional hearings on the froth the fed minutes of 1926 Are a fascinating read where they're talking about how to get the froth out, but bernanke never remembers that part He always talks about [01:22:00] they failed to print enough money in the 30s So I would not have given him a nobel prize Because I think I think what he says It's stupid.
Tom: So, um, do you think that somehow AI is going to save us, make us more productive, anything in the next 10 years, uh, to, no,
Dave: no, no. Here's my view on computers. I'm a Luddite now, apparently, um, every time you ask a computer to make a decision for you, you put your credit card in, it says yes or no. You go through, you go through security airport, it says yes or no, you are handing authority over to a computer.
These computers don't care about you. They just make that decision. The person who is in theory overseeing them, at this point in time, has no [01:23:00] concept of how you would ever make a human decision to override the computer. So the person at the store doesn't know how to say, well, your credit card didn't work, let's do it this way.
Let's take that thing and crank the credit card like we used to know. And they're not that smart anymore either. So if you look at the people who are manning the desk, They're not there because they're technically gifted anymore. They're not problem solvers. They're just a head. They're bobble heads. And so the more we ask computers to make decisions for us, the more authoritarian it's getting.
One day I got mad at a help desk. I really try not to do that. And I got off the phone and about 10 minutes later I go, were you talking to a computer? Because I couldn't get them to answer a question. They kept giving me this sort of canned answer. I go, No, I don't understand what this word [01:24:00] means. Could you clarify what this word means?
And I couldn't handle that. And then I said, I, I wonder if that was the computer I was talking to that will be the problem. Yes. And when you can no longer get that, my wife, we had to return things to Amazon. They wouldn't scan. The guy at UPS says, Oh, that barcode doesn't scan well here. It was a UPS package guy says, we can't scan here.
I went down to Kohls where they send Amazon ship back. They couldn't scan it. So my wife calls Amazon. And the person could not send them a scannable barcode. So they just told her, keep the stuff. We'll give you the credit. Now that's at least overriding the computer. But there's an absurdity here. And [01:25:00] what happens when, when your next colonoscopy, how old are you?
I am almost
Tom: 62.
Dave: You've had a colonoscopy. I have, yeah. What happens when your colonoscopy is a robotic gerbil with a GoPro camera? Thank you. Did you have to run with your own iPhone? I haven't thought about that. Right. What happens, you know, do you have to use medical portals? You communicate with your doctors through the medical portal.
I don't know about you guys, but I do. I find myself, I have to read my own test results. It's like the checkout line at the grocery store, except I'm reading my own test results. And then if you notice the doctors, they know how to scan you and they know how to do blood tests. But the dead reckoning doc hollywood [01:26:00] shit is long gone The doc and and by the way, the doc that the hospitals and doctors have all been bought by private equity firms Who have gutted them of their assets loaded them with debt are making doctors do seven and a half minute appointments They'll eventually sell off this biomedical company into the open market because the loose monetary policy at which point it'll have a 50 Percent probability of going bankrupt.
They're destroying The healthcare system and the insurance system, private equity guys, Leon Black and Apollo Capital, guys like that, KKR. They're buying companies, gutting them and you go, well, if you got the company, it's not worth anything. Well, in the modern era, you sell it to the Kentucky Pension Fund because they're stupid.
And there's unlimited capital sloshing around the system, which is dumb money. In the olden days when [01:27:00] capital was hard to get, it was treated as a precious commodity. You spend it carefully.
Housing crash?
Dave: Now that it's just so much capital, you know, when Blackrock was buying Residential housing here. This is a terrible business You want to house people efficiently build a rectangular building with 500 units?
If you want to house people inefficiently build a big friggin house for three three point eight people, right the McMansion Blackrock bought up single family houses after, oh wait, getting them on fire sale, which probably was created by them. So I asked where'd all the inventory go and then I realized it's being scooped up by the big money guy.
Was called, you know, private, private equity, private capital. And, um, and then they crank up the rents, but the whole, the business model sucks, but you can make it [01:28:00] work by buying houses in which you can get a razor thin profit margin and then leveraging the shit out of it. BlackRock was buying houses using, using leverage that they were paying 0.
15 percent interest. We don't get that. But they get that. Now when this housing crisis comes, guess what's going to happen? They're going to have to liquidate their houses because they're going to be looking at, at interest rates, which are not so friendly. And all of a sudden their profit margins are not going to be there.
And they're going to have to liquidate. Like the Airbnb guys. Look at all the people who bought a house to do an Airbnb. I'm going to get rich. I'll just do air. I'll just run an Airbnb. And now all of a sudden their ballooning mortgage is now at 8%. I can't make any money at 8 percent now.[01:29:00]
Tom: How big of a housing crash do you see coming? What percent of a
Dave: haircut? Well, you can actually do the math considering that taxes are part of the story and they're going up. And the mortgage payments part of the story, crudely speaking, going from a 3 percent mortgage to an 8 percent mortgage, means that the average person can afford half of what they could afford before.
If you replay the tape of what it means to buy a house, you walk into the realtor, you lay out your net worth, you lay out how much you earn, the realtor says you can afford a 550, 000 house, current rates. And what do you do? You go buy a 550, 000 house. Well, if now you can afford a 275, 000 house, not a 550, 000 house, then that's all you can pay.
So if everyone's ability to buy a house just got cut in half, the price of houses has to
Tom: cut in half.[01:30:00]
Because of inflation though, could, if our money gets to be worth half of what it was, then can you still have your 500, 000 house? Well, so Twitter
Dave: used to be loaded with people who say, boy, I hope we get inflation because that'll erode my mortgage payment. Those guys are gone now. I'm not hearing those guys raving because you know what, their salary didn't go up.
It eventually will. And you know what'll happen? The Fed will look at the rising salaries and go, that's inflation. I don't have to step on the economy. Rising salaries is inflationary. This idea that your salary is going to go up and your mortgage won't and therefore you're going to be better off, the Fed's going to step on your ass.
Isn't this a twisted world? It is a twisted world, yeah. Now let me give you the scariest plot of them all. I can give it to you verbally. If you plot the S& P 500 adjusted for inflation, [01:31:00] you get a gently sloping... Rise in prices that that's nowhere near what people think if you plot the S& P 500 over the last hundred years Corrected for inflation instead of using CPI, which is a crooked ass number invented by loons You use the m2 money supply Which is a great metric of inflation, because that's the increase in the money supply, right?
And it's a pretty clean number. The market is flat. Correct it for, that's a Ron Grice plot. It's the only guy I know to do it. It's flat for a hundred years. Correcting for M2 money supply. All you got were dividends for a hundred years. Well, now it's one and a half. It used to be six. And guess what? You know the thing that drove your equity prices?[01:32:00]
Debt driven share buybacks? Do you think companies are taking out 8 percent loans to buy back shares now? No. So, so that's gone. Chinese sold labor for pennies on the dollar. That's going away. Russia sold resources for pennies on the dollar. We screwed that up pretty good. The demographics in 1981 were phenomenal.
The boomers were entering the workforce. They brought their wives with them. Demographics was everything. So we had this lot of people hitting the workforce ready to make shit. That's gone. So for 40 years, we've had a tailwind, and during that 40 years, the valuation, not the price, the valuation, the actual valuation is the price relative to something it should track, like earnings, revenues.[01:33:00]
Book value, the valuations compounded over those 40 years. They shouldn't compound at all, 3 percent a year. What happens if the next 40 years, it compounds at negative 3 percent to get back to cheap. That's a 6 percent or more swing. That's going to be tough to invest. That's my multi decade bear market right there.
So you
Tom: are the biggest bear. Do you have any other names we should be listening to as the second or third biggest bears?
Dave: Stephanie Pomboy, Grant Williams. Um, there's a lot, but should you listen to just bears? No. Um, I like Wealthion. It's a very good finance channel now. Um, um, Adam Taggart runs it. Uh, Lacey Hunt, if you're wonky.
Lacey bends my [01:34:00] brains and twists it. Um, he was a deflationist for many, many decades. And right. And he's now become an inflationist. He's now saying, now we're in trouble. Um, great book, The Price of Time by Edward Chancellor. Audiobook. Edward Chancellor says every single time interest rates have got down to two percent, we've had a major crisis.
Well, it got negative. Real interest rates got negative. So guess what? Either Edward's full of crap, or we're gonna have a crisis.
Buffett/Munger
Tom: Are you a fan of the work or the writing of Warren Buffett, Charlie Munger,
Dave: those guys? Uh, yes and no. You can hear wisdom in it, but they also are kind of bullshit artists in the sense that Warren's like the mobster who walks around in a bathrobe trying to look harmless.
Warren's a stock jobber of a higher order. The deals he cuts, [01:35:00] insider trading all the time, right? When he, when he gets called in to save the day, he's insider trading. He's buying when he knows it's time to buy. He's been told by the authorities that he will be backstopped if he buys now. They're also about to die.
So there's that, um, he's brilliant. He's a brilliant stock jobber. I mean, he's been spectacular. I don't know who's supposed to replace them. That's an interesting question. It's also so big now that it's gotten very indexy and, and they can't, they can't just liquidate. To get out of the way, even if they smell a problem.
So I think they bring wisdom, but I, I'm not sure Berkshire's it's just gotten so big. You're buying the market when you buy Berkshire, I think. Although if you said we're putting your money in it, I wouldn't lose sleep either. I'd be okay.
Musk/Tesla
Tom: Uh, do you have [01:36:00] any, I'm sorry, do you have any take on Elon Musk or Tesla you'd like to share?
Dave: Yeah, I think by the time Tesla actually gets to fair value, all the other car companies will have caught up and they'll have no advantage. So Tesla, I don't think really knows how to make cars. They make cars, but they, they control a small percentage of the car market and half the market cap. I mean, that's the problem.
And Toyota's not going to sit around waiting for Tesla to sell all the cars. And Volvo and all these, they're not. Then the second problem gets real interesting. The batteries cost a fortune. So 20, 000 repair bill. Second thing is it goes because there's a breach in the battery. And you won't have enough time to get out of the car before you're burned to death.
They don't, that car doesn't wait for you to undo your seatbelt and open the door. It just [01:37:00] fries you. It's like putting you in an incinerator. Yeah. And then
Tom: it's, it's happened already, right? I think
Dave: Oh yes. Oh yes. And then thirdly, the insurance companies are going, okay, here's the problem. The batteries cost a fortune and we can't tell if the batteries breached.
There's no metric they have right now. I just read this. The insurance companies can't say, look, you are an offender vendor, but your battery's okay. They're going, you're an offender vendor. And we don't know. So we're at risk of a situation where they might say we can't insure the car, or we can't insure the car against something that involves a battery breach, or we will insure the car minus the battery, meaning your collision insurance is going to be collision minus 20, 000.
I just don't know how they're going to do it, but the insurance companies are looking at this going, this is a problem. There's a big problem wasn't
Tom: [01:38:00] Tesla themselves weren't they selling insurance on Tesla's gotta look
Dave: that up Well, the other thing is must kept his company alive and Musk is a genius. I mean, there's There's something about him that is so special But he kept his car alive by trading Bitcoin and dogecoin and stuff, right?
And at some point you got to start making cars and making money And I don't know how he's doing it all. The other thing you don't know is that if, if the Pentagon is missing 10 trillion, you don't know where those are going, but it's quite possible. If you look at all these tech stocks, it's somehow they talk about how profitable they are.
Is it all federal money? Is it possible that Google is getting defense money to pay the bills to keep the lights on? Is it possible Tesla is getting defense money to pretend to be profitable? Because 10 trillion is [01:39:00] a lot of money. And those are all defense interest, interesting industries. And then the question is, should I care?
If, if they're going to take our tax dollars or create inflation and give it to these companies. I guess you should buy the companies. By that model, though, you say, Well, I should have bought J. P. Morgan 25 years ago, then. Because they're obviously the death star of the banking system. You wouldn't have made any money.
J. P. Morgan has more than shit. The pharmas haven't. Pfizer is lower than it was before COVID started, right? I mean, Pfizer's in the tank right now. Pfizer was this low back in 1997 or something, but you got the dividends. So I, I don't, these are come, I don't even know how to think about investing now because cheap stocks get cheaper too.
Pfizer's got a PE of eight or something. I mean, it's cheap. [01:40:00] So
Tom: I need to come up to speed on the missing 10 trillion, but you must have written it up maybe in some of your year in review. No,
Dave: no, not really. Okay. The 10 here, here are the two day, there's two data points on the 10 trillion. The proponent of the missing 10 trillion is Catherine Austin Fitts.
And some think she's the prophet, and some think she's nuts. I've had a lot of interactions with Catherine, and I think she's trying to get it right. Anyone who thinks that's complete crap has not seen the video of Rumsfeld 25 years ago, almost 25 years ago, saying we're missing 2. 7 trillion. If they're missing 2.
7 trillion over 20 years ago, 10 trillion now seems pretty credible, right? Now, trick question for your audience. I'm gonna get your audience to ponder this one. What day did he tell us? That they were missing 2. 7 trillion dollars. It's an amazing day the day before 9 [01:41:00] 11 the day before 9 11 What a way to cover up a bad story.
If you know 9 11, you know 9 11's gonna be a bad day. Put down some bad news on 9 10. Seems like a pretty good idea. Because we're not gonna all of a sudden jump all over the Pentagon and say, Cut your budget on 9
12. And so they spilled the beans and got away with it.
Dave as a human router
Dave: So, by the way, you
Tom: are incredibly well connected from my perspective, right? That, uh, you're connected to Whitney Webb and Edward Dowd and, uh, RFK Jr. and all
Dave: sorts of folks, right? I'm a bit of a human router. Um, I, I, years ago I was at a chat board that had a lot of what, who became fairly well known people like, like, like Chris Martinson and Adam Taggart and, and some guys from Fidelity [01:42:00] and Goldman and stuff.
And they all had funny names like Yogi Bear and weird things like that. And, um, and it was run by a guy named Doug Nolan, who's one of the best credit analysts in the world, in my opinion, and David Tice, who ran the most prominent short fund in the world. And we all just chatted. There was about 250 of us.
We were chatting in the late 90s and early 2000s about the mess we were facing. And, um, and I got to know a bunch of guys that way. And then when the internet was young, you could actually just reach out to some guy and say, Hi. And you get an answer. So I'd reach out to Jim Rickards and say, Oh, you might be interested in this.
He'd say, Oh, thanks. You know, and I now know Jim Rickards well. And, and, and I reach out to Stephen Roach, you know, and I had a three way chat. This, this is ridiculous. So Roach was executive director of Morgan Stanley, right? I had, last year I had a three way chat with Stephen Roach and Larry Summers [01:43:00] about the state of the economy.
That's weird. And then I, I used to, this is so funny, I used to chat with this obscure Harvard professor late at night. She's a progressive. And we would just, late at night, swap emails. I'd send some. I remember one article I sent to her that described how you could get a credit card to tap your retirement account.
And she says, oh, there's a special place in hell for that person. That person was Elizabeth Warren. And then she became head of the TARP Oversight Committee. I sent her an email. I said, oh, you just threw the shortest straw I've ever seen. This is going to be a mess. The next thing I know, I'm introducing her to the former CEO of Morgan Stanley Bank.
Because he's a friend of mine, and I thought he'd be an ally, and so there was this three way going, and I'm going, what is going on here, right? This is surreal. So yeah, there are moments where I shock myself. And then I got some [01:44:00] guy, Matt Iglesias of Slate, telling, tweeting out, Dear Cornell students, do not learn your, your economics from a chemistry professor.
I go, oh, that's fabulous. You know what my son did? He had that made into a doormat, gave it to me for Christmas. And so, yeah, I, I see. Uh, so a hedge fund manager used to work with Louie Bacon years ago. And I played golf with a bunch of times and that's how I met Kuntzler. I cold called Kuntzler and he joined the three of us for dinner.
And, um, and, and he said, you can get to people I can't get to. And I go, why? He said, because you're a professor and then I realized that every single person in the halls of power at one point had professors who were their primary authority figures.
And there's a, I think there's kind of a knee jerk response. You know, the [01:45:00] Cornell cred helps. I used to referee Taekwondo tournaments and the Koreans. Adored the fact that I was a professor to them was like the highest rung of the ladder and I'm going you don't understand We're a bunch of whack jobs guys, you know, we're losers You're you're giving too much credit to losers But yeah, so that's that's how I did it.
I'm a talker
Tom: It seems like you're just living a very interesting life, right? You got so much stuff to think about and you're you're writing all these
Dave: but the darkness I've got to find a way to get back to the light And I gotta, I gotta stop reading about pedophilia, right? I got to start reading about the fun.
Now I think when the markets crash and burn and it's total chaos, I'll be back in my element. Okay. Now there will be people in great pain and they will not want to hear me say, I told you, right? They're not going to want to hear that. And so there's going to be no, uh, there's a famous Roman proverb that says, [01:46:00] um, the, the vanquished, the, the, the, the, the, the vanquished will weep.
The victors will not laugh. And it says that when you finally win, you'll realize you didn't really win. Yeah.
Edward Dowd
Dave: So Edward
Tom: Dowd says, or he's indicating there's darkness ahead, but there are great times after that. We should have faith and it's going to recover after that. What do you think?
Dave: So Eddie is now a prominent figure.
And so, so he's. Without insulting him, he's probably, he's probably a little filtered. And he's in, he's got himself into some pretty high, high rarefied atmosphere. He's, he's really doing it. And we used to have long phone calls at night talking about weird shit, which I will not talk about because I don't want to tell people what he thinks about what he thought about, but he, he was very open minded, creative things, things, [01:47:00] problems, Alex Jonesy like problems and stuff like that.
So, so Ed was a natural to sort of grab onto the COVID story. And figure out the liars are lying again. What a shock. What a shock. Um, and so, uh, so yeah, so Eddie's great. And, um, and it'll be interesting to see if he keeps managing to climb that ladder, except for being tied to RFK might be like tying an anchor on your neck and jumping overboard, right?
I mean, that's, that's like, that's like, you know, if you worked for Trump, the odds of getting indicted are about 98 percent just because they'll indict anyone who worked for Trump to make sure that you learn that lesson. Interesting. Right.
More climate content
Dave: So what do you do when you're not being a climate guy? What do you do when you're not being a climate guy?
I'm
Tom: mostly a climate guy these days. Uh, now Martin Durkin, uh, he was, he did the great global warming swindle. He is now working on another movie, a, uh, updated version of that. So [01:48:00] I'm helping him with that. I'm actually the producer of that movie. So I'm working on that. It's coming out in the first quarter of
Dave: next year.
So what'd you do before you were a climate guy? Um, before
Tom: that, I mean, I was, uh, in the tech world. That's what I did when I, I, before I retired, I was in the tech world. I did consulting and traveled around. Yeah, help people in the middle of the night with their computers,
Dave: all sorts of stuff. So
More climate content
Dave: I had no idea until a couple of months ago, I would say, who the hell you were.
I just knew that you kept showing up on my Twitter feed, calling out the liars. Saying, oh yeah, here's some more fiction from these losers, right? Just, just absolutely relentless. I'm going, this boy is tireless. You really just, you stay on them 24 7.
Tom: Yeah. Yeah. I really do enjoy it. I've been doing it since about, I don't know what, 2007 or so.
I was on Blogspot and then I moved over to Twitter, started the podcast.
Wisest climate realists
Tom: So who brings,
Dave: who brings the greatest wisdom? If you were to say, look, you know, if, if, if you got to pay attention to [01:49:00] some people talking, there's guys who have creds and stuff, but who, who really, who really brings game in your opinion?
Well, yeah.
Tom: Will Happer is way up there. I've had him on my podcast twice. I just had him on about a week ago. He is incredibly smart. Uh, yeah. Yeah. Bye. He's up there. I mean, Richard Lindzen
Dave: was, was Happer, one of the guys, the American physical society put on the committee. They had, um, who's the guy who died? The famous physicist who died.
He actually didn't have a PhD, but he's super famous. Dyson, right? Freeman Dyson. Freeman Dyson. Yeah. So Dyson Koonin was Happer in that group. I should know, but I don't know if he was on the American, for those who don't know, this American physical society put together a group and said, look at the science and it created this huge group.
a dozen deniers because they came out of the investigation. This stuff is crap, right? So, so do you know any prominent Solar physicists who [01:50:00] believe the story who believe
Tom: in the climate crisis. Yes. No, no. I
Dave: mean, there's all the amazing part of the story. You got the guy [Nir Shaviv]. Yes, Nir Shaviv.
He's the he's he's the chairman of the physics department at Hebrew University. PhD in solar physics. Got his got his bachelor's degree at 18. And he writes an article saying it's all solar. And he writes it to Forbes and it stays up for, what, four hours before they take it down because it's not up to their high standards?
Tom: Yeah, I mean, it's just full of geniuses. There's the Connollys. It's a father son team that they work with Willie soon. They're Irish. They're I
Dave: don't know. I
Tom: don't know. And then you mentioned earlier before we hit record at John Clauser.
Dave: 20. There's a new is he a newcomer…I
Tom: first found out about it just now.
I don't know. I don't know what he thought five years ago, but
Dave: so for those who don't know this, [01:51:00] he won the 22 Nobel prize in physics and he comes out and he says, these clouds can't even account for clouds. And then there's the, again, I love to go back through the examples like the woman who studies polar bears.
I'm in the middle of a podcast one day and there's the picture of the starving polar bear that we all see, right? You know, it's the same frigging polar bear. And I'm sitting there going, I go, that polar bear can eat anything he wants. So if he's starving, there's a reason. And it hit me, I go, maybe he's 35 years old.
Exactly. Maybe he's got stomach cancer. And then I show a picture of this emaciated grizzly bear. I go, he's looking kind of sad, too. And then I show a picture of him at the end of the season. And he's, he's, he's Beednose Bear 409, the winner of the Alaskan Fat Bear Championship. I go, see how easy I faked your ass out, right?
Beednose Bear, the Fat Bear Champion. [01:52:00] He had his, he, oh, it's just fantastic. So I love stuff like this because, because the, The, the, the press falls for these stupid things. They sure
Tom: do. Yeah. That was Susan Crockford. And then same deal with Great Barrier Reef that's supposed to be dying from a heat or whatever.
But then Peter Ridd is an expert there and he's saying it's just fine that it does this all the
Dave: time. The salinity of the ocean is not going up after all. Right. And, and I, there's just, there's just, here's what I want to talk about one. You can't go away yet. The, uh, ice sheet in Antarctica from out of left field.
Disappears on us in 2023, right? And, and you can see it go off the curve, uh, superimposed on all the other years, and then someone plots it as a standard deviation. It's six standard deviations, which is one in a billion.
And, and I've written about this. So I wrote about it in the [01:53:00] context of Fat Tony. Do you know Fat Tony? From the Simpsons? No. Fat Tony from Nassim Taleb. I don't. So, so, so here's the story. Someone says, we'll call him Vinny, says, Hey, Fat Tony. I flip a coin 30 times, it comes up head 30 times. Which turns out to be a one in a billion, that's why I picked that one.
And it's a modified Fat Tony story. And he says, it's a legitimate coin. What are the odds it comes up heads the 31st time? And Fat Tony said, what are the odds it comes up tails the 31st time? Fat Tony said, zero. The guy says, no, no, 50 50. And Fat Tony says, no, it's zero. And then he says, why? And he says, he says, he says, uh, the coin's rigged.
And then he says, well, I told you it was, I told you it was legit. And he says, you lied.
The message being, [01:54:00] when is that? Not. I want in a billion, someone's lying. So here's where it gets tricky. So then the guy who runs the site, what's up with this? What's that guy's name?
Tom: What's up with that? It's Anthony Watts. Yeah. And he's
Dave: very good. Very good. Very good. And he comes out and he says, by the way, Southern winds pushed the ice sheet up and sort of piled it up.
And as a consequence, it didn't shrink, it just got thicker. And I go, what are the odds they forgot to measure the thickness, sincerely? I got one in a billion. But here's the problem I'm having. It seems to me that the odds of Southerly winds thickening it that much is kind of a one in a billion. Because it's still, but then, then it turns out when you look at these superimposed plots, There's one year where the ice sheet [01:55:00] dips down to the six sigma level and then goes back up and it's there a month and I go, what are the odds it deviated six standard deviations?
And then recovered in a month. And I go, I think I said one over one Google.
And so what do you think happened there? You know this plot. I don't know the answer.
Tom: You know more than I do about this, this issue. I don't.
Dave: I don't. I don't know. All I know is this is somebody lied.
Tom: Uh, one person who does a great job of exposing this stuff is Tony Heller. You know him well, his
Dave: work. You know Tony?
You know Tony?
Tom: A little bit. He's been on my podcast. Yeah, I'm a big fan.
Dave: So here's the deal that I don't understand. Tony is wearing a t shirt in one of his pictures. It says, Ithaca is gorgeous. Can you tell me why?
Tom: I don't know why he wears
Dave: that shirt. And I thought maybe he was a Cornell guy or something, because he's got another name.
[01:56:00] It's Tony Heller's a pseudonym. What's the other name? His real name, I think, is Tony Heller.
Tom: Well,
Dave: there's another. Stephen Goddard. Stephen Goddard. Is that the pseudonym then? Yes. Yep. Okay. So, I want to get to, I want to meet Tony Heller. He blocked me on Twitter. Now, I've been blocked by Michael Mann. And I've been blocked by Peter Dezak.
But Tony Heller is a hero and I'm trying to, I, there's no way I said anything to him. So he must've slipped with his mouse or something. Oh, you don't know him? Well, I think he might've unblocked me, but I could be looking at a phantom account. Now here's, here's what I'd like you to do. Tell him, tell him, I just want to be able to read his tweets.
Now he might look and say, Oh, I didn't, he's unblocked, but he might look and say, oh, he's still blocked because I don't know He there might be a phantom account. He's gotten [01:57:00] quite a few quite a few follows. Maybe it doesn't matter Maybe i'm getting every tweet anyways I'll take a look I would love to be able to communicate with tony heller and he's really good or just read his tweets And somehow he blocked me.
I you know one day I I got a I got a message from charlie. Um, Oh god, i'm drawing a blank on his last name charlie. Um, oh famous wall street journal guy and he's in any event He said, um He said, I found out I unfollowed you. I don't know how that happened. I feel terrible. And I go, it happens. I don't know why.
I found I blocked a guy named Jim Quinn, who I really liked. And, and he's, I'll say, Oh, what's he doing blocked? There's, there are problems with Twitter. And, and I would love Tony Howard to release me from the penalty box.
Tom: Yeah, I think Twitter has done some shady stuff, like Patrick Moore, somehow it unfollowed me from Patrick Moore.
I didn't do that.
Odd Twitter algorithms
Dave: Well, the other [01:58:00] thing I noticed this year, I was, Dr. Drew has gone dark. Right, Drew, uh, what's it, Pinsky? The guy who used to be on the Man Show, really smart guy. If you look at his tweets, he's got 2. 6 million followers. And he'll put out a tweet and get like five likes. I go, that's not mathematically possible.
With 5, 2. 6 million followers, something is shutting down his feed like crazy. Yeah, I've noticed
Tom: a lot of odd behavior, like Joe Bastardi. I was seeing his tweets all the time. I love his tweets. Then I realized, uh, for some reason, they're not in the algorithm anymore. I haven't seen his tweets for months.
Dave: Do you find, do you find your follower count X weird? So I don't care about my follower count, but there'll be multi month periods where I'm picking up what can be several dozen a day and the total count doesn't move.
Tom: Yeah, that exactly is what's happening to mine. It'll be pegged just right at one number [01:59:00] 26.
8 or 53. 6 or whatever It'll just be paying it
Dave: just doesn't move now. I'm sitting i'm sitting at 98. 7 And I'm thinking it would be great. It would be entertaining to get another 1. 3. Maybe, maybe your podcast will pull that off. But I, uh, I, I don't really care. By the way, I don't know if you've noticed, but your Twitter feed, the more followers you have, the shittier it gets.
And I had 350 followers. It was great. I had some really good ones. And yeah, my first follower ever was Jim Rickards. That's an amazing first follow. And so I go on Twitter. And he's in a fight with Rubini. I mean, they're slinging shit at each other. They're talking about each other's mothers. And I said to Jim, I said, I said, uh, uh, I named myself David B.
Cobb because he's James G. Rickards. I said, okay, I'll imitate Jim then. And, and I said, Jim, first day on Twitter, [02:00:00] you're in a shitstorm with Rubini. This is a very strange medium. And, and then, uh, and then he writes this tweet that says, Oh, it's so wonderful. You're here. I look forward to all your great wisdom.
And I go, why are you blowing smoke up my ass? But then all of a sudden I had like a hundred followers. I go, Oh, did he do that? Then one day I, I, I insulted Henry Blodgett and he answered me and I go. He read that? So it took me a while to figure out that Twitter truly is a communication. It's a cocktail party.
But the more followers you have makes it just a gigantic, a cocktail party at Shea Stadium just isn't, isn't a cocktail party. It's, it's a mess. And, and so more and more, I'm seeing the people I want to see less and less. Do you use lists? I'm
Tom: a big tweet deck guy. I use columns on tweet deck to see what I really want to see.
Totally works [02:01:00] great. Yeah,
Dave: so I just have two lists that I really use. One is, um, must see tweeters. I shouldn't tell people this because they'll check and say, oh, fuck, I'm not on this list, that son of a bitch. Um, and the other is entertainment. So late at night. I'll go and it'll be French bulldog videos and, and, and fight videos.
You know, there's some fight videos, guys beat the shit out of each other and, you know, just weird stuff. I've got about 40 of those. My, my entertainment list is late at night when I've got no brain left and I, I just go to entertainment. I just look at the shit. I go, oh, that was funny. They have car crash videos and that's, that's just twisted shit.
Tom: I am a big fan of TweetDeck. You can filter in all sorts of different ways. So somebody tweets with climate change or global warming or climate crisis and it gets more than like 100 likes. Right away, I find out about that. So
Dave: it's great. Now, TweetDeck is something on a computer or your
Tom: phone? [02:02:00] It runs on a browser.
I don't know where else it runs. I just have it up here on my browser. I'm just looking
Dave: at it all the time. I guess I should look into it. I know nothing about it. Very useful. Yeah. Okay. I just, the list was about as tacky as I got. Okay. I'm not very tacky. We're past
Tom: the two hour point, uh, any more that you'd like to, to share?
I have really,
Dave: this has been fun. I'm a talker. So, you know, I, I've, my record is three and a half, I think. Yeah.
Tom: I've listened to that one. I think
Dave: I would make God have mercy on your soul. It's
Tom: a Rudy, right? Was it Rudy? Have that's over three. I think I have to look, but I've enjoyed listening to this. That
Dave: was Rudy's second interview.
So what happened was I, I'd been begging Rudy to, to, to do an interview and he, he, he, he, uh, he wouldn't, I always thought Rudy was shy when I listened to him, he doesn't sound shy, but I said he was really shy based on what I thought. I've known Rudy on [02:03:00] Twitter. It's like we're best buddies. It really felt that way.
And one day someone said, who should I follow? And he listed three of us. It was me. So I said, okay, there is a mutual feeling here. And, and I said, and I asked Grant Williams one day, I said, if you could have one interview, who's your drop dead interview? He said, Oh, Rudy. So I told Rudy that. So then when Rudy decided to do an interview with the grant and, and then he, then he DM me and he said, I want to do an interview with you.
Now we had an audio problem that I think fucked up the interview actually, but um, so, so we talked about who to do and we went with Marty Bentz and, and I think his second choice on the list was a guy named Mike Farris. I don't know if his name is Ring a Bell. I've been on both those
Tom: podcasts actually, the Coffee and a Mike and uh, Yeah,
Dave: yeah.
Mike's a sweetie, right? I love it. His podcast is great. Yeah. He's just so sincere and forlorn. Yes. And, and so I didn't tell Mike that he [02:04:00] came in second on that cause he, it would have broken his heart, but then Mike did one with Rudy. So I think Rudy reached out to him and said, I want to do an interview.
And so, so, so the route, the one with Marty bent, the problem is I had a terrible audio connecting and it was really screwing up and it didn't play into my strength either. So I thought I'd bone. It wasn't terrible.
Tom: Oh, it sounded great on, uh, when I listened, it sounded
Dave: fine. Okay. Um, so in any case, so Rudy's, I gave Rudy my password during COVID and said, if I die, if I disappear from Twitter, find out if I died.
And if I died, I want you to tweet from heaven. I said, I trust you. To really come up with some zingers. Who do you see up there? What are we eating? Right. He and he said i'm not comfortable with this. I said rudius my dying wish And uh [02:05:00] And I didn't die fortunately There's a guy named not jim kramer who's disappeared from twitter and i'm haunted by the fact that he might have died I I don't I don't even know the guy's name, but there's something so odd where he just went into the ether It's a bad sign.
Yeah But why do I care? But there's something, you know, he just all of a sudden was gone. Poof. And there's so many guys I wish that would happen too.
Tom: So when you gave away your password, were you worried about COVID getting you or someone else bumping you off for what
Dave: you wrote about? No, no. I gave it to him in case I died from COVID.
I wanted him to tweet from heaven. I said, you get, I said, I said, you know, post a post in a bit. You gotta do a little legwork here. Gotta find out that I died, and find some news article that said, Professor Collum died, and then tweet from heaven. I mean, think, you could really have a party with that one, right?
[02:06:00] My first, the first thing I remember from Rudy, and I think I said this in the podcast with him, But he was really funny. But I remember the day he said, it's not fake. It's not like the Loch Ness monster or North Dakota.
That guy's so twisted. How does his brain? So I started studying Rudy. What is it that makes him so funny? So it's like analyzing Chappelle or Stuart. I read Stuart's book on humor to understand what makes you the pearl of wisdom. I got from that. He said, specificity. He said, you didn't drown your sorrows in ice cream.
You, you, you buried him in Mocha chip. And I go, that's an important message to those of us who like to be wise asses. It's not ice cream. It's [02:07:00] mocha chip. And, uh, and, uh, what was the other one? I heard the other day that was really good. And then he went, I've worn you down. It was fun. It's I'm so thrilled to meet you.
Finally. No, this
Tom: has been great. I've totally loved it. And like I said, I really enjoyed the studying I did just in the last couple of days, I was just immersed in your stuff and it makes me happy with modern tech that it's so easy that I could find out, you know, long form your thoughts. Cause if this, if I were to learn about you at 20 years ago, it would have been a lot harder to figure out what you're thinking about so many things.
Yeah. It's really good.
Dave: That's what, that's the genius of Rogan. Yeah, that's the genius of Rogan. Now, I should be able to get out of there. God damn it. Absolutely. Well, I don't know how to do it. I need, I need, maybe I should ask Brett Weinstein to help me. He knows Rogan. Yeah, I mean, Rogan
Tom: has some of those same guys on over and over, some of his friends or whatever.
He should bring
Dave: in fresh blood. [02:08:00] Absolutely. A whack job, filter free whack job. I literally have a quote I use from Larry Summers that says, Dave, you really do not have a filter. What a great quote, right? What a great quote from the Secretary of the Treasury. Dave, you really don't have a filter.
Tom: No, we need more unfiltered talk.
So anyway, I will let you go. But, uh, thanks. I really, really enjoyed this. I hope to do it again sometime. This is, uh, very valuable stuff for me.
Dave: You bet. You do podcasts too? You also do do I am on a few
Tom: yeah, i've been on a few I don't know.
I've been on maybe 10 total something like that. You do 100 a year,
Dave: right? Something like that. It's a ridiculous number. Yeah
Tom: Yeah, but yeah, like you say it helps you learn right even to be on the podcast and talking it helps you organize your thoughts It was fun
Dave: today because I we're I'm checking, checking the knowledge and, and, and trying to find out what's, what I, what I don't understand [02:09:00] and, and making sure that what I say is valid and stuff like that.
Um, okay. All right.
Tom: All right. I will let you go, but thanks again. Talk to you soon. Goodbye.