Transcript: Professor Dave Collum’s Interview on The Tucker Carlson Show

Read the full transcript of organic chemistry professor Dave Collum’s interview on The Tucker Carlson Show titled “Financial Crisis, Diddy, Energy Weapons, QAnon, and the Deep State’s Digital Evolution”, premiered on August 20, 2025.

Academic Freedom and Speaking Beyond Your Lane

TUCKER CARLSON: Very few college professors do what college professors are supposed to do, which is kind of breakthrough, outside campus into the conversation among smart people about what the world is about. In other words, they don’t kind of influence the broader culture directly. And you do, and you’re an organic chemistry professor.

Are you allowed to do this at Cornell? Are you allowed to kind of opine on economic, social policy, foreign policy? What are your administrators saying when you do this?

DAVE COLLUM: I don’t know if it’s generally true, but Cornell’s not giving me any grief. The only problem I had with Cornell, and we talked, you know, we had breakfast and we talked a little bit about. I think my colleagues wish I would shut up, but they don’t tell me to shut up. Although, you know, they’ve told me to stay on.

I have kind of an intellectual Tourette syndrome where “stay in your lane.” Well, I’ll be in the middle of class, like in March of ’07, in the middle of class. No warning. I blurted out “the banking system’s about to collapse.” I’d written about it in ’02, but I turned, I said, “I think it’s about to collapse.”

TUCKER CARLSON: This is an organic chemistry class.

DAVE COLLUM: An organic chemistry class. And they looked at me and I just said, “Look, I think the entire banking system’s going down the tubes now.” And it took another year, year and a half.

TUCKER CARLSON: Did they say that’s not a related discipline? What are you talking about?

DAVE COLLUM: No one gave me grief for that.

What was entertaining about that particular Tourette’s-like outburst is that I had the same kids in an honors thesis course two years later. In the first lecture, one lecture a week, the first lecture, I said, “Didn’t I warn you?” This is February of ’09. Said, “Didn’t I warn you that the banking system was going to collapse?”

I said, they said, “Yeah, you did.” I said, “Did your econ professors tell you that?” They said, “No.” And I said, “What are those made for?”

In this thesis course, I used a lot of guest lectures. So my first guest lecture was the CEO of Morgan Stanley bank and he had cut his teeth on mortgage backed securities and he spent two hours talking about the catastrophe that we were in the middle of in February of ’09.

So yeah, I do occasionally go off the rails, but no one gives me grief.

The 2020 Cancellation Incident

I got canceled in 2020. The closest you and I – I’ve been following you for years, but the closest you meeting, but we didn’t – was in 2020. I got canceled during the height of Cancel season. Remember how it’s happening all the time? And the probability of me ending up being interviewed by you was pretty high because it was being. I got canceled. I was written up in the Federalist or someplace like that.

TUCKER CARLSON: So you got canceled for?

DAVE COLLUM: Oh, it was a real crime against humanity. I supported the police.

TUCKER CARLSON: Oh, okay.

DAVE COLLUM: It was one of those. Remember the guy got knocked over in Buffalo? A friend of mine I was doing a podcast with that Saturday, posted that late one night and said, “I think this is just appalling.” When the old guy got knocked out by the riot police and I watched the video a couple times, I said, “Well, Chris,” his name is Chris Irons. I said, “We can talk about it on Saturday. But I have no idea what he was doing there.”

So this is in a tweet. And I said he was poking riot police with something that looked kind of like a taser or something. Turns out in retrospect, it was a skimmer. And so I said, “It looks like kind of a self-inflicted problem to me.” I didn’t say he deserved it or anything like that. But it is self-inflicted if you poke a riot policeman and he knocks you over. That’s pretty much, you know, it’s a Darwin award.

TUCKER CARLSON: Bears and riot policemen shouldn’t be poked.

The Astroturfed Nature of Cancel Culture

DAVE COLLUM: Turns out what I learned that night was the cancel culture is not organic. It was incredibly astroturfed. The speed with which it happened was staggering. It was automated within 20 or 30 minutes. Email boxes all across the administration were filling with complaints. It went everywhere. I had to lock down my Twitter feed fast and things like that.

And then Cornell was on sort of a war footing, trying to figure out what to do. Now they’re trying to figure out what to do just because they wanted the fire to be put out. So they weren’t against me in that sense. It was during the lockdown, so I didn’t actually. There was the advantage of everyone was locked down, but I wasn’t sure Antifa wouldn’t show up. And we know that’s not organic either.

And so I slept with some loaded guns and I was emotionally ready to blow someone’s brains out.

TUCKER CARLSON: How many tenured professors in Ivy League schools have guns at home?

DAVE COLLUM: I don’t know. Just you. I would not. Well, there’s probably more. We have Natural Resources Department and stuff like that, and those guys probably use the resources available.

But the one mistake Cornell made, they made two mistakes. First of all, it turns out the guy was a grifter. The whole thing was faked. And there’s video footage of him telling people he’s going to go get knocked down and people yelling at him for doing that. It turns out the blood that came out of his ear, I’ve talked to physicians. They said it would never come out like that.

There’s pictures of him on the gurney, talking on his cell phone behind the ambulance. The press couldn’t find him in any of the hospitals. He made a lot of money on GoFundMe, so he grifted his. While he was supposedly in a coma. His Twitter feed, which had all the police kind of comments, was being scrubbed very quickly.

And so the turn of the whole thing, in retrospect, was a grift. So I was dead right. Cornell was on a war footing, trying to figure out how to just stop this. There’s graffiti all over the campus and stuff. And so they made two mistakes. One is at no point did someone from Cornell reach out and say, “How are you doing?” Because I got. North Carolina got canceled. And he killed himself. I wasn’t going to kill myself. It was unpleasant. I would admit that.

TUCKER CARLSON: How long had you been at Cornell at that point?

DAVE COLLUM: Oh, that would have been 40 years. 40 years. Four years as an undergrad. So, you know.

TUCKER CARLSON: So you’d spent 44 years at Cornell at that point. So not a newcomer.

Cornell’s Response and Administrative Dynamics

DAVE COLLUM: No. And by the way, the guy who was the provost at the time was a friend of mine. He was. I knew him from the day he got to Cornell. He’s now the president, and it’s useful. So when I knew I was coming here. And I asked a trustee. I’m going to be talking to Tucker. Is there anything you’d like me to somehow get out there. Not that I’m going to be there talking, man, but it would be stupid to miss it. And I sent a quick email to the president, said, “Is there anything?” And he gave me a couple bullets. But they were obvious. They were the obvious things.

And the second mistake they made is eventually they put together some. And the Daily Sun was doing what I called the daily column, where they’d publish an article about what an ass I was. And they’d write an article about the football team and get the NSA. By the way, did we mention Collum’s an ass? That sort of thing.

So they finally wrote a letter denouncing me. And it was signed, interestingly, by the president, who I didn’t really like that much. That president, the provost, who’s a friend of mine, which is ironic. The chief of police, which was super ironic, and a couple other administrators who was missing was one of our deans, the Dean of Arts and Sciences. Who didn’t sign it. He would have been an obvious signer. And he once said to me, “What good is tenure if you don’t have free speech?”

Now, they weren’t trying to hurt me. They were just trying to put out a fire. And it put it out. So to, in that sense, they did the right thing.

TUCKER CARLSON: Did they call and tell you they were going to denounce you before they?

DAVE COLLUM: No. And by the way, I know a number of trustees at this point, and they all said they should have just shut up. So that was a mistake.

More recently, a guy named Rickman, I think it was, you know, made that statement about it being exhilarated that Israel got attacked. And he shouldn’t have said that. That was stupid. But what people don’t understand is that universities are this funny combination of free speech and academic freedom. We’re supposed to foster speech. And that means dumb speech. That means sometimes hostile speech. You know that troll and then the president denounced him. Same president, the one I didn’t really like, the one who denounced me. And she said, “This is only the second time I’ve denounced something a faculty member said.” And I go, “Yeah, I was the first.”

Cornell’s Unique Character

TUCKER CARLSON: What about the pro, the then provost, now the president, who was your friend who denounced you? Did that affect your friendship?

DAVE COLLUM: No, not a bit. They were just trying to put out a fire. And I was ready for the fire to be put out. What helped is several trustees wandered in the president’s office and said, “Don’t even think about doing something stupid here.”

So I had one day. I put out a tweet, talked about how lovely Cornell is. Cornell is a phenomenal institution. So my loyalty to Cornell is tainting my vision. But Cornell is not like the other Ivies. It’s not Harvard, it’s not Princeton. It is. It’s in the middle of this idyllic setting with we have 200 gorges.

The people at Cornell are self selected. They’re the ones who want to live here. If there in your neighborhood, it would be filled with people who love the outdoors. It would be filled with people who like this way of life.

TUCKER CARLSON: Right?

DAVE COLLUM: Cornell has that. And so by the way, it’s ranked number one in a critical category. It has more top 10 ranked departments than any school in the country. And that’s because we have so many different things going on here. So it’s a very special place.

TUCKER CARLSON: So the letter denouncing you was really just Kabuki.

DAVE COLLUM: I mean, it was Kabuki. Yeah. It was tried to just put out the fire and it did. And I paid a price. I lost a consulting gig at Pfizer because of it. Because I was now a Nazi, you know.

TUCKER CARLSON: And wait, Pfizer didn’t stand by you?

DAVE COLLUM: I had consulted there for 20 years. And they were going to Zoom Consulting and that Pfizer doesn’t need a controversial consultant either. So they just cleared the deck as well. So I don’t hold it against them. I hold against them. What I hold against Pfizer is the vaccine. I don’t know. The guys I consult with at Pfizer were great guys. They were trying to get their job done, stuff like that.

TUCKER CARLSON: Why do you, as an organic chemist, why do you hold the vaccine against…

COVID Vaccines and Scientific Concerns

DAVE COLLUM: Them because I think it killed a lot of people and they knew it. I read the… I started writing about COVID right away. You can imagine, right? As scientists I started networking, I started trying to figure it out. I’m in a group called Doctors for COVID Ethics for four years where we had every major anti-vaxxer on the planet go through this.

TUCKER CARLSON: Wait, so you’re a consultant to Pfizer? You’re a pretty famous, one of the most famous organic chemists in the country. So if you say the Pfizer COVID vaccine killed a lot of people, it can’t be dismissed as crank talk.

DAVE COLLUM: Well, it could be because I’m not a vaccine expert. I’m an organic chemist. So I have certain technical skills that probably help me burrow and it’s the genetics majors and undergrad that helps me. I don’t use the biochem or the genetics, but it allows me to sort of read stuff and…

TUCKER CARLSON: But you think it killed a lot of people?

DAVE COLLUM: Well, the Pfizer papers, which are papers written about the clinical trials and the VAERS database show huge number of problems. Right. And so our, the doctor for COVID Ethics, we had every famous anti-vaxxer. One of the first ones I went to, it was Bobby Kennedy and we had you, you name it, you name an anti-vaxxer, you name the Malones, the Ryan Coles, the Brian artists, you can go on and on and on. They all went through this group and we talked about things three or four years became the…

TUCKER CARLSON: Is anyone keeping track of how many Americans were killed by it?

DAVE COLLUM: Well, it’s very hard because first of all every flu death got absorbed into the COVID stats. So flu disappeared, which can’t be true. And if it did, because we were locked down, then how’d we all get COVID? Right?

So there’s now studies coming out from other countries because we have too many people who will look very bad when this data comes out. But the Japanese for example, have come out and said some very strong things about what didn’t happen. The head of the Japanese medical system I think came out and said that you could correlate the number of deaths with the number of shots. Right. And so it’s now that the gag order has been released, scientific studies are making it into the literature and there’s already thousands.

TUCKER CARLSON: Got to be one of the great man-made disasters of our lifetimes.

The Lockdown Impact on Education

DAVE COLLUM: The lockdown too I think you mentioned, or someone did in one of your podcasts about the travesty. Maybe it was Walter, about the travesty of locking down. You show me. You tell me how old a kid is, and I can tell you what subjects he does not or she does not know. So if you were studying trigonometry the year that everything was locked down, you don’t know trigonometry at all. We pretended to teach them. They pretended to learn. Nothing happened.

TUCKER CARLSON: And do you see that now?

DAVE COLLUM: Well, you could see it going through the system. So, for example, our first year grads who were taking organic chemistry went during lockdown. When they showed up, they were very weak in organic chemistry. Yeah, you can see it.

So think of the poor kid who’s five years old trying to learn how to read and write and everything through a mask, right? That. And there’s imprinting periods, right? There’s periods where you learn to read and write or you’re kind of in trouble. And so we… It was disastrous. It was absurd. And the whole thing was done by Fauci.

TUCKER CARLSON: But how could…

Fauci and Birx: Incompetence or Malice?

DAVE COLLUM: And our Zoom group, by the way, had Scott Atlas. And so I asked Scott, I said, “Scott, was it malicious? Fauci and Birx did. What they do is malicious.” And I think it was. I mean, I think there’s evil forces behind those two. But he took a different tact. He said, “You cannot fathom how stupid those two are.” That was his answer. He said, “Fauci never gave a scientific argument. Never.”

And he said, one day. This is astonishing. He said, one day. This is all recorded. So I’m not talking behind his back. This is… There is a recording on the Internet with us. He says one day he walks in with a scientific paper that Atlas had read. And so he’s thinking, whoa, Fauci is actually going to say something scientific. Fauci went to say, “encephalomyelitis.”

Now, if you work at the 7-Eleven, you might stumble on that one, but if you’re headed the entire health organization, you shouldn’t. And he said he botched it so bad, it was unintelligible. And Atlas said, “Come again? What’d you just say?” And Fauci wouldn’t repeat it. He said Birx was yanking off the Internet, making pie charts, having not a clue what it meant. Not a clue.

TUCKER CARLSON: That’s terrifying.

DAVE COLLUM: He didn’t speak up. I don’t think Fauci. Atlas. I think he sat there.

TUCKER CARLSON: Can I ask you to back up just a moment, though? So you’re describing now incompetence, but you alluded earlier to malice. What do you think the dark forces behind Birx and Fauci were?

COVID Origins: North Carolina, Not Wuhan?

DAVE COLLUM: Well, I think they, first of all, they love the fact we’re talking about whether it came out of a lab in Wuhan because that way we’re debating whether to blame the Chinese or not. Right. When in fact, I think it came out of a lab probably in North Carolina. A number of guys have tracked both the disease and the vaccine back years before it showed up on our dinner plate. I think low level of malice would be…

TUCKER CARLSON: Wait, you think it came out of a lab in North Carolina?

DAVE COLLUM: Yeah. Ralph Baric. Yeah, he… You can follow guy named David Martin has followed the patent trail. And an artificial organism can be patented. Not a natural one.

TUCKER CARLSON: Yes.

DAVE COLLUM: And this. You can follow the patent trail on COVID and you can follow vaccine patent trail.

TUCKER CARLSON: And it…

DAVE COLLUM: Watch it get moved around, move from point A to point B.

TUCKER CARLSON: If it was created North Carolina, how did it get to Wuhan?

DAVE COLLUM: Because what was that we were funding. We were funding research in Wuhan because we were not allowed to do gain of function. Sorry. I keep tapping the table.

TUCKER CARLSON: Oh, it’s all right. This is a topic that deserves some tabletop.

DAVE COLLUM: I’ve done podcasts where I have headphones and I have four… boss three Boston terriers soon four. And they snore. I can’t hear them because my headphones are noise dampening. And then I listen to the podcast, this humongous amount of snoring behind me. So I’m aware of background.

TUCKER CARLSON: You didn’t bring the terriers this morning?

DAVE COLLUM: I didn’t bring the terriers, no.

TUCKER CARLSON: So but you. I just want to flush this out a bit. You think it was created or begun in North Carolina, then brought to Wuhan for…

DAVE COLLUM: To be elaborated, to be studied to be… So I think we took everything offshore because gain of function got banned in the US. But I don’t think we banned it. There were something like 36 bioweapons labs in Ukraine.

TUCKER CARLSON: Yeah.

DAVE COLLUM: Of U.S. origin. Yes. So why is Ukraine perfect? Ukraine’s perfect. To run a bioweapons lab, you need first world infrastructure.

TUCKER CARLSON: Yep.

DAVE COLLUM: And third world people to test on. Ukraine’s pretty much got that right. Because Fauci, for example, in the United States, when he had to do clinical trials, when one of his lower rank, they’d go to… They’d go to foster care. They would do clinical trials on foster children.

TUCKER CARLSON: What?

Clinical Trials on Foster Children

DAVE COLLUM: Yeah. You got to read Kennedy’s book. Yeah, he did. He did an estimate. He… They use an estimate 13, 14,000 foster kids to do clinical trials. They said the kids would figure out they’re getting sick and they wouldn’t want to take the meds.

TUCKER CARLSON: That’s so… That’s like nuts.

DAVE COLLUM: So I think Fauci has been doing damage to people and killing people for many, many years. Yeah.

TUCKER CARLSON: But to do clinical trials on foster kids. I thought after the second World War when both the Japanese and the Germans were doing things like that…

DAVE COLLUM: Nuremberg Code.

TUCKER CARLSON: Well, exactly. It was codified there, but in for scientists. But for the rest of the world and certainly American culture, we were taught that testing potentially dangerous drugs on people without their full consent or on the weakest among us, or you know, euthanizing mental patients or whatever, all that was bad, right? I thought that was one of the big lessons of the second World War.

DAVE COLLUM: Well, as we both know that there are no rules.

TUCKER CARLSON: Well, that’s boy, is that the truth.

The Diddy Case: Data Collection Operation?

DAVE COLLUM: There are no rules, right? There are none. There are rules for us, you and me. But there are subjects for which people could be thrown in prison. You know, a great example would be Diddy. So what happened with Diddy? I think what happened with Diddy is Diddy had a bunch of very incriminating tapes. I think, you know, Epstein light.

And I think they arrested him to round it all up. All the data. I think they did it to get all the data away from Diddy because he was being sued in civil court, and the guilty party said, “We got to get it out of there before the civil court gets it.” And so they arrested him. Would they just convict him of nothing? They could have put him away for 20 years based on what he did to Justin Bieber. Right. They didn’t even get him on any of that. So it’s a classic… It’s a classic case.

I know I sound like a nutcase, but you’ve had a lot of nutcases on your shows. I had my brother who’s trying to dial me back his day. They’re going to think you’re a nutcase if you talk about all the things you think about. And I go, “Well, I think that ship has sailed.” You know, as I said to…

TUCKER CARLSON: Well, I thought that was the whole point of academic research, was the, you know, the predicate for it. The basis of it is free thinking.

DAVE COLLUM: Well, but according to Douglas Murray, I’m not supposed to talk about it unless I’m an expert.

TUCKER CARLSON: Well, you are a demonstrable expert in your area, I mean, which is not Diddy.

DAVE COLLUM: It’s not.

TUCKER CARLSON: You’re not a tenured professor of Diddy studies at Cornell.

DAVE COLLUM: We could have it. You know, we do have subjects. And…

TUCKER CARLSON: And so you think the point of arresting Diddy was to shut down inquiry into what Diddy was, get the data.

DAVE COLLUM: Right.

TUCKER CARLSON: Well, that’s clearly the point of the first Jeffrey Epstein arrest.

DAVE COLLUM: Hunter Biden’s laptop.

TUCKER CARLSON: Tell me your view of Hunter Biden’s laptop.

DAVE COLLUM: Well, Sydney… What’s her name? Lawyer. Come on. Sydney Powell.

TUCKER CARLSON: Yep.

The Deep State’s Digital Evolution

DAVE COLLUM: Elite lawyer. Now, down a few notches because she work for Trump, and that always gets you in trouble. She said that if Hunter Biden’s laptop were ever released. No, if Anthony Weiner’s laptop were ever released, the government would fall.

Weiner’s laptop had kill switches in it. I mean, it was filled with crap that wasn’t supposed to be there. We never get to see it. Supposedly, nine cops watch the videos on Weiner’s laptop. They had to keep leaving the room because they couldn’t stand what they were seeing. And all nine are now dead. And there’s names and faces and deadness. Right. They’re real people.

Now you can say, well, maybe they died for other reasons. I go, but it’s still nine cops and you know, it’s like the five cops who died after January 6, right? The four of them were suicides. According to AI, there were about 80 cops really in the thick of things. Four of them died from suicide. I don’t need any more information to wonder what the hell is going on there. That’s one of those standalone observations where I go, that’s not right. The math of that doesn’t work for me.

I’ve got pictures of Ukrainian operatives with the QAnon shaman guy. Think I have the horns in January 6th. At January 6th. What is that all about? I’ve got videos.

TUCKER CARLSON: That seems totally normal.

DAVE COLLUM: Yeah, yeah, totally. I’ve got videos.

TUCKER CARLSON: It’s a National Guard 100 yards away, not doing anything.

The John Sullivan Connection

DAVE COLLUM: I’ve got videos of John Sullivan, right? The guy who was supposedly antifa, but Antifa said, “No, he’s a fed. Don’t talk to him.” Who then filmed Ashley Babbitt getting shot. This guy’s getting around. What’s your image of an antifa person? Lost soul, tattoos everywhere. Right. No meaning in life. Right?

TUCKER CARLSON: Yeah.

DAVE COLLUM: And no.

TUCKER CARLSON: No path forward, really.

DAVE COLLUM: These are societies. If they’re real, that is, if they’re real.

TUCKER CARLSON: But I mean, if you look at the mug shots of Antifa arrest or the people who came to my house, Antifa there, I mean, these are, you know, obviously I disagree. They threaten my family. I don’t like them and all that. But you also feel like these are like one step above homeless. Like these are right. Losers.

DAVE COLLUM: Yeah, Right. And so if he’s antifa, it’s really odd that he was on a nationally ranked cyclist. What I know about nationally ranked anythings is their lives have purpose.

Now there’s a mug shot. Did you follow this Patriot front story? I’m really. This is. Now the helmet’s on the leash to the jungle gym is on the patriot front guys, those guys who’d stop around looking like neo Nazis, who also were buff and had no pot bellies and covered their faces, get arrested and they’re handcuffed with their backpack still on and their megaphone’s still over their shoulders. And then I saw mug shots of them. Not a single tattoo. Yeah, no tattoos. These are Neo Nazis. Not a single tattoo.

TUCKER CARLSON: They didn’t have like Waffen SS lightning bolts on their cheeks because, you know.

DAVE COLLUM: Right. So we are in this big Walter Cornish, we’re in this made for the Internet plot. Walter is great in his description of the. I’ve been tracking the Manjoni story. It’s not the story. There’s something wrong. And I, Walter laid it out. Now what Walter didn’t say is who’s behind him.

The Butler Rally Assassination Attempt

TUCKER CARLSON: That’s obviously the question. I mean you can look at all of these different stories, particularly the acts of violence, which are, because they are acts of violence, are, you know, examined much more closely than any other kind of act. And it like doesn’t, it doesn’t make any sense. I mean the shooting of Trump a year ago in Butler, Pennsylvania.

DAVE COLLUM: Oh, I wrote about that, everything. Do you know what I just read the other day? The guy who shot Thomas Crooks, right? There were bullets flying all over that place. But it was a catastrophically poorly set up defense of Trump. But the guy who shot Thomas Crooks was the same guy who organized the protection of Trump.

And they said, “Oh, you know, he didn’t get convicted of anything and other guys didn’t.” I go, well, so the guy who was in charge of making sure that after the assassination was done, he popped the assassins is somehow not getting prosecuted. Why am I not shocked?

TUCKER CARLSON: So you’re saying he was the Jack Ruby figure here?

DAVE COLLUM: He was a Jack Ruby figure, yes. So what was odd about that story? Well, first of all, all the news agencies were there. This was a totally irrelevant rally in the. An irrelevant place, Butler, Pennsylvania.

And there’s a stranger story there. And again I just pick up these shards and sometimes they fit together into a story and sometimes it’s just put it in your head. Keep it there until you get more detail. There’s a guy sitting behind Trump named Joseph Fusca. Fusca is his last name. I’ve seen him before many times.

He was by the QAnon guys, which are a bunch of whack jobs said to be, you’re not completely. Said to be John F. Kennedy Jr. Waiting to come back and save the world. And I’m going, “Oh, you guys have lost your minds. Finally you’ve really gone.” It doesn’t matter that that’s a total crock. Fusca is this guy. And they said now his name is Fusca and whatever, you know, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But he’s one of. Suppose he’s JFK Jr. In disguise. Fusca was there sitting right behind Trump. I go of all the rallies, there he is.

TUCKER CARLSON: Who is he?

DAVE COLLUM: I don’t know. And what’s really interesting gets shot. Everyone’s reacting and Fusca’s not. And then there’s two pieces of footage.

TUCKER CARLSON: Now when you say you’ve seen him before, you’ve seen him in photographs before.

Down the Rabbit Hole

DAVE COLLUM: Oh, he had been talked about. I’ve dug down some deep rabbit holes and find this guy. So one of the things you discover, you know this as well as anyone. You think you’re going down a rabbit hole and you discover Gobekli Tepe. You get down the rabbit hole and you go, “This thing that, this, there’s an entire ecosystem down here that people don’t know exists.”

Once you ask, “How did Kennedy get killed?” And you go, “Oh boy.” You know that that’s troubling, right? And then Building 7, which you talked with Ron Johnson, who by the way, was in our Doc Zoom group, right when I’m talking, we had everyone. We had everyone. Once you get on one or two of these and you go, “I can’t trust anything.”

And I work in a field where you’re supposed to be able to get the facts and say, “Now here’s an odd story.” A friend of mine’s binding all my annual reviews that I write. I write one blog a year. I’ve been thinking about why and.

TUCKER CARLSON: Can you just pause and describe what that is? That’s really the reason I wanted to talk to you was because your interview is, you know, well known among people who are paying attention. What is it and why do you do it?

The Annual Review

DAVE COLLUM: So I stopped paying 100% attention to chemistry and started on the side looking at markets. When I became a boomer with some wealth and I started paying and I became, I was a tech bull. And then by 98, I realized the markets were in trouble. I’d read enough books, read enough blogs, read enough articles, and so, and then that naturally led me to politics because if you don’t understand politics, you don’t understand economics.

And in around 07, I wrote a. I used to. On this chat board I was at, I’d write a summary at the end of the year. And part of it was to make sure that my fairly extreme views weren’t costing me serious pain and suffering. And instead of getting 200 clicks because this group is about 200 of us talking, it went to like 4,000. I go, “What happened?” I said, “Oh, I put it on my blog.” Someone told me that.

So in 09, I decided to do it. Seriously. I said, “30 years of investing.” So I wrote this thing. I said, “30 years of investing from the cheap seats.” And it went wild, actually. And part of it was because I’d been highly successful as a rank amateur through the 90s as a tech bull. I made 700% on WorldCom and then got out. Right. I made 700% on Dell, Warner Lambert. I thought I was a genius.

And so I had years where I made over a hundred percent without leverage. And then I got out. And I got out due to Y2K, which turns out to be a grift. Yeah, it took me decades to figure that out. I thought I just blew it, but no Silicon Valley selling software and hardware, and I can make that serve you want, but it’s not worth it.

And then I start paying attention to politics. And then I just went deeper and deeper down rabbit holes. Next thing I know, I’m reading about Putin in 2012, trying to understand what’s going on there and stuff like that. So I just kind of naturally go down rabbit holes now.

What? You can’t market a blog worse than writing one a year, right? That’s about as bad as you get. And I don’t charge for it. So there’s that. And then I realized, though, the reason it works for me is if I wrote a blog once a week, most of them would be garbage, because imagine how many blogs I would have written about how Trump and Elon are best friends, right? And now it seems irrelevant. I’d be writing about how Trump and Elon are enemies. And then a month from now, it’ll be irrelevant because they’ll be best friends again, Right?

ALSO READ: Transcript: Why I Exposed Anti-Trump Bias At The BBC – David Chaudoir on TRIGGERnometry Podcast

And so you could. I could not write a weekly block. And so what I do is I. By writing once a year, gives me a long time to think about. So I get the idea. And then I sort of watch. Go. “Oh, look at that. That’s a puzzle piece right there.” So it essentially is book length, 250, 300 pages every fall.

TUCKER CARLSON: You don’t charge for it.

DAVE COLLUM: And I don’t. You also can’t write it in March. That’s not a year in review. So I usually end up with about 700 pages of links and notes. And if I see something we talked before about using trite metaphors, you know, how we both hate it. And but once in a while, I’ll see a way to insult a person. I’ll go, “Oh, I’m saving that right now.” The other reason, it’s really great.

TUCKER CARLSON: Where do people find it?

The Peak Prosperity Year-End Report

DAVE COLLUM: It’s published at Peak Prosperity. And it’s my link. It’s my pin tweet. So it stays up there all year and then until I publish the next one. And it gives me the chance to collect the information, to ponder what’s going on that year.

And some things become irrelevant, so I don’t write about them. Some things are not. Some things become trite. But I think my analysis of the 2016 election, for example, is really good.

The prophetic line, I was watching BET – please don’t get me to explain why I’m watching Black Entertainment Television – and some burly black guy’s talking about Trump, and he says, “Forget the messenger. Listen to the message.” I’m going, holy moly. Turns out he was the head of the New Black Panther Party. I go, Trump just got endorsed by the Black Panthers.

And then I saw Jimmy Brown, the running back, say, “He will be a president of the people.” And all of a sudden I wrote, “It might just be a flicker, but I think the black community’s moving to the right.” And, boy, was that ahead of its time.

And so what I won’t do is write about something that everyone’s writing about.

TUCKER CARLSON: Yeah.

DAVE COLLUM: The other problem I face is that I don’t write about stuff I’m an expert. I write about stuff that I know nothing.

The Ukraine War Analysis

DAVE COLLUM: So when I wrote about, I’ve been following Putin. But when the Ukraine war came, first thing I announced – I bet you noticed it, too – it wasn’t a war. It was a police action. And they weren’t killing people. They were moving troops across the border. They were talking to Ukrainians.

And I kept saying to my wife, “There’s not a war.” And you see some grandmother going, “This is just really terrible,” and going, “That’s not a war. You want to see a war? Look at Baghdad, day one. That’s a war. That’s what a war looks like. You’d see an explosion from 20 miles away, you wouldn’t know what blew up.”

My wife thought I was nuts. I go, “It’s not a war. It’s not a war.” Well, it became a war because, as you and I both know, NATO wanted a war. And so it morphed from being a police action, which I think Putin was trying to throw a fastball past NATO’s chin and saying, “Back off on this whole NATO thing.”

TUCKER CARLSON: Correct.

DAVE COLLUM: And so when I wrote about that, I found about 20 to 40 guys who are trying to get it right, which includes you and includes guys like Max Abramson. Glenn Greenwald, the guy who died. What’s his name? The guy who got killed by the Ukrainians.

TUCKER CARLSON: Gonzalo Lira, American, who was murdered by the Ukrainian government.

DAVE COLLUM: We could have gotten him out with a phone call, and we chose not to.

TUCKER CARLSON: 100 percent.

DAVE COLLUM: Because the narrative was, “Putin’s bad. Ukraine’s a bunch of really nice guys. These super nice guys. It’s a democracy.” What a crock. That was a lie from head to toe. We wanted a war. We still want.

Intelligence Surveillance

DAVE COLLUM: I have intelligence friends, too. Not like you, but I have them. And I was talking to one the other day. I think he likes to talk to me because he can talk to me about these subjects. And in his universe, I’m the only guy he can talk to for which he doesn’t have to worry because everyone else in his world is connected to everyone else in his world. So I think he likes to have real, honest conversations.

One day we’re on the phone, he says, “Do you do signal?” I go, “Yeah.” So we went to signal. He said someone was listening to us.

TUCKER CARLSON: Boy, there’s a lot of that.

DAVE COLLUM: There’s a lot of that.

TUCKER CARLSON: Yeah, I know.

DAVE COLLUM: So there’s always a narrative. There’s always one narrative. And we’re now in an era where you only get to talk about that narrative.

TUCKER CARLSON: And the penalties for straying from the story.

DAVE COLLUM: You get fired are real.

TUCKER CARLSON: Yeah, totally. I mean, there’s been no age in human history where telling the truth, the real truth, is rewarded.

The Las Vegas Shooting Investigation

DAVE COLLUM: So where you first really won me over. So you and I agree that when you were young, you were a punk.

TUCKER CARLSON: Yeah.

DAVE COLLUM: The fact that you’re so proud of the metamorphosis is great. It may have come before this, but where I noticed it was the Las Vegas shootings. Here’s the funny story. They interviewed that night a guy named Mike Cronk.

TUCKER CARLSON: The night of the shooting.

DAVE COLLUM: The night of the shooting.

TUCKER CARLSON: That was 2017, maybe.

DAVE COLLUM: I can’t remember. Yeah. And Mike Cronk told this story. He didn’t look very emotional, which I found a little odd. I, by the way, think all the shootings within an air bar are not what they appear to be. I’ll take it all the way back to Columbine if you want.

But Mike Cronk talks about his friend getting shot three times in the chest from hundreds of yards away. And later a marksman said, “Not possible. Too much spray. A sniper would be required to hit a guy three times.” And the guy was just doing this. And Mike says his friend stuck his fingers in his own bullet holes to stop the bleeding. I’m going, “Now you’re lying. Why is Mike lying right away?” Red flag. Why is Mike lying?

TUCKER CARLSON: And who is he, by the way?

DAVE COLLUM: Well, that’s a great question. So Mike then finishes how they put him on a cart and wheeled them out.

TUCKER CARLSON: May I just ask why?

DAVE COLLUM: I’ll tell you why.

TUCKER CARLSON: Did you know he was lying when he said his friend put his own fingers?

DAVE COLLUM: Because you don’t get shot three times in the chest and provide your own health care. Fair?

TUCKER CARLSON: Fair.

DAVE COLLUM: Right.

Multiple Interviews, Same Witness

DAVE COLLUM: So then like YouTube used to, it rolls over 15 seconds and then it goes to the next YouTube and we’re watching Vegas like you watch 9/11. It was really 500 people. It is the biggest shooting since probably Gettysburg. When was the last time you heard a gun antagonist say, “Remember Vegas, we got to get rid of guns?”

TUCKER CARLSON: Never.

DAVE COLLUM: Never. And you know why? So it rolls to the next interview and it’s Mike Cronk, new network, same guy, he tells the same story. Now he’s looking a little more emotional and his story changes just a little, just a little around the edges.

And then it rolls the next interview and there’s Mike Cronk again. And I go, “Why? You got 22,000 people and why are you interviewing Mike Cronk?”

And then there were oddities that showed up like some lady walking through the crowd saying “You’re all going to die tonight.” And they carted her away and things like that. Weird stuff.

And so I tried to figure out who Mike Cronk was. He’s just some hick from Alaska. After the fact I looked and just picture him holding an elk by the horns that he shot the next day. The head of the police said there’s no way one guy did it. The following day he said one guy did it. Takes a long time to show one guy did it. That’s something you don’t know. There’s a lot of debris before you figure that out.

Multiple Shooters Evidence

DAVE COLLUM: There’s now a documentary called Route 41. So I dug into this. What I noticed is you stayed with this story for about two weeks maybe and you were bringing up, you and Coulter jumped in. Paddock was making money how? Playing video poker. That’s his way of making a living. That’s like saying, “I’m a professional crackhead.”

And then what happens is there was shooting all over the place.

TUCKER CARLSON: There was shooting everywhere in the city.

DAVE COLLUM: That day, in the city that night. And so now there’s – if you don’t believe me, there’s this documentary called Route 41. And they got stuff I didn’t know about, but they also got stuff that I – so it’s kind of an answer key for me to use academic terms.

And if you watch Route 41, you will see there were shooters everywhere. There are cop cameras showing shooters. And remember, the guy got shot in the leg up on the floor where Paddock was.

TUCKER CARLSON: Yes.

The Jesus Campos Story

DAVE COLLUM: Some guy named Jesus or something. Some illegal with two Social Security numbers. Hello. And then afterwards, reporters tried to get to his house. His house was being protected by cars. They had no license plates. And then all of a sudden, he goes to Mexico. And when asked, “Well, where’d he go?” they said, “Well, he was planning a trip to Mexico.”

So when I wrote it, I said, “Oh, by the way, Jesus, when you get back, could you stop in? We’ve got some questions for you.”

And then he comes back and he does one interview on Ellen DeGeneres. And Ellen introduced him, saying, and he’s there with a handler I had already seen. I’m going, “Wait a minute. That guy. I’ve been seeing that guy a lot, that other guy.”

So Jesus is looking at his feet. His name isn’t Jesus, but it’s something like that. Ellen introduces him. “This is the only interview you’re going to do, and you got to get it off your chest.” I’m going, “Oh, here we go.”

And then the handler’s doing all the talking. Jesus is looking at his feet. And then we never hear about Jesus again. Probably he’s in some shallow grave somewhere because he’s too inconvenient.

TUCKER CARLSON: But I tried to interview him at the time.

DAVE COLLUM: Really?

TUCKER CARLSON: Yes.

DAVE COLLUM: Couldn’t get to him.

TUCKER CARLSON: He drove to Mexico from Vegas.

DAVE COLLUM: Right.

TUCKER CARLSON: Two of them.

DAVE COLLUM: Yeah. Probably an escort. Yeah.

TUCKER CARLSON: Then he came back and yeah, I tried my hardest.

DAVE COLLUM: Ellen works for MGM, the company that owns Mandalay.

TUCKER CARLSON: His handler.

DAVE COLLUM: Yeah. No, no. Ellen DeGeneres.

TUCKER CARLSON: Ellen, I’m so sorry.

Audio Evidence of Multiple Shooters

DAVE COLLUM: Yeah. And so buttoning it down now. What you see from Route 41 videos, is there just an enormous amount of chaos? There’s enormous numbers of shooters. Even that night, you were seeing videos from cab drivers saying, “They’re shooting over here. They’re shooting over there.”

And there would be some chaos, but there’s way too much. There’s guys who took audios and said, “Here’s here. Bam, bam, bam, bam, bam. They’re here. That, that, that, that, that, that.” So you could hear multiple guns, the whole thing.

So then what happened? Mike Cronk, I start reading trauma surgeons saying there’s something wrong with the story. If you get hit with, what was AR-15 or something?

TUCKER CARLSON: Yeah.

DAVE COLLUM: And a .308, you’re going to die out there. You’re going to bleed out right there. Even if it doesn’t hit a major artery, it’s going to turn your leg to jello.

TUCKER CARLSON: Three chest wounds from a rifle?

The Vegas Shooting Investigation

DAVE COLLUM: Yeah. So what would he look like? And so then I saw an interview of a young woman and she’s sitting there in a chair in the hospital and they’re interviewing her. I’m going, you look pretty perky.

And then Mike Cronk with the news crew goes in and interviews his friend. Now, first and foremost, we know HIPAA says you ain’t bringing a news crew into a hospital room. Second, we know three shots to the chest, he’d be in the ICU. The only way you’d know he’s alive is that there’d be a beeping on the screen and he’d have hoses coming out of every orifice and he would look dead.

And so they take the news crew and they interview his friend. He’s got a nasal cannula. A nasal cannula. So I’m sitting there thinking, oh, so you’re talking with three holes in your chest. What are you sticking your fingers so the air doesn’t come flying out of your chest holes? And then I notice the screen’s not even plugged in.

Now, what is Mike Cronk now? He’s a state senator from Alaska. In Alaska, I think he’s a state level state senator.

TUCKER CARLSON: What?

DAVE COLLUM: Yeah. Who’s the chief of police. He became governor. Nevada or something. So again, so there’s a guy named John Cullen who did an analysis of the shooting and his conclusion…

TUCKER CARLSON: A relative?

DAVE COLLUM: No, no, no, no, no. This fell different. John worked for Oracle. He’s some on the spectrum code head. He also analyzed the Butler shooting, the audio. So the Butler shooting, he’s an…

TUCKER CARLSON: On the spectrum code head.

DAVE COLLUM: He’s on the spectrum codehead. He sort of bears down and grabs on something a little too firmly, I think. But he brings…

TUCKER CARLSON: On the spectrum cone heads.

DAVE COLLUM: Yeah, I know. And he, there was pretty good evidence that a lot of the shooting was coming from helicopters behind the Mandalay. And he tracked the transponders turning on and off behind the Mandalay. The story was that Mohammed bin Salman was on the top floor, the crown…

TUCKER CARLSON: Crown prince of Saudi Arabia.

The Saudi Connection Theory

DAVE COLLUM: Yes. A guy who lots of people would like to kill. And his theory is that the Saudis tried to flush him out of there, and on the way out, they would cap him. Now, they blew it. If that’s the story, they blew it.

I think the helicopter idea is not bad, but I did a couple podcasts with John, and I said, “John, but what about all the shooting on the ground?” And John was kind of dismissive. I go, “You can’t dismiss it. You can’t let that stuff go. Your model’s got to include that.”

But it occurred a year later. Muhammad, remember when Khashoggi got killed? What was his name? Jamal Khashoggi. Now, Adnan Khashoggi is one of the most famous CIA guys on the planet. Jamal Khashoggi is one who got diced up and fed to the camels.

TUCKER CARLSON: Yes.

DAVE COLLUM: Now he’s a New York Times reporter. I think he was also CIA.

TUCKER CARLSON: Washington Post columnist. Yeah. And he was killed in the embassy in Istanbul, I believe.

DAVE COLLUM: Okay. Supposedly, on the anniversary of the Vegas shootings, supposedly Muhammad bin Salman had a party, locked the doors, and showed a video of him getting sliced up and said to the royal sitting in the room, “Don’t even think about it.”

Now, when I wrote about Khashoggi, everyone was having a cow over Khashoggi when he got killed. I’m going, we’re killing tens of thousands of Yemenis. We killed 5 million people in the Middle East directly and indirectly due to our post-9/11 responses. And I called him ODK. One dead Khashoggi. I said, it is insane to worry about one dead guy in a region of the world where people die for no reason all the time.

TUCKER CARLSON: Who was at war with his own government, the Saudi government. I mean, I’m obviously not for vivisecting people, but I also think there’s a scale of evil. And starving kids is worse than what happened to Khashoggi. I agree with you.

DAVE COLLUM: So you were the only mainstream guy who I watched steadily on the story, staying with the Vegas shootings, noting that there’s something wrong.

TUCKER CARLSON: We got very hassled by law enforcement, which was, you know, I worked at Fox News, obviously at the time. And big supporters of law enforcement. I’ve always been a big supporter of law enforcement. We’ve never gotten hassled anywhere. Just the opposite. “Oh, you work for Fox News. Oh, my gosh, of course. Slow down.”

DAVE COLLUM: Official law enforcement is what got…

TUCKER CARLSON: I mean, they blocked our camera position. They were totally opposed to us doing that. I’ve never had that experience.

The Uvalde Shooting Inconsistencies

DAVE COLLUM: So let’s stand the shootings just briefly. Uvalde. There’s problems all over that shooting. Remember that shooting in Texas where the…

TUCKER CARLSON: Guy got very new. The mayor? Yes.

DAVE COLLUM: There’s problems all over the place because first of all, there’s something like 800 law enforcement guys within reach of the damn thing. And there’s a ton of like 5,000 people. And then they didn’t go in for 78 minutes or something.

I go, remember, excuse me, you show me 10 cops. Eight of them have kids by a lot. Right now I’m reading a book called “The Moral Animal.” It’s about human behavior. And out of those eight, eight would have gone in. I don’t care what you say, I’m going in. Of course. You give me a soccer mom, she’s going in.

And then there was the mom who did go in and her story was incoherent. Her story. She came out and she said this and then she said this, and it was not consistent. And I’m going, that’s just a narrative thrown on top of it.

Understanding Kayfabe in Politics

TUCKER CARLSON: So what are we looking at here? So kayfabe, what does that mean?

DAVE COLLUM: Kayfabe is something Eric Weinstein wrote about. He’s asked to write an essay with a bunch of other scholarly types and he said that politics was kayfabe, it was professional wrestling. And there’s all these layers, there’s all these tricks. It’s way more sophisticated than people think.

The way you get, the way you engage the audience and you have some reality and some non-reality and things change. And he talked about politics being kayfabe. I don’t think anything you see can be interpreted literally at face value.

TUCKER CARLSON: Now, what would be the purpose, however?

The Digital Evolution of Control

DAVE COLLUM: Well, as I was telling you, a friend’s binding all my annual reviews and I will probably make a thousand dollars off this. I mean, this is not getting rich. I’m paid probably 0.001 cents per hour for this task.

I had to go back. I’ve been proofing the drafts from previous years and what I noticed about 2013, 14, 15, is something’s changed and what’s changed is you could get facts and you felt like you were getting, and the stories would break and they would stay that way and they wouldn’t be shifting around. And you could say, “Okay, here’s what happened in here, here, and this piece fits in here.” And now you can’t.

Now it’s like, and we talked about using tribe metaphors. Here’s one. But I really like it. It’s like when your GPS starts randomly rerouting you and our GPS just keeps random rerouting. I go, “I’m not taking that right turn now.” You know, so you just boot the GPS and you break out your gazetteer and you figure out where you’re going. And so we, our GPS is rerouting us constantly.

And one of your guests, Mike Benz, who I occasionally chat with briefly, who’s very impressive and as I’ve said, I don’t know everything about him and I don’t mean just in a casual way. I think he’s, I think there’s a complex story there. But right now he’s saying the right stuff.

He gave a talk one day where he talked about how around 2013, the so-called deep state, which is a term, I’ve tried to figure out where it came from. And I think the guy gets the most credit is kind of Peter Dale Scott, who wrote about drug trafficking, Berkeley professor, and he called it deep politics. But I think it predates that. But that’s where I get it from.

He said the deep state realized they were losing control of the narrative. They had underestimated the Internet and social media.

TUCKER CARLSON: Exactly.

DAVE COLLUM: And as a consequence, they had to get a hold of it completely. And so now this is where we’re at now. We thought Trump was going to save us. We thought Elon was going to save us. My Twitter feed is a dumpster fire.

So instead of taking away data, they provide excess noise. So now, so now instead of trying to suppress the signal, you just increase the noise.

TUCKER CARLSON: I think that’s very deep and I think it points to what’s happening. I think it’s clearly true.

DAVE COLLUM: So what is the fact. That was the title, last year’s write up. “What is the fact that…”

TUCKER CARLSON: Yeah, it’s impossible. You can’t actually control the, and you can’t restrict the flow of information across the Internet.

DAVE COLLUM: They throw debris out there. It’s like the pilots who throw the debris out the back of the plane so that the guided missiles don’t know what to do.

TUCKER CARLSON: Of course. Exactly.

DAVE COLLUM: And they also throw out debris so that then they can prove that it’s not true. So you feel like an idiot.

The QAnon Phenomenon

TUCKER CARLSON: QAnon was clearly that.

DAVE COLLUM: QAnon? Yeah. QAnon.

TUCKER CARLSON: What was QAnon?

DAVE COLLUM: I don’t know.

TUCKER CARLSON: I don’t either.

DAVE COLLUM: I avoid, you know, I’d be listening to something and it would have useful information and all of a sudden then it would show the hole and “here’s Trump and his generals are going to save the world.”

TUCKER CARLSON: No, I agree, but the interesting. I never knew anything about QAnon. I never paid any attention at all. I have a good friend who I really admire is much smarter than I am, who, because he is smarter than I am, took like a year to look into QAnon.

DAVE COLLUM: What do you got?

TUCKER CARLSON: I don’t fully understand it, but here’s what I understand is that some of the predictions in QAnon came true. I mean, it’s a sophisticated thing. It’s not just…

DAVE COLLUM: I think it’s a bunch of ex-spooks for sure.

TUCKER CARLSON: It’s not a bunch of college kids on 4chan or whatever they claim it was.

DAVE COLLUM: These are guys who are probably pissed that the system went bad.

TUCKER CARLSON: What was the point of it? And it’s unclear who’s behind it. I have some theories, but people I know actually, but I don’t know if they’re true. But what is obvious to me is that it was a control mechanism trying to siphon off some of that energy and move it in a less dangerous direction.

DAVE COLLUM: Right. Focus on Wuhan. Focus on the lab in Wuhan. That’s siphoning.

TUCKER CARLSON: It’s all American politics. Like, have a race war, leave us alone as we loot your country.

DAVE COLLUM: That’s right. There’s a meme out there, there’s a joke where the king and his right hand man, his chief of staff are looking at the angry townspeople. And some have pitchforks and some have torches. And the king says, “Don’t you have to worry. You just convince the guys with the pitchforks are the enemies of the guys with the torches.”

The Wuhan Distraction

TUCKER CARLSON: So you said that a couple times. Focus on Wuhan. I’ve fallen for that squirrel. Wuhan thing.

DAVE COLLUM: Squirrel. Why a blind nut finds a squirrel that’s funny.

TUCKER CARLSON: That’s a. I’m stealing that.

DAVE COLLUM: That’s an original. I never know if I heard it and forgot where I got it, but that’s an original.

TUCKER CARLSON: It’s the squirrel. What is that? Distraction.

DAVE COLLUM: I think it is great. You put me in an asylum overnight.

TUCKER CARLSON: In an asylum overnight?

DAVE COLLUM: Yeah. My hotel’s a former asylum.

TUCKER CARLSON: Is it really?

DAVE COLLUM: Yeah. You didn’t ask.

TUCKER CARLSON: No.

DAVE COLLUM: Oh yeah, it’s a former asylum, I said. “You finally got it right.”

TUCKER CARLSON: Well, I think there’s wisdom here.

DAVE COLLUM: There is wisdom here.

TUCKER CARLSON: What are they distracting us from by having us focus on Wuhan?

The Truth About Government Grift and Historical Narratives

DAVE COLLUM: Well, huge amounts of grift. You had. You interviewed Catherine Austin Fitts.

TUCKER CARLSON: Yes.

DAVE COLLUM: I’ve been blessed.

TUCKER CARLSON: This smart woman.

DAVE COLLUM: So I come out of nowhere. I have no credentials beyond those that I can create. Right. And I think one of the ways you created is by being truthful.

TUCKER CARLSON: Yes.

DAVE COLLUM: And I know truth is everything to you.

TUCKER CARLSON: I try to make it that.

DAVE COLLUM: And actually in this book, “The Moral Animal,” they say the reason we self delude is so that you can be truthful and deceive your opponent. That’s what self delusion is.

TUCKER CARLSON: Yes.

DAVE COLLUM: And I practiced a lot of that. I’ve been adopted by some people who didn’t have to adopt me. And so for example, I’m tight with Steve Hanke, who’s a famous economist. And Catherine has been very supportive. And there’s several dozens who somehow have decided that I’m worth their time and help me. And so they’re useful to chat with. They’re useful to.

But Catherine’s story. And a lot of people think Catherine’s nuts. Right. But she talks about the huge amount of resources that have been siphoned off in the tens of trillions of dollars of resources that have been.

TUCKER CARLSON: I know Catherine Fitts.

DAVE COLLUM: That’s.

TUCKER CARLSON: You can disagree with her. She’s not nuts. That’s not true.

DAVE COLLUM: She’s not what?

TUCKER CARLSON: Nuts.

DAVE COLLUM: Oh, no, I don’t think she is nuts. That’s right.

TUCKER CARLSON: No, no, no. She’s a grounded person.

DAVE COLLUM: She could have things wrong. Totally different. And I had a friend, another friend who I think is phenomenal, tell me that she’s nuts and don’t get near her. And I said no, I don’t think so. And we all can get sucked down into the rabbit hole to the point you can get out too. There are days where I wish, why don’t you just go play golf?

TUCKER CARLSON: Yeah.

The Importance of Writing and Critical Thinking

DAVE COLLUM: Right now I’m on a. My house is hanging off 100 foot cliff looking west over Cayuga Lake. I can literally throw rotten fruit off my deck and drop it down into the drink from. I’ll show you photos afterwards. The view is such that if there are places in the country where the view would cost $20 million. Not Ithaca, of course. And if people come and visit, they should. It’s beautiful. I can’t remember why I said that.

TUCKER CARLSON: That’s probably saying that people dismiss.

DAVE COLLUM: You.

TUCKER CARLSON: Know, the few who are just committed to pursuing truth no matter what, as crazy. And you gave Catherine Austin Fitts as an example. And you said you can actually go crazy.

DAVE COLLUM: Oh yeah.

TUCKER CARLSON: By looking too carefully into.

DAVE COLLUM: The other day on a credit card. Was talking to lady and it kept sending me in these loops and she finally straightened out. But what happens when the code is being written by computer? So there’s no human who understands the code. So the system will be very brittle, be very unforgiving.

Forget about whether it’s used nefariously. Forget about whether someone uses it as an authoritarian tool, which is very real possibility. And I worry about that a lot. Just the fact that no one will know who’s driving the cab, ever on anything.

And also now you’re taking out the intellectual part. So when I write. When you write. When I write a scientific paper, the project’s not done until I’ve written it, because that’s where you lay it out. And if you can’t put it on paper coherently with no internal contradictions, you’re not done.

TUCKER CARLSON: You’re not done understanding it.

DAVE COLLUM: You’re not done understanding the writing is understanding.

TUCKER CARLSON: So I think people who don’t write for a living or aren’t forced to write regularly don’t understand. This concept is a hard one. But it’s through writing, or I would also say speaking, you know, public speaking, that putting concepts into words makes the concepts intelligible to the person who’s articulating them. You don’t really understand something until you’ve been forced to write about it.

DAVE COLLUM: It’s like a comedy shop. You know, the great comedians will go down to the cheapo comedy shops to practice, to figure out what works, what doesn’t work. Right. And then they go on Johnny Carson.

TUCKER CARLSON: Exactly. And so when there’s no writing, there’s no thinking.

The Maui Fires and Missing Children

DAVE COLLUM: Right. So I read about Maui, the fires. I wrote about that very clearly. A land grab. You may remember how many kids died. No, do you remember the USA article said 750 kids are missing.

TUCKER CARLSON: Yep.

DAVE COLLUM: Right. Okay. When a kid’s missing after something like that, they’re dead, but they’re not missing, they’re dead. Maybe a couple found their way, someone drove them out of town, but they’re dead.

Try to find anywhere a statement about dead kids. Now you can’t find it. You go to Wikipedia, you search the word child, you search the word, you read it. There’s no mention of dead children. There were 750 kids missing according to USA Today.

Then all of a sudden the governor saying, “Well, you know, we’re worried about land speculators, so we’re going to buy the land up so that the speculators can’t get it.” And I go, so you can sell it to your friends. Right. Is it possible maybe they mowed down Lahaina because they want to put up resorts and things. Right.

But what also was out there was this idea of directed energy weapons starting the fires. Now I think that was a dead end. I don’t think directed energy weapons were used. Even though there’s a, they’re called DEWs. Even though there’s a DEW facility on Maui, you don’t need that. And there were videos. I go, I think those are fake. So I found nothing. But I used it as an excuse to read up on DEWs. And I was reading Rand reports from 40 years ago.

TUCKER CARLSON: And what is a directed energy weapon?

Energy Weapons and Testing Grounds

DAVE COLLUM: It’s basically Star Wars. And so it’s Reagan Star Wars. And everyone said, “Oh, that’s just science fiction.” I go, “Well, Gorbachev seemed to want to get rid of them every chance he got.” So Gorbachev took him very seriously.

So it turns out what you do is you put something in space, then it shoots some sort of energy, guided energy down to the surface of the earth. And it can, the different frequencies have different efficacies. And so some are really good at hitting a target, some broaden out. Like microwaves are different than some sort of ultraviolet laser. I’m not very good at this stuff, but.

And then I started reading about how what they do is they use a pulse of one laser to punch a hole through the atmosphere and then the second pulse would go through that hole. It’s really clever stuff. This is 40 year old RAND reports. What do they have behind the paywall 40 years later?

Now the best, I think evidence of a DEW being used. And I was reading about fires in different places where trees were burning that shouldn’t have burned and cars that. There were, there’s, I wrote about it if someone wants to go read it. That was a couple years ago. The best evidence of a DEW. So if you’ve got these, you got to test them. Right. It’s like why you need bioweapons labs in Ukraine. You got to test them. You can’t use lab rats.

You look at the Quebec fires. Satellite imagery of the Quebec fires. Very mysterious. About 26 fires started simultaneously. How do you know some? Well, if a fire starts and then another one starts, it’ll be downwind, so you’ll see. It’ll look like the Hawaiian Islands. Right?

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TUCKER CARLSON: Right.

DAVE COLLUM: Okay. Boom. All at once. 26 fires in a crudely buckshot pattern. There was 350 miles in diameter. Boy, that’s a determined arsonist. Or at least 26 of them.

TUCKER CARLSON: Yeah.

DAVE COLLUM: With, in the middle of nowhere.

TUCKER CARLSON: Yeah. With helicopter. I mean there are no roads, so.

DAVE COLLUM: But no, a cell phone can’t do it. You know, nothing. Right. They’re in the middle of nowhere and all of a sudden simultaneously. And I’m going, “Okay, that probably was them testing out their weapons.” And we have a lot of wars to test weapons. Right.

The Information Control Theory

TUCKER CARLSON: So your basic overarching theory is around 2014-15 it became clear to the people running the world that you can’t keep information under wraps anymore because the Internet is impossible to control. And so you had to flood people’s brains with extraneous and misleading information.

DAVE COLLUM: And shut down people. They shut. They booted the President of the United States off Twitter. Yeah. How is that possible?

TUCKER CARLSON: Because he was a racist. That’s what they said. That’s what they told me. He was racist.

DAVE COLLUM: Right. You know, so many, something like 70,000 got booted off Twitter. My sister in law who’s, she had a Twitter feed, she can’t get it back. You know that somehow I don’t know.

TUCKER CARLSON: What was her crime?

DAVE COLLUM: She must have said something favorable by Trump or something, I don’t know.

TUCKER CARLSON: So, but the control of information, the shaping of people’s understandings of the world around them, that’s the whole game right there.

DAVE COLLUM: So I used to say the Internet was democracy’s greatest hope and worst enemy and that it was a battle. I don’t think we’re going to win it. And the reason I don’t is because it’s too powerful. And so whoever has control of it will then have that power. So it’s only a battle for who gets control of it.

TUCKER CARLSON: Control of information.

DAVE COLLUM: Control the digital world. Yeah.

Silencing Dissent

TUCKER CARLSON: So if you see voices out there dissenting from.

DAVE COLLUM: I hear voices.

TUCKER CARLSON: If you see or hear voices that are dissenting from the official storyline, they’re going to have to be silenced or eliminated.

DAVE COLLUM: I mean, well, look at what happened. Look at the ambushes that occurred when Thomas Massie, who I think is great. Rand Paul, who I think has matured immensely, and who was the third Republican who stepped away from the narrative. And all of a sudden the attacks were relentless. Now, that could just be Trump being Trump.

TUCKER CARLSON: It wasn’t just Trump attacking them, though.

DAVE COLLUM: I know.

TUCKER CARLSON: Marjorie.

DAVE COLLUM: Marjorie Taylor Greene, who, by the way, is nowhere near as stupid. I mean, she’s not even stupid.

TUCKER CARLSON: Oh, I know.

DAVE COLLUM: She ran a construction company.

TUCKER CARLSON: Oh, I know. And her. She just doesn’t have whatever that normal. The fear that controls people in D.C. we’re like, “I can’t.”

DAVE COLLUM: But how do you turn on Thomas Massie? Marjorie Taylor Greene at least played a role in Kayfabe that you can imagine drawing fire. Massie’s this guy, you know, who built his own house and fixes his own car. And he’s an engineer. He’s an archetype of who we ought to be as a country.

TUCKER CARLSON: As a country.

DAVE COLLUM: As a country.

TUCKER CARLSON: I so vehemently agree they turned on him. Yeah, well, I haven’t.

DAVE COLLUM: We know why they turned on.

TUCKER CARLSON: Texted with him this morning. No, I mean, you know, you could say I disagree with Thomas Massie, but if you think Thomas Massie is the problem, you are the problem. I couldn’t agree more. I couldn’t agree more. Just because, first of all, he’s a decent man, which always matters to me, and I think it should matter to all of us.

DAVE COLLUM: I.

TUCKER CARLSON: You could, you know, give Thomas Massie a routing number, and he’s not going to take a dollar. He’s just not.

DAVE COLLUM: Not.

TUCKER CARLSON: He’s not going to.

DAVE COLLUM: He’s the only one without a handler.

TUCKER CARLSON: That’s true. And I think we should admire that. Even if you think that all members of Congress should be required to have handlers. It’s okay to live in a world where one doesn’t. That’s what I find.

DAVE COLLUM: So. Right. It’s not okay to live in a world where everyone else does.

The Religious Quality of Control

TUCKER CARLSON: No, I agree with you, but I just find what’s so interesting. And there’s a religious quality to all of these conversations that I find so striking. It’s like it’s okay if you have, you know, all this power, all this money, if you’re running the US Government or whoever you are, with a lot of power, you know, you can afford to have some percentage of the population not play along. You don’t need. It doesn’t need to be an Albanian election in 1982. Like, you can have some dissent.

DAVE COLLUM: Unless you’re an authoritarian state.

TUCKER CARLSON: I guess that’s right. I mean, but even in an effective authoritarian state in Saudi Arabia, in the Emirates, these are, you know, basically theocracies. They don’t. They don’t agree with that, but they, you know, these are Islamic states. Under Sharia law, you can kind of dissent.

DAVE COLLUM: It’s okay.

TUCKER CARLSON: You just can’t do anything really threatening, of course.

DAVE COLLUM: Right.

TUCKER CARLSON: But more dissent is allowed in Abu Dhabi than in D.C. I just find that just absolutely incredible. Like, what is this? Why. Why can’t they allow Thomas Massie to just, like, have his own Massie views?

DAVE COLLUM: He’s a vote.

TUCKER CARLSON: He’s a vote.

DAVE COLLUM: Okay. But the. Got.

TUCKER CARLSON: You got hundreds of others. Like, I. I just think it’s weird. There’s this desire to make sure that nobody sings off the song sheet. Like, and that person must be killed. And I. Wow. I just. I don’t enforce that among my own children.

DAVE COLLUM: So.

TUCKER CARLSON: Do you know what I’m talking about?

DAVE COLLUM: Yeah, no, I absolutely know about. We used to allow opposing views. Yeah.

TUCKER CARLSON: I mean, look, if someone is really a threat to the system, well, I think that should be allowed personally because the people only don’t.

DAVE COLLUM: Depends on in what way. But.

TUCKER CARLSON: Yes, in what way. I have a very wide strike zone for that. But I get it. If the system is like, “I’m sorry, you’re an actual threat, we have to kill you.” Okay. Systems exist to preserve themselves. I understand that. What I really can’t even comprehend is someone out there, in a place I’ve never been and never will go among 350 million people, is making a noise that I disagree with. I must crush it.

DAVE COLLUM: Him.

TUCKER CARLSON: What is that? That’s just weird to me. Why are you going to the effort to shut down all dissent?

DAVE COLLUM: I don’t know. But.

TUCKER CARLSON: But it’s. That’s. That’s.

DAVE COLLUM: That’s what’s happening. Oh, I know. Not to swing the topic yet again. Let me get back to the universities. People don’t understand universities. There are people who do, obviously, but they’re. The average person doesn’t. So people are going to say, “I’m talking my book.” Let me take this opportunity with your gargantuan following to explain how universities work so that.

Universities and Academic Freedom

TUCKER CARLSON: Well, let me just say before you begin that I’m amazed by the broadness of your thinking. Right or wrong, you’re certainly thinking thoughts that most people don’t allow themselves to think. And you are a tenured professor at an Ivy League college, and you still have your job, apparently. So that does say something.

DAVE COLLUM: It would be hard to fire me, apparently. I mean, part of the problem. One of the reasons I got canceled is because I twice fought unionizations.

TUCKER CARLSON: Yeah.

DAVE COLLUM: And the first time was at the request of the dean of faculty. Second time was at the request of the provost of late night phone call. “You got to fight this. You got to put together a team.” And that’s the now president. And so if they fired me, that group was sort of behind my cancellation. So firing me would have been hard because, you know, witness number one would be, “Did you ask Collum to fight the unions? And did that lead to, you know, them canceling him and stuff like that?”

I really think Cornell’s great. I think most universities are fine. We needed a fastball past our chin. Great example. Claudine Gay shouldn’t be president of Harvard, shouldn’t be on the faculty, shouldn’t have a PhD. In my opinion, that is the sign of the rot that has gotten into the universities. But then it’s still an exceptional rot. So I don’t see people at Cornell that look like Claudine Gay to me.

And if you actually look in the whole DEI thing, you say, “Well, universities are super duper DEI.” And I go, “You guys are forgetting that a year ago or two years ago, if you weren’t DEI, you got destroyed.” The whole system was geared up to make sure you paid dearly if you weren’t DEI. So you had to have your deans of diversity. And the world was demanding it.

And don’t forget, this is a world where men were competing in women’s sports. They still kind of are, but at least it’s now starting to dissipate. And that was considered totally normal and was considered rational. And if you fought it, you get fired and things like that. So the universities were simply responding now. They’d gotten way left wing.

My colleagues were all hired based on their skills. Guaranteed. I would have. I’d remember a case if it was a DEI hire. I remember a case because I would have fought it. I screamed, I don’t shut up on things like that. We try to find the best person in the world to hire. And we go for that person if we can. And we do pretty well. And so if you were on a campus, you wouldn’t see what we’re hearing about. I don’t think. You’d walk around the camp, you go, “Everything just looks pretty normal.”

TUCKER CARLSON: The hardest of the hard sciences, though. Do you think that that’s the problem?

The Cost of Education and Academic Reform

DAVE COLLUM: If I walked over the Arch squad, I’d see some Looney Tunes. Right, right. And we’re now to start. The cost of an education is too high to waste it. And so if you’re going to spend $300,000, you can’t go into a career that you make $40,000 or that you make $25,000 because you’re a barista. Yeah, right. It’s just no longer even viable. So you have to.

So colleges. If I were president of Cornell, I’d put together an elite committee of people I absolutely trusted and say, “You guys are in charge of trying to figure out where we should be in 20 years and how to get there.” Because we can’t be here in 20 years. It’s not going to work.

Arts and sciences and this whole idea of this broadly based education was formed prior to the cost and was formed when wealthy people went to college. So you could be frivolous if you wanted and getting a sheepskin could get you onto Wall Street and be the lead analyst for all the do Henry Blodgett style. Right. Those days are gone. And so colleges are going to have to tighten up.

Academic Research and Federal Funding

But my colleagues are, I would say on average, out of 20, out of 30 colleagues, I’ll say maybe I think 27 of them are left of center. And I can’t explain why now when I talk to them, totally rational people, totally reasonable people.

The way it works as a chemist is you are an entrepreneur. You get a job, they give you startup money to get started. You have to then go, RA funding rates are ballpark. Maybe 15% of the people get funded. By the way, the ones who never get funded, they’ve dropped off. So that 15% is people still trying. And I’m going to brag, I put 21 in a row successfully. Do the math on that. That’s improbable.

But my colleagues are constantly battling. They’re putting together this program, they’re running research groups of anywhere from 5 to 30. No one pays for that. They raise the money from the federal system. You say, “Well, the Fed shouldn’t pay the money.” Well, years and years ago, we decided the way to run a research program in the United States was through universities and federal grants, was a Sputnik thing. There’s other ways to do it, but we set up that system.

And if you look at all the startup companies around the country and all the pharmaceutical agents, they all, you can trace their origins back to academic labs. Pfizer discovers far fewer drugs than they buy from some small startup that came out of some biochemistry department or some medical school or something. And so the academic research area is the foundation level starting point.

I have a number of friends who are worth a fortune because they patented something. And that’s actually good because it would be neutered and not even usable by the free market if it didn’t have the patent coverage. And so it made sense. So it puts an incentive system in there, right? Cornell gets some, the investigator gets some, the department gets some, and the world gets a new drug. It’s not a crazy system. Now, there’s other ways to do it, but that’s not how we do it. And we produce the best science, so it works.

Trump’s Impact on Academic Funding

Now, the problem is that Trump threw a fastball past our chin, and we deserved it. We absolutely deserved it. So he’s saying, “Look, get rid of the guys in sports,” which Penn did with Leah Thomas. You know, get rid of the DEI, which a lot of schools are trying to, and at the same time ducking, you know, naming them by different things. But the fastball was needed. The problem is he, as you said at breakfast, it was the social stuff that Trump was going after. But you don’t go after the social stuff with social stuff. You go after it by going after the money.

TUCKER CARLSON: Right?

DAVE COLLUM: So Harvard’s locked down for $9 billion of research funds. And my understanding is it’s still locked down. Cornell’s locked down for over a billion.

TUCKER CARLSON: Harvard was getting $9 billion from the feds for research of various research. And it’s on hold.

DAVE COLLUM: Hold. And it’s on hold. And the word cancel versus frozen, I was trying to figure it out. Columbia, I thought it was a cancel. Columbia got crushed, and then Columbia put out a memo that said canceled. Now, I don’t know if that’s because it’s been canceled, but my understanding is the money’s not flowing.

Now, the problem is, is a trustee said to me, “You know, if this goes into 2026, we’re in a world of trouble.” I said, “If this goes into August, we’re in a world of trouble.” I’ve got colleagues with 15 person research groups that are all funded by these federal grants. And they do good science. They do good science. There’s probably some crap in the humanities, but they suck about $10,000 of grant money out of the system to do that stupid thing. I don’t know, and I don’t even know if it’s stupid. And there’s no Mac.

So now if you’re getting your PhD, there’s no one who can give you a postdoc. That’s the next step. That step’s broken. And so the system right now is online, it’s flatlined. And I really wish they gotten rid of USAID. And you told me they did, they just moved it. Well, that’s a problem. But I think the academic research system was working.

University Endowments and Tax Issues

TUCKER CARLSON: I think part of the problem from a civilian perspective are the endowments.

DAVE COLLUM: Now let me explain the endowments.

TUCKER CARLSON: So for. I’m going to just complete the thought by saying it’s the no tax part that I think drives some of us to want to sort of storm the campus with guns because that’s, you know, everyone’s getting, I mean, the private equity guys are taking all their income as interest, so they’re paying half the rate. But for a normal person, you know, you’re paying over half of everything you make to the government and it’s being spent on nonsense where given to Ukraine. And then there are these giant hedge funds called university endowments that aren’t paying any taxes. And I think that can really drive people bonkers, including me.

DAVE COLLUM: Well, I understand there are some subtleties of endowments. Again, it’s not to say that you’re not 100% correct, but I at least want to say to your listeners so they understand what they’re complaining about.

First and foremost, there supposedly are rules where the universities are not supposed to be competing with the private sector. So, and they get around those. But if Cornell builds housing, is making money off the housing in town, that kind of breaks the rule, right? But they build dorms and you know, things like that. So you’re right about that.

The endowments are a funny game, first and foremost. I looked this up last week. Approximately 50% of all endowment spin off. So it spins off at revenue. And Harvard’s has been collecting since 1656. 50% of the money spun off goes to financial aid, which means making college more affordable. Admittedly not very affordable for a lot of people, but making it more affordable. So half of the money being spun off is going right back to education of the students.

Another 20% qualifies for academic programs, which means paying for things that would have to be paid for or we’d have to do without. And I would argue we got bloated. So there’s things we should have done without. If you looked at the dining program now compared to what they have now, it’s really unbelievable.

TUCKER CARLSON: I’m not against good food, against DEI administrators and administrators in general. A college should be focused on professors.

DAVE COLLUM: I agree with that. And that’s where we should have gotten the fastball past.

TUCKER CARLSON: Any of these schools have more tenure professors than they do administrators? I don’t think so.

Administrative Bloat and DEI Programs

DAVE COLLUM: The administrative bloat is a combination of all the problems that drive you nuts and the fact that the interactions between the university and the feds and the states has gotten more complicated. Right. So for example, you need way more bean counters and grant writers and. Well, no, grant writers are me. Okay. They’re us. The grants are being written by the faculty.

Again, the DEI, Michigan’s DEI payroll was $93 million last time I read about it. That’s a lot of money. Right. But just when you get a federal grant, there’s so many things you have to do. Used to. They ran it out of a shoe box. “Here’s your check.” You know, that’s what. It’s no longer like that you now it reached the absurd point where you’re supposed to make statements about how you’re going to save the whales and donate organs to Guatemalan orphans and things like that. And I think Trump’s going to successfully get a lot of that crap out of there. He would save Cornell a fortune if he could get rid of all of the DEI.

Now I do think the original idea of affirmative action makes sense. It basically said go find people who are being missed. Look into the dusty corners where you normally don’t look and see if you find talent. Right. There’s a famous chemist named Henry Gilman.

The SAT and Merit-Based Testing

TUCKER CARLSON: I thought the SAT was designed to do that.

DAVE COLLUM: No, the. It turns out the SAT has problems now. And the reason it has problems is because when Kaplan got a hold of the and they for profit it coach kids on how to do well. And then they made it such that the SAT could be taking three times and you get to use only the one you like. All of a sudden the cost of maximizing your score on the SAT became prohibitive. And so it’s a legitimate argument that someone coming out of the hood.

TUCKER CARLSON: Right.

DAVE COLLUM: Cannot take the Kaplan course and take the SAT three. But you shouldn’t get rid of it. You should just be aware of what it’s telling you.

TUCKER CARLSON: Would it be possible to design a corruption free screen for intelligence and you know, initiative.

DAVE COLLUM: Shut up, racist.

TUCKER CARLSON: No, but I mean, so the idea was that the SAT was supposed to democratize education. We’re just going to locate it and.

DAVE COLLUM: Discover kids who’ve got double eight hundreds who you wouldn’t have spotted.

TUCKER CARLSON: Exactly.

DAVE COLLUM: Right.

TUCKER CARLSON: And actually have a child who got an 800 couldn’t get into college. So clearly it’s like the system has gotten so corrupt. So, but the idea in Kaplan, you said corrupted it as well.

DAVE COLLUM: Well, it kind of corrupted the SAT.

TUCKER CARLSON: Right, that’s what I’m saying.

DAVE COLLUM: So now the GRE, which is the next level, is nowhere near as corrupted because by then the students don’t give a damn. They do. “I’ll take the GRE” and they. So it’s more legit.

TUCKER CARLSON: But is there, I mean, but the idea that of a colorblind class, blind, pure, you know, meritocracy test, it’s, I mean, why give up on that?

Looking for Students Who Overcome Adversity

DAVE COLLUM: Here’s what I think we should do. I was graduate, I was a graduate director of graduate studies, which involved admission into our grad program for seven years. Record the only guy who held the four administrative positions in the chemistry department. So that’s pretty good for being the chemistry douchebag. And you learn about things.

And I read undergraduate admissions on purpose for a number of years because, and you read Regent, so I might read Manhattan, for example. And you learn about who’s applying and stuff like that. And what I think you want to look for is a system where you see evidence that a kid overcame something. And it’s not about color, although you could say non statistically, it’s about color. Butler. Right.

But a kid from the Ozarks, you know, J.D. Vance, who. I find his origin story a little suspicious, I must admit. But so we had a kid who applied and everything was sunshines and skittles rainbows in his application. Then one of his letter writers said his mother died here, his father died here, he was raised by his neighbors, you know, and I’m going, and he didn’t mention it.

TUCKER CARLSON: I hope you let him in.

Academic Excellence and Character Assessment

DAVE COLLUM: Oh my God, yes. You give me in graduate admissions, I see some kid from Stanford with a 3.0. I didn’t take them because a 3.0 is a kid who accepted a 3.0. You show me. I’ll take a 4.0 from St. Mary’s College of the Divinity. Because that kid said, “here’s the highest you can get to.” That kid got there, right?

MIT kids with lousy GPAs are lousy grad students, even though they’re smarter than hell, but they’re cocky. Now it turns out you show me a kid from Stanford with a 3.0 played football, I take the kid in a heartbeat. You show me a kid from Stanford who is a 3.0 who was a brilliant violinist. I’ll take that kid.

Parenting Philosophy and Different Paths to Success

My son applies to Cornell for reasons you know, he was going to get in, but his resume. I had one son who was underachiever as a kid, who’s now phenomenal, and the one who is a super achiever. What’s super achieving? And we didn’t push him because it was a pain in the ass. We were driving all the time. All state orchestra, first violin gold medalist in the eight state regional gymnastics championship, fifth in the nation. Equestrian, played lacrosse. Got a resume better than that.

So here’s what happened. My older son, who could care less about school, just nothing. His teacher, all, sweet kid, no attention. At one point, I said to a teacher, “the only kids he’s beaten are crack babies.” And she kind of blew a snap bubble and then said, “yeah, yeah.” He’s now phenomenally successful. He’s a super dad. I’m so proud of the level of dadness that he is. He’s the director of event management at the Council on Foreign Relations.

After being the most underwhelming kid in high school, he grew up. He climbed Mount Stupid a little bit late. And fortunately, he was in a family that could help him get over it when the time came. The things that we get credit for is not breaking him, is not forcing him into a mold that didn’t fit. You know who he is. You know the book Ferdinand the Bull?

TUCKER CARLSON: Yeah, yeah.

DAVE COLLUM: That book wasn’t for kids. That was for the parents. That was telling the parents, your kid is Ferdinand. Maybe. My other one was Mike Mulligan. Steam shovel. Yeah, right. Faster. The more people watch, the faster he watches.

TUCKER CARLSON: With.

DAVE COLLUM: Ironically, the overachiever got to Cornell and got lost. The underachiever just grew nicely in college, and now the younger one is now a professional. After trying cubicle farming and all that crap that you get by being a business major at Cornell hotel school. He’s a professional violinist in Boston.

TUCKER CARLSON: Better outcome.

DAVE COLLUM: Better outcome. Bank of Dad’s important because violinists in Boston don’t make a lot of money, but I’m happy to support it because it’s his soul. You know why he’s a professor? You want neurobiology. My wife was flat on her back when she was pregnant. She put headphones against her stomach and played classical music when he was in the womb. I know prenatal development’s important.

By the time he’s three years old, his friends are singing B and he’s listening to orchestra pieces and he’d say, “I like this part right here.” And you’d hear the second violins come in there and you see can go right there. I like that. And I’m going, holy. This kid’s got an ear. He has an ear like you. He developed an ear from the womb. So don’t do that to your womb. You’ll have a musician in your family if you do that.

Economic Predictions and Current Financial Crisis

TUCKER CARLSON: So I want to ask you here, since you mentioned the struggle, you know, the triumph, but also the struggle to pay for it because the economy doesn’t support young people very well, since you did call the financial collapse of 2008.

DAVE COLLUM: It sounds like in 2002.

TUCKER CARLSON: In 2002. So you couldn’t short, you couldn’t get rich shorting anything.

DAVE COLLUM: I shorted twice. And it’s shortings for fools and pros. And the Venn diagram of those two is almost that.

TUCKER CARLSON: That’s exactly right.

DAVE COLLUM: They’re both.

TUCKER CARLSON: I know both.

DAVE COLLUM: Yes. Yeah.

TUCKER CARLSON: Where are we now?

DAVE COLLUM: We’re in a catastrophic situation.

TUCKER CARLSON: Catastrophe seems strong.

DAVE COLLUM: Yeah, well, I think you can make arguments. The economy has a lot of problems and there’s a paradoxical problem with the economy and that is you can go up to any 7-Eleven and they can’t hire. There’s help wanted ad. So it looks like an economy burning hot. But if you look at the high end, there’s layoffs going everywhere. So there’s foreshadowing of real trouble coming plumbing.

The Job Market Paradox

TUCKER CARLSON: So college graduates, even Ivy league graduates, humanities graduates, not engineers or chemists. But you know, the mark, the business guy or whatever, they’re having trouble getting jobs.

DAVE COLLUM: The kind that they’re trained for, certainly.

TUCKER CARLSON: Yeah, but they’re just, I mean, I know a bunch of them and. But you see it in the numbers. Educated 22 year olds are having trouble getting jobs. But 7-Eleven can’t hire.

DAVE COLLUM: Right.

TUCKER CARLSON: So what, what is that?

DAVE COLLUM: Well, so this is a normal sort of. It’s a distorted version of, I think a recession coming or in. Now, where it gets complicated is if you don’t believe the inflation numbers, which I don’t. And you’ve got chapwood index and shadow stats that give inflation numbers that are probably on average 6 or 7% higher than the official numbers. The official numbers are corrupted. And I don’t want to go into it because it’s technical, but.

TUCKER CARLSON: But the CPI is.

DAVE COLLUM: The CPI is correct. Crap.

TUCKER CARLSON: Right, I agree with that.

DAVE COLLUM: Now, here’s the problem. If the economy’s been growing 2 and a half percent and the inflation numbers are underestimated by 4 means we’ve been in a recession the whole way. Yeah.

TUCKER CARLSON: Moving backwards.

DAVE COLLUM: We’re moving backward. And you say, well, that can’t happen. The recessions last, you know, two quarters or whatever. And I go, no, the British Empire was in a recession for a century. Right. They just shrunk and shrunk and shrunk and so, no, you can be in, you can be in a slow decline. So. But that’s not what we’re. That’s not.

TUCKER CARLSON: The catastrophe session means decline.

DAVE COLLUM: Yeah. Actually I think it’s a stupid word because it’s like. You play golf. No. Well, if you play golf and you go down into the sand trap, according to the definition of a recession, once you start climbing out, you’re out. You ask a golfer if he’s out of the sand trap because he’s on the upslope of the trap. He’s not.

TUCKER CARLSON: No.

DAVE COLLUM: So the fact that your economy is now growing again, if it’s coming out of a hole, as far as I’m concerned, you’re not out until you’ve gotten past that previous period.

TUCKER CARLSON: So you’re at par.

DAVE COLLUM: Yeah. So you’re at par right now. That’s not the catastrophe, because they happen all the time. And we’ve been able to either cover them or fake them or prevent them through very bad monetary policy.

The Problem with Monetary Policy

TUCKER CARLSON: Monetary policy.

DAVE COLLUM: Right. And what’s bad? Pumping the stock market is just stupid. But private equity buys. Private equity has bought up 80% of the hospitals, the health care. And what they do is they go in and they buy some organization, they strip it of its assets, they load it with debt, they pay themselves huge fees and bonuses, and then they sell the shell of a company which is now effectively worthless into the marketplace, like to pension funds who are not smart enough to recognize that they just bought a piece of crap.

And according to Gretchen Mor, 47% bankruptcy rate now post sale. Now as long as it’s profitable to buy up viable companies, destroy them, sell the shell and make money, monitor money’s too loose. Precious capital, if capital is of real value, you, it’s a moat. So good businessman can get capital, bad businessman can’t.

The fact that Black Rock could get by single family dwellings, which is a terrible business, you really can’t make money unless you can. Unless there’s a housing boom and you leverage up to hell the fact that they could get it for at an interest rate of 0.15% in is a highly flawed system. And that’s where the inventory went after 07-09. It got bought up by these guys who could lever up and then charge rents to people. So they basically scooped up the.

TUCKER CARLSON: Housing market now with free, with free money.

DAVE COLLUM: With free money. Kind of free money. Unlike you know, credit cards which are 25%. Right.

TUCKER CARLSON: And that’s just free. I mean if once you factor in.

DAVE COLLUM: Inflation, it’s a gift. Yeah, it’s profitable money.

TUCKER CARLSON: Literally just taking the loan is profitable.

DAVE COLLUM: Yes.

TUCKER CARLSON: You don’t have to do anything with.

DAVE COLLUM: Yes, right.

TUCKER CARLSON: Yeah.

The Wealth Effect and Market Distortions

DAVE COLLUM: So here’s what happened. Somehow the market has ceased to respond. And the reason the market’s important is because of the wealth effect. And that is that if you own equities, you own a house and they’re soaring in price, your spending habits change. I’m having a great year, for example. So when the bank of dad has to provide some liquidity to the children, I feel okay about it. Right.

The problem is, is that it’s a false wealth. It’s not real wealth. It’s a false wealth. So what happened? Well, I’m getting tired of seeing these. I see four year plots of the equity market and they make various comparisons. I go don’t go back four years, don’t go back 40 years, go back 120 years.

ALSO READ: Transcript of Mel Gibson on Joe Rogan Podcast #2254

So I follow about 25 metrics of valuation. Valuation is inherently a price of the market relative to something it ought to track whether it’s the earnings, the revenues, the book value. I think I’ll Tobin’s Q. The GDP, which is a fictional number as I’ve heard you recently say, but I follow about 20, 25 of them. So you can kind of track whether markets have gotten expensive relative to the thing it ought to track now.

Historical Market Context and Demographics

Around 1981, the markets were at the cheapest valuation arguably in history. Inflation was scaring everyone, which is why they were cheap. It turns out that the boomers were just hitting the workforce. So demographics was a huge tailwind starting around the then. And most economists agree demographics is huge. Now, I’m disingenuous in that I quote economists selectively. In the next sentence, I’ll probably say something horrible about them. And so I’m obviously cherry picking my data. But economists like demographics.

So the boomers hit the workplace. So it was almost guaranteed. I think Reagan was not important. I think he did some very important things. But I think whoever got to be president was going to be at the beginning of a boom. It turns out that China was coming out of the dark ages. They started selling labor at slave wages. They were so desperate for capital when they sent their leader. Don’t make me pronounce his name. To the United nations when he first started opening up.

TUCKER CARLSON: Is it Deng Xiaoping?

DAVE COLLUM: Yes. And they had to scrounge to get the money to send them. I mean, they really didn’t have any foreign capital. And so I remember when China said, “we’re going to let our workers keep some of their profits.” It’s like, whoa, Russia had. Soviet Union hadn’t collapsed, but they were in trouble. So they were obviously cranking a resource base as hard as they could and we had our guys in there helping them and stuff like that.

Interest Rates: The Key to Understanding Markets

And interest rates were at all time highs. And if you read a 1999 article by Buffett, who I think is a hoser, I think he’s much more of a stock jobber, much more of a conniver than he is. He loves to be the Mafia don. Walk around in a bathrobe saying “I’m harmless.” He is not harmless. When we’re in a bottom. He breaks all sorts of laws. They do all sorts of insider crap to bail the system out. But he pretends to, just like Dairy Queen and Coca Cola. Whatever.

He wrote an article in 99 that said you want to understand secular big long bull versus bear markets. It’s all interest rates. He said it’s not GDP. Said from 67 to 81, everything sucked. It treaded water. Not accounting for inflation. And the markets dropped 75% accounting for inflation. So it was a horrible period. He said the GDP grew faster during that period than from 81 to 99. But interest rates from 67 to 81 went up. Yeah, from 81 to 99 they went down.

So we started in 81 with interest rates in the high teens and over the next 40 years they dropped to zero. That is absolutely the story. So when interest rates are dropping, risk assets go up.

The 40-Year Interest Rate Decline and Asset Valuations

TUCKER CARLSON: Yep.

DAVE COLLUM: Because they’re competing against and as they get cheaper so. So bottom line is that we just enjoyed 40 year recency bias.

TUCKER CARLSON: Can you just explain that principle right there? You said as interest rates drop, risk assets go up.

DAVE COLLUM: Or are you going to buy shares of a stock that by the way has treated you like crap over the previous 14 years or a bond that pays you 17%? Right, right. So the bonds become less, the fixed income becomes less and less attractive steadily for 40 years now.

Now take the Case Shiller PE. Which is just one of the metrics but I happen to like it. It’s a kind of an averaged earnings price earnings ratio. It also doesn’t allow you to cheat because it doesn’t use the immediate and forward PEs are stupid but Case Shore averages. So I like it.

If you take the Case Shiller from 1880 to 1990 it just channels, it just, it’s evaluation metric and it just goes up and down and up and down and that’s what it should do. It responds to things, but it stays in a channel. It’s flat. Valuation metrics shouldn’t trend. They should trend for a while, but then they should regress to the mean. Unless you can someone can give me an argument why they should trend. And I don’t think there is one. And I’ve tried to find one.

And then in 1990 they just kind of started to take off in the Case Shiller. So the Case Shiller PE. The Case Shiller PE averaged around 12, 13% for 110 years. Then around 1990, oddly 1994 in every metric is when things left. I think it was because of a bond problem or something. I haven’t been able to quite figure out why. But the valuations went up.

Now here’s the problem with valuations going up and now they’re astronomical. So the KCLP average 13, which meant it was priced to return about 8% a year. Right. If you think of it as a gas station and you’re paying, you know, 13 to 1 earnings, you’re getting about 8% and it keeps pumping gas. Every year you get about 13%. It is now 38. It’s way above where it should be. It’s a factor of 3, 200%.

Now if you assume it’s never going to regress to the mean. Now you’re accepting, crudely speaking, a two and a half percent return, not an eight. Now, if you’re okay with two and a half percent, that’s fine. But by the way, most pensioners, most boomers are not planning on 2.5%.

TUCKER CARLSON: They’re not.

DAVE COLLUM: Right now, if it regresses to the mean, it’s a 70% correction. Assuming. If it’s fast, assuming nothing else changes, no damage to the economy, you know, all the bad things that happen when you lose 70% off the equity market, which is a questionable assumption.

Another way to think about it, which I think is much clearer, is if you say, look, we’ll just grow our way. I think it go up or down or up and down. You don’t worry about the path. You say, if we grow two and a half percent a year, which I just questioned as being valid. But let’s assume it’s valid, solid. If we grow 2 1/2% a year to get back to historical average of 13, we’ll take 45 years.

Now, here’s the thing. I made no assumptions about good news, bad news. I assumed it’s coming like the 20th century, two and a half percent a year. It’ll be 45 years from now. I don’t care what path you follow. If we are at the average Case Shiller PE and the economy grew two and a half percent a year, the equity markets will have returned capital gains zero. And it doesn’t matter if we crash and spike. It doesn’t matter. You know, if we get the, you know, a Dow 40,000, 50,000, 60,000, 45 years from now, if we’re at the mean, we will have earn nothing.

Now you say, well, that would never happen. You go, well, if you own the 1906 high, you were even after something like 40 years.

TUCKER CARLSON: Even after 40 years.

DAVE COLLUM: If you buy, if you own the top.

TUCKER CARLSON: Yep.

DAVE COLLUM: People always say, well, how long did it take to get back to the top? That’s a favorite question. You go, oh, you know, it took 22 years. Oh, it took 15 years. Oh, it took. I like to ask the question, no, no, no. Not how long it took to get from the top back to even. How long did it take to go from that top to the last time that that price was attained adjusted for inflation? And those can go anywhere from 40 to 75 years. All you have to do is look at inflation adjusted S and P and draw a line from a top across the S and P. And you will find that most of them break even in the mid-80s no matter what they started.

The Housing Crisis and Asset Mispricing

TUCKER CARLSON: So you’re just answering the question, what the hell is going on with land prices and asset prices?

DAVE COLLUM: Everything, everything’s mispriced.

TUCKER CARLSON: But is it mispriced? I mean if I’ve got excess money, you know, and I need to store it somewhere and I’m listening to you, I’m like, oh, I think I’m going to buy something a little less volatile, a little more real.

DAVE COLLUM: Like real estate.

TUCKER CARLSON: Exactly.

DAVE COLLUM: Okay. The first time home and I know this drives you bananas. The first time home buyers not too many decades ago were on average about 30 years old. Yep. I just read. What’s the fact? I don’t know. 56 now, first time home buyers. 56.

TUCKER CARLSON: That’s been a massive.

DAVE COLLUM: Do you want to buy, do you want to buy that into that market? It. That somehow seems like it has to regress because you can’t have people going 56 years without owning a house. Right. You said you personally, I think it was in Turning Point USA you went absolutely non stop about how you can worry about Ukraine. But we’ve got guys, we’ve got young adults who can’t raise families and houses.

TUCKER CARLSON: Yeah. And it creates a very scary political environment where people don’t own anything and therefore have nothing to lose in the future.

Monogamy vs. Polygamy: A Social Stability Model

DAVE COLLUM: Right. Well, here’s an interesting ADHD moment. Monogamy versus polygamy. And this will sound random, but it’ll get you to the same.

TUCKER CARLSON: No, it’s a core, it’s a core question actually. These are the building blocks of the west.

DAVE COLLUM: Turns out polygamy, monogamy is viewed as favoring women. That turns out to be backwards. And it’s a simple math. Imagine there’s a hundred people ranked one to 100. Hundred number one hundreds. Mr. Big Cheese. And on the women’s side, hottest chick on the planet. Right?

TUCKER CARLSON: Right.

DAVE COLLUM: Monogamy says number one would marry number one, number two would marry number two in the perfect system. So think of it as just a very simple model and that what you can’t do is if you’re at the bottom of the chain, marry up. Right. If you do, then someone else gets pushed down, of course. Right. So it would be of the interest of the girl still working 7-Eleven to be Jeff Bezos’s second wife.

TUCKER CARLSON: Yeah, I think that happened.

DAVE COLLUM: So in fact you can upgrade your game and, and you know, Elon. Right. I mean the guy’s a reproduction machine. Right. The women are signing off on it because it’s better to be with a guy worth that kind of money than broke. Right. And so it turns out that you say, well then why did cultural evolution lead to monogamy? And the answer is, is because it minimizes violence.

TUCKER CARLSON: Right.

DAVE COLLUM: It’s for the men, of course. So they don’t fight.

TUCKER CARLSON: Well, yeah, because in a polygamous system, all the high status males scoop up all the women.

DAVE COLLUM: Well now in a situation where men can’t provide the home for their families and stuff like that. And so we’re going to fight.

TUCKER CARLSON: Right, I’ve noticed.

DAVE COLLUM: I’ve noticed that too. And so now here’s the deal. Let’s say we’re I’m right, we’re to market top. And if, if I’m not, I think we’re close. One of the things that my peers who were paranoid as hell about this, some very smart guys, they tend not to put numbers on it. I’m one of the few who puts numbers on it. There’s, there’s a couple others who do, but they just say, oh, the valuations are ridiculous. But no one wants to be on record that we’re going to be to say it’s catastrophically overpriced. Whatever correction you get, you say, see, I told you, I’m saying 200% overpriced.

Now, how do you get out of overvaluation? You can’t inflate your way out. No, because the numerator, the price and the denominator, the thing is supposed to track both our influence by inflation. So as your price goes up because of inflation, your revenues go up because of inflation, you’re still 200% over historical average valuation. And so you can’t inflate away an overvaluation.

Market Corrections and Historical Precedents

TUCKER CARLSON: So what I mean, is this just a gravity scenario or. Ultimately it has to revert to its actual value.

DAVE COLLUM: Best model I have and they never work because it’s always one of these. Something will be creatively different. But the best models in the equation, Japan hit a high in 89. It briefly got back to that 35 years later. It’s actually below that. I think if I remember correctly, inflation adjusts for that, guaranteed.

TUCKER CARLSON: Yes, that’s right.

DAVE COLLUM: I asked someone during a podcast if you can do this spreadsheet for me, I’d love to get it. Someone did it. I said, what if you started buying the Nikkei at the top, not own the knee. If you own the Nikkei at the top, you’re dead meat. You died broke. But what if you, what if you started buying. 22 year old graduate of Tokyo University. You started putting yen into the Nikkei in 1989. How long if you averaged in, did it take you to break even? It’s around two decades, starting with zero in the Nikkei.

So I was on a podcast with George Noble, Twitter space actually he was Peter Lynch’s right hand man and he said, well you could. I said I think the markets will be uninvestable. He said oh, you could do this and this. And I said the Nikkei. And he said oh, you could short. I said no, you couldn’t. You can’t short a market that takes 20 years to find a bottom. You can short a market like an 07 to 09.

TUCKER CARLSON: A volatile market.

DAVE COLLUM: Yes, you can’t.

TUCKER CARLSON: A market in inexorable decline can’t be short.

DAVE COLLUM: So if we’re in a top, aren’t top supposed to be euphoria? York, Remember the dot com?

TUCKER CARLSON: Oh yes.

DAVE COLLUM: The world was changing. The Nifty 50, you know, Webvan and Pets.com, you know, sustainable prosperity. We are supposed to be true believers that the world is wonderful. Do you sense much of the population thinks the world’s wonderful?

TUCKER CARLSON: I don’t, I don’t sense that. And all around us are signs of.

DAVE COLLUM: What’s it going to look like when 70% gets clipped off this market.

Safe Havens and Gold Investment Strategy

TUCKER CARLSON: So I’m immediately going into prepper survival mode. What, where are the enduring safe stores of value?

DAVE COLLUM: I don’t. You can’t answer that. I bought gold at around $270 an ounce.

TUCKER CARLSON: $270.

DAVE COLLUM: $270.

TUCKER CARLSON: Hope you bought a lot of it.

DAVE COLLUM: I did, but it’s worth a lot more now. You think? Yeah.

TUCKER CARLSON: What spot price today, do you know?

DAVE COLLUM: Ballpark? $2,300. Yeah, I bought silver, I bought gold below $270. I’ll tell you why, because my first purchases were actually in a closed end mutual fund that was trading 27% below net asset valuation. Because no, people say, oh, it was easy to buy back then, it was cheap. I said it was cheap because five of us wanted it, right? Well, of course, right.

And by the way, the top, some Tuesday afternoon at 2:03pm we will hit a top that will be decades later to be returned to potentially. The top is the point of maximum optimism, which paradoxically is the moment in time where your justification for optimism is zero. The bottom is the same thing in reverse, of course. So we’re not happy now.

TUCKER CARLSON: So you’re saying the herd’s not always right, Is that what you’re saying?

DAVE COLLUM: I’m told. So let’s hold on.

TUCKER CARLSON: Let’s just go back to gold first.

DAVE COLLUM: Second.

TUCKER CARLSON: So you buy.

DAVE COLLUM: I bought gold net at around $210.

TUCKER CARLSON: Come on.

DAVE COLLUM: Well, I bought it 28% below nav.

TUCKER CARLSON: When it was physical delivery.

Gold and Silver Investment Strategy

DAVE COLLUM: No, that was not physical. But then I started buying. Here’s what I did. I bought gold from the local coin dealer. And I’d say when you get ounces, I’ll pay cash. And he sold it to me at spot. And he’d call and say I got three ounces in. I’d go to the bank, I’d get out $900 and I’d buy the gold from them cash. I buy silver from them cash.

I could buy silver eagles at spot that you go on eBay. Those things are like 10 bucks above spot. And it was for ballpark $4 an ounce. And then I remember it was at $457 and I was buying from him and he said “Don’t you think there’s a top?” He knew I was going to buy it. He said “Don’t you think there’s a top?”

TUCKER CARLSON: $457 an ounce for gold.

DAVE COLLUM: There’s like ’03 or something. I don’t know. And I said “How many people are buying gold from you?” He said “About four.” And I said “And the other three are my friends, aren’t they?” He said “Yeah.” And I said “Does that sound like a mania to you?”

And so here’s the thing I’ve been on. I’m a big fan of energy. But I think when the selling starts, everything sells. You’ll be selling your children, you’ll be selling everything. Everything sells. So I think the idea of trying to get into any risk assets so dangerous. I’ll take 4% on a treasury two year treasury. Some people think, you know, I’ll lock it up for two years. Oh, that’ll save me. I won’t dip buy after six months.

TUCKER CARLSON: So at what price would you buy gold again?

DAVE COLLUM: Well, I’ve got so much I don’t need anymore. If I didn’t own any, I’d buy it now. But the Bitcoin guys would say, “Buy Bitcoin at $117,000.” I turned it down at $10. I wish I’d bought it. I would have sold it at $50 and spent the proceeds on therapy.

TUCKER CARLSON: Why on therapy?

DAVE COLLUM: Because I would have sold it at $50.

TUCKER CARLSON: Right, good point.

DAVE COLLUM: And I know I would have. I know I would have.

Cryptocurrency Skepticism

TUCKER CARLSON: You don’t believe in crypto?

DAVE COLLUM: I don’t think so. The crypto community, I am their number one target. They say you are a holder, and I won’t buy it. And the reason is because I believe that several layers. One is that I believe that the authorities are not going to let crypto take over.

TUCKER CARLSON: Of course not.

DAVE COLLUM: And by the way, that means…

TUCKER CARLSON: That they’re going to lose total control over society.

DAVE COLLUM: I don’t think so. You think the Rockefellers and the Rothschilds are going to hand it over to Max Keiser and Michael Saylor? I don’t think so.

TUCKER CARLSON: You don’t think…

DAVE COLLUM: Here’s what I think it actually is. You know, the first paper on crypto was written by three NSA guys.

TUCKER CARLSON: Yeah.

DAVE COLLUM: That means, I think if I were speaking smart and I were going to bring in central bank digital currency, which is an authoritarian nightmare, I would do it the way they did. I’d release the crypto. I’d have guys pumping it, I’d have guys supporting it. I’d let them debug the networks and the kinks and acclimate people to it. And then I’d say, “Okay, it was fun, we’ll take it from here.”

TUCKER CARLSON: And in the process, of course, you acclimate people to this new digital world. New kind of commerce. Yeah, exactly. No, that’s… And I get rid of the ATMs and I would make airport convenience stores, credit card only. And I would do all that stuff.

DAVE COLLUM: To change people’s… Cash is liberty, of course.

TUCKER CARLSON: Oh, I couldn’t agree more. So you just have too much gold. You just don’t want any more gold.

DAVE COLLUM: I just, yeah, no, that, it’s… I’m…

Real Estate and Investment Strategy

TUCKER CARLSON: What about real estate right now?

DAVE COLLUM: I’m long. I own a nice house. I’m long real estate by owning that house. I wouldn’t buy real estate as a speculation. If you put a gun to my head, I’d say maybe farmland, but that’s been getting scooped up. That’s a pretty trite narrative now.

TUCKER CARLSON: Well, I follow that because I’m interested and I mean it’s turning for just crazy numbers, an acre and that.

DAVE COLLUM: Well, that’s a problem.

TUCKER CARLSON: That’s what I’m saying.

DAVE COLLUM: So here’s what I got. Here’s what I watched for years and then jumped in. And it’s a problem, the modern market. I bought gold steadily from ’99 through about ’03, and then I bought some more when it was around $1,200 in the teens. I said, “Okay, it’s kind of flattened out. I’m going to get some more.” So around bought it around $1,200 in maybe 2016 or something.

But the modern markets don’t wait. If you get a good idea and social media stuff, it will close up that gap so fast you won’t know what hit you. So I’m bullish on energy, long term energy equities and stuff, but I think they’re going to sell before they become a good buy. So I just can’t commit a lot of money to the energy.

Even though I think I have some mutual funds on uranium based investments which I think we got to go to and now it looks like we are. I actually think AI is not demanding nuclear energy. I think AI is being used as a Trojan horse to bring in nuclear energy, which I support. I think they’re using the buzz of AI to say “Now let’s get the nukes going.” People say “Yeah, nukes. We need it for the AI.” We’ve needed nukes. It was the obvious next thing to go to.

The Platinum Investment Thesis

For years I watched platinum own so little platinum that if it went to zero I wouldn’t even notice. I mean trivial, trivial amount. And I’ve been watching, it’s been flat. I mean flat as in like a flat line not moving away from $900 an ounce by a few dollars flat for 10 years after dropping. And I go “What’s the platinum story?”

Well, the platinum story is I don’t trade, I don’t trade it all. If I buy it, I’m buying and saying look, I’m hanging on to it. If it goes down, I don’t trade. The platinum story is I don’t believe in the EV. I don’t think it’s a good technology. I think it’ll be here, but I don’t think it’s going to take over the world. I think the hybrids are going to take over the world.

TUCKER CARLSON: Well, they make sense. They make inherent sense.

DAVE COLLUM: Yeah, yeah, yeah. They’re more efficient. They use more platinum than EV than internal combustion engines. Because their catalytic converters burn cold. So they need more platinum.

Now here’s where it gets real interesting. The platinum miners are in Russia and South Africa. Russia will therefore have control. South Africa could become a failed state so fast you don’t know what hit you. More to the point and again trying to get real facts on this stuff. But the above ground platinum supply, the available platinum supply is something like $3 billion which is something a medium sized hedge fund could buy at current prices. It’s been in deficit production for at least four years.

TUCKER CARLSON: What does deficit production mean?

DAVE COLLUM: Means that we’re consuming more per year than the miners producing.

TUCKER CARLSON: Okay.

DAVE COLLUM: Based on the rate of deficit production, that the above ground supply will be gone within about a year.

TUCKER CARLSON: Year. There’s no more platinum.

DAVE COLLUM: Arguably we could go to potentially palladium, but you know, whatever. Platinum has not gone through a meme phase. So my, a little bit of trader in me says that meme phase could get spectacular. Platinum could go to $20,000 because it has industrial uses.

TUCKER CARLSON: You know, it seems kind of natural.

DAVE COLLUM: Right. So I decided I was… So I reached out to some technical analysts who draw the squiggles on the curves and I make… I’m sarcastically occasionally commenting about technical analysis, but I can’t do it or don’t believe in or whatever. But I asked if you, I said, “Look at this plot, where would you start getting excited?” because it’s been flat for 10 years. I don’t need to put money in and have it sit there for 10 years more.

And a few gave me opinions about what price. I kind of formulated an opinion where I had to start and then hit it. Now instead of buying it, you know, slowly, I said, in the modern era, you got to move quick. So I started hitting the buy button and I’m still not…

The Boomer Investment Dilemma

I face a boomer dilemma. The boomer dilemma is the good news is my net worth is good enough. If I don’t screw up, I’m fine. I mean, I could retire today, not earn another penny. Fine. I want to leave money to my kids. I will be able to.

The paradox is that to commit to an asset requires committing a percentage that’s not stupid. If you commit 0.01% of your assets to it, it’s not going to make a difference no matter what happens. So if you say, well, 5%, when I look at the quantity of money I have to spend to commit 5%, it seems huge, but it’s only 5%.

And so as a consequence I go, look, if it went, if it went to zero tomorrow, I’d have a bad day. I’d lose 5% of my assets. But it would be too much money. So I’m fighting this bias about how many dollars it takes to get to a… I get it.

The Average Person’s Financial Reality

TUCKER CARLSON: So let me ask you just a wrap up question, which is, given your description of where we are and you haven’t even mentioned what could be a debt crisis when people stop buying our debt or slow down. But there are all kinds of things to worry about that seem imminent. How does the average person respond?

DAVE COLLUM: They don’t have any money anyways.

TUCKER CARLSON: Yeah, fair.

DAVE COLLUM: I mean the average person has no money.

TUCKER CARLSON: So…

DAVE COLLUM: So how does the 5th percentile boomer respond? Well, years ago I did an analysis on the 5th percentile boomer. This is how bad it is. This is years ago actually. And it actually got vetted by Stephen Roach, who’s executive director of Morgan Stanley. He looked at my numbers, said “Actually you’ve overestimated something. You should be more conservative.”

The 5th… I invented 5th percentile guy at that time, he is worth $1.1 million. He was earning $156,000 a year. You also know he’s not 22 years old. He’s probably a boomer because it takes a while to get to 5th percentile. At a reasonable rate of withdrawal from a retirement account, Mr. Five Percentile Guy, who has to be living the American dream, could take about $48,000 out annually without risking going broke. And you know what? They don’t know how to live on $48,000.

TUCKER CARLSON: No.

DAVE COLLUM: Now they might have other assets. This is a complicated analysis, but that’s…

TUCKER CARLSON: A scary number for a modern life.

DAVE COLLUM: That’s a… Yeah, well the, but the other thing is if he knew how to live on $48,000, he’d have more than $1.1 million.

TUCKER CARLSON: Good point.

The 40-Year Recency Bias Problem

DAVE COLLUM: And so we’ve got a whole generation that has got expectations that are just off the chart, distorted. And it’s not because of a 5 year or 10 year recency bias. It’s a 40 year recency bias. It’s 1981. Let me finish that story from 1981. The valuation which should not trend compounded annually 4% a year. What happens over the next 40 years when it compounds negative 4% a year to get to cheap again?

Now you say, “Well that’ll never happen.” I go, “Of course it’ll happen. Show me an asset that got overpriced. It didn’t become cheap again.”

TUCKER CARLSON: Well, if you believe in markets, that’s just by definition going to happen.

DAVE COLLUM: Right. And if there’s a way to fake it so it doesn’t happen, then it means you’re just deluding as to what actually happened. You’re not getting a reality.

TUCKER CARLSON: Right, right.

The Boomer Bubble and Market Overvaluation

DAVE COLLUM: And so the bottom line is that the boomer demographic almost by definition was going to generate a bubble, a big mother bubble. Because the demographics now I was telling you about how I was reading my old write ups from like 13, 14, 15, 15. I make a compelling case that the markets were crazy.

How do I do it? I use numbers, I use stats and I use quotes from the most famous money guys in the world. You know, Paul Tudor Jones, Stan Druckenmiller, you name it. These are not lightweights. Saying these markets are insanely overvalued in 2015. What has happened since then? Straight up.

Oh for sure. Example, Apple, tenfold gain and a growth in revenues of 50%. 95% correction brings that back down. Microsoft, 150% gain in revenues. Tenfold gain doesn’t make mathematical sense. Let’s go to Nvidia. There’s the winner. $4 trillion of market cap being run by a guy who has a very sketchy past 25 fold gain in revenues. You go now we’re talking 250 fold gain in market cap.

TUCKER CARLSON: Yeah. So that’s the problem right there.

DAVE COLLUM: 90% correction takes you back to 2015. Do you remember 2015 being depressed? I don’t. Stan Druckenmiller didn’t think so. Howard Marks didn’t think so. All these guys were considered legends. Thought the markets were insanely overpriced in 15 and it’s been nothing but up. And that will end, I don’t know when.

Global Asset Classes and Debt Crisis

TUCKER CARLSON: And you think that all asset classes are tied to that?

DAVE COLLUM: I can’t say all because that means 100%. But if I found something that I thought was dirt cheap, I’m glad I own the gold from as cheap as I did because when it goes down I go, I’m still up what, 15 fold or something. Right. So it makes it easier. Buying gold now from scratch would be harder. It would be that, you know, the number of dollars to get the percent position, that sort of thing.

And I think the debt problem is global. If you actually look at the metrics for the growth in the global debt relative to global GDP, the entire world has become priced much more than 10 years ago relative to what the world produces. So what’s a global debt crisis? That’s the question you say, well there’s you got lenders and borrowers. It’s a zero sum game. No it’s not.

I know a global debt crisis is when the entire world thinks they’re going to get that the world can’t produce. And the way you think of how to create one artificial thought experiment, let’s say the leaders of the world got together and said look, let’s just solve this problem. Let’s guarantee health care to all our citizens. Let’s guarantee their pension. All our citizens, problem solved.

They go well. But you didn’t in any way shape or form increase the ability to produce wealth, right? So you now have obligations for which you haven’t a clue how you’re going to pay for them. Who’s going to do it? We going to have the Chinese delivering Chinese food to our doors still? I don’t think so. We’re going to be delivering food to the Chinese. So everything will regress. 40 year recency bias says it won’t. It will.

TUCKER CARLSON: On that dark note, I’m just picturing myself showing up at a doorstep in Beijing with some kung Pao chicken, hoping for a tip.

DAVE COLLUM: I can see you now. You turn the scan around and shove the 25% tip in the guy’s face.

TUCKER CARLSON: Professor, thank you. I hope this doesn’t get you fired. And I hope you’ll come back.

DAVE COLLUM: Anytime you call, I’m in the car. Thank you.

Transcript: Professor Dave Collum’s Interview on The Tucker Carlson Show

Academic Freedom and Speaking Beyond Your Lane

The 2020 Cancellation Incident

The Astroturfed Nature of Cancel Culture

Cornell’s Response and Administrative Dynamics

Cornell’s Unique Character

COVID Vaccines and Scientific Concerns

The Lockdown Impact on Education

Fauci and Birx: Incompetence or Malice?

COVID Origins: North Carolina, Not Wuhan?

Clinical Trials on Foster Children

The Diddy Case: Data Collection Operation?

The Deep State’s Digital Evolution

The John Sullivan Connection

The Butler Rally Assassination Attempt

Down the Rabbit Hole

The Annual Review

The Peak Prosperity Year-End Report

The Ukraine War Analysis

Intelligence Surveillance

The Las Vegas Shooting Investigation

Multiple Interviews, Same Witness

Multiple Shooters Evidence

The Jesus Campos Story

Audio Evidence of Multiple Shooters

The Vegas Shooting Investigation

The Saudi Connection Theory

The Uvalde Shooting Inconsistencies

Understanding Kayfabe in Politics

The Digital Evolution of Control

The QAnon Phenomenon

The Wuhan Distraction

The Truth About Government Grift and Historical Narratives

The Importance of Writing and Critical Thinking

The Maui Fires and Missing Children

Energy Weapons and Testing Grounds

The Information Control Theory

Silencing Dissent

The Religious Quality of Control

Universities and Academic Freedom

The Cost of Education and Academic Reform

Academic Research and Federal Funding

Trump’s Impact on Academic Funding

University Endowments and Tax Issues

Administrative Bloat and DEI Programs

The SAT and Merit-Based Testing

Looking for Students Who Overcome Adversity

Academic Excellence and Character Assessment

Parenting Philosophy and Different Paths to Success

Economic Predictions and Current Financial Crisis

The Job Market Paradox

The Problem with Monetary Policy

The Wealth Effect and Market Distortions

Historical Market Context and Demographics

Interest Rates: The Key to Understanding Markets

The 40-Year Interest Rate Decline and Asset Valuations

The Housing Crisis and Asset Mispricing

Monogamy vs. Polygamy: A Social Stability Model

Market Corrections and Historical Precedents

Safe Havens and Gold Investment Strategy

Gold and Silver Investment Strategy

Cryptocurrency Skepticism

Real Estate and Investment Strategy

The Platinum Investment Thesis

The Boomer Investment Dilemma

The Average Person’s Financial Reality

The 40-Year Recency Bias Problem

The Boomer Bubble and Market Overvaluation

Global Asset Classes and Debt Crisis

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