Transcript: Dave Collum: The Private Credit Bomb Is Coming

Dave Collum [0:07] You've had a dynamic where money's become freer than free.

Rudy Havenstein [0:10] Let me talk about a Fed just gone nuts, all, all the central banks going nuts. So it's all acting like safe haven. I believe that in a world where central bankers are tripping over themselves to devalue their currency, Bitcoin wins. In the world of fiat currencies, Bitcoin is the victor. I mean, that's part of the bull case for Bitcoin. If you're not paying attention, you probably should be.

Dave Collum [0:34] Probably should be. Probably should be.

Marty Bent [0:37] Oh man, yeah, you can hear us.

Dave Collum [0:38] Okay, okay, cool.

Rudy Havenstein [0:39] All right, maybe ours— maybe it's— maybe it's the R stands for retarded. Maybe that's the—

Dave Collum [0:47] well, so far I can't argue with you. It seems that way, doesn't it?

Rudy Havenstein [0:51] There's—

Dave Collum [0:51] there's—

Rudy Havenstein [0:52] there is a certain parallel universe going on here.

Marty Bent [0:55] Yeah.

Dave Collum [0:55] All right. Well, somebody's trying to say that—

Marty Bent [0:57] Are SNRIs different than SSRIs, Dave?

Rudy Havenstein [0:58] So my wife is coming off SNRIs, which turn out to be a horrific class of drug. It's— I can't rule out the possibility that it has saved people's lives, but they throw standard people on them. And she was on Effexor for about 15 years, at least at a high dose. for pain management, which because there's, well, there's rumor that could help probably in the New England Journal of Medicine where they lie their ass off about what could work. And she has to go off it for complex reasons. And so we tapered down over what we thought was a rational tapering period to find out that if you, instead of listening to the authorities tell you how to taper off, You listen to people who've tapered off, what you discover is that a calendar year of tapering is bare minimum.

Marty Bent [1:59] Wow.

Rudy Havenstein [2:00] And then you discover people who have tapered off whose brains are completely fucked up and they've been fucked up for years. And then you learn about people who go back on it for obvious reasons, and some percentage of them when they go back on it, they don't recover. And so it's really just a nasty situation. So she has these wild panic attacks and has trouble controlling thermoregulating. And she doesn't have brain zaps, for those who know this world. But it's conceivable it's not a fixable problem. And it's all because pharma wants to sell us Effexor and Prozac and all that crap.

Dave Collum [2:47] Yeah. Yeah.

Marty Bent [2:49] It's, again, I'm sorry to hear that. And I was telling you some personal stories with family members on SSRIs and just being thrust upon them during a time of deep stress, but trying to wean them off. It's like, it's not easy. And I mean, I think it gets to the crux of a lot of our ongoing Conversations, both the 3 of us together, and then Dave, you and I independently over the years, which is like this rot at the core of the system, which is fucked up with bad incentives and it just manifests in different ways. And in this case, the pharma industry.

Rudy Havenstein [3:25] Well, the one I jumped on first before we even tapered off is just by coincidence, they wanted to put her on statins because she had a leg— they had her legs checked for circulation because she's had so many surgeries. And one of her legs was getting 50% and the doc wanted to put her on statins immediately. And I had heard bad things about statins, so I said, no, we're waiting. And she went to a specialist and the specialist said, no, your leg's been hammered about 25 times by surgeons. It's not about statins. Your cholesterol's fine. This is nuts. She went back to her GP and her GP still wanted her to go on statins. And then you read about statins and you discover that, well, first and foremost, your body has cholesterol for a fucking reason. It's not there as a byproduct or anything. It's not something you want to drive to zero. And the side effects of statins turn out to be excruciating lower limb pain, which by the way, that's our problem, and swelling and early onset dementia. And there's people who talk about ending up in wheelchairs within 2 years. People end up demented within 2 years. I mean, it's a real nightmare. So I actually went out on Twitter and said, give me an anecdote, give me anything you got. Has someone in your family been on a statin and what was your experience? And I got about 500 responses and I would say 495 of them were, don't touch those things.

Dave Collum [4:51] Yeah, I'll give you another. I'll be part of that 5. I've been on it for 14 years. You know, half my family on the mother's side is dead by the, See, that's a good case then. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. But I mean, I had buddies tell me right away, 14 years ago, dude, you can't take Lipitor. I take Lipitor and they go, it's going to— your joints, everything you're saying, I believe. But I asked my doctor who I really love because he saved my life a few times and I said, is it acute or is it chronic? And he goes, it's acute. You'll know within a short period of time. I go, so it's not like I take them for 14 years and then suddenly—

Rudy Havenstein [5:35] now the early onset dementia, clearly I've succumbed That's what the R stands for, by the way. The R, I think, is totally appropriate.

Dave Collum [5:43] Well, you can't say that. That's very offensive. So anyway, but I'm just saying it's not— I agree for many people it's a bad choice. And in fact, I know someone who took a much smaller dose than me and had to cut it in half because immediately started having, or actually went off it because of symptoms like you're saying. So I think it hit, I think it just, everybody's body you know, is, is different, you know? And I've had things happen to me that, you know, it's not in the literature, but I'm saying, I'm telling you, it's the drug, you know? And so I think, like you said a minute ago, like instead of trusting the quote unquote experts, trust people who've been through this, you know, like with the SSRIs.

Rudy Havenstein [6:20] That's exactly, that's, that's the epiphany. You know, I used to tell people, when you go on a new drug, go on Twitter. This seems crazy to people. They, they go, what are you talking about? You're getting your medical advice from Twitter? I said, go on Twitter, search the drug name. You just start reading posts.

Dave Collum [6:35] Yeah.

Rudy Havenstein [6:36] And my wife was on a drug called Keppra, and it made her batshit crazy angry. Now, batshit crazy is bad, angry on top of it. And I'm trying to tell her doctor, something's wrong, my wife's a bitch. And he's going, mine is too, what's your point? Right? And it turns out that I spent 2 hours one Saturday night on a on a call with a neurologist and I got to the Keppra part and he says, how long has she been on it? About 3 months. And he said, it's the Keppra. It is the Keppra. And it's called Keppra rage. So I go on Twitter after that. This is before I realized I should do this. And there it is all over Twitter, all over Twitter. So by the way, back to the statins, I did a poll thinking maybe only the people with horrible experiences are answering. But polls tend to poll on people who just wanna see the result. And so I said, has anyone in your family been on statins? And if so, what's your experience? And the choices were no one on statins, so they could see the result. No side effects, minor side effects, major side effects. 62% major side effects. Mm-hmm.

Dave Collum [7:52] No, I don't doubt that. I mean, that could be very possibly true.

Rudy Havenstein [7:55] Sure. I love these commercials.

Dave Collum [7:59] Yeah, go ahead.

Rudy Havenstein [7:59] Go ahead. Go ahead. I'll interrupt you.

Dave Collum [8:02] Well, I'm just saying, do you ever— no, no, no. Do you ever see a commercial for some innocuous drug? Like, do you have social anxiety? Take this drug. And then the list of side effects is suicidal and homicidal thoughts. And I mean, you know more about this than I do, but I'm always cracking up. I'm going, dude, just— it's not worth the risk reward here. It's not worth it.

Rudy Havenstein [8:20] Well, so here's what the drug does passively to caregivers like me is it gives them homicidal ideation.

Dave Collum [8:29] Yeah. Well, I could see living with you. That's understandable. Just without the big drug.

Rudy Havenstein [8:36] Homicidal ideation is me. Homicidal ideation is me.

Dave Collum [8:39] Right.

Marty Bent [8:40] Well, it's crazy too, really, because we're— I mean, I think it's more well-known now than it was maybe a few years ago, but we're one of 2 countries that allows pharma companies to to advertise in that way on television. And this is, I mean, maybe this can dovetail into like the broader conversation of like where we are today. This was supposed to be one of the larger topics that this administration tackled with MAHA, like taking care of all this stuff, like getting to the root of the corruption in the medical industry. And what's your perception on how well they've done that up to this point?

Dave Collum [9:14] Didn't Trump promise at some point to stop The commercials, I forget, was that Robert Kennedy?

Marty Bent [9:21] I don't know.

Dave Collum [9:21] Anyway, one of these things they flip-flopped on, kind of like Glass-Steagall. They're bringing Glass-Steagall back and they're getting rid of the carried interest exemption and all that. I mean, it's, yeah, it's bad. I don't know. I think it's us and New Zealand that allow on-air drug ads. And when I did—

Rudy Havenstein [9:37] Who were, by the way, total Nazis during COVID Oh my God.

Dave Collum [9:42] I made fun of that. What's her name? Ardern or whatever her name was.

Rudy Havenstein [9:45] Bucktooth. Yeah, Bucktooth.

Dave Collum [9:47] Yeah, she was ridiculous. I mean, I keep playing this clip where she says, you know, if you we we continue to be your single source of truth, and if you don't hear from us, it is not the truth. And I'm just cracking up.

Rudy Havenstein [9:57] That's an amazing clip. It's an amazing clip. And she also looks like she's now a cokehead.

Dave Collum [10:04] Oh, she's us. Yeah, yeah, we recognize the sign.

Rudy Havenstein [10:07] Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. She's twitching. She's like who's the one in Canada? Christia Freeland. Bobbing away, tweaking. Well, I was told by Canadian intelligence that it's well known that she's totally drugged out of her mind.

Dave Collum [10:20] Right, right. And probably very compromised too, obviously.

Rudy Havenstein [10:24] They're all compromised.

Dave Collum [10:26] Seems that way.

Rudy Havenstein [10:27] They're all compromised.

Dave Collum [10:29] So, like Nick Bryant said, you know.

Rudy Havenstein [10:31] So the bottom line is that—

Dave Collum [10:33] Yes. Well, Nick Bryant was making a comment about that senator that was caught in the bathroom, you know, propositioning a cop, and he's like, You know, how hard is it to, to, you know, entangle these guys or blackmail them? I mean, this guy is hitting on guys in public restrooms at airports, right? And he's a senator. So, and I always joke, how long do you think it would take to, to entrap Clinton or Trump? I mean, like, 5 minutes?

Rudy Havenstein [10:54] Well, it's worse. It's worse than that.

Dave Collum [10:56] Yeah.

Rudy Havenstein [10:57] So one day, one day I'm on, I'm listening to a Janda, a guy named Janda, Dave Janda, I think is his name, who was undersecretary of something or other in Bush administration. And, and, and, and I actually was on a Zoom call with a couple of generals, and one of them mentioned Janda, and I said, is he a good guy? And they said, oh yeah, he's a really good guy. So Janda's being interviewed, and he says his first week inside the Beltway, he gets hauled off to the side by a grizzled veteran, says, whatever you do, don't go to a private party.

Dave Collum [11:27] Yeah.

Rudy Havenstein [11:28] And he says, what do you mean? He says, don't go to a private party. He says, why? And he says, and he goes, even if it's at the Vice President's house, which by the way was Cheney at the time.

Marty Bent [11:37] Yeah.

Rudy Havenstein [11:37] And the guy says, uh, you'll wake up with a Polaroid clipped to your lapel in a total fog with you and a 5-year-old.

Marty Bent [11:44] Right.

Dave Collum [11:46] Like in Godfather 2.

Rudy Havenstein [11:47] They will drug you at the party. They will drug you at the party.

Marty Bent [11:50] And then— I'm sorry, I'm just—

Dave Collum [11:52] Burchett said the same thing.

Marty Bent [11:53] James O'Keefe.

Rudy Havenstein [11:56] Right.

Dave Collum [11:56] Who did?

Marty Bent [11:56] Tim. Yeah.

Rudy Havenstein [11:57] Go ahead.

Marty Bent [11:57] Go ahead.

Dave Collum [11:58] Tim Burchett said the same thing.

Marty Bent [11:59] But it's all throughout this like federal bureaucracy. I mean, James O'Keefe had a video this morning or this week. where he like incriminated, uh, somebody at the Pentagon saying they're gonna roll back any changes that are made during this administration. Uh, and he was basically on a Grindr date with James O'Keefe with a fake mustache on and like baby powder in his hair. It's like, how many times does this guy need to get—

Rudy Havenstein [12:22] I thought he was missing. I thought he was AWOL. I didn't know he came back.

Marty Bent [12:26] No, he did. But it's like, there's some weird— there's some weird psychology going on in that city. And I've, I've I've had to spend more time in that city in the last 6 months than I did in the first 34 years of my life. And you can like feel it in the air. I've been going to DC like once a month.

Rudy Havenstein [12:42] Yeah, apparently once you spend time talking to these guys, they're— the, the sense of corruption is overwhelming.

Marty Bent [12:51] Yeah, well, that gets to the question, like, are we just in the, the, like, the unabashed looting of the Treasury stage. I mean, you look at what's going on. I mean, as it pertains to what we're doing in like, um, the Bitcoin world right now, the Clarity Act's obviously the big topic of discussion. And like, the main thing holding it up is this ethics clause about like— this revolves around Trump's ability to trade like meme coins and crypto and his family's being able to do it. And they came out with the stat earlier this year, like Trump made $1.9 billion Off of some of his crypto trades. It's like more—

Dave Collum [13:28] He doesn't take a salary, Marty. He doesn't take a salary. Okay, so give the guy a break.

Marty Bent [13:34] It's more profit than Coinbase made last year, which is like insane to think about.

Dave Collum [13:38] How's Melania coin doing? Is that, is that doing good?

Marty Bent [13:41] That went straight to zero.

Rudy Havenstein [13:43] Where's Melania is a better question even. Where is she?

Dave Collum [13:45] Probably hanging with, uh, what's that guy's name?

Rudy Havenstein [13:48] Powell? Epstein. Epstein.

Dave Collum [13:50] Yeah, hooked her up with—

Marty Bent [13:51] Where is Mitch McConnell? That is another question.

Rudy Havenstein [13:54] Well, he's in a, I think he's in a refrigerator.

Dave Collum [13:57] He's like a Joe Biden, Feinstein. He's, he's, you know, they're gonna wheel, if he's still alive, they'll wheel him out and push a button to vote. You know, it's, it's ridiculous. Uh, they're all the same. Maxine Waters, Grassley is like, I don't know, he's like 105 or something. There, there's a whole, a whole bunch of 'em that are in their 80s and 90s that have lost it. I was making McConnell jokes, you know, like 10 years ago. The guy, the guy was like, He would have moments of, and they've gotten much worse over the years, but he should not be, he should not be driving a car. He should certainly not be a US senator voting on things, which, you know, he's got someone pulling his strings.

Marty Bent [14:31] I mean, that's, I think that's the point. He's obviously not voting on these things. He's just a puppet.

Dave Collum [14:35] Well, you can get that Randy Fine. You see the video of Randy Fine voting for missing congressmen that weren't there? There's a video of him, you know, that Randy Fine scumbag from—

Rudy Havenstein [14:44] Oh, walking along, voting along the—

Marty Bent [14:47] Yeah, exactly.

Rudy Havenstein [14:48] Exactly. Exactly.

Dave Collum [14:49] In Congress. Yeah. Yeah, that was great.

Rudy Havenstein [14:51] Yeah, I really like Randy Fine and all his political views too.

Dave Collum [14:55] Well, you know, there's no— I mean, Porter Collins said it good the other day, is there's no adults anywhere. They're not in the government. There's no— I mean, you know, there's no adults in regulation. I mean, Trump actually actively, you know, embraces corruption. And, you know, he's pardoned over 70 people convicted just of fraud. I mean, look what he's doing now. Like Marty said, looting of the Treasury. I mean, I don't know. There's no cops on the beat that I can see. Congress is completely owned by other country. And Supreme Court, I guess, gets things like 5 years later. But, and, you know, with mixed results there.

Rudy Havenstein [15:35] Way too late.

Dave Collum [15:36] Congress is— there's no brakes on this administration. We gave the executive way too much power under Bush and Cheney, and it's just metastasized over the years. And everything that Trump does is going to be done by some president in the future that you really hate. You know, even if people love— if you love Trump, you're going to have like Mondani elected and he's going to do the exact everything Trump did, only worse. So be careful what you wish for. We have a founder set up—

Rudy Havenstein [16:02] Mondani's not even looking that bad on the scale of 1 to 10.

Dave Collum [16:06] Well, you know, he's not the one that's blowing up schools in Iran. He's not the one that's destroying the middle class. He's not the one that allows this massive inflation without doing anything about it. So I'm not, you know, is it Mom Dami? Do I love his olive ideas? No, but he's not my enemy. He's not my main enemy. My main enemy is the people that have been running this country the last 5 years.

Rudy Havenstein [16:34] Clinton had 1,115 pardons. And I actually, at one point they were easy to find. It was, you know, top search link on Google. Now they're kind of buried, but you can find 'em. They're there. And they were all drugs and bank fraud. They were all—

Dave Collum [16:54] He ran a drug empire in Arkansas.

Rudy Havenstein [16:57] Kind of, you know?

Marty Bent [16:57] Yeah.

Dave Collum [16:58] Yeah. Yeah. So, okay. I can understand that. But I mean, now it's like, I mean, Trump just, I mean, Biden's pardons were unconscionable. I mean, you know, just at the end and blanket pardons and you get pardoned from 2014 on and and all that bullshit.

Rudy Havenstein [17:11] I don't even think those are legal, but no one cares about the law. No one cares.

Dave Collum [17:15] Like, there's no adult, there's no cops on the beat. And, and then now Trump is just making a farce of the whole thing. He's basically, he's blatantly selling it, you know, to major criminals, major criminals.

Rudy Havenstein [17:25] Um, yeah, as you know, I had hope for him. And, and as I've said so many times, um, It's not that I had great hope. He seemed like our last hope, and now our last hope is gone.

Dave Collum [17:44] Yeah, he he's done the opposite of everything he promised, and and it's it's pathetic. And that Joe Ken, I saw an interview the other day talking about how some something flipped in June of 2025. As from his point of view, he said Trump was never interested in war. It's war. He didn't want it. Something happened. I assume something happened is you know Netanyahu showed him a video or something. So it's bad. It's bad. It obviously corrupted. I mean, obviously look at the vote, you know, to merge our, our, you know, military procurement and other intelligence with Israel.

Rudy Havenstein [18:19] Oh, okay.

Dave Collum [18:20] And there's like 4 Republicans vote against it. 4 Republicans. Now, I hate both parties. I hope people know by now, but I mean, my God, I would never— I'm never going to vote Republican again. All right. I mean, I'm going to write in Tom Massie like I used to write in Ron Paul. And I tell people, hey, if you're liberal, write in Ro Khanna. You know, do I agree with him on everything?

Rudy Havenstein [18:38] I had dinner with Ron Paul once.

Dave Collum [18:40] Oh, good.

Rudy Havenstein [18:42] They sat me next to him because they— it turns out he's a pretty shy guy.

Dave Collum [18:47] Ron Paul?

Rudy Havenstein [18:49] Yeah.

Dave Collum [18:51] You sat next to him?

Rudy Havenstein [18:51] He's pretty—

Dave Collum [18:52] Yeah, he's a great— he's a hero. He's one guy that I respect in government in the last—

Rudy Havenstein [18:55] Total hero. I was on his— I was on his— I was an endorser on his homepage of his 2008 campaign. The homepage, my name was there endorsing him.

Dave Collum [19:04] Yeah. I voted for him many times.

Rudy Havenstein [19:06] And then I'm at dinner and I said, I apologize to him. I said, I have to do this. And I hand my camera across the table to the lady. I said, could you take a photo? And she— I watched her blow it. She hands the camera back and she took a picture of Ron Paul. And I said, I can get these off the internet. I was kind of hoping to be in it. And she goes, oh, right, right, right. So in any case, He's a genuinely nice— Honest the whole way. He's authentic. Um, Massie has done some things that don't quite make sense to me, so I haven't in any way, shape, or form given up. But he seems to have had information that he didn't release.

Dave Collum [19:48] Yeah, I hear you. You don't know who to trust 100% nowadays.

Rudy Havenstein [19:53] And, and so he's, he's the one I trust the most, but I You know, I like Ron Johnson. Ron Johnson, I think, is very good.

Dave Collum [20:01] Yeah, I'm less familiar with Ron Johnson, but I hear you. You can't— I mean, I had hope for Tulsi Gabbard, and then, I mean, you know, it didn't really work out. I had hope for Robert Kennedy Jr., or Robert F. Kennedy, you know, and, and, and that didn't work out really, you know. Um, it's like everybody— look at Joe Hegseth.

Rudy Havenstein [20:19] Do you think he— I mean, do you think Kennedy failed because he couldn't beat them, or do you think it was never going to be?

Dave Collum [20:27] Well, he's kind of been swamp adjacent for his whole life, you know. So who knows? Maybe he got compromised too. I mean, he's got a lot to be compromised about. I know. I don't know. I mean, are they threatening you? Maybe they just say maybe they don't even have to have any blackmail on you. They just say, you know what?

Rudy Havenstein [20:43] We're going to kill you, Marty. You're getting a lot of wind, Marty. I think you're getting a lot of wind.

Marty Bent [20:47] That's Rudy. Rudy, are you walking?

Dave Collum [20:49] Oh no, I'm on the roof. I'm going to go. I'm going to go back in. Sorry, guys. Okay.

Rudy Havenstein [20:53] Yeah, yeah.

Marty Bent [20:55] Dave, while you're throwing noise, uh, noise arrows, your dog's snoring.

Rudy Havenstein [20:59] Here's the funny thing. Whenever I listen to the podcast, which people say my dog's snoring, I can't hear it in the, in the recorded podcast. So what I try to do is keep them awake by scratching them so that they don't go into REM sleep. But I— my wife's in the other room and I can't let the dogs in because she can't take the beating of the dogs.

Marty Bent [21:19] Shut up.

Rudy Havenstein [21:20] Go. Sorry, I don't have a lot of choice on this one.

Marty Bent [21:25] Yeah, much better.

Rudy Havenstein [21:26] Yeah, much better.

Marty Bent [21:28] The, um, yeah, I think we're getting it. Like you said, there's no hope. Is there?

Dave Collum [21:34] Go ahead.

Marty Bent [21:34] There's no hope at all. Is there a new hope? Let's bring a cheesy Star Wars reference into this. Like, what is the— what is that?

Rudy Havenstein [21:41] There's another.

Marty Bent [21:43] The Princess Leia would give me hope because the, uh, because the other thing too is like the contradiction, like the Saudi nuclear deal, like right while we're bombing Iran for enrichment. It's like, what's going on there? Like, shouldn't we?

Dave Collum [21:53] I think there is hope.

Marty Bent [21:55] Do we have anybody building more nukes?

Dave Collum [21:56] Yeah, I'll be hopeful. It's, you know, we felt, I've talked about this before, back in the '70s, we had, we were in the '60s and '70s, we were very divided over the Vietnam War. And then we had the debacle in, you know, we had the inflation, we had '75 Vietnam. It was an embarrassing loss, kind of like Afghanistan. And you know, people were down. High inflation. We actually had recessions back then. They allowed recessions back then. And and then Carter just wasn't. You know, I think he's the best ex-president, but he he wasn't really a guy that inspired confidence. And everybody was kind of feeling like today, like what is all? I mean, no, actually not. This is much worse now. But I'm saying there was a lot of despair back then. Like well, it can't get any better. Remember Carter does his famous Malaysia speech, which I remember like I think in 1980. And then you had the whole Iran hostage thing in 79, and that was very demoralizing. Like oh, here we're getting our. ass kicked by these, by these mullahs. And actually, it was a widespread protest. And then the mullahs took over after they got rid of the Shah, you know, and because, you know, they're pretty brutal. They were more brutal than the students. But it was a bad time. And then we had a— and people, by the way, people say, oh, we've had this war with Iran for 47 years, you know, ever since 1979. Well, you know what? There's a reason that Iran's kind of ticked off at us, because in '53, we overthrew the democratically elected president and we installed a dictator. And he was a brutal dictator. And they're kind of ticked off about that. So the Americans have no such a history. 72% of Americans in a poll like, you know, 5 years ago didn't know where Iran was, couldn't find it on a map or even get close. So then we have this rescue mission in '79. I don't know if you remember Desert Eagle or something. And we, we tried to rescue the hostages and it ended in helicopter crashing, people dying, and we ran out with our tail between our legs. So I would put that as our bottom of that era. And then here comes Ron Reagan. Now, I'm not going to defend a lot of the problems we have today probably started under Reagan. And he had a Some bad people around him, but he come on and he was like inclusive. He was not divisive. He he was self-deprecating. He was he had a sense of humor. He didn't call the Democrats you know demoncrats and and call them communists and say they should all be you know go to jail and all that like Trump. He was you know even he'd go have you know a beer with Tip O'Neill, and I think he won in Atlanta. You know he won the election in eighty and eighty four. I think in eighty four even had. Won a huge landslide because I think largely because you got people feeling like, hey, we're yeah things are tough but we're all in this together. But now I think people they say yeah things are tough but Trump and his buddies only care about one thing. They're Trump and his buddies. I mean it's it's there's no he doesn't care about America at all clearly and neither does Lutnick or any other Epstein class that's that he has in his administration. So that I think was what makes it worse today and we we need a leader who's doesn't demonize people who don't agree with them. And, um, and we also need to return to, um, uh, accountability. There is no accountability for anything at any level. Who's accountable? Who's accountable for the Fed's policy of, uh, of actively seeking higher inflation 5 years ago? Who's responsible for Afghanistan? Who's responsible for Iraq? Who's been— I mean, who's been fired? You know, I think I read today they fired some some lieutenant colonel or something who said that, you know, we were doing Israel's interest in Iran. They fired him. That's who gets fired. Not the generals that have failed for my entire life. Not the generals that failed in Vietnam and Iraq and Libya, Afghanistan. Not the politicians. And, you know, here's— and you got to get rid of the deeper state BS because, you know, Trump tweets these things like, oh, you know, Hillary Clinton's going down and Barack Obama was corrupt. They were treasonous. I'm like, okay, dude, you're calling people treason. That's a serious charge. Where's the evidence? I mean, I've been hearing for 35 years that the Clintons were about to go to jail. It's all a fab. You know what I mean? The wrestling. Anyway, I'll let you guys pine in, but I don't get me started on this. There's no accountability and we need accountability again. We need to end too big to fail and we need to end too big to jail.

Marty Bent [26:07] Yeah. I mean, it seems like at least out of the gate, they tried to produce some form of accountability with DOJ in the auditing. Obviously, USAID and other things have been cut, but they basically stopped dead in their tracks. And then obviously over the last year, we've had Nick Shirley and I think many others on the trail of this Medicaid, Medicare fraud that seems to be pretty rampant throughout the country. And as a taxpayer, it's like, well, Why am I contributing to this? It's just a blatant waste of money that in many cases is being used actively against my interests as an individual American citizen.

Rudy Havenstein [26:46] Do you trust Shirley to be legit or a limited hangout?

Marty Bent [26:49] I mean, I don't think it really matters because Shirley— so I have a good friend in Maine, Steve Robinson. He writes for the Maine Wire and he's a really good investigative journalist, and he— I trust him. I worked with him at Barstool Sports. I've known him for years, and independently in Maine, he was doing investigations for years before Shirley even came out and was uncovering the same Medicare scheme in Maine alone. So whether Shirley is some limited hangout to draw attention away from something or towards something that may not be As important as other things, maybe. But like, I think still that problem exists. It is wrong. As a taxpayer, I don't like it. What are your thoughts on Shirley? You think he's a limited hangup?

Rudy Havenstein [27:39] I'm suspicious. He went from 0 to 60 so fast that I'm suspicious. He's like Harry Kissin', Republican style or something, you know? I don't, I don't trust anyone, actually. I asked Rudy in a DM one day about— and I don't need you to tell us what your answer was— but I asked him about, you know, do you trust Kiriakou, for example? And I would love to trust Kiriakou. I would love to trust Kiriakou. I just have this little voice in my head that says, you can't, you can't. And I like his stories and stuff like that. They seem a little times a little Old, a little overstated or something. But Bustamante, guys like that, I don't trust him as far as I can chuck him. And and it gets back to you know was Tulsi good? I I've been a Tulsi fan since well before she got near the national scene for fifteen years maybe. Then I don't know if you saw this, but. She was— she appears to have been in a cult.

Marty Bent [28:51] I did not see that.

Rudy Havenstein [28:53] I don't know whether that's completely— oh, you haven't seen that?

Marty Bent [28:55] No.

Rudy Havenstein [28:57] Supposedly there's like 25,000 documents that basically trace her public statements directly from a guy who's running this cult. And I don't know what to make of that. Rudy, did you see that?

Dave Collum [29:14] I, I, yeah, I'm familiar with that. I think, I think what I do often, like, um, I quoted Elizabeth Warren. Do I believe— I, you know what, I agree with what I quote, you know. I can't— I mean, if she comes out and says that, you know, corruption is bad, I'm gonna, I'm gonna agree with that. Now, is there— is she, is she lying? Is she— it's, you know what I mean? It's like, I can't, I can't vet everything anyone's ever done if I agree with something. Right. And I, you know, like I quoted Elizabeth Warren the other day, who I know you and I think she's a big phony. And, and, but I love, but I, but what I quoted was from her 2009 FCIC testimony, which I think was, was very good. It's before she got corrupted. And, and yet I get all people every time I do something like that, I could quote anybody. I could quote left or right. I get people saying, well, you know, that guy did this. And I'm like, you know what? I endorse what I quote. So I say that a lot. I have no problem. Look at Ron Paul and Dennis Kucinich or Tom Massie and Ro Khanna working together on things. Do they agree on everything? Hell no. You know, but on the Venn diagram where they intersect, let's work together. And I have people on the far left that follow me and people on the far right. And they're the minority of people who are able to, you know, I'm sure half my tweets tick them off, you know, and yet they're just, yeah, that's just okay. I disagree with Rudy on that, but I agree with— On this other thing. And so I think we should be more like that. Now you got a litmus test. If you disagree with me on one issue, then you're dead to me. I mean, so I just think we should try to find common ground, a very, very necessary thing today, left and right.

Marty Bent [30:51] I completely agree. And I mean, Dave, to your comments, like you can't trust anybody, I think that's the right way to approach everything. I think getting to how you fix this is one of the big phrases of Bitcoin is don't trust, verify. It's like, how can we get the system to a point where you don't need to trust these politicians as much? You can just verify that they're actually doing the right thing. And that would preclude making the federal government much smaller, making these things much more auditable.

Dave Collum [31:22] Well, that's what Reagan said about the Russians, trust but verify. That was one of his favorite sayings.

Marty Bent [31:30] Yeah. And it's, uh, and it's like, I wrote a newsletter about this earlier this week, particularly in the context of like the rise of socialist leanings for, um, from gener— uh, Gen Z. And it makes sense why they're leaning socialist because they've been taught that the system that they grow up in, like they've been taught that it's a capitalist system and there's many capitalistic aspects of our system. Like it's easy to start a business, to take risks, Where'd he go? He'll be back. He dropped earlier too. But like, the point—

Rudy Havenstein [32:02] He was digitizing a little. Were you hearing the digitizing?

Marty Bent [32:06] Yes, but that, uh, that won't come through in post. That'll, uh, he'll record locally, it'll come through clear.

Rudy Havenstein [32:12] Yeah, I was wondering if he is. My house has got a very complex wiring diagram, and so if I walk through my house, I will go in and out of reach very quickly. I'm like a highly variable Faraday cage in this house because there's so many lights and circuits and stuff. The guy who designed it, he— it's great, but it makes it impossible to walk and have a conversation on the phone, for example.

Marty Bent [32:40] But the point being is like this, you— I mean, you mentioned Mamdani, like he's not your enemy, but like I think long term The principles he stands on, like democratic socialists, like, are an enemy that would make this worse off. And the point I was making is like Gen Z is like—

Rudy Havenstein [32:56] But I don't think he'll have the power to do it.

Marty Bent [32:57] Well, he obviously can't run for president unless they change something.

Rudy Havenstein [33:00] No, no, no. But I, I think, I think even in his current position, I think, I think there are people telling him what to do.

Marty Bent [33:08] Oh, that's very obvious. Like he's some theater kid. Right.

Rudy Havenstein [33:12] So I, I know, you know, when, when Trump was running in '16 and it looked like it might be Trump versus Bernie, my brother and I talked excessively about whether we would vote for Trump or for Bernie, because Bernie's somewhat predictable and Trump was unpredictable. And we talked about how the system would keep him in check. And he was out there spewing shit about not supporting Israel the other day.

Dave Collum [33:44] Yeah.

Rudy Havenstein [33:45] Unless it's AI, right? That's that's the the other problem we face.

Marty Bent [33:51] Well, I mean, do you think he he's a bit pissed off? Do you think he's a bit pissed off about how things in Iran are going, or do you think he expected it?

Rudy Havenstein [34:00] How could you not be, right? I I there there's so many things, and I'll tell you there's a there's a Rorschach test for me going on right now, and I paid very close attention. And one could argue it's irrelevant, but because I view it as a Rorschach test, I'm paying very close attention. And that's the Charlie Kirk, Tyler Robinson story. Because you can see people picking sides in ways that you go, I did not see that coming. And I keep seeing this. Megyn Kelly, for example. I thought she was trying to get it right. And then all of a sudden she's out there giving the overwhelming evidence speech, which is just not right. There's just— there's someone wants to debate me. And I said, I don't think so. Because he said, because it's our understanding that you think everything Candace Owens says is correct. I go, no, I don't think everything Candace Owens is correct. No one thinks that. But we think she, you know, some of us think she's at least digging. And then all of a sudden, someone like Robby Starbuck, who I have— I think he's done some really good journalistic work, all of a sudden comes out and does this total hit piece on Candace. And if he did it with facts, it would be one thing, but it was done with all the usual tricks to undermine a person by showing clips of her acting goofy and things like that. And I go, that's just dishonest to me.

Dave Collum [35:34] Yeah.

Rudy Havenstein [35:34] And and then there's Megan Kelly all of a sudden doing the overwhelming evidence. I'll tell you what's overwhelming is that I don't think you can convict Tyler Robinson based on what I've seen. Based on what I've seen, I don't think you can convict him in a standard court of law. Sup freaks?

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Rudy Havenstein [38:33] What's going on is that there's not a single shred of evidence he did anything. I think, I think that you can make— you could possibly, possibly make the argument that he is somehow involved, but, but, but to the extent there's hard evidence, the hard evidence is that there's a lot of liars. There's a— the hard evidence is there's a lot of liars, and they're lying for a reason, and you don't know why. But, uh, but, um, but, but you can, you can throw me any piece of information people claim is true about Tyler Robinson, I can tell you it's bullshit because it's just, it's this massive campaign to get this guy convicted and put away before we find out that Israel whacked him or something like that. I don't know who did it, but— Yeah.

Marty Bent [39:19] Yeah, what are the lies they're telling? Because it's all weird, like the fact that they bulldozed the stage and concreted over it within days.

Rudy Havenstein [39:35] Yeah, they had to get rid of the evidence. If there was a local explosion like Candus says— Candus is Exploding mic theory is about 80% meritorious and 20%, um, I don't understand it. Um, but they dug up the dirt, and, and here, here's the key. If you listen to her—

Dave Collum [39:56] Yeah, well, they dug up the dirt.

Rudy Havenstein [39:59] What's the deal with that? Why would they, why would they possibly—

Dave Collum [40:02] Right, Dave, you know more about this than I do.

Rudy Havenstein [40:03] So when they dig up the dirt and lay it out— Yeah, you have to watch the 1-hour presentation. And if she said Frank Turek is lying, she shows Frank Turek, a clip of him saying something, and then Frank Turek, a clip of him saying the opposite, right? She doesn't just say he's a liar, she shows he's a liar. And if you watch clips of Candace, you're not getting a straight story. You unfortunately have to put in the hard work to see it. And she corrects herself all the time. And like I like to say, if Seymour Hersh did one of his big, big exposés, right, right, yeah, I understand, but presented what he understood on a daily basis, you'd get a very different result.

Dave Collum [40:42] Okay.

Rudy Havenstein [40:43] Because the people he's going after would start playing defense, they'd start evading, they'd start throwing out bullshit, right? Seymour Hersh would not be able to do what he did if he tipped his hand every single day as to what he was up to. And so, um, so I've watched a ton of Candace Ryan and Baron Coleman, who, by the way, I don't trust Baron Coleman. He showed up on Twitter exactly the month that Charlie got shot. Seems too coincidental to me. Now, I think he's saying the right stuff, but he arrived exactly— maybe that's what drew him to Twitter, I don't know. But, um, but, but, but, um, but the videos of him limping along, and, and you watch him carefully, and his— he doesn't have a gun down his pant leg. There's no— there's not a snowball's chance in hell he has a gun down his pant leg. For one thing, because once in a while he forgets and he bends that leg.

Dave Collum [41:33] Yeah.

Rudy Havenstein [41:34] And, and then there's not a single clear picture of his face, his license plate, anything. There's nothing. And, and then the— and during the testimony, that the def— and people are saying, why didn't the defense do A, B, C, and D? And I go, because it's a preliminary hearing, you retard. It just—

Dave Collum [41:51] it—

Rudy Havenstein [41:52] the defense doesn't— the defense has no reason to spill, tip their hand on anything. They just— but what they had to do is they had to counter some of the stuff.

Dave Collum [42:00] Right.

Rudy Havenstein [42:01] Because the prosecutor's trying to win the case before it starts.

Dave Collum [42:05] Yeah.

Rudy Havenstein [42:07] So they're interviewing some guy and he says— and she says to him, she says, you reported that a woman had a security camera and she saw Tyler Robinson's car at 12:45 AM, right? And he says, yes. And she said, did you mention in in your testimony that he was bald? And he says, no, I didn't. And then she says, and in this reported sighting of Tyler Robinson's car, did you mention that the woman also said there were 3 other people in the car? And he says, no, I didn't. This is a cop on the stand. Right. So, and then they interview Lance Twiggs, who, by the way, is a potential primary suspect. He could be the shooter.

Marty Bent [42:58] Mm.

Rudy Havenstein [42:58] They literally talked to him the day after the shooting and this April, and that's it. And then they do a videotape, and we see about a minute and a half clip, and they get nothing. They got nothing out of that minute and a half clip. I mean, and he'd answer the question like, well, does that look like— does that look like Tyler Robinson to you in those photos? He goes, well, I can't say for sure. But he dresses like him. I go, what the fuck is that? Right? And then he later on starts sort of trying to solidify it up. And then, so I found the 20-minute clip where it was something like 20 out of 23 minutes total. And they got even less than the 20-minute clip. So here there's a critical, critical witness, and the guy's supposed to be a furry. And you look at him, you go, he's not a fucking furry. He doesn't have any affectations you'd expect for a furry. He was— he'd been working construction for the last 8 months. This guy's not a furry.

Dave Collum [44:00] Yeah.

Rudy Havenstein [44:02] And he shockingly looks similar to Tyler Robinson. You'd go, yeah, cut his hair right down, it'd be the same guy if you put a little fur. You can't even see the lights. These are security cameras in the parking garages, right? If you have a security camera in the parking garage, what do you need to see above all else? The fucking license plate. You can't see the license plates. Candace Owens pointed out that, by the way, in these Dodge Chargers of the era, it's kind of a weird car. There's double-barrel exhaust and single, and the car, they keep showing us a single-barreled exhaust, and then the car that got towed was double-barrel exhaust, things like that. Literally no fact that holds up in this case, that holds up to scrutiny. None. And the screwdriver— the screwdriver found on the roof— there were 4 guys on the roof between the time he supposedly shot him and when the cop who got on the roof, who looked at the crime scene supposedly for the first time, and he doesn't even mention the screwdriver.

Dave Collum [45:10] Right.

Rudy Havenstein [45:12] And the screwdriver, by the way, isn't even the right screwdriver to take apart one of these Mausers. And these Mausers are big, heavy mother guns. So the— and that he, he took it apart, put it back together, took it apart again, changed his clothes several times.

Marty Bent [45:29] And just left it in the woods?

Rudy Havenstein [45:30] And just left it in the woods with the screwdriver. And they said, we found the screwdriver with the gun. For like 3 days, Then all of a sudden they said, holy shit, we got no evidence of him on the roof. So all of a sudden the screwdriver miraculously finds its way to the roof. This is all official record. You can see people testifying to this. You got it. It's just crazy. It's just a complete— look, so it's going to be like, um, I had a chance to chat with Derek, uh, with, uh, Jonathan Turley this year, which was— I'm like, it's total groupie. And, um, and, and I asked him, I, I, I asked him, I said, I got one question I'm dying to ask, 'cause you paid very close attention to the George Floyd death. And I said, did Derek Chauvin get a fair trial? And he hemmed and hawed. You could see him going, holy fuck, I didn't see that question coming. And then he said, I have real problems with that trial. And I think we're gonna do it again.

Dave Collum [46:28] Well, I don't follow— I can't follow everything. I pick and choose my rabbit holes.

Rudy Havenstein [46:33] But, um, no, you can't.

Dave Collum [46:35] You can't. But, uh, one thing I did find amusing, and I never followed Charlie Kirk. I really had very light familiarity with the guy. And, um, uh, I did find it amusing that immediately after he was—

Rudy Havenstein [46:45] yeah, I thought he was just a grifter. I thought he was a grifter, Charlie.

Marty Bent [46:48] Yeah.

Dave Collum [46:48] I think I got that impression. If you— I saw a few tweets and like where he was defending Trump and when obviously I thought Trump did something indefensible. But, but I did find it interesting that Ben Netanyahu felt the need to go, go on and give a lengthy, uh, protest that we didn't kill him. We didn't kill him. I mean, you and I didn't feel a need to get on the, get on TV and say, hey, we didn't kill Charlie Kirk. You know, it's like, that was very, very, you know, he doth protest too much. Uh, so I found that amusing, you know. Uh, and they have some experience with exploding devices, I think, over the years. Yeah, they sure do. Well, from reading the news.

Rudy Havenstein [47:25] I'm told.

Dave Collum [47:25] I'm told.

Rudy Havenstein [47:26] Yeah, I'm told. But you know what Netanyahu's doing this week? You know what he's doing this week? He is going to Lindsey Graham's funeral.

Dave Collum [47:35] Where's a meteor when you need one?

Rudy Havenstein [47:40] I know, I know, I know. Oh, well, good.

Marty Bent [47:43] I mean, that was like—

Rudy Havenstein [47:44] I made a—

Marty Bent [47:45] Dave, I thought we talked about— I think we might have talked about this, but the whole like golden beeper that he gave to Trump, I thought that was a very weird—

Rudy Havenstein [47:51] Yeah, very strange.

Marty Bent [47:52] Is that a veiled threat or? Like, I don't know what the hell that was.

Rudy Havenstein [47:55] So I have a working hypothesis of Trump that's generous, but it's not super generous. And that is, I think it's possible he did think he could change the system. And I think it's possible that it was driven by his narcissism where he said, look, I want to be the greatest, right? Muhammad Ali on steroids, right? And that the way to do that is to do great things, right? You don't get to Mount Rushmore by being a douchebag. And that something caused him to say, fuck it.

Dave Collum [48:31] Could be greed. He's made $2 billion last year. Oh, he was 80. 80. Can you imagine?

Rudy Havenstein [48:37] No, he's done well after he said—

Marty Bent [48:40] yeah.

Dave Collum [48:40] Can you imagine being 80 and being anti-war your whole life and then— And then you have the power to actually change things, and all you do is enrich yourself and your friends and your family and start new wars that you promised for the decade not to start. I mean, he's 80 years old.

Rudy Havenstein [48:58] See, that part of—

Marty Bent [49:00] part—

Rudy Havenstein [49:00] that's part of my fuck-it theory. That's part of my fuck-it theory is that he said, look, I, I— there's nothing I can achieve here, and, and therefore I'm just going to do what I do best, and that is grift.

Dave Collum [49:10] Well, what about the war? He clearly doesn't do war nearly as well as he does grifting.

Rudy Havenstein [49:15] Well, I think since it totally destroyed his presidency and he had to know it, he had to know it. He had to have advisors saying, you are going— this is going to be an epic disaster. I think something, something made him do it. I kind of think even Trump the grifter Wouldn't have done.

Dave Collum [49:39] I kind of take the opposite tack. I think he was so high on Venezuela that I bet he—I'm sure he had people telling him it's going to be a disaster. But he also had people telling him it's a cakewalk. I mean, the head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff—I got a tweet I commented on where he—he says it would be wouldn't be difficult, wouldn't be difficult. They—they thought that they literally this how ignorant. No, clearly people were arguing against it. I mean, I have except and tell you. Going nuts, but he does. You know, Trump likes people that stroke him. I mean, he's got Lutnick like is like his Siamese twin. He never goes anywhere without Lutnick, and of course, his man should literally touch.

Rudy Havenstein [50:17] Well, Lutnick's been AWOL since since the Epstein papers. I don't know. Lutnick's been AWOL.

Dave Collum [50:22] I thought I saw him the other day standing next to Trump. I don't know. Maybe it was a clip, but well, but it was a very awkward moment.

Rudy Havenstein [50:29] It was one of those things where where he was talking, where he was trash talking Israel with Lutnick standing next to him. I missed that. That was a strange, strange. I'm sitting there. There's I'm almost feeling sympathetic to Lutnick at that point. I'm going have to stand next to Trump while he's hammering Israel. That that's that's got to be. I missed that low point of his life. Israel.

Dave Collum [50:49] Okay, I'll believe it.

Marty Bent [50:51] Like, well, he was because he they didn't want to join the war, right?

Rudy Havenstein [50:54] They said they're not going to get. You know what?

Marty Bent [50:56] They're not going to pick up.

Dave Collum [50:57] It's all on Trump. He's a big boy. It's his responsibility. I'm sure Israel told him it was. It's all on Trump. Israel told him it's going to be a cakewalk. And and now that I said the chutzpah of these guys. They they they say, "Oh, we don't want to be involved in the Sudan War. We'll let the Americans fight it." You know, it's it's we we are so stupid. You know, I said today we were lied.

Rudy Havenstein [51:16] We've been lied to. We don't know though. We don't know though if if we don't know if if if if it was you know risk of death and dismemberment of family members. We don't know that. And and and if you think that's about that's beyond Israel, you're you're.

Dave Collum [51:33] Well, I would think Trump has access to people who can dismember Netanyahu's family. I mean, seriously, I mean, nobody has more power in the world than Trump. I mean, or whoever controls him.

Rudy Havenstein [51:42] I think the Israelis are the best.

Dave Collum [51:44] I think not. You know, look what they're butchering. They're good at people that don't fight back, you know? So they're good at, you know, blowing up hospitals. And of course, we're doing the same thing. We're blowing up hospitals, we're blowing up schools, we're blowing up bridges. I mean, these used to be called war crimes. Like I said, yeah, we've killed many more than they have. We've killed many more than they have. Many more.

Marty Bent [52:08] But not to the point of the shit show. Now it's like Yemen is starting to bomb Saudi Saudi ships on the other side. Bomb those poor people in Yemen.

Rudy Havenstein [52:15] And it's just like the Saudis Saudis are going for the bomb now. The Saudis are going for the bomb now.

Marty Bent [52:20] That's what I was saying earlier. It's like that's like the weird contradiction. Like we're in this this war with Iran to stop them from nuclear enrichment. and like, we're signing a deal with Saudi, like, yeah, yeah, go make a bomb. It's like, what? How did we get to this point?

Rudy Havenstein [52:32] I don't know. It would be hard to make the case we're better off than we were 6 months ago. And then of course, here we are, everyone's pissed off at everyone except for the 3 of us. We're not pissed off at each other. And we're at what has to be something approximating a market top and an economic top, right? I don't even think it's an economic— I think we're already on the skids badly economically, but they're hiding it. What happens if we get a 75% correction in the S&P? What the hell is society going to be doing then?

Marty Bent [53:14] They're not going to allow it.

Rudy Havenstein [53:16] That'll never happen, I don't think. They don't have the control over it, Marty.

Marty Bent [53:20] You don't think so?

Rudy Havenstein [53:21] No, no chance. Well, there's never been an asset class in history that got overvalued that didn't find its way back to cheap. Never.

Marty Bent [53:28] The—

Rudy Havenstein [53:30] Rudy, chime in here, buddy.

Marty Bent [53:31] Well, I was gonna say, Rudy, chime in because I know you liked my interview with Nick Namath, and we were talking about private credit insurance companies and sort of the systemic risk that may exist there. Like, what, what is going to be the catalyst? Because we've been talking about this for years and like What's—

Rudy Havenstein [53:47] Are you there?

Marty Bent [53:52] You sound like you're in a fishbowl, Rudy. Are you using your phone? What are you using?

Rudy Havenstein [53:59] We're not getting you at all.

Marty Bent [54:05] Yeah, you're muffled. I don't know if you're—

Rudy Havenstein [54:07] Like you're, uh, like you sat on your phone.

Marty Bent [54:13] You boomers.

Rudy Havenstein [54:14] He's going and coming back. Yeah, I'm boomer tech. I was on with Chris Martinson the other day and he couldn't get his technology to work after a Microsoft upgrade. Um, and then he went on Tucker, which, which was interesting. He went on Tucker.

Marty Bent [54:31] I had Chris on a couple months ago. It was, uh, it was the first time I've had him on. It was a good conversation. I think you may have brokered that intro. Or I used you as a reference. I said, Dave thinks I'm—

Rudy Havenstein [54:43] What's that?

Marty Bent [54:44] I used you as a reference to get Chris on the show. I said, I've had Dave Collum on. He's—

Rudy Havenstein [54:48] Oh, I saw the end. You guys spent the first 2 minutes talking about me.

Marty Bent [54:51] Yeah.

Rudy Havenstein [54:52] In your podcast, right?

Marty Bent [54:54] Yeah.

Rudy Havenstein [54:54] I'll take any press, good press, bad press, and I've had my share of both. And, but I do wonder what is going to happen. I'd like Rudy to chime in here, but there's things that— there's forces of nature out there that are more powerful than central banks. And one of them is that real live economic downturns are not stoppable. Real live market corrections from profound overvaluation are not stoppable. They can be delayed, they can be stalled, they can be made more overvalued, but they're ultimately not stoppable. Yeah. And it's like the death of currencies, right? They're not stoppable either.

Marty Bent [55:36] Yeah. What's the frothiest part of the market in your mind right now?

Rudy Havenstein [55:42] You'd have to say AI, I think. But I think AI is actually the trigger. I put out a tweet about a month ago or so that I said I never call market tops and crashes, but if I were to call a market top and a crash, it would be the IPO of SpaceX. And because on the one hand, it is the peak absurdity in the market. It's like SpaceX was a $1.5 trillion NFT, best I could tell. But more to the point, sentiment doesn't— I've actually thought that we would not get euphoric. We seem to have gotten euphoric for some reason. But I do believe that these really, really super high-priced IPOs— Rudy, you there? Just for laughs, got to ask. You're still in it. You're still in a fishbowl. Nothing's coming through. We're getting— we got to— I came back, but it was really— it's kind of like your head and phone were both up your butt.

Marty Bent [56:52] Yeah. So what, um, SpaceX NFT?

Rudy Havenstein [57:02] So SpaceX and these other really pricey IPOs that run into the multiple trillion dollars are going to suck the liquidity right out of the system. I, I think they're going to be— I think they're going to be like throwing, you know, sponge in there. Just so if, if you can— if you want to put out debt You're a bank. You could put out 1,000 $10 million loans or one $10 billion loan. What are you going to do? The one loan. So it's going to— it's just— it's going to— and they tried to come up— you can see them scrambling to find ways to dump the shares, right? So they tried to put it in the index right away. QQQ picked up on it. I think maybe the Russell, but the S&P did not. The NASDAQ picked up on it and put them in the NASDAQ and things like that. But the S&P has various rules, one of which is you have to have 2 quarters in a row of profitability. SpaceX is not going to have 2 quarters of profitability legitimately for many, many years. And, um, and, um, and so, so, uh, so the S&P actually held, held their ground. Now, the other noticeable thing is they, they staged the lockout, which at first I said, oh, now they're really grifting. But, but I realized that it would be better to stage it the way they did, which it's over the next 6 months. It's— they'll The shares are going to lock out percentage-wise. I actually saw a ramp. I saw the precise lockout thing. Someone drew it out graphically. You wouldn't want to release over $1 trillion worth of shares on one day, right? That you wouldn't want to do. So I think that's why SpaceX is rotting very quickly in the market. I think people are trying to get out as As fast as they can. And someone said, what price would you buy it at? $30? And I said, well, $30 would put it at 10 times sales. 10 times sales is Scott McNealy, what were they thinking level of valuation. So one could argue that if you do it based on sales, one could argue that $3 a share would be the right price.

Marty Bent [59:34] Yeah, it's down 30% from its list. That's the question. I mean, you have like Gavin Baker and others saying, look at the Anthropic compute leasing deal, like that's going to pay back Colossus 1 within like a year and then it's pure profit from there. And they're making the case that they can build a gigawatt facility with Colossus 2 and lease out Comparable economics than that.

Rudy Havenstein [1:00:03] So the guy, you might be pretty good at this story because of your understanding of the relationship of energy and Bitcoin and things like that. But the guy who makes the most sense to me is Ed Zitron.

Marty Bent [1:00:16] No, he's like the Peter Schiff of AI.

Rudy Havenstein [1:00:22] Oh, is that correct? Because he seems to— are his numbers wrong?

Marty Bent [1:00:28] I think so, yeah. Um, the— I mean, he's just making false claims because like they're— I mean, it's reported behind the scenes, obviously they're still a private company, but like rumors are like there's credible people on Anthropic's cap table that are saying they've hit cash flow positive, um, in many of their business lines. Uh, when he— like he The CEO, I believe, of Iron came out after—

Rudy Havenstein [1:00:56] I think they're recording fictional revenues and stuff.

Marty Bent [1:00:59] I don't know. I use this stuff every day.

Rudy Havenstein [1:01:01] I think the circle jerk, the circle jerk of, you know, vendor financing stuff looks profound.

Marty Bent [1:01:09] I, I, so I don't have like full clarity on like where the money's coming in, where the circle jerk is corrupting things. What I know is I'm using the tech, and I also sit on the board of a company that's a Bitcoin miner, and we are exploring doing some hosting for AI compute specifically.

Rudy Havenstein [1:01:34] Oh, I don't doubt that AI is going to be really important.

Marty Bent [1:01:38] Yeah. So that's what I'm trying to get at here is like—

Rudy Havenstein [1:01:42] I don't doubt that a bit.

Marty Bent [1:01:43] It's going to be really important. That's what I'm trying to discern. It's like, okay, where Like, it's obvious that this technology is—

Rudy Havenstein [1:01:49] The best analogy I knew, heard, was Jeff Gundlach, who said that at the turn of the century, obviously electricity companies were rocking because electricity had been invented and it was starting to be shipped around the world. And he said, of course they'd rock. It'd be like the railroads, right? He said they peaked in 1911. So the people who somehow think that the revenue is like, oh my God, how can you not own electricity? It's like the guys who bought the Nikkei in 1989. 14 of the 20 biggest companies in the world were in the Nikkei. How do you not own the Nikkei? You have to own the Nikkei under those conditions, right?

Dave Collum [1:02:37] Yeah.

Rudy Havenstein [1:02:39] Cisco in 1999 had a 30% growth in revenues.

Dave Collum [1:02:43] Yeah.

Rudy Havenstein [1:02:45] And so none of this stuff has anything to do with investing is the problem.

Marty Bent [1:02:50] Yeah. No, I think that's clear. Like, I would not be shocked if like Anthropic and OpenAI turn out to be companies that end up in the dustbin of history.

Rudy Havenstein [1:03:01] Well, no, I think what they'll do is that whatever they've created will be bought up for pennies on the dollar. And I mean pennies. And then the money will start. So the big winner of the internet were not the front end of the internet. It was not Yahoo or Netscape or whatever. It was Google. It was Amazon. It was the guys who came along and used it. And even Amazon, right? Amazon supposedly after the dot-com bust corrected 95%. Now, if you'd owned it and held onto it, you'd still be okay, but you would've gone through years of sleepless nights, years and years and years. And I wonder what's going on with Rudy. So there's things like a story I like to tell. Buffett, after the dot-com bust, Buffett ever so briefly lamented owning Coca-Cola. Now that's like the Pope lamenting reading the Bible, right? That's really extraordinary. And I only heard him say it once, but he lamented owning Coca-Cola. And so you say, well, why would he say that? And I go, well, it turns out that in 1998, I think it was, Coca-Cola was trading at 50 times earnings. Now, Coca-Cola was not a growth company. Coca-Cola, as someone said, I think Eddie Dowd said, he was in Nepal and there were Coke machines in Nepal.

Dave Collum [1:04:29] Wow.

Rudy Havenstein [1:04:30] I mean, Coca-Cola controlled the entire global beverage industry. And they were trading at 50 times earnings when Treasuries were returning 6.5%, 7%. There was not a— so you say, well, there's no way Coca's going to double its earnings. No way. But let's say they did. Then they'd be trading at— 25 times earnings. There was no way owning. And so Buffett noticed. In retrospect, he said, I should have sold. And that's where you get to. You get to the point where even guys like Buffett are not able to see with the clarity. Now, a guy who sees things like this with the clarity is Jeremy Grantham. If you look at his returns, they stink. If you look at his returns over the last 40 years or so, he called all the bubbles. He called them early. I give him credit for calling them early. But his returns suck. But I think— I sincerely believe that this is the biggest mother of them all, because you've got the AI bubble perched on top of— Perched on top of— of private equity, and private credit, and real estate, and standard equities. I mean, these are bubbles on top. This is turtles all the way down. And so this bubble is humongous. Someone came up with an estimate. I don't know how you estimate this, so I'm inclined to believe it's just a story. So I will warn the listener. But they said, if you look at the malinvestment of the dot-com bubble, the malinvestment— what's the metric for malinvestment? I don't know. The claim is, this is something George Noble, I think, brought up, who was Peter Lynch's right-hand man and has been very active lately. I did a Twitter Spaces with him once. He runs Twitter Spaces with an iron fist. And he said the malinvestment of the AI bubble is 17 times the malinvestment of the dot-com bubble.

Dave Collum [1:06:38] Wow.

Marty Bent [1:06:41] What's he pointing out specifically? Where's the money being—

Rudy Havenstein [1:06:43] No, no, that's the problem. It's a vague statement. It's a vague statement. It's misallocated resources, but I don't know what metric they use. So it's probably some guy on Wall Street, so his lips are moving, he's probably lying, right?

Marty Bent [1:06:55] Well, that's what I, that's what I worry about with like the, the, um, those analysts like that who are like putting bear cases out there. It's like, have you used this technology like outside of just Asking ChatGPT a question in the chat app.

Rudy Havenstein [1:07:10] And yeah, to me, ChatGPT— these Grok and ChatGPT, most of us are using it as the next gen. By the way, did you see that Google, for the first time in its history, has a negative cash flow?

Marty Bent [1:07:20] Yeah, but that makes sense. They're investing so much in the infrastructure layer, right?

Rudy Havenstein [1:07:24] Right.

Marty Bent [1:07:25] But they're putting it all on the line. I know. But they—

Rudy Havenstein [1:07:28] and how many, how many of these multi-trillion-dollar companies putting it all on the line.

Marty Bent [1:07:33] Well, the revenue was up, what, 24%? Same earnings report.

Rudy Havenstein [1:07:37] Just like Cisco, you mean? Like in '99?

Marty Bent [1:07:39] Yeah, maybe. But that's like where we have this weird— I think we have to take a nuanced approach here. It's like Google. I had a conversation with Mel Madison last week and he made a really good point. All these hyperscales, Google, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft, They are taking risks right now. Obviously, they've exacerbated their cash flow. Now they're going into debt or issuing equity. But on the debt side, Mel made the point AI could blow up tomorrow, go to zero, could have proven that none of this works, it doesn't make sense, and all their investments could go to zero. And the cash flow of their legacy business could pay back the debt that they've accrued up to this point within I think he said 3 or 4 quarters, like within a year.

Rudy Havenstein [1:08:28] But who's going to get hurt in that process?

Marty Bent [1:08:30] Yeah, I guess everybody attached to that buildout, like the—

Rudy Havenstein [1:08:37] All the people who have shit in their 401s.

Dave Collum [1:08:42] Yeah.

Rudy Havenstein [1:08:42] Well, I think, for example, the insurance industry could completely and utterly implode.

Marty Bent [1:08:51] Well, I think it can implode for separate reasons, but that's—

Rudy Havenstein [1:08:55] Right, right. But think if that was the only bubble, it would be a big bubble. Because here's what the insurance companies are. Insurance companies are companies which you give them money and you say, look, in some number of decades, you're going to pay me a lot of money back.

Dave Collum [1:09:17] Yeah.

Rudy Havenstein [1:09:17] How many companies are still around in many decades?

Marty Bent [1:09:20] I don't know.

Rudy Havenstein [1:09:25] That's a real problem.

Marty Bent [1:09:25] Have you been following Nick Namath's coverage of the life insurance and the private equity?

Rudy Havenstein [1:09:30] A little bit, but I sure as hell wouldn't buy an annuity from anyone. I wouldn't, right? There's just— I think Social Security is safer than these insurance annuities. I, I— because they can print money.

Dave Collum [1:09:45] Yeah.

Rudy Havenstein [1:09:45] The insurance companies are probably, probably loaded to the gills with private credit and alternative investments because the Federal Reserve— I wonder what happened to Rudy. Federal Reserve made them reach, forced them to reach.

Marty Bent [1:10:04] Well, not only that, but like Nick, so I've had 2 conversations with Nick.

Rudy Havenstein [1:10:09] By the way, I find Mel complicated. I'll just leave it at that.

Marty Bent [1:10:13] I do as well. But back on the insurance thing, what Nick has been pointing out is that a lot of the private equity funds saw what Buffett was doing with GEICO and they're like, we can do that. And so they've been going and buying up insurance companies and then replacing the asset manager of the balance sheet assets with an internal agnostic capital allocator who will invest across the spectrum and replacing it with themselves as the asset manager of the insurance balance sheet.

Dave Collum [1:10:47] Right.

Marty Bent [1:10:47] And then pushing it into their own products, which are then taking private equity risk and private credit risk in software as a service companies and this AI build-out to a certain extent. instead of buying like treasuries or— I'm sure they have treasuries, but they're taking more risk within their own portfolios and sort of double dipping.

Rudy Havenstein [1:11:12] Have you read The Plunders by Gretchen Morgenson and Josh Rosner?

Marty Bent [1:11:17] No.

Rudy Havenstein [1:11:17] That should be on your reading list because it shows the medical industry and how it's treated by private equity. And if you simply read that and you say, okay, let's assume that other things they touch, they're doing the same thing. They take totally viable companies, strip mine them, load them with debt, gut the place, sell them into the open market because monetary policy is too loose. So they actually are consumers of stupid purchases. And then those companies, with a 47% rate, go bankrupt after being resold into the market. 47%. And so all of a sudden, you have some hospital that they bought in Indiana in some town. And now they don't have a hospital. So I'm sitting there thinking, I got a relative who dies. I find out the reason they died is because of some private equity deal. I'm going to go find the CEO. I'm going to let him know what I think of him. Yeah. Was that obtuse enough?

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Rudy Havenstein [1:14:40] Oh, fucking Rudy. Rudy's one of the few people who— so some number of years ago, that's in excess of a dozen. I showed up on Twitter after being on other chat boards since the late '90s. And he's one of the few people, you know, they say you can only keep track of like 100 people in your lives and, and, and, and you just, you can't, your sphere of, your sphere of friends—

Marty Bent [1:15:07] Dunbar's number, it's 180.

Rudy Havenstein [1:15:09] Yeah, something like that, right? And, and And I have connections with guys like you and stuff because we occasionally podcast and, you know, and so that keeps us connected. But Rudy and I— Rudy is one of the very few people in those early days that is still very much sort of in my sort of inner circle of influence. And I think part of it because he does a good job of keeping the relationship going well. But Rudy and I exchange DMs. We've been doing it for 15 years now or something. And in some sense, I find it frustrating. So I enjoyed Twitter when I had 350 followers and I would chat with them.

Marty Bent [1:15:59] Right.

Rudy Havenstein [1:16:00] And I'd know them, you know, and, you know, there was guys like Eddie Dowd and I still occasionally— I did a podcast with Eddie the other day and And, but you can only go down so many rabbit holes, pay attention to so many things. And I think I spread myself too thin. So I'm aware of the evils of the world in too many categories and probably therefore have just a skim coat understanding of them. But I think we got some real problems.

Marty Bent [1:16:37] Yeah.

Rudy Havenstein [1:16:38] I think that the lack of accountability. And so, you know, why would you ever worry about breaking the law if you know you're never going to go to jail? Right.

Marty Bent [1:16:48] And that's what I— going back to that newsletter I wrote earlier this week in the context of Gen Z. And like you, like, I had hope for Trump and I won't lie, like, I still, like, there's that part of me still—

Rudy Havenstein [1:17:02] Have some remote Hope.

Marty Bent [1:17:03] It's like turn it around.

Rudy Havenstein [1:17:05] Um, like, I think he's lost me. He's lost me. But, you know, we're getting back. Lost me. Yeah, same.

Marty Bent [1:17:13] War lost me. Now that's like— now that it's expanding and like Saudi's getting bombed by Yemen, it's like, okay, we're just doing exactly what we did post-9/11. Here's another 20-year war.

Rudy Havenstein [1:17:24] This one's riskier. Yeah, this one's way riskier. Post-9/11, we stomped around like the meanest bastard on the planet. And at no point were we as a country at risk. And then next up comes the Ukraine war. And all of a sudden, we got politicians talking about nuking Russia and stuff. And now we're, you know, they talk about how, you know, Ukraine's doing serious damage to Russia. I go, you really think that's Ukraine doing that? You really think that's Ukraine doing that? Ukraine can't even field a goddamn army because everyone's either dead or left. Right? Ukraine's a ghost town. So the pain being inflicted on Russia is NATO. And if you had told me 10 years ago that we would be bombing sites in Russia, I would have thought you were insane.

Marty Bent [1:18:22] Hmm.

Rudy Havenstein [1:18:23] Now I realize they are insane. And at some point, so I did a poll on Twitter. I love polls because sometimes I use them to get other people to say what I don't want to say. And sometimes I actually use it to find out what people are actually thinking or what they know. And I said, let's say, I said hypothetically, Putin loses his shit and starts dropping some serious weaponry on Main Street Europe. Who do you blame? And I gave us the choice: Putin, I think it was Trump USA, NATO, and I think I had a 4th one, I can't remember. But the only thing I cared about is what percentage of the people blamed Putin. The rest were just the other potential candidates to blame. And you can sum them all up and say they're They're not Putin's, right? And it turns out Putin got something like 4% of the vote. Everyone understands that we've been pushing Putin's buttons. Really? I can't even— I got my— I only have one next to me. I can hear you. Yeah.

Marty Bent [1:19:43] Logan's interjecting about the snoring. But yeah, no, Putin only got 4%.

Rudy Havenstein [1:19:47] Something like that. It was single digit, guaranteed single digit. It might have been 8, might have been— I'm guessing. I could go look it up. And we understand. To me, Putin's one of the most grounded leaders in the world. He's not a good guy. I mean, he's a tough guy. But Justin Trudeau wasn't going to run Russia either.

Marty Bent [1:20:13] Yeah.

Rudy Havenstein [1:20:13] Come on, you punk. Wake up. Wake up.

Marty Bent [1:20:16] The, uh, it was like, how do you solve— like, again, going back to it, like, what is the hope? Like, do we have to do something external and put pressure on the system?

Rudy Havenstein [1:20:25] I think it's fourth turning shit. I think we gotta go through the valley of death. I, I— that's my metaphor. You got— you don't go into the valley of death and go out and come back out. You go through it. But you just gotta, you know, billy goat scruff, whatever.

Marty Bent [1:20:40] So would you say we're in the— are we in the beginning stages of that? Are we?

Rudy Havenstein [1:20:44] Well, chronologically speaking, we should be pretty far along. But it's like a fireworks display where you're— if you're half done, what percentage of the fireworks have been blown off? And the answer is probably 15%. Right? 'Cause they all blow him off at the end. And so, I think the— Quit snoring. Come on, stop snoring. How can you snore while I'm rubbing you like this? And so, I think the grand finale— Get off here. Get off here. Go over there.

Marty Bent [1:21:19] Go somewhere else.

Rudy Havenstein [1:21:22] I just can't let him go.

Dave Collum [1:21:23] Oh. I can't.

Rudy Havenstein [1:21:27] No choice. So what do you think?

Marty Bent [1:21:29] I don't know. Yeah, that's the, uh, I think, I think the core, like, I, I truly believe the money is the core of the problem and we need to fix it. I think—

Rudy Havenstein [1:21:40] I agree.

Marty Bent [1:21:41] That, uh, and that is again going back to like becoming dejected. It's like for me, like refocusing on Bitcoin, using the AI tools to get it out there. Like, I, I think, I don't think it's looking good. I think Gen Z particularly is more polarized than any generation of our lifetime before it. And you either have the Mondani socialist or like the tradcast, like send them all back. We are like literally inspired by what Hitler did to the Third Reich. Like we want a leader like that. Like we want to like that.

Rudy Havenstein [1:22:14] Well, for example, there's a great example of Trump owning it. You're not going to send 20 million people back home one at a time. And so he has this highly visible ICE thing going on. And I go, I can't imagine— there had to have been a better way.

Marty Bent [1:22:31] Yeah.

Rudy Havenstein [1:22:33] And the better way, by the way, would be to punish the fuck out of the guys employing them.

Marty Bent [1:22:38] Yeah.

Rudy Havenstein [1:22:39] Right? Make it not possible to stay. And I think they did get a lot of self-deportations. So I think there was some logic to it. But I think you just, you know, and the Mexicans have never been a problem. They're part of our economy, right? I'm not asking to send Mexicans back to Mexico. But I think you somehow have to say to the company, you know, Arthur Daniels Midland, whatever, say, if you're using illegals, you know, you better tell us who they are or we're gonna shut you down.

Dave Collum [1:23:14] Yeah.

Marty Bent [1:23:15] Yeah, or fine you. Um, and I mean, bringing it back to the Fourth Turning, where are we? I mean, we're beginning to see the political violence come back. I mean, it's small, small example, but like earlier this week in New York when that guy threw the gasoline and like lit it up and fired, that gave me like—

Rudy Havenstein [1:23:35] Did you see my tweet on that? You probably didn't because the world's too big now. I, I showed a picture of it. It's like a dumpster, right? It's like essentially a dumpster lit on fire or something in front of the building. And I said, I said, why aren't they evacuating the building? Did we learn nothing from Building 7?

Marty Bent [1:23:53] That's a good one. I know. It's like you get like, you get like small, like you can see that bubbling up. Like you had the people shooting at ICE officers.

Rudy Havenstein [1:24:07] But it was way worse with George Floyd.

Marty Bent [1:24:08] Just, yeah, I mean, that's— I mean, you could be talking about chronologically, where are we? Like, that, like, bubbling up, you can go back to 2020, like it started then.

Rudy Havenstein [1:24:16] Um, but, but the finale, the, the real end of the Fourth Turning is, again, and it's, you know, it's so— it's really sociology and trying to put a real tight bow on it, and that doesn't work very well, but, but they've been— it's been a pretty good model. It has been a pretty good bottle. And the grand finale, and Ray Dalio, who I think is way overrated, created a 6-cycle thing just to make sure it was different than the Fourth Turning. But the final stage is usually a really horrific war.

Marty Bent [1:24:56] Yeah.

Rudy Havenstein [1:24:58] Real turbulence.

Marty Bent [1:24:59] People have been talking about World War III. You get 2022, you get Ukraine, Russia, This year you get Iran, US.

Rudy Havenstein [1:25:06] Well, if Putin starts hurling serious weapons into Paris or something, into Berlin—

Marty Bent [1:25:13] Do you think he's getting to the point where he may do that?

Rudy Havenstein [1:25:17] I think he's getting pressure. I listen to guys like Mearsheimer, who I— it's not to say he doesn't have it wrong, but I think he's trying to get it right. And I find it so frustrating that people, you know, I was on a podcast, I was with friends. Several times this has happened to me where people talk about the evil Iranians. And I go, you are aware that we bombed them, right? And then they say, well, you know, but they're gonna get a nuke. And I go, you are aware that Netanyahu's been saying that for 30 fucking years, right?

Marty Bent [1:25:58] Yeah.

Rudy Havenstein [1:26:00] And, and, and they— and I go, you know, Iran could destroy Israel this week. I'm positive Iran could destroy Israel this week. All they have to do is send the drone swarm and hit Israel's 7 desalination plants, and Israel will die of thirst in a week.

Marty Bent [1:26:18] Oh.

Rudy Havenstein [1:26:20] Because they, unlike Iran, Israel depends on like 90% of their fresh water comes from desalination plants. And so then the question is, and people say, well, the reason they don't is, why haven't they done it? I said, well, you know, most people give the argument because mutually assured destruction, blah, blah, blah, blah. I go, how about the possibility that maybe Israel's not as a medieval society as much as you think, and that they know that that's not the right thing to do? How about that? Are you willing to entertain that possibility? Yeah. Because here's what I like to encourage people to do, and I don't know if this does any good, but I tell everyone on every podcast when this topic comes up, I go, go to YouTube and search streets of Tehran. Look for videos about this that show the streets of Tehran and tell me it doesn't look like New York City except they're not burning shit down and it's clean. They're extraordinary. You could do it right now. You could boot it up and share it and Boom, you know, streets of— it's a— they're beautiful. It's like when they show the Moscow subway system, you go, that's a lot cleaner than New York's, that's for damn sure. And so I, I think it's quite possible that the Iranians actually do have a moral compass.

Marty Bent [1:27:35] Yeah, and I think it's not only incredibly naive, but, uh, like, there's a whole Western propaganda arm.

Rudy Havenstein [1:27:47] It's just like we're seeing this, which is way worse than everyone else's.

Marty Bent [1:27:50] And that's, that's where it gets very frustrating because it's, it's, it creates a frame where it's impossible to even make, uh, make the assumption that you just put forward. Maybe they're, maybe they have a good moral compass. And like, we're seeing this in AI too, where it's this existential race for dominance in AI between the United States and China. And you just look at the contradiction of like the values that have been espoused that we're supposed to believe that each country holds. And you have 2 major companies here in Anthropic and OpenAI. They have a closed-source model, closed-weight model. They're not sharing it with the world. And they're obviously, if you're paying attention, they want a regulatory moat. They want to be the god kings of the AI future. Whereas in China, that's where they have the open weight models that are keeping pace. And actually just wrote about it in the newsletter this morning, DeepSeek, their CEO gave a 4-hour interview and he explained their perspective on how they're building their AI model. And it's just like, hey, we think this is good for humanity. We're going to price things appropriately so people can get access to it. We're going to be as efficient. We're going to be hyper-focused. We're be long-term thinking and we think humanity should have access to this. We've been taught like China is this communist country, which it is to an extent, but having worked with Chinese in the Bitcoin mining industry, these people are hyper-capitalistic. Like the Chinese citizens, all they care about is making money at the end of the day. Like it's actually pretty impressive and they can get shit done. And then like the US, it's really like the intent of the frontier model providers and Anthropic and OpenAI. It's not explicit, but I think implicitly it's get the regulatory moat, become the AI god kings, bring the surveillance state where the communist country is creating like the liberty-minded, like open system. And it's just like this weird contradiction that exists between the two.

Rudy Havenstein [1:29:48] I know, it seems backwards, doesn't it?

Marty Bent [1:29:50] Yeah.

Rudy Havenstein [1:29:50] Have you ever dug into Sam Altman's background?

Marty Bent [1:29:53] Oh yeah, he's weird.

Rudy Havenstein [1:29:56] He's just a hypester. He's, you know, a Ronco salesman. He's not a techie. He's not gifted. He's not some boy genius. He's just a hosebag. And I think it was Peter Thiel who sort of pulled him up, said, I know how to use this guy. And so he's not some genius, farsighted guy. He is just the pitchman. He is fucking selling goddamn pillows.

Dave Collum [1:30:25] Yeah.

Marty Bent [1:30:27] And he's a sociopath.

Rudy Havenstein [1:30:28] And he's undoubtedly a sociopath. And, and, you know, did you see the interview where, uh, where Tucker interviewed him and accused him in the usual Tuckerian way where he didn't actually accuse him of killing his coworker? And so Tucker asked him a question, well, it's kind of suspicious where your coworker died. And Sam says, sounds like you're accusing me. And Tucker goes, oh no, no, I'm not accusing you. I just find it very odd that it went back and forth about 3 fucking times. And I'm going, Tucker is accusing you of killing your coworker. Yeah. And I mean, so the problem we have there— this, I know, I know. One of the merits of the Chinese system, which I don't think, you know, I'm loath to defend, but it doesn't have the Sam Altmans running around doing this shit. To the extent that we used to have checks and balances, our system worked better. You take away the checks and balances and accountability, and now you have this situation, this crazy situation where we're running around threatening everyone, tariffing everyone, bombing everyone, and China's going around, hey, can we build you a port? You know, can we build you factories? Let us help out here, right? Holy shit, who's winning this game, right? I think, by the way, what do you— what's your take on the— let's go to the Iran War for who's winning. Who's winning the Iran War?

Marty Bent [1:32:01] Looking at oil prices, not the American citizen, I would say.

Rudy Havenstein [1:32:08] Well, but to me, the game theory is that Iran just has to outlast us. Because I think their goal has to be— their number one goal has to be, when this is over, we need the Western world to swear off ever attacking us again.

Marty Bent [1:32:27] Yeah.

Rudy Havenstein [1:32:28] And by the way, they're doing total point-for-point escalation. And the scariest one, there was a post yesterday from the Hormuz, the Strait of Hormuz or something. It looks like it's an outlet for for the Iranians to me. And it says, we're gonna do tit for tat. And you guys have tried to bomb our leaders and their families. And we know where you live, and we're going to do that too now. And we know you— civilian infrastructure, we have not attacked that, but you're attacking that. So we're gonna do that too now, which all of a sudden, next thing you know, boom, they start attacking infrastructure. The Iranians are matching blow for blow the whole Yeah.

Marty Bent [1:33:17] And it's with a degree of restraint too. It's like, hey—

Rudy Havenstein [1:33:19] With a degree of restraint.

Marty Bent [1:33:21] And it does seem like a war of attrition because you have Bessent coming out and others saying they have, what, 180% inflation? I guess the Western perspective is hit them hard enough and long enough that their economy crumbles and they have—

Rudy Havenstein [1:33:39] Yeah, yeah. Take out Persia, which has survived 3,000 years.

Dave Collum [1:33:43] Right.

Rudy Havenstein [1:33:44] 3,000 years. By the way, you never win— you don't win wars when they have home field advantage. Home field advantage is everything. Guys in Vietnam, we, we couldn't beat them. They were in pajamas and sandals. Home field advantage is everything because they got nowhere to go. You know, during World War II, The Germans did end up losing, I think. One thing's for sure is the Soviets won. Not us, not Europe. The Soviets won because they ended up with half of Europe on our dime. But I lost my train of thought. But the The, the, the, the reason the Germans fought so hard at the end is, is they didn't want— they did— they were afraid of the Soviets. That's why the war started, actually, in my opinion. It was Germany was afraid of the Soviet Union.

Dave Collum [1:34:49] Yeah.

Marty Bent [1:34:52] And well, that— the other thing, bringing this back to Iran, it's like, I thought like a month ago, I was like, okay, we got the memorandum of understanding, we got the ceasefire. It's like, okay.

Rudy Havenstein [1:35:03] Oh, I didn't think that would hold at all.

Marty Bent [1:35:05] You didn't? I was holding out hope, like, hey, maybe just eat our lunch.

Rudy Havenstein [1:35:08] No, Israel doesn't want it to hold.

Marty Bent [1:35:09] Well, like, that's the confusing thing is like now they're saying they don't want to enter the war. So they're just—

Rudy Havenstein [1:35:16] They don't want to enter the war. Of course they don't.

Marty Bent [1:35:21] But how long can this persist or how long will this persist now that things escalated?

Rudy Havenstein [1:35:25] As long as AIPAC dumps money into the pockets of our politicians. Yeah. This is the problem. We just didn't we just wasn't it two days ago we merged the militaries, whatever that means.

Marty Bent [1:35:36] I guess in the House. I think the Senate votes still. Oh, okay.

Rudy Havenstein [1:35:40] Well, if that goes through, you can kiss your ass goodbye, in my opinion.

Marty Bent [1:35:47] Yeah. Are we a sovereign nation?

Rudy Havenstein [1:35:50] Yeah. The State of Israel. Yeah.

Marty Bent [1:35:54] It's uh. Yeah, it's weird times.

Rudy Havenstein [1:35:58] It is very weird times. Israel wants us to shed our blood to take out their enemies. It's that simple. And they don't, they don't want to, they don't want this war to end. They want, they want Iran to get flattened.

Marty Bent [1:36:17] I find that hard. I mean, to your point, like Persia has been around for 3,000 years. think of the topology of the country too, how mountainous it is.

Rudy Havenstein [1:36:26] Well, we also learned why no one has ever conquered Afghanistan, right? It's the same sort of problem. But when Iran said, part of the deal is you have to stop bombing Lebanon. Now, there's 2 ways to look at it. One is they knew that Israel wouldn't, and therefore they put it there so that they didn't have to make a deal. The other is, is that it's the high road and they're saying, we don't like the fact you're bombing Lebanon.

Marty Bent [1:36:54] Yeah, the Lebanon incursion is incredibly egregious in my mind, where it's like, why?

Rudy Havenstein [1:37:02] Right.

Marty Bent [1:37:02] Yeah, you'll scream Hezbollah and all that.

Rudy Havenstein [1:37:04] Which is more egregious, Lebanon or Gaza?

Marty Bent [1:37:06] I mean, Gaza's been going on for so— like Lebanon, I know Lebanese people.

Rudy Havenstein [1:37:12] Um, well, the reason you don't know anyone from Gaza is because they're all dead.

Marty Bent [1:37:17] Yeah. I mean, Saifedean Ammous, I mean, he's a—

Rudy Havenstein [1:37:19] And they haven't been let out. That's the other thing. Yeah. They've been in a concentration camp for decades.

Marty Bent [1:37:27] And it's weird. Why is this such a third rail that people can't touch? Because, I mean, obviously you're not—

Rudy Havenstein [1:37:34] Money and power. Yeah. The other thing is that you could criticize Israel until October 7th. So you could say Jeffrey Epstein was a Mossad. No one gave a shit. But when October 7th occurred, Israel took off the gloves and said, we will punish anyone. We can get our mitts on, which includes podcasters.

Marty Bent [1:38:01] Yeah.

Rudy Havenstein [1:38:02] But I'm pissed at them, you know. I called the head of the JNS a pig-fucking liar after he called me a Holocaust-denying Nazi.

Marty Bent [1:38:14] When did he do that? Did he do that on X or? Last year.

Rudy Havenstein [1:38:19] He wrote an article about me. He called me a Holocaust-denying Nazi. Yeah. Morty Klein. A Nazi. Well, actually, I didn't call him a pig-fucking liar. What I said is I would never call you a pig-fucking liar because I couldn't defend that completely.

Marty Bent [1:38:37] Well, that's the other thing too. Like, everybody's getting called a Nazi. It's like, okay, it's like the term racist.

Rudy Havenstein [1:38:45] The anti-Semite label is wearing off. It used to be people were terrified of being called an anti-Semite. Now, fuck you. Yeah. The number one— there's a spiking anti-Semitism. The problem is because of Israel.

Dave Collum [1:39:08] Yeah.

Rudy Havenstein [1:39:09] Right? You want to stop antisemitism, stop bombing the shit out of— stop kicking people out of their homes. Can you imagine what would you do if some guy come— if Canada somehow got feisty and came along and took your home and kicked you out of your home, killed your relatives? What would you do?

Marty Bent [1:39:29] Yeah.

Rudy Havenstein [1:39:30] You'd become a terrorist.

Marty Bent [1:39:30] Yeah. And to your point, it's been going on for decades.

Rudy Havenstein [1:39:34] But before they kicked me out of— if they kicked me out of my home, the guys who moved in would not survive. They would— I've thought about this, the squatting problem we have in the United States. I guarantee you no one could squat in my house. I guarantee you. I'm gonna show you. See, I've shown you this before. See that lake out there?

Marty Bent [1:39:56] Yeah.

Rudy Havenstein [1:39:57] Can you see it? Yeah, there it is. Yeah, yeah, that's a deep lake. There's— you could hide a squatter at the bottom of that lake. So if anyone came to my house and squatted, I, I would just go in there with the Louisville Slugger and I would just beat the living piss out of them. And I'd say, if you want to go to the cops, the next one's going to be fatal. You can now leave my house. Go get some healthcare, and I don't ever want to see you again. And if you show up again, you're going to die. That's how I'd handle it.

Marty Bent [1:40:33] Yeah.

Rudy Havenstein [1:40:34] Why is that irrational? I'm on a jury and that happens, the guy's getting off. I'm hanging that jury. Did you see the guy who wrote fake vaccine papers for people? Fake vaccine characterizations?

Marty Bent [1:40:48] Yeah, I thought it was a woman, the nurse.

Rudy Havenstein [1:40:51] I think it was a doctor. Maybe there's several, I don't know. But they dropped the charges. Now, we got a problem when you— when— when— that shows you the absurdity of the situation though. Because it— he shouldn't have to do that either.

Dave Collum [1:41:08] Right.

Rudy Havenstein [1:41:10] So it's accountability.

Marty Bent [1:41:13] Where was this? Well, again, I think that's a core theme of this conversation is accountability.

Dave Collum [1:41:19] Like, that's—

Rudy Havenstein [1:41:21] and swinging back to healthcare, by the way, I will never get another vaccine. Never, ever, ever get another vaccine. I don't trust them. Another good book is Vaccine Amen by Aaron Suri.

Dave Collum [1:41:34] Mm-hmm.

Rudy Havenstein [1:41:35] I thought I'd read everything I could about COVID I don't wanna read another, but I read it. You can't get to the end of that book without swearing off vaccines forever, forever. Aaron Seary is a lawyer. He fought the cases. He uses court transcripts. He shows you the sociopathic crime syndicate upfront, personal. And he, he, he, he basically deposed every single major vaccinologist in the country. And the transcripts show he, he tore them to shreds.

Marty Bent [1:42:10] And this is the guy—

Rudy Havenstein [1:42:10] Because there's never, there's never been a vaccine that was tested correctly.

Dave Collum [1:42:14] No.

Rudy Havenstein [1:42:14] There's never been a vaccine that was tested correctly.

Marty Bent [1:42:17] This is the bald guy, right? That's been testifying to Congress. Yes. They came out with a study.

Rudy Havenstein [1:42:21] Yes. At the—

Marty Bent [1:42:23] what was it, the Cincinnati Hospital?

Rudy Havenstein [1:42:24] So someone like Fauci should be taken to The Hague, tried for crimes against humanity, and executed.

Marty Bent [1:42:29] Well, that's—

Rudy Havenstein [1:42:29] Real straightforward.

Marty Bent [1:42:30] Going back to accountability, that's the frustrating part. They'll like leave a little breadcrumb.

Rudy Havenstein [1:42:35] I don't see how Fauci survives.

Marty Bent [1:42:37] We're gonna drag him in. Yeah. But they're saying they're gonna drag him in. They have it. It's, uh—

Rudy Havenstein [1:42:43] They're not going to.

Marty Bent [1:42:44] But that's—

Rudy Havenstein [1:42:45] They're not going to.

Marty Bent [1:42:46] That's the point I'm trying to make, is like, they, they, they know people want accountability, and so they'll, they'll like pretend out there like, yeah, we're gonna bring him in, don't worry. And then it never happens.

Rudy Havenstein [1:42:55] I'll tell you what worked. A judge released an illegal immigrant who then went out and raped some and killed some Girl. The judge let him out. And I think it was the next day or a day or two later, the judge walked out their front door and there was the guy's head on the doorstep.

Dave Collum [1:43:14] Really?

Rudy Havenstein [1:43:16] Yeah. Go ahead, let him out. We'll deal with him.

Marty Bent [1:43:19] Yeah. Well, that's— I mean, that's—

Rudy Havenstein [1:43:22] They used to hang horse thieves, right?

Marty Bent [1:43:23] Yeah. I mean, that's— and that's where the Fourth Turning vibes really come back. It's like if she—

Rudy Havenstein [1:43:27] That's exactly right.

Marty Bent [1:43:29] If you don't have any accountability, like, people are going to take it into their own hands.

Rudy Havenstein [1:43:32] And that's exactly right. And, and, and, and right now the guilt is diffuse. So if you actually say, what's the guilt of the COVID Well, I produced a guilt hierarchy one year where I said at the very bottom are the, the guys who unknowingly did something. That's, that's fine. I, I have a problem. There's guys who knowingly did something, but They were told, look, either you do this or you have to give up your career. I understand that. I took the vaccine because I was told you had to quit your job. We will fire you if you don't take the vaccine. And so I took the vaccine. I waited, I did the risk-reward ratio measurement, and I said, okay, it's, it's a risk I got to take. They're forcing me to do it. I told the president of the university they blew it. I was pretty clear on that. And, uh, and I've got health issues that maybe are from it, but I got away with, I got away with it.

Marty Bent [1:44:29] Has there been any accountability there? Has anybody admitted like, hey, we regret?

Rudy Havenstein [1:44:33] There have been organizations who've been sued for back pay and stuff for firing people. The problem I had was, remember the vaccine came out in 2021. I'd gotten canceled in 2020. Very unpleasant experience, I should add, even though I like to think of myself as fairly resilient. But when you've got thousands of signatures trying to get you fired and graffiti all over the campus and articles written daily about how you should be fired and things like that, that's unpleasant. And I just kind of rode it out 'cause it was during the lockdown. And what I didn't know is if Antifa was gonna come and get me. And so I slept with loaded guns and I was emotionally ready to blow someone's brains out. And didn't have to because we were locked down and Antifa probably doesn't have cars. And right after that, I got told, you're gonna lose your job if you don't vaccinate. And I had people saying, well, you should just fight it. And I go, There are people waiting for me to make a mistake. This is not like they're going to say, oh, we can't lose Dave. We'll just let him off the hook. There are people who say, got him.

Dave Collum [1:45:54] Got him.

Rudy Havenstein [1:45:57] So I couldn't take the risk.

Marty Bent [1:45:58] Yeah.

Rudy Havenstein [1:45:59] And I could have quit my job. I shouldn't have to make that choice. And I don't blame the president of the university for doing it. And again, I told him, I said, you blew it. At one point I said to him, I sent him an email. I've had some interesting exchanges. I've known him since the day he got to Cornell. And what got me canceled was I fought 2 labor movements on campus where I, the first one, I played a major role but wasn't critical in it. The unionization, which was a bad idea. lost on its own merits, lack of merits. And there was some smearing that went on, but otherwise not a big deal. The second one was when Randi Weingarten showed up with her labor union. And I got a call from the provost who is now the president and said, we need you to organize a counterattack. Late night, 10:30 in the evening, no emails, No, nothing like that. But I was on speed dial with Cornell Legal. If I, if I had a question, boom, they'd put me right through to Cornell Legal. And, uh, so I organized a team and we won it by a whisker, by a whisker. And, and the only reason we won it is because, uh, I picked a fight and they bit. They took the bait.

Dave Collum [1:47:19] Mm-hmm.

Rudy Havenstein [1:47:20] And then we had this fight. We, we finally got the issues out on the table because of this fight. And, uh, and they were mad at me, so they smeared the shit out of me. Those same issues and people were behind the cancellation in 2020. And so, um, and so, uh, so I'm, I'm a bit infamous on campus.

Marty Bent [1:47:44] Yeah, well, I think you're a bit infamous, uh, beyond campus too.

Rudy Havenstein [1:47:48] I think so. I'm told. Um, But there's— one day I put out a tweet. This is a funny story. I put out a tweet and I said Cornell was getting bad press. And I said, Cornell's been in the press a lot lately. It's getting bad press. This is a fairly utopian existence and it's silly that faculty talk about being oppressed. Right? We've got it made. And I said, what we have to do is just find a way to get out of the news cycle. That's it. That's our only problem. That was basically on my tweet. And I get a call from my brother-in-law, my brother-in-law, and he reads part of the tweet. Now, who's my brother-in-law? My brother-in-law is Ezra Cornell, by birth trustee. My wife is Candace Cornell. And he reads me part of the tweet. I said, Ezra, how'd you see that? He said, my boss sent it to me. I said, Daphne, how did she see it? That's his wife. And he said, no, my other boss. And I said, you're self-employed. He said, the chairman of the board of trustees. And he calls him and says, Ezra, you by chance know this guy? Because Ezra Cornell in Ithaca kind of knows everybody, right? This is not a name you hide in Ithaca.

Dave Collum [1:49:10] Right.

Rudy Havenstein [1:49:12] And he calls him and says, do you by chance know this guy? And Ezra says to the chairman of the board, he says, yeah, that's my brother-in-law. And they laughed. And he was just thrilled that there was someone on the faculty who wasn't a douchebag.

Marty Bent [1:49:27] Yeah. And so she had some common sense.

Rudy Havenstein [1:49:31] And, you know, and when I was getting canceled, I was getting— I was spending hours on the phone with David Einhorn and with my my brother-in-law and stuff like that. I, I had friends in very high places. Both of them went into the president's office independently and said, don't even think about doing something stupid here. And, um, and, uh, so I wasn't going to get fired, but it was still miserable.

Marty Bent [1:49:53] Yeah.

Rudy Havenstein [1:49:54] And, um, I don't want to fight that again. And then last year when I went on Tucker and I made the mistake of, of, in an effort to describe how Stalin was horrific, I made reference to him being worse than Hitler and that one could argue we should have sided with Hitler and fought Stalin. And by the way, I was quoting Patton. George Patton at the end of the war said that. And then the Jews went at me.

Dave Collum [1:50:22] I mean—

Rudy Havenstein [1:50:25] The Zionists.

Marty Bent [1:50:25] Yeah.

Rudy Havenstein [1:50:26] And so I'm pissed at the Zionists, not the Jews. I've talked to many of my colleagues, one of which actually spent 2 years in an attic in Germany. And, and, um, none of them support what they're seeing. They're all frustrated. They're, they're all potentially suffering from antisemitism, which is caused by Israel.

Marty Bent [1:50:51] Yeah, I, I think very obviously, especially with the BBC, the BBC, and then like you have that that hardcore Zionist, um, sort of Orthodox sect.

Rudy Havenstein [1:51:06] Yeah, I don't even understand the Christian Zionists. Those, like, like Huckabee?

Marty Bent [1:51:10] Oh, I mean, they believe in, uh, what is it, the Schofield Bible, where they think they— I know they want anything to pop off there because they believe—

Rudy Havenstein [1:51:19] I want a signed copy of the Schofield Bible. Um, boy, did Tucker take him to the cleaners. He did it just like he did Ted Cruz, which is why Ted Cruz went at me last year and why Laura Loomer went at me last year and why Mark Levin went at me last year. And I called Laura Loomer, I said she's the master of clickbaiting and then said, and then referred to from that point on in the write-up as the masturbator. And, and, and but then Victor Davis Hanson not only went at me, Who I thought was a good guy, but he went at me repeatedly. And he was wrong. He was wrong. He was factually wrong.

Marty Bent [1:52:06] What was he saying about you?

Rudy Havenstein [1:52:08] Well, he was saying, first of all, that my quoting of Patton wasn't right because Patton said it at the end of the war. And I go, yeah, what's your point? Then I said, I said in the Tucker interview, I said, I said, Maybe there wouldn't have even been a Holocaust if the alliances— because Hitler was actually looking to form an alliance with Britain. If we had formed an alliance with Britain, there might be a lot fewer dead Jews because you control your allies a lot better than you control your enemies. So maybe the Holocaust wouldn't have occurred.

Dave Collum [1:52:47] Right.

Rudy Havenstein [1:52:49] That's, that's a counterfactual argument. That's just saying, you know, what if we had thought— and I go, this is not a butterfly flapping its wings. This is, this is a big change. Maybe it wouldn't have occurred.

Marty Bent [1:52:58] Yeah. And then that's—

Rudy Havenstein [1:53:00] And Hansen said that's preposterous. I go, no, it's not fucking preposterous.

Marty Bent [1:53:03] Well, that's like, it's like the thought control. It's like, why can't you even have a thought experiment to explore something?

Rudy Havenstein [1:53:07] Right? That's all it was. And, and as Tucker said, as he attacked Levin for attacking me, he said He said, he said, how's that antisemitic? What are you talking about? And Levin was sort of threatening to use the power of television to go at me and stuff. And I called him a rabid bobcat in heat. But it was shocking. It was like a little PTSD from getting canceled, you know, 5 years earlier.

Marty Bent [1:53:37] Yeah.

Rudy Havenstein [1:53:38] Resurfaced. And so I was really a little dazed and confused by it. And I asked the question, do you really want to play in the big leagues like this? Do you really want to get into these fights?

Marty Bent [1:53:49] Are you Candace Owens?

Rudy Havenstein [1:53:50] Because if you're not, be careful. And, uh, but I've kind of realized watching Dave Smith and Candace Owens and these guys, I go, you know, you're a fucking pussy. You know that? You're a fucking pussy if you don't get out there and say, you know, this is a genocide. By the way, October 7th was clearly a false flag. Clearly a false flag. I mean, so they held the door wide open. Here's what I did. I wrote about it but didn't publish it. I'm going to use it, I think. I think I'm going to publish it. But using exclusively Israeli sources, I can make the case that Netanyahu knew they were coming months in advance. Months in advance.

Marty Bent [1:54:30] Well, she's, uh, she's In Bitcoin now, but like Efrat, she's a journalist and she was—

Rudy Havenstein [1:54:36] Efrat, I've had several conversations with. Yes.

Marty Bent [1:54:39] Yeah. And I mean, I think she's been in these relatively—

Rudy Havenstein [1:54:42] And Efrat makes me feel like a pussy, right? Because she's out there fighting the good fight and Brett Weinstein was out there fighting the good fight and he makes me— so I said, okay, so you got to stay in the game. You got to go on Brett's podcast and you got to go on podcasts and make the case that that this is a genocide, that these guys are douchebags. And so I read a bunch of books on the origin of Palestine-Israel conflict and stuff like that. A guy named Pape wrote a very nice book and some others trying to understand. And people think that the Jewish state of Israel started and that really the whole thing was triggered by World War II. It wasn't. It was in the making at the turn of the century. They just used the war as the final launching pad. But October 7th, here's a question I like to ask. I said, is there a country that doesn't lie to optimize this narrative? Can you name one? The answer is no. There's no country that doesn't lie to optimize this narrative, right? Propaganda, every country uses it. I said, therefore, I said, what happened on October 7th? And I watch people kind of recoil back a little bit because they realize that my rhetorical question is, is going to be a problem for them. And then someone will say, often I get something like, well, we know a lot of people died. I go, really? How many? How many died? You know? How many hostages were there? Do you know? Were some of the hostages possibly being put up in Motel 8s, being fed prime rib, waiting to be released and to tell their horror story? Were some of the people who were killed possibly killed by Israeli fire? If I'd asked you, Marty, on October 6th, Hamas is going to drop 800 guys by paraglider into Israel, how long would it take for Israel to clean up that mess? One thing I have great faith in is that Israel knows how to defend itself. I would have said maybe 10 minutes, but I'm not sure they would have made it to the ground alive. They didn't run around raping and pillaging and taking hostages for 8 hours. There's no chance Israel let that happen. There's no chance Israel couldn't have stopped that. No chance. Yeah. No chance.

Marty Bent [1:57:17] I mean, that's what, like, Efrit reported on. Like, while it was happening, she's like—

Rudy Havenstein [1:57:21] So, Alfred's first report, I think, was with a— in a— on a podcast with Bret Weinstein. And they very, very delicately talked about what didn't make sense. You could see them sort of walking out on the thin ice going, holy fuck, this is nerve-wracking. I take my hat off to both of those two. And I don't blame the Jews of the world for not speaking up. That's, you know, it's something like Title IX, right? The, the, you know, transgenders in sports, right? Preposterous situation. Absurd situation. I directly blame all the adult former female athletes for not speaking up. Where the fuck were they? They benefited from sports. They should have said, what the fuck are you doing to women's sports? And they didn't. You're cowards. I blame you. And then Riley Gaines finally came out and started doing it. And now you don't get hammered for— but Riley Gaines took the arrows, right? She took the arrows. And, but a Jew who comes out against Israel is really going in harm's way. And so I, I don't— I understand why they don't want to speak up. You're asking for so much trouble. But someone's got to. I thought Trump was going to.

Marty Bent [1:58:56] Yeah, it's just like, from my perspective, I got into— I'm very like, the wars in the Middle East growing up radicalized me to the point of like becoming like very anti-war. I still am to this day.

Rudy Havenstein [1:59:10] I'm profoundly anti-war. I make, I make the hippies of the '60s look like bikers.

Marty Bent [1:59:15] It's just, um, I don't know, it's just very, uh, very concerning to see that we're getting back in the Middle Eastern wars and, um, that this is going on, it's allowed to persist, and that it is like a third world topic. Because it's like, again, like, I grew up, um, in the Philly area, like half my Middle school was Jewish. I've got Jewish friends. I work with Jewish people. And I think—

Rudy Havenstein [1:59:37] Doesn't vaccinate you. That vaccine doesn't work either. Oh, some of my best friends are Black. You know, it doesn't work. I don't even— my brother said several times, you know, you should say that. And I go, no, no, because it's a hollow statement. You know, that it's a, oh, I have Jewish friends. Well, here's an interesting question I've had. This is when I got to Cornell. I think probably half my colleagues were Jewish in chemistry. What I'll also tell you is I didn't know because it wasn't a variable for me.

Marty Bent [2:00:16] Right.

Rudy Havenstein [2:00:17] It wasn't anything I cared about. So I knew a couple, like one who has a Nobel Prize who lived in the attic. I knew he was Jewish. That was no problem. But I later found out other colleagues were Jewish. I go, oh, I didn't know. And what's interesting is now they're not. And I don't know why. So the Jewish influence, it's like they've been replaced by Chinese nationals or something. I don't know. But where did these exceedingly bright and talented and ambitious and Where'd they go? My guess is Wall Street or Silicon Valley or something, right? Somehow chemistry. It's also possible that Cornell, for some historical reason, which I don't have a good feel for, maybe was one of the first schools to hire Jews regularly. And so it's conceivable Related story, there's a guy named Henry Gilman, published 1,400 papers at Iowa State, should have got the Nobel Prize for that. What he really should have gotten the Nobel Prize for was he recruited Black students back when it wasn't cool, back in the '50s, in the '40s, to go to grad school at Ohio State. There's a picture of Henry old man sitting in a chair surrounded by 5 Black guys in suits who are college and university presidents who work for him. That is changing society. So we might have had a very heavy Jewish influence at Cornell because somehow we embraced them first. We were one of the early, early schools to embrace them. I don't know. I do. We had a guy named Peter Debye who was one of the most famous classical physicists of the 20th century, early 20th century, Nobel Prize, you name it. Left Germany in '39, you know. And at one point someone wrote a book claiming he was a Nazi. And there's debye institutes all over Europe. They're called debye institutes. He was really that famous. He was sort of in the Einstein world. And in fact, in that famous picture, Foundations of Modern Physics, where there's like 30 physicists, Einstein and de Broglie and these guys, he's in that picture. And so he was at Cornell. And, and when I was probably about 1986 or '87 or something like that, this book came out and they started peeling his name off the Dubai Institutes in Europe. They all, they all got cowardly. They started yanking his name off, and the evidence was spartan. They— someone found a goddamn letter in which he wrote Heil Hitler. Well, in Germany, if you didn't say Heil Hitler, you ended up in a gulag somewhere. So And he also helped families get out of Germany, Jewish families and stuff. So it was just an absurd accusation. So instead of pulling his name off chair positions and stuff that we have in chemistry, we hired a historian, said, go find out what the truth is. And he came back and we wrote an article in Physics Today and said, this is why we are not abandoning Peter de Bary.

Dave Collum [2:03:57] Right.

Rudy Havenstein [2:03:58] And, and, and we were correct. Now, here's an interesting subplot. I know I'm rambling.

Marty Bent [2:04:06] I love your ramblings.

Rudy Havenstein [2:04:07] We wrote, we wrote a letter sort of from the department that denouncing the people who denounced Dubai. One person dissented. It was my colleague who lived in an attic for 2 years. And he wrote an independent letter, and he has tremendous influence with his Nobel Prize and stuff. And, and I remember at the time feeling betrayed by him, although I understood. And over the years, I realized, no, you should almost never sign a group letter because group letters require you compromise. It's got to be some bland bullshit thing that you somehow all agreed to sign, but it's not what you would have written if you wrote the letter. And I realized his dissent was a very important part of the process, and that I just was wrong thinking he shouldn't have dissented like that. Although, again, I understood it because he had to hate Nazis like no one else. And, and so I won't sign group letters. Some guy wrote a journal article— he's dead now— saying that women have hurt organic chemistry. I didn't even read it. I'm thinking, you really didn't think that one through. Even if you can make a case why maybe affirmative action or something has done something, Keep that to yourself, right? Society doesn't want to hear this. And he got pounded. And it was a German-based journal that published it, prominent. And the— some like 16 advisory board members from the US all resigned from the advisory board. I have a problem with that. I have a problem because you really didn't have a choice. You're going to be the one who says, I'm not resigning? No. You didn't get— you lost your autonomy when it became too politically hot.

Marty Bent [2:06:27] Yeah.

Rudy Havenstein [2:06:27] So you didn't dare speak up. So I really, really take my hat off to the people who stand up for the underdog when no one else will. Now interestingly, there was evidence in the past that Trump was the guy who did this sort of thing. There's all these anecdotes of things where like Dana, what's his name, the professional wrestler, Dana White, and how Trump was the only guy who backed him.

Marty Bent [2:06:56] Yeah, he had his first TV deal or something like that. Wasn't there like— yeah, I forget what it was.

Rudy Havenstein [2:07:00] But, but, but then here's the problem. I'm reading about Bush family secrets, Family of Secrets, the book. And they say that what they do is they bury stories deep, years in advance, and then make it such that a journalist discovers it. And because they dug it up themselves, they really believe it. And they shepherd the story into the light. And so, 30 years ago, Trump said, someday I think I'm going to run for president. I might need it. He can start burying these stories.

Marty Bent [2:07:37] Seeding them.

Rudy Havenstein [2:07:39] Mm-hmm. To be used at a later date.

Dave Collum [2:07:43] Yeah.

Marty Bent [2:07:47] What, um, where do we go from here? What are you, what are you looking for?

Rudy Havenstein [2:07:51] 4/30.

Dave Collum [2:07:52] Yeah. I'm—

Rudy Havenstein [2:07:54] I think we're very— I think we're very close. I've said this for so many years that it's It's absurd. I'm the broken clock. I like to say to people who call me a broken clock, if when that broken clock is correct, it blows up your fucking house, you should start paying attention to what time it is.

Dave Collum [2:08:11] Because—

Rudy Havenstein [2:08:12] Because I put the probability that— put it this way. If you give me a choice of saying a correction to these current markets is 40%, Or 80% to 90%, I would have to take the latter. I do not believe 40% gets us anywhere. If you look at historically, right now, by every rational metric of valuation, we're about 200%, 3x. People don't understand that math even. They're so thick sometimes. If we're 200% over historical average valuation, we got a 65%, 66% percent correction to get to the average valuation.

Dave Collum [2:08:56] Yeah.

Rudy Havenstein [2:08:57] And my understanding of average is you got to spend half your time below it, half your time above it, or it's not your average. And if you look at things like the Case-Shiller PE from 1870 to 1990, it averaged 15. It's a reconstructed PE. for those who are shitting their thong. It averaged 15 and now it's 42, 43, right? It's way too high. They're all out of whack. They're all Buffett's indicator, market cap to GDP. Well, then you need to— And I've asked people, explain to me why that should trend. Their answers suck.

Marty Bent [2:09:43] Well, that— I mean, then you get to like the consumer side, like housing looks like it's turning over. Obviously inflation seems to be rearing its head again.

Rudy Havenstein [2:09:51] Well, I think we should be raising rates.

Marty Bent [2:09:53] It's on the table.

Rudy Havenstein [2:09:56] I think it is on the table. By the way, what do you think of Walsh? If you had to say, what's Walsh going to do?

Marty Bent [2:10:01] I'm not going to pretend to know exactly what he's going to do. What I do know for certain—

Rudy Havenstein [2:10:07] No, none of us know. What's your guess? It's closest to the pin, Marty. You got to make the shot here. What's your call?

Marty Bent [2:10:14] I think he does raise maybe a quarter of a point.

Rudy Havenstein [2:10:21] I don't mean short-term, long-term. What is his administration going to be?

Marty Bent [2:10:26] They're going to be the one that basically welds the Treasury and the Fed together and makes it politically palatable. Like, they're just gonna— they're gonna like fully nationalize this whole thing.

Rudy Havenstein [2:10:39] Um, that's right. Is it possible that he's put in there as a hawk, which he has been for 15 years, to be the guy to take us into the valley of death?

Marty Bent [2:10:54] I wouldn't be shocked.

Rudy Havenstein [2:10:56] Right. A lot of people say, oh, new boss same as the old boss. Like, are you sure? Certainly Volcker wasn't new boss, same as the old boss. And Volcker didn't do it for us. They never do it for us. They did it because the banking system needed it. It had to projectile vomit. Volcker did it for the banking system, just like every other Fed chair. I think right now, I think we're in a situation where they go, we got to projectile vomit. Get Warsh in there, stick his finger down his throat. Projectile vomit.

Dave Collum [2:11:31] Purge.

Marty Bent [2:11:32] Purge and then have the Treasury step in. Is it kind of—

Rudy Havenstein [2:11:37] I don't— I think it could be part of the ultimate solution, the final solution, we should say, given our chat.

Marty Bent [2:11:44] Well, just look at outside of everything we've discussed today. Just look at like the, the sort of trend towards nationalization, like buying equity stakes in Intel, Dell.

Rudy Havenstein [2:11:54] Oh my God.

Marty Bent [2:11:55] Rare earth metals. Rare earth metals companies. I mean, it seems like they're making like wartime.

Rudy Havenstein [2:12:03] I could imagine something like that. I can't rule out the possibility that I could support something. That's what stablecoins are to a certain extent. Buying yeah, right. Buying shares of Intel? No. And by the way, Intel's rolling over. It's just a burst. Trump probably made a ton of money. You know, did you see what his plan is now? He he um he he posts all his posts on Truth Social.

Marty Bent [2:12:31] Yeah, now you got to pay to get it five minutes early.

Rudy Havenstein [2:12:34] That's right. That's right. We talked about this. Oh my God! Oh my God! It's insane. How is that? That's so that's so absurdly criminal. I mean, that's worse than. Melania coin or whatever. Then you got— then you got— here's another theory. I'm working on all these theories. So you got Ivanka, who— she did her interview where they made her look angelic. They almost put wings on her. The whole everything was white. It was like she was in heaven. And she's talking about her and Jared were swimming and they discovered an island, you know, with their buddy Nat Rothschild. I'm going, oh my God. Oh, Gag me with a spoon, right?

Marty Bent [2:13:20] It's like, are you, are you like aware of all the conspiracies, or is this, is this one of those things where you have to be like blatantly, uh, explicit, like in your face?

Rudy Havenstein [2:13:28] So, so, so, so the good news is the Albanians who own the island are saying no, hell no, you're not taking our fucking island. It's not your island. I don't care, you're not buying it. We— I don't give a shit what you do, you're just not getting this island. And I'm hoping that holds up. But I'm looking at the fact that Trump has gone pro-Zionist. His daughter's married a very capable Jewish man. You go, okay, that happens. But he's also part of an exceedingly powerful Zionist family.

Dave Collum [2:14:10] Yeah.

Rudy Havenstein [2:14:12] Which is getting a little coincidental now. And I start looking at this, I'm going, wait, let me see if I got this right. The King of France marries his daughter to the son of the King of Germany so that they have an alliance. What if Ivanka and Jared— by the way, so you go, oh, that's absurd.

Marty Bent [2:14:39] Yeah.

Rudy Havenstein [2:14:40] Turns out the matchmaking for those 2 supposedly was this Chinese woman who was very prominent. And their relationship started to go on the skids at one point, and she sort of swooped in again to try to save the day, supposedly. And she has ties to— God, who the hell is it? Peter Thiel or something? I mean, there's just— There are some strange things. So I'm wondering if Ivanka didn't get married off to form an alliance, and that maybe the world's always been this way. We had this delusion. And while we were vastly, vastly economically superior post-World War II, what a perfect setup to become absolute dominant empire, we could afford to just produce our way past the problems. Yeah. And you could, you know, you'd go to the gas station as a kid and 3 guys would come out and service your car while they filled your gas tank, right? That doesn't happen anymore. Now you do your own tank.

Marty Bent [2:15:55] Unless you're in New Jersey.

Rudy Havenstein [2:15:57] Unless you're in New Jersey. Yeah, I never quite— is that a Lobby or something? What is that?

Marty Bent [2:16:03] I don't know. I don't know. That's a low-level job trigger. I've always wondered about that.

Rudy Havenstein [2:16:10] So it feels to me like we are going to— I don't think it's end of empire necessarily, but it is certainly going to be like, you know, when the Roman Empire moved to Constantinople or something like that, right? I mean, it's good.

Marty Bent [2:16:25] That's one of the theories that's been thrown around is like maybe we're leaving the era of republic and into true empire. No, right? It's like egregious.

Rudy Havenstein [2:16:34] Well, the one thing Trump seems to be doing with his babbling about Greenland, which he was the 5th president to talk about taking Greenland, so that was not just Trump. Gulf of America, Venezuela, it's Monroe Doctrine, right? So if Trump has gotten the memo that, look, we're in a multipolar world, Which is not good news for us. But it's one of those, you play the hand you're dealt, right? Say, okay, how do we not end up becoming real losers? You set up your little tech-nate in the Western Hemisphere and say, this is ours, stay away.

Marty Bent [2:17:14] I was all for that. That's why—

Rudy Havenstein [2:17:18] Yeah, I don't have a problem with that at all. I want, I want to bring our carriers home. I want to I want to tell Europe to defend itself and quit, by the way, picking a nuclear holocaust fight with Russia. Let's stop. Let's start there. So no, that to me is— there's a savviness to it. And by the way, why should Denmark get Greenland?

Marty Bent [2:17:40] Why do they have Greenland? I don't know the history there.

Rudy Havenstein [2:17:44] That's some historical thing. Some guy named Sven something or other, you know. Some guy. You ever see the Vikings series? It's really good on the History Channel.

Marty Bent [2:17:56] No.

Rudy Havenstein [2:17:57] Oh, it's phenomenal. It's phenomenal. Ragnar Lothbrok and— yeah. And at one point— I'm so rambling. At one point, Floki, a real guy from the past, they're on Iceland. They go to Iceland and they get told it's really— It's really a wonderful place. It's just this rock. It's a rock with steam spewing out of crevices and stuff, right? But at one point, Floki takes off on his own and he goes deep into this cave and there is a Christian cross. And there's actually historical evidence that that could be true, that the Christian missionaries got to Iceland first.

Marty Bent [2:18:45] Yeah.

Rudy Havenstein [2:18:46] And so I, how any of this works, I don't know, but wouldn't be the first time that the border's changed.

Dave Collum [2:18:54] No, no.

Marty Bent [2:18:58] Canada, bring in Canada. We need all that oil. They need to be saved from—

Rudy Havenstein [2:19:01] That could get tricky. That could get tricky. How about that? Canada's pretty divided. Canada's pretty divided.

Marty Bent [2:19:09] But what are your thoughts on Trudeau? Just like destroying the country, becoming boyfriend— the boyfriend of—

Rudy Havenstein [2:19:15] I think Trudeau is Castro's son.

Marty Bent [2:19:19] I do too. The Cuban nipple crisis is real.

Rudy Havenstein [2:19:23] That's a funny story, but you look at Trudeau and you look at Castro when he's young, you go, oh boy, there's a paternity test needed for that one. And there's this one picture of Marie Trudeau, is that her name? Pierre's wife, who apparently was a floozy. I shouldn't say it that way. I support floozies. But she's sitting there with Castro and he's cutting a cake or something. First of all, there's a photo of her, Castro's holding Justin. Castro's holding Justa with Pierre and Marie or whatever her name is, and she's looking at Castro in the most adoring look, as in like, oh no, that's, that's her, that's, that's the father of her child right there. But then there's a picture of her where, where Castro's cutting a piece of cake or something, and she's got his hand on his chest. Now anyone knows who's been through middle school in high school is that once the chick puts her hand on your chest, you're going places. That is inside the personal space. On your back, a little sketchy. The chest, no, you're in good shape. You're good to go. And so I do think a DNA test, I don't know if I— I wouldn't choose that as my first choice. I think I'd choose Macron's wife To get a DNA test first, because that one would tell us whether or not she's a he and whether he is Emmanuel Macron's father. That's the one that I wanted the answer to. Is Macron married to his father?

Marty Bent [2:21:15] That's a rabbit hole.

Rudy Havenstein [2:21:18] That one would be a real National Enquirer headline right there.

Marty Bent [2:21:24] Yeah. Yeah, it's like, do we have any effect on, like, if that's true? Who knows?

Rudy Havenstein [2:21:32] Well, I think he's a dude. Yeah. So, so, and, and the, the royal families in Europe have real problems. So I could— the King Charles, he had 4 influential guys in his life. All of them were pedophiles. All of them. The 4 guys, Mountbatten, there's a couple in the middle I can't quite remember, and then at the end Jimmy Savile. Savile.

Dave Collum [2:21:57] Yeah.

Rudy Havenstein [2:21:57] It seems—

Marty Bent [2:22:00] The true demon.

Rudy Havenstein [2:22:01] Yeah, yeah, yeah. A real— the most prolific pedophile in history, arguably. Although that's probably a reach of a statement, but he certainly was famous. Pedophile to the stars. And And I think the royal families in Europe have a fundamental problem. I was on a Zoom call with Archbishop Carlo Vigano. That's a pretty cool Zoom call to be on. Number 3 at the Vatican. I didn't know the Vatican had ratings. So that could be wrong, but he had the Pope's ear and he's the guy who ratted out the Vatican for covering up pedophilia, which—

Dave Collum [2:22:40] Wow.

Rudy Havenstein [2:22:40] Doesn't shock me.

Marty Bent [2:22:41] And he came out strong during COVID too, right?

Rudy Havenstein [2:22:43] Came out strong during COVID Doesn't shock me there's pedophilia among priests. What would shock me is if the Vatican was involved in child trafficking. Not shock me, that's the real story, I think, is I haven't found evidence of that, but I think I will not be shocked if I do. But Vigano in the Zoom call comes right out of the gate There's about 20 of us on the Zoom call with him, and says, all of the leaders in Europe are pedophiles. And then he says, he actually said that Macron is married to a dude. And then he says, Obama's married to a dude. He didn't say dude, but that's my language. And then he went public with that. So that might have been not official yet, but he wrote that publicly. And what did they do to him? They excommunicated him, supposedly. Yeah, that's sending him to hell.

Marty Bent [2:23:46] So, so, well, like, that's like, as a Catholic, it's like, is that an excommunicatable— like, I guess making those claims something that warrants excommunication? I don't think so.

Rudy Havenstein [2:23:58] Shouldn't be, but You know, you know, there's, there's Vatican, the religion, Vatican tied to the religion. There's the Catholic Church, the religion, and there's Catholic Church, the financial entity. And they're very different things, right? It's a political financial entity. And, and heaven only knows the net worth of Vatican, of the Vatican. And you've seen the snake room at the Vatican? Yeah, for the 3 people listening here, search Snake Room Vatican and look at the Snake Room.

Marty Bent [2:24:32] It's, it's an altar, right?

Rudy Havenstein [2:24:34] It's, um, no, no, it's an entire auditorium. It's a 20,000-person auditorium.

Marty Bent [2:24:39] Yeah, but it's got like the crucifix in the background. It's like got the—

Rudy Havenstein [2:24:43] Oh, it's got all sorts of weird shit in the background, but the entire auditorium looks like the head of a snake.

Dave Collum [2:24:47] Yeah.

Rudy Havenstein [2:24:48] And it's just— I go, why? I go, is that Adam and Eve maybe? I just don't know. I've wondered if the good versus evil, if the Vatican actually caters to both.

Marty Bent [2:25:02] Well, I mean, there's many. I mean, there's hardcore Orthodox Catholics who think like the Vatican after Vatican II, like the church, the political side of it was taken over by like Luciferians and—

Rudy Havenstein [2:25:17] Right.

Marty Bent [2:25:19] Completely antithetical to what we're supposed to be doing as Christians.

Rudy Havenstein [2:25:23] I have read so much shit trying to understand this stuff. I'm in a reading book right now about cults, and the one thing it appears to absolutely not be willing to do is in any way connect the cults to official sources, which I— which is why I read the book. I don't need to read about some pervy guy. That's of no interest to me. But a pervy guy who was trained by Jolly West than I care. They even went through Charles Manson and his cult and made no allusions whatsoever to him being tied to the CIA, which therefore I said, okay, so you guys blew it. Jim Jones, Reverend Jim Jones, who was very prominent in Republican circles for a long time. So there's, The world appears to be a battle of good and evil. I'm not a religious guy, but when you use the term good and evil, you're this close to getting religious, right? I mean, it's really, it's hard to not say God, good versus evil. That sure sounds like something I'd hear on a Sunday morning.

Marty Bent [2:26:30] Yeah, I believe in it.

Rudy Havenstein [2:26:33] Yeah, I think that's true. I'm not sure that it's an inherent aura in the world, but it's, it's certainly— there are people who are good and people who are evil.

Marty Bent [2:26:46] Yeah, I, I like to think that, that you're one of the good guys, having gotten to know you over the years.

Rudy Havenstein [2:26:51] And well, if, if I'm not, I'm phenomenal, I think, at covering it. Now, there's still people who think I'm a limited hangout of some kind.

Marty Bent [2:27:00] Really? I'm getting called—

Rudy Havenstein [2:27:02] I wish I got paid for this.

Marty Bent [2:27:04] Yeah, you get, you get, you get enough followers, you get immediately— are you getting called on that? Oh yeah, yeah, particularly within Bitcoin. They think I'm some corrupted, corrupted actor.

Rudy Havenstein [2:27:13] You're frozen right now.

Marty Bent [2:27:14] Am I frozen? Am I good?

Rudy Havenstein [2:27:16] You're frozen completely. Oh, there you go. You're digitizing now. Hello? You can see me. You're not moving. You're, you're doing a Mitch McConnell now. God damn it, you're frozen at the microphone.

Marty Bent [2:27:42] There we go, I'm back. There you go. Uh, internet disconnection there. Well, you're frozen still. Am I? Am I back?

Rudy Havenstein [2:27:51] This would be funny to watch to see how it comes. I think I'm back. You're moving a little bit. You're moving a little bit. You are frozen. You are doing a As I said, in case you couldn't hear me, you were doing a Mitch McConnell at the microphone.

Marty Bent [2:28:04] Oh, we didn't get to expand on that. What's his wife's deal? Is she a Chinese actor? Remember her sister probably died in a Tesla on their property?

Rudy Havenstein [2:28:13] Well, isn't— isn't it— which is the one whose sister's sister who's deeply tied to the Chinese Communist Party? Is that Mitch's or is that Swalwell or Swalwell was hooking up with it. The Democrats have got to get their shit together. We need a better team on the field.

Marty Bent [2:28:35] Yeah, I mean, both sides do.

Rudy Havenstein [2:28:37] A spy.

Marty Bent [2:28:39] Yeah.

Rudy Havenstein [2:28:41] You're frozen again.

Marty Bent [2:28:42] I know, it's— goddamn it.

Rudy Havenstein [2:28:44] You gotta fire Logan, get someone who knows how to run this operation. Logan, can you hear me?

Marty Bent [2:28:54] There we go. I'm back. It's my, it's my internet connection.

Rudy Havenstein [2:28:57] It is.

Marty Bent [2:28:58] That's Wawa Spy.

Rudy Havenstein [2:29:01] I think it was Logan there with you, or is he totally some other site?

Marty Bent [2:29:05] Is this— he's on part— he's in another— some other site? Yeah, he's in another part of the country. Um, he just shows up with me with better internet.

Rudy Havenstein [2:29:13] Okay. How many people do you have on staff? There's 5 of us. On your podcasting staff?

Marty Bent [2:29:21] Really? Just on the podcast? Just, yeah, there's probably 3 dedicated to the podcast, myself included.

Rudy Havenstein [2:29:26] So give me, give me, give me an estimate of what someone makes. Let's say you're a podcaster. I'm gonna do a podcast in a week with Julian Dory.

Marty Bent [2:29:35] Jimmy Dory?

Rudy Havenstein [2:29:37] Best 4-hour Julian Dory. Not Jimmy Dore, no. Julian Dory.

Marty Bent [2:29:45] Is he the guy in Jersey City?

Rudy Havenstein [2:29:49] Yeah, he's a very Jersey boy. He's got a real Jersey delivery. Yeah. And he, and he did the best 4-hour interview of Joe Kent. I did a 1-hour interview with Joe Kent, and it got a complete abortion in my opinion because it wasn't handled right. But, but Julian Dory did this 4-hour interview with Joe Kent. Not only did he get Joe Kent to really Hit every topic. But Julian, you're frozen again. Yeah, maybe. No, Julian, Julian could stay with him the whole way. It was really extraordinary. So I, I posted. So I'm supposed to do a podcast with Julian, a 3-way with Julian about a week. I want to find out his backstory. Are you gonna have a little bit of a—

Marty Bent [2:30:38] Are you going in person?

Rudy Havenstein [2:30:41] No, no, no, actually he's an invite. We're both invites. We're doing it with Ferris.

Marty Bent [2:30:46] Oh, nice.

Rudy Havenstein [2:30:47] But so let's say someone— let's say someone averages 100,000 eyeballs on YouTube, YouTube, you know, and has some commercials, you know, has some ads probably and stuff like that. What's that guy gonna make a year?

Marty Bent [2:31:02] Maybe he's doing it per episode. If he's doing like 2 episodes per week, That's 8 a month. It's close to a million views. Going rate, like $20 per 1,000 views is the going rate for some ads.

Rudy Havenstein [2:31:19] $20 per 1,000 views. So when someone brings me on and we get 5,000 views, we're making $100?

Marty Bent [2:31:27] Around there, I think on YouTube, maybe.

Rudy Havenstein [2:31:30] And if you're that low a level of podcaster, are you still making that? You know, $20 per 1,000 views?

Marty Bent [2:31:37] Yeah, on YouTube at least.

Rudy Havenstein [2:31:40] So YouTube, there's no— you don't have to get above some massive threshold to start getting paid?

Dave Collum [2:31:46] No, no.

Marty Bent [2:31:48] I think you have to have over 3,000 subscribers and then you can begin monetizing and have had and put a certain amount of videos on. But yeah, that's okay.

Rudy Havenstein [2:31:58] Yeah, $20 per 1,000. I can remember that number. I'm paid what I'm worth, every penny.

Dave Collum [2:32:06] Yeah.

Rudy Havenstein [2:32:08] As far as I know, the only money I've ever made was Bob Moriarty did the legwork, heavy legwork, paid for the editor to publish all my year in reviews, which turned out to be 17 of them. uploaded them to Amazon. And I think I made about $5,000 off all the sales of those. The funny part was I had to write a dean's report and I had wrapped up my research group and I'm thinking, well, I didn't do shit, right? So I taught these 2 courses, but I didn't do shit. And so this— and then I thought about it, I go, wait a minute, I published 17 books this year. And it was crudely estimated at about— the total was something like 4,500 pages.

Marty Bent [2:33:03] Holy crap.

Rudy Havenstein [2:33:05] And that year I had to go through them all and fix them and fix the graphics and do it. It was a pain in the ass. But we got all— we got from 2009 to 2025 all out last year.

Marty Bent [2:33:17] That's insane.

Rudy Havenstein [2:33:20] And it's on Amazon. And if anyone's listening, I know there's 3 or 4 of you left. Do you get paid based on clicks or do you get paid on total watch time? Do they have an algorithm that—

Marty Bent [2:33:29] Uh, yeah, it would have to be watch time, right? Because they insert the ads, you would think. Yeah, in certain parts of the show depending on whether you're YouTube Premium or not. Um, yeah, we have, but we have much more. We have the newsletter. We do a bunch more stuff as well here.

Rudy Havenstein [2:33:49] Oh, I know that. Yeah, it's just that part I don't understand at all, so I don't need to know anything. But I was just wondering about the click count. I'm wondering why some guy bothers to bring me on to get 2,000.

Marty Bent [2:34:02] I mean, some people are in it for the love of the game. I didn't get in—

Rudy Havenstein [2:34:07] Well, there are those guys. There are those guys. And just have a chat, as I like to say. We're just chatting, and if you wanna record it and upload it, that's fine too. It's easy to forget it's getting uploaded. One time I was watching Candace Owens, I think she was on Rogan, and she said something. She said, well, you probably wouldn't wanna say that on the internet. And Rogan said, you just did. Oh well, keep an eye out, keep an eye on this Charlie Kirk story, this Tyler Robinson story. I think there's much bigger geopolitical implications than a lot of people are giving it credit.

Marty Bent [2:34:48] Well, I did notice like the Big Con come out and like sort of like take the, the party line stripped and like blast it out.

Rudy Havenstein [2:34:58] It bothers me, the people who have done that. I go, I thought you were one of the good guys and now you're not looking like one of the good guys to me. I don't know. There's a lot of things I don't understand. What I do know is it's so fucked up that if you're saying he's guilty on overwhelming evidence, you, you are lying. If you want to say, I don't know what's going on, it's fucked up, but I don't know the answer, you're not lying. You're truthful.

Marty Bent [2:35:22] That's where I am. I have no idea.

Dave Collum [2:35:25] Right.

Rudy Havenstein [2:35:27] But overwhelming evidence is, you know, those, those compilations they do where they show, you know, 20 people They're all saying exactly the same thing on the news. That's overwhelming.

Marty Bent [2:35:36] This is dangerous. This is dangerous for our democracy.

Rudy Havenstein [2:35:39] Yeah, it's a danger to our democracy. And the irony of that one is particularly good. But I don't know, life goes on. I sometimes wonder why I do any of this, but, you know, I'm retired now, essentially operationally retired. And I'm still on payroll. They haven't shaken me off their payroll. I did so much for the university over the 45 years. If I if I hang on payroll for another year, I think they can they can suck it up. Yeah.

Marty Bent [2:36:13] Well, I thank you for continuing to do it. I I think the fact that you do stuff like this is is great. I loved it. I always I love I always enjoy this.

Rudy Havenstein [2:36:21] Born to talk. Born to talk.

Marty Bent [2:36:23] Did you pee in a coffee?

Rudy Havenstein [2:36:25] No, no. I had most of my prostate taken out about a year or so ago. And as I said or written, I said, I can get an 8-foot arc and I can put out 14 ounces, which I was putting out a shot glass at a pop.

Dave Collum [2:36:47] Wow.

Rudy Havenstein [2:36:48] I had an inch and a half bladder stone.

Dave Collum [2:36:50] Ugh.

Rudy Havenstein [2:36:50] And it formed because my prostate had gotten too big. And so the guy said, you should have it taken out. So I did. And I said, 8-foot arc, 14 ounces. I said, those are 2 different experiments. I'm not that good. But now, next thing, I'll probably get diabetic or something and then have to piss even more. No, I can get through a whole 2-hour, 3-hour podcast with consuming beverage and not have to drain a lizard.

Marty Bent [2:37:27] That's good to know.

Dave Collum [2:37:28] Well, I know.

Marty Bent [2:37:30] Hopefully next time we try to get Rudy to do this, he doesn't call in on a phone and we can—

Rudy Havenstein [2:37:34] Yeah, was he on a phone? Is that what he was doing?

Marty Bent [2:37:37] Yes, I think so.

Rudy Havenstein [2:37:38] Yeah, he's got such wisdom and that throaty voice of his and stuff. You really— You really get a sense of sincerity. Actually, for me, I remember years ago someone said, who else should I follow on Twitter to Rudy? And he named 3 people. I was one of them. I go, so there is an affinity here. I thought it was just me. Maybe I had a Rudy. My favorite tweet of Rudy's, and that's when I first really spotted him, I started studying his tweets. when he said, he says, it's not fake. It's not like the Loch Ness Monster or North Dakota. And I go, this guy is funny. I mean, that is some serious funny. And so I started watching his style, sort of like studying, you know, how Eddie Prinze or any of the, you know, the comedians, how the great comedians do it. I started watching Rudy and said, how does he do it? He has, he has these— he has this great sarcasm about him.

Marty Bent [2:38:42] It's a great way of trolling the CNBC.

Rudy Havenstein [2:38:44] He fights. He's not afraid to pick fights. He's, he's, he doesn't— you know how journalists become captured when the people they're writing about, they get too close to? Rudy doesn't suffer from that at all. So like, I worry about Megyn Kelly being on the wrong team. But I also don't want a loser. She was like, you know, in Twitter bingo, getting followed by Megyn Kelly was one of those. Oh wow, that's cool. That's a, that's a, that's a grand slam Twitter follow, right?

Marty Bent [2:39:17] And yeah, no, that's one thing you have to worry about too, is like calling everybody a spook. And like I was saying earlier before my internet went out, and like people are like, you're a spook, Marty.

Rudy Havenstein [2:39:24] I'm like, goddamn it, like I'm just doing this. Yeah, well, my son works for the CFR, so I get called a spook all the time for that.

Dave Collum [2:39:32] Yeah.

Rudy Havenstein [2:39:32] And maybe he is a spook, but he's good at keeping a secret because I sure as hell, you know, he doesn't tell me shit. Of course, on the other hand, you know, what would I do with that information? I'd probably go spew it on a podcast. So he's smart not to let me in on the secrets that he knows. But He is useful. I say, what's the hot topic? And you'd be surprised sometimes when he tells you the hot topic. I said, isn't this a hot topic? Oh no, there's no discussion of that whatsoever. And so there are things we think are important.

Marty Bent [2:40:11] Well, that gets into the idea, like, are there actually competent people running the show, or is it just completely random?

Rudy Havenstein [2:40:19] Well, he also says he And maybe he's lying to me. You know, I raised him through his teenage years, so I know he has lied to me. You'll really enjoy that phase when your kids are teenagers. Oh, they lie like teenagers, I'll tell you. They'll just— their lips are moving, they're lying to you. And they'll treat you like shit too.

Dave Collum [2:40:42] Oh, okay.

Rudy Havenstein [2:40:43] But he says the council really doesn't have the agenda that people think they have. He said their agenda really is to get important people talking, getting them in the same room, and by doing that, keeping the world a little bit of a safer place. And at one point I said something about, well, the blogs say that the Council runs the world. And he said, well, someone has to. And so he might have been only half joking. But I don't think the Council is what it used to be with Allen Dulles or David Rockefeller. I think it's a much more neutral organization than it used to be.

Marty Bent [2:41:28] Yeah.

Rudy Havenstein [2:41:29] And I went in there one day, gave me a tour of the place, and he tells this very funny story of the Council. Famous people can use the Council for functions during the weekend, for example. And who's the woman who killed Bill? Uma Thurman. So he's sitting out on, like, late one night with Ray, the security guard, and Uma Thurman comes out and her chauffeur's there. And their chauffeur— Uma walks her dog and the dog takes a dump and doesn't clean it up. And Ray says, hey, hey, you gonna clean that up?

Dave Collum [2:42:02] Wow.

Rudy Havenstein [2:42:04] And she, of course, doesn't give a shit about cleaning that up. So my son sort of scrabbles and cleans it up 'cause he's really good at that sort of thing. you know, smoothing over uncomfortable personalities. And I trained him well. And, and, and then he says, you know, you know who that is? He says, he says, no. Oh, she says, she says to Ray, do you know who I am? And Ray says, no. And she says, I'm with Thurman. He says, my name's Ray. And then, and then afterwards, Will says, You know who she is? She's in Kill Bill. And Ray goes, oh yeah, okay, I thought I recognized her. He one day, he got to sit down and chat with Nelson Mandela for 45 minutes, met the president of Iran and Iraq the same day. Madeleine Albright on his first day of work is throwing a shit fit because something's wrong with her beverage or something, and he's He says, don't worry, I'll take care of it. And Greenspan, when he'd come in to talk, they'd send a body double in to make sure the chair was right and the microphone was right. And I'm thinking, oh, shoot that fuck. Of course, he died, so he solved the problem. Him and Lindsey are down in the hotspot. You know, during COVID I actually gave Rudy my password. Said, if I die, I want you to tweet from heaven. Right? You could have a field day, right? If you have a guy who's known, who's known to be dead, and he's tweeting from heaven saying, you know, I don't see a sign of Lindsay up here. Nothing. Not, not— no one's even heard of the guy. You know, you could, you could have a field day tweeting from heaven. Oh, we get lobster every fucking day. And oh my God, you can't believe how many times I banged, you know, Marilyn Monroe.

Marty Bent [2:44:00] Going viral from the grave.

Rudy Havenstein [2:44:03] Oh my God, yeah, it's like tweet of God. You can turn it into tweet of God level, you know. And, and it's like— and he says, I'm not comfortable with this. I said, Rudy, it's my dying wish. He's too morally sound. I couldn't think of someone else I'd rather have do it though. I mean, he would be phenomenal. Phenomenal.

Marty Bent [2:44:29] The wit is very much aligned between you two.

Rudy Havenstein [2:44:30] Yeah, there's, there's something there I like. He's smart. He's smarter than me, and he, he can remember shit better than me. My, my adult brain is, is, is gone. I, I just— in one ear, out the other ear. Um, he pulls up shit from the past. I don't know how he does it.

Marty Bent [2:44:48] Yeah, he's, uh— and he's got those threads that are, they're incredible. If you're not following Rudy, go follow Rudy. I've got to jump. This has been fun.

Rudy Havenstein [2:44:57] Okay, I'll let you go. Always.

Marty Bent [2:44:58] Yeah, I mean, sort of got derailed because of Rudy's technical difficulties.

Rudy Havenstein [2:45:06] All the technical problems. Yeah. The R for retard, right? The R for retard.

Marty Bent [2:45:11] We covered some bases though. Fourth turning, fourth turning, prepare.

Rudy Havenstein [2:45:17] Fourth turning, that's the best model.

Marty Bent [2:45:19] Yeah. All right.

Rudy Havenstein [2:45:20] Or Ray Dalio's 6 turnings.

Marty Bent [2:45:23] Peace and love, freaks. Thank you for listening to this episode of TFTC. If you've made it this far, I imagine you got some value out of the episode. If so, please share it far and wide with your friends and family. We're looking to get the word out there. Also, wherever you're listening, whether that's YouTube, Apple, Spotify, make sure you like and subscribe to the show. And if you can leave a rating, On the podcasting platforms, that goes a long way. Last but not least, if you want to get these episodes a day early and ad-free, make sure you download the Fountain podcasting app. You can go to fountain.fm to find that. $5 a month gets you every episode a day early, ad-free. Helps the show, gives you incredible value. So please consider subscribing via Fountain as well. Thank you for your time, and until next time.

Rudy Havenstein [2:46:17] Okay.