All right, we're back with Doug and Michael Yon.
And again, the format we're using here
is three consequential news events or observations
these guys had within the last week
and a prediction for you.
So Doug, why don't we start with you first?
What's something you observed this week of interest?
Well, as far as things that are happening,
it really is a target rich environment.
And I almost feel driven to talk about this ridiculous selection
coming up on Guy Fawkes Day, November 5th.
Maybe that's for next week when we're closer to it.
So lots of things to talk about.
But before the disasters in Appalachia and Florida
fade from memory and the news cycle drives on,
I thought I'd just draw people's attention to FEMA
because I've had no personal interaction with FEMA,
fortunately.
The only time I've seen them was during the aftermath
of Hurricane Katrina when I was in New Orleans
and rented a car and drove around the affected area.
And one of the most interesting things that I saw there
were about a dozen FEMA guys all wearing their jackets
with FEMA written across the back.
And they were standing around in a circle talking
or being lectured to.
And I watched them for about five minutes.
And I asked myself, what the hell are these people doing here?
I mean, Katrina was a huge disaster.
And here's a dozen FEMA types.
And they're just talking.
So anyway, with this latest thing,
I thought, well, who the hell is FEMA?
What do they do?
They were founded in 1979.
But what do they do?
They're the Federal Emergency Management Administration.
That's what it stands for.
And I went on their website and tried to find out
stuff about them.
And I don't, I'm not very competent.
I must admit, playing with my computer and finding things.
But I spent time and went from one thing to another.
And I think there's a dearth of information.
What I was able to determine is this,
is that they don't actually help,
they're not intended to help people
when there's an emergency.
They're intended to give money to people
that are affected by the emergency after the fact.
Now, I tried to find out how many employees that they have.
And there aren't any current numbers.
As best as I can determine, this agency
has about 6,000 or 8,000 employees.
And they don't do anything,
but distribute a few meals.
They distributed some tarpolines in this last disaster.
But mainly they assist people in giving them money.
Sometimes billions of dollars.
I'm uncertain where it goes because individuals,
they give dribs and drabs of $500 for this
or $750 for that.
And oddly, if you have a funeral,
this is one of the big things that they mentioned on
their website is that
if you've had a COVID death,
they give you like $500 to bury the body.
Well, that's rather odd.
Federal emergency management
and giving funeral money to COVID deaths,
it's very strange.
And it's an insurance agency
where apparently this is something
that they've worked out with developers.
A lot of houses are flooded.
Now, why are these houses flooded?
Don't people realize that if they live in a hurricane zone
or a flood area,
that maybe they should not build a house there,
but FEMA has insurance.
And that's where most of its money goes
towards bailing out people that have been flooded
because they live in flood zones.
So it's a FEMA that seems to me to be a giant scam
that just pays for six or 8,000 FEMA people
to drive around and look like they're doing something.
And in this Appalachia thing,
to pretend they're doing something
since there's nothing they can do,
I mean, they don't have hammers and nails
and shovels and that kind of thing.
They don't build stuff.
So they basically stop things from happening
to show their presence.
They're a totally counterproductive agency.
And I don't want to go on too far,
but I might as well cover this talking about FEMA.
And I'd certainly like to hear from anybody
that's got more boots on the ground experience with them.
But on their website,
one of the most disturbing things about it,
they have four main raison d'etre.
And the two of them are listed as equity,
which means giving money to blacks and homosexuals
and women and other protected classes.
I thought that was pretty unusual
for one of their four reasons for existing.
And one of the other ones was climate response.
It's like they've assigned themselves
the duty of protecting the climate.
This is strange
for the Federal Emergency Management Administration.
The other two things related to helping people
in floods and stuff like that.
But two of the four things were equity
and climate response.
Anyway, I think that's about all I got to say about it.
It's a scam.
It ought to be abolished.
It's one of the agencies should be pulled up
by the roots that was established in 1979.
So I guess that was one of Jimmy Carter's
parting gifts to the country.
And it costs, once again, the numbers are sketchy
and they vary from year to year.
On average, about $6 billion per year,
which goes into God knows whose pockets.
It's all very sketchy.
And yet they have an annual report
but digging through that thing, which I tried to do,
I said, it's just too much brain damage.
And I think I've indicated
it's a gigantic waste of money.
It should be abolished, post-haste.
Anyway, I'm sure you got something to add.
According to chat GTP, the fiscal year 2024 budget
was $32.2 billion.
Oh, well, that's quite possible with,
where did all that money go?
They haven't built any houses.
They haven't, what have they done with all that money?
Just...
You know, it's funny that you start talking about FEMA
because I was just looking them up.
We're on the same wavelength on that.
My battle buddy, Anne Vanderstiel,
we'd gone out into the Darien Gap
and across the US border and all kinds of things together.
She's my partner in Operation Burning Edge.
So she's been in North Carolina
since almost the beginning, right?
And about maybe five days ago or five days ago,
she was at this new FEMA camp that they're building.
And it looks just like a fob,
which is a Ford operating base.
And this video that she made went viral, right?
And so the guards were armed and they started talking.
And so she's got it on video.
They're actually talking and they call it
Supervisor Out.
And these tornado shelters keep going by, right?
And did you see that, Matt?
So the...
Yeah, I did.
Yeah.
And so that was Anne, Anne Vanderstiel.
And she's been out into the Darien Gap
and all the way out in those jungles and stuff.
So she's constantly doing things like this,
but and so I looked up FEMA as well.
And it looks like they were formed on April Fools in 1979,
coincidentally.
And maybe, maybe not.
Jimmy Carter, of course,
the guy who gave away our Panama Canal
and somehow structured that information more
as if we're returning their canal,
returning whose canal?
It was our canal, it was never...
We are the ones who helped make Panama.
Panama didn't exist until we made it
and we cleaved it off from Columbia
so we could make the canal.
But somehow then that became...
Anyway, whatever.
That's the same president, right?
So I just asked Anne just before we came on,
like 20 minutes ago, what's going on?
What should I say?
And she's talking about FEMA, right?
This is a message just came in.
I asked her what's going on in North Carolina.
She said, we need money raised to get campers
for people who have lost all their homes and cars, et cetera.
Clearly there is a long-term federal plan
coordinated with state and local authorities
to drag permitting processes
for those who lost homes in mineral rich areas.
People will not be able to pay mortgages on property
that do not have houses for up to four years
while they wait for the process to be completed.
This will result in the loss of land and ownership
by big corporations that have mineral interest in the area
that people need to be able to stay on their land
so that it will not be eminently domained.
Anyway, that's Anne Vanderstiel on the ground there.
Yeah.
Pretty amazing.
Well, they say there's a big lithium deposit there.
Lithium will take a lot of 5% from their peak.
So there's kind of a glut of lithium,
but who knows what they're up to?
You know, remember when Jesse Ventura was governor
of Minnesota and he did an investigation
or maybe it was after he was governor
and there are these FEMA camps around the US
and I haven't heard anything about them since then,
but they're kind of like,
while you said forward operating bases,
kind of look like federal prisons.
And what the hell are they doing there?
Just empty camps.
Have you heard about this?
Oh yeah.
I mean, I could go on and on.
I mean, Anne and I and our team,
we, I mean, I know people that build those things
like personally know them, spend a lot of time with them.
And same thing in Ireland, by the way.
Ireland's thick with those things.
I had somebody map them out in Ireland.
I've got all kinds of drone footage and whatnot.
Yeah. And Ireland's got them there.
They're all over the place.
They're in Texas, Arizona, New Mexico, of course,
big, big camps.
Yeah. Well,
So who builds where all that money comes from?
It's kind of ominous.
And that's a huge amount of money
that they did her to weigh last year.
I mean, even in today's world,
35 billion is a lot of money.
That agency should be abolished.
And like most, it should be pulled up by the roots.
And Agent Orange should be scattered where it grew.
You know, some of those crazy conservatives years ago
were saying that eventually they would take Walmart's
and put people in them, right?
And they are doing it.
I have physically been to one in Brownsville, Texas
that's operated by Southwest Key.
No kidding.
For sure, 100%, they keep children in there.
They keep boys in there that are coming across the border.
100%.
And so we got it all in the news
and other people have gotten it in the news.
Yeah, operated by Southwest Key.
So it's not just new camps that they build.
They literally take over those Walmart's.
It's right there in the middle of,
you can go see it.
It's a Supercenter Walmart.
Oh, wait a minute.
What do they do with the stuff that was in the Walmart?
Maybe it's a Kmart, which are empty buildings.
No, that one is a former Walmart.
But I mean, it's right there.
You can look up, just look it up online
and you'll see many articles.
You'll see Ann and me and others
that have been there reporting on it.
And many people now,
it's been a documentary by Ryan Matta recently
who just messaged me last night.
Ryan Matta's got at least two.
I haven't seen the second one yet.
I saw the first one,
but he's been tracking these missing children.
There are a lot of missing children.
Like I don't know how many.
I mean, one estimate is over 400,000.
I don't know.
We see them coming across the border every single day
when I'm down there.
Keep in mind, I've spent months
across that Southern border.
Just all, I mean, all the way across
from SpaceX to San Diego.
SpaceX is at the Rio Grande,
the mouth of the Rio Grande in Texas, right?
So people cross right there all the way across,
all the way to San Diego.
We've seen, I mean, I have personally seen
thousands and thousands of children
and the Border Patrol helps load them on the buses.
I mean, these aren't children that are,
I mean, some of them are at night time
coming over the wall and that sort of thing,
but a lot of them are just walking right in
and the Border Patrol help them get on.
I got endless videos that I shot myself.
Where are these children going to?
A lot of them are alone.
Very strange, isn't it?
A lot of strange things going on in the country today
and FEMA is certainly doing its share
to muddy the waters, a great expense of the water.
Mike, what's your first observation
would you like to share?
Well, when I was with Doug,
Misako and I spent a couple of weeks with Doug,
which was, we call it you, Doug, now.
University of Doug, it's like a joke
between Misako, Genaha and me.
That time was so valuable.
We learned a lot.
We watched the Jones Plantation,
but we also met with some interesting people
while we were entirely in together.
And one of the things that I've seen
with those people and others that I keep meeting
is a lot of the people that are the most experienced
traveling around the world, working around the world,
working in places like Hong Kong and China
and just all over the place, Vietnam.
They've been all over the world,
and yet now they're confused about where to go,
which is something that Doug has talked about numerous times.
So at one point, Doug said he made his choices between,
and Doug, you've been to like 150 countries, right?
And so you were having that difficulty,
should it be the antipodes, as you say, Thailand or,
Venezuela, or I'm not Venezuela,
but Argentina or Uruguay, right?
And I see these other people that are very,
they've got basically infinite choices.
They've got, there's money is zero problem for them.
And yet they're not exactly sure where to go.
And they've been all over the world.
I find that fascinating, actually.
Are you finding that?
I know you found it with the people that we met with.
Yeah, well, you go back to what Joe Lewis said,
you can run, but you can't hide.
And the world has become a very small place
in just about every way possible.
So if the United States collapses and it's on its way,
there really is no substantial free country
that will be left, really a bad situation.
That's true.
It's quite clear.
Yeah.
Okay.
So it's not just your average American
that has uncertainty about what to do to prepare.
It's even, it's people at all levels
of the socioeconomic ladder experience
and knowledge ladder as well.
The more sophisticated people,
let's say the ones who have been around more
like Doug and you and these other people that we're meeting,
they're the ones who have the most problems
figuring it out.
The people that know less about the world
are the ones who have a definite answer.
Like I'm going to go to Panama,
which I'll tell you right off the bat is a mistake.
That's a do not do it, right?
Unless you're just going on vacation.
Do not move to Panama.
I mean, or even Costa Rica,
I wouldn't take any of the Central American countries.
Although I've been to all of them,
all the way from Canada to Columbia,
I wouldn't, I mean, and I like Central America.
There's some people that are moving to El Salvador.
I would actually recommend El Salvador for a vacation,
but I'm not sure about the long-term stability
of anywhere there.
I was in El Salvador this year.
I actually liked El Salvador.
Can you imagine just even 10 or 15 years ago
recommending somebody take their family on vacation
in El Salvador?
They think you're completely...
Out of the question, out of the question.
Yeah.
Now I would say take your kids and I'm,
you know, I'm not going to recommend
you do something dangerous.
Take your kids to El Salvador.
It's safe.
The world's, you know, we've seen it change a lot.
It continues to do so.
Well, they've got 65,000 gang members
that are newly imprisoned,
and lots more have run north
to greener pickings in the U.S.
But what's going to happen
with all those criminals that are locked up
and they haven't been tried?
So how long are they going to stay locked up
and what's going to happen?
I don't know.
I don't either.
Seems like things are good now,
but that's an unstable situation
when you've got that many young men
locked up without trial.
Yeah.
All right, Doug, what's your second one for this week?
Well, what have I got here?
When Michael and I were in Phuket,
when we were talking to our lawyer friend there,
he pointed out that there are 94 pot stores.
100.
Licensed pot stores in Phuket.
And not a real big deal.
That seems like a lot of pot stores.
9,400 in the whole country.
9,400 in the country.
And am I correct?
It was 94 in,
or do I have that number in Phuket alone?
Oh, I don't know,
but I could at least 94 in Phuket.
I mean, there was a lot.
No, they were everywhere.
Yeah, they were everywhere.
So we were remarking on the fact,
now I'm all for the legalization of drugs
it's a matter of personal responsibility.
I've tried lots of drugs
because I've always said,
I'll try anything once, twice if I like it.
But the fact is I don't like drugs.
They cloud the mind.
And I don't like operating with the clouded mind.
So in order to know what I'm talking about,
I've tried a number of drugs,
but I disapprove of them,
but I think they should be legal.
And the reason we have a drug problem
is it's a psychological problem
that we have in the U.S.
It's part of the ongoing collapse
of the civilization actually
where people are running away from their problems
and trying to hide from them
by dodging reality via drugs.
Anyway, that's a different story.
But what I wanted to point out was
all these drug, all these pot stores in Thailand,
on the one hand is libertarian,
I say, hey, let people do what they want.
But on the other hand,
if everybody is fucked up with clouded minds
because they're puffing pot all day
or doing other drugs,
this is a very bad thing
from an economic point of view,
a social point of view, all kinds of points of view.
And so I wanted to find out how many pot stores
just are there in the U.S., just in legal states.
And it turns out that at this moment,
there are 12,500 operating pot stores in the U.S.
Well, that's a lot.
I mean, was pot a problem in the 60s?
Yeah, I mean, sure, you'd get some weed I guess
and smoke it with your buddies
and it was like getting drunk.
But it's entirely too easy to get stoned
and whacked out now.
So for what it's worth, that's the pot situation.
And it's not good.
And I speak of somebody that thinks
that everything should be free and easy.
Yeah, I was gonna bring up the weed thing as well
because everywhere I go around Thailand now,
see more and more of these things,
I'm sensitized to them though.
Like last night, I was going to a meeting
and outside the taxi door was,
it literally said weed delivery in English.
So I looked it up quickly online
and there's weed delivery places all over,
look online, if you web search,
you'll see there's weed delivery services
all around Bangkok.
You can order a pizza in dope, you know?
And you know, I was like you and so far, Doug,
and so far as I've always thought
people should be able to do what they want.
It's a matter of personal responsibility.
So like you won't see a history of me
opposing this through the years, it just didn't happen.
It's only as time has gone on
and I've realized how weaponized it is
and more studying brainwashing and that sort of thing
and watching what, for instance,
the Chinese are doing coming through the Darien Gap
and running dope farms all over Maine now.
They've got their own bank that just got busted
according to the news.
Matt and I were talking about it last week.
There's all kinds.
I mean, if I were going to attack your country
and you let me put dope stores all over the place
and grow the dope, oh, of course.
And the Chinese talk about doing things like this
in their book Unrestricted Warfare.
I read the book.
It's a very interesting book,
Unrestricted Warfare written by two Chinese colonels.
And you know, in the book Rape of the Mind,
it's a 1956 book on brainwashing by Juist Merlot.
I read that book very closely, actually.
I studied that book as a more accurate way to put it.
He talks about Juist Merlot,
the Dutch psychologist talks about
how China was running a drug war in the 1960s.
50s or 60s, there was, I'm sorry,
it would have been the 50s
because the book came out in 1956.
But he talked about how in North Thailand,
and the Chinese were running a,
because there was a drug war going in the 60s and 70s up there.
It's quite intense, actually.
And, but how the Chinese were running this drug war
to weaken the ties and also to make money.
And actually I wrote a series of dispatches
from Afghanistan in 2006 called The Perfect Evil.
And I described how the Taliban were using the,
you know, by the way,
how the Taliban got so much poppy going was the,
when the Soviets came in,
the Afghans have these underground aqueduct systems
called Keres, K-A-R-E-Z.
And I would see these Keres all over the place.
They're, it's a very interesting,
very difficult to build a Keres.
Some of the Keres can take generations,
a hundred years to build.
And you'll see that Keres is like an underground,
it's an art and a science,
they can go 10, 20, 30 miles, right?
So it's a water, it's an underground water system
that has to be just the right angle and everything else.
And you'll have all these villages along the Keres
down the way from the mountain.
So they'll dig the Keres on the,
where the water collects underneath.
And so the Mujahideen at the time of the Soviet war,
they were using those to hide weapons in
and to go from place to place to attack the Russians
and go back down like the gopher and caddyshack, right?
So the Russians were blowing those things up, right?
And so they, these Keres systems,
and that's how they made their farms work, right?
So there's huge amounts of farms that depended
like pomegranate farms and every,
especially like grapes and that sort of thing.
And so that's, I found actually a translated Russian
manual on how to blow those up.
Anyway, I wrote about those extensively in Afghanistan,
took a lot of photos of the Kereses.
But once the Russians started destroying that stuff,
because they were destroying the enemy's ability
to hide weapons and move undetected,
then the Mujahideen started growing opium
because opium is much more robust against the weather.
It's a cash crop.
You don't have to, you plant it now
and you harvest it later that year
and you make money immediately, right?
Whereas the grapes and the pomegranates,
it takes years for the trees or the vines, right?
And so, and the poppies require a lot less water as well,
right?
So the Keres, so they started growing a lot of poppy, right?
And when I talked with many of the farmers
that were growing poppy,
I was out in their poppy fields all the time.
There was some, it was like Wizard of Oz,
like straight up Wizard of Oz,
huge fields of poppy, right?
And actually on Wizard of Oz,
those were Papaver, some Nifram.
You see, they fall asleep in the,
Papaver means poppy,
some Nifram means sleeping poppy, sleeping poppy,
like Soma from the book, what's that?
1984 or what?
Oh, brave world.
Brave world, so some Nifram,
Papaver, some Nifram is poppy, sleeping poppies, right?
And you see, they fall asleep in the poppy.
Well, anyway, so they started growing
these poppy and they harvest,
but when I talked with the farmers,
I was out with them all the time
and they would say, no, we would,
all of them would say, I don't like to grow this
because this is much more work and I make less money.
You know, I want to grow grapes.
I want to grow pomegranates.
They make more money and it's easier, right?
But they grow that because their caress systems
and whatnot have been destroyed
or their vineyards have been chopped down
because they, you know, they can hide things.
Anyway, the bottom line is,
is that was how they started funding the war.
And of course, upstream, you know, downrange,
most of the heroin and whatnot that was in UK at the time
was actually coming through Pakistan,
up through Russia and all that
and getting over to United Kingdom in places like that.
It's interesting.
So in other words, drug addicts in the United Kingdom
were funding the war that was blowing up the soldiers,
the British soldiers I was with, right?
It's quite interesting how this,
the drug wars are quite real going in both directions.
There's no way out of this to my knowledge.
And there's no pretty way to have your freedom
and then let the enemy use that freedom
to basically put a hellfire missile through your house, right?
But you know, because I think everybody watching this
will have had at least one alcoholic or one drug addict
or one gambling, you know,
somebody addicted to gambling
within somewhere in their family or friend structure.
And if you have one alcoholic or drug addict
or serious gambler under your roof,
it's like your house guy hit with a hellfire missile.
I mean, the windows are blown out.
Kids don't go to university because of that sort of thing.
And anyway, what I'm getting to is
I'm all about freedom obviously at the same time
I know how our enemies are using that against us.
Yeah, in particular, I'm sorry to go ahead.
I was just gonna say that I heard you
on a podcast with Matt Bracken this morning
and he mentioned a fact, something that I was aware of
but I had forgotten about.
And that is that a lot of us look at George Soros
as the bad guy, you know, we see him funding the migration stuff.
We see him funding local DAs
that are Black Lives Matter supporters.
Well, before all that,
he funded drug decriminalization
and marijuana legalization programs
widely in the U.S. and around the world.
He put the best number I could find
as something like a quarter of a billion dollars
into financing those efforts.
So that in and of itself is suspicious to me.
And he was using drug warfare.
He was using drug warfare.
I mean, straight up hardcore.
And, you know, people have talked about that for years
how Soros was doing that, right?
And also Matt, as you know, Bracken brought it up today
but, you know, they saw like this is,
I mean, again, we want to be free.
We want people to have their own responsibility and whatnot.
But it's also, I mean, it's a straight up weapon.
You know, there's no there's no way around it
that's used as a weapon.
Well, and there's no easy solution
because people will say, well, drugs are bad.
Let's illegalize drugs.
But that is totally counterproductive
because it creates a black market
where it artificially raises the price of drugs
and it makes it profitable
where it might not be in a free market.
So you get these syndicates that are created
just as the mafia was created by illegalizing alcohol
in the 1920s.
All these syndicates in cartels
have been created by illegalizing drugs
because it creates an arbitrage opportunity,
which they take advantage of.
So I don't see any way out of this.
It's part of a collapse in civilization.
You can't illegalize it for moral reasons
and practical reasons.
But at the same time, you don't want the drugs there.
So you've got to change the way people think
and act and perceive.
And that's got to stick.
You got to make a stigma, you know, stigmify it, you know,
like if you do drugs, you know, you're a bad guy.
You know what I mean?
I know people say, well, no, I'm not a bad guy,
but you're going to you got to attack them
with information war, right?
Because otherwise, you know.
And the worse the worse the economy gets,
the more people will try to hide from reality
by clouding their mind and going into a dream world.
So, you know, and by the way, when I was studying
the the poppy issue in Afghanistan and other countries,
I was here in Thailand studying it.
Actually, I was out looking at the royal projects
and in one of the reasons that they sell so many flowers
on the streets in Thailand is because, you know,
in the royal projects that the king Rama the ninth,
who was an incredible king of Thailand,
he did a lot of work to replace the the poppy with coffee.
They didn't used to grow coffee with the hill tribes,
but he got them.
I actually was given a private tour
of a lot of these things years ago because I was
I was trying to figure out what went
wrong in Afghanistan.
And like they like all the farmers I talked with
don't want to do poppy,
but it takes a long time to get their great
vineyards going again, right?
So I came over.
I went to meet with with General
what's his name that we talked about
when we were in Phuket together
that used to run the drug war.
What's his name?
We mean Barry McCaffrey.
Yeah. Yeah.
I had lunch with Barry McCaffrey a couple of times, right?
And I because he used to be the drugs are.
So I wanted to talk with him.
And he first time he actually asked to meet with with me.
And so we were talking and I asked him about Thailand
and he goes, oh, you know, the reason that Thailand was able to nip it
was because King Rama the Knight had so much
moral clout here.
He just came up and said it's untied to grow poppy, right?
So that made a lot of people stop right there.
But a lot of other people continued.
So he started with the Royal Projects up there,
which he did all over Thailand.
But so he started growing.
He got all these scientists out there, got the water going,
started building the roads and and and figuring out which,
you know, what they could grow up there.
And and then so it was a silver led thing.
It's like, we'll help you make money.
If you grow this, that and the other will help you get it to market.
We will guarantee we'll buy it from you.
And if you don't do that, we'll send the army, right?
And so it was.
And so that's why there's not much poppy out there.
I mean, I've been out with the Hill Tribe people.
Some of them still grow up, but it's not it's not like it used to be.
Now it's methamphetamines.
All right, Doug, what's your what's your third reservation for the week?
Well, what do I have here?
It's.
Once again, this may not be current news for this week,
but it's once again, the news cycle is driving on.
And I wanted to mention it before it's lost in the collective memory.
Wasn't so long ago, but these three female presidents of universities,
Harvard, MIT, and what was the other one?
Anyway, all totally work.
Socialist leading type people, and then, of course,
they resigned, Claudine Gay at Harvard and so forth,
a diversity hire of the highest level.
Well, OK, what am I leading up to here?
It's that.
In that environment, promoted by these horrible college presidents
of these highly prestigious universities,
then we have the Palestine, Gaza, Israel thing
where they all want to hang the Jews and riots
and all this type of thing.
So I asked myself, these universities that are the slightest
or horrible people and horrible riots by their students,
how rich are they?
And of course, Harvard, which is the richest of them all,
has been has been described as a hedge fund with an attached university.
It has an endowment of about fifty billion dollars.
That's quite a bit.
And you ask yourself, what are they doing with that money
because it costs an arm and a leg to go to school at Harvard?
And it's the same at Yale, Princeton,
Stanford, they're all in the thirty five billion dollar range.
And you might ask yourself, how come these universities
became so incredibly wealthy?
And of course, all that money probably has had some effect
on the corruption there they can afford to make mistakes
when they have that much money.
Well, it occurred to me that.
A lot of people of good will leave their
estates for the betterment of humanity.
And they think, well, education is the betterment
of humanity and outfits like Harvard and Stanford are the best.
I'll leave all my money there.
And this is incredibly stupid, considering that these universities
have been totally taken over as these scandals with Claudine Gay
and and her pals illustrated by the left.
People that hate capitalism, hate money, hate America.
But, you know, Anne Rand used to apotheosize businessmen.
She thought businessmen were the greatest.
Well, OK, they are the greatest in a way, because they're responsible
for producing real things, and that's wonderful.
All the good things we have are kind of produced by businessmen.
But the fact is that individual businessmen are not to be idealized
the way Rand did, because they have no philosophical bases.
They're good at earning money, but they're not good at giving it away
because they they're in effect buying the left
ropes that will be used to hang them in the future.
And that's why I think the one of the good things going on now
is that enrollment at these top universities is dropping
because people say it's a waste of time and money.
And they're not going to universities, which, of course,
your son Maxim is illustrating excellently and is in his weekly blogs.
Anyway, a bit of a ramble here, but I think that one of the things we're going to say,
and this is kind of a semi-prediction, is these universities
are either going to have to change radically back to what they were 100 years ago
or they're going to dry up and blow away.
They're and they're not going to be getting the money coming in and endowments
from from dead businessmen as much.
So this whole thing with the universities being woke and communist leaning,
it's just got to change.
Reality will reassert itself.
It's anyway, just something I thought I'd point out.
It looks like a stat here.
It says in twenty twenty three universities received a total of fifty eight
billion dollars in philanthropic support.
That's absolutely crazy.
We teach more people more responsible things and they don't do that.
They don't send us a billion.
I mean, it's shocking.
That's a huge number. That's a huge number. Yeah.
All right, Michael, what's your what's your third thing?
Well, I think you're going to talk about Ukraine nine years a day or something like that.
Yeah, today is about the nine hundred and seventy
a day of the short Ukraine war that should be should have been over nine
hundred and sixty days ago, according to the Warhawks.
You know, something that, you know, I mentioned over and over and over again.
If you if you predict three things about every new war,
you're almost always going to be right.
This war is going to grow.
I do this all the time and people think I'm a genius.
It's going to grow and it's going to grow unpredictably
and it's going to go longer than you thought.
And then, you know, a year passes like, wow, you were right again.
I'm like, yeah, it's like dropping an apple.
I think this apple is going to hit the floor, right?
It's like it's that predict.
I mean, this is like cheating, you know, you know,
all the angles of this triangle will add up to 180.
And so and and and so we're in day
number nine seventy approximately in the Ukraine war.
And there's no end in sight, which many of us predicted.
I don't know when it's going to end. I don't know.
I have no idea because wars are unpredictable and wars like fires.
They just you can start it, but you can't turn it off.
And so likewise with Israel, you know,
after the clear false flag attack on Hamas
or using Hamas as useful idiots was actually a green flag attack
on October 7th of two thousand twenty three.
Israel still has not defeated Hamas.
Little Hamas and Gaza, the easiest enemy
while they've widened that other front out with Lebanon.
My alerts were going off all day today.
Israel is under attack.
And I get to have this app where, you know, it, you know,
they're they're getting drone attacks and rocket attacks all day.
And to Israel, right?
So now they got two fronts going and they haven't beat Hamas,
much less has Bala and they obviously want to pick the fight with Israel.
I mean, sorry, with Iran.
And so my prediction is that war will grow
because, you know, I know I'm going to be right.
And and it's just history is going to be right.
It's not me. I'm just channeling history.
And and Israel will be actually increasingly at this point
lucky to survive because they're hanging by this thread called the United States.
And the United States is clearly going into some very, very rough times.
And if we lose focus on Israel, it's goodbye Israel.
I mean, it's that serious.
They've started a war that, you know,
I know people are going crazy when I just said they started the war,
but they are clearly pushing and widening the war.
They could end up ultimately being the end of Israel.
Will that happen? I do not know.
Do I want it to happen? No.
But that doesn't if just because if you're an oncologist,
you don't you don't, you know,
diagnose somebody is not having cancer
just because you don't want them to have cancer, right?
And and I'm just saying as a war correspondent,
I could easily see where Israel could end up dying by their own hand.
Makes sense to me.
I mean, you know, you've got
what's the population of Israel, about 10 million,
of which about three quarters, seven and a half million are Jews.
And there are about 1.5 billion and growing rapidly
Muslims in the world.
And in the Holy Koran, it says many times that
it's the obligation of a
of a of a good Muslim to kill the Jew.
So it can't end well.
It can't end well.
I totally agree with you, Michael.
Yeah, keeping in mind that I think about 12 percent of Israel is Orthodox
and they won't join the army.
They're not going into the IDF unless they're dragged in.
And I think that has come up.
And and a lot of the Israelis
are a lot of the Jews.
And I mean, I'm on a private chat with just me and some Orthodox Jews.
I'm the only non-Jew on there.
They hate Israel.
I mean, they hate Israel more than Hamas does.
I mean, it's really epic.
You know, I didn't realize how deep that hatred goes
between many Jews and the Zionists.
It's quite intense.
Yeah, there's quite a split in the Jewish community
because I'm not on the same group that you are,
but I'm on another group, which are about 30 guys
and they're almost all Jews.
I'm one of two or three Goyim on the, on the chat.
And these people are intensely pro-Israel,
but they're all rich American Jews.
So there's a split within the Jewish community
about the state of Israel, obviously.
Yeah, it makes those together
and they're going to go hyperbolic, right?
Yeah.
That's right.
So insoluble problem and certainly there's no solution
the US can offer.
It's like, it's like joining the feud between the Hatfields
and the McCoys.
It's pointless.
It's just a software conflict.
You know, it's like, you know,
this belief system doesn't mesh with that one.
And they have a conflict and they turn into a tornado
when they get together.
Yeah.
Well, you got to let them sort it out.
We don't have a dog in that fight or we shouldn't anyway.
I agree.
All right, Doug, your prediction for today.
Well, I'm going to make an extremely dangerous prediction.
I think I'm going to be correct, but interest rates
and to introduce my prediction and say why it's dangerous.
I'd like to tell my favorite financial joke.
And here it is.
Einstein dies and goes to heaven.
St. Peter greets him.
Happy to see you, Mr. Einstein.
We're getting your digs in order,
but we have a temporary housing shortage here in heaven
for obvious reasons because we're a centrally managed
economy for obvious reasons.
So Einstein goes to his new digs, temporary digs
with three other guys.
First guy, they're all happy to see him there.
The first guy comes up to him and says, Mr. Einstein,
I'm really pleased to meet you.
I've got an IQ of 130 and I want to get to know you better.
So Einstein says, very good.
After lunch, let's bounce around a few concepts of astrophysics.
I've been thinking about.
Second guy comes up to him and says, Mr. Einstein,
I'm not as smart as that first guy.
I've got an IQ of 100, but I still want to get to know you.
So Einstein says, well, let me put my grip away
and let's play a game of chess.
Third guy comes up to him and says, Mr. Einstein,
I'm not as smart as those other two guys.
I've only got an IQ of 70, but I still want to get to know you.
So Einstein asks him, so where do you think interest rates are going?
I think that's a good joke.
Anyway, with that as a preface, I've got a prediction.
Long-term interest rates,
which the Fed can't really control are going up.
And I say that for a couple of reasons.
One, the last time we really had high interest rates in this
country were in the early 80s,
when the US government was paying over 15%,
almost 20% at one point for money.
Those were high interest rates.
They've gone down, they went down then for the next 40 years
to almost zero in 2022, almost zero.
And then the Fed started raising interest rates,
at least the money that it made available to banks,
commercial banks.
And they went to say, well,
what did they pick out at almost 6%, something like that?
Then they've driven them down and now they're going up again.
Here's the point I want to make.
With the trillions of dollars that the government is spending
above what its income is in taxes,
it has to print money to finance the difference.
And that's to the tune of about $2 trillion per year
being sold to the Fed.
The Fed buys US government paper,
it goes into the commercial banking system
where it's lent out with a fractional reserve multiplier
where a dollar goes into a commercial bank,
theoretically can lend, let's say $10.
So that's why raising interest rates can damp inflation
because when interest rates go up,
people don't want to borrow as much,
the banks don't lend as much.
I don't want to get into all of that.
I'll just say this, that at this point,
inflation is going to start going much higher
because of all this money that's being printed up.
And as interest rates go higher,
a lot of people are going to get hurt
because the country is very, very indebted.
In all ways, consumer debt, student debt,
automobile debt, mortgage debt,
interest rates go up, you're asking for trouble.
And the Fed doesn't want to see that happen.
So it'll lower interest rates at the low end,
but at the top, long-term, 10 years and beyond,
they really can't control that
and that's where the big money is.
So interest rates from here are going higher.
I haven't given a very good explanation
because it's hard to sum up interest rates
where volumes have been written about them
in a two-minute presentation,
but that's my prediction of what it's worth.
It's a fundamental you're saying.
The Fed doesn't really control,
sorry, Doug, the Fed doesn't really control
interest rates on the long end,
like the 10-year plus, is that what you're saying?
That's right.
They can control the short end
through the banking system
by giving the banks more money,
but on the long end, that's controlled by inflation.
And the problem is, is that a lot of banks,
when interest rates were low,
loaded up on government bonds, risk-free asset,
but interest rates go up, bond prices go down,
and bond prices go down.
Those are major assets of the banks.
And so we've got a number of banks in this country
that are on the ragged edge of bankruptcy at this point.
Interest rates go higher.
It's going to go get worse.
And there's nothing that Fed can do
about long-term interest rates.
Let me ask you this.
Sorry.
I was going to say some evidence of that
is the fact that unrealized losses
for banks in the US is something like three times now
what it was during the financial crisis
and the fact that there's risk-free stuff
that they invested in the bond.
So that shows what you're saying.
And also, since the Fed cut rates half a point recently,
the 10-year is up half a point.
So it's gone exactly the wrong direction
that people who think the Fed controls the world would think.
Exactly the opposite direction
of what the Fed was trying to achieve, exactly.
And I can't speak to what's going to happen
next week or next month,
but if we have this conversation next year,
I'm pretty confident interest rates are going to be higher
and it's going to be very unpleasant for a lot of people.
Let me ask you this.
What do you think will be the first major bank,
let's say the next major bank to close its doors
or something bad happened to it?
The bank they talk about most in that regard
is Bank of America.
My bank, it's got problems.
I can feel it.
I don't know what bank you should use to keep your money.
It would take analyzing the balance sheets
of these banks to see where they've put their assets
and what form they are.
So I haven't done that.
And I suppose I should,
but that's the type of thing of professional accountant
that's interested in that type of thing should do.
I've got other fish to fry.
Yeah.
Porter Stansbury has done a lot of work on Bank of America.
He definitely has pointed that out
is like you pointed out GM in the past.
He thinks that's the first one to fall.
So he's going to get a call on those things.
Well, Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway
has been selling gigantic amounts of Bank of America
at this point.
The sign.
That's a sign.
Okay.
So just so I got this straight, Michael,
your prediction was that the Israeli war will expand
and that Israel's odds of surviving
kind of decrease the longer this goes on.
Yeah.
The longer it goes on, definitely the odds decrease.
They may survive, but you know how wars are there.
Incredibly.
It's a complex system of complex systems.
You know, nobody really knows which way it'll go,
but you can feel the energy is not in their favor.
The longer it drags out.
Well, yeah.
And in addition to that,
it's basically a citizen soldier army.
And those guys that are in the army
aren't working at their regular jobs and investors
are a little bit loath to put money into businesses
in a country that could be in trouble.
So this war is going to become unaffordable for Israel
in addition.
That's an incredibly important point.
All right.
Okay.
So I think we got it for this week, guys.
We will be back next week with more consequential
observations and predictions from you.
So thank you both for joining us again.
This is awesome.
I appreciate it.
Thank you from Bangkok.
And thank you from Columbus, Sri Lanka,
where I've been for the last week.
That's another story for the future.
We'll have to get that.
Okay.
Awesome.
Thanks guys.
Appreciate it.