James Rickards - LIVE ELECTION DAY COVERAGE: Civil War & The Plan To Disqualify Trump

Full transcript: James Rickards on London Real

2:19 Brian Rose: This is London Real. I am Brian Rose. My guest today is Jim Rickards, the American lawyer and investment banker, turned economist, thought leader, and author. You have over 35 years of experience working in capital markets on Wall Street, while also acting as an advisor to the CIA and the Pentagon. You are a New York Times best-selling author, and your new book, Money GPT, AI and the Threat to the Global Economy, looks at the danger AI poses to national security and the global financial order.

2:47 The Financial Times has called it, quote, one of the best new books in economics. Jim, you are known as the man who predicted the biggest financial crash in American history, and right now you believe that a second crisis in the banking system could happen at any moment. Today, you believe that Donald Trump will win the American election, but the story will be far from over. You have said that the Democrats have a doomsday plan that aims to disqualify Trump’s electoral votes and stop him from becoming president.

3:15 Jim, welcome back to London Real.

3:17 Jim Rickards: Thanks, Brian. It’s great to be with you, especially on the election day. It’s a big deal here in the States, obviously.

3:24 Brian Rose: Yeah, there’s no one I’d rather have on this broadcast live, and thanks for doing that, Jim. I guess it’s about 10 a.m. ish there on the East Coast, and so it’s still early days on election. How are things feeling where you are, I think, in New Hampshire? Have you voted? What’s the vibe? What are you seeing from mainstream media?

3:43 How’s it all feeling?

3:44 Jim Rickards: It feels good. I did vote this morning when our polls opened at 8 a.m., so a couple hours ago, my wife and I went down. The lines were longer than usual, which is interesting. New Hampshire does not have the early voting. You hear so much about the mail-in, the Dropbox, the ballot harvesting, and all that stuff. We’re an exception now. It used to be the norm, but New Hampshire does not have that, so you pretty much go down and vote on election day, which we did. But it looked like turnout was pretty good. Everyone was pretty friendly.

4:17 Our model here in New Hampshire is live free or die. I’ve never seen any accusations or evidence of any election tampering in New Hampshire. It’s just a nice old school, nice, clean, fair election, no cheating. I wish I could say that about places like Maricopa County, Arizona, but maybe we’ll learn more about that tonight. But yeah, it’s a good vibe, definitely.

4:39 Brian Rose: We’ve been talking about this for the last couple months. I had Rudy Giuliani in my studio, and it was strange, Jim, because that was the first time I ever spoke to anybody about the details of interference in 2020, because typically the mainstream media just dismisses it, oh, you must be crazy to talk about it. But Rudy, as a former lawyer and as a former prosecutor and a former attorney general, he was giving me the details of like three hours of missing video footage in Atlanta and what happened in Maricopa and what happened in Philadelphia.

5:11 And I’d never heard such detail given to me, and I was like, wow, this is realer than I even knew about. And so it was interesting to hear from him. We had Navarro here who had just done time in prison, and then it just got out that was talking about what was going on the line. We’ve been watching it. We’re also heavily involved in crypto. And so Trump is a very pro-crypto candidate. And so this puts a lot on the line for the markets that we watch.

5:37 I also follow this prediction site called Polymarket, which is one of the ones that’s gotten in the news lately. I think there’s a billion dollars bet on Trump and maybe $600 million on Kamala. And one thing I found really interesting in the last three days, Jim, and I want to get your thoughts on this. First of all, on October 6, when Elon showed up at Butler, Pennsylvania, for the post assassination rally, all of a sudden, what was 50-50 with actually Kamala in the lead broke out to where Trump was kind of 60-40 ahead, and it stayed there since. It was peculiar to watch. I also saw all seven or eight swing states swing towards Trump, including the ones that we knew were close. And that stayed that way until a couple days ago, when Michigan and Wisconsin dove back to 60-40 Kamala, and the other states are pretty much 60-40 or 70-30 Trump. And I thought, wow, are they actually predicting what’s going to happen?

6:36 And I’m curious what your thoughts are, first of all, on prediction markets. I don’t know if they’re any more accurate than polls. And second of all, it seems to be calling something that could be very likely. Your thoughts, Jim?

6:49 Jim Rickards: Yeah, look, prediction markets have their uses, and they are a powerful source of information, but they’re one of many inputs I use. So, yeah, I look at polls, I look at prediction markets, I look at anecdotal evidence, et cetera, and I have my own proprietary models. But the more inputs, the more diverse inputs you have, the better. So just kind of focus on prediction markets. By the way, this is a lot of what I did at the CIA for 10 years. We were trying to predict the next 9-11 type terrorist attack, and they didn’t need me to jump out of the helicopter with a knife between my teeth.

7:21 I was using capital markets, using stock market indicators to pick up signals potential terrorist attacks because the terrorist associate living in a safe house would short American Airlines or buy put options really on American Airlines. And then we had like 400 tickers, there was a lot to it. So I actually know a lot about this field now. So a couple of things about prediction markets, on the one hand, they follow what’s called the wisdom of crowds. And the idea is, yeah, you can get all the experts and intelligence analysts you want.

7:52 But everyday people, going about their lives, exercising common sense, using their observations, if you get enough of them, and get that data, it’s pretty good. In fact, there’s a book called Superforecasters, James Sorecki, if I have the name right, but it’s called Superforecasters, where he did this for years in a controlled experiment, and they outperformed CIA analysts. And that didn’t, as someone who worked at the CIA, that didn’t come as a surprise to me, you actually can, with the right group, you can get that information. So we get a good output.

8:27 So there is something to it. However, like every system, like every piece of data, there are shortcomings and flaws. And it’s important to know what they are. So when you see the data, you don’t read too much into it, a couple of things. One thing people don’t understand about betting markets, when you have 6040, which you described, 6040 for Trump, 6040 for Kamala and Michigan, whatever the case may be. But let’s just say 6040 for Trump nationally, just to use an example, that doesn’t mean that Trump’s going to get 60% of the vote. What it means is that there’s a 60% probability that he gets 51% of the vote. So the bet is really in the odds, in the 6040 or 7030, whatever it is, it’s a probability that you get one more vote than you need, because you’re betting on a winner. So it’s a binary outcome. So don’t take it as a poll that says Trump has 60% popularity, take it as a forecast that there’s a 60% probability that he wins by one vote or more. So that’s, that’s the first thing to kind of clear up a lot of people get confused about that. The other problem, and I’ll go back to June 23, 2016, with the Brexit vote in the UK, and I know you were very, very close to that.

9:40 They have, there are a lot of betting markets in UK, there’s Patty Power and I think Lad Brooks, and there’s like a little kiosk in every straight corner. So the betting is wide open in the UK. But those polls, sorry, those betting odds gave Brexit about, sorry, gave Remain about a 70% chance, 70% chance that they were, that the UK would remain in the UK. And obviously, that was way off. They, the UK voted to Brexit. And I followed that very closely at the time. And I use that to predict the opposite. I said in advance that they would, that they would leave that Brexit would prevail and got thank you notes for months afterwards, actually, pretty much gets to a college guy said that short sterling and they go long golden that that was that was a good trade. But but here’s the point, you have to ask your so the betting markets are legitimate, I’m sure they’re well structured and run honestly, and all that.

10:35 But there’s something called self selection, meaning the people who are actually in the betting markets have to have enough money to bet. And not everybody does, you can maybe better, you know, equate or something like that. But but the point is, and also those betting odds are weighted by the amount bet. So the way I reverse engineered the Brexit vote, but you can do the same thing right now and Polly, Polly markets or whatever that whatever the US betting odds are, is, you know, if you had if you bet $10,000, you’re going to count your your vote is going to have more your bet, I should say is going to have more weight than somebody who bets $5, you’re going to have far more weight. So not only is it self selected in terms of who has any money to bet at all, it’s way this is parry mutual betting, this is how they compute the odds is way to buy the amount you bet what I saw and, and again, I’ll go back to to the Brexit by the referendum in 2016, all these city bankers, they were betting $10,000, $100,000, etc. They had the money.

11:37 Meanwhile, upcountry, you know, in Birmingham and Manchester and all that, where people were more hard up and they were hard shell, you know, leave voters, they didn’t have the money to bet. So you have to take what’s staring you in the face and the actual output, one, it’s not a vote, it’s a probability of getting more than half and two, it’s way to buy the amount of money. So you have to ask yourself, is one side betting more than the other? Now, that can kind of even out, but it’s also the case anybody betting at all is a separate economic category, to some extent, from the mass of people who don’t have the money to better or not inclined to. So you have to filter for all those elements. Having said that, yes, it’s valuable information, but I wouldn’t put too much weight on it. It’s just to me, it’s just one more, you’re putting a mosaic together, it’s one more piece, and it’s a piece I do look at, but you have to understand all those shortcomings.

12:37 Brian Rose: And so, how are you calling this? And what were the inputs that caused you to make that decision? I remember you told me six months ago, Trump in a landslide, but again, that was when Biden was in the race. I know you wrote about this recently, and you’ve made a call, unlike most of mainstream media, which is saying 50-50, which is pretty much a cop-out, as I think you’ve described. What is your call? What’s that based on the inputs? And how certain are you, Jim?

13:06 Jim Rickards: Well, Trump’s going to win. And when I say landslide, I should, I did say that, I’ve said it recently, but that’s a landslide in the electoral college. That’s not a landslide in the popular vote. And I won’t spend a lot of time on this, but I travel overseas, a lot of people say, Jim, I don’t understand US politics. I say, well, don’t worry, Americans don’t understand it either. But the way we do it, there is no national election. We have 50 state elections, plus the District of Columbia. We vote state by state. It’s a winner-take-all system. If you win a state, you get those electoral votes.

13:45 Otherwise, no. And so you have to get 270 electoral votes to be president. And so the way, someone familiar with all this, the way you would analyze it is, what’s the path to victory? What combination of states with a fixed number of electoral votes each, and they’re all different, gets you to 270? And you start out and say, okay, Democrats get California, get New York, no one seriously doubts that. Trump will get Texas and Florida, no one seriously doubts that.

14:16 And you pretty quickly get down to seven battleground states. Now, there could be a couple of surprises tonight. I think maybe there will be. I’ll talk about those. But so I’ve got Trump in a, I put out two estimates, put them on writing, they’re all there. A conservative Trump victory, so he wins. But that electoral vote count is kind of, I don’t have the exact numbers in front of me, but it’s kind of like 302 to two, whatever that’s up to five, 435, or 438, sorry. So I’ve got that. Then I have a slightly more aggressive count, which would be an electoral college landslide, where Trump’s electoral college vote is up over 320. And that’s landslide territory. A number of presidents have done it, but that’s not that close. So I’m calling Trump in an electoral college landslide, recognizing that the popular vote will be very close. And I’ve got my conservative forecast, my aggressive forecast, he wins either way, but he’s into 300 plus electoral votes. And you need 270 to win.

15:28 And I think it’s kind of like, what good are you if you’re not willing to make a prediction? By the way, I give a lot of thought, it’s not women’s goal, there’s a lot of data behind it, our proprietary models. So I’ve given a lot of thought, and I feel very confident in it. But you’re right, Nate Silvers, he’s a very well known pollster, analyst, etc. He, I remember Nate, because in 2016, he gave Hillary Clinton about a 90% chance of winning as of the morning of the election. I was on TV, I was on Bloomberg with Francine Lacqua, it was a European time zone, but it was like three in the morning here, but it was before the polls opened. And I said, Trump is going to win her jaw drop. She’s pretty pale, but she turned white. And then she said, well, is it the turnout or the poll? I said both, and I explained why. But Nate Silvers was 90% Hillary. But then like 10 o’clock on election night, after the election, the polls are closed, the votes are coming in, it’s 10 o’clock at night, it’s leaning Trump’s way. He revised this forecast, like thanks a lot. We stopped voting hours ago, we got much of the data we need, if not all of it, you revised your forecast.

16:41 So I sort of take him with a pound of salt. But what he did, he said, it’s too close to call. And then he ran what’s called a Monte Carlo simulation, which is basically a computerized high speed coin toss, which can go either way, and came up with Kamala Harris who win, but her percentage was her winning probability is 50.00, and then out a couple decimal places as small as you can get. I’m like, okay, that’s worthless. New York Times, too close to call, many others. On the left and the right, conservative and progressive outlets say it’s too close to call. I don’t think that’s very valuable. I’m calling for Trump, I have a lot behind it. So one thing are the polls. Again, you don’t overweight any one factor, but when you get to polls, you can’t take those at face value. Again, Brian, a lot of it’s digging down layers and cross tabs and looking at it. So let me be concrete about that. I look at the real clear politics polling averages. What they do, they’re not a pollster, but what they do, they’re the most widely followed, they take about 20 polls, state by state, Michigan, Wisconsin, Nevada, as the case may be, whoever has a poll on that, they include it, they list them all, it’s all transparent, and they take an average of those polls, and they say Trump’s ahead by 1.2, or Harris is ahead by six tenths of 1% as the case may be, but that is the average of a bunch of polls. So they do it very clean, very honest, no problems there, but it’s only as good as the

18:21 Underlying polls. So then you have to go open that tab and look at the polls, and they’re all there. Well, what you find out very quickly is that, first of all, some of them are still. So whatever real clear politics is showing is with a lag. And again, I’m not criticizing them, it’s just how they do it. So this is November 5th. Okay, so some of the polls are November 3rd.

18:45 I’m really interested in that, like that’s two days old, fresh, you know, fresh material, but some of them are October 2nd or October 3rd, before, you know, the VP debate, you know, before everything has happened since then, including Garbage Gate. So I put much less weight on that. The other thing you have to look at, and this is really important, is the number of respondents. How big is the sample size? So again, statistics 101, I don’t want to get too geeky, but for the population in the United States, 1300 is a good sample size. You’re going to have a small margin of error. That’s a pretty good poll. If you’re above that, good for you, nice job. 1000, okay, still good, still interesting, you tried. But when they get down to 800, I’m like, okay, that’s that now you’re in others, your margin of error is inverse to your sample size. So as the sample size gets smaller, the margin of error goes up.

19:42 So I saw one poll, it had 400 respondents, which I would say is a joke. I don’t take it seriously. But Kamala Harris popped in one of the states, I think it was Michigan. It doesn’t matter. She did better in one of the states. And I looked at these individual polls. And one of them gave her a six point advantage. Now, bear in mind, all the other polls were in, you know, about one percent or fractions one percent. So this one poll gave her a six point advantage. And by blending it in to a simple average, it put her ahead in that state. And that’s what real clear politics was showing. But the margin of error was six points. So it’s like, okay, you’re ahead by six points with a six point margin of error. So junk, and that’s just garbage. So what you can do, I mean, if you really want to get in the weeds, you can manually adjust for all that.

20:30 You have to filter your own biases and not cherry pick things that happen to agree with you. But if you take the most recent polls with a thousand or more in the sample size and just take that data and average that data, that’s going to be a much better read than what real clear politics has not because they’re doing anything wrong, but just because of some of it still on some of the sample sizes are really weak. There are other pollsters. I look at Trafalgar.

20:58 He had the best track record since 2016. There’s a new player, but they had the best results in 2020. It’s called Atlas Intel. I look at Rasmussen. And as I try to identify the pollsters that are playing it straight, whichever way it goes, using large sample sizes.

21:19 The other thing you can have, Brian, is let’s say you have a good sample size. That’s a good start. Well, but let’s say the electorate in that sample is 40 percent Republican, 40 percent Democrat, 20 percent independent. That would be pretty typical. So 40, 40 Republicans, Democrats.

21:37 But in the sample, they do 35 Republicans, 45 Democrats. Notice they oversample or overweight the Democrats. Well, of course, you’re going to get a result that leans more heavily to the Democrats because you ask more Democrats the question. That’s typical. And then you get into a whole other branch of the science, which is the ghost voters, the shy voters, other Trump voters out there who won’t talk to pollsters. The evidence is pretty good that that’s true, that there are people just some people don’t want to talk to them anyway, but Trump voters in particular, because I had a case the other day where a guy was wearing a red bag in a supermarket and he was assaulted and the guy broke his teeth. People get triggered by that, so you tend not to wear your hat if you have one. So you look for stuff like that. So these are all in what they call the question. You can find it, but you got to dig and you got to know statistics and you got to know what you’re doing. So when you adjust for sample size, skew, timeliness, meaning how recent is the poll, et cetera, and filter out the garbage or reverse engineer it, you can get to something that’s pretty close. When you do that, Trump’s ahead in all seven swing states. And he was, you know, for overseas listeners or even Americans, it’s Arizona, Georgia, North Carolina, Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Nevada. Those are the seven swing states. And you can, and Trump’s ahead in all seven, according to what I consider the most reliable polls,

23:13 It’s a head and some not in others. Harris is ahead in a few on the real clear politics polling average, but it has those shortcomings, which I described. So that’s, that’s the place to start. But when you, but see, now you’re getting the flavor by because you take, take the polls I described, filter out the junk, average the ones that are more reliable, take the betting markets, but make allowance for the fact that it’s self-selected. And then what they’re telling you is not the voting spread, but the probability of somebody getting more than more than one vote more than they need. And then anecdotal evidence and a lot of geeks, and I guess I am one, but a lot of geeks don’t like anecdotal evidence. Like, well, you can’t quantify it. You can’t put it in a model. It doesn’t, you know, I can’t write an equation. So it’s not good, good for anything.

24:04 I’ve solved a lot of problems with, with anecdotal evidence and do a lot of intelligence work that way. And what I say to people is, if you had, if you had all the information, a smart high school kid could probably solve the problem. Intelligence work, or in this case, political intelligence or political forecasting is when you don’t have all the information. You know, you wish you had more, but you don’t. And then how do you move the ball down the field? How do you advance that? And the answer is anecdotal. Again, I’ll come back to my Brexit experience. I was in London and, which was the, you know, the beating heart of, of remain that’s all the city bankers and all the, you know, the operators were all wanting to remain. I couldn’t find anyone who wanted to remain. They were all voting to leave, but who was I talking to? I was talking to bartenders, cabbies, chambermaids, you know, sales clerks. And, and so that, that is very valuable because you’re getting out of the bubble. We’re all in bubbles.

25:02 Brian Rose: I would, I would agree with that,

25:04 Jim Rickards: but there are two hurdles there. One, do you know you’re in a bubble? And I would say for a lot of my progressive friends, they don’t, they just, they go to the same dinner parties and hang out with the same crowd and read the same period, periodicals, but they don’t even know they’re in a bubble.

25:21 Brian Rose: I would say, yeah, I probably am. We all are,

25:24 Jim Rickards: but if you know it, you can take remedial

25:26 Steps. You can push yourself out of your bubble. Travel’s a good way to do it. Talking to everyday people is a good way to do it. Reading. I always read the opposition. I read the New York Times every day. It’s painful, but I tell people during the cold war, I used to read Prada and people say, well Jim, it’s all lies. I said, I know it’s all lies, but that’s valuable because if someone’s lying to you, they must care about what they’re lying about.

25:49 Like they wouldn’t lie if they didn’t care. And so even though they’re lying to you, you can infer that they must care about that and then use other evidence to figure out what they’re actually thinking. So I read the New York Times the same way. They’re all lies, but they’re like, okay, you must care about this. There must be a reason for that. And I can use inferential method to go a little further.

26:09 Brian Rose: But those are like, you know, how do you, those are like anti bubble techniques. How do you, how do you get out of your shell a little bit? Yeah, I am in a bubble too. And I know I am for the reasons I kind of mentioned before I get, you know, talk to a lot of pro Trump people on the show. I follow a lot of those people on Twitter. Like I said, Trump is pro crypto. And that’s, you know, in our interests.

26:30 And what do they say? It’s very hard to convince a man of something that conflicts with the way he makes a living. So I know that’s true. I do read the New York Times as well. And it’s painful.

26:39 And I pay for the subscription, which really bothers me because I’m thinking, wow, I really am supporting these people. But I read that just to try to see what they’re spinning every day. And that hurts. You know, anecdotal evidence, I was thinking of the movie God Father Two. And there’s a point where Michael Corleone is in Havana, Cuba. And he watches one of the rebels, I think, blow himself up in a car. And he relates that anecdote, I think, at a meeting later, made with Hyman Roth. And he says, today, I saw someone blow themselves up for this revolution, he said. And that gave him an anecdotal point that maybe this government wasn’t going to last. And so, like you said, anecdotal evidence can be very, very helpful if you can process it, you know, in a way that doesn’t get too biased. I guess the question, if the question I want to ask you, Jim, is if you had to give someone a plain answer of why Trump will win, you know, what would you say? Because they’re saying, okay, Kamala has activated the female vote, and they’re going to come out and they could make it happen.

27:40 With Trump, they’re saying people are going to vote for him, because when they go to the gas pumps, and they go to the store, they really see and feel the inflation. And they’re angry about that, and they associate Biden and Kamala with that. Then there’s the anti-Trump vote. He’s a crazy man. He’s a this, he’s a that. You know, I went to California, and I met with a few female family members a couple months ago, and the things I heard blew my mind of why they were not voting for Trump. I’m just curious, if you had to put it in plain words, what do you think that is? Or is that missing the point of using statistics?

28:18 Jim Rickards: No, it’s, it’s very important. I believe in, you know, in the future, maybe 50 or 100 years from now, psychologists and professors will treat Trump derangement syndrome as a genuine mental illness. I have no other explanation for some of the reactions, leaving your family out of it, or friends. It’s, hey, there’s room for disagreement, there’s room for debate, always has been left wing, right wing, that stuff is not new. But the intensity of it, and the anger that comes out, again, the guy got punched in the mouth in a grocery store for wearing a MAG hat. There was another guy, he was in a very expensive gym membership, Equinox, he has a big, big, high end gym, gym brand in the United States. He was in New York, and he, he was a member, fully paid up member went every day and wear a Trump shirt. It wasn’t particularly blatant. It was like a white t shirt with a mugshot. They threw him out because they said it’s a safe space. I tried to explain it to people. I’ve been all over the world. There are no safe spaces, because you know, you need survival techniques and are good to have, but there are no such things as safe spaces. There’s a, there’s a very prominent, very expensive, private school, private high school in New York called the Fieldstone School. You know, Danila, but you know, it’s very, very upscale. Jerry Seinfeld’s kids go there. They’ve declared Wednesday to be a school holiday in case Trump wins, and you’re traumatized. And you don’t

29:46 Feel that you can go to school on Wednesday. It’s okay. So at least in the Northeast right there, we have snow days. This has been called the snowflake day, because you know, the little snowflakes can’t, can’t deal with Trump winning. So the stuff like that, that’s not normal political debate. That’s not the give and take of American politics. That’s some kind of mental illness. I don’t, I don’t quite know how else to describe it. So, but yeah, but the point about that group, Brian, and you’re right, they’re voting for Trump. I’m sorry. They’re voting for, no matter what it does, they’re impervious to argument. They’re impervious to reason. It doesn’t matter.

30:20 They’re going to vote for Harris. So, you know, put that in the bank. Magination. Yeah, the same thing. There’s, you know, Trump’s base is not quite enough to win.

30:33 He needs to reach out a little more, but I’ve never seen a more solid base. I’ve never, yeah, it’s about 40 to 41%. It is rock solid. It is granted. It’s not going away.

30:43 So each side starts out with this base, as I describe it. And then you got it. And now, here’s what’s different about this election. The traditional solution is, okay, you have your left wing progressive base. I have my right wing solid as rock base. And now we’re going to run an election campaign. We’re both going to move to the middle and reach out to the middle and try to get that independent voter, whoever he or she is. And there’s a little bit of that, but that’s actually not what’s going on. What’s going on is that they’re saying, let’s find more people like our respective bases and get them to turn out. And I’ve set up for a long time. This is going to be a turnout election because I could go social class by social class, ethnicity, race, gender. I could break them all down. I have all the data and others do as well, of course, and show how they’re polling. So we’ll talk a little bit about that because it is important. But none of that matters if your people don’t vote, if they don’t turn out. Now, this is where, just to take it to the next level, I am forecasting Trump’s going to win, but let me be specific. So there’s some information that’s publicly available, but Elon Musk did a very good job of, I guess he’s got all the research analysts and computers he wants. So he went state by state and gathered all the data. And what he was looking at in particular was the increase in registrations by party, because when you

32:09 Register, you say I’m a Republican or a Democrat, or you know, independent as the case may be. And he looked at 2020 registrations compared to 2024 registrations, Republican and Democrat respectively. And of course, Musk couldn’t say difference. He had to say Delta, but he looked at the Delta between the two, you know, options traders know what that is. But what he found was that in 2020, Democrats outnumbered Republicans registrants by about 950,000 voters. Those are not the totals. The totals are much bigger, but out there were 900 plus thousand more Democrats than Republicans. Today, that number is about 400,000, meaning you have 500,000 more Republican registrants.

33:00 The Democrats still outnumber the Republicans, not a surprise. I mean, just go to Philadelphia. But that gap, what Musk calls the Delta, has shrunk significantly by more than half. So if you say, if you just look at the margin of safety, how many, by what measure did Republicans outnumber Democrats in terms of new registrations? The answer is 500,000. Biden won the state in 2020 by 80,000. So the net gain in Republican registrants dominates Biden’s margin of victory, not to mention the fact that Trump has more, there’s more receptivity to Trump today, because in 2020, you had a lot else going on, you know, Scranton, Joe, Amtrak, Joe, it was all fraud, but they pulled it up pretty well.

33:48 And then he went state by state and looked at those. And they were in every state, well, he focused on the swing states, but in every one, Republican registrations outnumber Democrat registrations by a significant amount. And in every case, more than the amount by which Biden won in 2020. So that was, if that’s all the data you had, you would say, well, Trump’s going to win. But what’s the wild card? Well, the wild card is, are they going to turn out? Now here, you don’t have data. We don’t know. We’ll find out maybe tonight or tomorrow. But you use inferential method, which again, when you run out of data, don’t stop and throw up your hands. And like Nate Silver, use good inferential method and ask yourself the following question, why would you bother being a new registrant if you weren’t going to vote? And it was if you’re just kind of sit at home, watch basketball, eat Doritos, and don’t care, and you never registered before, okay, probably not going to vote. But if you actually took the time and effort to register, you might actually care enough to vote. In fact, you probably do. And so combining the hard data that that Musk is out there, but he given credit, he collated it with the inferential method that why would you be a new registrant if you weren’t going to vote tells you that a lot of those people are going to vote.

35:05 And the Nikki Haley factor is not big. The idea that Republicans are registering running down the polls to vote for Kamala Harris, because they like Nikki Haley, that’s, that’s the kind of thing New York Times would come up with. But that’s not the real world. So that’s very positive for Trump. And what I’m really getting at, Brian, is you can’t rely on any one thing. But when you see he’s ahead in seven out of seven swing states from a very reliable pollster, and I would say, listen to Ellen Trafalgar passed that test, when you see Republican registrations are up by significant amounts in all the swing states, that’s a plus when you use inference, say, hey, by the way, if you registered, you’re probably going to vote.

35:43 That’s a plus. And you can kind of keep going and, and get to a place where, again, Trump will win. But he might if there’s a surprise, it’s going to be that he wins by more than I expect or others expect. I mentioned the seven swing states, but there are changes, but there are at least three, maybe four states that everyone sort of grants to the Democrats, that Trump might flick one of those where I’m coming to you from. I’m in New Hampshire. New Hampshire is on that list.

36:18 Virginia, Minnesota, believe it or not, and New Mexico. And of course, Minnesota is the home state of Walz. Remember him? He’s the vice presidential candidate for Harris. It’s Harris Walz. Walz is the governor of Minnesota, but that’s very close. New Hampshire has always been kind of purplish. I mean, I live here. We are our governor and both houses of our legislature, state legislature, are controlled by Republicans. But both senators and two out of two members of the House are Democrats. So what is that? Everybody in Washington is a Democrat and everybody in Concord, New Hampshire is a Republican, but they’re all from the same state. So suffice to say, New Hampshire is close on a good day and adjusting for some of the polling errors or polling biases that I talked about. I could see Trump winning New Hampshire. Now, we only have four electoral votes. We’re not going to put anybody over the top, although maybe we will. I mean, there are some scenarios. The worst is, there are 538 electoral votes. The craziest one is 269 to 269. That’s 538, but nobody wins. You need 270. And then we’ll spare your viewers the history of the 12th Amendment and the 1800 election when Thomas Jefferson and Aaron Burr won president and vice president. They were two different parties and they hated each other’s guts. But the system was such that that’s what happened. 1824, when you go to the House of Representatives, 1876, it kind of went to the House of Representatives,

37:56 But it was really a backroom deal to end reconstruction if a Republican could be in the White House. So in 2000, it went to the Supreme Court. So these things do happen, but we’ll have another interview by the time, don’t we get that far down the road? That’s the other point. Today’s election day, we may know late tonight, early Wednesday morning.

38:17 That’s probably what’s going to happen, but maybe not. Arizona, which is the biggest cheating state in the country, Maricopa County. See, I think about Arizona. I’ve been all over Arizona. It’s a beautiful state, absolutely beautiful. Grand Canyon, Sedona, you name it, but it’s empty. It’s all desert and canyons and mesas. They filmed westerns there. It’s beautiful. Everybody lives in one place, which is Phoenix, Scottsdale, which is Maricopa County.

38:45 I just shake my head. I mean, the Board of Election Commissioners or whatever their formal title is, they’re all Democrats, the Governor’s Democrat, Secretary of State. So like in 2022, when Carrie Lake was running for governor, they printed ballots and handed them out. And then they had machines that were scanners. They weren’t like ATM machines. They would scan their vote, but they printed the ballots in such a way that it was a different width than the scanner. But they only did this in Republican districts, precincts.

39:21 And so the scanners couldn’t read the votes because the paper was too wide. So I said, don’t worry. We’ll put them in boxes and we’ll count them later. Well, they did put them in boxes. They sent them to a warehouse and they never counted them. I mean, stuff like that.

39:35 And then who’s going to investigate it because the governor’s a Democrat. So you just don’t know what to say. But so let’s keep an eye on that sort of thing. But the point being, there are some states where we might see some surprises. I mentioned those four and keep an eye on New Hampshire and Virginia in particular, maybe New Mexico.

40:01 They could go for Trump. Now, what about Pennsylvania? I mean, everyone seems to think that whoever wins that gets the whole thing. Obviously, Elon decamped that state with his whole team, I think, for the past four weeks and has been giving out a million dollars a day if you sign a petition that affirms, I think, the first and second amendment where he gets your contact details and you go into a database. But of course, he’s not paying for a vote. A brilliant idea. And again, if it gets disputed later, that’s also post-election. So who cares? I’m guessing that’s what he’s thinking.

40:34 But we know Philly is notoriously a place where apparently, I think you quoted me as saying there hasn’t been a fair election there in 100 years. What do we have to be concerned about there and has a lot changed since 2020? One thing that Giuliani told me when he was here is he’s like, Brian, we forget we were in the middle of COVID where we couldn’t even get anywhere near that. And it was all the distancing and the masks and even the fear. And of course, now that’s not the case. And of course, now Republicans are, you know, fool me once, shame on me, fool me twice, shame on you. They’re ahead of the curve.

41:11 They’re expecting this. Maybe they’re watching a little bit closely. But then again, if there is some funny business that could block that margin that you think Trump has. So just curious what some of those questions are. And then you alluded to the fact that I think if it’s a big win, then it could be settled by tonight, tomorrow morning. If it’s close, that’s when this really could get dragged out. And Arizona is saying 10 to 13 days before they have results. So curious for your thoughts on those points.

41:40 Well, quick footnote on Arizona. That’s not inconsistent, Brian, because it may be 10 to 13 days to count over the votes. But if it’s a big win, it won’t matter. There’s a little bit, there won’t be enough uncounted votes to change the outcome. So we, and I’m not necessarily forecasting that. I think Arizona will be close. But if it’s, as you said, if it’s a big enough win, you can take two weeks to count the votes. It doesn’t matter. It’s over. So let’s go to, I was born in Pennsylvania, I grew up around that area, went to law school in Philly.

42:10 So I know pretty well. Philadelphia is heavily Democrat. It’s a machine state, a machine city. It’s a legal county. Philadelphia is a county and a city. And it will go for Kamala Harris.

42:22 The question is by how much? And the basic math, Pennsylvania math, well, to your earlier point, it’s hard to see how Trump wins without Pennsylvania. And it’s almost impossible to see how Harris wins without Pennsylvania. You need other pieces of the puzzle. There are other paths to victory without Pennsylvania, but they become more and more attenuated. It’s like, can Trump win without Pennsylvania? And you say, yeah, but he’d have to win Michigan and Nevada.

42:50 Well, what are the odds he’s going to win Michigan if he can’t get Pennsylvania? Right. And so it becomes the key to everything. And you’re absolutely right about that. So, so what’s the, what’s, what’s the secret to Pennsylvania? You need to win Philadelphia by 500,000 votes or more, you know, 600,000 is a nice number or more to offset the rest of the state. Western Pennsylvania, Northern Pennsylvania, the, all of Pennsylvania will go heavily for Trump. That’s, that’s a given Pittsburgh.

43:23 It’s Harris territory, but that’ll be closer. But Philadelphia is the beating heart of the Democratic party in the state of Pennsylvania. And it will go for Harris. The question is how much the answer is you got to take Philly by five or 600,000 votes to offset the, what the rest of Pennsylvania is going to do, which will be to go heavily for Trump. So then you can boil it down and say, well, what are the odds of that?

43:48 And then just to kind of do the masterclass, there are four counties that surround Philadelphia, like, you know, pearls on the necklace, if you will. And it’s Bucks County, Montgomery County, Chester County, and Delaware County. Bucks is, you know, old school, a little more country on the way up to New Hope, Pennsylvania. Montgomery County is what we call the main line. And that’s your, your, your, your wealthy, your upper middle class, your preppies, you know, Bryn Mawr, Devon, Pennsylvania, et cetera. That’s where the, that’s where the money is. Chester County is a little more country and Delaware County is a little more blue collar, but they’re all close to Philadelphia. And even the blue collar County is, is heavily unionized. And so they kind of lean Democrat a little bit.

44:33 So this is the heartland of the, you know, the white college educated female, and they go both ways. They’re, you know, they’re Republicans, but that’s what is the white college educated single female. They are heavily for Harris and it’s not, not casting aspersions. It’s just the data. That’s where they live. And so the question is, can you combine, you know, can you roll up a big win in Montgomery County? Can you roll up over 500,000 of Philadelphia or more? If you do, you’ll take the state of Pennsylvania and you’ll probably win the election.

45:13 So can she do it? The, the initial data says, no, that you want. And here’s why. One is the early voting is through the roof. Now the counter to that is, yeah, there’s a lot of early voting, but all you’re doing it, you’re cannibalizing your election day turnout. So all those people who came out early would have voted on election day. So you didn’t get any extra votes. It was just a timing difference that appears not to be the case. In other words, the early voting is significant in and of itself. You’ll still get a good turnout on election day, but you’re not cannibalizing your election day votes. You’re just getting a lot of new voters. And oh, by the way, where are those new voters coming from? Probably from the new registrants that we talked about a couple of minutes ago. So that’s favorable, but around the country, and we see it in, um, Pennsylvania, but we have data from other states where there’s a similar dynamic, you know, Nevada.

46:05 Okay. All the Democrats, I’m overstating this, of course, but all the Democrats are in Carson County, which is Las Vegas. The Republicans are all over the rest of the state in Carson City and, you know, Lake Tahoe and a few other few other places and rural areas. Um, so we’re seeing the rural areas come heavily Republican. Now we’re not, we can’t open the envelopes and see who they voted for, but it’s fair to assume that, uh, the Republican early voters, they’re voting for Trump. It’s not automatic, but that’s, that’s again, inferentially, that’s a pretty good assumption. So we’re getting all that. And then we’re seeing the urban vote come in too, and it’s low. It’s just not, uh, the same magnitude, not the same level of enthusiasm, you know, and you get into the campaign, Kay Kamala, she went through the motion. She was only on the trail for 60 days. She didn’t compete in any primaries either this year or 2020 when she ran for president. She never got a single vote anywhere from anybody. Never participated in a single primary anywhere was handpicked in a coup d’etat. And I believe my view I’m expert on political science. It wasn’t coup d’etat that threw Biden under the bus and here she comes. Well, the Democrats were like, okay, well, it’s fine. We got the media in our pocket. We’ll create a narrative and push her over the finish line before anybody figures out who she was.

47:28 And I said early on, I said, this is going to be a race between the narrative and the reality. And the only question I had going back to early July, um, would reality catch up to the narrative before the election was over? That was the question. I was as if it does, she loses. Um, and in my view, it did that, uh, she, they were trying to run out the clock, but they just, uh, the reality was catching up too fast, partly because of muskin and, uh, and X, you know, formerly Twitter, but, um, when, when X Facebook, Google, and a few other YouTube Instagram, where they’re all on the same team, uh, supporting Harris, it’s very difficult to get the Trump message out there except through rallies and TV commercials. But once you, uh, but, but, um, Musk broke the mold. Once Twitter X goes open, I’m not saying it’s pro Trump. I’m just saying you can do whatever you want. You can be honest, um, and heavily, heavily, uh, Trump oriented that made it, uh, first of all, there’s another channel and then others, you know, Joe Rogan. Um, I think he’s the largest audience for a single host in the world. If I’m not mistaken, something like 12, 15 million listeners he endorsed, uh, by the way, I’m not sure of the, the news was picked up in the UK, but he endorsed, uh, uh, Trump late last night around 10 o’clock Eastern time. I, I wrote a column about it, finished it at midnight, but I got the Joe Rogan thing in there. Yeah. Uh,

49:00 But Joe Rogan’s demographic is interesting. 71% male and about 80% between the ages of like 18 and 30, you know, approximately. So that’s the Trump demographic. I mean, that’s all that’s heavily Trump. And so I think that is meaningful, but, but getting back to the, the early voting, the early voting does seem, uh, that more people are voting. It’s not a timing difference and not cannibalizing election day. It’s just more people voting very likely to be Republican registrants because the Republican has dominated the new registrations.

49:32 And we’re seeing this even in those counties I mentioned and Philadelphia not holding up its 10 from the democratic perspective. Yeah. She’s going to take Philadelphia, no doubt about it, but not by the kind of margin you need to offset the rest of the state. If that, that that’s all backed up by data, but if that plays out, we’ll find out late tonight then you’d put Pennsylvania in the Trump column. And then it makes it extremely difficult for her to win.

49:59 Brian Rose: Yeah. Well, I hope you’re right, Jim. Uh, and this is really kind of great for me to hear because I’ll be honest, even in my bubble, which is definitely pro Trump, you know, the last seven days I’ve seen a few people cracking and sending me messages like, Oh man, I’m really worried. Or I hear we’re going to let not get this. And I just, you know, and I hadn’t really heard that before. So it was just interesting to, to see a few people in my bubble kind of cracking. Uh, so it’s great to hear from you. You mentioned Rogan. How important was that three hour conversation with Trump and Rogan? And what did you make of the, um, the search results being throttled on YouTube? It was almost impossible to find the full interview.

50:41 And from my, you know, nine, no 12 year experience with YouTube before they deplatform me, you know, long form content ranks very high because YouTube ultimately wants to compete with, you know, cable news. And if they know they can keep you there for an average of an hour, as opposed to an average of a minute, they’ll always serve up the longer form video. It was at 34 million views. And when you type in Rogan Trump, it wasn’t even in like two pages of search results. There were a clip here, a clip there, sometimes a reaction clip, sometimes a clip from a mainstream media platform. Um, obviously big tech has been pushing back except for X on this. Uh, so just curious what you think of that.

51:18 And then there were rumors that Kamala was going to go on, but from that conversation last night between Rogan and Musk, it sounds like they wanted a shorter form so they could control it. And ultimately after Trump spent three hours with Rogan in his studio, Rogan just said, no, you have to have the same terms. So yeah, curious your thoughts there.

51:37 Jim Rickards: Well, um, it’s very powerful in a number of ways. Just intrinsically, the fact that Trump did it for three hours, that’s, you know, uh, that’s cool. I do a lot of interviews. You, you, you do it for a living in London Real, uh, it’s hard work. You were saying, just talking to a comment. No, actually you’re thinking what you’re saying, you’re prepping and it’s hard work. So the fact that Trump, uh, uh, was just able to get through it and in good style and good form told, just sent a message content wise. Yes.

52:04 Substantively yes. But also that the guy can keep up with Joe Rogan. I mean, good luck with that. He’s a, he’s a pretty demanding host. And yes, he has tough questions.

52:11 He might lie. We’re not like you, but and Joe said he didn’t go to the bathroom before he didn’t go to the bathroom afterwards. And then he went to a rally in Michigan in crushed and Joe was like, wow, even Joe was impressed. And this is a guy, you know, who trades martial arts and is pretty hardcore. So yeah, I agree that that was, if that impresses Joe, that’s impressive.

52:33 And there’s another aspect of it, just a little more, uh, uh, opaque maybe. But you know, Hemingway was known for a kind of spare lean writing style. And he’s got a million imitators, but he kind of, uh, in, in, in terms of modernist writers, he kind of invented that, that style. But he said, and I’ve read all those letters and biography and everything. He said, um, I started out with more words and then I remove words. And that’s how I get to what you see.

53:06 But the reader infers the missing words. It’s a ghost word that in other words, there’s a subconscious interpolation or interjection, if you will. He said, I take the words out, but they’re kind of still there on the mind of the readers. Cause that’s how people think. Um, and so what is the, the hidden message of the Joe Rogan interview, which is what’s the thing that people are thinking, even if it’s not being articulated?

53:31 The answer is she didn’t do it. Where’s, you know, we, okay. I got Rogan and Trump three hours. And we’ll talk about YouTube in a second. Got wrote. Where’s, where’s Rogan Harris? She was invited. Yeah. Same terms. Okay. That’s fair. She didn’t do it. She cannot do it. It wasn’t even a choice. It wasn’t even like we’re busy that day. She cannot think on her feet. She cannot think X, she cannot speak extemporaneously. She can’t do what you and I are doing right now on any subject. Doesn’t have to be the subject matter. She can’t do it. She resorts to platitudes, cliches. Uh, it’s actually not that different than Biden. Biden had serious cognitive decline.

54:10 I don’t see any evidence that she’s in cognitive decline. I would just exclude that possibility, but she might just not be that bright. And, um, so what you do in those situations, you don’t want to see people let people see a sweat. You have these modules and it’s like pushing a button. Uh, so when you get a question, you push a button and she’s like, well, I grew up in the middle class and we had a lawn and my father mowed the lawn and like, well, no, I was asking about the open border, uh, you know, miss hours, uh, but, uh, or, um, we’re going to turn the page. I’m going to turn the page. Okay. What does that mean? What, what’s your tax policy? What does, what does turning the page mean for tax policy, investment tax credits, foreign policy, the born Ukraine, open border, pick your picket topic. What do you mean by turn the page? You’ve been vice president for three years. What page are you’re turning? We seem to be on your page might be a good idea to turn that page. But my point being, that’s all she has.

55:09 That’s all she has. So you can’t do three hours with Joe Rogan. I don’t think you can do three minutes with Joe Rogan if that’s your repertoire of, of answers. So, and they knew that, and that’s why, and she’s relying on surrogates. That’s why you see Bernie Sanders, Mark Cuban, Rachel Maddow, Nancy Pelosi, you know, between drinks, I mean, whatever it’s, uh, they’re getting all the surrogates out there because she can’t do it. It’s not even like she can do it. And we’re helping. It’s like, no, she can’t do it. So I think the Joe Rogan interview was huge for three reasons. Number one, Trump did it, didn’t find style to Rogan’s audience is Trump’s audience. That is his demo. That’s what the demographic he needs.

55:53 And three, the, the, uh, the silent part, which is she couldn’t do it. She, there’s no, there’s no Harris interview with Rogan. As far as YouTube is concerned, it’s what you expect. It’s censorship. Uh, it’s biased. It’s, um, might not be illegal, but, uh, see it for what it is.

56:12 I think what’s different, you know, Brian, you were talking yesterday, a few questions about the difference between, uh, 2024 and 2020. Cause you know, Trump lost in 2020 long story there, but, but Biden was president. Um, but one of the differences, the, the American people see right through it. And that has not always been true. Cause when you start propaganda, often the propaganda sticks. I mean, it actually, if it’s, if you’re good at it, um, you know, and a lot of, you know, dictators are and Democrats are, um, you can make a stick for a while.

56:47 But eventually, as I was described before, here’s the narrative. Here’s the reality. The reality wins. The reality is the thing that, you know, when you go to the guest pump, that’s reality. When you go to the supermarket, that’s reality. It’s not a narrative. You’re paying whatever you’re paying, or can’t afford to pay for chicken and, uh, um, you know, ground beef and eggs and guests of the pump. So you can say all you want and you can throttle Joe Rogan on YouTube if you want. Um, but it doesn’t alter the fact that people are see through it. They know what’s going on. They, they, they live the reality. You can’t, you know, make it go away. And so I don’t think, um, I think YouTube might be late to wake up to the fact that they’re not as powerful as they think they can do exactly what you described. And they did, they did, but it’s not working. And that’s my point.

57:38 Brian Rose: Wow. All right. I want to talk about this doomsday plan. And I think it’s something you and I talked about even six months ago.

57:45 And so let’s say, um, for arguments purposes that Trump wins tonight, and maybe it’s 300 plus and it’s a clear victory that they can call by tonight or tomorrow morning. Um, and, you know, America doesn’t burn itself down in the meantime. What can still happen? And I think we’re focusing on this gen six state or right around then, when I assume that, that, that, that the house has to go ahead and officially recognize those electoral votes. Um, maybe you can talk to about the detail of what happened. I think this is also what happened on gen six, 21, that famous date. Um, and then what do you actually think will happen?

58:26 Jim Rickards: Well, um, again, this is the, uh, the masterclass and, uh, uh, us, um, political process, but election day is election day and you vote by state, you get a certain number of electoral votes. By the way, again, this is not well known, but when you, um, vote for Trump or vote for Harris, you’re not actually voting for Trump or Harris. You’re voting for a slate of electors who are real people. Um, and you want them to go to state capital and be the electoral votes for Trump. That’s how it works behind the curtain. So, um, so we have three more steps. One is, okay, we’ll see what the results are tonight. Let’s just say Trump gets more than 270 electoral votes. Um, and whatever the number is, you know, three, five, three, 20, whatever. Um, so those electors, uh, will go to their state

59:18 Capitals. But so, so will Harris as electors. She’ll, if she doesn’t win, she’ll still win a lot of states and she’ll have a lot of electoral votes. So they all go to their state capitals and I, um, it’s around December 11th. I could be off by a day or two, but it’s easy to look up.

59:36 It’s around December 11th and they, uh, have to get certified by the secretary of state or the governor. So the secretary of state of the state, not the, not the one in Washington. So secretary of state says, yeah, you people, yeah, I checked it out. You’re the Trump electors. Okay. You’re certified electors or, um, Harris electors as the case may be. Well, right there, you can have a fight. You could, um, if you’re a Democrats, you could say, well, no, it was Trump electors. They, they cheated. They rigged the election. Uh, there were, there was voter suppression. They violated the civil rights act of, uh, the voting rights act of 1965 on and on and on. And we’ve got our Harris electors right here. They’re sitting, you know, right outside your office and you need to certify them. And so there’s, there’s a potential for a fight right there. What’s supposed to be kind of pro forma. Uh, so, so let’s, so that could happen. You could be in litigation before you get any further.

1:00:36 Okay. Let’s assume somehow you get past that stage. Then the next stage is, um, this is around December 17th or 18th. Again, uh, I could be off by day of it around then those electors having been certified by the state, go vote for their candidate. Trump or Harris, as the case may be, if you got past the certification stage, that should be kind of pro forma, but who knows. Uh, and then December 25th, Christmas day is the deadline for states sending those votes, those vote totals to Washington.

1:01:09 And people ask me, wait a second, Jim, it should take about 10 minutes with digital. You know, why does it take months? Um, and the answer is, cause this system was invented in 1789, uh, when you got around by horse and carriage. And if you were coming from Maine to, well, the capital of the time might’ve been in Philadelphia, but, um, uh, you know, it was a hike, uh, but it took time anyway, December 25th is the deadline. Then we come to January 6th, 2025 with the ghost of January 6th, 2021 still fresh, but there are a couple of steps even before that. So in January 3rd, the new Congress convenes and all those members are sworn in.

1:01:51 Now this is critical. It’s the new Congress. It’s not the existing Congress. It’s whoever we elect on November 5th, those people get sworn in and Capitol Hill. I’ve been down there for the ceremony. Um, so we don’t know who they’re going to be because we don’t know who’s going to win. Well, we might know by tomorrow, but in some cases longer, but, um, uh, and what if that turns out to be, what if the house representatives turns out to be majority Democrat and that’s what we don’t know. And by the way, in this January 6th counting process, the house votes for the, uh, vice, sorry, the Senate votes for the vice president and the house votes for the president. And then they certainly put all the results together.

1:02:36 So that’s how that works. Uh, so, um, but if the Democrats take the house and this is, I didn’t break it in any space for this. James Raskin says it’s publicly, James Raskin is a ultra liberal, ultra progressive Democratic member, Congressman state of Maryland with a certain amount of seniority. So he’s not a nobody, even if you haven’t heard his name, he said, I’m going to introduce a resolution to the house of representatives before we count the electoral votes that will declare Donald Trump to be an insurrectionist under section three of the 14th amendment of the U S constitution. And people say, well, wait a second. Didn’t, didn’t Colorado and Maine try to do that and kick Trump off the ballot because he was an insurrectionist and didn’t the Supreme court say you couldn’t do it? Not quite.

1:03:22 Those States did try to do that. They did kick him off the ballot that was taken to the United States Supreme court. And the United States Supreme court said a state cannot do it. But they said the Congress could, and it was, it was a federal power. So they didn’t really address the congressional issue, but they, they, they, they did. They said the Congress could do it, but the States cannot. So, so Trump’s on the ballot in Colorado and Maine, but now we’re in Washington, we’re dealing with the Congress.

1:03:47 So let’s say that that let’s say the Democrats take their house. It’s very close by the way. Right now the Republicans only have a ballot, I think an eight vote margin. You know, it was kind of a few rhinos, but it’s changed size, but it’s a very slim margin and it could go to the, to the Democrats. If they pass that, they stick together and they pass that resolution and Trump’s an insurrectionist, then he is disqualified from being president.

1:04:14 The section three of the 14th amendment says, if you’re an insurrection, I mean, I don’t know how in front of me, but it basically uses the word insurrectionist. By the way, that’s why on January 7th, 2021 Pelosi and the rest were calling Trump an insurrectionist. It wasn’t a word from like high school vocabulary class. That word was, was picked on purpose because they knew it tied into the section three. This whole thing has been orchestrated since before, before 2021, but it’s four years in the making. Here we are.

1:04:45 So now they say he’s an insurrectionist. You see the squabble. So now what happens? What happens is nobody has 270 electoral votes because in my scenario, Trump has more than 270, it’s 300, whatever. And Harris has some lesser number 220, whatever the number is.

1:05:07 So if you disqualify Trump, nobody has 270. So who’s the president? Well, now you go to the 12th amendment, sorry to transcend to the law election, but the 12th amendment passed in 1804 and response to the Jefferson Burr outcome says, well, in that case, you throw it to the house of representatives and they pick the president. But there are a couple of rules. Number one, you may only vote from among the top three electoral vote getters, whoever they may be.

1:05:34 And they, the Congress at the time when they passed the 12th amendment was contemplating, you might have four or five parties, you know, more like the, more like the UK system. But, but in the scenario I’ve given, there would only be one person. You could only vote for Kamala Harris because nobody else is going to win any electoral votes. I’ve scheduled, none of them are going to win any electoral votes. If you disqualify Trump by default, Harris is the only person you can vote for because he’s the only person who has any electoral votes.

1:06:03 Now it turns out that the Republic, and by the way, you don’t vote in the house. You don’t vote by individual members. You vote by state delegations, which means every state has one vote. So New Hampshire, small state would have one vote. Texas would have one vote. So you have to say, well, who controls the majority of the state delegations? Right now the Republicans barely, I think it’s 26, 24, but that could change too. So we got to watch that. So now the, the Democrats are ready to elect Kamala Harris as president. Meanwhile, over in the Senate, what’s happening there? Well, JD Vance has won election as vice president because he was not disqualified. So he’s, he’s the vice president and she is about to be elected president. Here’s what the, here’s what the Republicans can do. The Republicans can walk out on the mall and stand in the snow and deny the house of quorum because the 12th amendment, again, this is not making it, it’s in the 12th amendment. You can read it. It says, if the house lacks a quorum, then the vice president becomes acting president.

1:07:11 So you could have JD Vance as acting president of the United States on January 6, 2025. It’s not, that’s not a hard forecast, but it’s not a stretch. In fact, that may be what the Democrats are counting on. So yeah, election day, we’ll find out who won. Maybe we’ll, we’ll find out who won electoral votes. We won’t know what’s going to happen until we get to January 6th.

1:07:35 Brian Rose: That’s quite a scenario, Jim. Wow.

1:07:37 Okay. I want to ask one more question and then I want to spend the rest of the time. We have left just asking a little bit about the book. What do you expect to happen if we get the Trump victory when it comes to unrest, civil disobedience, violence, pushback from the Democrats? Obviously you just talked about the scenario on December 11th, 17th, and then of course, Jan six. First of all, what do you think the population will do? Because Trump derangement syndrome is real and people will react. And then secondly, what is the probability of Democrats taking a lot of the actions that you actually said, where they just say to hell with this, we have to stop him because this is, you know, Hitler reincarnated.

1:08:25 Jim Rickards: Right. You know, think about all the Hitler rhetoric is, you know, one of the recent last 50 years or whatever, one of the moral ethical dilemma, uh, case that the people present in like philosophy class, they say, well, if you were living in Germany in 1934 and you had the opportunity to kill Hitler and it makes prevent world war two and the Holocaust said, would you do it? And most people go, yeah, I pulled the trigger. I’d kill him because I would save the world.

1:08:56 I think that, uh, you need to go slow on that answer because, um, first of all, uh, is it okay to kill anybody? Question Mark, that’s the moral debate. But if you kill Hitler, who is to say that somebody worse, you know, like, uh, like a, uh, a, a Heidrick Reinhardt wouldn’t have taken his place or him lower or somebody else. And you would have had a bigger Holocaust, Holocaust sooner. This now we’re into alternative history, uh, but, but that’s the notion. But But the point is, when you call Hitler, when you call Trump Hitler, you’re giving a license to kill to a lot of whack jobs who answer the question.

1:09:34 Yeah, I would absolutely kill Hitler. Well, he’s Hitler. Well, I guess I better kill him. And that was, you know, look at the rhetoric and the social media footprints, et cetera. The two assassins, there’s good evidence for that.

1:09:45 So that’s a very dangerous thing to do, but the Democrats don’t care. Now, the Demick, if Harris wins, will the average typical Trump voter do anything? No. I mean, you might move to New Zealand or whatever, but you’re not gonna, you know, and the Republicans, well, put this way, there’s a high correlation between gun owners and Republicans. So Republicans have, Americans have 300 million weapons.

1:10:15 No one knows the exact number, but it’s a big number, bigger than the number of people in the country. So they’re pretty well armed, but they’re not gonna do anything. But the Democrats, I would say your average Democrat voter, even the, you know, Pearl Clutching, Michard and I drinking white women in Montgomery County are not gonna do anything either. They’re not gonna form a gorilla band and, you know, fight their way into the heart of Pennsylvania. But the Republicans, sorry, the Democrats have gun squads and they’re real.

1:10:43 That’s Antifa, BLM, and a couple other outfits. And the Antifa people, they’re not just crazy activists. They’re pros. They are trained. They are on call.

1:10:57 And they get activated when need be. That’s where the gun squad is. Not unlike the Nazis and communists battling in the streets of the Weimar Republic in 1929. So, and they get their transportation networks and they show up where they’re told. Now, there was a, there were not significant riots in Chicago at the Democratic Convention, August 19th.

1:11:26 And that was because they were told to stand down. They protested, you know, they really waved their flags and all that stuff. But they didn’t do anything violent or anything extreme. Cause the view at the time was, hey, she’s gonna win or we’re on a track to win. Don’t mess this up for us.

1:11:38 You know, they’re basically told to stand down. Now, Western governors, governor instantly of Washington state, several other states that believe the governor of Oregon. Another list of every state in front of me, but a number of states in the West have activated the National Guard. Basically put the National Guard on standby. National Guard are troops, but they report to the governor.

1:12:00 So each governor is the, in effect the commander in chief of that state’s National Guard. But they fight in foreign wars. I mean, they’re armed and trained. Why? Well, they would say, well, you know, if Trump loses, you know, he’s not gonna accept the results and there’s gonna be an armed, that’s not true.

1:12:19 I mean, that Trump could lose. I don’t think so, but Trump could lose, but there’s not gonna be an armed reaction to that. The real danger, ironically, is coming from their own side. If Trump wins, will Antifa start breaking windows and lighting fires and attacking corridors? The answer, my view is yes.

1:12:37 And by the way, Washington DC right now, as we speak, the whole place is boarded up. You know, all of the shopping districts, the good hotels, anything worth preserving is boarded up like as if they’re getting hurricane, except they’re gonna get bricks and sledgehammers. And other places are doing likewise, America, this is all pretty dark stuff, Ryan, but it’s true. Americans are filling up their cars with gas, like in case they gotta get to a second home or another state or a safe haven, et cetera.

1:13:09 So the short answer to your question is if Harris wins and there’s not like the most blatant kind of cheating, which there may not be, because Republicans are keeping watch, I don’t expect much of a violent reaction or a demonstrable reaction. If Trump wins, we may see it beginning tomorrow morning. They may just start, particularly if it’s by a convincing margin, where you’re not gonna have much recourse to the legal process I described with the electoral college.

1:13:38 Like if you don’t think you can march down that road because the wind was too big, you might just start burning down Michigan Avenue and Chicago.

1:13:46 Brian Rose: Wow. Okay, well, we’ll be watching and obviously people know that everyone’s watching. So it means anything even small will probably be magnified and taken to an extreme. And that means you’ll probably find someone that will do something.

1:14:00 So yeah, I didn’t know Washington was being boarded up, but it also makes sense. Jim got a little bit of time left. I wonder if you could tell me a little bit about money, GPT, AI and the threat to the global economy. From what I understand, your thesis is that AI is gonna do something that really kind of shocked me, but it would actually exacerbate a lot of the human tendencies that we see in markets sometimes and really create even more volatility and more some of these maybe black swan type events.

1:14:29 Did I get that right? And maybe you can tell me why you wrote this book and a few of the basic tenants inside of it.

1:14:36 Jim Rickards: Yeah, thanks. Thanks for the book is a money GPT. It’s available now on Amazon.

1:14:41 The publication today is a couple of days away, but it’ll be on your doorstep next Tuesday if you order it today and Barnes & Noble and other other booksellers will be in the bookstores next Tuesday. So yeah, the subtitle is AI and the threat to the global economy. I started writing it, book writing is still very much of a 19th century kind of process. By the time you write it and do the research and dot your I’s and crush your T’s and editing, copy editing, and then you got to print them and bind them and ship them and all that stuff.

1:15:13 It just takes time. And so one of the questions my publisher is Penguin Random House, a very good of a great relationship with them. But one of the questions my editor asked me when I came up with this idea in late 2022 was Jim, how do we know when this book comes out that this is still gonna be a hot topic? It is today at the time. I said, Nikki, I guarantee it.

1:15:36 I promise you AI is big, getting bigger. It’s gonna be a bit more important topic when the book comes out than it is when we start writing it. So she said, okay. And that turned out to be correct to me. AI is driving the stock market.

1:15:49 We don’t have to get into whether the stock market’s in a bubble. In my view, it is your contrary views, but it’s driving the stock market. But that’s not what the book’s about. The book’s not about the fact that Nvidia stock has gone up 100% or whatever. It’s about AI stuff and GPT, generative pre-trained transformers.

1:16:10 It’s a particular subset of AI, but GPT is the part of AI that you give it a prompt, which is a question. It’ll give you an essay. It’ll write a book for you. By the way, I wrote my own book. I didn’t use GPT to write it, but it could write a book and it’ll write essays and college kids using it to finish their term papers or pictures, et cetera, as the case may be.

1:16:31 These things rely on what are called large language models, and some of this technology is new. It’s a combination of new technology, higher processing power, and a very large training set, otherwise known as the internet. In other words, if I’m gonna train a computer to write, I need to give it some examples, and a billion, billion pages of internet is a pretty good place to start. And you can buy the internet. Most people don’t, because they use a subset or whatever, but that’s kind of what’s going on.

1:17:03 I have built AI models. I built multi-layer networks. So I did it for the CIA. I did it privately. So I kind of know how this is done, although I did quite a bit of research as well.

1:17:15 So here’s the point. So here’s AI, and by the way, I’m not bashing AI. I’m not saying it’s horrible. AI is gonna do it. It’s very powerful.

1:17:23 It’s here. This is not a book. In the future, we’re gonna have this. It’s here now. When you open your refrigerator and a little license, time to change the water filter, that’s AI.

1:17:32 It’s like keeping a clock ticking and checking the water filter and telling you what to do. It’s on the dashboard of your car. It’s everywhere. So the AI is already here. Now, there’s human nature, which has been around as long as humans.

1:17:47 So you can say the history of civilization, or go back a million years, if you like. It hasn’t changed much, certainly not in the last 50,000 years. So human nature has its characteristics and quirks. AI has its processes and inputs and outputs. I’m getting at the combination of the two.

1:18:06 Looking at what happens when we, as humans, empower AI, put it into our trading systems, put it into our stock markets. People go to, one of the booming businesses here is wealth management, registered investment advisor, wealth management, not a broker, but someone who’s gonna manage your money and charge a 1% fee, et cetera. And people go into the office, they make an appointment, it’s very nice. And they sit down and the advisor says, well, let’s do the questionnaire.

1:18:34 How old are you? You know, you’re married, any kids? How old are your kids? What are your savings? What’s your portfolio?

1:18:39 What are your goals in life? You know, et cetera. And you tell them all this, because they’re an advisor. And they go, okay, we’ll come back with a plan. And then they come back with a plan.

1:18:47 You talk about it. What the clients don’t realize is all the plans are the same. They’re using software. They’re not sitting there saying, oh, I wonder what’s right for this person. They’re putting it into a system.

1:18:58 It’s cranking it out, coming out with 60, 40, whatever the portfolio may be. So that’s AI, that’s a form of AI. So now, everyone’s getting the same advice, the same plans, putting in the same algorithms because it’s all the same. And it’s taking over the markets. There are actually hedge funds that have, they don’t pick stocks.

1:19:19 They let the AI pick the stocks and the hedge funds. And some of them have had some success. It’s not crazy, but it’s like a lot of things. The early adapters have success, but the more people come in, the more problematic it gets. So now we get to something I call the fallacy of composition.

1:19:36 And what’s that? It’s a fancy name, but what it means basically is that a strategy or an action that can make good sense at the individual level can prove catastrophic at a mass level, at a large scale. And it gives a simple example. You’re at a football game and you can’t see very well. And you’re like, well, I’ll just stand up.

1:19:54 I’ll see. So you stand up and you’re like, hey, great, I can see the whole field. Well, what happens to the person behind you? She stands up. The person behind her, he stands up.

1:20:02 Pretty soon, the whole stadium is on their feet. Nobody’s better off because you got the same view you did before and everybody’s worse off because you’re all on your feet. So there’s an example where a good strategy for an individual standing up to get a better view is disastrous at scale because everybody’s worse off. Now let’s apply that to markets. This is where the AI comes in.

1:20:24 So let’s say you’re in the beginnings of what looks like a market crash. And again, they happen all the time. March, 2020, the stock market fell 30% in 30 days. That was not the biggest crash in history, but it was the fastest crash of that magnitude in such a short period of time. So when that starts to happen, what do people do?

1:20:44 Well, maybe a lot of them do nothing, but at some point you say, you know what? I don’t know what’s going on here. I’m gonna sell everything, get cash, go to the sidelines, wait it out, and when things come down, I’ll tiptoe back into the market. And that avoiding losing money is as important as making money because it can really set you back if you ride the thing all the way down. So that’s a smart strategy for an individual, at least it can be.

1:21:08 But if everyone’s doing the same thing, you very quickly get to a place where you have all sellers, no buyers, the market’s not just crashing, it’s going through the floor, and then you can trip circuit breakers and the exchange is closed. It’s like a 15-minute timeout, supposedly time for people to talk it through, whatever, reopen, boom, hit the next circuit breaker, boom, the next one, then the markets are closed. It’s not a timeout anymore, the markets are actually closed.

1:21:31 And it’s problematic if they’ll ever reopen. And for people to say that can’t happen, I remind them that the New York Stock Exchange was closed for five months, from August to December, 1914, at the beginning of World War I. It was closed for four days after 9-11, so these things do happen. So again, so that is an aspect of human nature. What I just described could happen in any environment, but when you combine it with AI, you automate it, you outsource it, and you don’t even have humans saying, huh, gee, could this be a good time to buy by the dipperware?

1:22:03 No, the computers like sell, sell, sell, because that’s all it knows how to do. All the computers are doing the same thing at the same time, and the markets are going to the floor. Now I give a scenario, this is a nonfiction book, but I create a scenario to describe how this would play out. And I have a character, Nick, he’s a wealthy family office manager. I have two guys in Mallorca, they’re hedge fund traders, but they’re quarks, they’re market manipulators.

1:22:30 I have a Chinese intelligence cyber warfare unit that’s trying to sink the markets. They’re not trying to make money, they’re trying to destroy the West. And other characters are paid share, reporters, et cetera, and I have this whole scenario. But here’s the point I make. There’s no mastermind.

1:22:48 In other words, the crooks in Mallorca don’t know about the Chinese cyber hackers, the Chinese intelligence unit doesn’t know about the family office manager in New York, et cetera. Nobody’s in charge, the Fed chair doesn’t know what the heck’s going on, he’s kind of the left to know. Nobody’s in charge, but the interaction of all of them amplifying each other, accelerating with AI is what will create this catastrophe. So it’s not a doom and gloom book, it is a warning, and part of the warning says, well, okay, if this could happen, and it can happen, I think I explained it in some detail with a lot of research backing it up, what can you do as an individual to preserve wealth?

1:23:29 And the answer in a nutshell is don’t have everything in the market, don’t have everything in digital assets, have some gold, silver, fine art, land, natural resources, or alternatives where you don’t care about the liquidity because you’re not relying on liquid markets to keep it going. And you’ll survive the storm with that, having those slices, by the way, nobody did this better than Elvira Nabiolina, who’s the head of the Central Bank of Russia. She’s the only, I like to say, she’s the only Central Bank in the world who knows what she’s doing, but she put 25% of Russia’s reserves in physical gold over 10 years, beginning in 2009 until recently, they had about 600 billion in reserves and 150 billion of it were in physical gold.

1:24:20 And what did the United States do after the special military operation in Ukraine? We froze 300 billion of Russian assets in the form of US Treasury bills and notes, lawfully acquired by the Soviet Union using dollar reserves, we froze them, why? Because it’s digital, who keeps the ledger? The Fed and the Treasury. So that was like a phone call or a couple of keystrokes, but we can’t touch the gold.

1:24:45 So Russia just experienced the equivalent of a market crash, which is the US froze, and now is in the process of stealing, separate issue, stealing $300 billion of Russian-owned Treasury securities. That was all kinds of implications and bricks, we talked about that some other time, but their reserve position is still solid because they had physical gold that you can’t freeze, act, interdict, or do anything else too. So not 100% season to taste, but I recommend some of this as a way to protect yourself off against the kind of scenarios I talk about in the book.

1:25:21 Brian Rose: Wow, love it, love it. And that makes a lot of sense to get things out of that digital feedback loop that’s gonna be out there. And I think we’re gonna see some very catastrophic scenarios, I think in the real world, and then also in the stock markets as well. Financial Times is calling it one of the best new books in economics. Congratulations, Jim, your books are epic, and a lot of people that watch the show own and have read many, many of them.

1:25:47 It’s called Money GPT, AI and the Threat to the Global Economy, picked that up on Amazon or Barnes and Noble. Jim, thank you so much for being here today. I couldn’t think of anybody else that I’d rather have here. You’ve definitely made me feel better today because I was freaking out a little bit the last few days because I really believe, of course, Trump says this, but I really believe that this, and Elon says this, and even now, Rogan says this, that this election has huge implications for the world and for decades to come.

1:26:19 And I can’t imagine a world where Trump doesn’t win, and I really relish and really want the world where he does win. And so I’d be lying to tell you I didn’t get down on my knees last night and pray for a Trump victory, and I’m not one to pray, but I actually did that. And so let’s see what happens today. Let’s hopefully, things stay safe there in America, and let’s hope if the victory comes that it all gets put to bed in January to where he can actually be sworn in and hopefully bring us an amazing economy, peace in the world, and all the other wonderful things.

1:26:54 So thank you, Jim. I really appreciate you as usual. And let’s have you back in the future and talk a little bit more about bricks and the markets and maybe the post-Trump election world. I think that would be fascinating.

1:27:08 Jim Rickards: Great, thanks.

1:27:09 Brian Rose: Thanks, Jim, appreciate you. Thanks, everybody at London Real. We will see you next time.

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