t of something changed, and you don't realize how much it altered the original.

But I'll tell you, the first third is enough for me to recommend it. No, the first half of the first third is already absolutely — I recommend it. For context, you want to see some good context about what the media and everybody else is doing to you. It's really good. Now, I don't know if it gets crazy later. There may be something in it that I don't like at some point. Maybe. I don't know. But at the moment, highly recommended.

Do you remember me telling you — and I tweeted it often — that the reason the United States didn't have rapid tests was almost certainly because of corruption? Does anybody remember me saying that? That there had to be corruption because the government was not only not approving rapid tests — and they were certainly available to approve — they were not only not approving them but they weren't explaining why. Right? They weren't explaining why.

And now here's something we learned. Matt Stoller did some reporting, and the summary of it is that the FDA person in charge of recommending which rapid tests are used recommended only Abbott Labs, which is where he used to work. That's right. The person who decides what company's going to get recommended for approval in the FDA recommended only Abbott Labs at first initially. And then when other companies came in and said, "Hey, how about us?" there was bureaucratic slowness. A slowness which would be hard to explain during a pandemic until you learned that the person who may be central to the story had one stronger connection to one company than to the other companies. The one he had the strongest connection to, reportedly.

Now this is the story. He approached Abbott Labs, and they weren't even in the business of making rapid tests. And it looks like this individual said, "Hey, why don't you make some rapid tests?" And I'm sure he told them that he was central to the approval process. And so Abbott made some tests, and they had a monopoly on the market for months and months and months during a time when they could pretty much charge what they wanted because they didn't have competition.

Other companies also tried to get approved but got slowed down, not because their technology was necessarily bad, but they needed to present more data, needed to fill out the forms better. A little bit of bureaucratic slowness.

So here's my bottom line on this. Have I ever told you that follow the money is not only predictive but also tells you what happened in the past even when it's not the real reason? That's a key point. Follow the money will take you to the truth even when it looks like the money had nothing to do with it.

So if you dug into the story and talked to the individual involved, I don't know this, but I'll bet you he'd have some kind of explanation like, "This. I was only aware of one company that could ramp up this quickly, and the other companies were not as capable, and so they didn't get approved as quickly." Could be the whole story. It could be that his strong connection to Abbott Labs caused more of them to be produced than would have otherwise. Totally possible. Totally possible.

So until you hear his side of the story, don't assume that anything unethical or illegal or sketchy happened. But every other European country seemed to get this done. Do you think that the United States is less capable than our European allies and friends? I don't know. Doesn't seem like it. Seems like on everything else we were comparable or better on a lot of stuff. So you always have to hear the other side of this. But follow the money took you to exactly what I told you it would take you to. Am I right?

I told you it was corruption, which means follow the money. I mean, this is another way to say follow the money, right? Corruption. If you follow the money, you would go directly to the person who approves them, and you would directly find these connected to the one company that got approved. And because the other ones didn't get approved, we didn't have enough, and there was no competition to lower the price.

I predicted it would look exactly the way it looks, which is not to say an