y raise our rates because of all the excess deaths, because we're going to have to pay these people when they die for the life insurance, right?"

So how many of you fell for believing the people who have the greatest incentive to lie to you, the insurance companies, the greatest economic incentive to lie to you? How many of you said to yourself, "Well that's a good source"? How many of you fell for that? That the good source is the one who has the greatest incentive to lie to you because they have a direct financial benefit to lie to you? All right. I would like to raise my hand and acknowledge my stupidity that it took me till today to realize that. Honestly, idiot. I could not be more disappointed in myself. It took me until today, literally this morning. I said, "Huh, wait a minute. If the insurance companies convinced us that there's a lot of excess mortality, I'm going to have to pay more for my... wait a minute, wait a minute." Is anybody having the same experience right now where you just assume the actuaries would be the good data? It couldn't possibly be true because literally everybody is influenced by money. How would you like to be the actuary who under-projected deaths? You're fired. Suppose you over-projected deaths? Promotion, because you set the rates at the highest potential profitability rate and you got away with it. Promotion, bonus.

All right. I don't know what's true about excess deaths, so I'm not going to tell you that it's not true. I'm just going to tell you that if your source is actuaries, not credible. Not even a little bit credible. Follow the money. It always works.

Another study shows us what I think we all suspected: that loneliness may increase your risk of death. So there's a new study about this. Lindsay Kobayashi in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, something out of the University of Michigan. And it basically says that loneliness seems strongly implicated in dying. Now while there are certainly questions about the safety of the vaccinations, always good to have those questions, and there are questions about any long COVID, and we certainly know about obesity and less activity, we know that there are more suicides and there's more fentanyl and all that. But if I had to pick one variable that's been underappreciated, it's the loneliness thing.

How many of you have experienced bad health that was instantly solved by having somebody just come over and say hi? I've actually experienced that lately. I've actually experienced my body just feeling terrible, and then you have some social interaction that's positive and your entire physicality changes instantly. Instantly. Just your entire physicality changes. Now I would be amazed if loneliness doesn't kill people, because the way I actually feel when I have that feeling of loneliness is like there's a weight on my chest and every part of my vital systems is starting to shut down. Because I think when you're lonely you don't feel any reason to live. Now lots of people like being alone, which is different. I'm not talking about people like being alone. That can be a plus. But if you're lonely and you really need people and you're not getting them, I feel like you just don't have a reason to live. And I do have a dog. A dog doesn't help that much. You know, it's better than nothing, but yeah, a dog doesn't help your human loneliness. Anyway, so I think that's probably one of the big variables. I think the excess, if there is excess mortality, it's probably several reasons.

Axios reports there's a home shortage. So we're short about 3.2 million homes, which is why our prices are staying high. Now why in the world in a place like America would there ever be a shortage of something so basic as a home? And it's not even that people can't afford them. Apparently just a shortage of them. Now it's not BlackRock, because BlackRock buys them and then instantly rents them out. So all the homes that are bought by the big hedge funds, they actually have them rented before they buy them. Did you know that? That they actually arrange for the renters and then they go buy the homes. So they're instantly rented. So they're actually increasing the rate of people in homes. They're not decreasing it. It's just that they're put in rentals. Yeah. So I don't think that they're distinguishing between rentals and owning a home. They're just saying there aren't enough homes. But this is entirely a government problem, isn't it?

Let me ask you this. If you were to make a list of problems the government solved, it'd be a pretty short list. But if you made a separate list of problems the government created, it'd be a pretty big list too, wouldn't it? Like every time the government gets in the way of the free market, and that's obviously what's happening here. It's all bad. So I'm going to say it for the billionth time: I think robots will be big and AI will be big, of course, but one of the biggest sources of economic activity is going to be completely rebuilding homes, putting these little pre-made factory ADUs, you know, the little backyard in-law homes. They're going to be wild. I mean they're going to go crazy. That market's going to be huge.

And I saw yet another Instagram reel in which there's some, it looks like a Mexican company. It was in Spanish so I couldn't tell the details, but they're making bricks. So they have machines that look like they're manual where you just put the right amount of dirt and water or whatever you put in there, and then you press down and you make a brick. But one of the machines that I saw, it makes a brick that's like a Lego. So the process of stacking them is as simple as you put it on top and it goes exactly where it's supposed to and you're kind of done. I think you pour some concrete over it or something. So now you can make your own bricks without electricity. No electricity needed. And the bricks are made to just fit together. So anybody can be a bricklayer basically.

So I think that and about a million other things are going to have us not only, here's the key to my prediction, it won't be just that we'll build new homes and let's say new cities, but we will have to completely tear down and rebuild existing homes to make them as good as the new ones. Because the existing ones are going to look like garbage once new ones are doing what they need to do. They're going to be so much less expensive to maintain and all that. So I think there's going to be a remodeling surge like you've never seen before, and it will be good for employment for probably 10 years. That's what I say.

Wall Street Journal is reporting that the Koch family, or Koch, how do you say it? K-C, how do you pronounce that? I always read it but I never hear it. Koch. All right, it's pronounced like Coke. K-C anyway. It's the Koch family and its network of donors, says the Wall Street Journal, are starting to back Nikki Haley. Why is it that everything looks exactly like you think it is? Why does it look exactly like you suspected that the big industrialists are going to back Nikki Haley and the military industrial complex? It kind of looks exactly like it looks, doesn't it? So we'll see how that goes.

All right, let's talk about Israel. Netanyahu has three conditions for peace. Number one: destroy Hamas. Number two: demilitarize Gaza. And number three: deprogram the Palestinians. Deprogram them. Well, I think he used the word deradicalize. Deradicalize. But that's sort of deprogram. But deradicalize sounds less provocative because everybody's in favor of deradicalizing, but not everybody would be in favor of brainwashing. Same thing. It's going to require brainwashing to deradicalize.

So here's what I think about that. What is missing in the three-point plan is who's going to run Gaza and the West Bank? Isn't he leaving out who's in charge after it's done? The most important part. How are you going to accomplish keeping Hamas destroyed, demilitarizing it, and keeping it that way, and deprogramming Palestinians, unless Israel has full control of it? It's the only way. They're going to have full control. Anybody who thought the two-state solution was ever an option, it really never was. And I'm going to tell you the reason that nobody else is going to tell you. Here's why the two-state solution was never an option. Because the parties involved didn't want it. They both wanted a one-state solution where they won. Surprise. And they both prefer the fight to the peace.

Now when I say they, I don't mean every citizen. The citizens of both Israel and Gaza, probably a lot of the citizens don't want to fight. Probably a lot. But the governments are a different situation. Let me tell you what I would do if I were Israel. Every time the Palestinians did something horrible, I would take some more of their land. Because it's like a free punch. "All right, if you're going to attack us, we'll keep your land. Oh, if you're going to attack us again, I guess we'll keep your land again." So Israel has this strategy where if they just allow the Palestinians to do what the Palestinians apparently want to do, which is elect militaristic leaders and have them threaten Israel, that Israel will just do the obvious natural thing, which is use those provocations to their advantage. So I think Israel is growing. And if you were to fast forward 100 years into the future and you were to look back at this period, you would say to yourself, I hate to tell you that Netanyahu is going to be like Thomas Jefferson. Right? Thomas Jefferson doing the Louisiana Purchase, increasing the size of the United States. Netanyahu is going to look like that in 100 years, right? I mean there'll always be two stories about him. There'll be the good one and the bad one. But if he succeeds in basically completely controlling Gaza and completely filling the West Bank with settlements until it's a de facto Israeli country, then it's going to look like it was one of the biggest successes of a country in the history of countries in 100 years. At the moment it just looks like, "Hey, why can't you get along? We don't understand why you can't get along." Well, why you can't get along is that Israel benefits from taking advantage of the bad stuff.

Now Glenn Greenwald tells us provocatively that it's always been the Israelis who turned down the two-state peace deals. Have you always been told that it was the PLO and the Palestinians who were always turning down the great peace deals? Is that your understanding what's happened? It was always the Palestinians. They would get these great deals and then they would turn them down, right? Well, Glenn Greenwald will tell you it's the opposite. So which is it? Does Glenn Greenwald have the accurate story that it's always been Israel? Because Greenwald says that Netanyahu has bragged about killing the two-state solution, that he's actively bragged about it in public. Do you believe that?

Here's what I believe. I believe that it doesn't matter if Netanyahu killed it or not, because it wouldn't have worked. What's the difference? Yeah, I'm not sure he's the bad guy because it wouldn't have worked. It would have just given the other side time to rebuild, build up their military, and then they would have attacked and it just would have turned into this. Eventually October 7th was going to happen anyway you look at it. So I don't think a two-state solution was ever possible. And I'm going to give you the inarguable answer why. And I'm going to call this Schrodinger's Jew.

Schrodinger's Jew. You've heard of Schrodinger's cat, right? It's a famous experiment in physics where