RLL 133: Happy New Year 2025!

Hi everyone, it's Steve Matthews, your host. This is Radio Look Solicit, episode 133.

Happy New Year 2025! Yeah, it's hard to believe we're already here in the new year today, and you know, these things seem like they come faster and faster.

At least that's what people always say, you know. It's like, when you get older, you know, the time goes faster.

And it does seem seem to be the case, because it seems almost like it was just yesterday that I was sitting here doing a

Happy New Year 2024, and here we already are a year later. So, imagine that. Well, anyway,

I hope everybody had an enjoyable New Year's Eve last night. You didn't stay up too late.

I think I slept in today until about nine. I don't get a chance to do that very often. That's a real luxury for me.

You know, I end up, you know, actually sleeping in without having to get up for an hour. Now, that's a real luxury for me.

So, being able to sleep until nine, that's even bigger. That's a pretty great thing.

And, you know, there's this other tradition that we have in my family, and it's something I always look forward to on New Year's Eve.

I think it's a lot of fun, anyway. Well, I like it. I don't know. Yeah, I guess it kind of is fun. We always have

Sloppy Joes on New Year's Eve, and I don't know how that tradition started. I don't really know where it comes from.

But, anyway, that's a thing we do, and I always look forward to that. I know it's going to be a happy New Year's when we have

Sloppy Joes on New Year's Eve. So, I mean, that sets me up. You know, that's a great way to end a year, and it's a great way to set up a good

New Year. So, anyway, we did have that. So, I was very happy. In fact,

I think one of the things as I've gotten older, I think one of the things I've come to enjoy about the holidays the most is the food.

You know, whether it's the Chex Mix or the cookies or whatever. Yeah, that's why

I always have to go on a diet in January. But, you know, it's a lot of fun there for a week or two when you're doing that.

I really do love the food. So, there's that.

And, yeah, it's hard to believe we're already done. Basically, we're wrapping it up, and it's time to go back to work here soon enough, at least for me anyway.

I've got to go back to work tomorrow, and I've got to go back to school. That's one of the weird things about having

New Year in the middle of the week like this. You know, if it's on Tuesday, maybe you can take the

Monday off the day after or something like that, especially if it's later in the week. If it's a

Thursday or Friday, maybe you can take the day off before, you know, what have you. But, you know, in the middle of the week,

I mean, you know, it's, I don't know. It's kind of screwy, at least for me anyway, because I burned up all my vacation this year, and I didn't really have anything left here at the end.

Not that that's a bad thing, because, of course, you know, the way my company is, is they let you carry a week over.

But, you know, I don't see a lot of reason to do that. You know, I'm definitely not somebody who believes in leaving vacation on the table.

If you're going to give me time off, I'm going to take that time. And actually, my company is pretty generous about that.

I got four weeks when I started my current employer a couple of years ago, and they're the most generous of any employer that I've had on that.

And we usually get a few floating holidays, and sometimes they have a day, they call it friends and family, where they, you know, they basically just close the company.

So, I mean, I do get, I'd say, probably above average time off.

That's something that I really do appreciate about my job. So, there's that.

But, yeah, I'd actually burned up a lot of my days earlier this year, and at least I had enough I could take all last week off with Christmas.

But this year, this week, no, not so much. I get today, a random

Wednesday in the middle of the week, and then I got to go back to work for the next two days. So, anyway, if you've got time off this week,

I hope you do. Enjoy your time for me, and, you know, well, that's just the way it is.

But anyway, hey, yeah, I wanted to do a program here today, really just maybe a quick New Year's program.

It's always good to kind of do a kickoff program on New Year's just, and, you know, it's a good time for it.

It's a good time to stop and to reflect maybe on the way things have gone in 2024 and hopefully looking forward to 2025 and make that even better.

You know, 2024 was a good year for me. I got some good things done, and I really do look forward to 2025.

I'm actually kind of excited. I've got some interesting projects coming up this year. And working right now on a designation at my job.

I work in the retirement plan industry, and I'm working on this designation. It's something that's not just with my company.

It's an industry -wide designation. And, Lord willing, that's something I hope to complete in mid -May, and that'll be awesome.

So, right now, I'm in the process of studying for that. That's not always so awesome, but, well, hopefully,

I'll learn something good from it. Anyway, you know, one of the things that's pretty typical that a lot of podcasters or YouTubers do this time of year is to do predictions, you know, do a prediction show, talk about what you think might happen in the upcoming year.

And I was kind of scrambling to put something together, so I actually, I kind of cheated a little bit here.

And what I did is I actually used AI to create a predictions for 2025 predictions list.

And the way I did that, I actually used, I used Grok. If you're not familiar with that, that is a, that's

X's brand. That's the name that they give to their artificial intelligence.

They call it Grok. You know, there's different types of AI out there. You know, there's, what, chat GPT. You know,

I know Apple's got Apple Intelligence now. That's kind of a new thing with them. And there are some others as well.

I can't think of them offhand. But, yeah, there's a lot of different AI bots out there. And Grok is one of the big ones.

Grok, it's kind of an interesting word. I think it actually is a word that was coined by a science fiction writer,

Robert Heinlein. He used that in one of his books. And I think the basic idea of Grok, the idea is that it means like to understand or to grasp mentally, something like that.

You know, I guess if you would use that in a sentence, you would say you Grok a particular idea. And I'm not sure why he came up, had to coin a whole new word for that.

But anyway, the, I guess Elon Musk must like that. So he calls X's AI Grok.

And, you know, artificial intelligence is actually pretty interesting. We'll talk a little bit about that because that's one of the predictions that came up.

And in fact, this is one of the things that I really do think AI is kind of a big deal because I actually used it to generate my list of predictions for 2025.

I did it the easy way. I just went out and had AI do it. I just put it in a query. I said, you know, predictions for 2025.

And it popped up a pretty nice list of some things here, some interesting talking points. So yeah, you can, even if you're a

YouTuber or a podcaster, you can use AI to help you with ideas for programs.

So we'll work through our AI inspired predictions for 2025 list.

I've got a few that I added on my own, but we'll start with this here. So predictions for 2025.

And this is what Grok said. It said, here are some key predictions for 2025 based on recent analyses and expert insights.

And the first thing it gives here, it's under the heading of economic and financial prediction. And this is what it says.

The U .S. economy is expected to reaccelerate with the GDP, that GDP as gross domestic product, growth around 3%, which would be pretty strong.

With inflation potentially rebounding, does monetary conditions ease? However, inflation remains a significant issue with a 40 % chance of 10 -year note yield reaching 5%.

All right, so there's a few things to unpack there. So, yeah, at least Grok is giving a pretty rosy picture of the year, financially speaking.

The economy is going to grow, that's going to imply that the stock market is probably going to do pretty well.

But it does talk about inflation potentially rebounding as monetary conditions ease. That's kind of a nice way of saying that the

Federal Reserve, they expect the Federal Reserve to print a lot of money. And one of the things that's really interesting, and I'm not going to belabor the point here, this is supposed to be kind of a fun show, right?

So I don't want to get all wonky on economics, but I'm kind of a little bit of an economics nerd. I find it really interesting.

You can blame Walter Williams for that. If you know who Walter Williams was, well, he was an economist. He was a

PhD economist. He taught at George Mason University for a long time. He was also a public intellectual. He wrote a newspaper column, a weekly column for many years, probably,

I don't know, 30 or 40 years. And I remember I first started reading him back in about the mid-'80s, around the time

I graduated from high school. And he really inspired me because, you know, up until the time

I read him, I always had this idea that if you had any kind of intellectual leanings or you wanted to study something, that you had to be some sort of a socialist or what have you.

And Walter Williams, he was actually a libertarian. And he was very much pro -freedom, pro -individual liberty, pro -limited government, these types of things, pro -constitutional government.

And I was really kind of amazed by that because he was really the first writer

I think I ever read that talked about, that defended liberty in a systematic fashion.

I always appreciated that about him. And as an economist, reading him, it picked my interest in economics.

And I guess I've kind of been a bit of an amateur economist ever since then. But when we talk about inflation, of course, inflation is not what most people think it is.

Usually, when people talk about inflation, what they mean is rising prices. But the thing that you need to keep in mind, and this is the thing that the news media works very hard to make sure that you don't understand.

You can watch, you know, whether it's CNBC or Fox Business or, you know, in any other business channel,

Bloomberg, what have you out there, you can watch that. You can watch the evening news for decades and decades and decades and decades on end, and they will never tell you what

I'm about to tell you. They're not going to tell you this. And here it is, that rising prices are not inflation, not themselves inflation.

Rising prices are the result of inflation. So what is inflation?

Well, inflation in the older and I believe more correct definition of the term is not rising prices, it's money printing.

In other words, inflation is when you increase the supply of money abnormally.

And the effect that that has in the economy is you and I experience that as rising prices.

And if you stop and think about it, it makes a lot of sense. What happens when the supply of something becomes more plentiful?

Well, it tends to become cheaper. So, like, if there's only just a very small number of, say, something desirable,

I don't know, you know, some new video game console or new, you know, hot new video game comes out, everybody's clamoring for it and they want to buy the thing.

Well, that's going to tend to drive the price up for that particular item.

Now, if it's last year's version of the video game, well, people don't want it as much anymore and so the price tends to come down.

Well, anyway, that's kind of the way, that's the way it works with money, you know, that the more, if you increase the supply of money very quickly, unnaturally so, the value of that money tends to come down.

And when we talk about the value of the dollar going down, you and I experience that as prices going up.

So, when the value of the dollar goes down, prices go up. So, when you've got the Federal Reserve creating all of this money, pushing that out into the economy, it tends to make those dollars, each dollar out there, worth less, which means you and I have to use more dollars to buy the same amount of goods or services.

And again, you're never going to hear that on the evening news. Inflation is always a monetary phenomenon.

A very famous economist said that and he was right about it. Inflation, you know, when you're talking about rising prices, price inflation, sometimes people will call it price inflation to distinguish it from inflation of the supply of money.

But yeah, when central banks, when they create lots and lots of money, it tends to make the value of that money go down and you and I experience that as prices going up.

So, yeah, I think that there's going to be a real chance that we're going to have, again, substantial rising prices in the new year because of all the money printing that's going on and probably will continue to go on in 2025.

I think we can be pretty sure of that. You're going to see a lot of money printing and you're going to see prices going up.

Now, something else it talks about here in economic and financial predictions, it says here, the S &P 500, that's the

Standard and Poor's 500 is projected to hit 6 ,666. So, the S &P 500, that's probably, that's one of the major stock indices that's out there.

It takes basically the 500 largest U .S. corporations, that it's comprised of the largest 500

American corporations. And if it goes up as far as what Grok is predicting here, well, that's about a 10 % rise, which would be a pretty good year for the stock market.

So, they're predicting a strong year for the stock market, it says, with large cap value stocks leading the charge according to Bank of America.

So, that's something from Bank of America. Now, here's the second thing that Grok talks about for 2025, it talks about technology and AI.

Of course, AI is artificial intelligence. Artificial intelligence is anticipated to significantly evolve with predictions, including the development of Grok 3 .0,

reaching an IQ of 140 plus. So, I guess, apparently, they assign an IQ value to their artificial intelligence.

And advancements in AI chatbots, leading to the creation of data responsibility platforms to ensure ethical data usage.

So, yeah, AI is really a big thing. Now, you know, sometimes, you know, I tend to be a little bit skeptical and stuff, and it's like some of these new things, it's like, oh,

I don't know, is this really going to be a thing? Well, in the case of AI, yeah,

I think it is going to be a thing. And one of the ways that I've come to realize that is just doing my job.

I have, let's say, I work in the retirement plan industry, and there's a lot of really kind of specific rules and regulations and all this complex garbage.

I won't bore you with that here right now. But the reason I bring that up is because sometimes, in fact, as I've been studying for my designation,

I've had some questions, and I couldn't always get answers to it. So, I went to Grok, and I would put my queries in about, you know, about retirement plans, and I didn't really have a lot of expectations.

I thought, well, what's this thing going to really be able to tell me about something as highly specialized as retirement plans?

Well, I was really surprised when I put some of the questions in, they call them prompts is the term that's used.

When I put these prompts into Grok, and it's just typing in the window, there's a little window.

In fact, if you're looking at the video right now, you can see on here at the bottom, it says, ask anything. So, I took them up on it, and I asked some questions, some pretty technical questions about retirement plans, and I was shocked at the result.

Not only did they give me information, but they provided sources, there were clickable links

I could go on, and they were pretty good links. I mean, these were actually remarkably good answers.

And, you know, I think I'm going to start using that maybe in my job on a day -to -day basis if I get into some kind of tough situation.

You know, and that really convinced me. I thought, you know, this is a thing. You know,

I mean, it's not just a passing fad. You know, this is a real thing. And one of the things people talk about a lot with AI is the possibility that it could, you know, begin replacing white -collar jobs.

You know, that a lot of jobs that are, you know, involve, you know, sort of,

I guess, intellectual work are things that could possibly be taken over by AI. In fact, I even think about my own job in my own industry.

I suspect, and, you know, I can't prove this out, but my own just suspicion at this point is, you know,

I think 10 years from now, I think there are probably going to be a lot fewer people doing the kind of work that I do right now.

And it might happen even before 10 years. I'm kind of pushing it out 10 years. But, you know, this technology is just going to get better and better.

And, you know, quite honestly, the rules and regulations that are around retirement plans are really complex.

And it's hard for anyone to really keep track of all of these things. And I'm just thinking to myself, you know,

AI might be able to do this job, my job, a whole lot better than I can in not the terribly distant future.

So, yeah, I could definitely see this replacing certain types of work. Maybe not everything can be

AI'd out of existence. I don't mean to say that. I don't know. But I think it's going to definitely change things.

And, I mean, what, in fact, you know, the way Grok predicts this, you know, yeah,

I mean, the AI is just going to get better and better. It's going to continue to grow here in 2025.

Oh, let's see. It says NVIDIA might experience more immediate growth due to the law of large numbers.

Yeah, it's easy for me to say, right? Yeah, if you follow NVIDIA at all, NVIDIA has been like this most explosive stock in the universe over the last 12 months.

It's just grown and come to really dominate the stock market. Not just the chip industry, but just the stock market more generally.

In fact, it's gotten to the point where, you know, Intel, you know, for years and years and years, I mean, Intel was like the gold standard in computer chips, but Intel has really kind of fallen behind.

In fact, there are people talking about Intel being acquired by another company. Another bullet point here says

Apple is expected to further integrate AI into its product, potentially through acquiring an AI company to enhance functionalities like Siri.

So, yeah, that's actually becoming a big thing now too. They call it Apple Intelligence. And I noticed that on some of my, like my iPhone and that,

I've got an iPhone. So, I mean, I've actually, they did an update to the operating system and now it's got some

AI capabilities. So, that's pretty interesting. So, that's going to continue to grow there. It talks here about global and societal changes.

So, there's another area that Grok talked about. It says there will be increased focus on sustainability with electric vehicles becoming more affordable, potentially making oil -rich

OPEC countries less relevant. Yeah, you know, I don't know about that. I mean, electric vehicles, I'm not like somebody that's got an animus against electric vehicles.

I don't. I mean, if, you know, hey, you know, the thing that's interesting, electric vehicles have actually been around since the 18, late 1800s.

I've actually seen pictures of this. And in fact, I saw a picture, I don't have it handy here, but it was like on Facebook or X or something like this, within the last year, where it actually showed an electric car being charged in somebody's garage.

And I think the photograph was like from like 1912 or something like this. And yeah,

I mean, it looked kind of, I mean, it wasn't a Model T, but it looked, it was kind of in the same, roughly the same kind of a style as an old

Model T, but it was an electric car. It was actually plugged in in somebody's garage. So, I mean, that technology has been around actually for quite some time, well over a hundred years.

And of course, it's been refined here recently. I don't know. I mean, to me, I think for most people right now,

I think the good old fashion internal combustion engine is still probably the best option when you're talking about overall, just, you know, in terms of the bang you get for the buck.

I mean, you know, these electric vehicles are a lot more expensive and they don't necessarily give you the functionality that you can get out of just a traditional internal combustion engine vehicle.

Actually, I might be looking for a new car here this year. So, you know, some of this applies to me. You know, part of me think, oh, you know, it'd be really cool to go get a hybrid or something like that.

But I'm just like, you know, I don't know because, you know, when those electric vehicles go down, like when you have to replace the battery pack, oh my goodness.

You know, I mean, you know, that's an arm and a leg there. It's expensive enough trying to repair my own car as it is.

But anyway, according to this, according to Grok, the price of electric vehicles will come down.

I guess we'll see. Let's see here. Societal shifts, including a significant number of people changing careers.

It's an influx of startups and the rise of aggressive spiritual practices. It talks about Ugra Siddhanta.

Yeah, I actually looked that up, this Ugra Siddhanta. I never even heard of that before. It's some kind of a, I don't know, weird transcendental meditation thing.

Definitely not biblical Christianity. Now, that would be a spiritual practice that I think would certainly,

I think we would all welcome, would be a rise of those who believe in the

Lord Jesus Christ, who are saved by the gospel of grace alone, through faith alone, in Christ alone.

Now, that would be the kind of spiritual change that I think would certainly benefit all of society.

And of course, as Christians, that's what we need to be working for. We need to be, you know, my minister at my church, he's been preaching a lot on personal evangelism recently, and I think he has a very good point.

I think it's important to reach others with the gospel. You know, the good news of what Christ has done to save his people.

That's what the gospel of Jesus Christ is. It talks here also, it goes on, it says, cryptocurrency and blockchain.

And under that header, it says, US is expected to regulate the crypto market with a total value locked in decentralized finance protocols could exceed $250 billion.

I don't know what the current amount is, but I think that's a substantial increase. Initial AI offerings might peak, leading to a decline in many lesser

AI agents. I'm not exactly sure what they're talking about there. Initial AI offerings, that's actually the first time

I've heard that term. Sometimes you hear of like IPOs, initial public offerings, is when a company issues stock for the first time, it's called an

IPO, an initial public offering. So, this is probably something like that, I guess, maybe where, perhaps where, and this seems to be related to cryptocurrencies and blockchains.

I'm not going to speculate too much and say something dumb. But anyway, here's an interesting bullet point here too.

Under cryptocurrency and blockchains, Bitcoin is expected to reach highs of $420 ,000 with significant

ETF inflows of about $175 billion. Okay. So, that is, I have heard that number before.

I've actually been studying some cryptocurrency. I've been taking a course on crypto trading.

Yeah, I think I'm going to quit my day job and trade cryptos, right? Well, maybe not. Yeah, don't quit your day job, kid.

But it's actually been very educational and I've learned a lot. Interestingly enough, the course

I've been taking is offered through, there's a guy that I watch on YouTube called The Economic Ninja. And if you haven't watched his channel before,

I mean, if you have any interest in, say, entrepreneurship, learn how to do a side hustle, something like this, you may want to check out his channel.

Again, it's just called The Economic Ninja. And he says he's a Christian, and he may very well be.

And anyway, he's all about teaching ordinary people, maybe like me,

I've never had, I've never done anything entrepreneurial, but I'm learning how to do this.

And he offers, he's got a lot of classes and courses in this that you can take.

And I think the one I'm in right now, this course on cryptocurrency has really been a huge help to me.

And so anyway, if you're interested in maybe beginning to learn something about entrepreneurship and cryptos, he talks a lot about, you know, it's not just about cryptos.

He talks, you know, real estate and different areas of investing. And he seems like a pretty straight shooter.

I mean, I think he's an honest man. So you may want to check out his stuff. But yeah,

I mean, the idea here that Bitcoin's going to hit 420 ,000, it's like good grief. I mean, Bitcoin just recently within the last couple of weeks, maybe, maybe a month, it crossed over the $100 ,000 market, kind of like 108 ,000.

It's pulled back. It's like around 94 or $95 ,000 right now. But I mean, if it got to 420 ,000, that'd be over four times the current price.

You know, and a lot of people, you know, it's kind of interesting. A lot of people who maybe who have never been involved with crypto, you know, they might look at a headline or something online and they see, oh,

Bitcoin's trading at $95 ,000. They think, well, I could never, I don't have $95 ,000 to go out and put in Bitcoin.

I can't even think about that. Well, actually, that's not true. And so if you see things like that, and that's stopping you from even trying to learn about the crypto space, don't be concerned about that.

Because one of the things about crypto is you could go out if you wanted to right now and you could buy $10 worth of Bitcoin.

Now, you're not going to own a whole Bitcoin. Now, to own a whole Bitcoin, yeah, you'd have to be able to put down $95 ,000.

You're going to get a small portion of a Bitcoin. But you could go out and quite literally put $10 into it.

And if you wanted to, come back, you know, a few weeks later, a month later, buy another $10. I mean, you can do those kinds of things with cryptocurrency.

You don't have to put down this, you know, gigantic amount of money all at once to get involved in the crypto space.

But yeah, at least according to Grok, you're looking at maybe a, you know, four times, you know,

Bitcoin going up four times here in a fairly short period of time in 2025.

So that's kind of intriguing. Let's see. And here under the headline, it says, other notable trends, innovations in healthcare might include the ability to regrow organs, reducing the need for organ donors.

Well, that would be an amazing thing. I know that's something that they've talked about.

Yeah, I mean, that's not the first time I've seen that. I wasn't aware that that was maybe going to be a more of a thing in 2025.

I guess we'll have to wait and see. But that would be a tremendous blessing. I mean, if it were possible to do something like that.

The Internet of Everything is expected to expand over 100 billion connected devices leading to a trillion sensor economy.

Yeah. So anyway, those are Grok's predictions there for 2025.

And I've got a few other ones that I wanted to talk about here. Let's see here.

You know, COVID is still a thing. And this is, I mean, of course, you know, that's kind of in a rear view mirror here.

I remember here in Ohio, the COVID restrictions actually were lifted at the end of May, I guess, 1st of June of 2021.

So we're going on, you know, it's been three and a half, almost four years now. Sometimes it's kind of hard to think back to COVID and all of the horrifying nonsense that people were trying to push.

But, you know, the powers that be, you know, whether it's the World Health Organization or Bill Gates or some of these other ne 'er -do -wells, they haven't given up and they are continuing with this.

Here is something. One of my favorite analysts of the pandemic was

Edward Dowd. He's an interesting guy. He's actually, he's about my age.

He's retired Wall Street. He was a fund manager, a hedge fund manager for some time.

I think he worked for BlackRock. But he was inspired during the pandemic to do some analysis of some of the claims and things like this that people were making.

And he showed a lot of the stuff to be false. And he really crunched numbers in a way that I had not seen anybody else do.

And he did it in a way that was very understandable. So you don't have to be some professional statistician to grok to understand that is what

Edward Dowd was talking about. And here he's talking about patterns. He says, patterns, you say, here's a pattern.

And he's responding to a post from Sheryl Atkinson. And Sheryl Atkinson, I know she used to work for one of the mainstream, maybe it was

ABC. She was a mainstream journalist, but she's gotten out of that.

She's an independent journalist now. She actually does some very good work on things. And this is what

Sheryl Atkinson wrote. She said, two more odd sudden deaths among friends who seemed healthy.

I don't want to make too much of it, but I do wish their doctors were logging circumstances and reporting so we could learn of any patterns.

But nobody seems to be asking the questions. At this rate, it's impossible to know if there are connections or not.

Seems somebody really doesn't want to know. Yeah, it kind of does. And Ed Dowd responded.

He says, patterns, you say, here's a pattern. Let's expand this a little bit. He's got a couple of screenshots here.

Now, the first screenshot, this is what you're looking at. In fact, you can tell that he's a financial guy because he got this chart from FRED.

And what that is, that's the Federal Reserve. It comes from these charts, these

FRED charts, F -R -E -D. They're put out by the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis.

In fact, down here it says the source is US Bureau of Labor Statistics, fred .stlouisfed

.org. So yeah, these are put out by the St. Louis Federal Reserve. And this particular chart is titled

Civilian Labor Force with a Disability 16 Years and Over. So this is a chart of civilian labor force for people who are 16 years and older.

And it goes back to 2009. That's the farthest, I don't know if you can see that, farthest date to the left here on this chart.

So it starts out, it's thousands of persons. So it's showing, if I'm reading that correctly,

I guess that would just mean there were just around 6 ,000 people or so in the civilian labor force with a disability.

That seems low, but okay, well, we'll just go with that. We'll go with 6 ,000.

Well, you can go from back here in 2009 over to 2021. And you can see the line, it kind of goes down, it goes up, it goes down, it goes up.

In other words, it's kind of in a range. If you were a financial analyst, you'd say, well, it's range bound.

It's like we have a stock that just kind of goes up a little bit, goes down a little bit, goes up a little bit, goes down a little bit.

It just keeps on kind of going sideways in that pattern. And you would look at this and you'd say, well, this is kind of a narrow range.

There's some variation, some years there's more, some years there's fewer people. Some variation within a year can go up and down through the year, but it's in a range, it's in a kind of in a tight range.

But now here you go all the way to the, if you look over here, I've got my cursor in the beginning of 2021, you see all of a sudden it takes off and it goes up at almost like this 45 -degree angle or so.

It goes up all through 2021, it goes up through 2022, it goes up through 2023, it goes up through 2024.

In fact, right here at the end of 2024, it seems like it's going on another big leg up. And that's very interesting.

Now, what's driving this? What happened in early 2021 that might just cause this explosion in the civilian labor force population with a disability?

Well, that's when they started the jabs. There's an early 2021, that's when those came out.

Now you can say, well, correlation is not causation. Well, that's true, but there had to be something caused that.

What could that something be? Here's another chart that Ed Dowd provided here.

In fact, it's a very similar chart. See, this one is also from the

St. Louis Federal Reserve. Again, it shows that, in fact, it looks like it's basically the same chart. And you can see here again, you've got this narrow range from 2009 to 2021, so a period of, what, 12 years.

And then right here in 2021, boom, this thing just takes off. What caused that to take off?

Well, I think what Ed Dowd thinks caused it very clearly, he says it's the jab.

And I suspect that, I think he's right. I think that seems to be the most likely thing.

So, I mean, there's a pattern for you. And that just really jumps right off the page.

That's one of the things, again, like I really said, I really appreciate about Ed Dowd's work. He does some interesting work.

And anyway, that's something I just wanted to share with you. And the reason I wanted to share that with you is really because we're talking a little bit about predictions for 2025.

There are a lot of people that are saying that, well, we're going to have another pandemic. It's going to happen.

And in this particular case, they're talking about bird flu. And I know that the state of California has already declared an emergency about bird flu.

And let's see. Here we go. I know, everyone's going to say, you're a conspiracy theory,

Steve. This is Alex Jones. Well, okay, yes, it is. But he's got this headline here, very subtle headline.

But he says, Deep State Big Pharma has launched a psychological warfare operation against the public so Biden can declare a new pandemic before Trump takes office.

So, yeah, I mean, some people are predicting that. There's all kinds of stuff that Joe Biden seems to be doing everything he can to kind of throw sand in the gears of the incoming

Trump administration. And I don't know, I think it would be pretty difficult at this point, even if they wanted to, to pull off some great big, you know,

COVID -style lockdown, vax rollout, all this kind of stuff in just three weeks. Because, you know, today's

January 1st and Trump's inaugurated on January 21st. So it's only 20 days off and just a little bit under three weeks.

I think that'd be pretty hard to pull off. But I don't think there's any doubt that there are some people that would like to see something like that happen.

And they have various reasons. You know, maybe one of those things is, you know, the idea would be, well, to, you know, to get everybody all in a panic, just like we did five years ago, and, you know, lock everyone down and create all this chaos and economics, stagnation.

And, yeah, I mean, are there people that would like to see that? Yeah, I think there are. You know, there was actually,

Trump came out with a video just the other day, in fact, basically where he said, you know, all that lockdown stuff,

I'm paraphrasing, but he said, yeah, all that lockdown stuff, he says, yeah, we're not going to do that. In fact, let me see.

I think I saved that somewhere. Did I save that video?

Yeah, there's good old Lena Wynn. She's a thoroughly horrible individual.

She was that one. Let's see here. Let's see.

Yeah, this is a doctor. She called for the mandating shots during the pandemic and barring unvaccinated from leaving their homes.

She's now advising the Biden administration to expedite the approval of Big Pharma's extremely mRNA bird flu shot.

So, yeah, before President Trump takes office. So, RFK cannot stop 5 million doses from being distributed and mass

PCR testing restarted. So, yeah, like I say, they, you know, and Lena Wynn, she's one of the people that wants to do things.

She also used to be head of Planned Parenthood, by the way. So, you know, you got to be a pretty evil individual to want to be head of that organization.

And she's really quite the tyrant. She was the one, and I remember her saying something,

I'm paraphrasing a little bit, but it was something to this effect. She says, well, we're not making anybody take the shots.

You know, you have the right to choose not to take the jab. You just have to stay in your home.

You can't go out of your home. But hey, the choice is totally up to you. And that's what she was trying to sell, that kind of nonsense back during the pandemic.

And I remember in Canada, in fact, I don't know if it was Justin Trudeau or some other Canadian official, they were saying the same thing.

And this was after the pandemic, but they were saying, hey, you know, we didn't make anybody take the shots.

It was always up to you, you always had a choice. I mean, you could take the shot or just destroy your life.

But hey, it's your choice, right? Well, I mean, that's just pure tyranny. That's nonsense.

So anyway, but yeah, there are people that are trying to gin up all this fear and stuff over the bird flu.

And I think as Christians, I think we need to take the lead and just soundly rejecting the whole big pharma, big government, globalist nonsense about these vaccines and all of the controls that they want to slap on us.

Yeah, that's a really evil regime and it needs to be rejected in total. So that's a possibility.

That could be something that you and I are looking at coming up here in 2025. I don't know that it will happen.

I'm just saying that's certainly something that you and I need to be aware of. Something else, and you know, and Grok didn't talk about this, but there are a lot of economists, you know,

I mentioned Ed Dowd before. And Ed Dowd has written quite a bit, at least in his opinion, as I said, he's an ex -Wall

Streeter, he's a fund manager guy. And he is of the opinion we could be looking at a nasty economic downturn in 2025.

I mean, at least that's what he's saying. And actually, a lot of the best analysts that I read on a regular basis, financial analysts, they seem to all be in agreement that, yeah, you know, we could be looking at some difficult economic times in 2025.

And one of the reasons that they cite for that, they actually cite a few different data points. One of the things that you hear is, for example,

Wall Street insiders, you know, these corporate leaders, you know, the guys in the

C -suite, when they talk about the C -suite, you know, that's always referring to like the chief executive officer, the chief financial officer, the chief operations officer, you know, they call it the

C -suite, you know, all the top executives. Well, they, you know, these corporate insiders that get a lot of company shares as part of the compensation, they're selling like crazy apparently, they're selling at record rates.

So that's one data point. Another data point just has to do with people like to watch

Warren Buffett. And Warren Buffett right now has a record amount of cash on hand. So a lot of people look to that and say, yeah, you know,

Warren Buffett's got a lot of cash on hand, you know, maybe there's going to be some tough times coming, you know, and he's got that cash not only to keep him from losing money in the stock market, but when things do crash, then he can swoop in and buy stuff up on the cheap.

So that's another thing that people point to. Another thing that people will point to as well is that they say, you know, the stock market valuations, you know, the overall valuations of stocks is very, very high.

You know, stocks are really expensive relative to the amount of earnings that the companies have. So that's something else that people will look at and say, yeah, you know, this looks like it's kind of a bubble and, you know, maybe that bubble comes down.

I don't know. You know, those things can be difficult to predict. You know, one thing that I've learned over the years in watching, you know, financial commentary and being involved in financial markets myself is that I think a lot of times people underestimate both the ability and the determination of governments and central banks to rig stock markets higher.

You know, they say, well, you know, historically speaking, things are really expensive. That doesn't mean it can't keep going up.

I mean, if the central banks keep printing money, if they keep, you know, creating all of this money that these big institutions could then go out and go buy stocks, yeah, you can keep driving up a stock market.

You can drive up a stock market a lot longer, certainly than I ever thought and that many other people thought.

So you have to take some of that stuff with a little bit of a grain of salt. So I'm not saying, yeah, I know the stock market is going to go tank.

But, you know, there are some people who have pointed to some of the things that I've talked about there, about stock market valuations being high, about, you know,

Warren Buffett having all this cash, about all of these corporate insiders selling stock like crazy, that does suggest there are some people think that, you know, things could go down.

Because after all, I mean, who knows the financial situation of the company better than the top executives in that company?

And if they're selling stock like crazy, yeah, that's kind of a good indication that they think, you know, things might be headed down.

So that's something to think about there. Something else, and this, there's been a lot of talk about this.

This is kind of interesting. There's an article I found here. This is in the New York Times. This is actually from 2021.

So it's a few years old, but this is very much still on people's lips today. And the headline in New York Times, it says,

Long slide looms for world population with sweeping ramifications. Fewer babies cries, more abandoned homes toward the middle of this century.

As deaths start to exceed births, changes will come that are hard to fathom. So this has been something

I know Elon Musk has talked a lot about this, but they talk about, you know, the crisis in the fertility crisis, you know, and how, you know, all of these nations are at or near record low birth rates.

And I think it's kind of interesting because, you know, for most of my life, you know, all I've ever heard is, oh my goodness, we've got the population bomb.

That was the title of a book, The Population Bomb. It's a very famous book. It was published by a gentleman named

Paul Ehrlich in, I believe, 1968. So that came out when I was very young.

I think it was two years old or so. So when I say it's my whole life, it really has been, you know, practically my whole life.

There's been this mantra out there, oh, it's overpopulation. Oh, we got to do something about this overpopulation of just too darn many people.

At least that's what some people say. I don't believe that, but that's what they say. And, you know, there's been this crisis, oh my goodness, you know, sometimes they call it neo -Malthusianism.

You know, Thomas Malthus, he was an English economist from about 200 years ago or so, and he had this idea that the population was going to outstrip the ability of the economy to sustain the population, that you'd have these mass die -offs and things.

And he's largely ridiculed today, although I know John Robbins thought well of him, and he said that, you know, he's ridiculed because it hasn't happened yet.

So, I mean, I'm not going to sit here and tell you that you're necessarily, that Malthus was necessarily wrong or, you know, that there can't be issues with high populations.

You know, one of the big problems with populations is it seems like governments today are actually working to undermine their own populations.

I mean, like you see some of the things that were going on last year, for instance, in Europe, I noticed particularly in the Netherlands, where the government was actually attacking the farmers.

And you see this going on in England right now as well, in Great Britain, where they're trying to make it very, very difficult, if not impossible, for small private landowners to be able to pass the farms down to the next generation.

So, I mean, they're trying to centralize control of all this farmland, make it very, very difficult for family farmers, for private individuals to engage in agriculture.

And they put the control of all this acreage in the hands of these large corporations. Well, you know,

I mean, that would, is it possible, you know, to cut off, if these large corporations, they have all this land, they own all the machinery, all the infrastructure for agriculture,

I mean, what if they just decided not to produce food or didn't produce quite as much food? You know, and you see prices explode, you see the availability come down.

Yeah, you could have some difficult times. It's why

I don't think that those sorts of things ought to be in the hands of large cartels.

I like the idea of having private farmers. I like the idea of individual liberty, small businesses.

But the masters of the universe, they're not big fans of that sort of thing.

So, I don't know. So, I mean, anyway, you've got this, you know, we've got the record population, but there are a lot of people out there that are saying, you know, that this might be the very peak and that you're going to see a decline in population, in some cases, precipitously.

And there are some people that are really concerned about the demographics. They're saying, well, we're not having enough babies and, you know, that's going to cause some real problems in the future.

And maybe they're right. As I said, I think you're going to probably hear more about it here this year in 2025.

I don't think this is an issue that's going to go away.

So, that's another prediction for 2025. So, anyway, I guess that's really about all that I had here for right now.

I wanted to do a little bit shorter show. It looks like I've gone on for about an hour. So, anyway, that's, well, just the way it is.

Anyway, I really wanted to close today, you know, because sometimes you can get caught up in all the stuff in the world.

I mean, there's a lot of bad news. I mean, you know, on Christmas Day, I think it was Christmas Day, maybe it happened on Christmas or it was reported on Christmas where this guy shoved somebody in front of a subway in New York City.

Then you've got this attack in New Orleans on New Year's Eve.

Lots of terrible stuff. You know, there's wars and there are rumors of wars. I mean, we've got wars going in Ukraine.

We've got wars going in the Middle East and the promise of possibly more war in the Middle East.

And, you know, as Christians, you know, we can sit here and sometimes feel overwhelmed and you think, okay, you know, all these master of the universe types, you know, whether it's

Bill Gates or Klaus Schwab at the World Economic Forum or, you know, various other forces, the

Pope or what have you, that all these people, they have all this power and you and I, you know, who are we compared to them in terms of wealth and power and influence?

But, you know, these guys that mean evil, I mean, they're not ultimately in charge.

They're really not. And I think that, you know, when you go to the Scriptures, you realize God is sovereign and he conducts the affairs of the world to his glory and to the benefit of his people.

And there are a lot of verses in the Bible that support that idea. Here's just one of them.

This is Romans 8 .28. And we know that for those who love God, all things work together for good, for those who are called according to his purpose.

So, you know, for all things to work together for good, that's not a promise to everybody.

You know, all things don't work together for good for those people who do not believe in the Lord Jesus Christ. But for those who do trust in Christ, believe in his name, who are saved by grace alone, through faith alone, in Jesus Christ alone, they can make that claim.

You know, we know that all things work together for good for those who love God, for those who are called according to his purpose.

So, all of the stuff that goes on, even things that are really terrible, you know, we can deal with that knowing that these things will work together for good.

Now, sometimes it can be hard to see how that is. I won't kid you about that. I mean, I know sometimes

I look at things and things can really despair. But I mean, you and I, I mean, if we're believers in Jesus Christ, we have every reason to be thankful and to be optimistic.

And when I say optimistic, I don't mean we have to say, yeah, boy, everything's just awesome, when there are some real tragedies and difficulties in the world.

But we do know ultimately that this stuff does end. You know, the good guys do win, that these things do work together for good, and we can take that on faith because God himself is faithful.

He cannot lie. So, I wanted to leave you with that thought. So, I think that's a very good reason, you know, if you are saved in the

Lord Jesus Christ, you're a believer in the Lord Jesus Christ, you have every reason, I think, to say

Happy New Year. So, Happy New Year to everybody out there. I hope you enjoyed this, and I look forward to seeing you on future podcasts.

Have a great evening. And until the next time we do meet, I have to say this, may the spirit of truth guide you in all truth as you read and study