All Episodes
Feb. 23, 2024 - Clif High
40:07
College vs Trade school?
| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
Hello humans, hello humans.
It's likely to be a bit noisy here.
It's um still the 22nd of February.
It's um a little after one, and we're heading outbound.
Doggo did good, she got her shot, and we uh got her all checked out.
She's healthy and stuff.
A little on the pudgy side, but other than that, doing good.
Um anyway, I wanted to talk for a minute about uh money, economics, and um stuff like that, but also colleges, right?
So uh a lot of people have um you know, we're sort of coming back out of the whole plandemic, uh, you know, lock you down, uh fuck with your brains, that kind of shit.
We got a lot of people that are waking up and talking about all of the crap that's been pulled these last few years, but in any event, some of these um some kids are uh starting to get kids, I mean, you know, college age, they they're starting to think about going to college, and I've had some people ask me questions about it, right?
And this one smart guy was saying, Well, you know, does it work economically?
Uh and you know, college, I mean, and if so, what kind of college and so on, and um this is a guy I know here out on the coast, and uh he's a young fellow and he's trying to decide what to do with his life, right?
Um well, one of the things not to do apparently economically is um go to college.
Uh I looked at it and um so if you went to college for an advanced degree, all right.
So if you if you were smart about it, you can maybe get uh enough money from the education, so to speak, the certification really is what it is, you can maybe get enough extra money from the certification of having a degree in some professions to pay you back for the amount of debt and interest you're gonna t take on.
Okay, but it's very very very few, it's very selective.
And so if we look at um some of these professions like uh college, right?
Uh or like um uh doctors and uh college professors and just examine them, uh we come up with a um uh a metric that shows us that uh if you were to go and take out uh loans to get a degree for uh even an advanced degree like you know PhD kind of thing in um teaching,
so you're a doctorate in teaching, but it doesn't matter anywhere along the line for teaching, uh it will never ever ever pay you back for the amount of uh debt and interest you'll pay on that education uh over the length of that education.
If on the other hand, and you can go and check me on this, right?
You can go and figure this math out yourself.
Uh I don't use AI on this kind of stuff because it can't add, and so I was just sitting there uh doing additions on you know how much money you'd make and you know multiplication over the number of years, the raises you'd get etc, etc.
And doing this um examination of uh teaching degree, right?
That's one of the okay.
So the reason the teaching degree was chosen here is an example, it's one of the easiest degrees to get.
Uh, you know, very very, very, very few people crap out of of um teaching schools, uh whereas lots of people crap out on medical school where they just don't uh you know they go into medical school and there's a fairly high attrition rate.
Anyway, so if you were to do that, you'll never get paid back.
Um if you were alternatively to take that same amount of money that you put into uh the school and do virtually anything else with it, you'd make you make your money back on it.
So if you if you took out all of that debt and um you know invested in crypto and did the right cryptos, you could make money or buy gold and just hold it as real value.
Uh so it if you were to go and take a fraction of that time and go to like trade schools, uh so some of these trade schools to get uh started to get an apprenticeship are as little as as eight weeks of actual schooling, and then you do some level of an apprenticeship, and so there are apprenticeship programs in um plumbing, all of the building trades, right?
I actually, when I was a kid, and we were living on the east coast, um, I I had too many um credits for high school, right?
So I didn't even I only had to go to in when we were in Virginia, I only had to go to high school um uh two hours a day to stay even with the credits I would need to graduate, uh, because I had had calculus and had all this advanced stuff uh in Germany at younger ages and did very well with it.
So um uh I joined an apprenticeship program to fill up the time and the rest of the day, and I learned to be a uh uh what they called a hogman, a uh uh the an apprentice to a bricklayer, and so I was into bricks, into ceramics, you know.
So I I was uh I was a high school kid, I'd go to school for a few hours and then I'd go in and uh basically carry shit for people.
Finally learned to do some level of bricklaying um after a while, but you gotta you gotta you know do it for a couple of years before they let you mess with anything that can um uh cause them problems, right?
Um so in any event though, uh you can uh get a uh plumber's apprenticeship or an electrician apprenticeship and get done with all of the schooling and everything uh that single year and go on out and then make start making money,
and if you plot the amount of money you will make as a um as an apprentice electrician or as an apprentice plumber, you will make more money there than a doctor will make working in uh his residency.
Not kidding you, right?
I'm not kidding you.
Plumbers out-earn doctors until doctors are 52, until doctors have are 52 years of age and have had that much experience and that much of a um uh uh build up a practice and all of that,
uh so it takes them a long time, you know, they get out of school at mid-20s and then they work for 25 years before they'll make more in that year than the plumber, than if they'd done it as a plumber, and all those previous 25 years, the plumber is gonna out-earn them in a significant way.
Plus, that plumber won't have the debt, and so a lot of the uh earning capacity of that doctor is eaten up by the debt and the interest not a good not a good scenario for doctors.
So um that's pretty much it for uh all of the professions, right?
Uh, where you where you have to be um basically certified to get in and do the work from it.
Now you have to be certified to be a plumber, you have to be certified to be an electrician, etc.
But um you you earn that and and um get through it in a much shorter period of time, and it doesn't take a lot of debt.
So you know, there's um even if so this one kid had a couple of scholarships uh for um some kind for sports and um uh we even looking at that, even looking with the the um heavy cost of schooling uh defrayed by some level of scholarships, you're still screwed.
You still don't make as as much money as if you'd gone into a construction trade.
Uh if you go into some of these other kinds of trades, so um you know, we've got uh mechanics out here that are that are uh specialists in these heavy-duty equipment things they used in um logging Operations, right?
And even when logging operations are even when logs are not the hot commodity, even when logs are not selling as fast as they should because there isn't as much demand for wood product, they always keep the mechanics employed.
Because it's almost impossible to find them when you need them otherwise.
They're that much in demand.
So anyway, relative to college, unless you're gonna go in and stick it out and be a doctor, and even then you're gonna uh be under the uh base level here of a plumber uh for your first 25 years as a doctor.
So, but unless you go out as a doctor or some other highly specialized uh skill, uh especially those relative to uh medical, right?
So that's really the only ones that uh hold up and can outproduce uh the plumber or the electrician or the you know that kind of thing.
And you know, if you get into the building trades and you make a career out of it, uh, you know, a lot of people that are now full-on contractors started off as plumbers or started off as electricians, so it it you know, there is a career path out, and you end up being uh your own boss,
you have your own business, you get equity, and so if you figure in those people that end up owning their own business as a result of having gotten into the the uh some level of a trade, um, and we you know we're talking surveyors,
all these kinds of people, um, they will outproduce the professions economically now and into the foreseeable future, um, just the way it is.
So, really, there's not much in the way of an economic incentive to go to college.
Now, it used to be that women started going to college to find men to marry them, right?
To get husbands, and that was a common uh pathway was to use college for that was one of the the benefits of the the college program.
But now colleges are more and are increasingly predominantly uh female uh in terms of the customers, the students, as more and more males have opted out.
They've just decided you know they don't want to screw with any of this, right?
And they're going other approaches, and so uh it's it's there's something of an issue developing at a sociological level, as far as you know, meeting eligible men and all of this, and um so we were just at the bets,
and what brought this whole subject up here was one of the women was talking about her boyfriend, uh the the reception women there, the two people working as um receptionists and taking money and stuff, and the other one was saying that you know, boy, she wishes that she could meet a plumber.
So it's like okay, all right.
So I'll I'll talk about this here, and you know, and there is that sociological problem there of um since the men are not going to these collective areas where they could be uh dated, what you know what's a female to do.
I don't have any advice on that, you know.
I'm I'm not the person to be answering those type of questions.
Uh boy, broken down shit everywhere on the road, vehicles having breakdowns all over.
So, anyway, um so there is that aspect of it, right?
So you need to really look at your your potential for gain relative to the continual drain of the debt, because the debt's gonna get a lot worse, and a lot of these um college loan program things are on a uh uh slight or not slighting,
a variable interest rate, and so they're gonna respond to the interest rates, and the um the Fed is gonna have to um raise interest rates to support the dollar against uh the euro.
This is really what it's come down to is there's gonna be a war uh between the European central bank trying to save the euro, which it won't, it it can't happen because of the political underpinning of the euro is breaking apart, um, and the Federal Reserve and so uh it's gonna be the one who will who will support their currency the longest by uh raising their rates the highest that will survive sort of
You know, because as you raise the rates, you cause all the problems for the banks, you cause all the problems for the debt-dependent industries like real estate and this kind of thing.
And we're already in a giant commercial real estate fiasco.
Never been this bad before.
But the major banks that did commercial real estate lending are now underwater.
They will not ever be able to, in this current market conditions, so that's basically for the foreseeable future, they will not be able to have enough in the way of loss reserves to cover the losses they're taking on commercial real estate as all these commercial real estate properties are going bankrupt, basically, going underwater.
They don't have enough activity to support the debt level on them.
And so a lot of the people that are nominally the debt holders, you know, supposedly the owners of some of these big commercial properties, they're just walking away.
Or just, you know, going and handing the keys to the building over to the bank and saying, you know, hope you guys can do better with it than I did.
That kind of thing, right?
Because they can't afford to make the payments on it anymore.
And, you know, and as far as commercial real estate, COVID really trashed that with everybody staying home and all the offices empty.
So there was a, there's, I know a lot of people that are in larger aspects of the commercial real estate markets all the way around.
I mean, like all around the planet in Europe, UK, Japan, even people that deal in commercial real estate and so on as principals.
You know, they take on the debt and buy the buildings and stuff and they're not doing well.
In fact, none of them that I know of are even holding their position relative to these past few years.
So they've been losing money for years and they can't continue.
They're going to have to make some kind of a decision and do some stuff.
One guy I know is he and his partners and maybe there's like six or eight or nine or something.
He's in like this little group.
Oddly enough, a couple of the guys in the group are doctors that made some money only really as a result of owning their own clinics.
But anyway, so these doctors and this guy I know, they're wrestling with the issue of what do they do with one of their properties?
I think it's like in Boston or somewhere.
It's a big commercial office complex that had retail in it.
And they were doing okay while the retail held up.
And now they've shut down a lot of the retail.
So they're basically, these guys are sitting on, I don't know, thousands, thousands of square feet.
You know, 20, 30,000 square feet or more in this little four or five story.
I think it's five story building that's got some apartments and then some retail attached.
And they're just losing it because they've got no renters in these buildings.
And so they're trying to get the bank to accommodate them to not make payments on the debt because they don't have the income.
And it's kind of like, you know, I think maybe they've got three or four stores still hanging on and maybe one renter in the whole building.
And so as I was told here, every single month, their light on their income is about 90% less than what they need to cover the debt for that month.
So every month they've got a 90% they've got a cover of that, that mortgage on their own.
And the doctors are pitching, all the partners are pitching, you know, nobody signed up for this.
Commercial real estate was supposed to be a good deal.
blah blah blah blah blah and they're all going broke and they're not alone okay so um I actually know a guy he uh found a he was looking he's like me he had to have a he had to move they moved out of Maine uh and he bought a an old restaurant in um and we're talking old I mean it had been uh empty for over a decade um before he bought it and it was like a three story restaurant,
it's over on the coast in um North Carolina, and uh he's converting it to a house.
The upper floor where you go on in the main floor of the restaurant, he's keeping uh, but he's basically demolishing the other two floors and uh repurposing this structure for a house, and he got it so cheap, it had been empty for over 10 years,
and um 10 10 years ago when it had been listed, uh it was listed for like a year plus, and then they stopped even trying to sell it because they got no offers or for whatever their motivation, they stopped trying to sell it and had just been sitting there.
He came across it and decided he'd go and see if they were interested, and they fell all over themselves to take uh basically a dollar uh on the hundred.
So they got like one percent of uh what they'd initially started to get, tried to get uh back in um 2014.
So, you know, quite the shock, but uh they can take some kind of a write-off, I'm sure, and you know, there's um that kind of stuff relative to uh the property, and he ends up with a nice place, even on that main floor, he's got 10,000 square feet, which is a little bit more than he needed for a house.
Um, but he didn't need the other two floors, which are actually underneath the main floor, and he's having them demolished and taken down.
It's a weird little place.
Each of the floors were sort of hung off of um these cement pylons.
Anyway, um, so commercial real estate not good, right?
Some commercial real estate, uh uh so has done fairly decently uh for people in being repurposed.
Um for a while I was sort of looking to buy some commercial real estate for myself to um for a project, and uh you know, I think we've passed on that.
I won't be buying the um property I went and looked at the other day.
Uh it's it's really weird.
I found also found a house up here, and it's like oh the house would solve a lot of our problems, it's not where we want it, but it meets most of the criteria.
But the thing's got more than one HOA on it.
You know, I don't know why you would need more than one, but anyway, it does.
And so that's it's not a good deal.
Another house I'd looked at uh that was closer to us, uh, is part of an HOA, and I hate HOAs just because I don't fit into them anyway, but uh for the reason of the lawsuits, and this house that I looked at at this uh development south of us,
brand new construction, really bizarre design, but nonetheless, um could have been made to work, and then I get into it, and it's it's a member of an HOA that's got a lawsuit against it.
And get this there's like three or four people within the HOA who are suing the HOA, so they're paying an attorney to sue the HOA, and then as members of the HOA, they've got a pony up money to support the lawyers that are defending the HOA against their lawsuit.
So they're paying lawyers on both sides of the uh of the contention here because of the hoa.
Uh you know, you just can't make this shit up, right?
So anyway, um that's it.
That's it about the going to school.
You're you're better off doing any other kind of schooling than um uh college.
I know a couple of guys that are real smart, they're fairly young.
Uh they used to work at a um uh distribution center in uh or for UPS.
Okay, there's just these big places that go 24 hours a day just sorting shit for UPS, mainly Amazon packages, that kind of thing.
Anyway, These two kids um uh can't uh you know they're not making enough money to have housing, right?
So they're living in a homeless encampment while they're working full time, uh, you know, just a really a hell of a situation.
But they they came up with a very interesting and and very unique, or not unique, but very very creative solution to both problems.
And so what they've done is they've signed up to be uh to go to uh merchant marine school, and uh they they basically have um I think six months that when they signed up, they got six months uh free schooling in the school,
and they get a job at the school during their schooling, and then uh once they graduate and get um go through the testing, um, they'll they can go to work, and most of the work they would be doing uh is on vessels where they would be getting room and board as well as their salary, so you know, good deal for them.
Uh free school, and then they get um you know, basically guaranteed work.
Uh, there's so many positions open for qualified merchant marine now, even with shipping down that uh there's no problem, and it's because of the uh this these current generations, you know, people were sort of wimps and didn't want to do this kind of hard dangerous work.
Um I know another guy who's down in the Gulf and he's working on a oil rig, and I think he's like it was like something weird, it was like two weeks on, two weeks off, like two weeks.
No, it was something uh something like that.
This is some time back that he told me this, but nonetheless, he's on the oil rig, he's got uh room and board there, they shove the food in you, you need the calories, they're working your ass off.
You work for a couple of weeks, maybe it was three weeks on and two weeks off, something like that, and uh so uh, and they're making seriously good money.
Uh so this uh guy is like maybe he's 26.
Trying to trying to think how how old he is.
Um, so like maybe he's 26 now and um making over a hundred thousand a year, uh as a wild uh or is um what do they call him?
Uh chain master something.
Uh they do um uh deal with all of the stuff uh in terms of you know getting the the piping down in through the um uh for drilling, etc.
And you know, fix it when it breaks, that kind of thing.
But he's at also he's been doing it now for over a year, um, but he's uh he's decided what he wants to do, what he's fascinated with, and what would pay him more for less physical labor is uh being a technician for all the tools, um, you know, keeping everything uh basically being your um the mechanic for for um an oil rig, uh fixing machineries and that kind of thing.
So, you know, uh technical skill, make more money than he's making now.
Uh not just a roused about kind of guy, but um, you know, a skilled mechanic for him.
So, you know, he's got a good career path, and and we're gonna need oil, and when Trump gets back, we're gonna drill drill drill.
So we'll need a lot of people to do that drilling.
And so it was a it was a good choice for him.
And you know, he's he's um making serious money, he's gonna buy a house over here in Louisiana this summer, and um I think he's gonna take a month or two months off.
Um he's got a girl that he's thinking about marrying, all of this kind of stuff.
So, you know, life is good for him, right?
Uh, but he doesn't have any college debt either, and so he's very atypical to all of the other people, uh all of his cohort of uh people he went to high school with, uh, all of whom most of whom I think went to college.
I mean, his um the males, right?
And um uh all of those guys that went to college have debt.
So um, you know, he he's he says he's the only one that he knows that has no student loans.
So pretty good there.
And hang on a second, I've gotta do a bit of tricky driving road hazards here.
They're working on this um state route.
And I gotta get over before this big large truck smooshes me.
There we go.
Anyway, so some other things that have come up.
Somebody had asked via email about the Elohim and sleep, right?
Which is a it's a curious thing.
You know, they were thinking, oh well, when they're asleep, we can you know sneak up on them, that kind of thing, right?
And what's really interesting is that there are reports um in Sanskrit that we get most of our uh what we can say is uh hard data or factual stuff about the Elohim is gonna be found,
most of that's gonna be found being in um Abistan, which is this precursor to Sanskrit, um, or is gonna be in this ancient Iranian language, ancient Persian language, uh that predates even Abbastan, or it's gonna be an ancient Chinese, because you get a you find a lot of these uh descriptions of what's going on in these other languages, as I say, not so much in the Hebrew.
Anyway, though, the in one of the um Abistan descriptions, uh, we've got a uh description of the these Elohim that were um they were doing shit, right?
They were they were at war with somebody, they were out doing stuff.
Um there's this group of them, they go to a um a bar, uh, you know, uh a roadhouse, a Hindu kind of a roadhouse, uh, on the border up in the north, up near the um the area of China where India smacks into all of the Afghanistan and all of that,
and they um they go out and do battle or whatever, and then they go to this bar, and we have a description of these guys going to the bar and drinking uh lots and lots of flagons, you know, uh beer just by the fucking barrel.
And there were a bunch of these guys, they drank all this beer, they'd been drinking uh uh the beer in zinc-lined uh beer mugs, flagons, and that were lined with zinc.
This was this was not that uncommon because zinc in a in one form is malleable.
You can smoosh it around and and hammer it, and it it does really well.
Um it also handles uh interacting with alcohol pretty well, and although I'm told it makes things quote sweet, alcohol is sweet if you put it into these.
In any event, though, so uh they end up getting poisoned and they die.
Then there's just all hell breaks loose because the Elohim find out about all these poisoned other Elohim, uh, all these uh uh warriors that were out doing this shit, and so the main base finds out that all these guys have been poisoned, and it rains absolute hell down on this particular part of the uh the area up there and converts it all into a desert.
And so this was the origin story for this one particular desert area.
Um, as I say, up in the north up near the northern part of India, but sort of off over towards Iran and uh sort of over towards um you know Pakistan and and into Nepal, this this particular little valley up there, and uh they just come on in and obliterate everything because these Elohim were were poisoned.
I don't think it was a deliberate poisoning, but but who knew that they were susceptible to poisoning from uh uh something relatively common.
Now, um it was usual to use lead, okay, to line uh glasses and stuff with lead because lead is very, very, very soft.
You can you can form it easy, easy to find, not a lot low temperature to refine it, and so on.
So it may have been that that what was called zinc was just this particular kind of lead uh that has a enough zinc in it that it turns it into a very slightly bluish color.
Um so we're not you know, we're not certain.
We don't know the composition of this.
We're not really sure what it was that that uh killed these guys, but we have descriptions of them, these guys dying of it.
And what what's really interesting in that description, uh, to me anyway, relative to this conversation, or relative to the uh the question, is that within that that um description, we have it, it being said, that uh at first the um the like management of the bar, the people running the bar, thought that these guys had just simply drunk enough to pass out, right?
And what's interesting in there is the descriptions include uh a couple of statements about um people had seen the Elohim drink so much that they were basically insensate and would sort of pass out, not like a human, where when you drink too much, you just pass out and that's it, right?
You're just boom, you're out, you're flat.
Uh you're totally soft, and you know, you're you're like um your frame is dead, there's no muscle tension, uh, you know, you are that drunk and out you go.
No one had ever seen the Elohim get that drunk.
They can drink and drink and drink and drink, and they get really inebriated, but we've never seen uh it's not recorded that they you know that that these Elohim came in and they drank all of our and they of course drink for free, right?
So they drink all your liquor and stuff because if you give them any shit, they'll just kill you and tell the next human over there go get me this uh this liquor, right?
Unless you want the same fate as this fucker.
Um so anyway, the it wasn't recorded that the Elohim uh drank so much they passed out, but in this particular instance, it was notable because they said, unlike other Elohim, these fuckers drank so much that they passed out around the table and were dropping around on the floor on the way out the door.
And no one had ever seen this before.
Just as no one's ever seen them sleep.
Okay, so we don't see them getting sleepy.
Uh, there's no reports of them having a sleep cycle.
There are um the exact opposite of that.
So the those reports that we have from humans that had some level of interaction with the Elohim when they were in the guns, when they had their uh force field bubbles up, um, these people would say that you know, within the bubble, it was like perpetual daylight.
And there was uh, you know, it has a um incredible air, uh, great smells, uh, you feel super energetic.
Um you feel like a newborn um deer, you know, you're just out there just testing everything, your your body feels new and and excited and so on, very energized.
So it's it may be that these guys don't sleep as we know it.
They may have some kind of a rest period, but um, insofar as we're able to determine that there isn't sleep there.
We also have the uh descriptions of some of the guys that um through hymns and shit.
So it gets really weird, right?
Because people over time think this shit is religious, and so they they convert it to a hymn.
Uh, but also maybe at the time that was really how things were written down because you'd come from a more oral tradition and you only wrote shit down under certain circumstances.
Nonetheless, though, we have descriptions of uh people that were in the Vimana that were um soldiers and stuff uh that were being transported, and they would go on long uh flights uh and there would be Elohim on board, and the Elohim were awake constantly.
It didn't matter how long.
I mean, you know, they they would if it's a 36-hour flight or whatever, the Elohim were awake the whole fucking time.
Uh and it's you know, they um the humans would record, well, that you know, we uh we were told to go over here, we got into this area, there were, you know, uh fundamentally like four companies of us, you know, four groups of um uh 40 men, and uh, you know, we were doing our shifts and stuff, and and You'd go and sleep and you'd wake up and there was so-and-so, you know, still awake, still standing there.
And these guys, uh, the Elohim were reported uh to be able to like, and so maybe this is a rest cycle, I don't know, but they would go into a particular stance, um, and it's like they sort of weren't there, right?
Like they were off meditating and uh putting their mind somewhere else, and their body is just standing there, arms crossed, uh uh, you know, legs sort of splayed out, um, slight um uh pressure taken off the body by uh letting the knees bend, and uh they just stand there hour after hour after hour kind of a deal.
And so maybe they're asleep that way, we don't know.
There's no sign of sleep, we don't see sleep being um described or ascribed to them.
And as I say, maybe they don't sleep, we just don't know.
We do know that there's reports that uh they have copper blood, right?
Uh that they have uh blue-green blood, and if you get them um agitated, angry, and inflamed, uh they can have uh blue and shading over towards green skin.
Uh so you know, uh quite the uh quite the colorful guys, and it sort of comes up on them as they as they get angry or whatever, you know.
So you're you like, you know, you get their um uh get their copper blood flowing, get their copper up, and uh they their skin changes color.
And you can see that you know, if they're um agitated or whatever, they would have uh splotchy skin.
You'd see the the anger and stuff coming out in them.
So they're really weird beings relative to what we might think of as our normality of being human.
Gotta fumble for a second, and we're gonna go through a there we go.
No.
There we go.
Anyway, uh, so that's about the sleep.
We don't know.
Uh maybe they do, maybe they don't.
Um, but it was apparently very unusual to see them, you know, falling over and passing out uh from drinking too much.
And so now we know it it probably was not overconsumption of alcohol so much as it was the introduction of either zinc or lead or something else within this uh with the alcohol.
Hang on, I gotta take some pills here.
Good girl, sweetie.
We'll be home soon.
We'll be home soon.
The Elohim were by the way, they we have descriptions of them, you know, uh hugely, hugely um exaggerated kind of activity relative to humans.
So um when the Elohim feasted, you know, they might eat a whole cow themselves.
This kind of a deal.
They were really um uh sensation addicts, you know, they that really got into physical sensation and all of this, and they're um hugely into drugs and uh alcohol of all kinds.
Export Selection