Shaun Newman Podcast - #452 - SNP Presents: Luongo & Krainer

Episode Date: June 21, 2023

This is the live recording from June 10 at the Gold Horse Casino. Tom & Alex discuss Ukraine, Russia and the conflict that is moving us closer to WWIII. Tom is a former research chemist, amateur dairy goat farmer, libertarian & economist whos work can be found on sites like zero hedge & Newsmax media Alex is a Croatian national, former hedge fund manager, author, contributing editor at Zero Hedge Let me know what you think Text me 587-217-8500 Substack:https://open.substack.com/pub/shaunnewmanpodcast

This is Nicole Murphy. This is Rachel Emanuel. Hi, this is John Cohen. Hey, everyone, this is Glenn Jung from Bright Light News. This is Drew Weatherhead. This is Terrick. This is Ed Dowd, and you're listening to the Sean Newman podcast. Welcome to the podcast, folks.

Happy Wednesday. Hope everybody's week is moving along. I promised you, SMP presents Longgoing Criner, and because of a couple things over the weekend, instead of it coming out Monday, it comes out Wednesday. So we're going to get to that here shortly. A couple of guys that were in attendance that night. when this aired was Blaine and Joy Stefan,

that's Guardian Plumbing and Heating. They're the home of the Guardian Power Station, bringing free electricity to everyone as well as a reliable off-grid solutions. And they're Alberta, Saskatchewan, and beyond. If you want more information, all you got to do is go to Guardianplumbing.ca where you can schedule your next appointment at any time. Last week, I spent the morning with Joey,

and we went around and checked out some different spots that Guardian has different, you know, applications at. We stopped in at Pleasant View Bible Camp and saw what they're doing there to heat their pool, which was pretty cool. And maybe if you got kids or no people going there, you'll probably see their little unit just sitting there working away and rather interesting. And then we got to sit with a farmer south of Lashburn, essentially, close to in between Lashburn and Nielberg, who is going completely off grid due to, you know, a bunch of things going on with the power system in Saskatchewan. He was talking a lot about how many times they get kicked off power, whether it's by storms or what have you, and just talked very highly about how Guardian had set them up on the farm and been able to use a couple different applications, you know, not only for the house, but then obviously there was some applications

being able to use it for grain drying and a business right off, as you can imagine, with farmers and trying to think creatively outside the box. and the group over at Guardian has done that for them and spoke very, very highly of that. So if you're wanting to find out more, go to Guardian Plumbing.com, where, of course, you can schedule your next appointment

at any time. The deer and steer butchery, butcher shop here in the Lloydminster area. I recently just started, you know, I'm back on to a bit of the carnivore diet again. You know, so many things, me and Brian were talking about this, so many things, you remember, you remember, John Wayne is the one that comes up

has died with a colon full of meat and it was poison and meat rots and all this different things and then you go on it and all of a sudden you start feeling better you know go back to the Sean Baker episode and anyways so we got to talk about this and of course there's a you know you look at it you walk around you see the prices of meat nowadays

you see the prices everywhere going skyrocketing up so if you're looking to get an animal butchered The deer and steer can certainly help out with that, and they can also show you some of the creative stuff in carving up your animal, and you can just go lend a hand, and they'll put you in the shop and let you experience that. I think these days it becomes a worthwhile skill to see and kind of talk about and understand. As prices continue to skyrocketed, you know, as we get not closer, I mean, we still got summer to go through here, but, you know, hunting season and everything like that, just something to keep in the back of your mind. you can give them a call 7080 870-8700.

But yeah, well, it's just becoming more and more, you know, the push to push everybody off of different things. And there's a, I don't know, I don't know what I'm rambling on it right now, you know. Just the importance of meat and the importance of establishing community and everything else. I think the deer and steers got some really cool things going on there. And for one, getting in there and being able to do it firsthand, and maybe you do that all the time. Maybe you've never done it.

I think just walking through and seeing that is really cool. Erickson Agro Incorporated, that's at Irma, Alberta. That's Kent and Tasha Erickson, Family Farm, Raising Fort Kids, grow on their food for their community, and of course this great country, they've signed on to the podcast. And I always point out, if you've got a small little business and you want to team up with the SMP, even for a short stint, you know, as we're halfway through the year,

the every episode that goes by, you know, the price is, honestly, if you just want to hop on and do what Kent and Erickson, Kent and Tasha have done, it becomes actually, I think, rather affordable. And saying that, it would be cool to have different families or different small companies team up with me and look forward to hearing if any of you are interested in that. You hop on the text line, shoot me a text, and certainly we can talk about some different options. Jim Spanrath and the team over three trees tap and kitchen. You know, it's funny.

People must be touring out for some live music. because I've heard a couple of how good it was the last time they had it. And if you don't know what I'm talking about, Three Trees has a live music every so often. It looks like about once a month, I would say Jim tries to target. And essentially, if you go and follow their social media, you can see who the upcoming bands are, the upcoming dates, when they're released, et cetera, and just call them book and get a reservation. Then you can go have a great meal and they're line up on the tap. is rather solid, local, some good beers in there.

And then to top it off, you get a little bit of live music, which doesn't happen a whole lot these days. So, hey, that's just an idea for you. Now, let's get on in the tail of the tape brought to you by Hancock Petroleum for the past 80 years. They've been an industry leader in bulk fuels, lubricants, methadone, chemicals delivering to your farm commercial or oil field locations. For more information, visit them at hancockpetroleum.ca.

This is the live recording I did back on June 10th at the Smbia. P presents Luongo and Craneer. That's Tom Luongo, Alex Craneer. The first is a former research chemist, amateur dairy goat farmer, libertarian, and economist whose work can be found on sites like Zero Hedge and Newsmax Media. The second of Croatian National Former Hedge fund manager, author, contributing editor at Zero Hedge.

I'm talking, of course, about Tom, Luongo and Alex Kramer. So buckle up. Here we go. This is Alex Kramer. This is Tom Longo, and you're listening to the Sean Newman podcast. Good evening. Good evening. and thank you all for coming.

Absolutely. Absolutely. It's ridiculous. Thank you so much. Oh, especially the young ones. Yeah, it is cool, isn't it? That's very cool. Oh, yeah, absolutely.

Yes. Like, my daughter wouldn't be caught at here. She's 17. She's proud of her dad, but she doesn't want to be. No, not unless there was free food. Maybe she would be caught. Maybe she would have. The desserts were pretty good.

The desserts were pretty good. They weren't bad. They were good. I live with Camille. He was regurgitate or regaling us. I live with my wife. And my wife is just her desserts. He's regaling us with duck eggs are the best thing for winning baking contests.

Without doubt. Anyways. What happened last September is a brother of mine put me on to this guy named Tom Longel. And I was like, all right, well, what's he talk about? And certainly if you pay attention to the world, Russia, Ukraine is this giant subject where you only get to think one thing and that is it and you know you carry on and so Dustin had put me on this guy named Tom Longgo so I reached out and weirdly enough he got back to me and so then we sat and talked and at the end of it goes you know if you really want to learn more about

this you should have Alex on and I'm like well if you think I should have Alex on let's have Alex on and so in October Alex came on and then since then everybody who listened to those to are like you got to get these two guys on so roughly once a month we sit and and have a you know like what's bugging Tom and Alex moment and they talk for two hours and I sit and let's and everybody chuckles and laughs and everything else. And so the idea was to bring you guys here. I don't know. Have you guys ever met before?

We had not. So this was the first time Alex and I had been able to hang out together in person without doubt. Sean, bringing people together. So there's people in the stands here that have never heard you two talk to one another. So I thought, I thought for the first portion, we do a little bit of, I consider it a bit of a history lesson, focusing on Russia, Ukraine, specifically. I thought to focus on starting in 2014 and then Tom goes, oh, no, no, we got to start in 2013.

You got to go to 2013. So with that, I want to hand over the mic, you know, to you two to start with 2013 Syria to kind of lay the framework of Russia, Ukraine. And then in the second half, we'll get to your questions, your poll questions, wherever you want these two to talk about. because they can talk about an awful lot. But for me, it's always come back to the Russia-Ukraine headline. Should I go? All right. So, Russia, Ukraine.

So what I propose to do is to give you, like, first, the broadest possible context and then to narrow it back into 2013. And just before you go, can everybody hear Alex, does he need it closer, louder? So they can turn it up in the back, Alex. You keep talking and keep it close to your face. That's the one. Okay. Okay, so, oh, yeah, that's better.

I can hear myself too now. So what I was proposing is the first, I try to give you the broadest possible perspective on this conflict, and then to go narrow into the events of 2013 and 2014. So basically, the broadest possible context to this is that today we have a conflict between two systems of governance in the world. And this is something that's been dragging along through history for centuries now. And then the last person can kind of brought it up. It was George Soros in May 2021 at the Davos meeting, where he basically said exactly that.

What we have is a conflict between two systems of governance. And basically what you have is the imperial colonial system, which has been promulgated by the government. British Empire and then transferred onto the you know American Empire but basically it's a it's it's basically a network of vested interest that use nations as hosts to pursue their own interests and the other system is pretty much the rest of the humanity and the for the overall overarching geopolitical imperative for the British Empire has been for centuries,

dominance over the Eurasian landmass. And this is the first time this was explicitly formulated, as far as we know, was by Halford Mackinder in 1904. And then again in 1919, he wrote this specifically. And basically he said that who rules Eastern Europe? rules the heartland, who rules the heartland, rules the world island, and who rules the world island, and who rules the world. And so Eastern Europe is Eastern Europe. Heartland is basically the, the, in 1904, he called it the geographical pivot of the world, which is pretty much the area

occupied by Russia, Iran, Kazakhstan, and Afghanistan. And then you have the, the inner crescent, which is Europe and the Arabian Peninsula, India, China, Japan, and then everything else is the outer crescent. And basically it has been an obsession of the Imperial Guard first in London now today, in London and Washington, D.C., to keep hegemony over this area. and it's not for bringing freedom and prosperity or democracy to the people of this area is because it has 75% of the world population, it has 75% of the global resource wealth, two-thirds of the, no, more than, by now it's more than this,

it's probably more than 70% of the global GDP, and so it's the wealth, it's the bulk of the global wealth that they want to control. Now, it's a huge area. And it's impossible to police this with military and police. You cannot rule it by enforcing your rule. So what the British Empire invented is the rule by divide and conquer. So basically they just created an architecture of dividing this into smaller, weaker political entities and pitting them one against the other, financing both sides in all the wars,

helping them financially, selling them weapons. And then, you know, conditioning all this by like, hey, you know, it's going to be our banks who are going to fund your development. It's going to be our corporations who are going to be extracting wealth from under you. And that's how everything went. And so everything was arranged in a like a patchwork of hostile states surrounding other hostile states. So, you know, like when they left India, they divided in. to India, Bangladesh, and then you have Kashmir there, and then you have Syria, Turkey, Turkey, Greece, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Israel, everybody around. And China, Hong Kong, China, Taiwan,

the whole continent was set up for this. And it worked for two, three hundred years. Except, the important bit was not to allow ever a credible rival to arise who could challenge the imperial guard for the hegemony over the Eurasian landmass, right? And especially not for a collusion or of two or more powers who could kick the imperialists out. And so this is what happened. Over the last 22 years, under Vladimir Putin, Russia went from being a corrupt, broken, rust bucket of Asia into a credible global power, and so did India. And so Russia and, no, sorry, not India, China. So India to some extent.

And certainly Iran as well. Yeah. And so now they are a little bit in a panic because they are really getting kicked out from the Eurasian. continent and the thing that was not ever meant to happen did happen that is the collusion of two strong powers that can challenge the empire so 20 years ago that is 30 years ago when the Soviet Union collapsed they started immediately setting up setting up like a insecurity architecture around Russia and around China to be able to keep them weak, keep them divided, to be able to regime change them at will.

And so Ukraine was extremely important here. So Ukraine was the big price, which is what they explicitly said. And so now we go to the events of 2013. And they were preceded, okay, so, you know, like there was a color revolution in Ukraine in 2004. They set in power Viktor Yushchenko, who was a central, he was a banker. He was a central banker in Ukraine. Then they put him in power. He turned out to be extremely unpopular. His government fell.

And then came Viktorovych, who was a representative, predominantly of the Russian-speaking, Russian-speaking part of the Ukrainians from the east, from the Dombas, where he had 90% support. And he became very overwhelmingly popular president with that part of Ukraine, not the western part, but the eastern part. And now we come to 2013, which is when this imperial guard, you know, the neocons, the Europeans, the British decided to bring Ukraine into their orbit.

And so it starts kind of the signal was given 26 September 2013. It was the founder of National Endowment for Democracy, Carl Gershman. He published an op-ed in Washington Post, urging the Obama administration to get Ukraine into NATO and to kind of force Ukraine into the trade. relationship with Europe. So there was this European Association agreement that was offered to Ukraine, which sounds like a nice thing, but it's actually, it was like a wholesale abdication on Ukraine's sovereignty. So the agreement had 1,000 pages addendum of European Union directives. So European Union directives is basically a decrease issued by the European

Commission, which is completely unelected body, appointed apparatchiks. And Ukraine would have to unquestionably follow these decrees. Not only that, they would have to commit to implementing all the future decrees out of the European Union, while having absolutely no say in formulating them. So basically, the seat of government from Kiev would have been effectively transferred to Brussels. Not only that, but the European Union was selling this as a like, yeah, it's going to cost you about $3 billion to make this transition because they wanted to break all the trade ties between Ukraine and Russia. Why is this, why was this very painful? Ukraine was between 1991, so the collapse of the Soviet Union until 2014, the, the, the

the world's worst performing economy, like dead last, right? It was only one of the five nations in the world that had negative economic growth over those 24 years. And so their economy was a shambles. Bulk of the population lived in poverty. So according to World Bank, in 2014, the poverty level in Ukraine was $127 a month salary. And the average salary in Ukraine was $131 a month, which is like $54.54 an hour. And so when they were going to join the European Union, this was being sold to them like, yeah, it's going to be, you know, short-term painful, but long-term good for you.

It's going to cost about $3 billion. And then the Ukraine's National Institute for Economics and Forecasting calculated that, no, actually, it's going to cost us $1,6. $60 billion. So Yanukovych was saying, like, right, okay, but you got to help us fund this transition. And the EU was saying, like, no, we're not, you know, we're not the IMF. And so they went to the IMF. And the IMF said, like, well, you know, okay, fine, we can give you a $4 billion loan,

but there's some strings attached. And so they gave him a series of extremely harsh conditions to fulfill to get this 4 billion IMF loan, including they would have to double the prices of electricity, increase the prices of gas by 40%. They would have to devalue the revenue by 25%. They would have to drastically cut pensions and all the social benefits and so forth. And people were already on the verge of destitution. Like in just a few years between 2010 and 2014, something like 11% of Ukrainian population emigrated. So it's like a massive demographic collapse. So President Yanukovych thought, like, we can't do this. This is impossible.

This is suicide. And so the prime minister decided this was in November, I think 20th November, 2013. They decided to suspend negotiations about this association agreement. And then a couple of days later at the Eastern Europe, European Partnership Summit in Vilnius in Latvia, Yanukovych said like, sorry, we can't sign it as is, we need to negotiate more. And at that moment, the Imperial Guard triggered the

the overthrow mechanism, the color revolution mechanism. And the very next day, 10,000 people descended on the streets of Kiev with ready-made placards and the slogans and everything saying, Ukraine is Europe and blah blah blah blah and then you had like Victoria Newland come in and John McCain and side with those protesters and this kind of had a crescendo for through through mid February and in February things got very very heated up and it was clear that something bad was going to go down and then the Europeans, the German Foreign Minister, Walter Steinmeier and Lauren Fabius of France,

together with Polish Foreign Minister Radislav Sikorsky. They organized the summit in Kiev with Victoria Anukovych, the president of Ukraine, with the members of the opposition. And they set up negotiations, how to resolve the situation. Well, on that very same day of those negotiation, you had those snipers shooting from the rooftops into the crowds of protesters. And they killed about 20 of them. And the initial accounts through the Western media and locally in Ukraine was that it was Victor Yanukovych's security forces that were shooting people in the crowd. In reality, it was the far right segment of the protesters. And they were shooting from about 20 locations and they killed about 80 people. Well, this put enormous

pressures on Yanukovych in those negotiations and he ended up giving everything away. So he signed everything that they demanded of him. And so that meant creating a new coalition government with this opposition. It meant promising to hold early new elections. And what happened that very same day as well is that Barack Obama called Vladimir Putin in Moscow. And they were discussing, calming the situation, taking constructive steps to get over the crisis in Ukraine. Same day, Joe Biden calls Victor Yanukovych

and tells him, stand down your security forces, withdraw them from Kiev. And Yanukovych thinking that he had an agreement in his hand with the opposition and with, brokered by the high representative of European powers, he thought like, well, okay, we're done here so I can withdraw the security forces, so he did. And then the opposition broke the agreement within 12 hours. They sent their armed groups of thugs into all the government buildings,

presidential palace, Victor Yanukovych's personal residence. And next thing, he had to flee for his life. They toppled him. European powers, the United States, the United Nations, immediately recognized the new regime as the legitimate regime in Kiev. And so that was like a very, very blatant coup that happened. And from then began a process of systematic notzification of Ukraine. The very first decree the new government issued was to ban Russian language from schools, universities, from all official use, from schools. and the practically hysterical Russophobia started to become basically the main cultural identification for official Ukraine now

and the conflict between people loyal to this new government, which was pretty much an amalgam of Nazis and fascistic forces, so forces loyal to the corporate banking sector, and forces who are who were like extremely nationalistic, chauvinistic, red-hot hatred of the Russians, of the Poles, of the Jews and so forth, aiming to create an ethnically pure nation. And from there, it went into like an escalating conflict that within the following two months broke into a civil

war. And then maybe I hand over the baton to Sir Tom. All that is Alex, thank you, because I have forgotten some of the stuff. There's so much that goes into that, the

background of that conflict. I've forgotten all about, I'm honestly, very gotten all about the Ukraine signing the accession agreement into the EU. And the one thing you did leave out, and in no way is to say a rebuke of anything you just said, this is brilliant, which is that New Yukovic, once he got that offer from the EU, went to Putin and got a better deal, right? Like a way, way better. Oh, yeah, an insanely better deal, right?

and that's what actually, I think, ultimately prompted the coup. Because at that point, you know, Yanukovic was like, look, we have a better deal with the Russians. And at that point, as always, once that happens, that's when it turns violent. So when the Donbass republics of Lugonsk and Dunez broke away, and I'll remember, this is the big thing to build on what Alex was talking about and how when the British Empire receded over the last 100 years, they always leave X and anti-X. So they have India and anti-India. They have Russia. The USSR falls. We have Russia. And then we have a whole series of anti-Russia. And Ukraine is one of them. Ukraine is a synthetic country that was created by Khrushchev and the borders were created in the 50s. And it was actually created that way in order

to keep it, you know, ethnically fighting against themselves in a very similar manager to what the British do to everybody else, right? So you have all the ethnic Russians in the eastern part of the country. These people are ethnic Russians from Kharkiv in the Northeast all the way around to Odessa, along with Crimea. So the goal here was always

to, and it's always been the policy of the British Empire, which is deny Russia a warm water port, i.e., you know, Sevastopol or Sevastopol, depending on whether you're, you know, if you're American, you say Sebastopol. So the Donbass revolt was clearly, this is now, we have Ukrainians in the West, we have the ethnic Russians in the East,

and, you know, you have a bunch of literal Nazis, right sector, who we backed directly. John McCain and Lindsay. Graham have, there's multiple photos, go look, John McCain, Lindsay Graham, Wright Sector, you'll see them sharing a stage with them, giving speeches while they give them money. These guys are literal Nazis. Okay. And this is, they were going to, you know, wipe out the people of the Donbass and Crimean.

And during that, that's the, the days of the Civil War, that's when I really began to follow this very closely. And I was like, in every day. watching this play out. And it was clear that the Russians were giving them tacit support, as you would expect. Because it would be no different than

it would be no different than people from Toronto going and going to wipe out Quebecers. Just imagine that, okay? Because that's what we're talking about. That Toronto would go to war with Quebec, with the explicit desire to wipe them out. That's what was going on.

And with the goal of ultimately bringing NATO to the Russian border and putting NATO nuclear weapons on the border with four-minute time of flight to Moscow. That's what we're dealing with. That's the level of insanity. And how that began to happen is that it was in April 2014 when the anti-terror operation was announced. And this happened after Joe Biden visited Kiev. And Sweden's foreign minister, Carl Bill, made no less than seven visits to Kiev.

And then in the aftermath of all those meetings, they say, like, all right, we're doing this anti-terror operation. And one of the first, the most spectacular actions of this anti-terror operation was the massacre in Odessa. Yes. Right. And the massacre in Odessa is a massively ugly affair where it was arranged 10 days in advance. They knew exactly what they were going to do. This wasn't an accident that, like, I don't know, between 40 and 200 people got killed, and 40 of them were burnt alive in the World Trade Union.

building in in in in Odessa they did this deliberately and as Tom said like they went to basically annihilate the the Russian-speaking populations of eastern Ukraine their objective was to provoke Russia into a conflict and the reason to provoke Russia into a conflict was precisely to drag it into a quagmire to destabilize and weaken Russia, to be able to regime change Vladimir Putin's government and get Vladimir Putin out of the Kremlin, and to then partition Russia into, again, like a patchwork of little entities opposed to one another, and to be able to rule the Eurasian continent as the hegemon once more.

So let's now move from April 2014 to the first day of that the capital markets open up on Q3 on July 2nd. I remember writing, I was writing for Newsmax at the time, and I had just gone along oil. Because oil had broken out of a massive long-term technical formation to the upside at $125 a barrel. It was going to $150. What year, Tom? This is 2014. 2014 so yeah this is this is literally the beginning of and literally to on it it that Monday morning the first Monday of July in 2014 oil takes a massive starts a massive slide and goes from a hundred and twenty five dollars a barrel to a low of $28 a barrel in four months the Russian rouble now the Russians are having to respond to this by you know intervening in the currency to keep it from collapsing and And the goal here was to regime change Putin, you destabilize.

The MO is always to destabilize the currency and then get the people to rise up with the incipient inflation. So the most recent attempt at this has been in Turkey over the last five years. But the Turkish leader has gone from 1.8 versus the U.S. dollar to 23 versus the U.S. dollar, whose the goal was to get rid of President Erdogan in Turkey. It failed. Okay. We'll get to that later on in the evening.

So the oil crisis of 2014 was the incipient regime change operation for Russia. By November, things have gotten so bad, and the oil kept sliding in price. Eventually, this is the many years of watching Putin. The most brilliant thing he did was in the last four days of November, in the first two days of December 2014, when he issued three different. decrees. The first thing he did was he let the rubble fall so that his companies could continue to pay their salaries and their operating costs in rubles, but they were going to be bringing in more rubles. The second thing was to he got a gift from the Chinese. This was the beginning of the Russian-Chinese

come together, where the Chinese offered the Russians cheap swathes. to get them dollars much needed through the Chinese backdoor. So they opened up yuan-ruble currency swaps. And the third thing he did was put forth before the Duma a massive economic liberalization package, which changed in an almost right-hand turn how Russia was utilizing its economic, It's economic, the tax base of the Russian Federation and shunting it off into different areas of the economy.

So no longer were they subsidizing oil. Now they were subsidizing food production and a variety of other things. And this is why the Russians are now that. And it's because of this, that they're the biggest grain exporters in the world. It's why oil and gas revenue is important to them. But it's not the only thing. John McCain was wrong when he called Russia a gas station with nuclear weapons. So Putin understood the game that was being played.

And the Civil War and the Donbass was not a particularly difficult thing for him to freeze by simply giving the Don Escal-Lugans militias the opportunity, you know, the support they needed to fend off the Ukrainian military. It was the Battle of the Bolshevaux where that ended, where the whole thing ended, and that's when the Minsk agreements come into play. Because the Ukrainian army got wiped out in a cauldron, a brilliant piece of classic Russian surround and isolate strategy where they captured on some insane number of Ukrainian troops at the Bolshevaux. And that was a few months into the war. And that prompted the West to have to go to the Minsk Agreements and try and freeze the conflict. And so when the Minsk agreements were, okay, go ahead and Sean. Well, you know, you're doing a great job of bringing us, just kind of giving the background of how we get to where we are right now.

And you keep referencing the Minsk agreements, and you're probably going to get to it. I am about to. Yeah, because I'm about to go, well, I can't remember what the Minsk agreements are. Sure. Could you enlighten us on how this impacts? Okay. So, again, this is the key. the Minske agreements were basically an agreement to end the civil war as a basically a ceasefire agreement

and that what would happen was that the Dineska and Lugans would be given effectively autonomy but still be exists within Ukraine okay and we of course have completely glossed over Crimea joining Russia in March of 2014 we forgot about that part sorry there's so much to go over and but the and that was signed by four people. Ready? France, Germany, Ukraine, and Donetschum, Lugansk.

Russia is not a signatory to the Minsk agreements. And yet you hear all the time about how Russia did not implement their side of the Minsk agreements. They couldn't. They weren't a signatory. So it was brokered by Angela Merkel and Emmanuel Macron of France, but

mostly Merkel. Franco Hollande. What's that? Francois Hollande. Oh, so that's right. Sorry, Francois, you're correct. Sorry, Alex. Macrone is, I got Macron on the brain. I hate that guy. And I hate Halan, too.

He sucks. So, sorry, we have kids in the audience. I was told I was going to be good. But the point of this was a classic ceasefire agreement that we always, whenever we start losing, we, oh, well, let's have a ceasefire. We did this in Syria when the Russians, after the Russians moved into Syria, half a dozen times. And there would be a ceasefire

that would then be broken within 24 hours. But the Minsk agreements at that point where the Ukrainians didn't have a military that could stand up, honestly, to the Donisk and Lugans militias. They could survive this indefinitely. So it's effectively a ceasefire agreement that both sides put stuff into

that they knew the other side would never implement so that it would be this frozen conference. Okay. So, you know, the Russians asked for, you know, and helping the Russians and Donbass asked for autonomy and free elections within there, to self-govern. And the Ukrainians wouldn't give it to them. And the Ukrainians asked for, you know, Crimea back and other things, you know. And so it was, designed as a thing for neither for both sides have plausible deniability about why they can't implement it. Meanwhile, both sides

start ramping up the military on both sides. So where do we go from there? What's Sean's outline over here? What's next? I can't read. I have my normal glasses on. I'm not my reading glasses. No, wait, wait. Where we go from here is that

particularly from the western side, so Angela Merkel, Francois, Francois, Francois, Petro Poroshenko, who became president in the first election after the coup, they all agreed that they signed mince agreements not with any intention of abiding by them, but to give themselves time to raise an army, get enough weapons, because their plan was all along to have a war with Russia. And we have statements from Zelensky's advisor Arrestovich.

What was his name? Alexei, Alexi, no? Yeah, I don't know. Arrestovic. Another Ukrainian. Who pretty much said that the price of them joining the NATO was having a war with Europe. And he made this statement like in 2019, and he accurately timed the conflict. He said it would break out in 2021, 2021, with a 99% certainty.

So this was being arranged. NATO had a relationship with Ukraine since 1991, and it was formalized in 1997, in something called Charter on Distinctive Partnership, which was signed in Madrid at a NATO summit in 1997. And so NATO was slowly building up the Ukrainian military, preparing them, training them, bringing him weapons in smaller amounts at first and then larger and larger amounts after the Minsk agreements.

to the point where it was clear that they didn't have peaceful intentions. And there's also a Bucharest memorandum from 2009, where NATO countries explicitly said that Georgia and Ukraine, so Ukraine is eastern border of Russia, Georgia is southern border of Russia, southwestern border of Russia. They said that Georgia and Ukraine will become members of NATO. Positive, determined statement. This is going to happen, even though the Russians told them,

Ukraine and NATO is red line, please don't do this, it's going to get ugly. They were like, no, no. Joe Biden explicitly said, I don't recognize anybody's red lines. We do what we want, okay? Well, that would be like if, you know, like, if Russia was doing the similar things in Canada or in Mexico against U.S. borders, it's simply not tolerable. And so, you know, by adding Ukraine to NATO, NATO would move to within 400 miles from Moscow. And Moscow doesn't, Russia, you know, like, unlike the North America, Russia has no natural. defenses. There are no mountain ranges, there's no big rivers, there's no ocean separating Russia

from Western Europe. So they're wide open to invasion, and they've been invaded by Western powers at least on three separate occasions. So they're right to feel nervous about this. And then after 2014, NATO has practically... quadrupled the amount of forces and arsenal near Russia's western borders. And this was the largest concentration of forces since 1941. In 1941, we had Operation Barbarossa, an absolutely massive invasion of Russia from, by, you know, led by the German Nazi machine, but actually Norway, Sweden, Finland, Poland, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, Spain.

There was a large coalition of nations that participated in Operation Barbarossa in 1941. And by bringing Ukraine into NATO, first of all, Ukraine becomes a trigger of, can become a trigger of Article 5, which says that like, oh, if one nation is attacked, then we all go to war, right? So that, if Ukraine entered NATO,

any conflict could turn into a World War III. And then another thing is that if Ukraine, which was actually being done behind the scenes, if the United States, if NATO managed to install this so-called anti-ballistic, missile treaty. No, not treated, the battery, anti-ballistic battery. Right. Right.

Patriots. Yeah, the Patriots into Ukraine, they would be within four or five minutes from striking Moscow. And so the intent that was being contemplated by the Western powers was to begin by launching a first strike nuclear attack against all Russian command posts. So the Kremlin and all the military command post, and then to launch an invasion. But by destroying the command post, it would very radically jeopardize Russia's ability

to defend themselves in case of an invasion. So this all for Russians was completely unacceptable. And for that reason, they said, this is a red line. You try to pull Ukraine into NATO. and we're going to have to take care of that. It's not acceptable. So, yeah, one of those is a small point about,

so you've heard probably about Russian S-300 and S-400 missile defense systems, right? You've heard about those, right? Yes. Okay, yeah, nod and say yes. So the important thing about the Russian air defense systems are that they are purely defensive. You cannot load them with offensive weaponry. The Patriots, on the other hand, are the,

are the exact opposite. The Patriot missile batteries can be turned around and be loaded with offensive weaponry. Nuclear within any, and it would take, it's literally a matter of a couple of hours of converting them from a defensive anti-ballistic missiles. So, you know, like the NATO was making an excuse, no, no, this is not offensive, this is just defense in case while they were, they were saying that it's against Iran. If Iranians launch missiles against Europe, this is for defense but they can be literally within a within a space of several hours be turned into an offensive battery which can be tipped with nuclear warheads even even worse than

that to call the patriot batteries anti-ballistic missiles is a kindness they can't shoot anything out of the sky no sorry we're talking about tomahawks not patriots tomahawks patriots are anti- Well, they can be turned offensive. No, no, Tomahawks. Tomahawks, not Patriots. Tomahawks. I know the Tomahawks can be turned. They're just our standard everyday cruise missile.

All right. We're going to have to do it. If I remember it's Tomahawk 100% because it's an Aegis. Oh, you're thinking about the Aegis system. No, no, Aegis is what they installed in Poland and Romania. And we're going to install in Ukraine. And Aegis launches Tomahawks and Tomahawks can carry new. nuclear nuclear. One of the reasons I wanted you guys to, you know, like it's been, it'll be interesting

in the second portion when we get there, what people want to hear and throw questions at you guys. But the reason I want to build it is if you, you know, you kind of listen to Russia, Ukraine, and you never, you never dig into any of it. You can go, oh, yeah, there's a war over there. And it's, yeah, it just seems like it's, it just happened out of nowhere. But one of the- Because the media makes sure not to give you any context, ever. Ever. No, that's the whole point. And so it's a little bit of a slow burn to start. because I want to make sure people understand,

and it can go back further. I mean, we can go back as far as you want. We can go back 150 years of the last Crimean War. One of the things is it just keeps, you know, like as you put the pieces together and keep moving it forward, you see how well thought out it is, and why Russia is doing what they're doing, at least. So, you know, now let's bring in the death of South Stream, the pipeline.

No, the death of South Stream led to Nord Stream, okay? So it has been U.S. policy, going back to the Kennedy administration, no new Russian pipelines into Europe, period. Nord Stream 1 got done and we were very angry about it. The Russians... Why would they care? Because they don't want the Europeans. Because pipelines stitch the world together. Think of...

It's like stitches in your clothing. Because you create these permanent... economic ties and energy is and moving energy from one place from another and having the and having a pipeline is a permanent thing it's a permanent well other than being bombed it's a permanent of artery you know it's a circulatory system energy is the light blood of a nation then your pipelines your circuit your circulatory system so north stream one is like an aorta right it's a it's a major artery to to produce to deliver cheap Russian gas to Europe and so cheap the Russians were practically selling it a below or that at a near cost so they wanted so

Putin understands this and it's like I don't want war with Europe how do I not have war with Europe well how about I give you a pipeline how about we build another pipeline so we're they're going to build one across the Black Sea. But wait. There's also the effect that this cheap energy allowed Europe to industrialize itself. And say industrialized. And if they, if the, if the, if the, if the, if the, if the energy is arriving through pipelines from Russia, which you don't control, uh, then you can't at will weaken and break

and de-industrialize Europe, which is, which with, whereas if you are the monopoly supplier of energy, then you can at will like, okay, well, we're not, giving it to you, you're going to end up in a recession and a depression and your industries are going to collapse, or we're going to invite your industry over to set up shop in our country. Right. And you have control over all this, whereas if there's a pipeline coming from Russia, you have no control over this, so you don't want those pipelines. So South Stream was supposed to open up new gas arteries into Southern Europe, one of which

was supposed to go all the way across Bulgaria and the Balkans. into Italy and another one was supposed to go up into Hungary and Austria. That got canceled as the EU kept putting directives on, kept signing new directives that made South Stream on economic. What they were hoping for with South Stream was that Putin and Russia were so far along in its construction. They were literally building the pipeline. And that, and then they changed, they kept changing the rules, kept changing in terms of the contract from, from direct, literal just directives coming out of out of Brussels, and you can look up the EU's third energy package. So that was going to be the thing where they had to unbundle the pipeline from the ownership,

like from the gas. You couldn't, they put this immensely idiotic rule that, okay, well, gas problem couldn't own both the pipeline and sell the gas. So somebody else had to sell the gas, because we wanted to democratize. Like, this is all nonsense. Okay. Putin just shocked the entire political establishment, and he just said, okay, it's canceled. had already laid a couple hundred miles worth of pipe.

South Stream was being built. And, you know, Bulgaria, through American pressure and through and through, you know, Brussels stupidity, thought that they had the Russians trap. What they were going to do with that was make South Stream un-economic, force the Russians to sell them gas at less than their cost. The Russians pulled gas out of the ground for almost nothing. And they still wanted to make an un-economic for them

so that they kept getting even a better sweetheart deal and make them and put them on an effect, just put them on a drip feed. So Putin just, you know, nuts to that. Repurpose South Stream, by the way, that pipe into Turks, but is now Turkstream. So it just went south out of the Black Sea into Turkey across Turkey. And by the way, the beginning the process of moving Turkey out of the, out of NATO and into the orbit of the World Island,

of the heartland and the world island. So, but Germany needed the gas. So Angela Merkel, probably one of the most treacherous people in modern political history, got Putin to sign off on Nord Stream 2. Now, Putin really didn't want to build Nord Stream 2 because he knew it would antagonize the Americans and forced them to go, and they would go ballistic. Like, no, you cannot build Nord Stream 2. And so, but the Germans wanted it.

And Merkel used Putin's sympathy and good heart. And Putin likes Germans. He was stationed in East Germany when he was a KGB officer early in his career. He speaks German. He and Merkel were friends, or at least he thought she was his friend. And so Nord Stream 2 got built because the German industrialists, in order for Merkel to stay in power, she needed to keep the German industrialists on side. They wanted South Stream, Putin canceled South Stream. They then get him to build Nord Stream 2.

Gerhard Schroeder, the former CEO, the former Chancellor of Germany, becomes CEO of the North Stream 2 joint venture with Gazprom. This is a big deal. But Merkel used Putin's love of Germans and his trust in her egregiously.

She did it, he did it to him over Minsk where, you know, and she did it over Nord Stream 2. And, you know, Merkel is that ex-Stazi. That's never talked about, by the way. Angela Merkel. Stasi.

Okay. Worst than the KGB. East German Stasze is German secret police right East German secret police the worst of the worst And so this duplicitous Vile woman who runs all of the German political I could spend an hour just going over German politics And how she destroyed German politics So Nord Stream 2 became the flashpoint

For how we were going to try and get Russia offside Once we move into the current situation, which is the minute that the Biden administration takes power in January 2021, and Ukraine was Joe Biden's bailiwick under the Obama administration. Normally, the vice president does nothing. Well, Joe Biden was in charge of Ukraine. He ran Ukraine for all intents and purposes. So all that stuff about, so when Trump got impeached for a phone call for, and was basically impeached

for things Joe Biden did by the Democrats? Yeah, that was, because Ukraine had become the true third rail of American politics, not Social Security. Like, I'm an American. Like, you don't talk about Social Security during presidential elections. It's the true third rail

of American politics. No, it isn't. It's Ukraine. It's been Ukraine for 15 years. So that's the background of when we get into the Biden administration. I don't think we really need to go much, And we're closing in on 8 o'clock.

So what I want to do is I want to give everybody a quick break and then we come back with their questions on to guide this last hour. So if there's any quick thoughts, we can have them, Tom, or Alex. So for me, like the Biden administration began the troop buildup of Ukrainian forces in early 2021. Russia responds by putting a quarter of a million troops on the border.

And on June 16th, 2021, Biden and Putin meet in Geneva and put off World War III for a few more months. On the same day, the Federal Reserve comes out and raises a small and technically supposedly uninteresting interest rate by five basis points or 0.05%. The same day, that happened. in my mind, and we're going to leave this hanging, this is where I get to go, come back after the break, right? And you'll be enlightened. Why did Powell, the FOMC chair, Jerome Powell, why did he do that and start draining the world of U.S. dollars?

At the same time that Biden and Putin are meeting in Geneva to stop World War III because the Russians were ready to invade them. Okay? This is a big one. This is the day that changed the world. June 16th, 2021. We good?

With that being said, we'll give you 10 minutes. It's 8.03, so we'll give you 12. We'll give you 815, okay? Bath three. Beverage, we'll be right back. And please use the link, folks, to ask questions, vote them up or down. It'll come to the computer up here. One of the journeys of the podcast has been,

all these different folks that come across it, you know? And I was actually just talking to a few different people because, I mean, like, you two are characters. And for those who, you know, you're like, you know, when I first listened to you two, it reminded me the first time I listened to Jordan Peterson. And Jordan Peterson was talking about things that my brain couldn't like, I had to like, you know, every time he said something, I had to go in like, okay, oh, that's what it means. Okay, and then I come back. And then you read a couple more pages or you listen.

And then he says something else. They're like, what the heck is he talking about? You go, and after you ingrain yourself in it for, you know, what is it? I don't care what the number is. It could be five hours. It could be 15. It could be, you know, everyone has their level where they get to where they start to understand it.

You just kind of start on your head and you're like, oh, yeah, I get what he's talking about. I just saw him with my wife for the first, or my wife saw him for the first time. And I was chuckling because she could tell her brain was like really working overtime to catch up to what he was talking about because he has a vocabulary he uses. And you two, the first time I sat and talked to him where they're talking together, They talked for two hours, and I literally said, I'll be back, you know, at the end. I'll come back with you two in a month, right? And I went back and re-listened to it and was like, I don't even know what I'm listening to, you know,

because, you know, you got all these words and terms and people, and then you're talking about Ukraine, which is on the other side of the world, and you're talking about Russia, and I don't know about you guys, but everything I've ever learned about Russia through pop culture at this point is they are the big, bad, evil person out there. And so, like, part of that's fighting in me, too. I'm like, ah, Ivan Drago, though, you know? Like, aren't they the guys that pump up their, their, their, their, their boxers and Stallone goes in and whoops them, you know, and the crowd goes wild,

and the Russians are cheering for the Americans? Anyways, I make light of it because, you know, as I'm listening to them again, I'm monitoring everybody in the crowd, because I'm like, I wonder how many people here are like, on my brain is just absolutely taxed. Well, yeah. Now you can imagine what it's like to do. try and put the pieces together in real time and you're watching this stuff happen like y'all think you're confused sometimes like Alex and I said we talk about this stuff like there's so much happening

that it's overwhelming I know it's overwhelming for me and I have the greatest patrons in the world I couldn't keep up with this stuff if I didn't have the group that I have it's a it's an amazing group of people and they sit and chat all day on amongst themselves they scour the internet for information, because they want to make sure that I haven't missed something so that I can, so I can, you know, put it through the difference engine and figure out what's going on, right? The synthesis engine over here. And I'm pointing to the right side of my brain, not the left side of my brain. So we left to the cliffhanger and about.

Before we get to the cliffhanger, can I do my favorite part of the show? Is that awesome? Sure. Go right ahead. Sure, dude. Well, I want everybody to stand up. This is my favorite part of the show. Every time I do this, I'm always amazed, and the people in Lloyd hate me for this because they're like, I'm going to sit down in like 10 seconds.

And I'm not going to make Alex and Tom, because they'll probably beat, well, Alex will beat you all. But I always find it really interesting how far people come to listen to a group of people talk. And it never amazes me in this room. The room we'll see tonight. Maybe I'm wrong on that. The game goes like this. If you've driven half an hour to get here or less, you can sit down. if it's an hour and I want to clarify if the plane right and I'm talking about

Edmonton flying in Edmonton if you're talking about not just driving here if you flew take it in driving time and let's just play that game not flying time okay so an hour if you came from an hour you can sit down two hours three hours four hours five hours always feel bad for the two ladies that drove from Calgary you know they're like one of these dates we're going to win. I've got to go to Hawaii, like your husband said, to actually get you to win. Anyways. Okay, how many of I got left? Let's go six hours. Seven hours? Eight hours. Okay. With eight hours as the low, now I'm curious, because I got about five left. Where did you come from? Winnipeg. In the back. Toronto. London, Ontario. And Glendon, B.C.? Langley. Langley. My ears aren't working.

Langley, BC. There you go. Round of applause for all those folks. This, you know, in Florida, and he flew up from East France, you know. Like, it's just, the reason I pointed out, guys, is when I first started this, one of my oldest brother, my oldest brother, joked while we were on the first ever brothers roundtable debating sports. The only way brothers know how to do. He said, yeah, 10 people listen to this, you know, and get laughed. And then, you know, you know, thousands of people later listen to the Brothers Roundtable and us, yeah, who's doing what we do? And when I put on these shows, I'm always floored, you know, like half the crowd was standing at two hours. They can't.

I'm like, whoa, right? And that doesn't knock Lloyd or anywhere else. You know, I got to do shows further away from Lloyd to get, because there's amazing people here too. I just, it floors me every time I do it to just show people how far they're coming to here, not only yourselves, but just to meet the community, to form that community, to hear these stories to kind of get around. you know, Alex said it ready to start. You know, mainstream doesn't tell you anything. It's like, well, and that's why you see these people come from all over the place. So really super cool.

Now, Cliffhang. Okay, well, no, actually, I'm going to out, I'm going to outdo you, Sean. Because in January, this is, in Christmas time, I was talking about how great my patrons are, right? In Christmas time, someone on my private, I have a private discussion server for my patrons. And I said, someone said, hey, Floridians, who wants to get together for dinner? Like, you know, Tom's in Florida, we're in Florida. How many of us are there?

I'm thinking to myself, yeah, I'll go. I mean, I'll do anybody's show once. And I'll, you know, and I'll drive. And if you're within two, two and a half hours of my undisclosed location in North Florida, I will happily drive to have dinner with you or coffee or whatever. I don't care. The whole point of this is to bring people together, right? And to, so I'm thinking, okay, maybe you.

10, maybe 12 people, they'll watch me in the back of a sunnies, eat too many ribs and act like a jackass list because that's what I do, right? Within two days, I mentioned it on our private podcast that I do, what I call the market reports. Send me a DM on Patreon if you're interested. Within two days, I had 60 people. Some of them came from Montana. Some of them came from Canada.

for an hour and a half dinner at Fogo de Chau on I Drive in Orlando and a pub crawl afterwards. But just to have dinner with me and my partner, Dexter White. And we stood there in the room, 70 people from all over. And we just look at each. And I know how much of an effect, you know, the work that I've done and Alex, you know, has done as well and I've tried to bring Alex along you know everywhere I can bring Alex to a new audience I do right I work you know I don't didn't you're not the only one I've

recommended Alex too is another bass and how many people said to me do you do you do me Alex's email address I'm like absolutely here you go and um but my partner dexter White never sees this I interface with the people all the time I talk to them I get their DMs, I hear their live stories, all of this stuff. And I'm like, and he didn't, had never seen it before. And it was like kind of just academic to him until it was in the room. And there's 70 people giving us a standing ovation. Before we had dinner.

And we're like, he just turned to me and said, we have a cult. And I went, yeah, pretty much. And it's, and what Sean's doing, guys, what Sean's doing with these, is brilliant. Even if you don't like what I have to say or what Alex has to say or whatever, what he's doing is brilliant, because how we're going to get through this very dark period

of history is by making connections and talking amongst ourselves and trying to find ways to keep everything, trying to keep the lines of communication and the lines of business open because that's what civilization is. Period.

All right. You want to talk about Ukraine first or the cliffhanger? We'll talk about Ukraine first. Just to make sure that everybody's clear here. And I know this clearly. There are no bad guys in this conflict. The Russians aren't the bad guys. The Ukrainians aren't the bad guys.

Well, there are bad guys, but it's all the people Alex talked about at the beginning of the show. It's the old British colonialists. It's the old Dutch colonialists. It's the old Italian colonialists and French colonials and German eugenicists and all those guys. Those are the bad guys. We are all their victims.

Okay. And I was saying to Tom, it's important because, you know, Alberta, as we all know, has a huge Ukrainian population. Right. And just important to bring that out just so that it doesn't, because I don't think it sounded like that, but just to make sure people understand, it isn't like Ukrainians or bad people.

No, like, you know, but here's the thing. Ukraine, Ukraine as a modern nation state, as a series of political borders, is a synthetic nation. It should have never been, those borders should have never been drawn. Those borders were created by Khrushchev in the 50s in order to set Russians and Ukrainians against each other within the Soviet Union. And then when the Soviet Union fell, they just, the Brits were like, oh, we already, we don't have to do anything with that. we don't have to set these people apart because we've already like created the perfect you know oppositional internal oppositional situation because this is in in some ways the way I hate to put it this way but in the mindset of the people who are fomenting this conflict

it's just a drunken bar fight between slabs which is disgusting and the other day I wrote an article about all this and I said you know trying to explain what happened with the dam, blowing up the dam. And I said, well, you know, to these people... Everybody here heard about the dam blowing up. They blew up in the Denepe River and flooded out, and flooded out thousands of Ukrainians downstream of the river. And then they blew up an ammonia pipeline outside of Kharkiv.

I said, well, what do you call 100,000 dead Slavs fighting over Swampland? A good start. You know, we all know the joke is, what's a, you know, 500, had lawyers, 500 lawyers at the bottom of the ocean, a good start, right? No, this is what we're dealing with. This is the level of inhumanity we're dealing with these people. And I, I, I, that's what we're fighting against. That's what we're trying to parse the information about, you know, what information they're giving us. And none of it's real. Like, the, the best way to go forward from here, if I can give you, if I can impart one piece of wisdom, one piece of,

distrust but verify. Meaning, assume that they're lying to you about everything and then force them to prove to you that they are not full of about everything. If you go with that heuristic, you will be right 75% of the time. You will be the upper 5% of all geopolitical analysts in the world. It's that easy.

They're just liars and thieves. and megalomaniacs and murderers. Okay, on with the show. On with the show. I wanted to add something. I think it's very important also not to regard any nation as a monoliths because there's always conflict between groups, power groups, and different vested interests.

And with regard to Ukraine, you know, I mentioned that since the coup, a process of nastification began in Ukraine. But it started from an extremely small segment of the population. So the first presidential elections in Ukraine, which were held in, I think, May or June 2014, the two Nazi parties, so the Pravis sector and Swoboda, so Oleg Tianibok and Dmitro Firtas, between the two of them, Tiani Bog got 1.16%.

of the vote and mitra firthash got 0.7% of the vote so that's how much support the nazi segment had in the ukraine society that's how Ukrainian people the ordinary people of ukraine how well they were interested in the nazification process and even by after after years of propaganda and and anti-russian hysteria even in 2019 when when Vladimir Zelensky ran for office, he was swept by 70% vote into power because he promised peace and reconciliation with Russia. So that's what the ordinary Ukrainian people were interested in.

The war that was concocted was concocted by a very small segment in power who were all manipulated, directly by Western interests. So I just thought that that's extremely important to make clear because this is not like bad Russians versus victim Ukrainians or bad Ukrainians attacking the victim Russians. This is not Russia-Ukraine conflict.

This really is back to the broadest context of this conflict, conflict between two systems of governance. and this one that's promulgated by the Nazi forces is manipulated by Western financial cartel and corporate interests through a very small segment of Ukrainian elite in power. Yep, absolutely. Now, I've got a list of questions, and they're bubbling in there. But you left us, and so I'm going to give you, I don't know, five minutes, three minutes, whatever you need.

Three or five minutes. It won't take three long. So June 16th, 2021, this is the day that actually changed my life. Because up until that point, I was, you know, I was as black pill as your average gold bug. Ah, the Fed's evil. They're doing, they always do that they always, all they ever do is, you know, destroy us. All they ever do is, is extend to pretend and, you know, and inflate and enslave us. It's terrible.

But Powell raising this reverse repo payout rate, five basis points above the Fed funds rate, which is the benchmark overnight lending rate in the U.S. is what all central banks manipulate, began draining the world of dollars. The world of dollars. And understand that the dollar is the global reserve currency. It's the dominant trade currency. Still is and will be for a very long time. We'll have that discussion later in the evening. That was the moment that the Fed declared independence from the global banking cartel. The most powerful central bank in the world declared itself independent of the global banking cartel. Because the whole point of Klaus Schwab's Great Reset is to do away with commercial banking, as we know it, the private formation of capital. And you do that by destroying the commercial banks. If Powell and the Fed were interested in playing along with that game, we would still be at zero-bound interest rates.

Because zero-bound interest rates, free money, is the lubricant that greases the wheels of tyranny and misinformation and excessive leverage and crazy credit creation and inflation and all the bad things. And, oh, by the way, trainee bathrooms. Okay? It's all tied to all of this stuff.

It's the ultimate corruption of money, which is the most powerful commodity in the world because it's one half of every transaction in the world. Money goods. Money services. Money. Corrupt the money. You corrupt the people.

You corrupt the society. You corrupt the language. You corrupt everything. A corrupt money that gets a corrupt. society. When the Fed is at the zero bound, the Fed isn't in control of itself. It's not even a central bank at that point. It's no different than a billionaire having 500 million or a billion dollars sitting in a bank in, I don't know, pick a play, Zurich, and lending that money out to the rest of the world with third party. He becomes a central bank. Okay. This is the part that's

lost on so many. It was lost on me for years. And I've been studying this stuff since I'm, you know, I had hair and it was black, right? So understand that it was, and I didn't realize it until I saw the correlation between that announcement on the FOMC statement day and the currency markets. And I watched the euro collapse overnight. And from there, it's been one big race to the bottom. And Ukraine and the conflict in Ukraine and the potential escalation of Ukraine into World War III is intimately tied to this revolt by the Fed and by extension the New York banking system.

And I'm the only one, and I'm not busting my handpatting myself on the back here, but I'm the only one, as Alex said to me earlier today, You own that narrative because you're the only one you talked about it. And I'm going to hopefully at some point during this evening, and if we don't get to it during the Q&A tonight, because you guys have other questions, I'll be here the rest of the night to try and help explain it to you. It's really technical, but it's actually not that hard. So let's get started with the rest of the evening.

Okay. Here's the first question. What is your perception of who is Elon Musk? destructive battery EV cars control space with thousands of satellites AI brain implants company Twitter bought by Saudi money but he's mr. freedom question mark should I go okay well I think one of the one of the worst mistakes that we could make is to dismiss somebody who's sincerely benevolent I don't know whether whether Elon Musk is but I sense that he is not playing along with the globalist Davoszett, you know, people who are loyal to Klaus Schwab and Bill Gates

and George Soros and whoever is behind them. And the King of England. Sorry? The King of England. Yeah, and His Majesty. And so they are obviously hugely irritated by him. He's obviously thrown a spanner into their works. They were massively, massively upset about him taking over Twitter.

was curious and I don't know over the last few months I've come across several people who you know are kind of in the know and they said like yeah I know Elon's on the on the good side of this conflict he's representing the different like sovereignist sovereign tis sovereigntist set of interest in the United States as opposed to globalists or you know they call themselves the transatlanticist community, whatever that is. And he's challenging their narrative, and he's giving free room for free speech to all the rest of us. Well, if that is the case, so be it, you know.

Musk is a very mercurial fellow. And I happen to, okay, one, I wouldn't be here tonight if Elon Musk hadn't threatened them by Twitter. Because you wouldn't know who I was. Isn't that true? Because in March of 2022, I'm sitting with 6,600 people after 14 years of using Twitter with 6,600 followers. And I know for fact that I was squelched to three degrees of freedom away from me. So everybody who followed me was squelched.

Everybody who followed them was squelched. And everybody who followed them was squelched. So there was no chance. The minute he threatened to buy Twitter. they had to change the algorithm overnight because the jig was up. They had to now, because he put the offer on the table, legally now they had to start scrubbing the code. And all of a sudden, boom.

And I went from, you know, 6,600 people, like 14 grand and like, I don't know, a month. Okay? 8% of my Twitter followers become patrons. That's how powerful Twitter is. I don't, again, this is my experience with Twitter. So if you watch what happened when Musk actually wound up buying Twitter for six months, they first they tried to poison pill it and they tried to, they threatened to do all the classic

poison pill maneuvers against him in order to make it too expensive for him to buy. They tried that. Then he took them the court over the valuation because Twitter was clearly not worth $44 billion. And he was right because he wanted to take them to court to get them to over. And in the discovery, during the discovery process of any lawsuit, and by the way, these people never want to go to discovery at Burr. We were going to find out just how bad everything was. We were going to get, because you'd have to pull the algorithm out.

You'd have to pull the code out, and it would all be put out there in the public record in the court documents. So Musk kept streaming them along for weeks on end. And then the elections happened. and the midterm elections happened. And Musk went from, I'm going to tie you up in court to show the world how bad Twitter is for months for the next six to nine months to I'm buying Twitter on Friday.

And then he walks in with the kitchen sink that Friday afternoon. And then a week later, like all of a sudden, all the stuff of the Twitter files are showing up. Like then all of a sudden all this information that we all knew in our hearts, but now we had documented proof. And I remember sitting there while this was happening, and my partner, Dexter White and I, we just sat there and we were like,

we free associate. To be honest with you, Dexter and I came to the conclusion ages ago that we should just monetize all of our conversations. But the best thing we should actually do is hit record when we're on the phone together and then just edit it together and put it out into the world. Well, it's not as good as that. It's better that I shape it into a coherent narrative for people to read.

But one of those conversations was, oh, the reason he bought Twitter was to get to the DM, the direct message archives. because you know that these people were not careful, because they had, they knew, you know, they knew that no, they never in a million years ever thought that any of their coordination between the FBI and Twitter and this one or that one, the journalists and everything else, that that would ever come out into the open. That would never show up. So like, no, let's get the DMs and let's go find out what these people did. And today we know all these things. We know that the FBI

colluded with journalists. We know that they did all this stuff. That's your point. proof. If Musk wasn't, hasn't flipped sides, we wouldn't know any of that today. So Twitter's still a mess. Okay? It's still

not a free speech platform because the code is bad, because there's still traders working within Twitter. Musk is only one man. But, sorry. Yeah. And he's under unbelievable pressure. Musk is only one man, but somebody pointed out to me that most of his business comes from the

Pentagon. That's where he draws most of his revenue. And so clearly there's a there's there's a grouping within the Pentagon that doesn't see things in the same way as the as these other globalists and they're fighting back and Musk is the frontman. Absolutely. You can see it in the way the Pentagon is dragging their feet over giving certain things to Ukraine because they know full well that if Ukraine gets them, they're going to use those weapons in irresponsible ways, oh, the way MI6 would like them to do it, British intelligence,

to provoke Moscow into an attack that they could then turn into a human rights tragedy to get everybody to go just war theory against Christian just war against the evil Russians. That's what you're, don't be gaslit by morons. Right? That's what they're trying to do. Everything they do, is that. Every

provocation, blow up the dam, blow up Kurt Strait, blow up the Kurt Strait Bridge, blow up Nord Stream 2. These were all intended. All intended. What Alex talked about in the first half. All intended, the Holodomir in Odessa, all intended to get the Russians to act

emotionally and Putin is inflappable because he understands what's going on here. It's like, you guys watch American football, right? You know how a quarterback uses a hard count to try and draw the defense offside? That's all

they ever do. It's just a hard count over and over and over here. Which is why Joe Biden say, for God's sake, this man cannot stay in power in Russia. Yeah, I know. Yeah, absolutely. Because we believe in freedom and democracy. Yeah, exactly. So we should decide. I'm not allowed to say that word, but

it's retarded, and I'm not allowed to say retarded. Taking it back. If the U.S. dollar goes down, the toilet with the Canadian, will the Canadian dollar necessarily follow it down into the sewer? Does the Canadian dollar have any independence? That's the wrong frame of the question. What you're worried about now is a U.S. dollar bull market.

Okay. What you're worried about now is the Fed draining trillions of liquidity from the global markets. And in a credit contract, and then the subsequent credit contraction that's going to occur. the Canadian dollars like everybody else has to get caught in the backlash. But at the same time, Alex, are we or are we not on the verge of a

commodity super cycle? We are on the verge of a commodity super cycle. Because this has been Alex's big thing. I'm like, dude, this is your, I already gave you my thesis, now this is Alex, let's go. So my background is

commodity trading and I've been on this commodity super cycle bandwagon for I think very least since like 2015 2016 so you go back 150 years into the into into history of commodity prices not in not in absolute term but as a in relation to equity prices as you see these big giant cycles that last about 20, 25 years. It goes up and then it goes down and it goes up. And so we have now ended a downward cycle and we've reached literally 50 year lows of where commodity prices are in terms of equity prices. So equity prices are very high. Commodity prices are very low. So this ratio is at 50 year lows. Not exactly anymore, but the commodity bull market that we've seen in 2000, 2021 and 2022 has only moved the dial just like a tiny little bit you know Alex a couple of percent I hate to cut you off but for the kids in the room and I'm speaking for myself in particular

Oh yeah come on it okay so commodities are things like you know oil and metals copper aluminum silver gold agricultural commodities like grains wheat corn soybeans all of that together is commodities all of that together is commodities Kind of important to Albertans, last I checked, right? It's kind of important to everybody. It's kind of important to everybody because it's at the bottom of everything we do. You know, stocks of different companies, you know, some provide services, but many of them just like process commodities. So it's at the foundation of the economy because it gives us fuel to go and food to eat and so forth.

So commodities are at the foundation of everything. And so, and then, but there's a bigger deal. dimension of this. And this is why last night we discussed this. It is, there's a risk that the commodity super cycle that we are going to see over the next 10, 25 years is going to be way beyond anything that we expected. And here's why. We go back to this model of governance, the British imperial colonial model of governance. Part of their strategy was also demand destruction, meaning It made sure that all their colonies are impoverished so that they don't compete for commodities. They don't create any demand for commodities, so they extract them from the ground,

but their own economies are too poor to use them, so they just ship them to Western corporations. And so generally, all the commodity producers in the world are poor countries. And so there's no... the demand for commodities there is not very important. And so in that way, commodity prices could be kept depressed. Now, China comes along, and their strategy is completely different because China has positioned itself as the global manufacturing hub. And they actually want to lift the masses out of poverty

and make them affluent so that they can be the customers, you know, like that, so that they have this very, very large customer, base all over the world of people who can afford stuff and stuff comes from China. So China has many, many, many affluent customers all over the world. So that means that this whole demand destruction strategy is going away and we're going to have indigenous economies all over the world becoming wealthier and more affluent and they're going to put upward pressure on the prices of commodity. So what we saw over the last 150 years which was all under this British imperial colonial system is going away and the

the new the next commodity super cycle could be could be turbocharged we'll live and find out and then going back to the the actual question this is important to like kind of lay the foreground work on this to that about the Canadian dollar the Canadian dollars commodity backed it's an oil currency right So the bigger problem for you Canadians, and I mean that with all, that came out wrong, the bigger problem for Canadians is this, how do you undo the damage that's been done by your government to leave you in a vulnerable position by having no gold reserves? Well, it's the same way that my friend Vince Launce keeps describing China and their gold reserves,

which is that China owns its gold through its people. You have gold in the ground. You have oil in the ground. You have uranium in the ground. You have unbelievable resources. But you're going to have to democratize, and you're going to have to rebuild Canada's gold reserves individually. And through the guy I met last night,

who's got the credit union, that guy over there, who's got the credit union, who's putting gold on the balance sheet. That's how you're going to do it. Because the government's not going to do it until you kick out the traders who work for Brussels. Until you get rid of Trudeau, spell T-R-U-D-O-H-exclamation point. I thought it was T-U-R-D. What's that? I thought it was T-U-R-D-O.

No, it's Trudeau. Trudeau, I thought it turdo. Oh, Tirto, gotcha. Sorry, I'm a bit dyslexic. That's even better, yeah. Alex just won up me. This is great. I'm like, I'm going through all my material tonight.

like outstanding. All right. So, so but no, it's important in the long run. I think the Canadian dollar has plenty of, they're going to do fine. But in the short run, you're probably going to see a super cycle high in the U.S. dollar as the, the part of the reason why the Fed has declared independence is they realize that de-dollarization, which we've all been hearing about, is big theme. It's happening, but it's not happening at the rate that they're like breathless telling you that it's happening. Whenever you start hearing out of mainstream media, which is another way of saying liars, and then another way of saying the British, sorry, that when you hear that, that's your clue to say, they want you to know this. And then you have to ask yourself,

why do they want me to know this? Oh, because that's how they're prepping the markets to go in the direction that they want those markets to go. Okay. So they want you to believe that de-dollarization is happening faster than it is so that you can keep, so that you help keep the dollar weak because a strong dollar undoes all of their plans because a strong dollar destroys their ability to lever up those dollars. They're trying to stop the Fed from raising to six, seven percent, right? They're trying to stop the Fed from, imploding trillions and quadrillions of dollars of credit derivatives that's where all their power is. They don't own anything, these people.

They just own a lot of financialized assets. Your assets completely financialized. And they're the ones making the money off of your mortgages and off of your credit roll dollars and off of your helix. Oh, I call them Davos. It's the old European colonial powers. It's the network of old European colonial banks. It's city of London. It's Frankfurt.

It's Milan. It's Milan. It's, it's Frankfurt. It's Zurich. It's city of London. It's Amsterdam. BIS. Yep.

Right. It's those guys. BIS is Bank for International Settlements. Yeah, the BIS. Central Bank or Central Bank. Right. It's those guys. We don't need to go there. It's not important.

it really is important. Let's not go there because that just muddies the waters and starts to get things completely we don't need to go there. It's not necessary. And I mean that because what's important is not who's really doing it, but what's the outcome of what they're trying to accomplish. It's really important because we're not going to lynch those people.

You're not going to, we're not going to like show up at their doorstep one day. Maybe that'll happen to some of them. Long guillotine and rope makers. folks, been the long guillotine's or rope makers for five years. The important thing is to understand what their plan is and then throw monkey wrenches and spanners into the

plans. And you do that by explaining the mechanisms by which they enslave you. That's how we do this. Okay? Right, Alex? Or am I wrong? So the Canadian dollar is going to survive as long as we get to that commodity

super cycle that Alex is talking about. But in the short term, it's going to be very rough. because the Canadian dollar is vulnerable. Now, the good news is the Canadian banks are on board with the Fed. Okay? The good news is, what is the, they are, the Bay Street boys are on board. I got to remember K Street is Washington, D.C. Think, thanks.

Bay Street is Toronto. You know, yeah, I got to remember that stuff. I got to get my street straight. Go for it. What the hell is going on in France? That's literally the question. Is that the next question? That is the next question.

France is falling? I don't know what's going to happen in France. You're closer to it than I am. Social uprising. I think that France is an economic basket case, not because necessarily there's anything wrong with the French economy. And I always like to point this out. We have to differentiate economy from the money,

the corrupt money, as Tom has pointed out. the economy is just people doing what they do, you know, and it starts with, like, you know, grass grows out of the, out of the ground, cows eat the grass. Whatever happens, this continues to go on, you know. It's just that the money dries up, too much debt, the financial system extracting too much paper wealth and makes it very difficult for people to exchange. And so in France has gotten to unbearable. levels and it's pushing social uprisings it's pushing it's creating a lot of strikes lots of disruptions the French have a very very low tolerance for nonsense there are there are a little bit different you know in the in the sense that you know in most countries in most nations when things get

intolerable you have waves of emigration from that country elsewhere where the pastures are better French stay and pitch a fit and and, you know, like, and behead their rulers. Yes, they do. Yes, they do. But, you know, good on them, I must say. No, I know. You're right. Now that you mention it that way, it's like, you know, the French are just really disagreeable.

They're like, no, no, we're French. And their arrogance, like, you know, being an American and being Italian-American, I get to say this, and, you know, I'm going to come off something. Like a horrible racist, but, you know, whatever. The, you know, there's no level loss between French and Italians at all, right? because the French have been trying to take over northern Italy for God knows, hundreds of years. So, and like, no, it's just not going to happen.

But we do respect, you got to respect the French's, the inherent disagreeableness of French being French in that respect. The French culture is that way. They just think they, you know, they may think they're superior to everybody and therefore, like, no, we're not going to leave. Why would we go somewhere else? We're French. Stay here.

You know, and they don't leave fascist. They don't run away from fascism. confronted. And that's kind of cool. I mean, we really stopped to think about it. And, you know, and we're talking about it. It's funny, like American neocons like to talk about the French being in the immortal words of Jonah Goldberg. The only good thing this man ever said was cheese-eating surrender monkeys, which is nonsense. Like, and we all have this- Absolutely nonsense. Yeah, we had this, we had this unbelievable, like, like modern American conservatives had this idea that the French, like, surrendered, you know, like, every, you know, like, every, you know,

you know, the Germans rolled across the border and the French surrendered. Like, dude, these are some of the, like, fiercest people who fought some of the most bloody freaking wars in history. The French are bad asses when it comes to war. And I know I'm now making friends with the French Canadians in the audience. I know.

And you guys make great goaltenders and great centermen. That's all I got to say. So the, no, seriously, Western Canadian defensemen, right? You know how to construct the Stanley Cup team. right so you've just won over everybody by bringing the Stanley Cup finals are we not going to watch i know we're doing this and the game this is going on right is game four tonight it's a game four tonight i think it is yeah so yeah i you know and now i'm going to check the score and an fyi i'm not rooting for either team even though i'm from florida because you know

you saw the jersey i was wearing earlier that's my second favorite team so um and has been for many many years but the but but i what's going on in France is, yeah, as Alex said, they're throwing a hissy fit, and they're not going anywhere. And that's why guillotines and rope makers, if you can belong anything in this environment. I think they invented the guillotine.

What's that? They did. I was like, when they get angry, they just be headgeyful. Which proves they're like, you know, like good entrepreneurial spirit, innovation. Seriously, like, you know, they're very inventive in how they get rid of their leadership they don't like.

It's kind of, you know, they're, you got to respect it. Like, there's no one. Vegas is up three, two, at a minute. We'll have to go in game four. So it could be dark days for Florida. Yeah, well, it is, if it is, if it is.

Here's, how do you predict the evolution of post-secondary institutions in the next five to ten years, given the prevalence of woke ideologies being pushed by educational staff, and are you aware of any sustainable alternatives to the current post-secondary system? Okay, post-secondary educational system. Everybody's going to go back to work at trade schools. Mike Roe for president, anyone? You guys know where Mike Roe is, right?

Yeah, Mike Roe for president. Honestly, I think that guy is doing Yeoman's work. I don't know that there's that, I don't know that the post-secondary educational system, certainly in the United States. For those who don't know who Micro is, how about you give him? Dirty jobs. Like, you guys have watched Micro of Dirty Jobs, right? You know, you've seen, or someone's got to do it or the Micro Foundation. Or the guy who tells unbelievably funny stories about his mom.

Like, Mike Roe's mom is awesome. I don't know. So you think everybody's going to move away from... I just think it's natural. Like, we already have a, we have a skills deficit that, by the way, we have an immense skills deficit in the United States. Like an entire generation that don't know how to do anything. They're going to have to be retrained.

And so there's going to be, that's part of the reason why we have now structural, structurally high unemployment. Some of it is just a skills deficit. But, you know, if someone, everybody says, we can't, I can't afford to go to college because college is $200,000 to be indoctrinated into being gay, then maybe I should go get a job as a plumber. Sounds good. I want to say something more beyond this because, okay,

so when I went to college, I took everything extremely seriously, and I graduated top of my class, and it took me very little time after I went into the world of business to realize that I've learned pretty close to nothing of any use. Right? So I learned how to write in English, so that was useful. That was thanks to just one professor who actually took care to teach me. But not to brag, but I want to explain what I've done in my life.

And I've built, let's say, starting in the late 1990s, I got a problem to solve at work, and I got some resources to solve it. And I started from a blank sheet of paper. I didn't know anything about anything about this problem, right? And, you know, by researching, studying, focusing on this problem, I built a superb piece of artificial intelligence technology. Not a software engineer. I don't know anything about artificial intelligence. I mean, I didn't know anything about artificial intelligence technology. I didn't know how to solve the problems that I was given or anything.

The point I'm trying to make, you're going to master, I mean, now I'm kind of addressing this. younger people in this audience, you're going to master everything you need to master if you want to. You don't necessarily need a university for that. University degrees might serve as a ticket, right of passage, into certain jobs and certain careers. But if you're just looking to advance your knowledge, your skills, your ability to function in society, and create something valuable and useful, you don't need university education for that in most professions. So, you know, believe in yourself, all the resources are out there,

you know, because once upon a time you went to the university because there were teachers there, there was a library there, and you had a way to learn things. Today, everything's in your smartphone. And you can start from there, and you can learn everything you want. Yeah, we had the Library of Alexandria and the Oracle of Delphi on our... hands every day. I have a degree in chemistry. So I worked as a bench and research chemist for 25 years. That requires a college education. Right. Chemistry. Physics. Engineering. Doctors. I like my,

doctor who's going to, you know, work. I'd like him to, like, you know, have some real education. Going back to, you know, anything really much beyond that, unless it's an incubation for, unless it's an incubator, for thought and advancement. And you have to sequester away, you know, certain people, certain types of people. I'm talking about like philosophy and stuff like that now. You know, the university may still hold value there to give those people an environment to exist, to incubate new ideas and new things. But really, innovation is, you know, it's going to drive directly out of, quote, unquote, the STEM fields.

And everything else is just nonsense. Everything else is just Pell Grant driven bullshit. It's that simple. It's just when you subsidize something, you get more of it. So we wind up with everybody gets a college degree, which means nothing. Philip Gaydick was talking about this stuff back in the 60s, going to need a master's degree to wash toilets. Like, you know, and I remember reading this stuff on the 14 going, yeah, he's right. Everybody's going on in college.

But it's not only that. It's just that most of the money that sloshes to university these days slosh through the hands of administrators, not researchers and professors. And the financiers that gave out the student loans. That's where the real money goes. Everything's hyper-financialized. At zero-bound, dumb ideas, never die. It's all money laundering.

Every bit of it. Go ahead. You're in charge, big guy. What's the impact or strategic importance of Alberta oil for Alberta, America, the world? And the blow to North America took when the Keystone Pipeline was killed. It's immense. And certainly you guys have felt you guys can tell us more than, because you lived it. I only like see it, you know, top down in the headlines.

Do you guys know? And we, I can tell you, like, I watched. we were talking about this earlier, and I was thinking about this the other day, and I'm like, diesel fuel is down to about 9% over unleaded in Florida, about 9%. During the height of COVID or the aftermath of COVID, it was a buck and a half. So about 40%, maybe 50%, yeah, about 50%. We're paying 520 a gallon over 350, which is insane. So diesel fuel, they were, clearly there was a, and what's Canadian,

as somebody pointed out to me last night, What do you guys produce? Heavy oil. What's heavy oil good for? Building roads, asphalt, diesel fuel, driving on asphalt. Pretty easy, right? So they clearly want to do away with cars, and they want to do away with roads,

and they manipulate the price of oil and the supply and demand of diesel fuel in order to make even the car companies, and everybody downstream of the car companies, make their businesses unreliable. So you get the public, we all are sitting there going with a lights and diesel cars that go 50, 60 miles of the gallon,

gallon of gasoline. Why do I need a hybrid? Why do I need an EV? Why do I need the diesel fuel? I mean, we had, you know, like my wife talks about this all the time, her Azuzu pickup truck that she drove around all, you know, in high school.

They got 52 miles of the 50, 55 miles of the gallon, right? We haven't had anything like that in the United States. in forever. So you manipulate, then you, you know, you manipulate the price of oil and the price of gas and price of diesel fuel, the crack spreads and all those other stuff that guys like Alex and me, you know, argue about all the time, about the direction that they're going. But the reality is, is that they're trying to sucker you into buying a diesel car and then make it on an economic for you to drive. The same thing to do and the same thing with the EVs. Why did the yellow vests start in France three and a half years ago? Because after the French government told everybody

buy diesel cars in order to save the future, then when everybody was driving a diesel car, they kept raising the taxes on diesel fuel in order to get them to stop driving, and then move them over to EVs. And they're still, what are they doing? They're still servicing the loans. They haven't gotten a full service life out of the car yet, blah, blah, blah, blah, and they're trying to move you off of it. Okay?

This is what these people do. They just waste your time and they waste your life in order to move you stepwise towards their preordained future. Right now, there is no diesel car industry in the United States, retail car industry in the United States. The only thing diesel fuel is used for is the trucking industry and offshore, and off-road diesel use, right, for agriculture and everything else. And so they successfully removed diesel completely from the U.S. car market. That's a victory. Soon, they're going to do away with the trucking industry. And the Canadian and the key, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, cancellation of the Keystone pipeline

ensures that we have all of these Gulf Coast refineries that could process all that heavy oil sands, all that oil. And it's trapped up here. And you all get to pay the price for it. And half the reason

you're going to pay the price for it is because y'all are a bunch of ungovernables who don't want to go along with the crap coming out of Toronto and Ottawa. And so you get punished for it. And we get punished for it. on the Gulf Coast. And that's just the way they operate.

It's just that simple. It's not hard. They hate you. You're the carbon they wanted to reduce. They do. They think you're, they just think you're the help. And you're not worked, and you're just a bunch of useless eaters. And you need to be reduced. And once you

realize that, that'll really get you angry. That's why I'm on the stage, because that's how angry I am. I don't know about you. That's, no. Next. Do I don't know. I don't know. really need to say anything else after that one. I'm waiting for the Mounties to take me away now. I try not to be angry.

I just try to think like, well, okay, what can we do, you know, rather than worrying about what they're trying to do. Alex, I'm Italian. I'm angry all the time. What is your prediction for how the inevitable China-Taiwan conflict will play out, and when do you think it will happen? Is it inevitable? It's a good question.

I think it probably is. but at the same time, I'm watching those the people that Alex identified earlier forces within the Pentagon. What I've noticed within the banking industry here in the United States, these are two of the most powerful lobbies in the United States.

They're like, we don't want to do this. So, again, the Chinese are also being trying to, we're trying, as much as we've described Russia being drawn offside through emotional responses, we know how to push China's buttons as well.

because go back to 2012. Do you remember this, Alex? The Sincaku-Daiyo islands off the coast of Japan and China. You remember when just before Abe, right after Abe came to power in Japan? When, okay, so I'm studying with a guy in Vietnam in 2011, 2012, and I'm thinking, I'm writing all sorts of articles that the yen is trading at $75 a dollar,

and I'm thinking to myself, ooh, look, the yen, regional reserve currency is going to, it's the strongest currency literally in Southeast Asia, and the Japanese are literally colonizing Southeast Asia. They're buying factories in Ho Chi Minh City and building them in Cambodia. They're leveraging all this young, educated Southeast Asian labor to offset their aging demographics.

And I'm like, I don't care, but, you know, Kyle Bass can go scratch about Japanese terrible demographics. But you just go, you got 200, million people in Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, and whatnot that you can, you know, bring out of poverty and pay to work in the, in the, in the, in the, in the, in the, in the, uh, tire factories or whatever, you know, Yamaha, all of those, all those companies were colonizing all across there. China and Japan had just agreed, the Chinese and Japanese trade was booming. And they had just put together an agreement saying, we're going to hold each other's bonds

as reserves and each other's reserves. I'm like, uh-oh, someone in the United States is not going to be very happy about this. And lo and behold, a couple of months later, Shinsuwabe has swept in the power when the Japanese declared dominion over the Sankaku Islands, which is a disputed bunch of islands, rocks, mind you. These are rocks. They're uninhabitable. And you can't even really even put, like, missile batteries on them.

They're literally just rocks that stick up. But both countries claim them. This is the kind of thing. It's like the Indian-Chinese border dispute in order to get the Indians and Chinese to be angry with each other and then threaten to, you know, never, you know, never speak to each other again. And this was a classic example of the Japanese did this on purpose to get the Chinese angry. Okay. The Chinese people got so angry that they trashed Toyota dealerships, Honda dealerships. Trashed them. Like, through rocks, through windows, overturned the cars, blew them up, all of it. Like, never buy another Japanese thing again.

That was the CIA British intelligence operation. Designed to keep Japan and China from getting together. And this is a classic example of how this stuff continues at every moment in order to keep the world the way it needs to be kept from their point of view. and it put Japan on the path to where they are today, which was to, because that was right at the same time that they started coordinating global central bank policy. So, yeah, no, it's just, this is,

this is the kind of thing that we're dealing with all the time. And then they went to ZERP and QE and all the stuff that we've been dealing with ever since then. Any thoughts on China, Taiwan? I just want to say that it seems to me that there isn't, there isn't very much enthusiasm for war over Taiwan, especially in East Asia, where the countries would be most affected. And even nations that are nominally loyal to the United States and to the West and that are allied with them have given pretty strong signals that they're not interested in going to war against China. And so the American side is trying to finagle it,

trying to kind of get together some kind of a coalition, to get something to blow up, to mobilize somehow enough forces to start some kind of a shooting war. But it seems to me that the powers that oppose it are stronger and more determined. So I'm not certain that that war is going to happen at all. And more importantly, it is very clear that the West, the United States, have zero chance of prevailing in this conflict. Zero chance. And they know it because they've ran, the Pentagon has run war simulations, and they realize that they're going to get killed in a very short period of time.

All of their frigates are going to, anyway. So with all that in view, one has to ask, like, so what would that war be about? about why would they even risk such a war since they have no chance of winning in it? I think that the only answer is that it's a war against their own people. Because if you create a major war abroad, you create this massive emergency that lets you sweep all the crises that are brewing in your society under the carpet to explain everything away as the China's fault, you know, like whatever. you know like there's no food on the shelves where we're at war and you know your

pensions not being paid out shared sacrifice and so forth and it allows you to very deal very quickly with your opposition and with all dissent because you know at war the first casualties the truth you deal with the the opposition quick and dirty because you can always accuse you know people who are not together with the with the government you can always accuse you can always accuse them of being collaborators. You can accuse them of

lack of patriotism and so forth. And so it's a way to consolidate power and to usher in a totalitarian tyranny. And I think that this is why they want that to

provoke that war anyway, even though they're going to lose it. We've always been at war with East Asia. Right? Exactly. Now, one other thing to think about, Taiwan's semiconductor manufacturing, TSM, is building plants all across the United States, chip facilities in the United States. They're building in Arizona. Apple is bringing its production back home. Part of what we're seeing now is, you know, the whole, Taiwan was created to be a flashpoint in this period of time. It was created to do, to put all of the chip manufacturing. there in order to be brought up as an open wound. You've got to think strategically the way these people put stuff on the table.

They start just, they look at the board, literally like it's a big, I don't know, chess board or go board, whatever version of, you know, whatever game theory metaphor you want to use. And I have a bazillion of most of which you wouldn't understand because you've never played these games that I have. But it really, they really do think in these terms, right? And so, hey, let's, let's offshore all the ship manufacturing in the United States that Europe and the United States need. Let's put it on Taiwan.

Because we know in the future we're going to want to start a conflict with China. And we'll be able to use Taiwan as a splash point. It's not really that hard to think about. Yeah, it's exactly what we started off with creating these flashpoints, divisions, divide and conquer, in order to be able. to maintain hegemony over the Eurasian land mess. And China, Taiwan is one of those flashpoints. You know, since, you know, they're failing in Ukraine.

Now the next flashpoint to detonate a crisis is Taiwan. It's Taiwan. The only problem is that the whole world by now understands the game. Right. And they're resisting it. This is the best part of the conversation. Because we're here after the Turkish elections. We're here in the same week that Iran and Saudi Arabia

normalized relations for the first time in years, where we finally, after being told for decades, that, oh, those Arabs, they've been fighting amongst themselves for thousands of years. The Sunni-Shiite divide is, you know, you can't deal with it. It's never going to be, you know, it's just, it's an untenable situation. It's all nonsense. It's all lies.

Like it didn't take very long for the Saudis and the Iranians. You know, once Syria, once the project to destroy Syria so that the Saudis could bring pipelines into Europe as opposed to Iran, because that's what Syria was all about. Once that became impossible for the Saudis to get that, the need to fight amongst themselves is irrelevant. it. The Middle East is declaring independence from the West. You know, all of it from the, starting with Turkey and then the entire Arabian Peninsula. And the failure in Syria, when we sent out to start tonight, Sean came up to me with the outline for the first half, and he started in 2014.

And he said, you know, Tom wants you to start in 2013. And I passed the mic to Alex, and I'm glad I did because Alex reminded me of the things that I've forgotten about, which was the European accession agreement, to keep the things. on Ukraine. I wanted to start in Syria. And so when Alex started doing that, I'm like, oh, yeah, you're right. I forgot. But I kept thinking, I've had Syria on the brain because it was Syria

that literally turned me into a geopolitic. I now started, that it was Syria that, for me, told me, I can't just look at markets anymore. I have to look at geopolitics. And the failure of the West to balkanize Syria is the beginning

of the end of the McKinder Heartland theory foreign policy of the British Empire and the Europeans. Because as at that moment when Putin moved into Syria in 2015 and blew open

the myth about ISIS. ISIS was created by John McCain of Barack Obama. Okay? And Hillary Clinton? Oh, and Hillary Clinton, yeah. Sorry. You're correct. You always only credit men. Wait, I don't like to say...

Inclusive. I don't like to say the devil's name three times in a row in case she manifests yourself. Like, I don't want to get shot in the back of the head with a nail. I don't want to commit suicide with a nail gun, shooting myself in the back of the head twice. I don't have information. No, seriously, I do not have information. I will lead to the arrest of Hillary Clinton.

I say that now openly. But the dam on the Danpe River did. Sorry. So, but Syria, when Putin moved in in 2015, in October 2015, after excoriating the West at the UN's General Assembly two days earlier, saying, do you understand what you have done? You know, and then blew open in six weeks blew open all the false narratives about Syria. So quickly did they do this, the Russian military, along with the Syrian army, take territory back, prove that ISIS was a paper tiger. Because remember, the Americans were fighting ISIS for two years in Syria,

and we couldn't get anywhere. And then all of a sudden, in six weeks, like the Syria of Arab Army under cover of Russian air cover, you know, took whole swaths of the country in like no time flat. You know what I find funny? I find you tell that story and you go, like, everybody should know that. I'm going, I had no idea about that. But I also live under a rock, and I don't pay attention to all this stuff, Tom. Okay.

As he rattles it off. I'm like, okay. My brain's starting to hurt all over again. Okay, well, that's good. You know, it's good time where I'm going to ask the final question of the night. In order for a muscle to get bigger, you have to exercise it. That's right. Okay.

And, you know, so Russia moves into Syria in October 2015, right? Starts fighting ISIS. The Syrians are taking massive territory back. Within six weeks, they take the Kirares Air Base out north of Aleppo. You guys have all heard of Lepo because Gary Johnson doesn't know where it was in 2016. And that was a critical moment. It was like the cauldron of Boltova. It was a pivotal moment

on militarily on the battlefield. Because at that point, then they were going to take Aleppo. They were going to take the entire M4 highway. They were going to start taking back large swaths of Syria at that point once they had the Quaras Air Base outside of Aleppo. So right after that, mysteriously, amazingly, a Russian SU-24 gets shot down by the Turks. I use that with air quotes.

By the Turks for violating Turkish airspace for 15 seconds, it's playing on the Turks. And a Russian SU-24 shot down. And that was to get another operation to get Russian Turkey into a fight. And six months later, President Erdogan of Turkey is facing a coup. because he didn't go to war with Russia. He made a deal with Putin. As a matter of fact,

six months later, Putin is the guy who tips off Erdogan that there's a coup coming out of Insurgic Air Force Base. It's a NATO Air Force Base, by the way, mostly stabbed by Americans against him, and it's the Iranians who shuttled them out of the country. Remember, Turkey saved Iran, during the Obama administration by laundering Iranian oil money

after they were thrown out of Swift by Obama. You know what Swift is? It's the global payment network. So the Iranians couldn't sell their oil to anybody because they couldn't get payment. So Erdogan remonitized gold in the Turkish banks and laundered all the Iranian oil sales

in gold through the Turkish banks. So Erdogan and Iran have had a long and storied history together. we're closing in on 930 and i'm not going to go past 930 for these fine folks i try it no no i know that people here already know that i try and end early that way they can sit chat and all that stuff there's one question though that i asked them the first time i ever had them uh on the podcast and uh they gave me this long thing and actually i think long will say you know and i'm curious your answer on it and i'm curious alex if it's changed because it was like it was kind of like

Don Charing-Raw-McLean talking at the time. And the question is, is there any way to avoid World War III? And I remember thinking this after I listened to them talk for two hours. And by then, I'd also had one-on-one with Alice. And I had one-on-one with Tom. I don't know. Is there any way? And I'm curious where you're at now on this, with all the recent events, with everything going on.

You know, I joked, not joked. I'd said last night, and said, yeah, I've been kind of a quiet period. Tom just, I just set Tom off, you know. because he's like, oh yeah, quiet period, yeah, real, okay. And away he went. So with that thought, you know, you got a couple minutes each, and then I'm going to close it off and allow the fine folks here to either get on with their night and go home or to, you know, visit with some of their neighbors,

come up, you know, all of it. Is there any way to avoid World War III when you see, you know, Trudeau was just over there again, you know, like you see all these people in the money and everything going there and you see the dam being blown up and on, and, and on, on and on it goes. Alex, Tom. Okay, so I go first. I'm very optimistic because I've been, I've been fearing a breakout of World War II, 3 for a couple of years now, and it's actually what prompted me to write my book in 2017 called The Grand Deception, which got banned within five weeks of publishing. And what I was envisioning at the time didn't really happen the way,

I was afraid it might. So the World War III agenda has pretty much collapsed and they're dragging it on, but it's not working quite. You know, the way World War I broke out, the way World War II broke out, there's a great deal of deception going on in preparation for the outbreaks of hostilities. What happened between then and now is that we have the Internet

and we have access, instantaneous access to information. Censorship is very difficult and narrative control is very difficult. So it becomes very, very hard to corral people into a major conflict or to drive them to give consent for that kind of a conflict. So what you're doing is you're sparking these little, you know, these little conflicts here and there and nothing's really catching on. They're trying more, they're trying the next thing and the next thing and the next thing, and it's all just kind of like fizzling out and falling flat.

And I think that the large part of the reason for that is exactly what we're doing here. Speaking out, trying to figure out what's going on, trying to understand the truth so that we do not fall into the trap of giving our consent for war. because they're trying to tell you Russia is evil, Putin is evil, let's go kill them. And people kind of go like, wait a minute, you're a liar. And so they don't give consent. So there isn't this massive groundswell of let's go kill the Russians because they're bad. Let's go kill the Chinese because they're bad.

And so I think all of us here probably deserve a little bit of credit, you know, because this is the beast that cannot be killed with one bullet in between the eyes. It's killed by a thousand cuts or a million cuts or hundreds of millions of cuts. And I'm honestly, I'm very humbled and I'm in awe to know that so many of you drove so far to be here tonight. And I want to thank you from the bottom of my heart. And I think that this is exactly what's moving us. in small increments away from this conflict and towards a different future.

And that's what makes me very optimistic about this. And I think that if you share what you know with the people around you and they share what they know, then we're on the right track. And we have a chance of creating a better future for our children and their children than what the last few centuries of Constant warfare, of constant debt, of constant challenges to peace have been made possible by this small cabal that's manipulating everybody else. So thank you. And I want to thank also, Sean, for putting all this together. I'm amazed. This must have been a hell of a lot of work, and thank you. Podcast in life. Tom, you get fined.

Final words. Unfortunately, I'm not as optimistic as Alex. And I don't say that lightly. Should have gone first. We're supposed to be leaving them on a positive note, Tom here? I'm going to try, but it is very clear that there would rather burn the world to the ground than you give up power. We have to be, we have to bracket for that.

They proved that to us this week when they blew up the dance. They proved it to us this week when they blew up the ammonia pipeline after the Russians pulled out of the grain agreement to export Ukrainian grain, which was nothing more than moving than a cover story to allow them to move weapons into the port of Odessa into Ukraine and to move British Secret Service and British SAS and American SEALs and blah, blah, blah, blah, all this is, these people don't stop until we remove. remove them from the scene. And they get infinite at-bats because we have no way of removing them from the scene. I've been asked already before I got up on the stage tonight what I thought was going to happen in 2024 in the United States. I'm like,

dude, y'all read Martin Armstrong. There's not going to be an election in 2024 in any real sense of the word. They indicted Trump. He's probably going to go. go to jail. They're puffing up Ron DeSantis to destroy him so that they can take over Florida. We don't want Ron DeSantis to leave Florida. Okay. They will never, ever, ever stop because they are literally Satan. And I'm not even that religious amount. And I want to believe, look,

leading up to Russia's invasion of Ukraine, I was adamant. There was not going to be a war in Ukraine. I was wrong. So maybe I'm over-correcting now, but it's not what my instincts are telling me. And I really wish it was otherwise. I don't know that they're going to get World War III out of it. So Alex may be correct.

But they're going to get as much conflict as they can. because, well, killing as many of us as possible is a good start. I'm sorry, but that's the way I see it. I have to push back because we got to end this on the positive note. They got the conflict in Ukraine, but it's not anything like the conflict that they wanted. Remember, they wanted to weaken, destabilize Russia. This is true. Russia is today way stronger than it was before the war.

Agreed, Alex. financially and militarily in every way. So they got the opposite effect. Well, yeah, they did. I honestly think they believe their own nonsense. Well, you know the lovely thing is we got the room till midnight. And if you want to continue the chat, these two jants will probably be sitting in a table

and you can go gather around and barrage them with questions and carry on the conversation. I'll be here until they kick us out. I really appreciate these two guys coming all the way across. I appreciate everybody here making us. another night, especially in the summer months. And I was saying to these two guys, you know, to mess around with people's summer nights, that's a dangerous thing, you know.

And I'm like, well, we'll see how this goes, you know. But I do appreciate you all coming out. I hope you stay around and enjoy people's company and talk. And I hope we've spurred on some thoughts and all that. Tom and Alex are going to be here. There's other people in the audience, I think, would be great if people got to know and just introduce yourself and then walk around. Either way, thanks again for coming out to another SMP present.

and for Tom and Alex making time to make it up here. Thanks again, folks.