Shaun Newman Podcast - #519 - Tom Luongo & Alex Krainer 8.0

Episode Date: October 23, 2023

We discuss peace in our lifetime, the importance of community and repercussions of the giants fighting. Of course Russia/Ukraine and now Palestine/Israel are discussion points throughout the conversationTom is an amateur dairy goat farmer, libertarian, former research chemist and publisher of the Gold, Goats n' Guns podcast and newsletter. Alex is a Croatian national, former hedge fund manager, author and contributing editor at Zero Hedge.  Let me know what you think. Text me 587-217-8500 Substack:https://open.substack.com/pub/shaunnewmanpodcast

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Welcome to the podcast, folks. Happy Monday, man, long-term guest, Tom, Alex, coming back. All right? Before we get there, though, how about we start here? Canadians for Truth, November 9th, Legacy Place, Red Deer, Alberta, Peter Freakin' McCullough. That's right. He's going to be at their next live show.

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I should point out one thing here before we get to the tail of the tape. We're slowly closing down Patreon. I put this out over the last month or so. And I was trying to push on Patreon, and I just, you know, the text line has been telling me over and over and over again that, you know, if you're not even remotely interested in Patreon, if you know what it is or your Patreon substack, majority of people said,

I'm substack, I'm just not really interested in Patreon. So what we're going to do in today's episode with Tom and Alex, you'll hail her at the end that we did a little bonus couple questions. Actually, it's a bonus question, and it'll be put on substack. And so we're going to slowly centralize some things, you know, if I don't really like the term centralized, but we're going to slowly weed away some of the things that are kind of sitting out there in the periphery that haven't been really been used.

And Patreon is one that we've been trying. And with a little bit of success, I won't sit here and say there was no success. But a lot of people asking for a different avenue. And so then once we put the question out, it's looking like it's going to be, well, no, it is going to be substack here for 2024. That's where we're going to focus some attention on. And so, yeah, if you're listening. into the debate of Patreon Substack.

I just wanted to update everybody and we're going to be slowly moving it. Well, I guess I shouldn't say slowly, quickly moving it over to Substack here in the coming weeks and trying to use that avenue to hopefully continue to interact and build a relationship and everything else. Of course, I love the phone line. So if you have thoughts, comments, texting is, you know,

the obvious choice for me. That's the way I like interacting with all of you. So now, let's get on that 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, methanol, and chemicals delivering to your farm. Commercial or oil field locations. For more information, visit them at Hancockpatroleum.ca.

The first is a former research chemist, amateur dairy goat farmer, libertarian, an economist whose work can be found on sites like ZeroHedge at Newsmax Media. Second, a Croatian national, former hedge fund manager, author, and contributing editor at ZeroHedge. We're talking about Tom Luongo and Alex Craneer. So buckle up. here we go welcome to the shan newman podcast today i'm joined by alex trainer tom loongo and man i i

i should have clicked i should have just started when as soon as we got going but now we've been yeah some people missing out it doesn't matter every time i get you guys on here um it's it's a hoot it's even though we're talking some serious shit um i enjoy having you guys on of course tom we finally got to uh live out your dream of talking star wars and and lord of the rings and everything else and I feel bad. I'm like, I guess I should have just brought Craneer in for talking Star Wars for three hours. I mean, he probably would have enjoyed it as much as we did. I don't know.

I had a blast, Sean. It was fun. I'm not sure. I watched most of the Star Wars movie, but I don't know that I have an opinion about them. You have no opinion on Star Wars? I'm glad you weren't there then. Sorry. You know, I'm all kidding.

I'm just kidding, dude. I wanted the good guys to win as much as anybody else. But, you know, the problem I have with that is that, you know, like we all watch these movies about, you know, this epic struggle between good and evil. Star Wars and Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter and whatnot. And then when like evil smacks us in the face, we all shit our pants and close ranks behind evil. Essentially. That wasn't the most eloquent sentence I ever uttered, but you know what I mean. Well, Alex, your point is well taken. Look, stories are designed. You know, this is one of the things that I brought up with Sean on the podcast. We were talking about the mechanics of storytelling. Stories are not meant to be true. All stories are only metaphorically true. All stories are false, even the stories we tell about our own lives. Like, there are no real stories because none of us.

actually lived each other's story. Like infinite perspectives, you know, the idea of their, the understanding is a three-edged sword, right? Your side, my side, and the truth. I'm bastardizing the quote from Babel 1-5. But what they're for is to give us the blueprint of how we're supposed to act in the face of evil, even if we don't live up to the ideal. Like characters like Harry Potter and Luke Skywalker and others are going to the way the hero journey is designed it's designed that the to be metaphorically true that the first time you do meet evil you shit your pants but then you still have to put your big boy you have to change your pants put your big boy pants on and get the job done right

right without a certain without certain things happening in the in the in the in the mechanics of the story right the story doesn't work which is why the the story the story story structure is of the hero's journey, is so well defined. And it hasn't, and it wasn't like somebody came up with it. And then, no, we as a species came up with it, right? And it was just illuminated by people like John Campbell and Christopher Vogler and others who have just put all the work together and then codified it in, you know, particular types of books.

Like Campbell wrote the Man of a Thousand Faces in order to explain the process. Chris Vogler wrote what is the best, I think, the best screenwriting Bible for doing, you know, for dealing with the mechanics of the of it, right? Because in that respect, it's like a medley. You just fill in all the blanks and, you know, and there you go. There's the form. And now you have to do it. But the, but the real art is in crafting the image systems and crafting, you know, all the unconscious stuff that burbles out of the minds of the artist making these films or making these television series or whatever, that's where the real magic happens

because that's where the real lessons are. It doesn't matter if we're talking to Dark Night, which is Sean's favorite, or Star Wars, which is my favorite, or whatever your favorite happens to be, the Lord of the Rings, which is my wife's favorite. So that's the, you know, that's why this stuff is fundamentally important,

and it's why we can't get too blackpilled and too upset about the crap that they're doing in Hollywood because it's clearly a fucking operation run by a bunch of British faggots. I was curious as you were talking, Tom, where do you think? I don't know how to go from that. Sorry, that's where I am. No, no, but, you know, on a serious note, Tom, that all makes perfect sense.

Your point taken, that I agree with everything you said. Where are we at, boys, in our story right now of the world? You know, like maybe everybody saw Palestine, Israel, Hamas, all this coming. You know, but when you first came on this podcast, we were talking about Russia, Ukraine. Heck, you came here to Canada to talk more about that. And I always enjoyed the balance of the two of you, Alex being the positive one, Tom being, I don't know,

not the negative one, more maybe, I don't know what you'd call it, Tom, the cynical, the realist, I'm sure there's a few things, just looking at what's going on and how close we were getting to it. Yeah, Tom. Well, what I was going to say is this. It's like, from certain perspectives, Alex is the, is the optimist and I'm the pessimist. But then if you look at it on the opposite direction, we just had this long rant about story. Alex's impression as a child and as a young man was that he fought in war, right? So he has a much different view of the world and humanity than I do.

I'm just a suburban white kid from New York. So I have a much rosier in some ways. I have a core belief in, you know, I don't know, because I haven't seen it, right? I haven't experienced it. I can only visualize it. I can only deal with it up here, all the crap that happens in the world. Alex has lived it. Yeah.

Right. And that's, I think, the fundamental difference between our perspectives. It's always interesting to see how, you know, we go back and forth and we take on different roles within the context of our own personal experience. And so I always defer to Alex's, you know, experience on that from, you know, from when I, once I knew that about him, I was like, oh, well, you know, Alex makes so, you know, that makes perfect sense why he would be the way he is. And I'm trying to be very generous here, Alex is what I'm trying to do. Because I really do appreciate that difference of perspective. And I'm actually trying to deprecate my own, you know, pretty much, hey, you know, fucking pampered life that I've had, I've had the privilege of leading. So. Well, thank you. That's very kind, Tom. But, you know, it's, you know, to be fair, I live, you know, that war experience for a couple of years. The rest of my life, I lived the pampered life as well, you know. And I only just realized that I got, that I turned up for this podcast dressed like Vladimir Zelensky. The slog that took over Europe. Oops.

That's okay. You know. It's funny, you know, when I saw, this is a YouTube, imparting some of your wisdom on me, I guess. When I first saw all the stuff come out on Twitter about Hamas and everything going on on that side of the world, all I could think of was Alex and the red and black ants. As soon as I saw it, I'm like, like, somebody is shaking the jar all over again. And I just go. And then I immediately thought, like, we.

got to be we got to be on the brink of of of you know all out war like but you know I don't know I that's when I'm where my brain goes at the start of this that's exactly where I don't know I'm like red black ants I don't you know for for the audience member they probably don't need to hear it again I don't know how many of them thought the same thing I thought I know sitting at the book club this morning we talked about it we all talked about it we're like red black ants man like it's horrific it's it's sitting here it's like I go on Twitter I go on any of these different things I see you know I see all the amount of information coming all the different

videos I'm like what's real what's not you see in he long he'llah musk removes New York Times a verification badge you're like you know when it was a CBC as a Canadian I laughed about it because we all knew like a CBC is a load of bullshit but now you know you go back to when Tom it had to been like the first time you're on you were talking about all the different news organizations and everything like that now to see New York Times have their verification badge on Twitter X removed? You're like, oh my God, this is, this is getting to a whole different level.

It is. It absolutely is. And I think that we're, you know, I think it's all downstream of the stuff that we, that we've been identifying over the course of our conversation, long running conversation together. And, you know, Alex is my conversation has been going on longer than, you've been involved, Sean, which is that there's something happening within the power. structure of the world that we that is just below the surface and it's a good thing right it's that it's the thing that Alex's optimism that the Ukraine war isn't going to spiral out of wasn't going to

spiral out of control no they just did just ship the theater Alex of course they shipped at theater right but it's very clear from a variety of perspectives and we'll get into this I think that you know in the in the immediate aftermath here it's very obvious that Putin is the big winner from this situation with Hamas and Israel. And we'll get into why, and it's very complicated. But Alex, I think, is probably on the exact same wavelength I am. This can see he's nodding his head. And, you know, that is all downstream.

And oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. So, but it's all downstream of these counter, what I would call counter-revolutionary forces operating within the U.S. because as you reach a particular breaking point, people are no longer going to be willing to go along to get along. And eventually you're going to gore enough people's oxen that they have to then turn around and they have to turn and fight. You can only push people powerful people.

And, you know, us, powerful people, everybody has a breaking point. Everybody has a line in the sand that they will not, that, you know, will not be allowed to be crossed. And as far as I'm concerned, you know, Europe went after the American commercial banking system and that was a no-go. And then everything else from that point forward means that, okay, what are we willing to break in order to stop these fucking people from destroying our country? Okay, well, you know, I'm no longer private equity Powell. I'm now commercial bank, I'm now New York Boy Powell, right? Because that's who he's clearly working for with the way he's prosecuting monetary

policy. Okay. Because the private equity guys are the ones screaming the most for him to pivot, because they're the ones that make all their money off of, you know, levering up shitbag, zero-cost money, right? So there's a, there's a dynamic here that's a lot of people just haven't groch because, you know, you can't have a private equity space if you don't have a vibrant commercial banking space. So one begets the other. And, you know, in some ways you can say that the private equity guys at the zero bound were the tail wagging the commercial banking, central banking dog. if you want to try and put it in, you know, graphical terms, right? So, you know, that's what I think is going on here. And that's why eventually I think Elon Musk chose sides.

And that's why you see this morning something as small as him removing the verification badge from the New York Times is all part of, it's all just kind of downstream of these other things. It's a small thing, but it's a big, but it's a big signal, right? Alex. I have the impression that what is happening is that the bad guys, and let's define them. I believe that they are a very small, narrow oligarchy that is controlling the global financial cartel, you know, the largest global banks, systemically important banks, that they're being, being, being, hit by a sworn that's only just started. You know, it's like they're getting attacked by a swarm of bees,

and they're whacking them wildly, and they're going to hurt some. But they're going down, I think, because this tsunami is rising. And I think that the tide has turned against them in such a big, robust way that there's no way that they can, they can put that all back and reverse the sequence of event to get back to get back to some kind of a world arrangement where they control things. They lost control. And so I think that's a good thing. But I think that we have to keep on pushing on, speaking out, figuring things.

out and eventually we're going to have to come up with our own solutions, you know, bottom-up solutions. This top-down nonsense just didn't work out. It worked out very poorly. And I think that there are excellent bottom-up solutions that are available to us. We're living at an amazing time. I mean, if you look at the stuff that's, you know, sloshing around, you know, in social media. I'm not talking about the quality of the discourse, the speed with which information is circulating, the speed with which the lies are being toppled over. But also, people inventing products and services and reaching straight to the consumer. You know, this is disintermediating these mega chains. like Walmart and even even even Amazon you know Amazon's turned into into

into a sewer it's it's just you know I used to be a great fan of Amazon I in 1998 I plowed all of my savings into Amazon stocks which was great but I have to say today you know like there are times when I want to buy something and I try to avoid Amazon and then I can't find it and then I think like, well, shit, looks like it's going to have to be Amazon. And then I go on Amazon. They don't have it either. And I go like, where could I find this thing? And they're like, oh, wait, there's Alibaba. And I go on Alibaba. It's like, everything is there. Everything is there. And you order it? And it arrives. And it arrives quickly. And so there's, I don't know how many merchants that are using Alibaba as their fulfillment and payment gateway, whatever.

But then there's also a lot of people who do this completely independently. They have their own e-commerce solutions and they just hit you with some ad, you know, like some pain you didn't know you had, but then you go like, oh yeah, that's right. I didn't, I, this is cool. I like this. And it works. And so there's only going to be more and more and more of them. that. So to me, this is some kind of a grassroot rise of bottom up solutions. I think it's

wonderful. And I think that it's going to integrate into this multipolar global architecture. I think we have a great chance of seeing peace in our lifetimes. We're going to have to fight for it in the West. But there's a great chance that we're going to see peace in our lifetime. And the people will finally be free to build a better life, a better world, and greater prosperity and greater freedom. So I think that we are on the cusp of that. We just have to kind of keep our, we have to keep our focus on the game rather than being distracted nonstop with these emotional outrages that are constantly pumped into the system. you know, pandemic 9-11, Israel, Russia, Ukraine, this, that, and God knows what else they're going to come up with.

I'm, you know, I'm kind of afraid of a real false flag. I hope that it's not going to happen, but it could happen. But we have to understand that this is what they use to, you know, it's like, it's like driving the herd, right? You create alarm to turn them the way. you want to control them. Well, no, we have to be going where we need and want to be going. And I think that the guiding principle is to ask yourself, not what you want from life, but what kind of life you'd want your children to live and what kind of life you'd want them to raise their children in. And that is our birthright, actually, gentlemen. That is our

birthright. That is what we need to claim by simply claiming it, not asking somebody's permission, not voting for somebody who's promising it, just staking the claim. I was born here. I don't know anybody else my life. This is my birthright, and I'm claiming it, including the right to speak my mind freely, including the right to engage in lawful commerce, including the right to refuse to support any war party for any kind of of a war. You know, when I was younger and dumber, I volunteered for war in Croatia while it was at war. And I was ready to fight and die for my country, you know, for my country. Now, I want to voice a big warning about that. For anybody younger in the audience who might feel inclined to

sacrifice themselves for their country, don't. Ask yourself first. What is your country? Is it the streets, the stones, the trees, the mountains? What exactly is your country that you would sacrifice your life for? Well, as you're going to find out, you're going to sacrifice your life for the state, the very same state that's going to sell you out for pennies as soon as it's convenient to somebody. So don't sacrifice your life. that what you want to fight for is your next of kin.

That's who. You know, we in Croatia fought a war of independence. I think that 10, 15,000 people died in that war. We won our independence. And then that state handed the country's independence and sovereignty on a silver platter to the Brussels. is bureaucracy. And we are now virtually a colony of the EU. We are far worse off that we were under Belgrade, under the, under the hegemony of Belgrade, the capital of Yugoslavia. And so we

swapped one hegemon for the other hegemon who's far worse. But, you know, don't go to war. Don't go to war. There's no point. If somebody is attacking your family, that's a different thing. if somebody's attacking your community or next of kin that's a different thing but don't go for work for your country because there's you know be very discerning how you're going to sacrifice yourself if you're already inclined to do so anyway that's durand for now that's it well i'll say alex is is i agree completely and um i've you know i've always i've always been you know i'm the i'm the i'm the i'm the i'm the i'm the i'm the i'm the i'm the i'm what I would like to believe is the right kind of patriot. I'm Tom who lives in this county, within this state, within this country on this planet. I'm a representative of my family,

and I'm a representative of my community. In my community, I get to define. No one gets to define that community for me, by the way. And when you reframe yourself as an individual, within the collective first as opposed to the collective that subsumes the individual. I'm not Tom the American who lives in Florida, who lives in this county, who lives in this town, who lives on this piece of land. No, I'm Tom who lives on this land, in this town, in this county, in this state, in this country, on this planet. It's a different mindset.

It's a fundamentally individualist mindset. It doesn't matter whether doctrinaire libertarianism is right or wrong or any of those other fucking rotten nonsense. That, again, is nothing but jargon to distract you from the reality of who it is that you actually are. Tyrants will always try to confuse you, to rob you of your reason and to rob you of your birthright, as Alex put it. That's their job. That's their goal. They're psychopaths and sociopaths, and they fucking hate you. Because they didn't hate you, they wouldn't be willing to sacrifice your children on the altar of their grand plans for humanity. Period.

Everything else is all just fucking marketing. The isms, the, the jargon, the propaganda. It's all just jargon. It's all just marketing scam. It's no different. And we can, we sit here and we get really angry, you know, looking at companies trying to use, you know, hot women to sell us beer or whatever and we get angry because we're being manipulated into it i got news for you folks guess who's the best ones in the world at the shit it's not it's not fucking bud light

that's because they used a man that's because they used the man they're just bad at it because they use the man exactly what are you guys biologists now me no i'm i do know i don't know that that was a man aren't we all newly minted virologists and and uh you know complexity theorists and and everything else. Like, haven't we all been, haven't all been taught that this is the way this shit's supposed to work? Oh, and geopolitical experts as well.

It only took a big, for a 12 years to get good at it. That's all. And I'm still got it today, and I'm like, I still know what the fuck's going on in half of these theaters, right? It's funny. Sorry, boys.

Alex, in your talk, you mentioned peace in our time. And I, I don't know, maybe I missed it, but I thought I saw Tom kind of nod, like, yeah, possibly. And I went,

Wow, that's interesting because this is what's so interesting about having you two on. I go, everybody right now, on a scale of one to ten, if they're paying attention, relatively, he's leaning like one, we're not going to war, 10 were in war. They're like eight. And they're like, man, like, nukes might be going off in five days, right? And I'm like, huh, what, you know? And I've kind of, I've been waiting for this conversation because I'm like, I'm not really going to make, I kind of removed myself

because I hopped on Twitter and just trying to even get anywhere without seeing like people marching in the streets, dead kids, this off, this. And I'm just like, this is all trying to get me going. And I'm not going to allow it. I'm going to sit and I'm going to wait

until I get these two fine folks on. And you're talking about the complete opposite. Like if any, nobody's talking about peace in our time. Everybody's talking about we are going, and saying that you did say we'd have to fight for it. But like you're mentioning something that nobody I haven't seen yet on Twitter a single iota of that statement everybody is terrified petrified of all these things and are picking sides all over again what did i miss you didn't miss

anything Sean that's the point most people just but look look it takes a long time to see how the sausage is made takes a lot of work to see how the sausage is made in propaganda central in war party central and then see through it and go oh that's what they're doing It takes a long time to finally see the code behind the matrix. And it takes a moment of crisis. And I'm not sure where it was for Alex. I'm not even sure where it was for me. I'll be honest with you.

I keep going back over my evolution and my history of this. And I'm like, it wasn't a singular moment where all of a sudden I realized there was no spoon. Right. There was a moment. There was just a series of moments where I'm like, that that spoon doesn't look right. Like, you know what I mean? And then it would, you know, it's like, it's a process. And then eventually you go, oh, it's a train to quote the tick.

I'm, you know, nothing but an endless series of obscure pop culture references. And, oh, it's a train. And then it runs you over. And you're like, that's what's going on. And even then, it's still, there's always another layer. There's always another mechanism, always another reality behind the other one. And then I go back to why is my favorite book Philip K. Dix Ubeck? It's because this is the book that taught you that there is no consensus reality.

There is only a series of awakenings into deeper and deeper understanding with each level of understanding that you get, you, you garner into the world. That's the metaphor. And it may be the most important book ever written if people would understand the concept, you know, understand the concept, other than the received and immense wisdom of the Bible and the various religious texts, which are all a history, a metaphoric history of the planet. Right. And they're incredibly important, but from a completely different perspective. This is how the process that we're all going through, okay, is like what Phil Dick described.

in all of those novels, the Bannon High Castle, Ubeck, Thurisic Mada, Palmer, Elders. I can go through all these freaking books. They're all talking about the same thing, ballast, all of them. They're all talking about the same thing of the journey of self-discovery, of understanding, of seeing yourself here, and then I get new information, and now I'm here, and then I'm here, and then I'm here, and then I'm here, and then I'm here, and then I'm here. And it's that process. It never ends.

Just when you think you've got the world figured out, the world throws you a curbball. And what that is, and that, if there's, in my cosmology, if there's one thing that I can go, oh, that's what I believe in. If that is my God, my God is that, at the journey towards illumination of, you know, trying to figure out how the universe works. But it's also the process of submitting to the fact that, I don't know a fucking thing about how the universe works. It's both of those processes simultaneously. And a lot of the anxiety we all feel about this is because we don't have a good roadmap. We don't have anybody to help guide us through it. We don't have anybody to help us on the journey from ignorance to understanding.

Not stupidity, ignorance. Ignorance is no fault. It's just a state of being. You're smart and you're knowledgeable in some areas in the world. You're not knowledgeable in other areas. And, of course, that's your job is to try and figure out. and then keep learning things and keep in order to better understand both the world and yourself and your role in it, right?

In order to figure out what it is that your fucking birthright should be. So let me rephrase then my thought and I'll throw it at you, Alex, is peace in our time, is what gives you hope for that is what you're seeing from different people, different entities, whether it's in different countries and how they're reacting to the sausage being made, essentially in Tom's word, right? Like more people are starting to see what's going on, and so the reactions, or maybe lack there of a reaction, is starting to give you hope that peace in our time

doesn't mean in two days we get peace. It means that there's more and more forces. You mentioned bees are starting to sting them all over the place. You're starting to see more and more signs of that happening, which goes, if you play this out long enough, what comes is, well, I mean, possibly peace in our time. Am I seeing what you're throwing down? Yes, yes, you are.

That's what I meant. You know, I studied the history of how World War I and World War II justated. And, you know, it's not the way they taught us in school. They really fed us an insulting simplification that distorts the truth grossly. But, you know, today there's enough records and literature out that you can kind of make. it out. And, well, in essence, what happens is, you know, the war starts and the public opinion polarizes very quickly. And there's a willingness to go to war in the population. And there's a willingness to sacrifice, you know, not just lives and limb, but also, you know, social, economic

sacrifices, all the hardships that go along with the war to kind of, you know, like tighten your belt, to close rank behind the leadership and, you know, the priority number one becomes fighting the war, winning the war, destroying the evil enemy that wants to destroy our way of life, you know, that kind of thing. And I lived through one episode like that, which was in the early 1990s when, you know, the countries, the republics of former Yugoslavia went to war against one another. And I saw that happen. And, you know, it literally is that one day you think like, no, war is unthinkable. The next day, it's on and everybody changes on the dime.

Everybody suddenly, you know, like you can no longer have any kind of a nuanced discussion about this and that. You know, if you do, you're unpatriotic, your suspect, maybe you work for the enemy. So it becomes all black and white and it's just war, war, war. And this is exactly what I was afraid of if for any reason the tensions between Russia and the West ended up in a hot war. I thought, you know, that that kind of a process would happen again on the old continent in Europe. and then we would have a World War III, you know, the collective West, NATO, everybody against Russia, World War III, the replay of World War II with, you know, maybe tens of millions of casualties, destruction of the economy, hunger, disease, everything, everything that went along.

That's, you know, and we went to war against Russia by proxy, okay, in Ukraine. They tried the playbook, you know, because, you know, If you remember, when Russia finally launched their special military operation in February 22, we had immediately the cutoff of all the Russian sources. You know, RT were off, Sputnikov was off, no more Russian sources. You know, they were canceling courses of Russian literature in universities across Europe. They were canceling performance of Tchaikovsky and other. Russian composers, you know, picture exhibition.

It was like they really tried to create this, you know, this focus on hostility against Russia and take out everything that would maybe bring Russia closer to the people. You know, if you go to hear Tchaikovsky's swan leg, it would kind of be difficult to think of Russia is something that has no redeeming qualities whatsoever. If you read, you know, I don't know. I even think of a... Just to ask you. I even think of from the NHL standpoint, Alex.

Alex Ovechkin is closing in on the most goals of all time to beat Wayne Grexky. And they stopped mentioning his name. You know, I have it from very reliable sources that they weren't supposed to talk about Alex Ovechkin, which is a wild thought. Because he's not the one. Yeah. I mean, like, do I even need to explain it? No, but that that's where we got to is like anything Russian bad. Yes. So this, this, you know, this unified, this, this focused concerted drive towards war and hostilities just didn't work out. It's somehow dissipated. And you know, what was shocking is that the French, uh, uh,

I think the biggest French polling agent, you know, the French equivalent of Gallup poll, it's called IPOF. They ran a poll in France, I think about a week into the launch of the Special Military Operation in Ukraine. And they found that 57% of the French public actually believed Russia's justification. for this war. So it failed. And what changed? I think that, you know, the obvious answer is the internet. You know, because even in 1990s, in the early 1990s, in the former Yugoslavia, we didn't have internet, right?

The internet wasn't there yet. And so we really depended on newspapers and radio and television for our information. So for people who were involved. control and who wanted to orchestrate these wars, they had full control of the narrative. And you didn't have alternative sources, which today has changed completely. So the equation has a brand new variable in it. And we've never seen it. We've never seen humanity plus internet in action. And so I think that first of all the awareness of what is being done and how is being done and for what purpose by whom is

growing and i think that even uh this awareness is growing on the other side you know i i've been paying attention very closely to the policies of uh russian government to maybe a little bit less to the policies of Chinese government. And I see that they understand what they're doing, but at a very, very high level, they really understand what they're up against. They're not, you know, they're not buying into provocations. They're not falling for stupid gambits. And so, you know, many, many attempts to spark conflicts fail. You know, remember, When Russia intervened in Syria, then, you know, they downed a Russian Air Force jet, the Turkish Air Force, because the British Air Force, because the British wanted to bring Turkey into the Western alliance, and they wanted to break the cooperation between Turkey and Russia.

And so they they somehow arranged to have a Turkish aircraft down a Russian aircraft or a helicopter. What was it? It was an SU 24. It was an SU 24. But they did down a helicopter as well, only that was maybe a five or something. And then they also somehow got Azerbaijan to down a Russian Air Force jet. And they also destroyed a Russian passenger jet in. Ukraine. Sorry, in Egypt. Yes. And then there was the Russian Eland plane. That was the IL-72

Russian-Eland plane. Correct. Yes. And they and then that was clearly a British and or French operation. That was a British missile and that that Netanyahu, Putin and Assad had to craft a fantasy story about in order to prove that in order to say that it was a stray Syria S-200 battery that shot the plane down, even though the plane was shot down outside of the range of an S-200 missile. That's right. It's clearly about an Article 5 invocation in Syria. Yes. Go ahead.

And then we also had a series of assassination of Russian diplomats. You know, I think about nine of them were killed in a relatively, or, you know, Some of them were obviously killed. Some of them were found dead in unexplained conditions. We don't know. But, you know, one of them was a Russian ambassador to the United Nations. Yes. And well, the Russians didn't take the provocations. They didn't destroy their relationship with Turkey. They didn't destroy their relationship with Azerbaijan. They kept their eye on the ball, you know. And so it seems to me that the old playbooks are just not working anymore. And I think that this episode that we're observing now with Israel isn't working out exactly the way they planned it and wanted it.

And I think that the whole, you know, bringing a whole pile of sitting ducks into the eastern Mediterranean has been a bluff. It's been cold. And I think that I pray and I hope that the situation in Israel will, you know, mellow out, that the dust will settle, that we're going to have a different resolution of the crisis than what they planned. And that the World War III aimed at Iran, in this case, is also going to dissipate. And so, you know, everywhere they're trying to precipitate a greater war like World War I or World War II, it seems that it's failing. And I think that as these things are failing and as they lost Ukraine, the West will have to capitulate. They will have to change their ways.

And if they don't, then, you know, what's going to happen is that they're going to be overthrown by their constituencies. And we see that. You know, like we see the AFD rising in Germany. We see the Front Nacional rising in France. We see. Even Donald Tusk's party takes out law and justice in Poland. Even though that's a win for the European Union, it's a loss for the British. That's right.

Law and justice was a complete fucking British sci-op at that point. That's right. American conservative. The polls never had a good choice, by the way, in that election. They had two bad choices. Right. And then we had Slovakian elections. We had, well, we had Victoria Obama and go to Beijing and meet with Putin and Xi.

Yeah. This week. Hungary is off the reservation. And I think that now they lost their last chance of pulling any of the Arab countries back into the Western. alliance. So and then you know you have Africa rising up decolonizing you have Russia they're building you know they're gonna apparently they're gonna build a nuclear power plant in why is that what is sorry sorry fellas you know like to me I go why is it a big deal that Russia is going to build a nuclear power plant I feel like that

shouldn't be that big of a deal because because energy ties tied countries together Pipelines are like stitching in clothing. Energy access to electricity is one of the most important correlates of poverty. You remember, I think we talked on one of these podcasts that the, you know, the strategy of the Western Empire in colonizing all these nations has been to deliberately keep them in poverty so that they can never compete domestically for the resources that they export. you know, if you prevent them from developing their own industry, then there's not going to be any demand for the, for the oil, for the coffee, for the cocoa, for everything that they export. Domestically, yeah.

It's just going to go west at bottom prices, at nothing. Well, you know, illustration, uranium ore going to France for 80 cents on the 80 cents per kilo, where on the open market, it's what, $100? $200 per kilo. So that's what the way you do that is because you're not going to build them a nuclear power plant where they're going to use that electricity for themselves. And so you kept all of the global south in crushing poverty so that you can extract all of their resources at, you know, knock down prices at like cents on the dollar

and turn all of those resources into financial flows for Western. financial centers controlled by who by the western banking cartel you know it gets even worse alex when it gets even worse Alex when you think about then they went then they took us to the fucking zero bound and did infinite rehypification of that stolen fucking money yeah i mean you take uranium at 80 cents a kilogram and then you burn it to create electricity or sell it or whatever you know refine it and france exports it and all the rest of it you just you know you're just you turn it into value. You take nothing to $200x value and then you lever it up a hundred times on top of that. That's right. Yeah. So all this year is and so this year is now having to sell at market prices.

So would you so the whole thing is a house of cars that is imploding, but it's imploding all over the place. Everywhere. Africa, West Asia, Middle East, whatever you want to call it, East, East Asia. in Europe is slower, but you know, like you got populism rising and, you know, threatening to overthrow. United States is hanging on a threat. I mean, if Donald Trump walks into the White House in 2024, it's the United States is free again. It's, you know, so again, you know, like, let's just clarify. We're not talking about the conflict between the United States and the rest of the world. We're talking about the conflict.

between the empire and the rest of humanity. And by empire, we don't mean the American people, right? We mean the people who are in power behind, you know, the Wall Street and City of London Axis. Plus, you know, their European satellites, Sweden and Germany and France and so forth. If I may, what you talk about is a very human characteristic,

And it comes into, because like by holding one down, you get to be very powerful. But what you do over time is you create an enemy. They're going to hate you for it because eventually they're going to learn that you've held them down. You've taken their resources and, like, made a giant profit off of it. Meanwhile, what Russia is doing from afar, or me watching it and hearing you to talk about it with the nuclear power plant, is you're going to pull them out of poverty. And you're going to help them do it, which is going to do what? It's going to pull you together and you're going to be very tight, which means,

As they try to attack Russia, Russia's going to be like, they're going to be like, no. They literally did the opposite of what you guys did. They are now our best friend. And it'll be very hard to break that friendship as time goes on because you pulled their entire population. And being in the population, this is what Donald Trump did to the American people, is it not? Everybody says all these awful things. But anybody who lives is like, yeah, but that's not what I experienced. Actually, it's the complete opposite.

You know, for the years he was in power, how many, how many wars did he start? How like all these different things. Like proof is in the pudding. Yeah, exactly. Remember, they used to, they used to say about Donald Trump that he's going to wreck the economy and start World War III. And he kept us out of World War III and made the economy better. Because everything they say is dark projection of what they want to do. Exactly.

So, yeah, no, guys, you're, you're all got it in one here. Sean is like listening to it. This has been the argument forever. I want people to realize that Putin is an amazing study, is an amazing student of history. Putin is not stupid. Going back to what Alex talked about with the shootdown of the Russian SU24 by Turkey, by Turkey in November 2015. Now, at the time, my understanding of the situation was very small, and I did not, I knew

that the Russians weren't going to react to this, but I didn't know. And so here we are eight years later. And now I go, having read a couple of articles and had a conversation with Richard Poe, and I go, oh, the history of wars between Russia and Turkey, going back 200 years, going back to Napoleon, were created by the Brits. Like, it's not like the Russians don't know that the Brits triangulate Turkey against Russia in order to get them to fight the Crimean Wars, the this, that World War. all of this stuff. And I'm like, oh. So of course Putin is not going to react to this very crude attempt to get him, get us involved, get Russia involved in a war because he's made the, because he's spent the time with his people explaining what it is they do, what their mechanisms are. The Russian people have deep-seated racial history about how much fucking Europe hates

them. And so it's a very easy sell for him to go, look, this is just nothing new. And so all of these attempts to undermine Putin's political situation in Russia have failed because the people in the West, and I've said this many times, and I haven't said it recently, so I'm going to update everybody on this, but I've said this before and I'll say it now. The people in the West who work in these think tanks on K Street, who work at the Defense Department, who work in the State Department, who work at GCHQ, who work at all these fucking places.

They all analyze Russia from the perspective of what the tolerance for political damage would be from an American point of view. Their frame of references that are politicians of a very low threshold

of being embarrassed and they have to respond to political pressure. And so all we have to, so they think, okay, so let's put Putin in a bad situation and it'll kill his polling by 20 points.

And they do this and nothing happens. They blow up the Nord Stream pipeline and it doesn't hurt his polling. They blow up the Kurdish Ridge twice and it doesn't do anything to his polling. They shoot down, you know, a Russian plane. It doesn't do anything to his polling. Blah, blah, blah, blah. Over. And they keep thinking if we just do it often enough,

if we just keep doing the same goddamn thing that didn't work before, eventually we'll be right. No, they're just insane. No, they're just the same thing. They're just outing themselves. And in the process, Putin is literally like Ali taking in the thrill in Manila, running rope a dope on these people. Yep, yep, take another body blow.

Yep, take another body blow. Yep, no, no, no, we're good. Everything's fine. And then set in motion economic domestic trends that protect the Russian people from the worst of what the West will do to them financially and turn the table. And so we've, Alex and I have been both chronicling this and other people have as well. People like Joaquin Forays and Vanessa Bealey and the, you know, Eva Bartlett and they've all been doing this. You know, formerly the Saker used to do this.

And we've been talking about this in these terms. And I've tried to be the guy to like put it all together and go, look, this is the Russian strategy. And it looks silly. And Americans don't get it. because they analyze, because people always analyze things from their own perspective. They never flip the script, see it from their enemy's point of view, see history proper, and put it in the proper context, and then go sell it out forth and go, oh, yeah, that's not going to work.

And then you get a guy like Doug McGregor, who very astutely makes all these points and does so far more credibly and far more soberly and with gravitas that either Alex or I do it, And breaks through the noise, gets on Tucker Carlson, and 23 or 25 million views later, explains it all to everybody in the West. And everybody goes, oh, yeah, that's really fucking dumb. We're not going to beat these people. And then it gets down to, okay, so what are they going to do to get,

what would they need to do to get Putin on tilt in poker terms? what would they need to do? Well, okay, we'll keep up being mistakes. So we're going to give the Ukrainians cluster munitions to kill Russian civilians with. Because at some point, Putin is going to be forced into a moment where he has to become their Hitler for the 21st century.

That's their strategy, folks. That's all it is. Okay? And before we got there, what did he do? He turned a blind eye to whatever happens with Hamas. I just published the latest issue of the newsletter. In it, and I wrote this, I wrote my main article on this last week. In it, and it sounds, it feels almost a little passei already, but it's not.

The thrust of the article is as follows. I made an argument as to why the Israelis would want to end the and the and the and the and the and the and the and the and the Western oligarchs would want to create a false flag with Hamas in order to do exactly what we've just discussed in terms of their strategy right and order to get everybody on Israel side right on the other side of it I said but at the same time Hamas is this thing that no one really wants anymore they've everybody's invested their money and and time in Hamas but on both

sides. Netanyahu helped create Hamas. The Iranians have supported Hamas and they and they always use them as a means by which to try and get what they wanted. So you might have, as my partner, Dexter White put it, the day of the attack, day after the attack, that Iran is in a use it or lose it moment. Iran slash Russia. Because Hamas is an asset that it was rapidly reaching past its use by date. Use it or lose it, folks. And I can then construct the argument as to why they would have activated Hamas to attack Israel in a particular way. Then you fill in some other data that we get after that, that there are forces within the Israeli government who are angry with Netanyahu and want to leave him vulnerable to this attack.

And then all you have to do is just wait. And here's the thing. I don't know who did what here, but everybody was motivated to allow this attack to occur because they thought they were going to get an advantage over it. It's the same thing in the setup to the Russia-Ukraine conflict. Everybody knew exactly what was happening and why. And the reason we're so fucking angry with Putin is that he went first. Okay? But he could see it coming and everybody said, okay, we're going to turn Ukraine into this

big ugly thing and then we're going to fight and the West says we're going to fight a war of attrition against the Russians and we're going to beat their paper-tie military down because they don't have the logistics, they don't have the combined arms operations and everything else. And the Russians are saying, yeah, and we're going to run a war of attrition against the political costs of the war against the West, financial and political war against the West. And everybody said, yep, okay, let's have the war. You want the war? Let's have the war. And let's see who went. Let's see whose cuisine, for lack of a better term, reigns supreme, if you've ever watched Iron Chef, right? So this is, you know, whose war of attrition will reign

Supreme here. So this is the situation. And when you view it from that perspective, all of a sudden, we're going to let it play out. And in my mind, I know before we hit recording, I opened up, FYI for everybody, we start the conversation before Sean hits the recording button. And I come in, like breathing fire about what's going on. I did what I don't. Damn it, I didn't hit the record button fast. Well, normally I don't allow you to do that. You know this. We, hit record as soon as we go, but for whatever reason today, I didn't do it. But I was, I was, I was, I was, I was, I was, you know, all hyped up on some other insulary point. But the point is, is that, how this is playing out is that when you view it

this way, how does Putin avoid the trap of being turned into Poutler by forcing the operational tempo up on the west, by allowing the Israeli Arab conflict? to boil over and force everybody to take a side. And all of the allies that they've courted over the last 10 years have taken, have continued to take their side, which is now forcing Biden to give a 17-minute speech last night, which basically says, I hate America and we're going to fight a war that no one wants to fight, which is in every way, matter, shape, or form exactly what Putin wanted. Because that is the, this is hit up that moment where he can flip the script,

flip the foot turn the tables forced the united states to lose either a rook or a pawn either ukraine or israel because you can't have both and then let the ships fall by they may and neatly avoid the trap of further escalation in ukraine that necessitates him basically telling everybody okay you've got 48 hours to clear out because we're new king kiyat which is what he was being maneuvered into, which Alex and I were talking about when we were in Edmonton together, and we've talked about on subsequent podcasts since then, right? And this is how he neatly avoids the entire thing. Because now we're dealing with Israel because the Ukrainian offensive over the summer failed. The Russians are now counterattacking all across the northern front

and winning small strategic battles waiting for the ground to freeze. And I fully, I think the Russians are going to issue, if it's a hard winter, hard freeze this winter, I think the Russians are going to come across the Ukrainian lines and blitzkrieg them again in the north. I absolutely think there's going to be a Russian winter offensive that no one, quote unquote, is expecting. And I made me wrong about that, but that's what I'm seeing. We never expect any surprises. Well, no, we don't. But then again, but there are always, but when, But in hindsight, they're always obvious, right? Yeah.

But, you know, everything you said and everything I said a little bit before, I think, are basically rounds up the reasons why I think that we have a chance. The chance, the chance to see peace in our lifetime because this great big war machine is being ground down. this is what's going on and I understand that many people think like yeah what's the difference then you know United States is going to be taken a peg down but then

the rise of Russia and China is just like you know here's the new boss just as bad as the old boss but that's not how it is there's a difference there really is a difference and over the last over the last how long

60 years since 1946. So after World War II, the United States has launched more than 80% of all wars fought in the world. So, you know, the war machine is in the West. And similar thing about

the Great Britain. I think that Great Britain fought, I think, 80-some wars since 1946 around the world. You know, the war machine is always associated with the imperial cabal. And I think that this imperial cabal is being cut to size. Their war machine is being destroyed.

And I think that, you know, how many countries did China ever invade? very close to none. I think that historically, they attempted twice to invade Japan, but only in the periods when they were under the rule of the Mongols, of Mongol dynasties. For the rest, China didn't invade other countries.

They didn't colonize. There's a cultural difference. And Russia also, they're not exactly a very aggressive warlike nation. Well, you know, we know where the mechanism of war making comes from, and it really is coming from the financial system. And I do have this remote worry that, you know, both Russia and China have adopted the Western financial system, you know, fractional reserve lending and fiat currency. But it doesn't necessarily have to go in the direction of military expansion. You know, we, in former Yugoslavia, the government intervened in the economy as everywhere else,

but they built monuments and they built, you know, other stuff that seemed like nonsense, but, you know, that's how the system function. You have to create, produce goods that are never sold on the market. That's a different discussion. But, you know, the point being, there is a cultural difference. and it has really been the West, over the last 500 years, Western nations, Spain, France, Belgium, Britain, Holland, United Kingdom, United States, that have been the driving force behind slave trade, behind the destruction of six indigenous civilizations around the world, thousands of tribes, thousands of cultures, thousands of indigenous populations. and deep populations, the population of huge territories all around the world. India and China have been economic powerhouses during most of their histories,

and they've never done anything similar. So we shouldn't assume that grinding down this war machine in the West is just going to transfer the war machine somewhere else. It doesn't have to be that way. And so I think that within our lifetime, look at what happened in the last 20 years. It was only 20 years ago about a little bit more that, you know, these neocons proclaimed the project for the new American century, you know, full spectrum dominance. They seemed unstoppable and look where they are now. And so that's happened in only 20 years.

And they seemed unstoppable until maybe just a couple of years ago. And so where are we going to be in another 20 years? 20 years. I think we're going to be in a much, much better place. We just have to not capitulate. We have to not surrender our right to free speech, freedom of movement, freedom of enterprise. We have to stand our grounds and claim those birthrights and not relinquish them. That's the only way that they can defeat us if we just surrender and capitulate. So what's interesting, Alex, when you were talking just now, I was listening very carefully. And one of the things that I came in this morning when we sat down and I hit the ground running and Sean was like, damn it, didn't get the record button started is because of this.

There was a report yesterday from Reuters that my friend Vince Lonchi picked up on. And it said, dude. And he sent me in text to the audio text this morning. Like, dude, we were right about everything. I'm like, love it. Which is that embedded in this report about China's response to the situation. over in Taiwan and all those other stuff was one of their possible responses is to issue gold redeemable, partially gold redeemable bonds, which is the theme that I've been talking about for over

a year and a half now. And I've been saying that eventually we in the West are going to have to throw gold down on what we say, when you do that, you're throwing gold out on the yield curve, which means that you issue a 10-year note, right, at that current rates or say 5%. But you can't afford 5% because of your budget deficits. So you say, look, we'll pay you a 2% coupon, but at the end of the bond, we'll pay you 5% of the face value of the bond in gold. So it's actually worth 5% going on the price of gold rise by 50%

over the course of the 10 years of the bond, and you've made up that loss in yield. Okay? Well, interestingly enough, what I've been saying is the Fed is, you know, eventually we're going to have to do this if we want to fix the budget situation in the fiscal situation in the United States.

First, you get political control. by the fiscal conservatives, they cut spending, they stop spending all the money on the wars and everything else, they shore up the entitlement system, and then we fix the unfunded liabilities by throwing gold out on the yield curve. That happens in isolation. But here's the thing. If we don't do that, Russia and China will do it for us. Gold is moving back into the global financial system, not away from it. We have moved maximally away from gold being an integral part of the global financial system to the point where we have a Fed chairman in 2008 or nine or whatever it was getting grilled by Ron Paul who says, you know, why do we hold gold? If gold doesn't matter,

why does every central bank around the world hold it on their balance sheet? And Bernanke, the old fucking globalist piece of fucking crap that he was said, Cudition? Very sarcastically. Right. Summing up exactly what's wrong with all of these people. In Bernanke, In the donkey's case, he never spent a day in the private sector in his life. He never traded a bond. He never did a goddamn. He never had to work for anything because he was, you know, Silver Spoon, went to Harvard or wherever the fuck he went to.

Never actually had to work. His experience was from that perspective, right? As I talked about earlier about how people's perspective inform their view of how things are supposed to work. Right. Well, guess what? If gold is moving back into the financial system, then the threat of what you just talked about, Alex, about you're worried that Russia and China will adopt

the same fiat fractional reserve system that was foisted upon that we embraced here in the West, right, as an outgrowth of what actually really built the British Empire, by the way, which was the formation of the Bank of England in 1694, 329 years later, that's where we are. And so Putin and Xi understand this. Iran understands this. In some ways, Erdogan and Turkey also understands this, or he wouldn't have made gold a reserve asset for the Turkish commercial banking system after Obama threw Iran out of the SWIFT system in December or November of 2012. And then Erdogan's move after that was to make gold a reserve.

asset for Turkish banks, which what that did was that allowed them to wander Iranian, sanctioned Iranian oil sales that couldn't be handled in dollars or through Swift that they were done in gold. And the money flowed through Turkish banks. Oh, by the way, that information came out about two weeks before the issue 24 shootdown of the Russian plane over Turkey. All that stuff came out all at the same time. It was finally talked about in the real world. It's just a coincidence. It's like it's all there. It's all right in front of you.

You can understand the story. But you have to know all the primitives. And then you can see the, so to your point going way back an hour ago, Sean, he said, where are we on the story? We're at the end of Act 2. What happens at the end of Act 2? The bad thing that sends us propelled forward towards Act 3, series of progressive complications that eventually we have to overcome in order to win.

But the question is, are we, who's the hero in the story that's going to emerge to finally, you know, get Darth Vader to pick up the emperor and throw him down the well? Right. And how does Star Wars end? It ends by Luke throwing his lightsaber away and said, nope, I'm not fighting anymore. I'm not doing this. I'm not playing this game. I'm not fighting your fucking war for you. Just everything that Alex said over the last hour. so like I said stories are always metaphorically true folks and the lessons are all there and our generation learned it better than I think any other generation because of stories like that yes I'm struggling with China specifically from a Canadian viewpoint because in our Canadian society

China has been influential have been but messing around with elections, that type of thing? Is that just part of what they do? Because you mentioned Alex, they haven't invaded anywhere, but it's just a different type of, I don't know, is it warfare, is it influence? It is warping. And so.

But the question is, it's like everything else, Sean, are the Chinese willing to go to World War, or are they laying the groundwork for a grand negotiation? That question is up to us, not them. we continue to fight. I've used the metaphor before that the people we're dealing with are like dogs or children have never had any boundaries put on them. And eventually, you know, you've got an out of control dog that is, you know,

doesn't know how to submit because it was never taught that it needs to submit to anybody else's authority. There's a submission, a very big theme here. And so eventually, if you want to get the dog under control, you've got to take your hand, you got to place it on the dog's fucking chest, and you've got to put the dog down until it stopped scratching your arm and trying to bite you and all the rest of it until it finally just goes, all right, fine, I give up.

You are, okay, you're in charge. You're the alpha dog, right? We are the alpha dog, folks, in that metaphor. We have the power to make these people submit, but we have to understand the mechanism by which we do so. We don't do so by fighting them. We do so. by going, you know what, we're not doing that.

We're not playing that game. You want my house? Come here. Find a sheriff's officer who will enforce that eviction notice. Go ahead. I know Charlie. He's not throwing me out of my house. He's going to show up with this stupid eviction notice.

I'm going to invite him in. We're going to have coffee and we're going to laugh about it. And he's going to go home. Because, you know, my daughter and his daughter are friends. This is the world that they can't map. Okay. This comes back to when, I've been quoting this a lot, Tom, lately. You know, when you're talking about World War III or just in general of tough times, what do you do?

And I've heard you say it lots, and I've heard others say it. You aren't the only one. And it talks about community. You need to build the community because if you don't have community, you got nothing. You know, you got nobody to rely on. You got nobody to go to bat for you. And in a large sense, you true are trying maybe, and maybe I'm just, just dense on this side, folks, are trying to say, is Russia, is it possible what you're saying

is Russia is building community on a world stage? I mean, a really messed up way. I mean, and parts and other parts, not so much. Is that question for me? I have no idea. I'm literally just making, I'm just making a, I'm listening to you. And I'm going, on the smallest sense, Tom's saying they can't come and get him because he has community built.

That's what he's saying is if you have a community that protects you, they're going to protect you. here's the gig. I had my mic on purpose, Alex. It was your turn. Sure. I see. Well, you know, I honestly, this is a new thought for me. I don't know, I don't know what to think about it, but I think that there is a, there isn't an angle to it. And I think that, you know, Russia has been dealing with a lot of countries in a way that's very different from the way the West has been dealing with them. You know, the West is all all about, you have to do this, you have to do that. coercion, color revolutions, sanctions, assassinations, things like this. All stick, no carrot. Sorry? All stick, no carrot. Yeah, all stick, no carrot.

Russia is going around the world with carrot. And one thing that nobody would dispute, nobody in the know would dispute that if Vladimir Putin gives you a word on a deal, you make a deal with him and he says, like, okay, we're going to do this. He keeps his word. Everybody knows this. And once you know that a person is going to keep his word, that you can rely on that word,

then you think, like, I can work with these people. I can cooperate. Whereas the West has done a very, very big disservice to itself because we have shown ourselves incapable of ever honoring our word. and we break it the minute it becomes more convenient in the short term to break it. So people think like, what's the point of signing any contracts, signing any treaties with you guys? When you're going to turn around on us and renege on it the minute that it's more convenient to you to do so? So I think that in this sense, maybe you're right.

You know, maybe there is like a community of nations emerging that say to themselves, we can work with the Russian side and with the Chinese, but we can't really work with the West in the same way. And so, you're not going to break all the bridges on day one, but you're definitely, you know, when Blinken or Joe Biden come to meet with you and they tell you, well, we want you to break the relationship with the Russians and the Chinese, they say, sorry, we don't want to do that. Right.

It, it, we, it, our long-term interests are to build bridges with countries that we can work with, that we can cooperate with constructively for a mutual benefit. And sorry, but it's easier to work with those guys than it is to work with you guys. And so we're not breaking those bridges. Right. Interesting, Alex, as you were saying this, again, it calls up. If there's a theme that I've been, I'm trying to get out here, everybody is that illumination happens over time. So remember back to when, again, I'm just like going through, so FYI, I was never, I wasn't a geopolitical expert. You know, I didn't come out the womb this way,

right? I didn't learn, I didn't know all this shit. I learned it slowly over time. And I remember a seminal moment for me. And there's always these like these little moments that you can go back to and go, that was a turning point, that was a turning point. That was a turning point. And here's one for you. When Vladimir Putin in a speech, somewhere around, I want to be a turning point, to say was in 2015. I think it might have been at his before he went to the UN. I think it might have been at like spief, SBEIF or Valdai that year or whatever. He used the phrase and the saker, Andre, parse this speech. And I'll never forget this. And I'm in forever in Andre's debt for this. He said, because he was Russian, because Andre, he was Russian, is Russian, and

parsed the Russian phrase used. He said, there's two ways in Russian to say the word, the phrase. not agreement capable. Putin used a very specific instruction, construction that implied do not want or intend to keep their agreements, as opposed to someone who's not capable of honoring their agreements because of circumstance, meaning they don't have the assets on the other side to, they want to, they intend to keep their agreement, but they don't have enough money,

as opposed to the people who have the money, the money and never intend to, so they enter into, in a contract law terms, that's called a contract of adhesion, where you enter into an agreement where one side is a superior partner to the other has superior rights, rights within, and that's a fun to the other, and that's a fundamental abrogation of contract law going back to the fucking Magna Carta, right? Putin invoked that term to describe the West, not in specifically the United States, the West, And he always makes a distinction between America, the Anglo-Saxons, and the Europeans in his speech. Again, he's very precise with his language.

So that was a moment for me when, oh, we will never honor our agreements with the Russians. And the Russians understand this. So since then, you hear Putin talk. And he says, who am I supposed to go to and talk to in the West to negotiate peace over Ukraine? There is no one. the president changes every four years the state department undermines the president when you do get a good president like Donald trump i can't even if he wants to be agreement capable no one else in the government system in the in the in the west wants to be you know wants to honor his deals so i can't make a deal with trump i'd like to but i can't

and so that just speaks to alex's point that on the it was as as follows This is the situation. So, of course, if Putin has that mindset, and even if you believe that he's just, you know, he's just, you know, a Russian version of Don Corleone, which is a fair way of looking at Putin, remember that Don Corleone himself believed in respect, believed in all of those things.

And even he does run Russia as a big mafia boss because maybe that's this the only way you can run Russia in the 2020s. I'm not casting stones here. I'm just saying this is the way you can look at it. You can see Putin that way, but then also understand that it's important that if Putin is going to advocate for Russia on the world stage to fight for his, you know, his, his mafia family,

that he's going to do so by honoring all of his agreements. And that drives the mendacious, evil fucking sociopaths in the West completely fucking baddie because he cuts a deal, he honors the deal. He stands with his people, he stands with the people he made deals with. And then you've, you see moments where after, you know, when Erdogan goes to Moscow, after the coup attempt against Erdogan in 2016, and there's a very famous picture of Erdogan of all freaking people hugging Vladimir Putin.

Because it was Vladimir Putin who tipped off Erdogan's people. We know now that the coup against him was being run by the CIA out of Inserlich, the air base, and tipped him off, got him smuggled into Iran so that he survives. And then Erdogan could marshal his counter forces to stop the army. coup and so what happens he goes to moscow what a month later to have a meeting with had a tete tete with putin and ensures that mr like uber freaking sunni muslim runs the muslim world the sunni muslin world hugs vladimir putin this story was over then folks yeah yeah so yeah yeah excellent excellent tom the i'm

I'm glad you brought that up because that was another extremely important moment, the attempted coup against, against Erdogan and how it failed. And it did fail, right? That was, that was huge. That was huge. Yeah. Then may have been. There's been like six other attempts against him. And they all fail.

Just, sorry, Alex. Go ahead. No, no, no. No, no. I was done. I was done. However, however, however, however, I wanted to go back to something that Sean brought up, and that is China. Okay. So here's, you know, I don't know about China as much as I know about Russia, okay, because I started, you know, researching and analyzing all things Russian probably about, you know, eight, seven, eight years ago.

Here's what I think about China nevertheless. I'm going to render a lower resolution picture. but it's probably not far from right. So China until about, you know, in the 1970s, I think that China was still, if not the poorest nation in the world, it was one of the poorest nations in the world. China endured a century of humiliation. And then it endured the, you know, the communist period. Well, you know, they're still under communist party rule,

but it's, it's, this is very different from the, you know, the, the, the legacy communism that they had in the aftermath of World War II with, with Chairman Mao in charge with the cultural revolution and all that. China has risen back to power, but they face enemies in the West. And I think that they understand where the century of humiliation came from, what it was, what dynamic led to it and where it originates. And I think that they have resolved to destroy the source of that. And the source of that is the thing that we often mention, the undead British Empire.

And I think that Canada is, you know, one of the five eyes and a very important piece of the puzzle of the British Empire. And so I believe that the Chinese have long ago, decades ago, started to infiltrate the structures of power in the West, including Canada, United States, Australia, New Zealand. And they have also systematically infiltrated the academic world and the cultural world, because those are all very important parts of the equation. And I think that they have also sought systematically to corrupt certain politicians. And it's, you know, when you give preferential business relationships to Hunter Biden and, you know, by extension to his father, and when you identify rising democratic

candidates for various offices, for Senate, for, you know, in terms, Intelligence Committee and so forth. Eric Swalwell, Diane Feinstein, John Kerry, Nancy Pelosi, and you offer them preferential deals. You corrupt them, in other words. You are gaining leverage over them because, you know, we somehow learn that all these people are corrupt. But the Chinese have the receipts. So they have a leverage over them.

And I think this is not because they want to invade United States or Canada and subdue them militarily and to turn all the Canadians or all the Americans into their slaves. Because, you know, the Chinese have never done anything of the sort anywhere. And, you know, also if let's say, the Chinese wanted to conquer a territory, if they had territorial pretensions, also they never had historically. You know, what would be a more obvious place to invade? You know, maybe Mongolia, maybe Australia, you know, a place where there's not much population,

not much defense, and a large territory, if that were the case, which it is not. But, you know, for arguments sake. Last place they would want to invade would be the United States, where there's a gun behind every trash can, right? So, you know, why? Why would you do that? So it's not, it doesn't make sense. But what does make sense is that the oligarchy who's in charge, the oligarchy who has caused them the century of humiliation,

are sensing that they're coming for them. And so what they want to do, what they would want to do ideally is to try to orchestrate a war against China. You know, the West against China, you know, United States, Canada, Great Britain, France, everybody, let's go kill China. And so I think that for this reason, you're getting a lot of fear of China being constantly pumped into the system, into the information flow. So you keep hearing this Chinese styles. social credit system, Chinese-style censorship,

Chinese Communist Party. You know, like you keep hearing these sound bites of China glued to something really bad, something that nobody wants, so that everybody perceives that the danger is coming from China. You know, the fentanyl, the fentanyl, you know, is killing Americans, the fentanyl. I honestly, I haven't seen yet any evidence.

that China is smuggling fentanyl to for junk, you know, fentanyl is a legitimate, well, not really legitimate, but it's a legal part of certain painkiller drugs that are sold in pharmacies and prescribed by doctors. So I try to ask people, what fentanyl are you talking about? Are you talking about the, the material that they turn into pills into into like this oxycontin and other painkillers, is that? Or are they dealing drugs on the street to junkies and trying to hook little children onto this fentany? Which is it? No, it's just a sound bite that's being thrown out there and there's no context to it. There's no evidence. There's no, it's just like fear of China, fear of China, fear of China, fear China, fear China, fear China.

It's like China, China, China, China, China. it was Russia, Russia, Russia. Before that, it was evil Muslims, evil Muslim. And so it seems to me that the fear of China is being pumped deliberately. And I also, you know, like I also saw a podcast. I didn't watch the whole thing. But it was some US intelligence agent who is telling everybody that, you know, like the Chinese are using these, how do you call it, these waves of migrants.

coming through the southern U.S. border. And there's all these Chinese military people who are going in there. And I'm thinking, what? Where are they going? What? If 100,000 Chinese got smuggled in there, if a million Chinese got smuggled in there, military-aged men, what the hell are they going to do?

They're all going to die if they try to, like, I don't know, overthrow the American government. Like, what is this? It's nothing. It's just fear of China being, pumped into the, you know, they're laying the groundwork for the next mass formation psychosis. Okay. And I, you know, if this was the real danger, I would say, let's look into it. But if you ask for evidence, nobody turns up any. It's just sound bites and it's fear.

but at the same time it's not you know like I began this by telling that the Chinese are going in there they are infiltrating the systems of power culture academia and so forth they are trying to buy up the media and so forth but the Chinese are not going after Canadian people they're not going after the American people

they're going after the oligarchy who have inflicted the century of humiliation on them. And the communist China, the Mao's China, Mao was Volodymyr Zelensky, because Mao was a Yale man. He was recruited and empowered and funded by the elite around the Skull and Bon Society at Yale. And he was the publisher of,

some newsletter that was that was published from Yale in China I don't I forget exactly what the organization was called but you know this is all this is all on record this is this is this is this is this is real so he was in a way in a way he was he was the West's the Vladimir Zelensky so not a not the same animal as Xi Jinping no So, you know, I would say let's not fear China until clear evidence to the contrary is presented. And meanwhile, you know, I think that it's a good thing that these Western, not elites, these parasitic oligarchies actually have an enemy that can take them down.

And I think that at the moment in this world, that's only Russia and China. So when I... With Iran giving that, with Iran forming the third leg in the tripod. Because the Iranians, again, these are all civilizational powers. Yes. Not system powers. Correct. Correct. And the difference being is that Russia, China, Iran are civilizations that have lived under many, many, many different systems.

But the core of what makes China, China, Russia, and Iran, Iran doesn't change. They can adopt different systems in order to meet the needs of the day and then dispense with them when they're no longer needed. When you were talking about that, Alex, what came to mind is, you know, the title of the article by Richard Poe that got me to reach out to him to have him on my podcast, which was how China created communism. blamed it on the Jews. Oh, not China. The British. The British. Sorry.

Let me, okay, let's back up. Let me try again. Richard Poe writes the article that says how Britain created communism and blamed it on the Jews, just like how Britain created George Soros to help create the European Union. Okay. Because the goal there was to get rid of Margaret Thatcher, who was against the idea of the, UK joining the European Union. Now, when you do, when you, when you, when you do that analysis and then you,

and then I did not know this about Mao, that's very interesting because that makes now perfect sense that they would create that guy in the same way that U.S. bankers backed Hitler's rise to power and, you know, and blah, blah, blah. And there's many, many, many angles on this. And none of these stories that we're throwing out here are the complete story. Okay. These stories, These moments in history are incredibly complicated. Okay. They're incredibly complicated. But what we're trying to do here is help add facets to the story

so that you're not looking through this glass and seeing one or two potential outcomes. You put some light in and then you split it and you get, you know, two outcomes. it's a prism. You get a spectrum. It's that cover of dark side of the moon, folks. Okay. It's it's sending light through a perfect diamond and it blows up into a kaleidoscope of colors and you know, looking into a diamond. You see all the facets. The history is complicated. Humans are messy. Okay. But what you never should ever underestimate is the through line of desire to create a particular outcome, which has animated particular people for hundreds of years because this is their perspective,

and their perspective is as follows. We've run the world for 500 years, and God, by God, we have a goddamn right to do so. And who are all these fucking brown and yellow people to tell us that we're not allowed to do so, or are these upstart colonists over in the United States to think that they now run the empire. They don't. We run the empire. So go back and think about what we brought up earlier about collateral. And sub-Saharan Africa and how that's fueled the French and the Portuguese, old French and Portuguese money.

And then the British and how they still have a huge influence in India. And why all of a sudden, everybody, like we went through this wave where they were installing, women everywhere around the world in order to ensure that they got particular outcomes, right, for women to advocate against really dumb public policy because women are built differently than the men, and they fight wars differently than men, they fight political battles different than men, and then all of a sudden notice how there's like all of these unreconstructed Indians everywhere. Rishi Sunak, Vivek Ramoswami, the guy who ran Twitter, the guy who, you know, the guy who's running Microsoft.

You can go through the entire thing. And now, Nikki, now they want to give us Nikki Haley. Like, there's something here. The hand of the British Empire is very deep. And, you know, there are a lot of people. And this is something that Narendra Modi in India has to fight constantly. He's got a lot of people within traditional, within Indian society who were still angry that the Brits were kicked out because they were on the take.

They were part of the viceroy system. You know, they were part, you know, they were part of the whole colonial, you know, infrastructure. And they benefit from it. And their families benefited from it. And they're effectively, for all intents and purpose, unreconstructed British colonizers. Yeah. Same way that we have best.

of them here in the United States. Same way that you have messages of them in Canada. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Okay? And they're the dogs that refuse to submit. They're the people that get activated. They're the ones that, you know, get the phone call and they have the meeting and they have, you know, and all the shit that Stanley Cooper is trying to warn us about in all of his freaking movies.

When all the best people would congregate at the Overhook Hotel or, you know, at the, at the orgy and eyes wide shut. It's all right there, folks. It's all in front of you. Okay? Like we've been trying, people have been trying to illuminate this process for decades. Decades. You told me once, Tom, and I want to say this is the first time I ever talked to you. I was, and we were talking very early on about World War III.

And what you framed was when the Giants fight avoid the feet, right? avoid getting stepped on. So now the more I get into this conversation, the more I hear you too go, I'm like, okay. So as they see their enemy in the oligarchs and whether it's Russia, China, Iran, and they have the common enemy in they're fighting, the thing this common folk is, is there's going to be all these offshoots of problems that come through society now because of what they're doing to one another. And this is where people such as you two that stare at these problems and break it down for people and try and make them make sense. sense of all this, try and help us avoid the feet. Because the feet, you know, you literally think it's a bullet in the head, but it can be a financial bullet in the head. It can be food shortages.

It can be all these different things, correct? Yes. So where we sit right now with what's going on, Israel, everything. Oh, God. Us common folk. It's your turn, dude, because this one's too big. Go for it, man. I don't know. I have many thoughts on this, but I want to hear what Alex has to say first.

No, Sean, go ahead, finish. Well, my, my, my thought is, you know, like everyone thinks what's happening in Israel, in Palestine, or Russia, Ukraine, leads to me going to war and physically going to water, children physically going to water, and us, empty in the population, World War III physical. But actually what's playing out right now through what COVID did was, you know, interest rates are up, inflation's up, all these different things that nobody was talking are up. I mean, people were talking about it. And it's death by a thousand cuts in a different way. That's a different version of the foot stomping on you while the giants fight it out and, you know, supply shortages. And business owners have their own things. They're staring at and going like, this is, what are we doing here?

And all these different things that are coming down the pipe. And what people are always looking for is answers. What's coming in the near future and how can I avoid it? What are they coming in the near future? And I don't know how big or how small you want to go. But as they clash, what are the vibrations or what are the calamities that are going to come and face us up here in Canada? Or, you know, everyone. And the other thing is about it is everybody else has their time frames on it, right?

Europe might feel it first and we can see it. how is that going to impact us over here and I just pretty much I didn't narrow it down because I don't know how to narrow it down I'm trying to but I'm like it's it's an overarching big giant like this is what's going on how do we narrow it down so people can protect themselves that's why Tom always talks about community build a community look out for one another you say protect your family when it comes to that protect them but don't put your family as the state because they don't give a shit about you. That's why you talk about it that way. So when I sit here and I, you know, where we sit

today, Israel, Palestine. This is real. This is actually happening. People are dying. All these different world powers are clashing all over again. How is that going to come home to roost for the West or for Canada? I don't know. I don't know how to put it in a more like clear but really wide question. I think that we have enough precedent through history. to kind of be able to gauge our expectations, you know. So, you know, there is going to be a rise in authoritarianism. Well, we already have that. It's not a new thought.

We will have economic crisis of unemployment, probably shortages of stuff, probably shortages of money. And it's going to take. a period of time for the crisis to unravel completely and for real political changes to happen so that, you know, society can reform and rise up. I think I couldn't agree more. By far, the most important thing that people can do is to reach out, cultivate the bonds of trust and cooperation within their local community. I think that's the biggest way in which you can build up resilience to your setup.

Other thing, yeah, and then, you know, like if whatever you have to make yourself useful to that local community, we'll do that, you know, hone up those skills, whatever it be. If you know how to fix cars, if you know how to fix leaky roofs, if you know how to teach children, how to play piano, whatever, whatever it be, be prepared to do that in exchange for things that you might need tomorrow. If there's no food, if there's no, if there's no, how do you call it, money and jobs? Then food-wise, well, I think you want to have some reserve. I think you want to learn how to preserve and ferment fresh vegetables, you know, fermented fresh vegetables are very, very nutritious. They're full of probiotics, which are extremely important for your immune

system, rich in vitamin C and so forth. So that you want to know how to fish, you want to know how to hunt, you want to know how to raise chickens and so forth, things like that, or you want to be in a community with people who know how to do that and be useful to that community. Maybe you want to have a little bit of gold and silver for trade or bribing corrupt government officials, if need be. I think that you don't want to regard this as like an investment opportunity to make a fortune because when shit hits the fan, you know, we saw in 1930s that the FDR administration made it illegal for Americans to own gold. that meant that you were not able to use gold. So you couldn't freely trade. And they, you know, like they had harsh prison sentences to punish people who traded against gold.

So you don't want to go overboard. You just want to have it in case something that's going to hold value. I think you want to, I think you want to, I think you want to, I think you want to, I think you want to, scale back your overhead, you know, make sure that your life expenses are tolerable and flexible enough that you can scale back without, you know, going and ending up homeless or sleeping in your car. And what else? I can, you know, on that point, if you do, it's interesting, I saw something yesterday and I tweet, I think it was yesterday and tweeted it out. It might have been Wednesday about an article on zero.

Arrowhead about the new Hooverville, which are now RV parks. And people are just parking RVs along the side of the road. And I said, this is a very interesting article because it's actually telling you that now communities are spontaneously forming around homeless people who are now living in RVs. And now all of a sudden you have all these people, different political backgrounds, different circumstances and everything else forming new communities. Right. And actually, after I tweeted that out, I had a patron reach out to me and say, this is why I've been. thinking about buying an RV park, not because I think that RVs are going to be that vacationing and traveling around the country, but as literal kind of hotels or, you know, and that the condominium

complexes effectively, right? Charge rent for people to, you know, hold their RV and live and live in their RV in my park. And I'm like, yeah, it's not a bad business model. Right. Yeah. And I think, Tom, too, like, I think there's a lot of people that COVID, really shocked them to where they aren't beholden to stay in their area anymore. And they want to go find their community. They're like, where is it? I'm going to go find it. And the nice thing about an RV is it gives you the ability to go find it.

It's funny, you know, my wife gets mad at me because I have a problem with cars. And hi, my name is Tom and I have a problem with cars. But, you know, we're also at a kind of a place for the first time in our lives where we, We can afford to not have to just think about buying the least we can afford or whatever. We can actually think about, you know, getting something nice. I'm still not nothing, you know, crazy. But I've been thinking in terms of, you know, wanting to go. You and I've talked about this when I was in Edmonton.

Sean was like wanting to go around the country. And like, you know, once my daughter graduates high school in June, Camille and I will be free to, you know, kind of go about and do our thing. And maybe we'll, you know, just. And so I've been looking at, okay, so get a, you know, get a nice big comfortable. thing to drive around and go see the world that I write about all the time, which is one of the things I would love to do. And then also be able to then show up, you know, and meet the people who's that community that I've curated, right, which is my patronage. And meet them, galvanize them, be a focal point for them, you know, do what this is what I can do, right?

I can do that. And at the same time, folks, you know, when we get done with this podcast, I'm going to get done with this. I'm going to shut down the recorder. And because it's Friday night and it's now the fall, I'm going to run down to my brand new local butcher shop, and I'm going to buy a whole bunch of frigging steaks and sausages for the weekend to grill out back around the fire pit I bought last week to ensure that we have stuff to do, and we make sure that we don't just come home, you know, have everybody come home from their day and everybody hive off behind their device and not talk to each other.

Like, this is important, right? And, you know, it's what's, what's, important. These are the things that are ultimately important. And I'm over the moon. I've got a butcher shop. I told Jim Kunstler this the other day on my podcast. And he was like, dude, really? I haven't heard of a butcher shop opening and like ever. I'm like, yeah. In my little hometown in North Florida, we have a, you know, it's just the little things that you're seeing. Right. Those are the things. And Alex brought all that stuff up. So, you know, we're bringing it down back down to what we talked about earlier, which is that it's about individuals first and what you need. I've inspired locally,

you know, other patrons to start, you know, group disaster preparedness groups. And we, and they meet once a month over at a local church. And, you know, we've come in, we've gone in a couple of times and been part of the meetings and, you know, told people not to raise goats because it's expensive unless you're going to make it your lifestyle and all the, all the things that go along with all this stuff. And it's, but the skills are there, you know, the ability to be, a mentor is there like you know think about it you know remember you know we used that we think we still do here in the united states we have something called score right which is a basically a society of old entrepreneurs that teach young entrepreneurs and get them access to you

know and teach them how to be to start new businesses and get that's awesome capital and funding and all this stuff right we've had this in in the united states for years and and i'm like score needs to be a thing because we need tool and die shops. I say this all the time. We need car repair shops. We need all this stuff, right? We need these basic things. Like, we're going to get to a point where, you know,

we have to ask the fundamental questions. Like, why don't we build screws in the United States? Why don't we build nails? Well, it's funny you mentioned screws and nails because this morning, like I said, we were talking right off the hop about my brother being down in Florida and him coming to visit again and different things. And one of the things we got talking about is in our lifetime, you can listen to the old boys talk about not being, you know, for nails,

like on the farm taking like spikes and bending them back in the shape and reusing them. Because whether it was, you know, it was gas cost too much, living out on the farm to drive to town to go buy 25 nails or whatever it was, back in World War II, my father's neighbor got put in an internment camp because he was of German background. And so the story that was being told this morning was that they needed a hired hand to help run the farm.

And in order to help run the farm, they paid with tires. And you're like, think about that. That's within the last 100 years. And that's where you got to. So when you, I chuckle, you know, when both, the matter where I go and no matter how many conversations, I have, come back to this idea of community and talking to one another and fostering that. And it doesn't, it's not this grandos idea. Certainly there's financial things and, and talents and working on skills and can you start a garden tomorrow and blah, blah, blah, blah.

But this idea of community and working with one another is such a simple idea. It's almost underwhelming. I mean, except for when you're a part of it, it's a big to do. It's like a basic revolutionary thought. Oh, my God, talk to your neighbors. Yeah. Yeah. Here's one for you, right?

I'm in negotiations with my neighbor to sell her some property. She came and asked, you know, she texted and said, you know, would you be interested? And I'm not using a lot of my land anymore because I'm, now 55. When I was 35 and I bought this place, I had all these grand-de-guess ideas about what I was going to do with the property that I had out here. My life has not gone the way I've expected it, but she's younger, and she has a clear need for that land. And I don't. And I love the idea, not just because I'm going to get the money for it, and the land is appreciated and value and

blah, blah, blah, blah. That has nothing to do with it. It's because after having sat down with her and chatted with her about what her plans were, it was very obvious that what she was. It was very obvious was doing was helping to buttress my property because he's going to use that land he's going to prosper she's going to build something that's there we have a stronger community bond in my little neighborhood in the middle of nowhere and you know it's a win-win for everybody i unlock value for my property she unlocked value for herself she gets to do the things that she and her you know her significant other one to do and like and they can go and they've got the skills the energy and the time to do the things that they want to do and all i'm doing is squatting on this property that's

actually benefiting nobody in any way matter shape or form you see i i think i see that about and i'm like and i told her flat out i said we get an appraisal and i'll just i'll take the appraise price like i'm not going to it's the negotiation was whatever it is i'm good i don't care and I'm not going to sit here and play the game for an extra couple hundred dollars an acre. I don't give a shit because to me, the benefit of selling her that property outweighs the amount of money I'm going to get for the property. You see, Tom, I love that you share this story because it highlights something really important that, you know, like in this new world that's coming our way where, you know, people are going to be living in a, in a in a in a tighter uh arrangement with their local community the logic inverts because you know once upon a time you wanted to be the big guy in the neighborhood with the biggest house and

the biggest lot and the the nicest car right so you kind of like thought yeah it would be it will be good if my neighbors were less well off than i am then i'm you know my status is here but when you're when the arrangement is genuine, you know, bottom up people to people, then you're actually better off if your neighbors are well off as well. You know, because, you know, she's going to be doing something that one day might be a job for your daughter or, you know, like maybe you're going to be buying stuff off of her. Or maybe if she's prosperous, she's going to be able to buy stuff off of you that you make.

You know, so everybody's better. off is everybody if everybody's better off this comes back to these two mentalities on the world just played out on a local sense if you hold somebody down they resent you for it and eventually you're overturned like toppled whereas if you foster like everyone if we support everyone and help them come up together they'll support each other and it'll foster that idea throughout your group is that you're looking out for one another instead of trying to screw one another over you can imagine how I'll give me a perfect example

of, you know, we live back a private road, right? We live on a private easement. Our whole neighborhood back here is a private easement off a county road. We live in the middle of North Florida and nothing. And there's a county road that feeds. And then the access road for the entire area back here, a couple hundred acres worth of, you know, sparsely populated, that's sparsely populated with a house to here and house there. Everybody's on five and ten and 15 acre tracks or whatever. But that access road, no one was paying to maintain. So it was eating up our cars. It was destroying our cars and everything else.

It made it, like, if you didn't own a car, if you didn't own a truck, you didn't get back here. Right. Which in some ways, like, to me, I'm like, yes, absolutely. I don't want people back here. But at the same time, after a while, I'm like, this is more expensive for me to maintain my cars than it is to fix the road. So what did Camille and I do? I was finally reasonably flush with some money. The first thing I did, like, I'm not particularly good at me talking to my neighbors and, you know, doing anything else.

But I can throw some money on the table to get the road fixed. And so what we did was I just told me, I was like, I'm willing to put five or six grand on the table. Let's find out what we can get from the rest of the, from the rest of the neighborhood. Everybody pledges what they can pledge. And we'll get the road fixed. And I'll cover the rest of the cost. And that's that. Done.

With a focus on the part of the road that I use, sure, but that was also the worst part, which was the part that everyone used, like 800 feet worth of road, which is absolutely awful. I'm like, it's all it is. But the county can't do it because it's a private road. We're not going to turn the road, the whole area over to the county because then we would have to change the way our easements work. We'd have to do all this other work. And it's just cheaper just to fix the road.

And so what did we do? Camille went and did it. She knocked on everybody's door. She went around, talked to everybody, raised about half the money. We put it the other half in. We called, you know, we called my friend who would be the general contractor on the job. We got the job done. And then, and now I pay every once in a while to have that same friend come out who does tractor work.

And I let hunt my property for free who gives me and he likes to hunt deer but not eat deer. So he hunts my property. I get the deer. If that isn't a win-win, man. I don't charge him to hunt on my property. He gets to teach his kids, which is very important to him, how to hunt. And he does tractor work and operator work. And it's all, it all works.

And then I have him come out every once in a mile with this box blade to, you know, to scrape and regrade the road. I'm like, and every once in a while I go, oh, it's about that time. It's the end of the summer. The dry season's here. It's time to call my friend, have him come out, dump a couple couple loads of lime rock on the road and the driveway will slowly but surely will fix my long ridiculous driveway we'll fix we'll bring the road up to the reasonable level so that eventually

the road will no longer wash out from the rain and everything is good slowly but surely over time we make the we make our lives back here better and all because I selfishly don't want to drive through potholes and I have the means by which thanks to my patrons thanks to the community that I've curated thanks to all the work that they do on a regular basis to keep me engaged and me operating at the top of my game. Y'all are around the world are helping to make my community, my little slice of heaven better. Thank you. And in return, Tom, you doing what you do makes their piece of heaven better. Right?

That's the essence of it. Folks. Yeah. man this has been and anybody putting up a fucking toll booth between you and that is the enemy and guess what they do

all they ever do is put up toll boots and say nope you didn't build that and you owe me 10% no it's no different than you know the king's highway man and all the rest it's all it is it's the same shit over and over and over again and all we have to do is start to say no I appreciate

you know it's funny every time I step in the the proverbial ring with you two and sit here and do this. You know, I like to think that I maybe have improved a slight amount, who knows. But regardless, every time at the end, I'm like, man, where did the two hours go? One, two, I'm like, I don't know what the heck.

We covered a full freaking gambit of things. And we never talk about what I think we're going to talk about. We fall down these, like, rabbit hole trails where I'm like, where are we going? And then we tie it all the way back around. And it always, I just chuckle about community because, you know, I was just saying the other day, and I believe this morning, how important just community is. And whether you noticed it or not, you've become a part of my community.

And certainly the show looks forward to when you guys come on every single time. We probably don't get to near enough of what they want you to talk about. But one of the things we're going to try out today as I close it off is we're going to post it on substack. So me and they've been on Patreon. and I've been having the conversation with my audience, my community, about moving away from Patreon and putting it on to Substack.

And so we're going to try it out. So for people wanting to follow along with the final portion of what I'm going to do with Tom and Alex, it's going to be a couple questions from the audience. We're going to close it off here, and we're going to try it out on Substack. And it's going to be free on Substack for just the first one,

just to see, we're playing out this idea. And so if you want to hear the last couple minutes, head over to Sean Newman podcast substack. Sean with a you, somebody was spelling it with a W earlier. They text me. I'm like, what are you looking for? They're like, Sean Newman podcast. They spelled it with a W.

I'm like, well, your first problem is it's you, and that probably won't find it. But if you want to hear the last couple, yeah, my parents wanted to have fun with S-A-U or S-H-A-U. And, you know, like, even I'm like, man, why not the W? Either way, guys, appreciate you hopping on. And to the audience, if you want to listen to a couple more minutes, It's substack is where you can find us. Hope you sign up and all that good stuff. And we'll see how this goes.

But either way, Tom, Alex, thanks for becoming part of this community and enlightening us with your thoughts on what you see from afar. Thank you, Sean. It was a great pleasure, as always. No, absolutely did. I'm happy to do it whenever you want. Happy to do it.