Shaun Newman Podcast - #553 - Tom Luongo & Alex Krainer

Episode Date: December 21, 2023

We discuss the new movie Leave the World Behind, Argentina election, COP28 and pirates in the Red Sea.Tom 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/shaunnewmanpodcastE-transfer here: [e-mail] Website: https://silvergoldbull.ca/Email: [e-mail] [phone] – general sales line, ask for Grahame and be sure to let us know you’re an SNP listener.

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For more information, visit them at Hancock, Petroleum.com. The first is a dairy goat farmer, libertarian, former research chemist, and publisher of the Gold Goats and Guns podcast and newsletter. The second, a Croatian national, former hedge fund manager, author, and contributing editor at Zero Hedge. I'm talking about Tom Luongo and Alex Traynor. So buckle up, here we go. Welcome to the Sean Newman podcast.

Of course, I'm joined by Tom Luongo, Alex Craneer. Boys are back. Thanks for joining me, guys. Thank you for having us. Good to be with you again, Sean. It's been a while. Okay. I want to start here because this has been nothing but the chatter.

I've been talking to so many people about this. The leave the world behind starting like Ethan Hawk and, you know, a whole cast of characters, Julia Roberts probably being the headliner. Anyways, but that isn't the story. The story is Barack and Michelle Obama have executive produced the film an adaptation through their company, Higher Ground Deal, a Higher Grounds deal with Netflix, their first foray into a scripted drama and as director sam asmel revealed in a recent interview with fanny fair the former potus also had valuable input into the content of the script offering his real life expertise on how

a widespread widespread crisis scenario might actually occur so tom Alex have at her because um you know is it predictive programming is it what is it tom i i could see you squirming over there it's beyond okay so we all know what predictive programming is we all know what we all have we all heard the phrase revelation of the method. I just got done doing like two hours with James Dellingpole on my podcast talking about this very thing. And I'm like, this thing is beyond that. Okay.

This is into a level of reveal their method and turning into self-parity. Okay. And I mean this sincerely. It's like, it's, we're getting, I'm getting weird feedback. We're getting feedback from you, Alex. Yes. I assume it's whether you want to mute yourself or if you have headphones. Let's try that now. Okay. It's started to get the, yeah, that's better. This is into self-parody. Like the dialogue is straight out of Obama's mouth.

I saw something from the directory. He's like, yeah, every time Obama opened his mouth, he scared me even more and more about what he was revealing, about how bad things are. this is one of those things that when there's a fundamental line you and I've talked about this Sean between propaganda and art right and propaganda is clearly propaganda it's not it's it's designed to tell you exactly what what to think about something and usually the two things are mutually exclusive because propaganda is so ham-fisted that you know you can see it for what it is and you know it's advocacy but there's sometimes when it's so over the top, it becomes self-parody, right?

It becomes unintentionally hilarious. It becomes unintentionally reflective of the content creator, in this case, the Obama's. They hate America so much that it's just, it's, it's so clear that the whole thing was them sitting on their, their, their back porch. I don't even believe the story that this is like, um, based on a book. If it is, it's one of those books that was,

was ghost written by somebody else for $50,000 and, you know, and then placed on the New York Times bestseller list so then it can be turned into a movie so that we can predictably program us. And like, you know, these are like from the New York Times bestseller that nobody's read. No,

now we're losing Tom. Right. It's going to be one of those days, folks. You know, uh, while we wait for Tom Alex. Oh,

oh shit. Oh, and he's back, and he's back. I, you know, you just said something that, okay, I, man, I don't know, this, this movie had so many questions going. The first, I guess, is, I, once again, I'm going to show my naivity in that what movies do you look at Tom or Alex, where they have paid a ghost writer, write a book to then have the movie to come out and whatever? Like, I go, man, can, will they go to that level of effort? I mean, obviously I know they will, but just hearing it laid out that way, Tom, I'm like,

yeah, like, Sean, they, they have been laying plans like this for all and long time. Like, do you realize that,

like, the whole publishing industry is nothing but mob level pay a lot, right? Book advances. Nobody reads Hillary Clinton's ghost written book about being, you know, wanting to be the first female president or her biography or her memoirs.

She didn't write that. You didn't. didn't build that Hillary in any more than you know like this is an Obama vanity project it's all this is and it's an it's both a confession of how much he hates America and uh you know and a therapy session for his their hatred of white people i go why like has a president before a former president uh no he's still president ever executive produced um a movie or something like this. Like, I'm like, you're going to executive produce a movie talking about a cyber attack,

which I mean, like, all you got to do is go through the wef and everything else. And I'm like, this is the straint. Like, I'm like, why would he do that? Like, they just don't care. They just do not care that people are going to know that, like, he produced it. And it's like, everybody can see it for what it is. Yep. Yep.

Yep. And, you know, I think that, you know, there's a certain level of this arrogance and hubris. like we're out of point with these these people remember narcissists don't back down they double down and you can just i i when i was i was working on last month this month's newsletter for the for my patrons and i was writing the editorial about this movie yesterday and i just i had this image in my head while i was like thinking about this film and i'm like okay i know how this movie like like like like scene after scene after scene in the movie is obama sitting on his back porch with a with a glass of wine in his hand when they're complaining about white people.

And then they go, oh, I have an idea for a scene. Oh, God, Christ, what an imagination I have. And you can just see them like, and it's like, oh, so we're going to have Tesla slamming into each other. And we're going to film it in such a way that, you know, the autopilots took over and then, you know, they clogged up on the roads, which obviously is something that we've all should have been worried about forever in a day. But they've turned it now into a big fuck you to Elon Musk for buying Twitter and, you know,

giving a platform to everybody again. Like it's just it's surreal. And again, I've watched a lot of black comedy in my life. Like, you know, I, I live by Kubrick and Terry Gilliam and all of these people. I mean, I watched this movie and I'm like, this is, if it wasn't such a,

if it wasn't so horrific in revealing just how much everybody who was involved in it hates America, it would have been like black comedy of the level of heathers or brazil or you know fight club or whatever it this was clearly that level of self-parody and you know we're you know and and and you know i don't know like it's it's funny watching the and then you watch the actors like work really really hard to bring out the nuance in this unnuanced script and the actors are doing their best and i'm not a

huge fan of most of the actors in the film in the first one never like gillier roberts they never you know, not a big huge fan of Ethan Hawker or anybody else, but you can see them really trying to do their best work. And that's even worse. Because now they're trying to do their best work to bring nuance out of these ham-fistedly written scenes where the 20-year-old black girl is like, Dad, we're trusting white people. And she's like horrified. And she's like supposed to be, you know, I don't know, sympathetic. And what she comes off, of course, is just completely horrific. Because it's all this deep union projection of what they think the rest of the world acts like. The way I structured it from my editorial, my newsletter is like, I'm old enough to remember

when television was false, right, when we had the Gilligan's Island effect in television in America, right? And it portrayed, and American sitcoms and portrayed a fake storytelling conceit that at the end of 26 minutes, the conflict will be resolved and everybody will learned a lesson and leave it to Bieber or the Dick Van Dyke show or or whatever, right? I honestly think that Obama thinks that that world existed. And that Archie Bunker really did need to be like destroyed and light made fun of. And yeah, I honestly think that there's something like fundamentally wrong with him beyond the fact that he's just a fucking commie and a narcissist. Alex, it's not that you're awfully quiet over there.

We got you muted right now. From afar, whether it's in discussion on the show or just the fact on a president, a former president, or what have you, producing a movie, what are your thoughts from afar? Well, okay, so as you said, I'm afar. I haven't seen the movie. and I have on a scale of 1 to 10 my interest in seeing is about zero. I really fell out of love with Hollywood many years ago, and it's fairly rare that I watch a Hollywood movie these days anymore at all. They're actors that I just don't like to see anymore, which is most of them.

Because as we found out, they are really virtue signaling hollow morons, most of them. And some of them are plain degenerates, twisted people like, I don't know, Tom Hanks, I don't know, Robert De Niro is maybe, who knows, you know, the Epstein client list is still, hasn't been revealed to us. And then Harvey Weinstein, you know, he wasn't a nice guy either. So the whole culture there is profoundly rotten. So I'm not terribly interesting. I'm very much aware that a lot of what they do is, what did you call it, pre-programming?

They're telling us what's coming because for whatever reason they have to tell us what's coming. and they've done that in a lot of films and TV shows, fine. So one should be curious at the very least. But I think that a lot of stuff that is portrayed in these movies are very peculiarly American topics. Most of the rest of the world just simply doesn't care. It's irrelevant. And, you know, I'm tuned into American media probably more than most people on this side of the pond.

And I find it fascinating that virtually every issue of any significance is always being framed into left and right. if you listen to any news channel, they're always, um, far right president of Hungary, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Um, far left, blah, blah, blah, everything, everything. The merit of the argument, the, the, the subject itself, whatever it is that they're talking about is always framed in left versus right. And that's not how the rest of the world functions at all. I don't know if somebody asked me to watch Vladimir Putin's four-hour presser last Thursday. And I did for the first time since he's been in power.

And one thing that struck me is that the whole four hours, his remarks and the answer to his questions are completely focused on the subject that's being discussed. He never says because the communist government did this and the and the and the and the and the leftist would be doing this. He's talking about we purchased 14,000 emergency vehicles for the for the healthcare service across the country. Uh, the cost of the road tolls from Moscow to St. Petersburg is a six rubles per kilometer or four rubles. It's this, it caused this much to get from here to here. We're exporting more wheat. We're improving this. He's talking about people's concrete problems.

He's answering to people's concrete questions left and right is so completely irrelevant that it never comes up the whole four hours. Nothing on that political spectrum is interpreted as left and right. That's our Western invention. And I think that it's whole purpose is divide and rule. That's all. It's just that the second you say like, oh, well, this is a far right candidate who blah, blah, blah, blah, then people stop listening immediately because like, oh, yeah, I don't, I don't, you know,

I'm not on the far right. I just listen to what people say on the left. And so many things that should be discussed, that should be pondered, thought about aren't because they're being labeled from the get-go as something, left or right, socialist or capitalist, whatever. and then people just, you know, diverge into their camps and they throw sticks and stones at the other camp, never even giving a thought of what needs to be taken care of in the country. And so going back to the Hollywood movies, I think that they just reinforce all this. And, you know, when left, right is not good enough anymore than we throw in race and we throw in, you know, men versus women. toxic masculinity, all of these things. None of it is helpful. All of it is divide and conquer, divide and rule. All of it is the drive to atomized society where the only group that really

resembles me and that I really identify with is me. You know? And if my parents oppress me, well, I'm going to turn them, I'm going to sue them. You know, you're breaking apart the family and women, you know, they are oppressed by men and they're being encouraged in every way to, you know, break away from that oppression to, you know, assert their power and emancipation and all of these things. And I don't see how that helps any of us. Anyway, long rant, all of these things made me lose interest in what Hollywood has to offer. I don't remember the last I saw a good, a good film. Maybe 47 Ronan,

Ronan, you know, the, that was 10 years ago. Canter Reeves. Yeah, that was 10 years ago. They make, they make good movies. I got to go back and watch 47 Ronan. Are you a fan of that, Tom? Yeah, that movie was fine. It was good.

I mean, you know, I, like, Canter Reeves makes a lot of, like, mostly disposable movies, and that's fine. I mean, I don't think that's one of them, but, you know, it was better to, I expect to get it's a remake. It was fine. Over the past, over the past, you know, months since we last talked, there's been a few different, I'm sure you two have been staring at a whole slew of different things.

One of the things that caught a lot of people's eye was Javier Malay. Is it Malay? I don't know how to say his last name. Sworn into office, new prime minister, Argentina. Were you guys surprised by that? Were you, this is par for the course? What have, you know, What do we do on this side of things? We get Tom and Alex to give us a little bit of a feel on on some of the things going on around the world. And a lot of people staring at Argentina as a big win or what have you. What is, what do, where do you guys fall out on this?

Alex and I've talked about this a little bit when he was on the Gold Goose and Guns podcast recently. We, we didn't have a good answer for what we thought about Millet. And he just feels, there's something feels off about him in the same way that something feels off about of Beck Ramoswamy. Like, there's a certain, like, he's almost a little too perfect or a little too enthusiastic or a little too over the top or whatever, whatever it is. There's just something not right. Like, when you get into that position, like, it, it would be one thing if it was, like,

y'all know what it would look like, right? If a huge larger than life personality like myself became, was put in that position, you'd be like, oh my God, this is going to be lit. Tom's going to go crazy. but actually I would not act that way in public at in that position because you've got to respect the office you've got to respect the process and you know you really do have to like you have to lead in a particular way right and the way you lead is going to determine and the way you comport yourself is the way you're going to be let you know is the way you're going to lead people

I'm not in a position to lead people here so I get to just be who the hell I want so there's a certain amount of that like he hasn't graduated at out of Joe Rogan's basement thing that's going on with him that bothers me. And Ramoswamy's doing the exact same thing. And that, to me, just screams like, does this guy glow? Like, does he work for somebody else? Like, how did this happen? Or, I mean, but at the same time, like, you know, Argentina's been like,

by all these people that we, you know, complain about every time we come on the show. Like, you know, all the globalists and all these evil people. And they go back to Alex's point about left and right and Putin. I've watched the four-hour Putin Q&A up. without easily watched a half a dozen of them. And yes, he's right. Putin rarely ever talks about things in terms of left and right because he's there to discuss how we're going to improve Russia because that's his overall guiding message. It always is whenever he's discussing, you know, domestic policy and or foreign policy. And, you know, that makes him, that's what makes

him a statesman. And the problem here is that, of course, guys like Malay and, and, and, and, to a lot to extend Ramaswami, I don't see them as statesmen. And so then I have to ask myself, okay, then what are that? Alex? What I think is very interesting with regard to Malay, because, yeah, Tom and I had this discussion, and I kind of laid out my very broad brush resume of why Argentina is chronically an economic basket case, in spite of the fact, that resource-wise,

it's one of the wealthiest countries in the world and it has a large well-educated population. So what's wrong? They're constantly in debt to Western financial institutions. The governments have to squeeze the people to pay the debts. They're pushing the people.

They have to fix the exchange rate. They're pushing people into black markets. Government doesn't collect taxes on the black markets. So what do they have to do? They have to print money to be able to make the budget. That causes inflation. People are losing their purchasing power.

They're deeply frustrated. And then Malay comes with the moronic idea of, oh, we're just going to do away with the pace all together. and we're going to dollarize Argentina and economy. Well, that is the interesting part because, well, the reasons why it's a moronic idea is because credit creation and credit allocation are far and away the most potent tools of policy that you have. You know, that's how you determine what you're going to invest in. Are you going to develop industry, agriculture, society, education, whatever.

You have to be able to have sovereign control over that function in order to shape the future of your society. And if you do away with that, then you're depending on Wall Street banks and on the IMF and World Bank, who are going to tell you, well, you know what? You're going to have LGBT parades. Guess what? Or else, no credit for you. And he's been, you know, forminating against the LGBT movement. And so what happened?

As he comes into office, Argentina has about a billion dollars of debt service that they have to pay, and they don't have the money. I don't know what happened. The next thing, he was on the phone with the Chinese representatives. And what happened is what Tom has kind of alerted me to. that the Chinese are giving countries around the world these swap lines so that they could service their debts to the Western financial institutions. And then they have to pay it back to the Chinese in Yuan, which is incredibly clever.

And that's exactly what happened with Millay, you know, with his whole dollarization. He had to back away from that almost immediately because it just didn't work. Argentina is already more than $40 billion in debt in U.S. dollars. They don't have the money to service it. What's the cure? Well, you know, the Chinese stepped in and provided the solution. And if that's what happened, that also means that, that the Wall Street banks and the IMF weren't forthcoming.

They told him pay up, that's it. And maybe he thought that because of his rhetoric, because of his pro-Western, pro-American, anti-Briks, anti-China, rhetoric and all this, that they would say like, well, okay, now that you're in the presidential palace, we're going to give you some, cut you some slack. Things are going to go well, we're going to help you with credits, maybe, you know, reduce your debts a little bit, a little jubilee, whatever.

It seems to me that none of that happened. And so he had to go to talk to the Chinese. And so there you go, you know. Instead of turning away from the bricks, it looks like he's going to be in brink. racing them even harder. And what's interesting to follow up on that is that this idea of swap lines for people don't understand what this is because I know this is not like a high level financial podcast that you guys that Sean runs here.

So let's talk about this real simply. Is that is that. Thanks, Tom. I mean, no, I know. I know this is not the normal audience for this kind of thing. 100%. I'm not. I'm,

I'm chuckling to myself because Tom, Tom probably looks at my face. Every time we do this, I'm sure at some point I'm like, what the hell are they talking about? And Tom always picks up on it or Alex and they're like, let's bring it down to a level Sean can understand. Perfect. Well, not just Sean, but you're normal, but the normal audience. 100%. So what you're looking at here is the following. As Alex pointed out quite astutely and quite simply, the Argentinians owe the Western banking loan sharks centered around the IMF and the World Bank, I don't know, $40 billion. And they've got to pay that back in dollars, right?

Well, who has dollars? Lots of dollars. China. Who doesn't have a lot of dollars? Argentina. So there's an opportunity here for people to make a deal. And that deal is very simple. China says to the Argentinians, look, really simple, right?

We'll lend you the money to service the debt and dollars. You pay us back and you want. But how do you get? But how do they get Yuan if they don't have a significant amount of trade with China? Well, then you open up a swap line where you take your Argentinian pesos and Chinese Yuan and you swap them back and forth. You open up a line of credit effectively to get Yuan into the country for them to pay back the dollars they own.

And that's what this is what's, it's a way for China to backdoor dollars into the system, into the Argentinian system, and then they pay back in Yuan. So what's going to happen is no different than what happened in Russia in 2014. The way they're going to ensure that there's enough yuan flowing through the system, there's going to be a big freaking business deal, some big infrastructure like a mine or an official oil platform or, you know, project or whatever. And the Chinese will buy whatever it is that the Argentinians produce and they'll pay in yuan. The loan that Argentinians, the dollars now.

Open up the swap lines to keep the liquid. running and then in the long run they'll pay the they'll pay the loans back in yuan from the profit they make on selling the chinese the oil so it's no different than what they did with they did with the russians when you go back to 2014 and the my don and right and everything that happened in ukraine and take retaking kramia and all the rest of it look at the timeline of events and this is what i wrote about the other day i wrote about a couple weeks ago in my blog about saudi arabia But we can talk about Argentina. We can talk about Egypt.

These are all the same stories or all going to be the same stories. With the Chinese having tons of dollars in order to splash around the world to help get these countries, the strategic partners that are important out from underneath the Western loan sharks. It was the same thing that happened in Russia in 2014. The Maidan happens in late 2013, early 2014. The Yanukovych just run out of power. Two weeks later, the Russians, quote unquote, an ex-con. Crimea and then there's, you know, there's horrible tensions between the U.S. and, and, and the West and Russia over Ukraine. And then in May of that year, the Chinese and the Russians sign a massive

$400 billion pipeline deal. Now today, known as power of Siberia, pumping in, you know, unbelievable amounts of gas and oil into the Chinese economy. At the time, everybody said, wow, that was not a particularly good deal for the Russians. They got raked over the coals. The Chinese got a sweetheart deal. But everybody forgets, didn't understand what was going to happen next. Because what happened after that was an attack on the price of oil. Oil went from $150 a barrel in June of 2014 to $28 of that barrel by November 2015.

It forced the Russians into a currency crisis into a rollover crisis for their corporate debt and everything else. Long story short, the Russians found themselves at the end of 2014 needing $50 billion like Tamar. in order to pay off their corporate bondholders. And they had been sanctioned, and they couldn't get dollars in the open market anymore because their banks had all been thrown out of the Western financial system. So who provided them the dollars? The Chinese did.

And the announcement of Yuan ruble swap lines and was the key to ending the rubble crisis of late 2015. Go look at the chart of the Russian rubble, and you'll see exactly what I'm not. What you're bringing up, Tom, you know, is on a small. level, everybody's probably been in buying a vehicle or something, you know, where you, where you deal with the sales guys and they know they can see. And on this side, you know, you're getting a,

you probably should have come up pretty soon, you know, you don't have a vehicle and you got, you got this mad press to get a vehicle by the end of the week. And so now you put yourself in the position of a bad deal, right? You no longer have the position of power, if you would. Because if you stay in there, they know they got you by the balls. And, and you need, you need, you need on a very large sense what you're saying is i think is the chinese are brilliant at recognizing when a country is in a bad spot they walk in and they go listen we'll solve your problem here it is and over time they're doing this over and over and over again why i can get the first time heck i can get the first three times but eventually isn't the western world going to be like

oh wait we look what's going on here we can't keep doing the same thing we've been doing. Right. Well, here's the here's the keg. And I'm going to turn the, I'm going to turn the microphone back over to Alex to explain the next point because I know Alex will be able to pick up on this, which is that the key here is understanding the U.S. military and the U.S. Navy's role in enforcing debt servicing and the lack of write downs. The West never negotiates any write downs. They will negotiate new terms for paying the loan back, but they will never write down a dollar's worth of the principal because the entire. Western financial system is based on this.

The Russians and the Chinese understand this. And before I go any farther, I'll let Alex do that. I'll shut up and let Alex say, you from here. Yeah. So I don't know if there's anything to add, Tom. I think that's absolutely correct. We discussed this a few days ago. One small caveat, they did in the past write down some debts.

and that was they reduced Poland's debt by half in the early 1990s, you know, the transition from communism to capitalism. They reduced Bolivia's debt by, I think, 80%.

On both occasions, advised by Jeffrey Sachs. So that does happen, well, no, no, that did happen. It does not have. happen. But the typical behavior is pay up and pay up every last cent on time or else. You know, you have sanctions, embargoes, blockades, orange color revolutions, assassinations, invasions, and so forth. That's why empires need military bases. everywhere around the world. So if somebody says, that's, this is not fair, we're using up like

60% of our national budget just to service the interest on the debt that we're paying to you. I was just reading some Africa country that forget which one it was, if it was like Burundi or whatever. They borrowed $500 million from the IMF. They paid back $540 million, and they still owe $520 million. It never goes away. And, you know, it's a, if your society is suffering, meaning education is in poor shape, your health care is in poor shape, your infrastructure is falling. down or you don't have any infrastructures. You don't have ports, airports, hospitals,

and so forth. But everybody's working like a slave. At some point people rise up or some military general says, enough. We're not paying you another cent. You know, you can't expect us to sell you uranium or for a dollar a kilo, kilo when the market price is $200 a kilo, Mr. Macron. And so you get a coup, well, you know, to make sure that you still get your uranium at $1 a kilo and not at the market price, which is 200 times higher, well, you need to have some troops there to make sure that nobody rebels or if they're rebel, you kill them all. And Western colonialists have, in many cases, just killed off the whole population.

You know, if you look at the Caribbean, it's practically populated by African slaves, even though 500 years ago it was exclusively populated by native tribes. You know, I was going to say Indian, but they're not Indian. They're just, you know, American natives. And this has been done multiple times, you know, where the people rebel. we're not going to be your slaves and these people decide like all right cool send the army kill everybody man women and children all of them every last one of them and bring in you know 30 000 slaves from africa and that's what they did you know that's how katy which used to be populated

by native tribes there uh is now populated by sons and daughters of african slaves all of them all of them every last one of them yeah no it's it's it's it's It's part of the process. And so we're staring at a moment here in time where you have, you have to choose between, are you going to try and keep the remnants of that system in place? And remember, the people who are running this system have known nothing else for 500 years. So they don't know how to react to a rival power that has a lot of money. like, you know, basically freeing all their slaves.

They're debt slaves, right? The story that Alex just told, the Burundi, is no different than, you know, half the people paying back student loans here in the United States between taxes and penalties and interest in everything else. And, you know, I know people who have paid back their student loans twice over and they still owe more than they originally borrowed. And then after a certain amount of time,

that, well, they get, discharge, but then that will be added to your, the balance will be added to your taxable income for that year. And then you're going to owe taxes on that money. And then, you know, you're going owe $40,000 or whatever in taxes, which you'll then have to come up with. And if you don't have that, well, then you're going to be put on a new payment schedule to the IRS at 8 to 10%. Vic, like it's definitely. Tom, but at least we have free. Well, yeah. We have Taco Bell. Yeah, a little bit of humor injected into all this, you know. Did, um, cop 28 was a huge thing.

And we, we sent here in Western Canada, I think the Saskatchewan government paid close to a million dollars to go there and set up. And, and then I think it's Alberta had, you know, I want to say a hundred delegates go. And, you know, and I just had on Premier Smith there. And, you know, she talked about, you know, explore, you know, put it in the best foot forward of Alberta and our clean energy and all this. jazz and meanwhile like half the not a half i think there's i think i think i read 100 000 people went to cop 28 and you know pro oil is like 600 people of that you know like it's a small little group it doesn't

mean they didn't hook up and find ways to network and make great deals but you know by and large this huge entity now this this is focused on shutting down um you know removing fossil fuel from uh from you know, everyday life. And you do that and I go, okay, what did Tom and Alex think of COP28? I'm just going to pull up here. It said, all nations formally agreed to move away from fossil fuels and rapidly ramp up

renewable energy. That's what it was. And language here is important because they didn't want to phase out fossil fuel. They wanted to slowly move away, you know? Like, we can do that, you know? And it's going to be factual. I don't know, you two. Did you stare at this 12 days of

lunacy with different people trying to and in, you know, Hillary Clinton saying, oh, we're going to keep track of climate deaths now. And, you know, and on and on and on and on and on it went. I called a Cope 28 because they didn't get, they didn't get anything of what they wanted. And then the, you know, the host came out and said, look, there's no data that suggests that there's any relationship

between CO2 and fossil fuels and energy, you know, and global warming and all the rest of it. Literally a big, you know, well, I'm trying to keep it clean, but, you know, because it's Canadian audience, but you know big fuck you to the uh um to the entire thing and then after that i was nothing about cope after that um well we're gonna do this and then daniel smith came out and said you know we're not going to pay our carbon taxes and then scott mo in saskatch one said we're not gonna pay yeah we're not paying our carbon taxes and we're gonna you know we've got uranium that we're

gonna we're gonna bring into the world and all the rest of it i'm like that's how you have to do this and it's funny i you know i wrote a private blog post from my from my from my patrons about Smith and Moe and I've got and I and I regularly take those posts and I'm working into a public blog post and I've got the essence of it's sitting there for a public bog post to talk about we just need a good old fashioned tax revolt and Western Canada as you as we all discussed when we were up in Edmonton earlier in the year um you know uh yeah that's what's coming and it's starting exactly where I expected to the people who have the most incentive to say you know what? No. Like, I'm just not paying. I'm just not going to, we're sovereign, we're states,

you know, you can argue all you want, but the provinces of Canada, from what I understand, or they have their, they have some right that they can actually say, yeah, we're not sending this to the, to the, to the federal government in Ottawa. Fine. It's the same problem we have the United States. At some point, we just say, you know what? No. And all they can do is say, okay, then we're going to withhold your federal tax money for, you know, if you don't, Nixon used to do this. we had the 55 mile an hour speed limit. And the way he enforced that was by saying, if you don't drop the speed limit to 55 on federal highways

and across your entire state, then you're not going to get any of the money, the tax money that you paid into the, into NHTSA for highways. We're just going to steal your money from you. Is it any different than what the EU's been doing to Hungary over, you know, not, um,

not going along with, you know, adding Ukraine into the EU or any other, whatever other subject. It's the same thing. They're going to take it back from you. They're going to take away from you. That what you paid in. They're going to steal your money. And then they're going to offer it back to you as blackmail in order to get, well, you know, in order to get your compliance.

Well, I got news for you. There's a whole lot of people going, you know what? Keep the fucking money. That's what the Russians are saying over the $300 billion worth of Forex reserves. Like, yeah, keep it. We'll get you back 30 years from now after we bankrupted you because Russians have a long memory. And I got news for you. So do Hungarians.

do of if they try that with foridians and yada got yada and the same thing is how going to happen with saskatchewan in alberta we have to just realize that at some point this is all a bluff it's a massive bluff that's all it is it's just a bluff so hey how about we don't take the collect those taxes or i like to say all the time why don't you go fuck yourself and we'll call it even that's literally the way we all have to act relative to these people we're need to channel our inner loongo is what you're saying everybody should channel their inner longgo it's good for the soul with um everything going on over in the middle east you know i i i've been getting not harassed i shouldn't say harassed but that's the words coming to mind um more and more

people want me to talk more and more about it and i'm like i don't know i i don't know what i can offer at this point but you two uh fine folks staring at all the world conflicts and and everything else what can you bring us up to speed on when it comes to, you know, whether it's Iran or just like the fact that you got pirates causing havoc in the Red Sea and on and on this goes. I don't know if there's one that you want to flip into and I don't, Alex, you look like you're ready to chomp at the bit. But you're muted. Yeah, I'll just go for a second to COP 28 because one of the things that I really, really enjoyed there are the tantrums that John Kerry and Al Gore through, you know, and it's phenomenal. And, you know, what you can see is that they're losing control of the narrative. So, you know, both of them were like, we have to do this.

We can't allow these people who don't know the real science to. you know, detract us, whatever. I don't remember exactly the way they said, but both of them, the gist was, we need more censorship. We cannot tolerate this diversity of opinion.

And, you know, between the lines is like we're losing, you know, the control of the narrative that we can't convince anybody anymore that our bullshit is actually a priority, a policy priority. Anyway, so that's just

that with regards to the Middle East, I think that the situation is phenomenally complicated. And I think that once more, the forces of the Western Empire are revealing themselves again and again and again as idiots, with no foresight, with no appreciation of unintended consequences and opposite our outcomes. This is just another stepping stone in the whole trajectory that has gone for 20-some years now. Remember, it was little over 20 years ago that they published their projects for the New American Century. That um what's his face uh the the the bush advisor the the the fat guy with the bold fat guy oh anyway dick cheney no no no not dick cheney um a different bold fat guy

uh anyway you know he was saying that we are we are the history's creators and you all study what we um study what we um study what we do but by the time you understand what we have done we will have done more things and you will just be studying what we do that's just how it is you know absolute total hubris um another another guy was saying that by the way Alex it was it was it was Carl Rove who who supposedly said it it's it that quotes been attributed to him but the reality is is that Dick Cheney actually said it Yeah. If you dig deep enough back into that, into the origins of that quote, it's like, you know, what did Plato say? What did Herod, what did Socrates actually say, you know, because Plato was just Socrates translator, you know, or the stenographer. Like, it's the same kind of thing. Cheney said it, but somehow I think it got attributed to Roe, because they like to keep Roeve as the evil, the truly evil guy. And we all know that Dick Cheney is Dr. Eel. But we're sorry. You go ahead. Go ahead.

The wrong, fat, bold guy that I named. And then there was somebody else who's name I also forget. You know, Alex, Alex, over here we call that a high-calorie human. That's what we call it. Okay, that works. That works. So, and somebody else was saying that the United States should, every few years, the United States should pick up some shitty little country

and throw it against the wall just to show that they mean business. And they were fantasizing about full-spectrum dominance, quote-unquote, right? What? In the space of one generation, everything went wrong. Absolutely everything went wrong. And what's going on today in the Middle East is just another example of them messing up. They started off with almost full spectrum dominance, their unipolar moment. They ruled the world. Nobody could even dream about challenging the United States. Remember Black Hawk Down, that movie?

You know, the unassailable, the invincible military that, you know, could intervene anywhere and do whatever needed to be done? Well, you know, now what? They don't know what to do. They're getting, they're getting, they're suffering attacks in Iraq and Syria every day, every single day. And they have no answer to it. They're getting attacked in the Red Sea. The, you know, the Houthis are attacking commercial traffic and military boats.

They have no, they've no answer. All they can do is pose. You know, now they're sending an aircraft carrier. What's they going to do? You know, everything they should cost millions of dollars. And these people are using like $5,000, $20,000 drones and missiles to strike at them, and they have thousands upon thousands on them. They're losing colonies, not the United States, but France, for example.

They're losing colonies all over Africa. They have no answer to this. So, you know, the whole Western Empire is in a rapid stage of collapse. They're losing their power base. rapidly and what's going on in the Middle East is yet another episode that is showing that they're just idiots I'm sorry but they really are just idiot take it okay just to just to finish this all take the example of Ukraine in December 2021 the Russians serve them with the draft treaty, the United States and a different draft treaty for NATO, setting out

the security architecture that would take into account everybody's security concerns. They spat in Russia's face. Three months later, after they started the special military occupation, operation, they had advanced negotiations with the Ukrainians, at which point the Russians were prepared to withdraw completely, even from the Dombas. All they were asking is neutrality. That's all they were asking. So, you could have fixed it there and then, but no. Boris Johnson goes to Kiev, tells Zelensky, don't negotiate. we're going to kick their asses. And what's happening?

They got their asses kicked. So remember Afghanistan? That was August 21. They had to withdraw from Afghanistan. You know, the scenes of airplanes flying and people hanging on to the airplanes. This is just happening one episode after another, but it's all a steep downhill curve. So that's what that is, aside for scenes that I didn't think I would ever see in my lifetime in Palestine,

which are so disheartening and so disturbing that I find it hard to find words for it. And I want to be extremely careful because I used to be viciously critical of the government of Israel. but some of my posts were taken up by people who are flat out anti-Semites and I don't want to fuel that because we've seen what people can turn into during the pandemic

and we in the West the Christendom have been the main key perpetrators of of atrocities against the Jewish people And I think that we have to be very, very, very, very careful not to redo that again. But the situation is just horrific.

And I really, really hope that this new coalition of powers, these new alliances that are springing up between Iran, China, Russia, the SCO, Saudi Arabia and so forth, that they will hold up, that they will solidify and that they will once and for all kick up. the Western Empire from the Eurasian continent. So I echo almost everything Alex just said. I want to throw some more color into this if we can. So I've been saying for a long, long time, that if the Israelis don't, but certainly the, they'll be careful about this, the people who will suffer the most from ruinous Israeli policy and ruinous Western policy,

will be Jewish people themselves. Okay. They will be the scapegoats for what is ultimately, they're being set up as scapegoats for what is ultimately a much bigger game than anything having to do with the Palestinians or the rest of this. I want to focus on the latest iteration of this. And this is going to be a little bit, folks, because there's a lot going on here.

But these attacks on shipping by the Houthis is downstream. of the mistakes that Alex just laid out. How are the Saudi Arabians standing there and urging the United States for restraint with the Houthis attacks on shipping around the Arabian Peninsula? Makes no sense. They were just a war with the Houthis, not two years, not a year and a half ago. Proxy war between Saudi Arabia and Iran went on for years, right? And it was MBS, the guy who's currently running Saudi Arabia, who started the war,

perpetuated the war during the Trump administration, and then eventually ended the war. Now we've got to ask ourselves a big question. Why? Because I was doing some analysis on this this morning, and I'm like, okay, everything I laid out this huge post for my patrons. And I just posted it up on Twitter if anybody wants to join and read and all that stuff, it's behind the paywall. Sorry, folks, my people get the best stuff first. But here's a version of the situation.

situation. I got all the way to the end of this big post, about 15 minutes before we went live, as a matter of fact. And I said, well, hold on. What did the Saudis think of all the stuff that you just wrote, you wrote Tom? It all falls apart if the Saudis aren't okay with, but if they're not silent about the Houthis. Because here's the gig. The Houthis are Iranian proxies. Have we noticed who is no longer shipping around the Suez Canal or through the Suez Canal and in that region. It's all of Europe. Maersk, Moeller, all those guys, right? All the European Greek and Dutch shipping companies insured by city of London. They are all now having to go around the Cape of Good Hope in order to do business with Asia,

adding over 3,000 miles to their trip, right, as opposed to going through the Suez. who's been the target since the October 7th invasion or attack by Hamas of the Israeli policy, which would then be, which would then be by extension U.S. slash British policy. What did Netanyahu say at the, at the UN, a week before the attack? He was like drawing in Red Sharpie, a new trade corridor going from Mumbai to the port at Haifa, with the new with the Ben-Gurian canal that they were going to build and all this other stuff. I guess they were going to blast apart, you know, mountains with nuclear weapons in order to build this thing. But hey, what was going on here?

It was all at our aim at Egypt. Let's bring another angle back on this, which was that right after, you know, the Israelis started their brutal purge of the Palestinians. They offered the Egyptians relief, debt relief, debt relief from their IMF loans. The Israelis, Netanyahu, said on behalf of the IMF, we will forgive your debt to the IMF if you take all the Palestinians in Gaza. Now, how in the fuck do they have the ability to even make that offer?

That tells you that Egypt has been the target the entire time. Going back to what Alex and I have been talking about since June of this year, about how the Russians and the Chinese have been urging the Egyptians to default on their IMF debt. What happened at the BRICS conference this year? Did we get a gold-back currency and all this other rotten, insane nonsense that everybody talked about for seven months? No, we got simply put Argentina, Ethiopia, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and the UAE joined the BRICS alliance officially.

What did they do? Ring the entire Arabian Peninsula with the BRICS being in charge. of global trade routes now. Who is the most upset about this? Who is, who does Netanyahu represent in Israeli politics? But British maritime interests. The British are a maritime empire. All of their foreign policy is based around a projection of their power

through the use of maritime power projection. Who is the current Navy for the, for the remnant of the British Empire. Why? The United States Navy. So you can see the trap that's been laid here. I could take this another 12 layers deep that I think this is an entire fucking Thucydides trap that the goddamn Iranians and the Russians and the Chinese have set up to make the Americans and the Brits think they're winning by pressuring Israel.

I think pressuring Egypt through Israel when the whole point of the thing is to flip the whole thing on its head and get control. over the Suez. Because since the moment Egypt was announced that they were going to join the bricks, they have been the target the entire time, the last six months, five months. And

we just had Al-Ci win re-election. Yeah, with 90%. And he wins with 90% and we don't hear a word about how that election was, you know, not real. Nobody wins re-election with 90%. Every time there's a lot,

ever and you know when Putin wins by 85% he's a dictator there's reason for this because Egypt is the is the key here the Suez Canal Egypt it all comes back to this stuff that at the end of the day they're trying to get rid of LCC by putting like so they're thinking like so what's going on here is that the West is thinking hey we can pull all of our ships out of the Suez and and we will gut what's left of the the Egyptian economy because that's how the Egyptian government makes most of their money is Sue has transit fees. So they all pulled their ships out and they're going to run them around the Cape of Good Ho. Right. And the Saudis don't care. But whose ships are going to fly through there? Saudi ships, Russian oil tankers, Chinese cargo ships. If they can

control, if they can, if Egypt can weather this, this effectively, this attack on their, on their, their economy and their credit rating and everything else, then what happens? Russia wins because the international north-south transport corridor now can function. Belt and Road functions. And the new ports on the Iranian coast, Bandar Abbas has been upgraded. It's now a massive oil exporting port outside beyond the Straits of Ormuz, the port of Chabahar on the south and the Indian Ocean, also now operating fully. Now all of a sudden, Iran can be the crossroads of Asian trade to Africa and to Europe and everywhere else. And who is in control of the Suez fucking canal? Not the British Empire, not the West. This was a massive gambit. And I'm firmly convinced

now that the whole the everybody thought that they had that everybody thought that when they allowed Hamas to attack Israel that they had their they had their battle plan laid out we're going to win this fight and this is how we're going to win it no different than how they went into Ukraine thinking the exact same thing ah we'll get we'll get the Russians to bleed themselves dry and we'll kill a couple hundred thousand Russians and there and then Putin will you know lose power and blah blah blah on it no no and the key to understanding that why i'm right about this is that the fact that the Saudis are fucking silent because under no circumstances they were really iran's enemy they would not allow the huthis to be running around pirating ships off the of the of the gulf of aden

under no circumstances with the Saudis terror, you know, cotton to this. There's your, there's your QED moment, folks. This is literally hit me after writing for two hours this morning. I'm like, oh, my fucking God. Don't worry, folks. It'll be, I'll put a version of this out in public for everybody to read. Like, this is what happened. It's a massive gambit they've lost.

And, oh, by the way, in this virtue signaling bullshit about Mariskin company, all going to go around the Cape of Good Hope, guess what? But it puts almost 500,000 barrels of oil demand per day to reroute all that Suez traffic around the Suez Canal. Upwards, if you were to take all of the Suez traffic and then rerout it around their Cape of Good Hope, it's over 500,000 barrels worth of oil a day. Which, yes, that 500,000 barrels a day, that's how much traffic goes through the fucking Suez. Guys, this is massive. So, hey, so why would the Saudis be okay with this? Because it supports the price of oil.

Yes, Alex. Thank you for restoring my microphone, Mr. Censert. No, I just wanted to say, it's very obvious now why we need to transition to renewable energy sources. Where's my light bulb? That, but no, but okay, on a serious note, on a serious note, you can see that all of this goes back to why the West didn't want to be,

well, why the West, not us, the West, but the, you know, the inbred degenerates West, why they wanted to rush this energy independence or, you know, return to renewable sources because they no longer control the the majority of the oil reserves uh you know places like iran and russia and venezuel and so forth and so they needed to

wean themselves off of this because remaining dependent on uh fossil whatever fuels uh they lose there's no way to win You know, it's not just that your containers and your container ships are running on fossil fuels. It's your tanks and your Bradley's and your planes and your everything. The whole logistical chain, commercial and military. So you're screwed unless you invent quickly like the solar tanks and wind-powered airplanes. I don't know. Alex, I just want to chime in here real quick to say, it was you who first taught me about the importance of collateral and oil as collateral. And so this is a combination of a five-year conversation that Alex and I have been having.

And, you know, the mutual education that we give each other as we go through each one of each one of these conversations. I just want to make sure that everybody understands that, like, when I go on one of these rants, half the time, it's because of something I learned from this guy. And so, you know, it's like everything else. I feel honor bound on a great, great, no, I mean, I really do feel honor bound on a, on a regular basis to remind everybody that there is no Tom Lulangos or whatever without there being a just, just massive, massive, um, groundswell of intelligence, crowdsourced intelligence. And, you know, at times you're just a conduit of it.

Now, yeah, you may be the guy who could put it all together or have the lightning, have the lightning bulb moment or whatever, but it doesn't, you know, but it doesn't, that's not what's important without the, without everybody around you, giving you that opportunity to then free up your day to go, oh, that's what that means. And there's a few of us that just run the mics, hey, Alex, all I do is run the mics here to make sure we don't get bad feedback. That's all I, so I just, it is really important. and understand that this entire analysis of what's going on in the Middle East comes down to,

and Alex and I have been saying this together for a while now, which is that climate change has always been about, you know, look at who, you know, pushes the climate change agenda, and then ask yourself hardest, and then ask yourself, do they or do they not actually produce hydrocarbons? They don't. And so therefore, none of the rest of us can either. It's funny, sitting on this side, sitting on this side, fellas, you know, when you compliment Alex, Tom, the first thing that comes to mind is like,

I'm like, well, when I first sat with, you know, just pulling it back to the theme of having you guys on once a month, all I do is sit here and just let you to rift off each other. I see the guitars in the back, Tom, and I just think of being in the garage and both you have an instrument. Some days we hit it out of the park, and other days, you know, like, you know, like, is it decent?

It's never bad. I look at the top 25 episodes of the year. I did it last year. You guys were number one on the podcast. This year you sadly fell to number two. And I guess that's news to the podcast group because I've been slowly releasing them on weekends. But I don't think you'll be surprised who gets one. We'll leave that for people to find out on New Year's Eve.

But regardless, I just get to sit here. I'm sure people when they're listening, they're like, Sean, shut up already and let them go back to doing what they're doing. because all I do is I run the mics. If we get bad feedback, I'm just the guy turning mics on and off, Alex chiming in and this is what it is. And the two of you going back and forth is why you're so popular on the show. Because, I mean, you bring it to a level that I don't stare. You told me the first time, Tom. Like, how the heck do you learn all this?

You don't. You just come and let us do what we do. And I'm like, good. Because I'm sitting here going, I don't have enough time in a day to get caught up to where you two are at. And I personally, it's not that I don't want to. It's just like I watch how you both get going. And I'm sure that's why the audience tunes in every time. Because you two going back and forth,

I have to applaud both of you on being balanced and allowing both to speak and have a little bit of, I don't know, like ideas really shape how you guys are looking at the world. And it's been really interesting, you know, as we close in when this releases, we're going to be like four days away from Christmas. And, you know, like this is the, I think, this is the 10th time this year you two have been on and we've been basically going along at you

know Alex says it's been a while I'm like well it's been a month we've been a month every month we bring you back on yeah I'm pretty sure it's been a month Alex so um regardless um as we uh close in on time here for for our discussion I don't want to shut it down by any stretch but I do want to just reiterate you know you're giving Alex paying Alex a compliment I want to pay you both a compliment and the fact that it has been really enjoyable to get to know you and have you come to Canada and do it in person in front of everyone and everything else. Really enjoy having you guys on and appreciate you.

And Merry Christmas to both you here as we get closer and closer. Now, I'll stop gushing over you too. Is there anything else you guys want to make sure that gets brought up here before the end of the year? It's been a busy year in 2023. Any thoughts here before I let you out of the studio? Thank you, Sean. Thank you, Sean. That's very kind.

And Merry Christmas to you as well and to Tom and to your families and all the best and great start to 2024. I hope your podcast gets better and better and more and more popular. I think it deserves it. I think with regards to what Tom was saying, I think that's exactly spot on right. I've been noticing over the years that, you know, if you're in... If you're after truth, right, if you're pursuing facts to uncover truth, you're obviously going to be reading other people. You publish your articles, you get lots of feedback, and some of the feedback is phenomenal.

So it's almost like a collective work of discovery. And the farther it goes, the smarter everybody gets. You know, and so, you know, I read Tom. I learn a lot of stuff from Tom. I read other people, you know, and so, and we all exchange this information. We talk to each other. We occasionally email back and forth and, you know, somebody reads what you wrote and says like, oh, did you also see this?

Check this out. So we're collectively growing smarter. And I've also noticed that the other side, you know, people who have remained very, very attached to their convictions, which are now kind of at odds with reality are growing dumber because it's becoming harder and harder to defend your positions. Because the evidence, the contrary evidence is so overwhelming that you have to grasp for straws. And you have to contrive these really, really stupid arguments to defend your position and to try to prove that you're right, even though you're not. And so I, you know, like I have some friends who are, you know, from my previous life in the industry. and, you know, they didn't... You can't not know what's going on.

You just can't not know what's going on. You're just desperately attached to your old convictions because that's how you get accepted in that environment, you know? And so sometimes I have arguments with them and I cannot believe that I used to think these people were smart because now there's I think I mean my 11 year old gets it

and these people don't you know so anyway you know I think unfortunately some people are going to be left behind or they're going to be in for a very very rude awakening but we're going places

I think we're going to good places the right will be the ride will be bumpy but okay just just this piece of information. I think it came from World Bank that in 2024, 130 million new consumers are going to be joining the global market. And I don't, I didn't, if I remember correctly, the World Bank has this $5,000 a year income that makes you like an affluent consumer. 130 million people just next year.

Now imagine if we're not all at war. What this is for entrepreneurs, for people who, you know, have new solutions, new ideas, you know, everything's getting disintermediated. You can use all these social media platform to reach the whole world and maybe, you know, like you sell knit caps or, you know, Reiki massage sessions, whatever. I don't know. But there's this whole world that you can reach. We don't need to be going to war. The only people who need to go to war are the people who want to hog control all the collateral. I don't need collateral.

I need markets. I make stuff and I want markets and I want the fewest possible impediments between me and the markets. I don't like sanctions. I don't like wars. I'm sure that there are tens of thousands of people in Russia who, for example, would want to watch your podcast or read Tom's newsletter. And why not? So, you know, the only people that are keeping us in this precarious state of the world

and this insane perpetual warfare mode of governance that we thought was only a, you know, existed in dystopian novels, novels, are the, you know, the people who like collateral, and that's the bankers. And it's not just any old bankers, it's the, it's the, is the Wall Street City of London axis. And we need to overcome that. And how we overcome that is, you know, we need to speak out. We need more podcasts like this. we need more good quality thinking and we need to reform the monetary system that's that rant

for today. Tom? So what Alex said about them, about us getting smarter and they getting dumber is really important. I've always said that one, there's two things that, you know, I say all the time. Lies are expensive and the truth sells itself, right? So and then the second thing is that you may be the smartest guy in the room, but you're not smarter than the room. Because collectively, the room is always going to be smarter because you're just going to have people who have an area, an area of expertise that you don't have time for. And it's the law of comparative advantage.

It's the law of diminishing marginal utility. It's all these basic, you know, human behavioral economic axioms that are all, they all come out of human behavior. And so as long as your analysis. and your thinking comports with these basic ideas, you're going to be right more often than you're wrong. And, you know, the question then becomes your level of resolution as to how you understand the map of everybody's incentives that you're talking about, right? That's what Alex and I do at a very high level, right?

But the basic analysis, the basic mechanisms in the analysis are anybody can learn. anybody can can can um can uh can apply and they frequently do like again i say this all the time i'm like i'm consistently amazed at just how much information gets shunted my way because people are like did you see this did you see that what do you think of this sometimes i don't have time to answer everybody that you know it's getting to the point now where i don't um but i don't care you know um i do my very best to try and engage with as much of it as i possibly can um And and I do so not just because, you know, I do it for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is that it means a lot to people when, you know, someone you look up to takes the time to, you know, take five seconds out of their day and dash off a response to them. I know, I know how I felt the first time somebody ever, you know, somebody I thought was, you know, I looked up to and I was, you know, and I respected and they took the time to respond to me.

And like, you always want to pay that idea forward because you never know when the next person in the next generation of commentators or analysts or whatever are going to show up. Right. And, you know, hopefully outdo you. Because wouldn't that be a great world where we have, you know, a surfeet of great, you know, homegrown, crowd source geopolitical and market analysts? who can do this kind of synthetic work and then write great memes and then poke holes in the eyes of the fucking tyrants because that's what we're here for

that's what the goal is that's why we do what we do I don't do this for the fucking money fuck money money is easy you want money go out and make it money is a consequence of doing good work of doing you know honest work

to the best of your ability. It's that simple. So, and if it's, you know, you're not doing good work, well, guess what? You're not going to get remunerated for it. I'm doing it for money, pretty much. You know, I'm not saying the money is not nice or not. I'm like, you know. I'm like, you know, I couldn't resist it, you know, like,

it's one of those things that you get, you get the comic relief moment in your head. and it has to go out. It just has to go out, of course. It can be able to go out. No, a great note. No, you're absolutely right. I'm going to sit here and, you know, I got to crush your legs. We've only got three fucking nails, like speech that I'm putting on here.

Like, you know, I get it. It's, it's real. There's something to what you're saying, Tom, and that, you know, when you talk about people responding back to you at the start, there's people along my journey. and by no means am I where I want to be, you know, I want to continue to move forward and upwards. But there's people that have been along the way that have supported or helped me along when they had, you know, like, why did they do that? They had, like I was a nobody. I still am a nobody at most times, right? And they have found, whether they saw something or whether somebody like Tom said had helped them along the way at a younger, and you just never know who that is. And I chuckle in my head because someday I hope, you know, I can, you know, I can.

repay the favor. Maybe you've already repaid the favor 10 times over. I have no idea. You know, like I try and respond to everybody who reaches out because, you know, like, I think it's really important. And, and I know that feeling you're talking about. Because, you know, when, you know, I don't know, I guess with, with Daniel Smith just coming back on, they could have easily said no, right? Instead, you know, at one point in time, we, we created, you know, whether it was me giving her voice, I have no idea. I'm, I, you, you, But regardless, you're one of the very few podcasts in Western Canada that's had a lady that's being talked about throughout the world for her stance on a whole bunch of stuff. And, you know, whether you ever get to that point in your life that you're that coveted, regardless, you just never know how many people you're helping along the way just by responding or, you know, helping them out.

Or even just putting out the content. Like I say, you know, I get, I get, I get, I get. and DMs from people all the time. And they're like, dude, you, you know, you have kept me, you kept me going sane from going insane in the last three years. And I finally, you know, finally found the means to, to, you know, I felt like the honor about to, to sign up or, you know, send you, like, dude, you know, you wonder, no obligation to me to to give me anything other than what, you know, my, I'm here doing this because it's what we do,

right? And it's a, it's good marketing. It's good, it's good. It's good, all those, all those things. But at the same time, it's also just a great opportunity to sit down. sit around to shoot the shit with people you like doing a thing. And, you know, it's like I joke all the time. I'm barely fit for human consumption on the best of days.

So this is like the, this is like whenever, this is the only time I've ever allowed to, like, you know, interact with real humans too. So. Well, I tell you what, I've done this poorly. I was just, I just wrote this down. I'm like, I'm, what I'm going to do for everybody is I'm going to put in the show notes, how you get to Tom's Patreon. So just a link. And Alex, I'll get something off from you as well. That way, people are like, you know, and I don't know if I've ever asked us.

at the end. But there's ways to help support these two guys or to at least follow along with them. And in the show notes, I'll put some links that way if people are like, oh yeah, I'd love to hear more of what Tom's talking about or it's Patreon or, you know, these articles you're writing. If they want to go read that, I don't know why I've never thought of. That's poor on this side. So we'll make sure that after the show done is over here, folks, I'll put it in the show notes that way. If you're wanting to find them, you can. And I don't know why I have it at, like the silliness on this side, but we'll make sure that moving forward it's there. There you go. Thanks, Alex. Thanks, John. Appreciate it.

Yeah, thanks. Thanks for coming on both with you. And we'll, well, Merry Christmas. And we'll catch up you in the new year because January, 24 is around the corner. And we'll make sure that Alex and Tom are back. And we'll, I'm sure the world is going to slow down in 24. It certainly doesn't look like it. Just to make it explicit. Merry freaking Christmas, everybody. Thank you. Who I know is Jewish. I'm doing that on purpose. Okay. You guys have a great time.

We'll talk soon.