TFTC: A Bitcoin Podcast - #351: Heading toward an inflection point with London Paul

Episode Date: August 10, 2022

Join Marty as he sits down with London Paul to discuss if the world is heading toward an inflection point, whether the inflation reduction act is a point of no return and what does the endgame for the state of the world look like. Follow London Paul on Twitter Check out The Sirius Report Shoutout to our sponsors: Unchained Capital Braiins HodlHodl Upstream Data TFTC Merch is Available: Shop Now Join the TFTC Movement: Main YT Channel Clips YT Channel Website Twitter Instagram Follow Marty Bent: Twitter Newsletter Podcast

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Take care. You've had a dynamic where money's become freer than free. If you talk about a Fed just gone nuts, all the central banks going nuts. So it's all acting like safe haven. I believe that in a world where central bankers are tripping over themselves to devalue their currency, Bitcoin wins. In the world of fiat currencies, Bitcoin is the victor. I mean, that's part of the bull case for Bitcoin. If you're not paying attention, you probably should be.

probably should be probably food insecurity and energy insecurity ever worked out well for anyone if you're in government and the simple fact is come this winter given what we anticipate will happen and they start to get frightened western governments there'll be massive civil disobedience and what are they going to do try and put down millions of people protesting and writing they can't because the optics will be horrendous. So this is just the, really in essence, the fallout of the absolute stupidity. And this is tied in with the Ukraine war, which we can discuss, just how they never engage their brains as the consequences of their actions. And now they are really, really frightened that come this winter, they're going to have

massive civil disobedience and and what are they going to do do nothing just let people riot or do something about it and they don't have any really any plans as to what they're going to do other than because you can't print energy or print food that's the point yeah and that's been a big topic on this show in recent months is energy is life energy is the basis for everything that we have in our modern society and really screwing up our energy systems globally is creating an incredible amount of chaos we had the arab spring in 2011 2012 when commodity prices rose in the middle east and it seems like now we're transitioning into a global spring as energy resources become more scarce

yeah and the well the well it's predominantly a problem for the west because russia can produce a lot more energy the iranians can produce a lot more energy the the opec plus can but they're not prepared to do it and and the issue is the west is going to suffer with having to pay exorbitant prices for energy. But if you're in the friendly global south, we'll sell you energy at enormous discounts. I mean, Iran can produce a barrel of oil for $15. This is why there's enormous Chinese and Russian investment in Iran, because they can scale up LNG production, oil production, and they can create a two-tier world where the West is struggling with a lack of energy and having to pay ridiculously high prices the global south go well we're fine we've got cheap access to cheap energy

and this is something the west just isn't computing in any way shape or form and it's an enormous problem that's very obvious to us but it's it's not yet really factored into the thinking of those in western governments and those on the periphery of governments in terms of policy making they they still think that somehow green revolutions well they don't even understand what it takes to manufacture a wind turbine i mean there's plastics where do they think plastics come from oil production they just act and the problem is people genuinely think it's deliberate but they are so stupid and it's far more worrying how stupid they are and yeah i mean we're not disputing that things happen there's people trying to take advantage of situations but the idea

there's this global nefarious plan to destroy western civilization well as i said when when's the how's that going to work out for them do we think 330 million americans are going to sit there going i don't have a problem i'm hungry and i'm cold it's not going to happen i mean in america well particularly in the u.s given the amount of firearms people have i think people are going to react extremely badly and what are these people going to do in government well they're just going to stand there and go i mean do they really think the police force or the army's going to stand up i mean the u.s army's going to stand up against hundreds of millions of americans and go watch we'll start shooting you no of course not and they know this so this is why i always come back

to the point there's nothing deliberate about this this is just decades of stupidity i mean russia is ideological hatred on steroids and now they're paying well we're paying a huge price because they simply cannot comprehend well how did russia manage to circumvent the sanctions from well they've been doing it since 2014 you know there's all these things they just don't think And the problem is anyone like me who talks about this, they go, well, you're a Kremlin apologist. No, I'm just telling you this is reality. It's not about agreeing with it. This is just a statement of fact.

This is how the world operates. And the West just will not grasp reality. And the problem is when does it grasp reality? The longer this goes on, the bigger the risks are for all of us. But, yeah, there's nothing remotely surprising about this. It's just simply the fact that their hatred of Russia is so great. It's a bit like, well, if this didn't work, we'll just do more of the same because eventually it will work.

And the more they do, the worse it gets for us in the West. Russia sat there going, we don't have a problem with this. If you don't want our gas, fine. We've already sold half of Nord Stream 2 gas supplies to Asia and we'll sell the rest and you can just do without we don't care and also russia's economy is only 15 percent of its gdp depends on oil and gas the westerners don't grasp this and these politicians and and those you know think tanks and all these people who advise governments or people trying to force government policy don't have any clue of reality i think lavrov called

the westerners schizophrenic and he's right the west is schizophrenic because it has a zero grasp of reality they live in this delusional fantasy world of this is how the world is and the world isn't like that and the world is increasingly changing and they need to accept that that's the way it is and you can either join it or you can freeze to death starve to death that's your joy when you know the rest of the world wants to move on yeah what do you think that is the driving force behind the stupidity this complete disconnection from reality well i guess we can talk about that when we as we record things because it's an extremely valid point but i've had enough experience myself in the financial sector and all that thing and we can we can talk

about that where the disconnect from reality has been has been my experience and i can talk about some of my interaction with governments and government advisors through through the pandemic which highlights their tunnel visions as well but i think it's good to talk about that as part of our discussion because it it will help to give people i think a better understanding that yeah we we know there's evil in the western world with evil intent and i don't want to dispute in that but there isn't some global nefarious plan to you know but i mean it's like the pandemic you know look how the oh once we have a lockdown we're in lockdown forever well here we are today that's not true so the people making these stories have to keep backtracking and changing the story and then

it became eventually oh covid was a dress rehearsal for the next pandemic oh it's going to be monkey pox no it isn't and here we are no it isn't you know it's this big but some of these people are as ideologically driven as as western governments and all the people the entourage surrounding them believe things they believe in this so passionately and they will not entertain the idea that that's not reality and it's not reality it's just it's just this idea well if there's people not in charge and it's total chaos they a lot of people can't cope with that that's worse than the idea that there's this nefarious group of people controlling the world they actually get some sort of some source of comfort from that even though it's a paranda

but the idea there's no one in control in the works in reality terrifies me and that's understandable but that's where we're at there isn't me because if they were intelligent they would never have sanctioned russia the way they have done because they're We're destroying ourselves, and it's absolutely stupid. Yes. Well, I should let you know that my producer, I think he was liking the beginning of the conversation, hit record.

We're not streaming live. Oh, that's fine. I'm not sure where we kicked in, but anyway, yeah, that's fine. I think we kicked in like a minute into the conversation, so we've picked up a lot of good content already. But going into that disconnection from reality, I mean, here in the United States, too. And I'll be honest, I go back and forth between it's a globalist ploy, and it's just pure incompetence. And what really leads me to believe that it's stupidity just looking at the President of the United States, particularly around energy policy. I mean, we just passed the Inflation Reduction Act here in the United States, which is essentially a way to reduce inflation by printing a bunch of money.

And not only that, it's essentially a backdoored Green New Deal where they're taxing methane and they're just going to hurt the oil and gas industry even more and then subsidize wind and solar even more. And it's doubling down. And like you said, it's complete incompetence, but the doubling down, the tripling down, the quadrupling down, it's the definition of insanity. We're doing the same thing over and over again, expecting different results. sitting here in the united states and watching this unfold is it's like how you just want to shake the people in charge like how are you doing this joe biden how are you going to oil and gas executives and begging them to spin up refineries when you're also telling them at the same time that they're not going to be able to sell the byproducts of those refineries within the decade Do you understand capital allocation, investment and return on initial investment? There's no incentive to spin up these refineries if you're telling them they're not going to be able to sell products within seven years. well yeah and we go back to this i mean the fundamental issue is i mean whatever people's

perspective on climate change is and my attitude is yeah the climate change agenda is farcical but should we be more responsible custodians of the planet yeah should we avoid dumping enormous amounts of tonnage of plastic in oceans of course we should there are things we should be doing but the problem is there are people driving government policies who actually again this is part of this schizophrenia mindset of no grip on reality who genuinely think if we don't do these policy measures then you know oceans are going to rise 50 feet the world will end in 10 years i mean okay the fact i'm not saying the same people said this but we've had this for as long as i can Remember, I remember, I'm old enough to remember comments like this in the 80s, the 90s, to varying degrees, but there are people who genuinely believe this.

And then from a political standpoint, whether these politicians agree or disagree, they know it's political suicide if they come out and say, actually, we don't believe in it. OK, you know, we had Trump who stood up against this and Trump's an exception and he's not a politician. But these career politicians, the whole basis of their existence is political survival. So they're never going to rock the boat. They're not going to say anything that deviates away from this idea that, you know, we need to move to more renewable energy sources. But again, it's one of those situations where rather like sanctioning Russia. and this idea, well, we can sanction Russia and cut off oil and gas. It doesn't matter because there's this magical oil and gas supermarket somewhere where someone in the world's producing millions of barrels

of oil per day, just waiting for us to buy them on the off-chan, you know, that at some point in the future there might be a conflict with Russia or whoever else. This is just not reality. And it's like the so-called Green Revolution. They don't grasp. As we said, maybe it was in the recording earlier, how do you manufacture a wind turbine? You need plastics, you need oil.

What are the raw constituents in making wind turbines? What's the mining cost of this? And at the end of its life cycle, you're going to have to throw it in a landfill site. You can't recycle it. So they're not thinking long term if we pursue this energy policy. In 2030 years, we're going to start running out of other resources. Like, we want to produce a lot of batteries. Are we going to deplete lithium resources in the world to the point we don't have any?

What's the implication of that? Nobody's thinking about this. So it's the policy decision where you know as well as I do, politics is just a four-year cycle in the US or a five-year cycle in the UK, for example. So they just want to get reelected. They never make policy decisions in the West that says, well, if we're going to implement this, what's the repercussions 5, 10, 15, 20 years down the line? No one thinks like that. That's the big difference with China and Russia. They have long-term plans.

They think about the future and go, what's the implication? So, yeah, Russia said we'd like to use more renewable energy sources, but we have to phase it in. China says the same. We have to phase things in gradually. where the West, prior to the Ukraine war, came up with this farcical idea, we can just switch off nuclear. We don't need oil and gas or coal.

Let's just go for renewables. And not understanding they couldn't produce enough energy via renewables. So we already had energy shortages. And then, of course, with Europe being a great example of this, with Nord Stream 2, Germany could have had double the amount of energy. But no, because of sanctions, it went, And because of all the investment in political capital, they go, well, we can't do that because the United States will get angry with us.

And we have to show a united front because we have to combat the aggressors of Russia. So, no, we're not going to switch it on. And then, of course, they had the farcical situation with Nord Stream 1 where there was an issue of a gas turbine that went to Canada and seemed supposed to fix it. And then because of sanctions, there was all these issues of sending it back. And anyway, there's this whole political shit show. And of course, it's still not back. So Nord Stream 1 is running at 20%, 30% of its operational capacity. And so what's the immediate?

Hang on. We're hugely short of gas in Europe. And obviously, Nord Stream 1 and 2 go to Germany. the logical conclusion would be we have to just switch nordstream 2 on get sort out the issue with the gas tub and get nordstream 1 running at 100 capacity again and this will start to alleviate the energy crisis which as we said energy is the lifeblood of a nation without it you have nothing we don't produce any energy we can't grow any food we can't heat and light our homes so we're in serious trouble i mean to feed ourselves is a serious problem all year round

eating less so in the summer months although europe's not you know doesn't necessarily have the greatest summers but you know we're in the window at the moment where it's less of a problem what happens when you get into autumn and winter we've got massive problems but they go no because we've invested all this political capital we've told people that the sanctions will inflict maximum pain on Russia. Okay, we'll have to suffer a little bit on a short-term basis, but that's selling the politicians the idea that when the Ukraine war started,

oh, it'll be over very quickly because Russia will capitulate. They'll capitulate economically. Financially, they'll collapse, and Putin will be deposed as the president. He'll be shipped off in exile to Siberia, and that will be the end of the problem. The war will be over. We can all get back to normal.

and it won't be a problem and of course none of that was ever going to be a reality because again westerners came to the conclusion that russia's military was incapable of fighting the war there was all these lies about russia was going to take ukraine in three days and when they didn't that's because they're getting bogged down no they had no intention of taking care and i'm not a military expert my military knowledge is quite small but if you've got you know a small force of 50,000 troops, you're not going to take a capital city with 3 million people. This is nonsense. So again, because of all this political capital invested, they can't backtrack because you

and I know Western politics, you backtrack, you're finished. Your political career is over. So they have to keep doubling, like you say, doubling, tripling, quadrupling, et cetera, debt on the narrative until eventually it gets to the point and we're kind of there now where we don't see the same rhetoric coming out of western nations about russia losing the war they're starting to try and say okay we've got an energy problem so you know the green revolution has to be temporarily put on hold so let's just switch on nuclear power plants again we need coal but europe's going no we're banning coal from i think the 10th of august

I mean, what are the ramifications there? But they're all over the place. And you're starting to see in Western media, I think there was some article on CBS News, starting to look like they're throwing Zelensky under the bus, questioning, well, we're putting tens of billions of dollars in investment. Where's it going? Where's it being spent? And it's very, very clear that elements in the West are starting to finally realize that

Russia is, whether people like it or not. This is a statement of fact. Russia's winning the war. It doesn't matter how slow they go. The progress isn't measured by how slow you go. It's by how much more land are you taking. They control the Gansk now. They control large parts of Donetsk and Zaporozhye and Kherson. And the question is, at what point does Russia stop trying to take?

Are they going to move into Odessa and Nikolayev? We don't know. But the issue is Russia's winning the war. this people can sit there and argue as much as they like this is reality deal with reality it's not when i say it's not a question of me supporting russia for me the war should never have happened but the war didn't happen just for the sake of it there are reasons and people in the west have to accept there's an uncomfortable reality that we've a lot of people don't want to deal with but there were problems in ukraine and in the donbass region since 2014 this this is a statement effect and okay whether russia's call on the fact they felt that the the on the east of the contact

line that the separatists in donbass threatened the massacre that's open to debate but they believed it was the case they went we have to go in because ironically the west thought putin going in and starting the war would finish him politically if he hadn't gone in and this massacre had happened he would no longer be president it's as simple as that that's the mindset of Russian people. So whatever people's perception is, Russia went in and, yeah, they started the war. And I've made this point very clear. Every single Ukrainian or Russian who dies as a result of this war is highly regrettable. I'm no fan of war. I don't want to see wars. But we have to understand and be mature and say, why is this war happening?

What's the ramifications of this war? What's going to be the outcome for the West and And from the Western perspective, we're seeing an aggravation in inflationary problems, we're seeing problems with supply chains, lack of commodity. And if you have high inflation in energy terms, then it's going to translate to every other facet of your economy, as we know, quite simply, because to produce food, as we've said, you need energy. And if energy costs are skyrocketing, your food production costs are going to skyrocket. So therefore, you start to have serious inflationary problems.

Inflation was a problem as well, because we printed trillions of dollars of money. And for some reason, economists seem to forget the fact that if you print money, it causes inflation ultimately. And we made the point last time that the big difference is prior to the pandemic started, they've tried to ring fence it inside the financial system, which means effectively that's why we see asset price inflation. That's where the inflation is. So bond markets in housing and equities, they try to keep the money inside. But once you print money, give it to the likes of you and I in Main Street, you're then going to create inflationary problems. So these are all very obvious manifestations of problems. So the question is, how long does the Ukraine war carry on for? And it's interesting, Harry Zelensky is trying to persuade the Chinese, meaning Xi Jinping, to talk to the Russians and try and broker a deal to end the war.

Now, whether that's his own making, whether he's doing that in defiance of the people who are dictating the war policy, and it's certainly not Zelensky, and it's most certainly the Americans. I mean, the Americans and the British, for that matter, are not fighting the war directly, but they're as good as fighting the war. They're the ones responsible for Ukraine policy, of how they prosecute the war themselves. And it's been a complete failing. You have to bear in mind that since 2014, all the major cities in Ukraine have been fortified. This war was always known it was going to happen at some point. It was questionable when, not if. And it's been an abysmal failure.

And the weapons provided to Ukraine have been substandard. Okay, there's an argument, and quite legitimately, that the Ukrainians don't know how to operate some Western military hardware. That's true. So they lack the training. But again, that's a completely horrendous oversight by the West. So the West has clearly demonstrated its ineptitude of fighting a ground war. The Russians are succeeding, and whether people like it doesn't matter. That's reality.

And the longer this war goes on, the stronger Russia's negotiating position would be. Because at some point, the war has to end. The question is, does the war end with Russia controlling all of Ukraine or part of Ukraine? Or is there independent republics linked to Russia? That's the question. So if Russia controls all the way around to Odessa, it landlocks this rough state of Ukraine. What does that mean? But the longer the war goes on, the risk is Russia's terms to end the war will get worse from a Ukrainian perspective or a Western perspective, because what happens if Russia turns around and says, OK, we'll agree to a peace settlement, but here's the agreement.

Ukraine is going to be completely demilitarized. We're going to insist on having Russian peacekeeping forces in Ukraine to make sure a war never happens again. We're going to insist that it's written literally in blood, so to speak, that you'll never join NATO. You're going to be a completely neutral nation. How does that pan out? What's the ramification of this? OK, we're surmising what the outcome will be. But there was certainly evidence back in April that the Ukrainians wanted to end the war and the British and the Americans told them, no, keep going because you'll win the war.

Well, they were never going to win the war. This was an attempt to think, well, we'll eventually crush Russia economically, financially. And the longer the war goes on, the chances are the Russian people will demand the overthrow of Putin. Well, its popularity is higher than it's ever been. The Russian economy is managing perfectly well. Its financial system is stabilized. There's people who argue the whole ruble thing is a farce, but it isn't. I mean, that's just sour grapes from people who were saying that the Russian ruble would go to 300 to the dollar.

It's never going to happen because Russia has had time since 2014 to understand. And there was always the risk they were going to be cut off from Sweden. But I made this point before elsewhere, and I think really if we look in historical terms, whoever ultimately, whether it was a group of people or some individual, came out with the idea in the first place, is one thing sanctioning banks, is one thing cutting them off from SWIFT, that's bad enough. But if you take a central bank and say, we're going to cut the central bank off from SWIFT, and in the process, we don't know what the figure really is, but we're going to steal hundreds of billions of dollars of legitimate Russian forex reserves, that is the worst

decision ever made in history because in doing so, the rest of the world, including the United States' allies in inverted commas, went, hang on, we might be next. So the global south's going, and Asia's going, well, if we defy America, they don't like something, they might do it to us, and we don't have the resources like Russia has. We would collapse very rapidly. It's the same with africa it's the same with the middle east and rapidly the united states is suffering an enormous backlash through this policy making decision because it does i mean the optics it sends to the world is we can't trust the united states because what happens if we want to you know impose our sovereignty on our own nation what happens if we want to trade with someone

in the world you don't want us to well maybe you'll crush us economically financially and we can't withstand this so again a ludicrous policy decision that ultimately was made in in haste that well if we do this it'll crush russia and of course it was it would never crush russia but i said this at the time in the backlash from people going this is ludicrous you're just a putin apologist you're just a kremlin stooge no this is reality and anyone who understands russia knew that this would never happen but again this is the problem if you had someone politically in the west who who actually came out and said hang on a minute but we thought through the ramifications of sanctioning russia what does this mean for us in terms of the backlash you know if we cut russia

off in energy terms what happens i mean if russia had switched off all the energy to the west the west would have been in absolute meltdown they didn't okay things have happened which have caused the energy supply to decrease which is basically the west's fault it's their stupidity in terms of sanctioning but there's no thought process and we need to get to the point and we probably will in the next decade where in the west we actually have politicians who are there to serve the interests of other people and to serve the interests of the country who sit there and go no we sanction russia this will be a disaster for us so what do we do we don't want the war? Of course, that's absolutely correct. What are we going to do to circumvent the war?

Well, the answers existed ever since the Minsk agreements were signed. All they had to do was get the Ukrainians to implement them. And they kept telling the Ukrainians, don't implement the Minsk agreements. We would not have had a war. Russia would not have been in anywhere but possibly Donbass. And Donbass was going to have autonomy. So maybe there would just be an independent republic that would have been the end of the problem whether the united states told ukrainians not to and the consequences are now far worse for the west it's strengthened russia's hand globally it's forced more and more nations to literally say well we're going to back russia we're backing russia's policy decisions and rather like china and taiwan and maybe we can talk

later. 160 nations in the world said we support China's stance over Taiwan and the One China principle. Whether we agree with that or not is not the point. That's the reality that's playing out. So they didn't learn the lesson with Ukraine. And the United States is hell-bent trying to provoke China with Taiwan. And the same problems are already starting to manifest itself. And it's about time someone somewhere went, this is insane. What are we doing? Why are we doing this? And yeah i'm a westerner so when i'm deeply critical of the west policy is making decision because i care principally what the outcome is for the west i live in the west we live in the west we're gonna have to suffer the consequences and the way things are going they'll be extremely

civilian we don't know what ultimately what the outcome will be but that's why i'm so critical because we are the ones who are going to suffer the consequences so as i say to people if you have a problem with me having a problem with our well-being you need to look in the mirror and ask yourself why don't you have the same concerns because that's where we're at this is reality and we need to deal with the real yeah and it's again going back to like doubling tripling quadrupling down like uh what the un is doing right now hastily approving the application of sweden and other countries and uh the the narrative machine that's been running here in the u.s it's just been extremely bizarre to watch play out as you see the narrative being spit out by

the media and the government and then actually see what's happening on the ground like you mentioned everybody thought the sanctions was going to absolutely cripple russia however the ruble has rallied to its highest point against the dollar in quite some time we've had russia not collapse as an economy gain more ground in ukraine and it's just it is seeing where we are today compared to where we were when we had our first conversation which was i believe like a week after the war had broken out or two weeks after the war had broken out It's been disgusting just to sit here and watch people objectively lie to the public time and time again. And as an American taxpayer, one thing you mentioned, the tens of billions, I think it's in the hundreds of billions of dollars now that have been sent to Zelensky's administration from the West.

As a taxpayer, we couldn't sign a $40 billion small business economic relief plan during lockdowns. However, I think we signed a bill that sent $70 billion over to Ukraine. And since then, we've signed several others that have sent billions more dollars over. What is happening with that money? What is that going toward? is it getting thrown into just some dark pool slush fund are people actually getting weapons and putting up a defense like the paper trail of all those dollars that are being sent over uh as a taxpayer would like to see that and just see there's something very odd going on like you mentioned it's probably not zielinski pulling the strings but uh the united

States, probably led by our Central Intelligence Agency and other intelligence agencies across the world really leading this charge. I mean, wasn't there a few instances where British soldiers were caught fighting on the ground in Ukraine? Yeah, well, to take the point again, it's worth just reiterating. Yeah, you're absolutely right. We see a situation in the West where there's always money available, inverted commas, to fight this enemy, whether it's, in this case, Russia. We've always got the money to support Ukraine.

And you're absolutely right. The amount that's being spent legitimately is probably a fraction. The question is, where's the rest of the money going? The other thing we know for a fact, and there has been admission even in the West, that a significant proportion of arms ends up in other parts of the world. Some of them have turned up in the Middle East and are now in control of the ISIS of this world. I mean, there's a black market and someone's profiting enormously.

I mean, there was instances where there was Ukrainians selling arms to Russians. This is the absurdity of what's going on. And the argument is, yeah, you can't track where arms are going. You can't track in the theater of war. But at least that's one thing that has been some pushback on this, saying, well, where's the money going? Where's it being spent? And you're absolutely right.

But I always come back to this point, particularly with the United States, this ridiculous military budget annually. What is it, $770 or whatever billion? My argument is, and it still surprises me, how few Americans are sat there going, if you can afford to spend all this money, which is just basically pouring it down the drain with horrendous consequences with wars and regime change around the world, why aren't Americans going, why aren't you spending this money domestically? Why aren't you rebuilding infrastructure, like you say, supporting people, have innovation,

to start to create a high-tech manufacturing base in the United States, and if over the last 10, 20 years, these trillions and trillions of dollars had been spent domestically, then the United States could have now been the strongest economy in the world. It could have had, I'm not saying dominance, but being a very strong nation amongst equals. It could have led the world by example. the world would have trusted the u.s and it could have been a fantastic for domestically and internationally it could have done all these things it's done none of them and very few americans seem to realize and ask the question why are we allowing this i mean but it but again

it's how it's sold more in the u.s than anywhere else it's like you could have universal health care for nothing that's socialism that is you know we have to pay for our health care no you don't have to pay okay you maybe people made a smaller contribution but the point is that's the level of indoctrination that makes people go well i should pay for all these things otherwise it's socialism no you shouldn't have to pay for all this health care should be a universal right this isn't about socialism this is common sense because again a healthy nation is extremely important for the future prospects of a nation so it's that kind of level of indoctrination where people think oh that's acceptable they don't ask the obvious question worse and like you say where's the money

right and there's just this endlessly writing almost not blank checks but it's a billion dollars this week it's a billion dollars in two weeks or whatever billions of dollars where's it going where's it being spent and then he's and this is one of those situations where imagine if $100 billion had been invested wisely in the U.S. economy in some way. That is what Americans should be demanding and asking questions and saying, this is how it should be. And obviously, as the West is in terminal decline, its economies are collapsing, its financial systems are collapsing, there's going to come a point when Americans are going

to turn around and go, hang on a minute, enough's enough. you're not going to spend 700 800 billion dollars a year financing whatever it is financing and and again the question is where's that money being spent is it legitimately being spent is money being siphoned off somewhere you know there's it's all the issue what black ops are going on what what's the intelligence agency's role in this and all these questions most people never ask but but at some point those questions need to be asked and they will be asked and it's going to create a very uncomfortable you know sort of situation for those in notionally at least in political power or the people levering political power in the military industrial complex and

someone's going to have to turn around and say enough's enough because you're going to have to start to to actually address the needs of the american people because the lack of investment in the United States is a staggering. I mean, let's say for a nation that's supposed to be, was the hegemonic power, domestically the lack of investment in the U.S. is just self-explanatory. And the U.S. should have done a whole bunch of things very different. And we'd now be talking about a world where the U.S. was respected,

where the U.S. had a very vibrant role, where the U.S. could be a great nation amongst equals, where it actually cooperated with other nations and went, well, okay, yeah, you do have a monopoly on energy, but we don't need to go to war with you or try and remove your leadership. Let's work together. We need energy.

We need cheap energy, okay, because we have these aspirational ideas of what we want to do with our economy and work together in cooperation. But from my experience, far too often, and this is going back decades, there's a mentality, particularly in the US, where it's it's zero-sum game you're either with us or against us it's always an endless competition

we have to beat you we have to defeat you and if your nation becomes too strong from our perspective then we have to crush you this just doesn't work anymore this is not how the world works and they still haven't adjusted to the fact that you're not going to crush russia and china and the more you try to crush them the more the u.s is isolating itself and united states is still heavily dependent on other parts of the world including the russian chinese for commodities rare earth metals for example the list is endless and not realizing you know again we don't have this supermarket where there's just these rare earths lying on a supermarket shelf and we just go well we're not interested in you selling it to us china and russia we'll just go and buy it from

these other guys somewhere in the world who don't exist and not grasping the reality that the us is heavily dependent this is how the world operates and trying to say i'm going to to for example we're going to reshore semiconductor production sounds great in principle do it in reality and it's not feasible you only you could spend 200 billion dollars trying to do this it's never going to work so instead of fighting the rest of the the chinese and the russians work with them and say, let's work together, let's lower the cost of semiconductor production. It benefits all of us. But at the moment, they're incapable of doing that.

But in the process, not only are they destroying their own nation, they're also just increasingly alienating the United States. And the longer this process goes on, the lack of trust is going to be very hard to turn around. And so, therefore, what's going to happen in the future? bearing in mind the west has kind of reached saturation we've saturated in debt we've saturated in terms of consumption we we've exhausted financialization of economies we've reached the end of the line we reached it 2008 and kidded ourselves we carry this on we we're not competitive because we have to pay too high salaries and we and because of inflation

people want higher and higher salaries so we become less and less competitive it's not feasible If the United States wants to reshore manufacturing production, apart from having to cooperate with the Chinese, the Russians, and the global south, they're also going to have to pay the equivalent of Chinese wages. Well, as things stand, if you pay Chinese wages in the United States, nearly everybody would just be bankrupt. They couldn't pay for food. They couldn't pay their mortgages.

They couldn't pay for anything. Businesses would collapse. It just wouldn't be feasible. That's why the West has to recalibrate itself and realize it has to live within its being and adjust its whole cost differentials, its economy, its financial system. Because the global South, including the Chinese and the Russians, have enormous growth potential in their economies because they haven't reached saturation point by any stretch of the imagination. And in Russia's case, they have an abundance of commodities, not just oil and gas.

And they've hardly scratched the surface in terms of, not we're talking about, okay, there's the argument of the green revolution, but just exploiting the planet for every resource ultimately is damaging. It might not be in the next 10, 20 years, but ultimately it's a very dangerous thing to do. But in principle, probably 70%, 80% of their land mass is full of commodities they've never even explored. They have need to assess the potential. So, like with Iran, Iran can produce a lot more energy at very cheap prices. So, this is the future. These are the growth sectors of the world. I mean, look at Africa.

Africa hasn't even started the process. In 50, 100, 200 years, they could be the major player in the world because of the fact they haven't reached saturation in consumption, in wages, in productivity of their nation. they've barely got going because the west has exploited them and the west isn't allowed to exploit they have enormous growth potential as does asia as and even the middle east is finally going we need to change you know we need to stop feuding with iran we need reproachments so the saudis have said they've had endless discussions the last couple years going yeah we don't agree with you on lots of things but it's in our interest to cooperate and it's the same with the UAE wanting to cooperate with Iran and the UAE and the Middle East going, well, China

and Russia are a better bet. They're more reliable. If they strike a deal, they stick to it. They're complying with agreements. The United States never is, and it's hardly a secret that the United States has been trying to get rid of MBS for about the last three years, consistent, trying to get him removed because he's moved into the China-Russia gap. It's very self-explanatory that that's the case.

But these are the fundamental issues we have now. But in the West, there's this belief that we can just keep going and the financialization of the economy is working. Well, since its inception in the 1980s, it's been a complete failure. If we don't see how it's a failure, look at the dot-com era. Look at 2008. 2008 was the clearest indication it would completely fail. because you don't create this enormous wealth in the financial sector that trickles through the economy.

And then we have all this money and we can just spend it into the economy as consumption being, which is why they abandoned all of, effectively, all manufacturing and production capability because somebody somewhere, again, another spectacular failure, went, no, we don't need that. Just offshore it. Give it to the Chinese. That's fine.

We don't need this. Financialization is the future. We're going to make enormous amounts of profits, and it will serve the entire economy of the United States or Britain or the European Union. It was impossible, because ultimately it was going to fail, because it was completely abused. There was wanton speculation, and 2008 proved this, and it's been going on worse since 2008. And the problem is, it's an illusionary world. There's no reality to it. There's no substance.

Everything's now fictitious numbers on the screen. So whether it's GDP, whether it's inflation, whatever metric, they're all lies. There's no basis in reality. So we have crazy situations also within the economic financial system where we have these people who don't understand basics. None of these people even understand the basics of economics, the basis of printing money has a consequence for them. They don't understand anything.

They're demonstrating they don't understand any of this because they haven't grasped yet that in 2008, you have QE zero interest rate policy. You can do it for a few months. It can be a short, sharp shot. Well, we've got a problem, slash interest rates, pump the economy for the money to get it back on an even keel, and then stop this. Raise interest rates and just use it as a short-term measure to just get through a huge economic financial shock.

I remember in early 2009 writing to Western governments going, if you do this for more than a few months, it's over. You are destroying the West. It's game over. It might take 10 years or five years or 15, but you destroy that. You cannot do this. No response. Okay, that's fine.

But the rest is history. it's because i mean not only is stupid but it's just read a history book i got i wrote in a newsletter last week that i sent out like it seems like because going back to the the inflation reduction act it's great again the the orwellian propagandistic the naming of these acts is laughable but one carve out in that act is the fact that the u.s federal government is going to hire 87 000 irs agents to go throughout the united states and harass uh middle class people and small businesses to make sure that they're sucking every penny of tax revenue that they can from the american populace and this is like and you mentioned like the the west is saturated the

american empire specifically via the military industrial complex it just spread itself too thin around the world, and it literally cannot keep up with all the operations it has going on. You cannot manage a military operation as large as the U.S. is trying to embark on globally. And this is just the exact playbook of the crumbling Roman Empire of the 4th and 5th century. I mean, just to a T. Print a bunch of money, expand your military as far as you can to try and get as much control as you can while at the same time having bread and circuses at home and telling people that everything's going to be okay,

we're going to print money, and we're going to send a bunch of tax collectors out to make sure that we're getting all the revenue that the state has deserved. And it's just, I mean, you hear the phrase, humanity doesn't repeat, but it rhymes. And it's, especially in 2022, too when we have the access to communications technology that we have and we have the the

ability to understand history because of all the information that's at our fingertips it's befuddling that we're literally going and just doing the exact same playbook that crumbling empires of the past have done and not thinking critically like oh wait this hasn't worked in to pass, why it's going to work for us right now. The IRS carve out in this Inflation Reduction Act is astonishing. I think that 87,000 new IRS agents would make that bigger than parts of the military, bigger than the intelligence apparatus that we have here. All agencies combined bigger than uh all the health and food administrations that we have just to go out and harass taxpayers uh for their tithe to the government and again going back to

conversation about sending all these billions of dollars over to ukraine it's like as an american taxpayer the fact that my government is now spinning up a essentially a small army to go harass citizens for tax money it's like wait a second like where is the tax money that i have been paying which is already pretty significant going like how you me paying taxes has led us to this situation and yet you want more to fix the problem like it is like you said we don't want this to be the reality that we live in but if you're a logical critical thinker is able to objectively just assess what's going on it's it's you have a dying empire trying flailing around trying to grasp on to the last sense of control that it has and like you said like

americans we have a lot of guns that's what i think this social shift could happen depending on how quickly this new irs task force is spun up like once these agents go out and start harassing And that's the thing. They're going to harass middle class Americans. They're not going to go after the billionaires or the large corporations. They're going to go after small businesses and middle class people. I think that will be the tipping point where people are like, wait a second, you've materially made our lives worse off over the last three decades, five decades, whatever it may be. and now you're asking me for more when I can't afford a $400 emergency expense. That could be a point at which people stand up and say, hey, this is not happening. Yeah, and let's look at just some simple maths.

I don't know what they're going to pay these 87,000 IRS inspectors. I know it's debatable how long they'll stay employed, but let's just say it's on an annualized basis. I mean, what are they going to pay them? I don't know. I don't want to go, right? But if it was $50,000, say, you're talking best part of 500, probably at least $500 million a year, just alone.

Then if you start trying to squeeze the extra bit of money out to the middle class, the middle class, sadly, in Western societies are the most leveraged. So you're going to, I mean, and maybe a lot of these people have small businesses. You're going to kill the small business. you're going to cause huge unemployment as a result of it you may you know i mean how how many tens of billions of americans might this affect when you start you know it's the cause and effect it's like you know it might seem to be a small problem it becomes a huge problem because if you affect one person's livelihood you can they've got a small business you might cause a small

business to go bust that might make 10 people unemployed and that small business might serve two other businesses and makes all those people rid of them. I mean, okay, we're extrapolating to illustrate a point, but this is the problem. No one thinks of the consequences, and this is in the West, but again, it's all soundbites. It sounds great. People out there all go, yeah, they're going to claw all this taxation money back.

There's all these people who should be paying tax who are these tax dodgers or tax evaders, not actually asking the question, who's really evading tax? Like you say, billionaires or big corporations who don't pay anywhere near their first share of tax. So it's just illustrative of why Western politics has completely failed. I mean, it's not a democracy. There's no democracy in Western nations. People think I get to vote every four or five years, but you're not voting anything. Nothing changes. Things just get progressively worse.

Occasionally, OK, whatever we think about Trump, Trump was a wild card in U.S. politics. He only lasted one term, whatever the reasons for that were. And once he became in politics, his hands were tied behind his back. And I'm not a supporter of Trump. I'm just observing what happens. But in the general sense, here's the point. If you and I, me not as a man, but if I was an American citizen, you and I said we're going to create a political party

and we're going to address these problems. And even if we had enormous amounts of support in relative terms, are we ever going to form a government in the U.S.? no chance as things don't there's no room for another political party and that's the problem this is the illusion there's no democracy in the west people think voting every four or five years means a democracy i'm sorry to burst the bubble but it's it's nonsense because nothing changes it's not as though voting someone else changes the status quo whatsoever you might get some little bit of tinkering in foreign policy but really the united states government's not about

anything domestic it's always about the the policy decisions globally in terms of u.s geopolitical policy making that's where the u.s is concerned about as you say the bread and circuses thing with domestically but okay things when we had the pandemic they had to do something because i mean this shows how weak the united states was the pandemic started okay whether whatever people agree or disagree with policymaking decision. For me, they're a complete failure. But the issue is, what did they do? They panicked and went, just print money, just print trillions, give everybody money, because if we don't, United States will collapse. Western nations will collapse. And that's absolutely true. That's because our economies function on this

endless need for debt, endless need for credit. There's no kind of growth sectors where businesses grow and evolve it's always just throw more money at it just give people more money you know i mean i endlessly get plagued morning noon and night with emails texts everything going borrow money lens get some money vote don't spend it just borrow it it will give you cheap credit this has been going on since 2008 because that's how our economies function which is completely unsustainable so when everything's an illusion and everything's predicated on it the political entities got away with it for years for decades because things weren't actually that bad in the sense they they just didn't do anything domestically the united states got away with it because

it had the dollar and it could effectively say to the world we'll give you worthless bits of paper you just give us a whole bunch of free dollars and we're going to black our way through you ultimately economies can't operate on that basis you actually have to produce something your economy actually has to take a dollar and make two dollars or a dollar twenty years not take a dollar recycle it through an economy and make nothing there's nothing to show it's just gone either it's been spent or you know the irs gets a slice or whatever and it all just disappears and the end product is the dollar is gone and there's nothing to show for it but they got away with it and they and they and that's part of the hubris they thought we can just keep doing

this it's working what's the problem the world will just keep taking our dollars and giving us dollars they'll buy our treasuries and then by 2014 the world's gonna hang on a minute no and the chinese whether people like it or not were really angry because they were supportive of the u.s government and then in 2008 when the u.s went we're just going to print a whole load the money. The Chinese went, hang on a minute. Where's that relationship? You're abusing the relationship. We had a sort of agreement in inverted commas. Yeah, you wanted dollars, give us treasuries. It's a reciprocal relation. You're just now trashing the dollar. You're trashing US treasuries. And it started a cascading process where trust went out the window and

The United States' foreign policy has engendered such much distrust that nations are de-dollarizing. People can say to the contrary, this is reality. And it's, again, caused by their foreign policy decisions. But ultimately, it's a statement of fact. You cannot have an economy that is endlessly dependent on debt. Because eventually, everybody reaches debt saturation. It's like you and I. You know, I could borrow $10,000 10 years ago for no reason.

Maybe, well, who knows why. But then I've got to pay it back. Then I can't pay it back. So it's like, oh, I'll remortgage. I'll refinance. I'll just take more debt on. Oh, look at this wonderful housing market. My house is worth twice as much as it was.

I'm going to take equity out of my property. What a lie. There is no equity in your property. Because if you sell it and buy the same house, you're going to pay the same price. so people took equity and they just became more and more leveraged had more and more debt well if your economy is dependent on that you're going to get to a point where you can't be sustainable and it happened in 2008 now they're just blacking it and they kept it going going well eventually we'll normalize things well you can't normalize things and now we've got to the

point where it's the end the west is just the west has basically consumed itself to the point It's just eating itself alive because it's not sustainable. And that's the fundamental problem that we're at. And it's worth reiterating this point because when you say things like that, people go, I've never heard anyone say that or very few people say it, but this is reality. So the people who go, well, our solution is we'll just reshore all our production. They need to ask themselves, well, how does that happen in reality?

How do we achieve that? It's not achievable. Because here's the thing, who's going to finance this? Who's going to finance the $5 trillion or whatever the United States need just in infrastructure? Who's going to bring businesses back to the United States when they're not going to be profitable? Because what are they going to do, manufacture a whole bunch of goods,

which they're going to cost three, four, five times as much? So what does that do to the U.S. economy? It means everyone has to earn five times the salary. Well, if they earn five times the salary, it's a vicious circle. You just create more and more price inflation, become less and less productive. If China manufactures something at a fifth of the cost, is the global south going to buy it off China or off the United States? They're going to buy it off China. The idea we become self-sufficient and we can do everything internally in the U.S.,

well, yeah, it could do a lot more to support its economy, no doubt about it. from an agricultural perspective i think that's certainly true but but you can't have this situation where you can just function internally and we're going to have this wonderful internal economy which it just won't be sustainable on the basis of how the economy financial system works now and this again is something that's just completely overlooked and and and this is just the fundamental problem where is that if you have enough people who are supposed to be in positions of responsibility in terms of the economics finance etc were actually understand reality and then if they come out and say it their career's over they'll destroy themselves i mean

one thing me saying it and being in the position where i can say these things and i don't care you know it's not gonna it's not like i'm gonna get sacked from working in the bank as i used to do if i said this now when i was working in the bank they'd find me because this is how this is how it works but there's not enough people telling people the reality and the reality is coming and there's nothing as things stand we can do unless and this is that this is where the the political capital comes in let's just say you have biden just because he's the president and you had a well who knows who's going to be the future prime minister of the uk probably trust when trust becomes prime minister of the uk everyone should leave the uk but anyway that's beside the point

let's just say it's trust and then you've got macron and shots whoever and and they go they turn around to the russians and the chinese and go look it's gamer we can't it's not sustainable the u.s empire is gone okay we we're a bit embarrassed we don't really want to have to admit this but it's the way we can sort of smooth this process where we can work together and and and try and readdress the fundamental problems that exist that's what has to happen And I'm not saying it's Bretton Woods, but let's just use that analogy. You have to sit there and work out the differences, work out how the world operates in the future. And there is a new financial system.

There's multipolarity. Multipolarity is here to stay. So the United States and its allies have to learn how to integrate into that, how to work. And that's what has to happen. But you imagine any of these politicians saying that. They'd be deselected. They wouldn't be prime minister within about a month. They'd be out of office and there'd be a new prime minister

or president or whoever it might be. And that's the fundamental problem in the West. We think we're democratic, but we don't actually have a democratic political system that tells the truth. I mean, there was whether people agree or not, but Roger Waters was on CNN, and he comes out with a whole bunch of statements.

He's talking about reality. And most people watch that and go, this is a lie. But these are the kind of discussions that needs to happen where we actually deal with reality and we start to have to face the uncomfortable truth that a lot of people pretend doesn't happen or want to deny happening. And until we do that, we're just going to sink more and more into the abyss. We're going to find ourselves more and more isolated on a world stage. I mean, it's one thing, you know, going to the likes of Africa and because the Africans are embracing Russia and China and particularly Russia. And then the United States deciding, well, we can't have this because Russia is having far too much influence in the African continent. So they don't go to the African continent and start saying, look, OK, Russia is telling you all these things, but we could do all these things.

we can work with you know we can we can benefit uh you know from each other and win-win cooperation now they go in and start threatening the african continent with well if you don't if you start trading more and cooperating with russia we'll sanction so what they're basically saying is what they fear the united states would do and they're going hang on you're threatening us but you think we want to work with you and the u.s just doesn't comprehend that the days of threatening nations is over you it simply won't be tolerated anymore but they don't have the basic fundamental grasp you cannot do this this is not how the future is going to be yeah it doesn't mean the u.s has to agree with russia and china why should they on everything but if there's a way the u.s can benefit

enormously from cooperating so both sides benefit that's that's just being an adult that's how the future should be i mean it's staggering really you know in 2022 and we're starting to talk about this and people think this is an inachievable objective it's absolutely how it has to happen because the world is going to have to work this way in the future we can't have this idea that we're going to become isolationist that the u.s can shut the rest of the world out of function internally and we can supply our own market and all work out swimmingly well this isn't reality it just isn't going to happen that way and rather like yeah russia can be energy independent and food independent of course it is but it needs to sell those things to someone because it needs

them be able to buy other things that the russia doesn't currently have it's the same with china china needs cheap energy so it gets it from russia and iran for example to because it's the life blood of its economy so the idea that u.s can have everything energy commodities you know just everything will work internally and somehow we'll we'll create this new little unipolar world with our little club of friends and we're all going to to coexist in that environment and we'll be perfectly all right then we'll keep chipping away at china and russia and because eventually they'll they'll crack and multipolarity will be over. And it's just not reality. And that's why the Ukraine war's happened. That's why the U.S. is challenging it with respect to Taiwan in a very

major way now. Because the U.S. is going, these are a threat to unipolarity, even though they don't seem to understand unipolarity is all but dead. So therefore, we have to challenge them. We have to. It's a competition. They're our adversary. We have to destroy them. And in In the process, the United States and the United Kingdom and NATO is destroying itself on the basis that it now has grasped the policy decisions are completely flawed. They've failed. And now we see it with Taiwan. It's like more of the same again, because apparently, if you keep implementing the same

policy decisions, even though they've failed by some strange law of physics, you can eventually somehow you'll succeed. By the law of averages, something's going to change, and we'll succeed this time, even though we failed miserably with Russia since 2014, because the sanctions didn't start in 2022. They've had them in place since 2014. It's just nations ended up going, we're not going to implement them anymore. They're pointless, who cares, and even the United States, who never really implements

them anyway, unless it suits them. I mean, if the US wants Russian oil, it goes, no, we don't apply sanctions there. if we want russian russia's fertilizer no it doesn't apply there oh if we need this russian bank to implement this transaction it doesn't apply but by the way europe if you do it you're in serious trouble this is this is how the policy making decision implement themselves and this is where we are and it's just ludicrous and sorry but anyone who's trying to defend the west in terms of this policy is sadly at some point is going to have a realization when it you know use this crude energy when a ton of manure lands on their own doorstep they're going to be screaming

at the government for their country about their abject failure but by then it's too late and we need to have people to understand better that you know the west is not serving our interests okay the west is collapsing and it's desperately trying to prevent multi-polarity and developing and it sees china and russia as the principal architects of that not realizing iran's a very important nation as well and again we have to destroy them and it doesn't matter what it's doing domestically but again it's right like the pandemic i talked to western world to the uk government and their advisors and said whatever you think about this you're going to create economic financial problems you're going to create psychological social problems you're

neglecting areas of the health service so people will die because they didn't get treatment the attitude is we don't well we're not thinking about that that's not we're only interested in case numbers because we keep case numbers down hospitalizations are down then the health service will cope and the rest of it doesn't matter we can just forget about that till tomorrow here we are in 2022 or reaping what what they've sown and and consequences are far more severe than whoever died as regrettable as it is in the pandemic the amount of people who are going to suffer and who have already died as a consequence of these policy-making decisions is far greater than anything the pandemic would ever have done. We've seen, and it's quite interesting,

we're starting to see noises coming out in the UK where they're going, if we ever have a pandemic again, we're never going to have lockdown. Because someone somewhere has finally woken up, even though, of course, the horse has long since bolted, so shutting the stable doors is irrelevant. But there are people in western nations who've suddenly gone hang on we should never have done this okay we can't politically say that exactly but they know it was a stupid decision to to implement but at the time even though maybe some of them realized it no one was going to politically come out and go we should end lockdowns because they would have been finished politically this this is what drives western decisions it's not nefarious entities per se who are who are driving some weird

global policy making decision that says we're going to crush nato with the west and then we're going to turn them all into serfs and they'll have nothing because if that was true then all these billionaires who got rich on us functioning in their in their world because we had enough money so we could buy all their goods and services well let's take mobile phone operators if we have nothing they're out of business no one have a mobile phone because we can't afford to buy a mobile phone so all these big corporations and all these billionaires will go bust so we're really suggesting they've gone yeah i'm happy with this i'm going to lose my billionaire status and and all the the trappings associated with that of course then they're never going to do that so

again this is the logical process that they're not doing things deliberately but there are people taking advantage and we that's certainly true in the pandemic there's no doubt about that there were a big farmer said this is a huge payday and we're going to milk it for all its worth no one's disputing that but that's a world away from saying they ultimately intend to to you know it's like we'll have a lockdown and you'll be permanently locked down this never happened as we said earlier and this is these are the realities of what's unfolding but what fundamentally drives western policy is it's short-term pop it's just short-term populist agenda something that sounds right we're making the right noises we'll get re-elected because yeah being in politics you

get all these fringe benefits some people more than others of course and they just want to keep the gravy train like in the uk they get lined up with a nice nice big fat pension they're going well, I've got this big fat pension in the end of it, so when I retire, I'll be perfectly happy. It's index-linked to inflation. I'm winning. And they'll just be in politics to serve their own interests. And in the process, they don't rock the boat.

So therefore, the idea, okay, there's somebody, there's policymakers somewhere are making decisions, and there's no doubt governments are. The military-industrial complex is a major driver of U.S. foreign policy. it's it's absolutely a statement of the obvious but it's also intelligence agencies etc who you have a desire to make sure that the united states is the the hegemonic power it's also as much as anything to try and ensure the dollar remains the world reserve currency the you know because the dollar is a matter of national security if we we don't preserve the status of

the dollar the u.s is dead it's over if the rest of the world and that's increasingly happening which is why the US has to print trillions of dollars, because the world in reality won't buy US debt. But that is why when Saddam Hussein went, I'm not accepting dollars for oil anymore, the US went, right, you're over. Sorry, bye-bye, you're gone. Same with Gaddafi. They didn't have a problem with Gaddafi for decades running Libya. But as soon as he went, I don't want dollars for oil, I'm going to launch a gold-backed African Dino, they went, sorry, you're gone, because you're threatening the U.S. dollar, you're threatening U.S. hegemony. But of course, we've gone to such an extreme now that U.S. hegemony is in decline because the world

is increasingly moving away from the dollar and saying, well, actually, if we don't move away from the dollar, then we're going to be destroyed like Russia could have been destroyed. And it's gone back through history. We've seen it where any nation that doesn't comply with the U.S., they tried to sanction them into oblivion look at iran four decades and they failed they tried it with north korea it's failed they tried to cripple syria it's failed because sanctions don't work and you would have thought after four decades with iran and it not working someone somewhere would have gone let's not do this anymore but no it's because we believe that because we think we're exceptional we think we're the greatest nation on the planet that even though sanctions

has never worked for decades it will have worked this time look it's really going to work with russia and here's the stupid part there are people in the u.s administration who genuinely think well if we go to russia or china into a military conflict with with taiwan so maybe they invade maybe they have missile strikes or something we're then going to do exactly what we did to russia to china and we're going to convince the whole world that china's this evil imperialistic totalitarian dictatorship who wants to spread its influence across the world look they're trying it in Taiwan and therefore oh what must we do I know we must sanction China we must exclude them from SWIFT we must steal their asset we must sanction their central bank and they this is there are

people who think despite what happened in Ukraine that this is a viable option okay we might have failed with Russia but we'll succeed with China and if we succeed with China it's the end of multi-polarity because China will roll back under the stone that it came from because that's their mentality and and therefore there won't be a problem and if China's no longer in the ascendancy then neither will Russia so Russia and China are put back in their little box somewhere it's the end it's over but they don't comprehend this is reality and and this is the problem we're back to this thing where it's you would have thought by now someone would have turned around and gone No, none of this is working.

And there are certain cool heads, certainly in the U.S. military and probably in the intelligence agencies and privately in the Beltway who are going, no, we can't do this. And this is where you get these huge contradictions where someone's going, well, we're going to arm Taiwan. We want to create a separatist movement too. But we do abide by the one China policy. there's a massive contradiction because there's partly some of the elements who are going well

hang on if right if china starts sanctioning us okay there's the argument it will happen it will hurt the chinese economy to some degree of course that's true well look at the trade war with china who suffered not china the united states has suffered enormously from this endless trade war just simply on the basis if you put tariffs on chinese goods china doesn't pay it If you put 30%, I don't know, on an iPhone, who's going to pay the cost? It's you and I. So we're paying 30% inflation on an iPhone. So we're the ones who suffer.

Our domestic economy creates inflation. And no one sat there and went, hang on. Has anyone thought that this is the reality? This is what's going to happen? No, if we do this, we'll crush China. And this is the problem with Western policy decision makers. okay governments don't make policy decisions they just implement but nobody across the whole food chain of this these policy making decision ever understands reality ever actually looks at this

and goes we can't do this anymore but they'll continue to persist doing it and because they think okay russia's military they've realized russia's militarily pretty strong they think China's economically not weak as well The amount of people who for 10 years or more Every single year China's going to collapse Because of all its debt China's economy's finished Well, China's now reporting record trade surpluses

So it's doing something right with its economy It's got enormous assets It's got enormous gold reserves Enormous forex with that And okay, it has got some internal problems like it's housing market, but China instigated the housing market crisis because it turned around and said, you're not doing this anymore. This wanton speculation's over.

China's aware of this. That's not where China's problems are. But we just force-fed this idea, well, China's economically weak, so let's look at this. If we promote them into a war in Taiwan, we can sanction them and destroy them. But China's not Russia because China's military is weak. they've never when did they last fight a war because does anyone even remember so therefore they don't have the military capability like russia so you know we can roll them over

and if we humiliate them with respect to taiwan then the world will go china's useless china's weak china's in so therefore we need to side with the united states because they're the dominant military power they're actually realizing the global south so far is going we respect china's restraint. That China's shown the restraint it has, we see as a positive. And the U.S. doesn't grasp this. It doesn't grasp that the rest of the world doesn't think like that. So it remains to be seen what happens with Taiwan at this point. It's very obvious that China will keep doing these military drills just to keep Taiwan on its feet, on its toes, sorry, and the United States like one, but the U.S. is threatening to send Taylor down the Taiwan Strait, which would be

extreme bureaucracy. But we are where we are, and let's not get too far ahead with the whole Taiwan story. But I made the point prior to the Ukraine war, not quite 12 months ago, the U.S. will be pushing Russia with Ukraine, they'll push China with Taiwan, and they'll try and nibble away at Iran again they're not really succeeding with Iran because ironically this whole pandemic and this whole energy crisis has meant they've actually gone to the Iranians and gone do you know what we like some of your energy because you can get it really cheap and so if we're really nice to you and we we walk away from the sanctions a little bit and you sign the JCPOA even though we don't really want you to everything will be fine and the Iranians are going you've got to be joking

you tried to destroy us for 40 years we don't trust you by the way we're selling all our energy to the chinese and everywhere else because we bypassed your sanctions and there's nothing you can do about it so go away we're not interested in cooperating and that's why all this chinese and russian money's piling in because iran can spec up its as we said earlier lng oil and it will sell it to the global south and it will turn around to the west and go why would we sell it to you look at what you've done to us even europe europe had a way of circumventing sanctions through instax and they said oh yeah yeah and then they they were too frightened and went no no we're not doing it well iran's going why do we want to cooperate with you

we're going to cooperate with the nations who stood by us the chinese the global south the russians they're the ones we want to work with but by the way the west you do realize we have enormous gold reserves we have enormous commodities not just energy we're going to be a huge future growth sector in in in west asia effectively and we're going to work with the with the rest of the middle east even though you'd never think that was going to be possible these are all things that have been very obvious for years i mean i've talked about it for longer than i care to remember and i always make this point people think i'm pro-russia and pro-china but just go back i've said things these things will happen and the west is asleep at the wheel and this is happening

the west could have avoided a lot of these problems if it actually made the right decisions but it's incapable of making the right decisions because there's an ideological hatred of russia and increasingly china and when you've had decades of this ideological hatred it's very difficult to then turn around to the american or the british people and say do you know what i have to confess you know we sort of lied a bit about there's a lot of propaganda we'd like to now be friends with russia i mean what's going to happen the people are going to turn around and go what what the hell are you talking about hang on we've had decades of this cold war mentality to varying degrees and russia's the antichrist or whatever people think putin is but now you're

telling us that's not the case anymore they can't do this because it's like they've dug this hole and the only way out of it is to keep digging and digging and doubling tripling quadrupling down and instead of going hang on can someone give us a hand so we can climb out this hole of our own making but is is that going to happen anytime soon it's extremely unlikely but this autumn winter there's never it's not like we're making a bold prediction but in particularly maybe in europe more than anything let's see what happens in terms of food insecurity energy crisis is it going to change the political will because here's the thing what are you going to do you're going to sit there in the schultz and the macrons going well i don't want to appear that i'm supportive

of china and russia well that's china more russia uh or and i'm going to just toe the line because i don't want to upset the americans or am i or and i'm just going to ignore the fact that half or more of my population are furious with me and the risk of civil unrest what's more important to my political livelihood the domestic problems that are now spiraling out of control or my foreign policy and that's the flip when the flip happens they're all going to turn around they have to turn around to the united states and go no it's over we're not going to we're not going to be your vassal states anymore because we're burning rome's burning now berlin's but whatever it might be and we're going to have to look we're going to have to seriously readjust our position now

could this happen in autumn through winter this year it's a possibility and that would then change the entire dynamic but the question is if that did happen what is europe going to do they're going to turn around to the russians and go look we're terribly sorry um you know we really shouldn't behave this way can you forgive us and russia might just turn around and say no go away you've made you bad you're gonna lie in it and if that happens okay an unstable europe's not good for russia by the way or anyone else in the world but we don't know because they've made noises recently both the russians and the chinese we don't trust the west meaning the eu including the uk and the us so those days are over we're the trust gone and they're kind of half hinting that it they're

not going to let it come back anytime soon well that might just be again a bit of bravado maybe there was a massive u-turn in the west they might go okay yeah you have seriously screwed up from our perspective but we're happy to forgive and forget and move on but if they don't then what's what's the west going to the west is just going to sink into the abyss more and more and the global south's going sorry you've got what problems we're fine okay we've had food insecurity we're addressing those problems we've got access to cheap energy we're very happy so we're growing our economy and we don't care if the west's burning because what did you do to us for decades and beyond through colonialism hundreds of years you basically raped and pillaged our

nations and treated us in the most disdainful way so maybe you need to learn a bit of a painful lesson and there is a risk that will happen and we have to hope it doesn't but we can't rule it out and this is why hopefully we never get to that point because if we do then the question is how long is it going to be before the global south trusts us again how long is it going to be before these nations go actually yeah okay we will forgive and forget now we think you've learned your lesson now if people like you and i were in in government we went to these chinese and russians and go look we really do accept the fact of screwing up but we really need to address this this is not good for us it's not good for you to have an unstable nation like the united states

given the size of it given the number and also because it's a nuclear power so this is always a potential concern so it remains to be seen what plays out but anyone doing victory laps going well we're winning the war in ukraine needs to wake up and the idea that the united States is going to do victory laps with respect to Taiwan again is just believing in an illusion it's time we all face reality it's going to be painful but it's better we face reality rather than just sitting there going well don't worry you know it was somehow we'll blag our way through this because we've been blagging our way through it for the last 20 years in financialization of our economies and destroying the wealth generators and the wealth creators and and creating an

unsustainable economy and financial system and we just need to deal with reality it's a it's a point where you keep we keep laboring but we labor it because and it's encouraging there's more people in the west seeing this but now i i mean i've said this before and i mean it i want the united states more than any other nation including britain which i'm british to be a successful strong nation amongst equals where it pulls all its greatest resources where it actually becomes a nation the world looks up to and trusts and respects that's great for america and it's great for the world and i want to see that but we are millions of miles away from that currently and the longer this goes on the more that the internal problems in the u.s will rear their head and it's

the one failure of trump trump was supposed to come in in 2016 and and go to the chinese and say look we need to rebuild america we can't do it on our own and it's going to be very problematic we're going to have to work in cooperation can you assist us and chinese would have done it in 2016 of that there's absolutely no doubt they would they do it now no chance but that was the one opportunity okay it didn't happen for whatever reason and the rest history but that was an opportunity where something major progress could have been made but the end of the day the u.s is going to have to rely on the rest of the world in the future and it can't think that it can function in its own little empire and still keep nibbling away at china in in in the indo-pacific

and rally all these allies who will stand against it. Because look at Taiwan. I mean, the Europeans aren't exactly going, we support the United States' policy with Pelosi. We don't see it particularly with the Japanese or the South Koreans. And look at Pelosi goes to South Korea. President, the foreign minister went, oh, I'm sorry, I'm on holiday.

I'm too busy to see you. Yeah, because they don't want to antagonize China because they're major trade partners. So, again, China is not Russia and Taiwan is not Ukraine. And whether the West likes it or not, most Taiwanese are very pro-China. Yeah, they want their independent, autonomous state. Of course they do. But they're Chinese.

They're pro-China. They want to have that affiliation with China. They don't want to become some vassal state of the United States going, well, we're worried about the security of Taiwan, so let's point some missiles at China 200 kilometers away. They don't want any of that. And, you know, whether people believe it or not, about 70% of the Taiwanese people said Pelosi's actions was deeply destabilizing to Taiwan and they disapproved of it. Again, this is reality. And whether people believe it or not, Taiwan isn't an independent country. We can argue whether it should be or shouldn't be.

But, you know, UN regulations have stipulated that since, what, 1948. This is, again, reality. It's not an independent nation. It is the one China principle from a legal standpoint. Why is it okay? We can argue whether that should be the case in the future, and that's a whole separate issue. But as things stand, we want to obey the law.

The rules are international law. That's the reality. But, of course, the U.S. doesn't believe in international law. It believes in rules-based law, which is there are no rules. We make it up as we go along. And if we don't like the rule we implemented yesterday, we'll just scrap it we'll we'll say it no longer applies and we'll just move on to some other rule and we'll completely change the goalposts with respect to whatever policy decision it is well

it may have got away with that but they're not going to get away with it so you know we have to somewhere common sense starts to prevail but i'm not optimistic but nothing would please me more i don't think it's gonna happen but if biden came out tomorrow and went okay we accept it's over except the hegemony is dead in the water and we're going to have to recalibrate our entire foreign domestic policy and we're going to work with the Chinese and the Russians. It will be a wonderful day. I'll be the first person to say this is the greatest decision

the United States has made in its history in a positive sense. And that's literally what's going to happen. And whether Westerners like that or don't like it, that's the reality. We can't believe that we, you know, that we can destroy a nation that has effectively is has an abundance of energy. It's food security. It has the commodities the world needs. It has a growing economy in Russia. And whether we like China or not, it doesn't matter. It has a vibrant economy. OK, it has challenges, doesn't it? But not the challenges the West thinks. Yeah, of course it has challenges.

but we're not here to tell china how to run china it's like covid policy for me in china's madness but the average chinese person is totally behind it that's what they want they think the government's being responsible why because chinese people's viewpoint is it's not about me it's about future generations it's about my grandchildren it's about my neighbor's rancho and it's about my village it's about my city it's about my region it's about the whole country everything's geared about the nation state and what's beneficial to the nation not me on an individual basis that's why they in the vast majority of cases they totally approve the covid policy they said it it's the the right thing to do now we can sit here in the west and go

i don't agree with this but it's irrelevant that's what the chinese people want they demand it the government gives it to them they're happy if you did that in the west the way they do it we'd be going no this is totally unacceptable but we have to learn to understand that just because we don't agree with it doesn't mean that we should change it you know we we're not here we should be here to change cultures and attitudes of nation or dictate them in economic terms or financial terms we need to go okay we might not agree with you with regards to taiwan we may have issues with you with regards to hong kong or whatever it might be we're not happy with what russia's doing in ukraine or maybe we're not happy with with russian policy towards syria whatever or

iran but we're gonna have to live with this we're gonna have to work together and realize that's how adults behave i mean you know that's the definition of what an adult should be is you don't always agree with that but you have the the attitude of accepting people have differences of opinions and and you have to just accept that that's how it is that we're all different and nations are different okay europeans are fairly similar but even in europe there's diverse thought processes diverse cultures and we just have to accept that just because we might think this is an appropriate policy decision doesn't make it right and we we have to get away from zero-sum game mentality and the u.s needs to go well instead of demanding i want it all i want to

instead of having a hundred percent of nothing why don't we have 50 of a hundred percent because do you know what would be so much better off with the 50 of a hundred percent rather than having nothing of a hundred percent they're really simple concepts but that's what we need to to move towards and it's not just exclusively the us the uk's it's bad and europe's you know then and they just need to realize and as this western financial system economies are just unsustainable eventually it'll become a situation where the illusion will completely give way to reality and and then they're going to have to face the painful reality and they're going to have to face the painful reality of how we react to this as people and this is coming and whether we like

it or not that's the future and we so if we change sooner we might mitigate some of the problems because things are getting infinitely worse on a week by month by quarterly half yearly yearly basis yeah well that's i think that's the big question right is it seems like there's two paths to resolving this on a geopolitical level you just piss everybody off that you essentially turn into isolationists you get isolated from the rest of the world as they go build the future they want or since this is all built and financed on a mountain of debt and cheap fiat currency at some point like the fed can only do what it has been doing since 2008 for so long before credit markets completely break and it collapses into itself and so i guess that like the question

of end game especially with the high inflation numbers here in the u.s and with the data coming out about foreign purchases of u.s treasuries uh hitting all-time lows on a relative basis uh like are we approaching and taking a step back to see japan they're losing control uh of their yield curve control program it seems to to an extent and they were the first one to embark on these types of policies like is the end game of the just print money and financialize your economy coming uh in the near to medium term and is that going to be what forces the west to to look internally and say oh uh we need to make some changes here well yeah the other problem we have though is it's and i don't want to draw parallels too much in history we have to be careful otherwise

we you know but the risk is if the west in inverted commas collapses and the political system implodes because people lose all trust i mean in political system and there has to be this radical reform okay can it radically reform internal that's highly debatable the risk is in western nations you could get some populist strong strong man woman who comes out and everyone goes yeah you're promising us what we want to hear and they get they become elect and they're not the solution and i'm not drawing parallels in history and trying to infer it's going to be like germany was with the nazis but my point is this happens in history it won't be the same but the risk is they'll come out with a ludicrous policy decision and it'll all sound

great for 12 months to two years but actually it'll cause more and more damage so there is always the risk that that's something else we have to contend with within within our political structure but the question is who forms i mean what is the alternative okay there needs to be an alternative to the democrats the republicans conservative labor in the uk who provides who and who's going to i mean as much as i don't like governance we're going to have to have light touch government we can't we can't eliminate all government structure because countries can't function but if we have very light touch government who's who's out there in western nations who can be presidents and prime ministers and foreign you know foreign secretaries or

finance ministers or you know secretary of the u.s treasury or the chancellor of the where are these people well this is i mean a major focal point of everything we've been discussing for the last hour and a half hour and 45 minutes and previously stems from this friction that's created with the way the global monetary order works particularly be the petrodollar system up to this point it seems like you're having brick nations begin to turn to each other and try to form alternative monetary systems and sanctioning russia using Swift is, like we said, forcing people to question, like, all right, they can do this to Russia, they can do this to us, let's find alternatives.

There's two things particularly that I think here in America that make me very bullish and optimistic that things are going to change in a positive light, and it's not going to happen via the federal government with COVID, with lockdowns. What we've seen is an emboldening of individual states asserting their autonomy from the federal government. I think that's a trend that's going to pick up here and only continue to get stronger as we move through this decade. I think states are just going to start ignoring the federal government, which is something that needs to happen and should continue to happen moving forward. And then again, I know you're not completely sold on

Bitcoin yet, but again, Bitcoin has distributed peer-to-peer cash system with a very transparent monetary policy where you really can't have any individual country or coalition coalition of countries use their geopolitical military power to influence that monetary system will just naturally force markets towards a more peaceful economic facilitation where you don't even have the ability to to get into a dick measuring contest using the monetary system and what's in the monetary system uh and you're just forced to abide by the rules of this apolitical distributed system that no one entity can control so states rights really just beginning to fade the federal government saying hey you guys are crazy anybody

within our borders does not have to listen to some of the federal mandates that you're putting out there and then uh we're gonna begin to facilitate settlement within our economy using this distributive ledger that can't be controlled yeah i mean look whether the point you in a broad sense yeah you're correct i mean okay we can agree or disagree on whether it's bitcoin but but certainly the one thing the last probably well since 2014 to people who paid attention but really since since you know russia was sanctioned into oblivion inverted commas and it failed the one thing the global south's looking at and you're absolutely right they're going well there are alternatives and there are alternative financial system the chinese and russians have

developed it years ago it's ready to roll whether it's not a question of can we implement it's timing of implementing but yeah there's lots of new initiatives for payment systems in dollar terms etc but the one thing the global south has perfect opportunity to do and this revolves around this whole idea the world's dependent on ad infinitum on dollars they're not because let's just look at Sri Lanka. We know Sri Lanka has collapsed. It's bankrupt. Well, Sri Lanka has a very easy decision to make. It can sit there and go, well, there's the IMF, the World Bank, and all the creditors. And we can sit there and go, oh, we'll renegotiate the terms of settling our debt. And in the process, we'll have austerity. And we'll probably have

assets we've got left to be stolen, or they can turn around and say to the IMF and the World Bank, do you know what? Here's a radical thought. We'll just default. We'll default on everything. We're not paying you a single dollar back. And you can give us a zero credit rating. We don't care, because we're joining multiple world.

We're going to join the Chinese and the Russians. Do you know what? We're not going to get ripped off by them. And they're not going to put measures in place of severe austerity. I'm not going to put some puppet government in place to make sure the austerity gets rolled out. We're going to do something radically different. And Sri Lanka has the opportunity to do this. It's rather like, and they've learned from Russia, because Russia's gone, do you know what?

We don't care if we're not partisan. We're never going to borrow money at Western markets again. We don't care. It doesn't matter to us. And you can exclude us. In fact, we're not going to operate in your financial system. We're not going to deal with the IMF or the World Bank. It's just completely irrelevant in the future.

We're going to sell our debt to nations in the Global South, and they'll buy it. The Chinese will buy our debt if we need to issue debt. So that's the mindset. So all the Global South can quite simply turn its back on the dollar, turn its back on the IMF, the World Bank, and all these institutions, credit agencies. We're just defaulting on it all. We don't care if we're $100 billion in debt or creditors will just have to lump it. They'll have to deal with the consequences. Because, and by the way, if we have some sort of financial and economic ties with the Chinese and the Russians,

then maybe we will have some military cooperation with the Russians just in case you might decide to try and invade our country and overthrow our government, or you might try and have a color revolution or whatever. You know, we've got some measures in place to circumvent that problem. They can do this. It's not, they don't have to be obligated to settle or renegotiate, refinance debt with the West or whoever it might be. Just walk away from it. Say, no, we're not doing this anymore. And they're quite legitimately able to do that.

They just haven't realized you can do this. Because if you're not going to borrow money in Western markets anymore, the credit agencies can give you a zero rating and say, I'm sorry. You just go, fine. Remember, we're not borrowing money. We'll go somewhere else. We'll borrow some money off the Chinese. And the West goes, oh, the Chinese are imposing all these debt traps. Well, go talk to the nation's concern.

You get a very different perspective. I mean, look at China's just postponed $2 billion of debt owed by Pakistan and said, well, we'll postpone it for 12 months, forget it, just move the gold post. And if in 12 months you've got a problem, we'll just shift it again. So there are alternatives. And, you know, this is the future. So it's just nations are learning to be, you don't have to effectively be subservient to the United States, of the Western financial system, the dollar, et cetera,

there are alternatives. And these alternatives, Russia's proved, okay, Russia's a unique case because, as we said, it's resources, et cetera. But they've proved you can actually financially benefit enormously not being part of the Western financial system and cutting yourself off in totality is actually highly beneficial. So maybe we as impoverished nations in the global south

should follow russia's russia's line and okay we need russian energy and cooperation with china and iran or whoever it is we need to and we need to make sure we have some safeguards in place if we've got access to these resources and we can then begin to grow our economy without being subject to austerity etc then that's the way forward so let's do it and remains to be seen which major nation because lots of nations are going to go bust in the global south we know this this is reality which one's going to turn around and go sorry we have a new way of doing things and this is how we're going to do it yeah i've seen that el salvador too has come out and openly um openly derided the imf um and yeah i mean the imf is one of the most parasitic entities on the

planet i can't believe i mean argentina alone i mean i was astonished by the fact i looked into it a few months ago they have an annual inflation rate an annualized inflation rate going back to something like 1952 of around 200 which is insane and they've gone over that 70 year period they've gotten 23 loans from the imf so you talk about insanity doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results and you're seeing that i believe i saw a video on the streets of argentina a video of people on the streets of argentina cornering the finance minister's van because obviously they have hyperinflation again there and the people are beginning to uprise and say hey how how does this keep happening here we're uh a relatively um well

off nation in terms of intellectual capital and landscape and we can't get away from this hyperinflationary crisis stop going to the imf is and yeah no i mean and we're in the middle of this fourth turning inflection point transition into the digital age whatever you want to call it and And just everything that we're seeing, whether it be Russia, Ukraine, China, Taiwan, the restructuring of the unipolar world to a multipolar world is just a product of decades and arguably centuries of stuff that's been building to this multi-decade inflection point that we find ourselves in. that probably started a couple decades ago, maybe three or four decades ago. It's just part of this multi-century cycle. And we're at the beginning of the transition

from the end of one cycle to the next. And there's just going to be a lot of tumult and volatility socially around the world during this period. We just so happen to be born in it and get to live through it. Well, yeah, I think the other point worth making, excuse me, with regards to this is you're absolutely right. It is the inflection point. So the challenge is and the challenge for any nation is not to rest on its laurels. the uk is a great one where you know i'm not advocating the uk and you know the empire of

the past and all the colonialism and the world reserve currency status but the point i'm trying to make is is it rested on its laurels it became arrogant ignorant and forgetting the very people who made its empire and treating them with disdain and the empire collapses if you want to carry on being a strong vibrant nation you can't rest on your laurels you have to keep growing evolving so the challenge for the global south is is can they sustain this for 20 30 50 100 years 200 years 500 years okay we're exaggerating for effect but it's possible that the world if it does things sensibly and and actually does things correctly it can go through a period of enormous less growth but enormous growth as human beings as planets evolving and it can be sustainable for a long time

provided we all live within our means we don't want things we can't afford and don't need invariably and we haven't so i've always said this change to multipolarity as much as anything is a reboot of humanity in terms of our values what do we think's important what matters rather than living in in this consumption-based economy where i use this analogy we buy things we don't need to impress the friends we don't have that's almost largely the way we go we need to end all this we need to rethink what matters is it more important that we have human interaction we have friends and people we trust and we spend time with people is that far more beneficial to all of us as humanity rather than sitting there with a bit of plastic whether it's a phone a tablet a

laptop and that's our world do we should we move outside that realm and engage with real friends i mean like yesterday i live right on the coast and we had some friends came and we went for a huge walk along the beach we were philosophizing and talking about the future and everything and it was wonderful it was just that's human interaction you need to get back to to doing the things that really matter and and you know beneficial to us as individuals and collectively and that's why it is it's a reboot in terms of humanity what we value and the challenge is can we sustain this in the future and we can but you know but the problem is there's that nagging thing where humans tend to be greedy they tend to be selfish they pretend to want to look after

their own interests only and not you know realize that there's there's a far better way of us all living and the question is okay we could have a halcyon period for 10 20 30 years but then do we slip back into that age-old selfish mentality where it's it's dog eat dog and these are challenges so every nation has to keep evolving it has to keep trying to move to the next level improve the livelihood of the people of the nation how the people develop how our economies how we can globally deal with the challenges of the future there's no doubt resources are going to be become more and more finite because we're going to keep consuming so here's an obvious example nuclear fusion it's always been oh it's 20 years it's in the future it's always been 20

years well we're now starting to say well it's actually not 20 years it could be 15 years we may have commercial fusion reactors and if we pooled our resources and when we had limitless dirt cheap energy the environmentalists couldn't mow and imagine how that would revolutionize our economies how lively these are achievable object objectives if we collectively pool resource and there are those big fusion reactor projects with 35 40 nations in them but it seems lately we've overcome the technological challenges there are still issues there are still problems but we've mounted from the major ones so if we achieve that objective what does that mean it's it's a major game changer everyone has cheap limitless energy well i think that the idea of

conflict doesn't really work anymore what you're we're gonna we're not gonna be able to sanction anyone and cripple them on energy terms and if we have huge affordable cheap energy what does that mean for food production the cost of everything that we can feed ourselves and very cheaply and if we had a global agricultural policy decision that would work for humanity we could do this because you know in the netherlands they've got an amazing agri-sector it's incredible given the size of the country the food the amount of food they produce and it works brilliant i mean you just drive anywhere i was there a few days ago and you just go anywhere and just everywhere any bit there's greenhouses there's food produce being grown you can go in a housing estate on the

edge of it they're growing food i mean this is these are all achievable objects objectives and if we do and then and we start to go well i'm gone we we do have finite resources we can't just keep producing wind turbines or or electric car batteries because in the end what if we don't have lithium anymore what happened so we need to start to be thinking like this is you know the 21st century it's about time we we stop being a bit neanderthal and wanting to club each other over their head to achieve our own objectives but this is the point of this some people say this will never happen well it will happen because necessity is the mother of invention so we by necessity things are going to have to change but how quickly that happens is the challenge the

other point is how do we get people in decision making positions who rather than this Dickensian political system we have in the west I mean you know with frankly political dinosaurs who should not be in politics anymore I'm not just pointing the finger in the US it's the same in the UK it's same all over europe we need to have a different mindset we need people who actually go do you know what the new policy is we don't really need to have these lunatic elections don't actually just drive people apart and create wedges between families because they hate each other because they're political beliefs we actually need a political system that says okay the west needs a 10 20 year plan yeah we can change it but we have to stick with it and we have to understand

that this is for the greater good so that is an evolution in political term these are these are the major challenges we face and it's going to be extremely tough even it's been that way for to varying degrees since 2008 it's accelerating the pandemic accelerated it that the war in ukraine's accelerating it there's no doubt we're in that period but we will get through this we it's going to be extremely tough there's no disputing it but we have to get through the other side then we have to start to think of things differently and have enough people because the vast majority of western populations will just go with with the consensus if there's enough consensus in a very small way that says well this is how we're going to do things and people will

just go with it because people just go with with the consensus even if the consensus is two people making the consensus they don't generally want to have to make decisions themselves so but we need a consensus we need to understand the challenges and change our perspective of how the world should operate and it's within our grasp and i've talked about this before we we're at an inflection point in our development as human beings that we need to break the proverbial glass ceiling so we move into a different realm of consciousness of thought how we do things and as much as younger generations are constantly derided for their attitude because that's what happens i do see a lot of positives yeah there's some i mean i'm not trying to tell people in younger generations

you're wrong but there are certain things i think that they can do better they have a lot of good ideas and those ideas need to be honest and it's possible we can achieve this but you know for for me and the age i am i'm going well we need to build a world that will benefit children and grandchildren okay i mean depends i mean i could live for another 40 50 years but what how much tangible benefit why yeah it doesn't matter the point is we need to start to look say well this is more about future generations as much as anything and adopting the philosophy that we want to build a better world and we can do this and it is achieved when i think politically these dinosaurs in are going to work whether they like it or not in the next five ten years will

cease to be involved in politics and by virtue of their age or by virtue of the fact the west goes enough is enough we're not putting up with this we want a different philosophy a different way of doing things and that by an evolutionary sense will happen and then we might start to get people in in the political system will actually go no we're having a different thought process now again this is hard work it's not easy it might be easy for us to discuss this and from my perspective it's it's child's play it's really simple there's nothing complicated but i know people's mindsets and how intransigent they are and how they don't like change and they don't like to think that what they believe in is wrong,

but we have to move on. We're at that point where it's obvious. The West, it's over. The West has failed economically, financially, societally. We've failed in education. We've failed in geopolitics. We're at the end of the road and we have to do something differently and we have to accept.

and it doesn't matter we've made really big mistakes we have to hold up our hand and go there's another way of doing things and this is achievable and anyone who says and this is impossible it can't happen well of course it can happen if there's enough people who say we want this to happen it will happen and you know as much as you're right i'm not the biggest fan of bitcoin what i will say is i applaud the people not the people who are just trying to milk it to make money in fiat terms i don't i don't but i because they're just just me mercenary but i applaud people like yourself who see it as something that's a an alternative something that will give people confidence something that's outside mainstream thinking that i applaud whole

heart because that's where we need to get and and there are a lot of people who believe that with bitcoin and that's fine i and that i really do well because that gives me confidence there are increasing numbers of people who think there can be alternatives we can do things differently and it's not just bitcoin it's everything and if we keep believing in that and more and more people rest this reality in the end that they will it's the straw that breaks the camel's back or it's the it's the domino that flips the entire set of dominoes and we're far closer to that perhaps than we realize it's like capitulation of the west people go it's decades away it's been happening for decades it's like you know the berlin wall fell not because someone made a decision one day

and they took it down this process has been going on for a long time it's like we only see the consequences we don't see often the the actions that led to that decision and the west i've made the point the united states is effective for me is effectively being in this slow motion collapse since the great depression i think the united states halcyon days were in the 1800s the late 80s early 90s when it you know and then it decided to embark on a completely different policy and it was made countless very bad decisions since then and you know i mean look at the vietnam war what a stupid decision that was and then you know turning to the petrodollar very bad decision and so throughout history you know they've been in decline and people go that's ridiculous but

that's how long empires take i mean you made the point about the roman empire think about how long the roman empire was in collapse mode it wasn't a matter of a few years it was decades and beyond that's how it works with empires they're often already in decline when people think they're in a sedentary the US for me now would have been the time

for the US to not be the dominant hegemonic power but one of the big nations leading the multipolar world. The US had waited longer and hadn't been a sensational desire to control everything and go well we'll kill the British

empire. And by the end of World War II, the whole world's collapsed. And we're OK. We're fine. Now, we're going to have the IMF, NATO, World Bank. And by the way, you're all going to enjoy adopting the usage of the dollar. By that, it was a stupid decision. They should never have made it. If they'd gone, done the things that made America great, and rather than rushing head first into to try and control everything, but made the right decisions in the last century. They could have now been easily, I mean, think if they'd invested trillions of dollars in the U.S. economy, the U.S. could have been economically, financially, technologically the greatest nation on the planet. It could have stripped the rest of the world.

It could have been the rest of the world could have looked at the U.S. and gone, you are, you've produced the model by which we want to follow and you want to work with us and cooperate with us. That's where the U.S. should have been now. Instead it isn't, and it remains to be seen how long the U.S. takes to be a great nation amongst equals, and this could be a very long process or a quicker process depending on it. But for me, that's the real cry and shame, and I want nothing but please me more in my lifetime to see the United States respected as a great nation

amongst equals because the world will benefit hugely from that, and the united states will benefit hugely from that cooperation with the rest of the world because i don't doubt there's a backbone to the u.s that can really make america use that awful phrase america great again but but in the sense of a global perspective but you know it's true it can be a great nation amongst peoples and i think there is a backbone in america who will roll up their sleeves and will gladly be part of that and we have to hope that that element in the u.s prevails in the next in the coming years and we're talking now not you can wait 20 years it doesn't matter it matters now hopefully that's what will happen yeah i think this is a good tenor

to end this on this conversation it's only our second conversation but uh i really like the uh the way these episodes go you have a being able to distill all this uh in in monologue fashion that uh really gets in depth and i agree i think we need to get away from this high velocity trash economy begin stop pointing guns at each other and thinking how we can game each other and just begin to think hey how can we live within our means and uh do great things together instead of uh just trying to kill each other and dominate each other uh give peace a chance well as one beetle once said yeah um paul i know uh it's getting late we're getting

into the evening where you are i want you to be able to go enjoy your monday night with your family so thank you again for doing this um where can people find it's great because often we i do things and it's all economic financial but i think we take the conversation in a different direction and and and it's a direction these need to not just you and i but generally people need to have these conversations more about yeah we talk about that but what underpins all this is us as people how we interact with each other not rocket science and sooner we understand it's not rocket science and it's quite simple then we can make the impossible a reality very simple yeah we can do it just take some effort rolling up the sleeves saying that that's

that's another thing we've been saying on this show the last few months it's like small actions you can take i mean in terms of bitcoin accepting bitcoin but in terms of food supply going out shaking your your farmer's hand getting to know them developing a relationship figuring out how you can help them not be so dependent on this this incredible incredibly oppressive system that has been thrust on the world and then just having conversations like this to get these ideas out to more people like i did mention that we live in 2022 and we have these communication and technologies that the previous generations of humans have can never even dream of and now it's here and i do think it's having a good impact these these conversation our first conversation

uh did really you know a lot it was really well received a lot of comments a lot of emails got a lot of downloads and people are very receptive to this type of no let's be be objective and just explain the reality of things instead of trying to pretend that reality is something else so i think we're going to make an impact um we just got to keep keep chugging along one day at a time yep exactly and i'm happy to keep doing it i've and nothing will ever diminish my my appetite to keep doing things and and hoping to be a very very very very small cog in a gigantic wheel of countless other people and people who don't engage but who think this way and and you know one day it will be it will happen it's just hopefully it happens a lot

sooner because then all humanity benefits a lot quicker and we may actually be you never know we might be really surprised it might just be if far sooner than we think a kind of tipping point when that does that attitude does change and prevails and you never know given what might happen in the autumn and winter of this year that we might be literally at that point far soon and it could be a matter of months it might not be and we're not it's not about nothing's time driven it's always event driven but this winter will pose enormous challenges for the west and they're going to have to decide what's more important and if you've got a lot of angry people hungry and cold that might finally refocus their minds as to what matters and what doesn't matter because even if they're

political beasts which they are they don't want uh ten thousand people trying to storm their house and smash it up because they're furious with uh the local politicians or their government for for their in ineptitude and inaction in dealing with what fundamentally would be a crisis in the like of which we've not seen in well since even worse possibly than than like the great depression all those scenes we've seen and people queuing up at soup kitchens i mean i'm not trying to dramatize things but that's the risk we're at and and it's a very real risk so maybe sadly it will that will be the catalyst that begins to change things and i think once things start to change this whole edifice of the illusion will just crack very rapidly and then there's there's

a whole bit of instability until common sense when people sit down and go okay enough and we're not just soundbiting as politicians and you know we get politicians who go this is a vocation this is this i'm doing this because i love people i care for my nation in a truly nationalistic way not bullshit national and and actually want to do the right things and people see this and you know when we get back to the way it used to be were you know people did have neighbors real neighbors and you have that community feel we build a community feel out and it actually becomes a reality once again because i remember it in my lifetime i can remember okay maybe it's just where i grew up but i remember that and i and i would love to see that come back and these are just

small important steps of humans interacting with each other and not with with a bit of plastic or in some virtual reality let's engage in the real world with each other because that's the starting point that's how people will start to to to evolve in ways i think that's far more beneficial to us rather than the isolationist kind of behavior where many people just like to live in virtual reality and not really interact with humans this is very very bad it's bad for us on a physical physiological level on a psychological level this is just a statement of fact it's not me you know trying to justify anything it's just not healthy for humans to interact in virtual reality yeah i mean all the mental health data coming i mean coming out

and people i mean i'm guilty of it sometimes too it's very addicting it's dopamine those cheap dopamine hits um do drive you back but no i mean that's like looking around here i'm gonna end this conversation and go to the beach with my wife like my kids and a few of our friends that are down and it's um it's been great being a vacation down on this island i've got my extended family and we've got extended network of friends groups that come down here too and it's i grew up with my cousins and that extended friend group and their kids and now just seeing it replicate with my children my cousin's children um it's it's makes uh makes me very happy and it gives me hope that these types of yeah you've got a microcosm of something that's that's wonderful

and it can be extrapolated across entire communities and nations and the world. And it's an aspiration we should all strive for. Stay under the old. Yes, we should. Well, Paul, thank you again for your time. Oh, it's a pleasure. We'll do this again at some point.

Maybe we'll make this like a once every six months thing. we record in February it's August now so maybe we'll catch up next February yeah we will do

or maybe sooner depends on what happens but anyway yes of course we'll certainly do it again and you know it's a pleasure for me as well

and thank you awesome well enjoy the rest of your night that's all we got today for love okay