The Duran Podcast - US Elections And Economic Policy w/ Chris Martenson

Episode Date: August 23, 2024

US Elections And Economic Policy w/ Chris Martenson

All right. We are live with Alexander Mercuris in London, and we are joined for the first time on the Duran. And it is a great honor and a great pleasure to have with us. Chris Martinson from Peak Prosperity. Chris, thank you for joining us on this stream. I have the link to your amazing site in the description box down below. I will add it as a pinned comment as well. Is there any other place where viewers can reach you? follow your work. Oh, it would be Twitter. That's at Chris Martinson, spelled like my name is right

down there. And otherwise, yeah, all the major platforms out there. I'm somehow still on YouTube. I don't understand, but it's happened that I've managed to sail through a couple of, we'll say, dodgy, anti-narrative constructs and somehow, you know, threaded the needle. But yeah, definitely not my most unshadow banned platform, but still there. So that's good news. That's very good news. And of course, you are joining us on YouTube. So hello to everybody that is watching us on YouTube. Hello to everyone that is watching us on Rumble, on Odyssey, on Rockfin,

and of course, our amazing community at locals, the durand.com. A big shout out to our moderators. Thank you to our moderators who are helping us keep the chat running. Alexander and Chris, we have got a. a ton of news to get to in the United States. So let's just jump right into it. Alexander, Chris, let's start talking U.S. politics. Indeed, let's talk about U.S. politics.

And let's also talk a bit about the economic situation and where things are going in the United States and most of the world. And no better person to discuss all that with than Chris Martyrson, who, of course, is not just a commentator about these matters, but has been at the helm of all kinds of things. And he knows about these things in ways that we don't, not just an abstract theoretician, in other words,

but somebody who's been practically there on the front line. So we have a very interesting, very remarkable election in the United States. The president of the United States has been dissuaded from standing for re-election. I'm being very careful what I say, because our friends have been a bit sensitive. about this. A new candidate has been selected. This candidate has not won a single vote in any primary,

either in this election or in the one before. She has now been anointed the Democratic Party's candidate. She has provided no interviews so far. She's made essentially no public speeches. I suspect one is coming. I mean, I presume one is. There's been no press conferences, no debates, nothing of that kind. The candidate, the said candidate has proposed an economic program with various ideas, which we are going to discuss soon. The third party candidate, apparently, he's not going to be able to stand in various states of the union, and there are rumours that he's going to stand down today. and might be supporting the opposition candidate. And the main opposition candidate has been facing an array of legal problems.

He's been facing one court case brought against him after another. Many of us have concerns about those, and somebody has tried to assassinate him, a fact which the media seems to have stopped covering. So already a very, very strange election indeed. most strange, the oldest election in American history that I can ever think of. Now, each side is producing their program and we've just had the program of the Democratic Party. And it's a fascinating program if you read it because, of course, it assumes that it's not the current candidate who's actually going to be promoting this program.

It's her predecessor, the incumbent president, who is no longer the candidate. And his name is mentioned all the time, if he was seeking re-election. And she's hardly at all, at least not very much, which begs the question to me, whether she's even read it. Just saying, but anyway, she's come up with some ideas, or people have come up with some ideas for her. And one of those is about actions to prevent price gouging. And there's been a lot of criticism of her economic policy. And why don't we start with that? Why don't we start?

So this is something you talk and think a lot about about price gouging. My own opinion about price gouging is it does happen, despite denials. It's not just the movements of prices that take place due to supply and demand. There is price currency, but the way to deal with that is by taking anti-competition steps. That doesn't seem to be what the current candidate is proposing. What do you think would happen if this program was implemented? And is she even identifying an actual problem? Well, we all know what happens with price controls.

You end up with shortages, lickety split. That's just the rule. It's the law. And we do have price gouging, though. She's not wrong. It's just not in anything she's talking about. So we have it in health care. We have it in our telephone bills. We have it in our insurance binders, right? We're getting gouged left, right and center. No question about it. But of course, they're not going to talk about the actual places. And watching Kamala talk about inflation is like watching my dog try and figure out how to work the remote. It's just, it's really painful. It just doesn't work out. You know, and so listen, I just diagnose this in a piece that's coming out later today. It's very simple. If you want to stop inflation, there's two things you do. One, you get the Federal Reserve to stop printing money. Two, you get the government to stop deficit spending at wartime levels, right?

So if you want to stop inflation, it's very simple. Milton Friedman said inflation is everywhere and always a monetary phenomenon. You just have too much money and not enough stuff. It's very simple. They pretend like it's this thing like we're Romans and there's a comet and we don't know what the omens mean. It's not that mysterious. It's a very simple process. The U.S.

government and its enabler in the private cartel called the Federal Reserve is busy printing too much money. Where's the federal government getting that $2 trillion a year of surplus funds that seem to flow into treasuries like water coming out of the Nile? It's not that hard. You chase it back. The central banks are printing money. They throw it into the system. they did a pretty hefty print in 2008-9 because of that emergency. Then they kept that printing all the way through 2010 to 16, 17, 18, 19.

And then COVID, and then they really ramped it up. Prediction is easy. They're going to do more of that printing in the future. And they don't care how many middle-class families get emiserated by that because they don't care. They just don't care. I think you're absolutely correct. I think you've hit the nail on the head. I don't know there's any doubt about this at all.

Now, would you agree with me that looking at the Democrats' policies, the only way that they can square the circle and implement them is by doing more of what you've described, more money printed, because I cannot myself understand how the program that she's outlined, which is always an ambitious one, can be made to work without it. So, in fact, what we're actually going to get is even more inflation and even more dilution of savings and of all of these things because... If we lose Alexander?

Just for a second. Alexander, we lost you for a second. Can you repeat what you're saying? Dallusion of savings. No. Yes. Well, I think you have the main point to be that it's the only way she can square the circle is by increasing money admission even more.

And that's just going to result in more. inflation. Well, it will. These policies they have, if you really just boil them down, honestly, and I always thought this was hyperbole. And honestly, if I'd said these words a year ago, I would have not listened to myself. But these are actually Marxist communist policies, right? The rooted in envy in resentment. I mean, you saw Walls talking about that. Oh, I had 24 students. None of them went to Yale, right? It's envy and resentment. And so that actually speaks to a lot of people who aren't getting by, but they've misdiagnosed it. They aren't getting by because of the government's prior ruinous policies. So the government's going to do what it does

when it turns into this sort of socialist, communist, sort of a flavor. It says, well, let's blame the rich. And right now they're going to call it a billionaire tax, but oops, watch it fall down to be a centimillionaire tech. Wait, $10 million dollar, $400,000. Like that number is just going to move down as more and more people are made poor by the policies and who they are targeting as the rich is just going to sneak on down that line. That's the path before us. I actually think this is really one of the most important elections we could possibly have because if it's the difference between going towards Marxism, overt Marxism, right? That's what I was shocked. You know what I was shocked by March of 2024 when Biden was still allegedly in charge, although we all know that's not what the case was,

But his team had decided they were going to put out in a budget bill this new tax policies. And they said, oh, we're going to take, well, eliminate 1031 real estate transactions, the depletion allowance for oil. Let's get rid of those as well. Oh, hey, let's take capital gains, move it from 20 to 44.6 percent. Highest it's ever been in any series. They were going to eliminate the carried interest deduction for Wall Street types. At any rate, I was shocked because they basically said in an election here, we're going to

take our tax gun and point it at all of our former major donor classes. That's an odd thing for anybody to do who's got a single political instinct in their body. And it told me only one of two things is true. They don't need these people anymore or there isn't going to be an election so they weren't worried about it or they already knew the results of the election. Something was very off of that because in my entire life I've never seen during an election cycle, they come out with not just a tiny tweak to the tax policy. These were extraordinary. And they hit oil, real estate, and everybody who's got capital gains. It was just astonishing in what it told me, in both the negative and the positive space, directly what it says. But when you think about,

it's like, what, what are you telling us here? It was eerie. It was a little unnerving, to be honest. And now, Kamala is just carrying that forward. And again, these are mainly policies of envy and resentment, which are great ways if you want to get a country broken, shattered, heading towards a civil war or mass atrocities eventually. Can you explain what this idea about taxing unearned capital gains is? What are unearned capital gains? I'm not sure I even understand what that means precisely, but perhaps you can explain it to us because I don't understand it at all, but it doesn't sound very good. I mean, is it just a way of taxing capital gains? How How, if you push this up, if it is what I think it is, how are you going to get investment?

How are you going to get long-term investment in the economy, which presumably is what the economy needs if productivity is to grow? And production and growth are to return in a sustainable way? Well, it's, Alexander, it's a really dumb policy on many levels. Level one is obvious, which is if you show me the incentive, I'll show you the outcome, right? That's Charlie Munger's quote. Capital will flee. People will suddenly decide they want to live, rich people will suddenly decide they want to live in Singapore or Monaco or somewhere, right? So that's level one. Level two, it's stupid because this idea, first, the government creates inflation. So let's say I bought the S&P 10 years ago and now it's doubled, right? How much of that was because I invested well and the S&P actually grew? And how much is just because the

government created inflation? So the government, actually wants to create the inflation and then say, hey, I need some of that. Give me a taste. Some of that. Bring it home. They want to create the inflation, then tax the inflation. It's this loop. It's a really bad idea. And then another layer that this really fundamentally fails at is what you're saying is that where's the incentive to invest? That gets taken out. It's really a fundamental rewrite of capitalism. And so it's just moronic on this final level, which is it's always this one-way street with the government member income tax they first started it it was like 1913 it was kind of hemi semi voluntary it really only applied if you were earning the equivalent of 500,000 or more in

today's terms and it was 1%. And now hip skip at a jump and it's like 50% of our top earners and you know, et cetera. And so the thing that's going to actually transpire with this, which is which is very bad is the government is going to want to have the right. to come in and tax your unearned gains, right? Which means you haven't, you've bought some Bitcoin and it's gone up a whole lot. And they say, don't worry, it's a billionaire tax. Actually, it applies to people who have 100 million or more of net worth. Surprise next year, it'll be 10 million on and on.

They'll go down that chain. But the idea is like, if your Bitcoin went from 25,000 to 50,000, you're going to owe us the difference on that, which, of course, what would you do if you didn't have the cash difference to pay your taxes on that? well, you're going to have to sell Bitcoin or stocks or whatever, right? So it's going to create a lot of selling. So it's obviously got easily anticipated unintended consequences, right? And then the other part that's really kind of messy about this is, of course, it's a one-way street. What about my unearned losses? Can I claim those as tax credits? No. Right. Can we inflation adjust all this stuff? No. And they're also now talking about doing away with people being able to die and pass their stuff on to their children without them having to account for they used to be able to do to what's called the cost, the tax basis, right?

Like it's like when you die, it's worth what it's worth. And that gets basis there and your kids would move on from there. They want to take it from from they want they want the capital gains off of that. So no inheritance, right, punishing capital. these are literally planks out of the communist manifesto. I wish I was being hyperbolic, but I'm not. There's planks one, two, and three. And these are planks two and three we're talking about right now.

I mean, what you're describing is an effect, a form of confiscation. I mean, it's, it's, or as the communist used to say, expropriation. But of course, the difference, the difference is, they were absolutely straightforward about what they were doing. I mean, if you go back to 1917 and to the social, obvious of that time. Of course, I've studied that period closely. They were absolutely open. They said, we would expropriate the expropriators. This is how they just described it. I mean, there was no, there was no concealment or subterfuge. And of course, they went forward,

and they set out various planning systems, which they were going to use to develop the economy. But they were absolutely straightforward about that. And I'm going to suggest, actually, that because it was honest, in a kind of a way, it was also coherent. The problem is this is not either honest or coherent because it's not admitted in that way. And it also, you can see this, I think, in their various planning mechanisms that they've been talking about. I mean, this is something that I think you're probably the best person to talk about, actually. But, I mean, can you talk about some of the sort of programs that they've had, you know, the Chips Act and trying to set up factories to make more chips? and some of the things they've been doing in the world of pharmaceuticals,

which I know you know very well. Can you tell us a little bit about that? Because it seems to me that we've heard an awful lot, an awful lot of money has got into all of these projects, but they have produced absolutely nothing at all. If you go to the former Soviet Union, you'll see quite a lot of things that the Soviets did build, you know, steel mills and, you know, aluminium plants and whatever.

Here, you don't ultimately, see very much. I think that's one of the things that I find very strange about all of this. It's a great set of points. And yes, of course, if you want something done ineffectively, inefficiently, the government's your top choice. But beyond that, so we've actually had a very interventionist, dare I say, Politburo, crop planning style cabal running things for a while. It's called the Federal Reserve, right? And by the way, sorry, but my most censored or suppressed tweets ever on Twitter still, or when I badmouthed the Federal Reserve, like that's still kind of off the reservation a little bit. They're a little sensitive about that subject,

but it's absolutely true. So you have this group of people called the FOMC, right, the open market committee. And they decide the price of money. Is it zero percent? Is it five? They're just making this stuff up out of thin air. And they shouldn't be doing that at all. The market should be setting the interest rates and the price because that's how capital moves. I believe in capitalism, when it's unfettered. We haven't had capitalism in a long time in the sense that we've had free, open, fair markets that aren't sort of littered with barriers to entry, regulatory capture, and then the Federal Reserve, willy-nilly deciding to, like, make money zero or not, remember 2019 and 2019 worldwide?

Because it wasn't just the Fed. It's kind of this global cabal of central banks. We had $17 trillion of negative yielding interest on the landscape. What is negative yielding interest? I have to pay Germany to lend it money, right? Here, Germany, here's a thousand euros. I only need $998 back when you're done. What even is that?

It's this bizarre thing that tells you money has less than no value. Time value of money is below zero. That is not even remotely how the entire concept of money works. So they broke the markets. All kinds of crazy stuff happened. And the government's sort of like this last frothy layer of inefficiency on top of that. But the core of this story is people thinking they can control the uncontrollable and that has destroyed. Look what the Fed did.

Like, oh, we have to preserve markets. We can't risk a systemic failure. I know we'll make interest rate zero. So houses will go up in price. Yay, saved the housing market. Oh, wait. A whole generation of people can't afford houses. You just destroyed household formation, which means you've socially engineered.

something. Was that the intention? Well, it was an easily predictable thing. I wrote about it in my crash course in 2008. Like, people can, this is not hard to puzzle your way through, but we're not having those conversations. We're not even allowed to have them. So I look at the DNC's convention. The things people actually care about aren't even on, they're not even talking about them. Open borders. Massive inflation. We don't want a nuclear third world war, right? These are things that people care about. Not a hint. They're not talking about. that at all. It's just saving our democracy. And other things which we can't really, which we can't talk about. They can talk about them, but we're not able to. Anyway, let's just

discuss something else because there is something that, you know, I always worry about. And again, perhaps you can tell us a little bit more about this, is that are we actually getting any real economic growth at all? Now, I say this because Larry Summers, who is not, I think somebody, which either of us would have a huge amount of time for. But he at least is coming out and saying that inflation is much higher than is being admitted to. I think he said that in 2023, which he thought was the highest time for inflation, inflation was around 18%, which is astonishing figure, actually. And I think he currently guessed him as current inflation is around 8%,

which is again an astonishing figure. It's a basic economic fact that if you are understating the inflation rate, then your growth figures are wrong. You're going to be making growth look much higher than it really is, because what you're actually doing is you are assigning inflation. In other words, growth of prices. And you're calling that growth. I mean, it's growth in the same way that cancer is growth inside a person. So, I mean, have we actually had any real significant growth in this economy over the last three years? And going back even further to the time of the pandemic, obviously not.

But over the last three years. No, we've had no real growth in the last three years in the U.S. economy. And this is easy to assess, right? So if we were scoring it honestly, at least they try and back out inflation. We know they fib about inflation, so they're not backing out as much as they ought to, right? Her Larry Summers comments, right? That's true. And we know they fib about it.

They fib or lie about jobs, how many there are, et cetera. Although, that's true. But we've sort of learned how to look past the noise if we need to. So you have your real economy, which is your nominal minus the inflation fine. So let's say we had 100 units of economic activity and next year we have 110. Well, if we had zero inflation, that's 10% growth, right? If we had 10 units of inflation, there's zero growth. It's just all inflation, right?

Fine. The thing that's really messing this all up, which we should be doing and we've never done it, is you have to back out the growth of debt because it's not real growth. Right. So let's imagine all three of us are individual economies, right? Alex is earning 100,000. Alexander, you're an 100,000. I'm earning 100,000, right?

Alex grows his economy by, you know, $5,000 of new income. Great, 5% growth. You've grown yours by $10,000, 10% organic growth doing great. I've just said, screw it, I borrowed 50 grand, fought a boat, went on a vacation. When we added up by the way we do inflate GDP statistics, I'm doing the best. Mine grew by 50%. Right? I got 50% more spending than, then.

last year. So it looks great. You have to back out debt. And the U.S. government right now is still deficit spending about 6.3% of GDP. It is an atrocious figure. It's never been seen outside of a war. Allegedly we're in peacetime, but we're not really because we're fighting proxy wars and that's very expensive. But if or when a real war comes along, they're going to have to double triple that number. You know, it's going to be atrocious. So if we back out just the excessive deficit spending by the us government, we get all ready to zero in that story. And that's easily said. When the government deficit spends, I hate to say this gentleman, they don't create actual economic growth. They mostly fritter that away and the rest they waste. I completely agree, by the way. I think this is,

do you just just to ask us a quick question? I mean, do you think we should do away with GDP as a as a metric. I think it is, I think it's extremely misleading. This is my own view. And I think the other thing it's doing is that it's a standing temptation to governments to goose up GDP figures in exactly the way that you say in order to give the impression that the economy is bigger and growing and growing, even if it might in fact be either stagnating or even contracting. I think we're starting to see that in Germany, by the way. I mean, I was, going over some economic numbers out of Germany earlier today, and they're terrible, but they are pretending to themselves that they're not in a recession.

When it was quite obvious to me, I was in Germany a few weeks ago, that they are, but they pretend to themselves that they're not in recession because they're spending so much again. And that's making the GDP figures look better than they really are. But do you think this thing should be done away with? I understand that the person who created it. said that it's been abused and that he was in fact even sorry that he'd even cannot come up with the concept. Yeah, absolutely it should be done away with or at least modified, right? So I don't mind a gross domestic product, but we should also have a gross domestic services

and then a gross domestic F for financialization because we do a lot of financialization, which is using money to make money and it looks like activity, but it's not actually. And that's really enabled by the Fed just pumping the markets all the time and throwing money in. I tell people waggishly, in life, one of your goals should be to find somebody who loves you as much as the Fed loves the stock market. Because they pay attention to it all day long. And they used to be, I'm old enough that I saw when they first started directly intervening in the stock market, or as I call it market, double air quotes now. Because anytime it gets in this latest bit of trouble, the Fed just wades in there as if it's job number one. and they do everything they can to pump it up.

Because the markets now and GDP and all of it have turned into something of a fiction, and they're in service to the narrative, not reality, right? And what's the narrative? Well, the narrative is your leaders are doing a great job. And the sub-narrative is, if you're having trouble, it must be you, so they gas late us, right? You know, as if, you know, when you get in trouble economically, financially in the United States, that's because you screwed up, right? That's the message, right? You end up under bridge.

Geez, you should have played the game better. But now we see that those bridges are full of formerly middle class people living under them, right? You know, adjunct professors and people who used to, like, right now in a lot of major cities, you need to have a median income that's deep into the six figures to not be in poverty, right? And of course, median income is way below that. It's down in the 70s, right? Household income. So how do you square that?

Well, if you're the government, you just lie about it, you try and tell everybody that everything's great and, you know, the Lego, everything is awesome. It's just you must be having the problem. And people are starting to wake up to that, of course. And unfortunately, I'm watching very cynically the Democrats try and convert that into envy and resentment and say it must be this guy or gal over here. It's Trump. It's those people. It's those, you know, the deplorables. And you know what?

I see when I see a Trump rally is I see people who live in the world of reality. They drive trucks, they pound nails, they plow fields, right? And when I look at the Democrat side, I see urbanites, and they live in a world of abstraction. They press keys, they do things. And that's the great tension we have resolving right now is that there are people out here are living in the world of reality, and they're just getting hosed and have been for a long time, and they're getting tired. And then you have people who live in a world of abstraction who are living on that endless cycle of fictitious GDP

and printed money and all of them. that. So they're the recipients of it. And of course, they don't want that gravy train to end because by large, this crew of people, if you gave them drywood newspapers and matches, they wouldn't know how to make a fire, right? They really lack basic life skills for the most part. And they know that it's terrifying. And my compassion is, I get it. I mean, I would be terrified too if my entire existence depended on this fictitious system staying fictional for long enough for me to live out my life. What about the other side? Because you brought up Trump and the Republicans. I mean, they've got their own economic ideas, which are different. I mean, I think there's more difference in this election than I've ever known before, actually. And by the way, I think that some of these radical ideas that the Democrats are coming up with are in a kind of way response to what the other side is saying. But if the other side is elected, if they win the election, and of course they haven't done so yet, but if they're they do? Will they change things? Will we start to see a return to reality, the reality of the people

who vote for them and who form the electoral base? By the way, about which I completely agree. And if I could just add a very quick point, one of the interesting things about American politics now, because I remember, my memory goes back to the 60s, the people who are coming out now to Trump rallies, they remind me very much of people who used to come out in the 60s to support Democrat leaders of that era like Lyndon Johnson. You look at the pictures, it's exactly the same demographic, except the Democrats have left it behind, and Trump has actually connected with them.

Would it change? Would there be a change going forward if he was elected? Would there be at least the first halting steps towards backwards towards the real world? I would hope so. Trump had four years, and my indictment of him then was I thought he picked badly, right? He left Anthony Fauci in place and he brought in Goldman Sachs people to run treasury and stuff, right? I didn't think he did well. So I was kind of hoping I'm kind of watching him now.

Is he going to pick better people? Because one man can't do anything in Washington, D.C. So he could be the figurehead and he could lead that, but who's he going to surround himself with open question in my mind at this point in time? It'll be interesting to see what transpires with the RFK Jr. announcement in anything that might come after that. I think that's something, I'm watching that very eagerly to see if that. Because Bobby Kennedy as head of HHS, man, that I just give me my popcorn. You know, I'm just, that'll be, that would be astonishing if it came to that. But so here's the thing.

So we know what we, here's the funny part. We actually know the things we need to do. So one of the things I analyze a lot is energy and oil and energy is the lifeblood of any economy. Germany's discovering that, right? They have very expensive gas and they're papering over it right now, but they're having a capital D depression on their energy intensive industries, right? Cement, steel, glass, et cetera.

Just 23% decline over from peak, right? That's horrifying. And that's your source of real well. energy is your source of wealth. Right now, the United States has this crazy policy of, let's rip it out of the ground as fast as possible, oil and gas, and then let's just export it. If we were smart about this, we would be saying, oh, no, rest of the world, we'll buy your stuff, and we keep that stuff in the ground. And that way it's for us and for our use and our future generations. That's what we would do. We would also have a crash program for making small

modular nuclear reactors, fourth-gen stuff, maybe thorium reactors. Really important. We would be doing these things. We would be putting not ag subsidies on big farms, which are like destroying the soil and just destroying people's health. And we'd put it into regenerative agriculture and, you know, bright young people who are starting the small micro farms that are actually repairing everything. There's so many things we could do. And I think there would be real hunger for that. I still don't see those things anywhere on the dialogue set. So I'm kind of hopeful that maybe it's what you said, Alexander, it'll be a step in the right direction. I think Trump's instincts for, not getting us into wars and telling China, hey, cut it out. I think those were good instincts,

having a actual border wall. Good instincts. I'd love to see them get done, though. It's very interesting to me that he brought up in one of his interviews. I think it was with Bloomberg, the figure of William McKinley, because what you describe a situation where basically America looks, you know, thinks about its long term future, that it invests and builds up If you go to the period between about 1860 after the Civil War, right up until about the 1950s, it's exactly what America did. In fact, there was a word for it that we used to use in Europe about it, which was the American system.

We called it in that time the American system, which is that the Americans had very open economy inside their own country, very focused on investment and production and doing very much the kind of things that you said investing in new technologies. I know anything about Borgium reactors, but things of that kind. That was very much what the US did at that time.

And a lot of these people of that era, people who are perhaps not looked on with great favour today, people like J.P. Morgan and Rockefeller and all of those. But they did have a vision for America in their own strange, their own complicated way. There were deeply patriotic people, actually.

And I should say I studied this period. It was very much my university study. And they did create the economic colossus, which is what the United States eventually. became. So it's not so different in some respects from what you're talking about. I mean, they had very controlled money emission. There was a big argument in the 1890s about the gold standard or the silver standard and they opted strongly, is well known, for the gold standard. They had tariffs, which is, of course, what Trump is talking about, but it wasn't just a policy of tariffs because

they were doing all kinds of other things too. And anyway, could we go back to something like that? Because that's what Trump seemed to be talking about. The world is very different now from what it was then. But is this perhaps maybe not reproducing that system, but beginning the very fact that he's talking about it, might that be a hopeful sign in itself? Oh, thanks for that context.

And I'm going to have to go look up what McKinley said because I'm unfamiliar. But yes, yeah, hopefully we're going to step back to that. Because, you know, if I rotate my Rubik's cube of analysis one more direction, the everything I've seen transpire since the Russia-Ukraine war began tells me that the whole balance of power has to shift now because these drones and missile technologies, I don't know how you project power with a Navy anymore. I'm not clear, right? We'll see.

But it really feels like the United States. is going to have to withdraw back to its own borders and stick to its own knitting for a while. You know, this whole idea that we're exporting democracy, I'm like, don't you have to have to have something before you export it, you know? It seems, you know, so maybe it's time to work on our own stuff for a while. And by the way, it's deeply embarrassing. Whenever I travel to another country and I get on, you know, in a country that's invested in itself, it's completely obvious, right? The difference in infrastructure. We're just shabby. Like that ride from, say, JFK into Manhattan on a cab where you're like bouncing like crazy on potholes.

It's just embarrassing, right? So there's a lot that the United States needs to do to return itself and invest in itself to get itself back to where it needs to be. And I'm talking comprehensive, right? Our education system is not churning out what we need at this point in time. Our political system isn't delivering the results we need. We seem to be captured in our foreign policy by interests that are less than, let's say less than transparent. And we're just I feel like my sense is the country's hemorrhaging. And so I'm kind of hoping Trump is the only one talking about putting some band-aids on that at this particular point. And it needs doing.

But if we don't do it, guys, we're just going to careen along pretending as if it's all fine, defeating ourselves S&P and GDP fictions until we hit the wall. And when we hit that, that's going to be a really bad moment. And if people didn't like the 99.5% survival rate of that last thing, that pandemic that came around, man, you're going to hate what this next, you know, when these bubbles burst in an uncontrolled fashion. That's going to be really bad. And we'll have regrets. We'll look back and go, oh, why didn't we do things when we had the vigor, the functioning economy, the functioning money system? But let's be clear, like this path we're on, this, everybody can feel it.

You just feel it, right? The question I ask people, like, who's waking up at three? in the morning for no good reason, right? And a lot of people go, oh, yeah, what is that? I think we have that collective ability as humans as a social species to know when there's something wrong in the story and people don't quite know what it is. And I would like to see us face that straight on. And I think we have to talk, we have to get real conversations again on the political level. They're not real yet about the problems we face. I'm going to just finish one observation of my own, which is when the people start to do,

when countries start to do the sort of things that you say, actually accept reality, start working to get things right, doing the kind of things that you're talking about. There's usually a certain period of shock, but their morale lifts. It becomes something that is actually energizing

in a society. People start to feel that there's a future again, that they can start planning again, that they can start having children again, which is a problem right across the West, if I can say, that there's that sense of optimism, which, by the way, in Europe,

we so associated with America. And I used to go to America. I haven't been to America for a long, long time. But that was one of the things that you noticed when you were in America, how optimistic people were there. That was a long time ago. But that vibrancy,

comes back and that in itself actually helps to overcome the problems. It's a strange fact that reality actually is facing

reality is good for you and not worrying about things that really aren't your immediate concerned like what happens in Cambodia or but there's a very big issue about the fact that the Chinese want to build a canal there, Cambodia or Ukraine or indeed Ukraine or wherever. It's surprising how, what a relief it becomes when you no longer need to worry about those things.

I totally agree, but it begins with that step one, which is you have to talk about what you're facing in real terms. I mean, let's face it, the United States is on the path for a fiscal train wreck. And the only way to get through that is we're going to have to have leaders who can undergo something that no leader ever wants to do, which is austerity, right? You know, if right now you took the federal budget and you zero balanced it out so they're not running a deficit anymore at least, right? That's a 6.3% hit to the GDP plus an overshoot effect. Let's call it about a 10% hit.

Nobody's going to sign up for that. in our current system. And so, you know, who's willing to be our Ross Perot and get the ears and the, you know, the pie charts and talk about this. It's not, it's still not happening at the national level yet. And, but you're right. We step one. What are we facing? What are problems? Right. Problems have solutions. We can work through it, right? Maybe small nukes are a solution, right? To a problem. But we're facing some predicaments too, which is that we've got well over a hundred trillion dollars of debt. We've got well over $250 trillion of debt plus IOUs, that's Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, underfunded pensions. There's not a chance in the world that that pencils

out. There's a math problem. We have a predicament. There's no possible combination of economic vigor you can conjure up that squares that. So what do you do with that? Well, there's really only one question left to be resolved, which is who's going to eat the losses. And that's a political question. But right now, the big banks and the wealthy elite are making sure that the answer is not them. And they want everybody else to eat the losses. And that's a political question right now that's not yet resolved because money has too much power in our particular political construct. But that's what we're facing. And I think we should talk about that and ask the big questions. Like, where do we want to be? Who are we? Who do we want to be? What's our role in the world? How much

should we take care of ourselves versus take care of the rest of the world? These are the kinds of conversations we should be having. Absolutely. I will just finish with one other quick thing, which is that the inflation era that the United States has been going through now for several decades is unprecedented in the history of a great power. To give an example, I mean, I'm British and I live in Britain, obviously. but if you looked at relative prices for key food stuffs in Britain, except in times of war,

they were incredibly stable from about the mid-17th century until about the 1930s. Now, in the United States, I was just checking some figures last night, actually. A dollar today is a tenth of what it was worth in 1967, which is. is pretty extraordinary given the time period that we're talking about. You're going to say. Alexander, I have, I'm going to do something, I'm going to show something. This is a chart of inflation levels from 1665 in the United States on through to about 2008, but I've hidden a little bit of it just so I can make the point.

But if we look here, that's inflation since the 30s and that's the wartime right there. And then if we take one more, that gets us to 2008. But look at this whole period. 250 years down here, right? 250 years on that first part from 1665 where inflation, yeah, it bumped up for wars, but those are just like little little heart rhythms on the bottom of that. It always came back to where it was, always. But this is only through 2008.

So I had to get a little fancy to make it look. This is where we live now. And it's going asymptotic. It's going vertical, right? And that's the world we're coming in. to and to not be in this world would require something very unusual, which is for the Federal Reserve to allow markets to correct, to have natural market forces, and for the government to not deficit spend. And frankly, I don't know where we get that political willpower from.

Chris Martison, thank you very much for stimulating an exceptional program. Over to you, Alex. Chris, let's answer a few questions that people... Sure. What'd you got? For you? Yeah, great. Goddess 7 says, good work, Duran and Chris. Please ask Chris about his views on peak oil.

He does a lot of great work on that. Yeah. Peak oil. So peak oil. Peak oil is the... I mean, listen, it's just I invest in oil wells. I'll tell you something. They do something.

They produce well for a while, and then they... just die. And what's true for one well is true for 10 wells. It's true for field. It's true for the whole world. It's just a process, right? It's not a theory. It's just a geological observation. When you start going after any resource, there's a lot of it at first, and then there's less and less, and eventually you're going after the harder and harder and harder to find stuff. This is true for copper, lithium, fish, doesn't matter. It's just part of reality. So peak oil simply says that there will come a time when we're going to hit a peak of oil production in the world. There's more subtlety to the conversation, though, which is that peak cheap oil is the stuff.

Like, you know, that Gawar field in Saudi Arabia, awesome, 138 mile long field, 50 miles wide, thousand feet deep, thick. Just astonishing, right? First tapped in 1938, been flowing ever since. It's amazing, right? However, you know, it's not an infinite amount of stuff. And so that oil was cheap down one to four thousand feet, stick a straw down. They had some wells they drilled in the like in the 50s, mid 50s still producing 3,000 barrels a day. I mean, it's just like you stick that one straw and, and amazing.

But now if you look at where we're after, we got the tar sands in Canada. We got the shale oils here in the United States. And when you drill down, like in the box, in 10,000 feet down, tip the drill bit sideways. Brilliant technology, by the way. The people who work this field are amazing. Tip the drill bit sideways and then drill sideways for maybe another 10,000 feet. So 20,000 feet of well. And it's 85% depleted in just three years, right? And it tops out at maybe a thousand barrels per day on the first month. And then it just goes hyperbolicly down. So yeah, there's oil there, but we're drilling into it. And we can clearly see when

end when that we're in the bumpy plateau phase for the next few years in the shale oils. And unless they open up the east and west coast, we find a lot off the shelves. Always possible. Um, but as we know it right now, we can clearly see where we are in this oil story as a nation, but also as a globe. And we're not prepared for it at all. China's preparing for it. It's written into their overall policy plans. They are preparing for an energy future that gets more constrained and tight. We're not. Um, and I don't know why. possibly because we have people like Jennifer Granholm as the energy secretary. You know, we actually, we need some people who know what they're talking about and some key positions of power.

And so my concern to finish this out for peak oil here in the United States is we're not planning for it. And it's already right there in front of us through our wind. We can see it coming. And even the JP Morgan Commodity Desk said from 2025 to 2030, there's a growing and percent. and ever-widening gap between how much oil the world wants and how much it can produce. So I trust the JPMorgan Commodity Desk more than, say, the International Energy Agency headed up by Fatiba Roll. It's turned into this whole greenwashing thing.

Don't worry, peak oil demand, and we'll have windmills and solar farms. They've lost the plot line for now, but if you understand who funds them, you understand why they have to sort of say those sorts of things. JP Morgan Commodity Desk doesn't care about that stuff. They're like, can we make money at this and what do we see? And so we see that we're entering a period of oil scarcity, which is going to lead to much higher prices for oil. Eventually, that'll lead to more oil, but then how long does that last? So I see a period where we're going to see more and more of this as we go on.

High oil prices lead to a collapsed economy. That leads to oil oil prices. That leads to more. It's just we're going to be in that ceiling floor zone where the amount of debt we have can only afford a certain price of oil. and the scarcity of oil requires a minimum floor of oil to find more of it, and that ceiling floor is coming together. Best guess, it kind of touches some around 2030. Fantastic. Sanjava says, I don't think one shouldn't dismiss the widespread apathy that exists in the U.S. electorate against both candidates. Trump needs to concentrate on policy rather than Kamala Harris' silliness.

he needs to attract the independence, your thoughts? Well, he does. And I think he really is personal opinion. He's missing, I think, what are some obvious things he should be doing right now, which is focusing on the fact that we can't answer the question in the affirmative who was actually running the White House for the past three years. Can't answer an affirmative what that palace coup was all about, right? These are legit questions that like, hey, Kamala, you were in the White House, apparently.

How did you not notice this most obvious thing that we now all know is true? So they're very cynical, right? But beyond that, I think this is a correct thing. Trump really should be focusing on policies and it ought to be the big ones, right? What's going on with the border? I mean, it's still happening, right? It was a big thing and then we forgot about it. There are still people streaming across the border who are unvetted just coming in.

A lot of them military-aged males. Maybe we should still talk about that. And I think he should absolutely be hammering on the economic front and talking about how he's going to be different than the whole cast of characters. And then the other thing, which the one thing that I will say I loved about Trump was he was the only president in my entire life who didn't start a war. And I mean, they tried, right, with the execution of Soleimani, right? They tried and he didn't take the bait.

So I thought that would be, I think people are war-weary, we're economically battered and we're tired of being lied to. would be the three things I would focus on if I was him. Right. Sparky says, Chris William, McKinley was the model for author L. Frank Baum's Gilded Age character, The Wizard of Us. Thank you, Sparky, for that. Thanks, Sparky. Cool. And let's see, from Wade, Chris, what is your outlook on alternate store of value networks, Bitcoin, gold, bricks, et cetera, question. Well, I'm talking to you from my studio, which is in my home, and just outside is the ultimate

store of value. We've got six cows, 30 chickens, a bunch of fruit trees, garden, good clean water. I'm really thinking that the bottom of Hat Maslow's hierarchy of needs is a good place to start, shoot, shelter, warmth, and, you know, safety. And beyond that, I'm a hard ass. asset guy, right? So if ever I get a chance, I buy trees on the hoof, right? We call that, you know, forested land. I like gold a lot. Bitcoin, I like, but I'm still a little cautious about it because of the way in which I know that if my government decides to put something in its crosshairs,

it will do it. And so I'm still a little concerned about that aspect of things when it comes to that, but it has a role to play. Right now, I know that we're going to have a monetary accident. So that just means the dollar crashes. People still are going to want money. We'll use money. I mean, thousands of years ago, people were using cowrie shells, goats and big stone wheels. We'll use, we'll always have money. That's just a human thing. So one of the things I like to do is I do buy silver, particularly junk silver, because I think that in a pinch, it could help repopulate the local circulating money system. just where I live, very, very local. But I would absolutely, if we could, if we could have a

national referendum on this, sure, have a Federal Reserve, but have a competing money system, and people can decide, hey, would you pay me in Federal Reserve notes? Or do I trust that you pay me in this Bitcoin or gold-backed currency instead? And then the Fed would actually have to compete. And I love competition. Nothing succeeds like competition. Now the Fed has to decide, Hmm, how am I going to defend the value of my currency, which as Alexander noted, has lost 90 cents on the dollar in just the past couple decades? How would I actually defend that? Oh, I can't just print it up willy-nilly every time Citibank gets in trouble, right?

I'm going to have to be more thoughtful. And that would, I think, enforce the appropriate level of concern, right? Remember again, you know, every, you show me the incentive, I'll show you the outcome. Somebody asked me recently, they said, Chris, you seem so so anti-eastern. expert. Believe me, the experts lost all their validity with me. And I have a PhD, right? But all the medical people during COVID, I'm like, oh my gosh, terrible, right? Is there an expert you trust? And I thought about it. I said, pilots, because our incentives are exactly aligned. I trust pilots. Right?

You know, we both want to get on the ground safely. So, so, yeah, but beyond that, yeah, I don't trust our monetary experts. They're not experts. They're not experts. They're charlatans. They're frauds. And so, yeah, get out of the dollar base system as fast as you can is kind of my advice. Fantastic. Gravo says Tucker, I imagine Tucker Carlson, said on his podcast how the U.S. cannot be a great economy when it's essentially a granite slab supported by toothpicks because we are a debt-driven economy.

Can you share responses and thoughts? Yeah. Right now, the U.S., according to the Federal Reserve, of data. It's a really good website, st.luis Fred.org. Or is it.gov. No, dot org. So anyway, the St. Louis Fred, you look at the United States has $100 trillion dollars of debt, right? So that's federal debt at about $35 trillion, but it's also corporate debt, household debt, you know, student, all that stuff. That's just debt, right? So there's about $330 trillion of debt worldwide right now and developed economy. See, the United

States is a third of the world's debt, give or take. And we're about $330 trillion dollars of debt, and we're about 6% of the world's population. So we have, like, we're highly levered. The whole thing is based on debt. Yeah, is it a granite slab held up by some toothpicks? It is. And here's the problem, because it's just a math problem. This is not a political statement at all.

Our debt has been compounding since 1971, when we went off the gold standard and everything became untethered, has been compounding at an annual rate of 8.9%. And our economy has only been growing at less than half that rate. So when your debt is growing at twice the rate of your underlying economy, you have a compounding problem. And so now it's grown at a much, much faster rate. And unfortunately, unless the debt is growing our economy, our financial system threatens to collapse. We had one period of time in the entire data series where debt in the system actually went backwards for about six quarters.

and that was from first quarter of 2009 through the second quarter of 2010. And that one period where it went backwards for a little bit was practically life-ending. Like, oh, my God. You heard about like Paulson in his memoirs. He's like taking money out of ATMs because even he didn't know,

is this thing going to survive? So we have a debt-based money system. It's either expanding merrily or it's busy threatening to collapse. And that's why I say, that's great, I guess, but get V over to a parallel system, which is something other than that debt-based dollar system. Because it's either growing or collapsing.

If it collapses, don't be tied to that, right? If your tendership is lashed to the Titanic, cut some of those lines, you know, have some gold, have some silver, have some land, have some, you know, good, strong social connections, have skills, right? These are all things that will give you sort of that resilient buffer so that if this thing goes down, you know,

you're not completely scroomed. And I call it the Amish model, right? Wall Street could absolutely immolate and go to zero. It might be a couple weeks before the Amish even noticed, right? You know, so this isn't a lot of people think it's either the system works or a dozen. It's not that simple. There's lots of side paths to take in this story. Parallel systems, as Baklapovil would call them.

Parallel systems. One more time from Rumble says, my school in West Virginia, class of 28, One went to Brown, one to the NFL. I was an aircraft trader for British airways. Poor small town kids get out if their teachers support them. Waltz is selling kids short. Your thoughts on Waltz, I guess, and his policies or what he said? Yeah, I can't really take Waltz seriously.

He really feels like a cartoon character to me. It's just not genuine on some level. And he just exudes that. has had kindly grandpa sort of a look, but he just feels like he's just not a very serious person to me in many respects. But for him to say, everybody, all the kids around me failed is not really like this great statement, you know, to this person's point. Yeah, anybody can make it, right? And often one good teacher makes a huge difference in somebody's life because it's somebody who challenges them and teaches them that the way you get ahead is you find out where you,

fail points are. And the way you do that is it's hard and it's uncomfortable. And so the good teachers, everybody who has them looks back and says, man, that person drove me hard, but they helped you find out who you really were. That's how life actually works. But all these grievance studies, people, they want nobody to be challenged and nobody should ever be triggered and we shouldn't have any uncomfortable moments. And God forbid that you say something that makes me reexamine anything, because I already know what I need to think. Right. That's not how life works. These people want to case us all in Lusitis, 13-year-olds, and call it a day, it's a recipe for disaster. And that's how I see Tim Walts.

Pirate Fish says, question for Chris, seems to me the government spending massively exceeds the taxation changes. There seems to be a huge disconnect. Well, there is. I mean, the government's last budget spent $6.1 trillion, took in about $4.2. So it's almost a 50% overspend at this point in time. So if they wanted to sort of square that circle, they'd have to raise taxes by about 50% just to get close to zeroed out on that whole thing. Of course, that would just destroy the economy too.

So the real question is, you know, how can we get the government to reel back in its spending? And that's getting harder and harder because right now we're at a run rate of about $1.6 trillion a year just on interest. You can't not pay the interest on your debt because then people won't loan you anymore. more money. So that's locked in. And when you look at the entitlement program spending, which is a big part of that $6 trillion, right, Social Security and stuff, that you can't touch that. That's hard to touch because it's not really entitlement's the wrong word. Is it an entitlement if I have to pay into something that's guaranteed to pay me back less than I actually paid in? It's not really an entitlement, right? So that's harder, politically difficult.

The only places we could really touch on the discretionary side would be, well, a lot of the useless departments, Department of Education. It could just go away tonight and nobody, nobody would care, except the people who work there. Nothing would happen. Everything would be fine. But also defense. The United States is going to have to rationalize its defense spending, which is really in many cases offence spending. We're going to have to reel that in. It's just way too high. And then we actually don't know how much we're actually spending anyway because of this awful odious thing called FASB 56, right, where the Financial Accounting Standard Board allowed the United States government to hide its spending if it deemed it in the national security

interest. Turns out there's a lot of stuff that's national security interests, like the billion pages a year that are classified secret. Like anything the government finds embarrassing is a national security issue all of a sudden. So we don't actually know how much the United States government is spending, but we can sort of guess at it when we peek at the actual level of debt accumulation. And it's about 600 billion more than they're admitting to right now. J.K. Prague says most Americans think the Federal Reserve is a government agency. And firsthand info, the 30-something crowd wants socialized medicine. Your thoughts?

Well, it's federal reserve is about as federal as Federal Express, of course. It's a government-sponsored entity. It very publicly admits that it has capital stock. that is the voting stock that is held by not the United States citizens, it's held by banks within the Federal Reserve system, right? 75% of that voting stock for the Federal Reserve is owned by just two companies, J.P. Morgan and City. So if you really want to know who's running it, it's those two companies.

They like to say, oh, all these member banks, there's thousands of member banks. They all collectively own the capital stock, but 75% is held by just two companies. So let's start there. And for socialized medicine, this is a really, this is a hard subject because right now, the United States spends more than any other nation on a percentage basis, aggregate basis, per capita basis on health care. And we have arguably worse outcomes than any of them, right? measuring that by things like more child mortality, overall longevity, you know, et cetera. So there's a lot that could be fixed in this, but socializing it's probably not going to do it. That just gets the incentives again, all arrayed in the wrong direction.

And so what we really have to admit is we have a problem. We spend about 18, 19 percent of our economy on health care right now. And we have the worst possible outcomes. So it's all wrong. It's broken. I don't know if you saw there's this amazing interview Tucker Carlson just did with Casey and Callie Means. And it just rocked my world, right? Because they said, look, the fact that United States citizens are obese and have metabolic disorder, which drives a lot of that over health expenditures, is due to the fact that our food was literally designed by otherwise bored tobacco scientists to be addictive and unhealthy.

And on top of that, the pharma company is like, we love this model because now they're not. They just push pills on top of those symptoms. And the medical system's like, great. We're going to make a bunch of money on triple bypasses and other things, right? So when you look at the overall system, I think what we need to do before we say, oh, socialized medicine is an answer. Maybe we should back the F up and say, wow, we have a really broken system that makes people sick as a business model.

And it begins by making people sick as children because now you have a lifetime customer. It is literally a model on CFO spreadsheets all across the corporate sick care system, which is food, ag, pharma, medicine. It's gross. It needs fixing. Let's do three more questions. Is that cool? Chris?

Sure. Absolutely. Great. Retro says, I'm not sure I understand it's invasion, rhetoric and smart wall trap thoughts. I'm not sure. Invasion. Well, you know, are we being invaded, you know, at the border maybe? is how I'm interpreting that, but let me know if I've got it wrong.

So yeah, this is a point that I really wanted to drive home for people is that they kept saying, oh, are you anti-immigrant? No, my grandparents both immigrated over here, Ellis Island 1923. I'm anti-migrant. Big difference, okay? Immigration is this multi-step, multi-step, 70-box, five-year process tests, and we're making sure that we're matching the right people coming in with the kinds of needs that we have. Immigration's great.

I love immigration. But it's a process of vetting, right? And I think we could all understand this. Like, if you're a landlord, would you just like anybody could just rent your house from you? You wouldn't do a background check, a crim check, a reference check? Of course you would, right? Or you're a dummy. Well, we're being dummies.

We're just like migration is what happens when a species moves from one area to another because they either need more resource. or they're seeking breeding grounds with appropriate resources. I mean, we are facing migration, unvetted, mass quantities of people who are just coming in. Okay. So that's why I think it's okay to call that an invasion because we're being invaded. It's what it looks like. The second thing is, if this was like some random cross section of people from various countries,

okay, that's a different story, but it's not. This is by and large military age men coming over. and that creates a whole set of questions and potential issues. Now, Michael Jan took myself and Brett Weinstein. We went to the Dary and Gap, right, flew into Panama, got a car, went all the way to the end of the Pan Am highway, got out, got in a little dugout canoe with a 15-horse Evan route and powered our way four hours up into the jungle to see one of these camps to see people coming out of the jungle from their trek across that Dary and Gap.

And because Michael needed us to see what he was seeing, which is like, this isn't families. This isn't the poor, the distress, the yearning to be free. This is like a lot of dudes. And the Chinese people, they had better clothes than I did. Like, Gortex jackets and $700 hiking boots and like, I didn't even know Gucci made backpacks. Right. I mean, it's like really incredible stuff. This was not poor people struggling to be free.

I saw military age dudes from China who clearly must have had okay. You don't just leave China, right? They must have had the okay to go. off they went. And we're, and we're just allowing them in. I can't see any other way to interpret that besides this is, this is, we're being invaded. And the worst part was watching all the NGOs who are heavily funded by my tax dollars, this includes the Hebrew Immigration Society, right, highest, this include Catholic, this include, you know, all the, um, the, um, the, uh, IOM from the UN, right? There were 69 when we were there, 69 NGOs helping all these people,

northwards, right? And it's going to be millions per year coming up out of this. And the thing that surprised me was like, we talked with one, very nice guys, actually, these were nice guys. And they would talk to us good English. Like, where are you from? Oh, we're from Afghanistan. What do you do in a jungle in South America? Well, we flew into Honduras. When we took a bus up to, Ecuador, took a bus up to Columbia, got out, walked through the jungle, here we are. Like, why wouldn't you just fly into JFK? I mean, it's what is all of this kabuki theater song and dance about and it was well this is the process so if they go through all of these steps and spend all this money and some of it goes to the sinolaoa cartel and some of it goes back into the pockets of all these NGOs they pay all this money there's

bus drive there's all this economic activity and then they finally get up to the border in the u.s and then they just lift the fence and in they come and and that's the system and it was just it opened my eyes I realized that this is well-funded, long-running. These people had maps with like 200 waypoints. Like, this is where all the Chinese people who tend to like these sort of hotels along the way. And this is where the Afghanistan people, like the Red Cross is printing giant maps

like hundreds of waypoints. This isn't something that just sort of happened because poor people decided to take a long, lonely trek north. This is a machine. And it's being enabled and funded by people. Unfortunately, funded by me. Alexander asks, at what point will the federal government be forced to cut down deficit spending? Oh, probably when the BRICS countries finally get their payment rails all set up and they cut over to what they're calling the unit or some equivalent, which is going to be a non-US dollar-backed payment settlement system.

At that point, the U.S. government's going to be, I've always said they will never willingly do this on their own because they lack the political stones for that kind of action. And so something will force our hand from outside, and it will probably be the bricks cutting, as I mentioned, their lines attaching their tenderships to the Titanic. Like they are busy, very busy setting up alternative systems, but they take time. And so my guess is sometime in the next no more than five, 10 years, that happens for sure. But it could happen sooner if a war breaks out and people accelerate the process. But yeah, no doubt about it. That process began February 28th, 2022, when the United States government, in its infinite ignorance, decided to weaponize the dollar and froze Russia's sovereign reserves, proving they were neither sovereign nor reserves.

That was weaponizing the dollar. And probably one of the dumbest things you could do when your main export is dollars. But we did it. And I think that it's gaining momentum what happened there. That was very bad. Yeah. And one more question for Chris from the alchalie. All money is not backed by gold or oil, but by trust that you will be rewarded for work. Is this true? Yes, we have a faith-based money system, which is why one should not destroy the faith. They're busy. We're in the fourth turning, right? And the fourth turning is marked in that crisis era by a loss of faith in your governing institutions, right? And how much? Much more true could this be watching like Harvard unable to like figure out that plagiarism

is bad, you know, and, and for our hospitals to behave the way they did. Like we're in this profound, fourth turning moment. And we have a faith-based money system. And once that gets eroded, it can go really quickly. Like it's, there's sort of a math problem built in, which the prior question was asking, like when will the U.S. kind of be forced? There's an earlier step to that, which happens way before the final math problem exerts itself, which is when enough people catch on and you reach that tipping point of awareness

and they say, yikes, I don't have faith in the currency anymore. That's when hyperinflation start. That's when you see it blowing down the streets and you have wheelbarrows of paper currency and people are adding zeros to the end of the currency units. That's coming. And I just worry it could happen faster than some people are expecting because we have this thing called the internet now. Look at all the people we're communicating with. Like knowledge spreads. very rapidly now. And so that question is a very important one that they just asked there because the real question is, what can we admit, what would be the tipping points for that final loss of faith in the dollar as a store of value? And that's, that's unfortunately, I think we could all

imagine some scenarios where that could happen relatively quickly. It might not, but best a plan as if that's a possibility. On that note, Chris Martinson, thank you very much. much for joining us. Peak Prosperity is the website. I will also have your Twitter account as a link down below in the description box, as well as a pinned comment. Chris, thank you very much for joining us on the Duran Fantastic show. Thank you very much, Chris. Alexander. Thank you. Really appreciate the opportunity, gentlemen. Thank you, Chris very much. And everybody definitely follow Peak Prosperity. Definitely go to Chris's Twitter account. account. Now it's called X. Follow him

on X and Chris, let's get you back real soon. That was a fantastic program. Anytime. Anytime. Gentlemen. Take care. All right, Alexander. Great show. Excellent program, by the way. Yeah.

Let's wrap up the questions. We've got a few more questions to get to. Let's definitely do that. We covered a lot of ground. Yeah. A lot of ground. All right. Nico is a new member of the Duran community, welcome. Nico Alexander G, new member of the drag community,

Big Y-Man, thank you for that super sticker. Matthew says, consistently brilliant content, Alexander, what are the odds of Russia declaring war rather than an SMO following the Kersk incursion? Will NATO and Russia avoid the smash?

Right, well, I think the Russians may have given consideration to doing that, but they decided that they wouldn't. There's a very interesting fact, which very few people have noticed, which is that when Ukraine entered, invaded Russia by sending its troops into Kusk,

there was this meeting in Moscow, and what came out of the meeting was a decision to refer to what was going on in Kursk and in the neighboring regions as a terrorist emergency and to deal with it as a terrorist matter. Now, I think the reason the Russians did that was because it can't be part of the special military operation,

because the special military operation is in Ukraine and it is in the regions that Russia has, you know, united itself to, and which were formerly part of Ukraine. So if it can't be the special military operation, what should it be? And I think there's a special military operation, what should it be? and I think they said to themselves, well, look, we've been invaded. Should we call it a war? Should we straightforwardly say we've been invaded and call it a war? And then they took a decision that they weren't going to go that far. And they gave it this actually slightly lower footing,

well, in fact, significantly lower footing, which is they decided to call it a terrorist emergency and to deal with it as a terrorist act. Now, that actually gives them a little. lot more room for maneuver than if they declared it to be a war, because, of course, a war would constrain them in all kinds of ways politically as to what they might be prepared to do. They would probably, at that point, be left with no option but to demand unconditional surrender from the Ukrainians as the eventual outcome, which might not have pleased some of their

allies. So I think they took that political decision, but it was a very interesting meeting because there was no public readout of what was discussed. And I think that they did discuss the question. Just saying. Zahir, thank you for that super chat. William, thank you for that super sticker. Tish M says, no question can't think focused on getting to my day job. Love the Duran community and guests. Thank you, Tish, for that amazing. Super chat. Ralph says, with the new Caribbean queen in charge bringing in communism,

will we all be sharing the same American dream where our hearts all beat as one, no more soaring inflation to bring us all undone? Well, I think you answer that question. We would need to recap the entire program. I mean, we've just been discussing this. Well, Larry said, yeah. Well, Sparky says,

Kamala married her APAC handler. Thank you, Sparky. Sanjava says, hello, Duran. Greetings from Australia. Sangeva. Sparky says,

all created and convoluted means of upward wealth transfer. Yeah. Very true. Absolutely. And duplicitously done. As I said, say what you want about Lenin.

He was absolutely straightforward about what he was doing. This law. They are completely, I mean, I always used to say, trying to read Obama's speeches always gave me a headache. They're following in exactly the same course because, I mean, you have to understand. You think all the time about what these guys are up to because it's so complicated and so convoluted and so weird. They do that on purpose. Yes, Sparky says food prices.

Yeah, food prices don't count in the U.S. inflation rate. Of course not Or any other prices It would seem I mean the whole thing I mean this is Larry Summers who's saying this It's essentially fictitious Yeah

Steve resurrected says All one knew was that every quarter Astronomical number of boots Were produced on paper While perhaps half the population of Oceana Went barefoot Thank you for that Steve Bin Linda says

opinion on freedom of speech in the UK now. Cheers. Good question. Oh yeah, absolutely. I mean, freedom of being in a terrible state. I'm sure you've all heard about the Richard Medhurst case. Now, I don't know him. I mean, we're not acquainted with each other at all.

He's got his views, which are not always identical to mine, but what's been done it's been outrageous arrested at the airport detained for 24 hours a legislation intended to deal with terrorists

supposedly used to hold him he's not able to communicate with his family he has difficulty at getting a lawyer he's held until eventually he's interviewed but it's part of a recurring pattern

in Britain we've seen this again and again we saw this with the responses to the recent disturbances. I can be very careful what I say because, you know, they're going off to people and I live in Britain. Remember that. But I mean, you know, freedom of speech in Britain is being eviscerated and it's happening in silence. Once upon a time the British cared about this. They cared about freedom of speech. There was a massive. political controversy in the 18th century about freedom of speech and defense, all sorts of

protections were provided to journalists at that time and not just journalists, everybody. And it's all going away. And it's going away. It's going with away in silence. Nobody pushing back. But if you'd been following our programs on the Duran since long before the Starma government came to office, what were we saying? Were we not warning people that this would happen? Jeff Bigford says, thank you. Thank you for that, Jeff. Ralph says Michelle Obama told Trump

that the U.S. presidency just may be a black job at the DNC convention with a strong black woman like Kamala at the helm. What changes can be expected internationally? None. I think that what we're going to see from the Kamala administration is the same that we got from the Bible. administration, which is ultimately not very different from what we got from the Obama administration, the Biden administration, the Obama administration before that, the Clinton administration.

I think there's a continuity. And to repeat a point which we made also many times on the Duran, never underestimate the material aspect of this. The money goes out of the United States. It gets filtered through all of the various agencies that we've talked about, the National Endowment of Democracy, all the other NGOs. It goes into these funds, these countries. It comes back and it ends up with the same people who authorized the fact that he sent there. So this is a loop of a sort of round table of money. which benefits an awful lot of people in the U.S.

Ralph says if the Nord Stream Gas Pipeline were to be repaired and Germany started to recover, do you think that a USA-Kamala presidency would also take umbrage at German-Russian relations recovering again? Well, yes, I think they would. But, I mean, bear in mind that the obstacles of this happening now are huge. There's one pipeline, which is said to be still intact and might concede. be brought back into operation, though pipelines that aren't used deteriorate, and we don't know what kind of a condition is in. But restoring one pipeline isn't going to change the picture immediately or perhaps at all. My own feeling, looking at these economic figures that have just been coming out of Germany now, I think we are either at or very close to the point of that.

no return. And I was saying that I was reading all these figures about, you know, PMI collapsing in Germany, industrial output collapsing in Germany. You had what Chris Masterson had to say, that 23% fall in the energy, in the energy-heavy industries. The extraordinary thing about all the German commentaries was that they were not admitting anywhere in them, what was the underlying cause? They were not talking about Ukraine, the wall, the one's dream too, any of these things. It's all as if this has all somehow happened. And now, if people are in that kind of denial, how can you turn it around? Amy, welcome to the Duran community.

Joe, welcome to the Duran community. And Joe asks, will Kamala rebuild the North Street pipeline? I think you just answered that Alexander. Sparky says, Chris, we may need to bring the church committee back to Congress before we're able to move forward with positive changes. Yes.

It's a very necessary thing. It would be an excellent idea. Will you have? Ralph. Ralph Steiner says, with a black president like Kamala Harris, surely being a bridge to soothe and conquer the deep racial divides that have,

so evidently affected the USA for century. Will the U.S. become a nation reborn? Well, exactly that argument was made about Obama, that he would actually act as a bridge, bringing together the communities, and that it was supposedly a great moment for America. It never worked out like that. And I have to say, I think that in some respect, she's an even more divisive character than he is. Yeah, Elsa says, I feel like the enemies of the U.S. support Convalist presidency. Well, I think that the enemies of the U.S.

have very complicated and mixed feelings about this, because on the one hand, they probably, you know, are aware that they're getting stronger and that the U.S. is getting weaker, and I can't imagine that at some level, that doesn't cause them a certain level of satisfaction. But at the same time, I think, they do want an orderly system in international relations because they do understand how

potentially dangerous this is and the United States is in a very big country, very powerful country and what no one who has any sense of responsibility leading any other major power wants to see is chaos in America. That really would freak out everybody around the world. Yeah, Yinka says, so when will the U.S. pocket its pride and join bricks? You know, it might happen one day. Who knows? Who knows? Yeah.

Stranger things have been happening lately. Anyway, Nigel says, great, great lads. Cheers, lads and great chat. Thank you, Nigel, for that. Sparky says, Chris George Soros used his connections as a currency trader to help the CIA set up NGOs in Eastern Europe. To foment discord during the Cold War. He helps them to this day. Think Sotos, think CIA.

Well, I think a lot of people have made this connection, and I believe there's been whole books written about this, which none of which I've read, by the way, I should say. Sparky says, build a better world with bricks. Happening fast. Azerbaijan has now applied to join. Yeah. Jamila says, good or bad, I lose faith in the United States system.

Trevor Mack, thank you for that super sticker. Polly says, Dear, Alex and Alexander, could you once invite writer Grito G. Preparata from Conjuring Hitler for an interview, thank you. Okay. That's interesting. I think I've heard of this book, actually. I think that might be an interesting program, actually.

Very interesting program. Retro says, Ment to the invasion rhetoric, however accurate, used as catnip, for Palantir et al. AI Smartwall Digital ID Trump wants. Whitney Webb reported on it. Okay. Yeah, I know this is always a topic that comes up.

I don't think so, to be honest. I think this whole, the use of the word invasion long predates, you know, Palantir, anything that they've been doing in the political sphere. So I don't think so. I think the situation on the border has almost, led to this word being used, you know, inevitably. It's used in Britain, by the way, to describe a problem with mass movement into Britain,

which, by the way, to just stress, is very, very different from the one that we see in the United States. There are similarities, but there are also huge differences as well. Sir Muggeyme says, Julian's prison cell is vacant, and the greater good Gestapo, abhor a vacuum. That's a good quote. It's a very good point. It's a good bus game.

Jay Tolbert says, greetings and much respect to you, fellows from the DNC healthcape known as Chicago. Thank you, Jay, for that. Retro says, thoughts on new MPox worrying spread, C192.0, question mark. Sorry, I didn't quite think.

The MPX worrying spread, C192.0. question mark. Is it a new coof? Oh, okay. Yeah. Same as the oak. I don't think so. I don't think so. I don't know. Yeah, I haven't been following it much, but I don't think

it is. Who knows? Who knows? Maybe it is. Who knows what they have planned? Elza says, Alexander has the Commonwealth of future, and does it matter? Some countries are also part of bricks or would like to join. Do you know, I think it does matter. Once upon a time,

not so long ago. one was very conscious of the Commonwealth. Back in the 80s, for example, it was still playing a big role in British life, as I remember, when the Prime Minister of the day, who was, of course, Margaret Thatcher, used to attend Commonwealth conferences. It was big news.

You have all the leaders of the Commonwealth turning up. And the Queen used to go, now I have to say, I haven't heard anything about the Commonwealth for a very, very long time. I think it's a shadow of what it was, and I don't think it has any real role. The BRICS is a much, much more important institution,

both including for the countries that are members of the Commonwealth and a part of it. All right. On that note, we will call it a day, call it a live stream. Thank you to everyone that joined us. Yeah, go ahead. Yeah, a brilliant program, by the way, yeah. Yeah, fantastic program.

Thank you to Chris for joining us. Thank you to everyone that watched the live stream on Rockfin, Odyssey, Rumble, the durand.orgas.com, and on YouTube, thank you to all our amazing moderators. Zareel was in the house, Tisham was with us. Who else was moderating?

I think that's, was that it? Peter was with us as well, moderating. So thank you to all our moderators. And what else, Alexander? I think that's it. I will have all of Chris's information. in the description box down below as well as pinned comment. Take care, everybody.