The Great Simplification with Nate Hagens - Michael Every: "The Many -Isms of the Metacrisis"

Episode Date: April 10, 2024

On this episode, Nate is joined by financial analyst Michael Every to discuss global macro trends in economics, politics, and social movements. By taking a wide-view lens of current events, we can better see how seemingly isolated events interconnect and what mainstream economic theories tend to miss. What do rising political tensions and dissatisfaction around the globe amidst increasing GDP tell us about the accuracy of our economic measures? How much are geopolitical conflicts and supply chain disruptions contributing to current inflationary pressures? And what can we learn from current economic models as we steer towards a new system with lower energy throughput in a multipolar world?  About Michael Every: Michael Every is Global Strategist at Rabobank Singapore analyzing major developments and key thematic trends, especially on the intersection of geopolitics, economics, and markets. He is frequently published and quoted in financial media, is a regular conference keynote speaker, and was invited to present to the 2022 G-20 on the current global crisis. Michael has lived and worked in 9 countries and been in the industry for nearly 25 years, with previous roles at Silk Road Associates, the Royal Bank of Canada, and Dun & Bradstreet. He holds a BA from Lancaster University, and a master's degree from University College London. Watch on YouTube: https://youtu.be/F_DhZaVoflA  More info, and show notes: https://www.thegreatsimplification.com/episode/118-michael-every 

You're listening to The Great Simplification. I'm Nate Hagan's. On this show, we describe how energy, the economy, the environment, and human behavior all fit together and what it might mean for our future. By sharing insights from global thinkers, we hope to inform and inspire more humans to play emergent roles in the coming great simplification. Today, I'm pleased to welcome Michael Evry to the podcast. Michael is a global strategist at Dutch investment bank, Rabel Bank. Today we discuss monetary policy at the national and international level, MMT, ESG, and geopolitics, which Michael feels is too vague of a word for most contexts.

As you know, I came from a background in finance, and I've invited numerous financially savvy people on the show who have energy background as well. Michael not only has that, but he also is aware of and cares about climate change and the greater social good, which in my experience is not too common with people at investment banks. This was a fascinating conversation. It was 9 p.m. time. I could hardly keep up with him even if it was noon my time. So please take advantage of the transcript and the show notes that are available at the great simplification.com. Please welcome Michael Evry.

Michael, great to see you. Great to be here. Thank you for having me. So this is kind of an evolution of my podcast because I used to work on Wall Street. And then I got my PhD in ecological economics and net energy. And I've noticed that a lot of financial people don't understand energy. So I've had a lot of guests on Kirosakalov, Lynn Alden, Luke Graman, who do understand energy and money. You also do, but additionally, you understand and care about climate change, you know, planetary limits, ecology, inequality, and some of the broader things affecting the non-financial space, which, if I'm blunt, is quite unique in people with your position.

So let's just start here from your perspective within the financial and geopolitical analyst field. How would you define and describe what some people refer to as the meta crisis? The meta crisis. That was actually my own cheeky terminology. Wait a minute. You coined that term? Well, I'm claiming it. It could well be that someone else used it.

before me because nothing is ever an original thought. Certainly Adam Too's, you know, who's vastly more intelligent and better known than myself, he came up with the poly crisis. I believe that was, I think last year, maybe the year before, which, you know, really caught on in the financial media. But in January 2022, before Russia invaded Ukraine, I was already using the term and I said, if this happens, as I fear it will, it will be a meta-crisis, which will basically challenge our precepts of how just about everything that we took for granted are done. So if someone can find someone else who said it first, I will happily, happily give them full credit for it. But as far as I'm aware, I was the first using it in financial media

and then it was superseded by Polycrisis, which is probably a better title, actually. I think it was well before 2022 because what I refer to as the metacrisis includes climate change, AI, you know, biological warfare, CRISPR risks, ecological drawdown, all those other things. But it is a cluster that we face. And what I like about your work, in addition to being really clear and witty and concise, is you do include things beyond the normal financial space, which I think might be difficult, given that you work for a major international bank.

But have you always been interested in a systems perspective? I have without necessarily realizing that's what it was. I have no kind of intelligence in my hands. I'm not an engineer in any way, shape, or form. You can ask my long-suffering wife, you know, how badly I even chopped vegetables, etc. But mentally, I've always been extremely interested in how things work from a Rube Goldberg slash, you know, Heath Robinson perspective, but what's the system you see round you? And the analytical method that I use necessarily over time, and it has taken a long time, like, you know, many, many years or decades to actually come to full fruition,

is itself necessarily multidisciplinary. So it's nowadays it's cross-asset, cross-geography and cross-disciplinary. And I like to try and join dots where I can, and sometimes in relatively unusual manners, and then project those dots forward to test within this particular system that you have, or hypothesizing, where does it break down? So is it linear or non-linear and in which of the moving parts and where the pressures and dynamics come from? Is it unidirectional or multidirectional or bidirectional?

So that's how I address things. And obviously I'm still work within the field of macroeconomics. That's where it's based and financial markets. But financial markets are supposed to be, and I stress supposed to be, based on the macroeconomy. And the macroeconomy is based on politics, and politics is based on geopolitics, and geopolitics to a large degree are based on the Maslowv Pyramid, which at one level or another comes back down to energy and food, etc., on climate. So it's not that difficult, actually, when you explain it in simple terms like that to put it together,

but mapping out how things really do work is complex, and it does involve a lot of moving parts and looking at lots of different things at once. And sometimes people say to me, why are you looking at that? And I said, you know, you'll see in a year or two. And then pretty often we do. Did you know there's a psychology expert named Scott Barry Kaufman who became very interested in Abraham Maslow and found that he had some unwritten papers before he died, that he retracted the top level of the pyramid of his Maslow's hierarchy from South. actualization, which was in his books and materials, to purpose for the greater good.

There was something beyond the self-actualization, which I think kind of maps and rhymes with our conversation today and how we've spoken in the past. Well, I mean, I agree. It's not something I thought we'd be getting into, A, maybe at all, and B so early. but there is a concept in Judeo Christian culture Tikun Olam to heal the world

and I have to say on a personal level I find that very motivating how you go about doing that is a different question I think a lot of people today find motivation in that

and a lot of them do it in a very how can I put it monomaniacal fashion like zooming in just on one component of it. And I think sometimes you miss the forest for the trees in doing that and that you have to recognize there are lots of different kinds of tree in that particular forest and you need a whole interaction of lots of different things to keep that ecosystem literally and metaphorically healthy. But yeah, I think looking for that self-actualization of that purpose is something

that I think a lot of people are looking for in life. I think part of the problem maybe we have around us in society is that GDP as a concept is pretty, pretty empty. I think, you know, I'm not the first to say that. There are many people, again, infinitely better qualified than me to talk on that. But what is GDP for? Not just how do you measure it? What do we even think it is? And the current measure, as you know, that we have was actually developed during World War II by the US military to actually map out what production was doing for defense purposes. And ironically, I think we may need to shift back for similar reasons to look at GDP very differently again today and on the supply side rather than the demand side for the similar national security reasons. But it would be nice if we could embrace

something that had a more, how can I put it, spiritual component at the same time or something that was more rewarding in a broader sense. And I think that's very far away in Western economies, but in eastern economies maybe not as far away as we think. I live in the East. I've been married to someone from the East for over 25 years. And, you know, I've covered Eastern economies extensively, and it's not true in the slightest. Really?

Well, I was thinking of Bhutan and the like. Okay, if we're going to choose Bhutan as the model, it's true in Bhutan, but that's kind of like choosing the duck build platypus as a representative of mammals. It's not how most mammals operate. It's still raw physical progress and GDP, GDP and most of Asia. Yeah, yeah. So you mentioned macroeconomy.

I understand you've studied a lot of heterodox economic theories, including my friend Steve Keen, who's been on this show, how have these works influenced your view on how modern conventional economics works and your overall work and worldview in general? I had the highest regard for Steve King's work. I think what he's doing is essential. Not only is he helping to explain Minsky's work

to the, you know, the current generation, using computers, he's actually now able to set up systems dynamic software to help show graphically and almost in real time how those conceptual processes, which, you know, Minsky built based on, you could say an element of Keynes,

but certainly on lots of Kalletsky, you know, and even on Marx before that, looking at the structural problems that we have within our current, neoliberal, neoclassical economic model and how it will always go wrong. The question is how wrong it goes and in what direction. Now there are downsides to his approach. I don't want to say that he's got all the answers because nobody does. That's part of the problem. But I hold him in very, very high regard. And his book, debunking economics is up there on my shelf. And I thoroughly recommend it

to anyone who's had a neoclassical economic background to read, but I don't think they'll enjoy it very much because it really does absolutely eviscerate a great deal of what they hold to be, quote, unquote, true. And it could actually have gone further. I mean, you can go back all the way to Ricardo and Smith and go through their works, and you can completely see that they made very clear

that how we conceive of what they argue today is not true. I mean, let me give you just one very quick example, which I use regularly at work. So comparative advantage and free trade, there is very little that most economists will say is more important in current economic theory than free trade being a good thing

and comparative advantage. So, you know, specialize in what you're relatively best at compared to everyone else. You know, these are the fundamental tenets of how the economy should work from a global perspective. Well, if you actually read what Ricardo wrote rather than not even knowing who he is nowadays, you know, the guy who came up with this, he openly said that when you're looking at the concept of trading cloth for port between, you know, England and Portugal, it won't work

if you have mobile international capital. If you have mobile international capital, one country will say, well, I'll just do both. Now, I know that contradicts the concept of comparative advantage, but that's exactly. what we have seen to a large degree. And of course it overlooks the fact that he also understood that you'd have transition costs in terms of shifting away from one particular industry to another. And one of them might have positive externalities in terms of technology spillovers or much better wages than the other one did.

So you specialize in something that's frankly, excuse my French, crap versus something that's really good. Like nobody ever wants to specialize in being the guy who cleans the toilets. everybody wants to be the high-paid coda who works for Apple or whoever. So his original works made clear that it doesn't work under the circumstances in which we currently allow it to operate, which is globally mobile capital. And that leads into another similar thinker, Michael Pettis, who's building on the work of Godley, which is related to Kean's work and related to Minsky

again, looking at global balance sheets and how they intersect, who's also been, you know, extremely fundamental in a lot of my approaches, who points out that the current system that we have, as constituted, early morning fumble here, as constituted, simply won't work in the long run. It will continue to break down in various different ways. And how that breakdown plays out is part of the meta-crisis that I was originally in this conversation. floating, that it's a broader intellectual collapse, which is then mirrored in a real world. So do you have, I didn't look this up, so I don't know the answer. Do you have degrees in economics from before you were doing your job? I've got a master's degree in economics. It was a

branch of economics. But I wasn't dyed in the wool, you know, hardcore, economics from school upwards. I was always more interested in political economy and how economics intersected with that. And I think that actually saved me because whilst I love economics and I know my economic theory better than most economists, I do find that the highly mathematical, overly theoretical, if we assume X, Y, Z, School of Economics, which currently predominates, which is like a neoliberal neoclassical school, is pretty useless, to be honest. It continually fails to understand what's going on. And the course, Keen makes that clear. And how, and I've asked Steve this too, and I've had Josh Farley and Kate Rayworth and others on, how will that change? Because

neoclassical economics and the models and assumptions are so prevalent and embedded in the financial architecture and most of the high profile leaders in the world are immediately flanked by a PhD economist. So it's like a fortress. Do you have any insight on how reality may be re-infused into the economics discipline? What do you think? Well, the old joke is progress comes one funeral at a time and that could still be the case. I mean, you know, I've been party to many conversations where you say, look, here's this software that Keynes produced called, you know, Minsky. Yeah. Yeah.

And look, it's great software. And it can show you that this will break down, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, under the following circumstances. I mean, all it really does, brilliant as it is, is just map out something that Kaleski wrote in 1943, just in verbal form, effectively. Just saying, if you don't allow capital to circulate, if it gets, a global, you know, are agglominated and accumulated effectively like a dragon sitting on gold and it doesn't flow through in wages or productive investment, you can borrow to a certain degree to try and keep everything going,

but eventually you can't borrow anymore. Everything collapses. You can cut interest rates to try and keep everything going. Everything collapses again after a while. And you end up with negative interest rates and then you're in this crazy world that we're in pre-COVID. So I think we all recognize that now. But you show it to people and I'll say, does it tell me what's going to happen next quarter? The answer is no. That's not what it's trying to do. Does it tell me what it'll happen in two or three quarters? No, that's not what it's trying to do. It's trying to tell you that if you assume certain key coefficients with the economy sit here or here, you either have a sustainable economy for the next generation or you have one that will break down disastrously in manner A, B or C,

within X number of years. And they'll say, well, that doesn't tell me what's going to happen next quarter and therefore I don't know how to speculate on the stock market, you know, with this number relative to what expectations were going to be, and therefore what uses it to me? So yeah, there's a lot of imbuilt bias because people do need to have this short-term predictive function based on the ability to play mark, quote-unquote, play markets, rather than actually saying, do we have a society and a socioeconomic model here, which will be, quote-unquote, sustainable. So the two completely different things. And I do think you can use both. And I actually

argue you can't get rid of the neoclassical what's next quarter going to be completely. Because every business needs to have some concept, even if you're not just playing the market, of is it going to be a good quarter next, you know, next quarter or a bad quarter? And of course it can become a self-fulfilling prophecy where everyone thinks it's bad, therefore they're bad. Everyone thinks is good, therefore they become too good, right? That's a separate issue. But people need a little bit of transparency on that to try and think ahead, even if it's just a finger in the air. So you're going to have to keep that. But why can't we run that alongside something saying, but at the same time, look, if Labor doesn't do better relative to capital and soon, we've got trouble, big, big trouble.

We can't push interest rates negative because, you know, we know that's going to destabilize X, Y, or Z. So therefore we need to be looking at this instead. But we don't have those conversations. So I'm going to ask you one more qualitative question about economics, economics theory, and then we'll move on to your current worldview on what the heck's going on. Does how one think about economics and economic theory have exclusively to do with facts, or does it involve values? It's a great question.

I think I asked that because earlier this week you had something question. on your daily writing about the ethics and the values that are missing from these discussions. Absolutely. I mean, that was something that I just lifted from a mere cul-per written by the Emeritus Professor of Economics and International Affairs, Angus Dieton, who works at Princeton, in which on the IMF blog, he basically said, you know, I've been wrong for the last 50 years. and here are all the fundamental things that I now think I need to see very, very differently.

Pretty brave to say for a professor of high status. Very brave. I mean, I was a bit pithy in my comments in the daily because that's my style, but I applaud him for doing it, better late than never, and we're well done, I hope others can follow that lead. But I think the key point that he was making is that when we look again, I've mentioned Smith already,

who was a moral philosopher, not an economist. He didn't call himself an economist. When you look at Ricardo, who was much more of an economist, but was still a classical economist, and that particular period was filled with great thinkers who were trying to think about, not just to how things work, but how should they work for a society that's fair?

We've completely abandoned that. We've moved over to an overly mathematical, wonkish, wrong fundamentally flawed technocracy, which doesn't actually try and address, what would we like a good society to look like? Because the fundamental principle is selfishness works well. More utility for the whole world means the whole world is better off, even though it's not shared equally. Yeah, and GDP is the metric, which means everything. And I mean, there are many different ways you can slice and dice that. We've already mentioned Bhutan and gross domestic happiness and other measures. They're a little bit, you know, a little bit abstract. But the more concrete way

I like to look at it is what's GDP for? I mean, okay, let me, let me pivot for a second to something that's more of a thesis of mine, because I think that's where we're going to go in a moment. So if you've got two countries trading together using comparative advantage and free trade, which, you know, ticks every box in terms of the current framework, and you say, okay, my GDP is doing well, your GDP is doing well because of this, because of how we're specialising. and trading together. That's wonderful. Until you ask yourself, what's your neighbour doing with their GDP? Now, are they building public housing and hospitals and schools and developing a thriving arts and culture scene and pushing the boundaries of literature and or are they creating technological

wonders to share with the world? Or are they building tanks and planes and aircraft carriers? and guns and bombs and starting to, you know, put them near your border. I'm putting it in the most stark possible terms. But those are very much the terms that we're starting to see around us today in different geographies. And what's the point of GDP if that is what GDP is producing?

Right. And what's the point of free trade, if that's what free trade is helping to generate through the efficiencies? And this fundamental concept, I'm not pointing fingers at anyone right now, and we can have a broader discussion maybe, is where I differ from Steve Keene. I think. I think maybe our own personal politics may differ to a degree. That doesn't matter so much.

But conceptually, the point I'm making here is this. You can use that Minsky model, which I have a lot of time for, a lot of time for. a lot of time for it in terms of mapping the flaws in the economy. And you can take that and say, we live in a Marxian economy, not Marxist, because I'm not a Marxist, but Marxian in terms of saying Labour is doing badly compared to capital, which has been the case for decades. That will have deleterious effects socially, socioeconomically, sociopolitically, and then eventually on financial markets too. That's going to happen. Let me just finish this point, if I may very quickly. That's actually, I think, already old hat, because I think that's a given, absolutely,

but we're moving beyond that. The metacrisis for me is not that, because you can address that to a certain degree. The problem is we've now moved from a Marxian phase to a Leninist one. And in a Leninist phase, political violence emerges to try and deal with this. Radical political sources internally within an economy and internationally between economies where you say, okay, we have to reset this one way or another. Now, I'm not talking about a hammer and sickle and a workers revolt. We're not seeing that anywhere because organized labor doesn't have the power that it used to. What we are seeing instead is that we've got massive polarization in most economies,

which is extremely dangerous in the long run, massive wealth inequality, which is extremely dangerous, how we're addressing that cannot happen within the neoliberal neoclassical framework because it only produces that centrifugal force. So it's like a Chinese finger trap. We're moving closer and closer and we can't get out because of the structure is moving us towards more wealth inequality, not less. Well, indeed. So therefore, what you're seeing in economy after economy is recognition of this.

This is now openly seen by the people who are. producing it, they're thinking, how can we narrow that gap domestically? How do we narrow that? Okay, that's one set of radical policies which involve throwing out nearly every precept that you have from neoclassical, neoliberal economics. Market forces will not do that. ESG will not do that alone. But as you try and do this internally, there are various different ways you can do that. That effect, from a balance sheet perspective, and here's where we move from Keen to Pettis, means that you will get a really disruptive effect between different economies internationally.

So economies who have been big exporters can't be anymore. Economies that have been big importers, which is the mirror image because of the inequality you have, can't be. So as you narrow the gap like this within an economy, you have to change the gaps between the economies in parallel internationally. So you're shaking up how you do things domestically

and you will necessarily shake up how you do things internationally. And for those who are moving from a losing quote-on-quote position, which is an emotional term, but that's how they see it, to a more equitable position, they will be disrupting and dragging down countries who see themselves in a quote-unquote winning position, which is, again, a crude way of looking at it because running a big trade surplus isn't the best thing in the world, but some countries do.

But they will be dragged from that to running a lower trade surplus. And that is where you start getting geopolitical tensions coming in because you are literally taking other people's lunch and saying, I'm having that for lunch now. Now, you can argue they had your lunch originally. That's fine. It doesn't stop the geopolitical tension. And this is the Leninist phase that I'm talking about. This is the we start invading each other phase, as we're seeing in some areas.

This is the isom phase where you start saying, okay, so I have to have an ideology now. I can't just say economics sorts everything out because it doesn't. Economics is no longer guiding me here. What can I do? What can't I do? What ism? Is it liberalism? Is it libertarianism?

Is it socialism? Is it communism? Is it communism? Is it imperialism? Is it fascism? You forgot capitalism? Well, capitalism there, but what version of it? Is it, you know, a regulated capitalism, or is it a wildly unregulated libertarianism? And if you look around you, from Argentina to Zimbabwe, literally the A to Z, and within every G7 economy, particularly within the U.S., you've got multiple variants.

Everything that I've just named there is being discussed. openly by name or tacitly because people don't recognize that's actually what they're selling, but that's what they are selling or trying to embrace. And as we struggle for what ism works for a global system which doesn't work as a global system, and therefore, you know, we need to do this domestically, which will change that internationally, which will create violence or stresses at least, whatism works for us. That's my metacrisis. I don't know the answer to that.

I don't know that our current political system and governance can handle the financial and geopolitical and class differences that are on the horizon. I think about it all the time. I don't know where we're headed there. Well, you know, I've got my own ideas, but frankly, who am I? You know, it's not up to me to say what I think the world should be. It's up to me to try and think how I think it will play out. The first thing to recognize within this framework, which I've had for years building up, but, you know, very much I think we see playing around us now,

is it increases volatility. That's one. The second one is from a purely market perspective, because I want to dive in occasionally to markets and economics and then pull out and go broader. But from a market perspective, one of the things I did expect to see was higher inflation as a result, because of that volatility, because you effectively have supply chain wars, where people say, I want to own more of the value chain. If I own more of the value chain, I have the better paying jobs, and I start narrowing the gap. The bottom comes up. Maybe the top doesn't come down, but the bottom comes up. That's zero sum. Again, neoclassical, neoliberal economics says you scatter the value chain around the world. Everyone has their own component. and obbit. It's very efficient, which it is. Corporate profits go up, which they do. We all link into a global system, which we have, and it's a positive sum game. It is, except when everyone

says, I want the nice part of the value chain. Nobody wants to be the toilet cleaner in perpetuity. Everybody wants to be the executive with a nice corner office. We're now in the stage where the toilet cleaners are saying, I'm not cleaning those toilets anymore. I want at least one day a week in the office, you get in here and clean this toilet, which is completely valid. I mean, that's what's going on. So as that's playing out, you're going to get higher inflation. As you try and bring supply chains home and you subsidise them and other people say, well, if you're going to do that, you're not going to have my minerals. You're not going to have my X or Y, Y, or my Z. It's an economic war. I'm going to make it very painful for you. So different aspects

of that are playing out from the hooties to, you know, various measures that may be too detailed to go into here, but supply chains are being disrupted. And that creates inflationary pressures and inflationary expectations, even if the extraction cost and the biophysical, um, inflationary pressures are subdued. This is a geopolitical forcer of inflation. Well, it is. I mean, there are various aspects of it. You've got, on one level, a demand boost in some countries. Now, we had that very much during COVID. Here's free money.

And maybe we can discuss that again in a second. But here's a big fiscal stimulus. And suddenly we had the demand, which we hadn't had for years, and the inflation we hadn't had for years. Now we're pivoting to do that more and more in the national security side. Because countries are waking up and realizing, well, A, if I get an army, maybe I can have a better slice of the value chain. So there's an incentive to doing that.

and B, at the same time, they're looking around them and they're saying, well, look, if I don't do that, maybe I'm going to lose part of my share of the value chain and I'm worse off. Or in an even worse way, you can suddenly see them saying, national security itself is at risk. You know, we don't know where we sit within the global system if we don't now have that defense. But when you're talking about doing that, you're looking at countries that have been spending in practical terms, maybe 1% of GDP on defence, maybe one and a half,

of which maybe only a third, so half a percent of GDP, has actually been physically on defence. The rest is on pensions or, you know, paperwork within the Ministry of Defence. They're now waking up and saying, maybe we need to spend three and a half percent of GDP on defence, in real terms.

That's a massive fiscal boost. And that's going to be from country after country off the country, all doing it at the same time. So you have that happening. It's a massive fiscal boost until the bombs are used. Let's not go there for a second. Okay, let's park that for a second. Because once you start going that route, and we are going that route in places, that's a whole different board game. But just purely from a market perspective and an inflation perspective, that's a lot of money. More bombs and more missiles and more planes is good for GDP and inflationary. good for GDP, but yeah, that's clearly the case.

But let's look at this top and bottom element that I'm mentioning again. If you look at how unhappy most Western economies are now, and they're pretty unhappy and how polarized, and you look at the high level of government debt that we have, and you look at the fiscal deficits that we have, and then you turn around to that population, polarized as it is, and you say, well, we need to spend, shed loads of money on new aircraft carriers and submarines and F-35s or whatever. And by the way, this is an American example. You've got other code names in different countries.

But we're not going to bring in any affordable housing or infrastructure or health care or education or green energy. That's on the back burner now. That ain't going to happen. No one's going to vote for that where they get a say. And so my other thesis is, look, if you're going to spend 3.5% of GDP on defense, you're going to have to have alongside that the same kind of fiscal program that you had post-World War II in the West, where we had like Homes for Heroes or the GI Education Bill or whatever.

So you're then talking about spending maybe 6% of GDP or 6.5% of GDP to try and keep society happy and your military growing. Now, we're really, really getting into COVID-level fiscal deficits here to put things in perspective. And you're talking about that, not for one or two years, you're talking about that for a generation. Which means in the US case, the $34 trillion in debt goes to $60 or $80 or something unimaginable. Well, okay, so here, we're throwing all the ingredients into the pot here now.

Let's go back to Steve Keane. What's he a big advocate of above and beyond, you know, the brilliant work he's done creating Minsky? He's a big advocate of MMT, which, you know, modern monetary theory. Now, I agree with him completely, because, you know, I've read the original text that he knows far better than me, in terms of how MMT can work from a balance sheet perspective. if you deny that, you're denying what we actually see in front of us and have just seen. Now here's the catch, though. Here's the catch.

Where I differ from that school is when you read MMT thinkers, and I do regularly, most of them are either extremely left-wing and anti-imperialist, shall we say, which is fine. I mean, I grew up in that particular milieu myself, shall we say. and that gives you one particular worldview or they're very apolitical just completely like Stephanie Kelton for example I'm not quite sure what her politics are

she advises Bernie Sanders yeah okay so pretty left wing okay so fair enough and again I'm not trying to take any kind of side here but let's say you're going to do the MMT thing and you're going to say right we need to put money into X or Y or Z

this is where it starts coming back to the Maslow pyramid and to energy and to society and to geopolitics too if you just throw that money in on the demand side which is how they normally talk about it let's do what we did during COVID let's give people money if you don't make anything and you give people that money

you run a very large current account deficit and in most countries cases your currency starts to collapse after a lag because why are we giving you all this stuff from other countries for free? And in the US case, I think the dollar can hold up because the US is the US, but you get inflation. So it's inflationary directly or indirectly if you don't have a supply side to match the demand side. And that's the one thing that's missing from the Minsky model, which is brilliant at mapping out what's going on on the demand side. it says nothing about the supply side.

Where's your energy coming from? What's your source of energy? Is it cheap or expensive? Is it domestic or is it foreign? What factories do you actually have? What do you produce along the value chain? Do you make the weapons that you're going to be suddenly spending three and a half percent of GDP on?

Or do they come from America, at which point where are you getting the money and the dollars from to buy them from America? That is the international dimension that I add to this, which is another impetus to onshore production. And that's where everyone has to try and do their own MMT behind their own barrier. And then that's completely de-globalization.

But everyone cannot do their own MMT. First of all, there's a lot of countries that are pegged their currency to the dollar. So if we do MMT, we get the economic benefits, the stimulus, both of the debt and the interest. but other countries have higher interest rates and they didn't get the stimulus applied to their countries, right? Well, if you're pegged to the dollar,

you're in a very special category. I mean, you'd have to basically get pretty much tacit permission from the US if you're going to run MMT when you don't have, you're pegged to the dollar, but you know, you don't have your own dollars. But if you're just the majority of global countries which have their own fiat currency. Sure, you can do it. You can, absolutely,

but you'd better be running a large trade surplus because I don't want to bore people with the technicality here, but link back to all the other arguments I've been making. If you're throwing in extra demand, you have to make sure you have excess supply. That's the nutshell of it. Here, I can print my own...

What? Well, inflation or currency, down, down, down, down. So if you're running a trade surplus, that means you have excess supply. If you look at the intersecting balance sheets, I'm running a trade surplus, I'm producing more than I consume. And I can gobble up some of that extra production with MMT. So 5% trade surplus, I can print 3% of GDP and give it to people to buy the excess product which is sitting on a shelf.

That's how you link up your MMT, your Minsky, with narrowing these gaps. and with printing money and the supply side. But most countries are not running big trade surpluses. And even if they are, there may be only one product like oil rather than everything. And you have to work out, okay, am I going to be able to get everything else I want if I print money for this? And that's where the whole global system starts to fragment when you do it. I agree with you. I think it's a bigger issue right now.

MMT is making a huge comeback and it seems to be critical of the fact that there are limits to debt and that debt is ever a problem. My view is that all that debt is created, all the financial instruments created in the world are a claim on energy and materials. And so when we're printing this money, they're creating this money, sure, it's by a sovereign that can print as much as they want. But all of that is a claim on energy, materials, and ecosystem services, which I think is also outside of the MMT story. It is. And yet at the same time, let's go back to a great quote from Keynes. We can afford anything we can do. And as I said, if we're just going to spend this MMT into the demand side, like here's a stimulus check, which is what we had during COVID.

Of course, supply chains are going to break down. Geopolitics starts to break down as well because countries are saying, well, you're printing money to get real stuff from me. After a while, that does break down, then it's happening more quickly than people think. But if you say people will accept my currency because I'm the US in particular,

or I'm country A or B with a big economy, and at least domestically, because I have the power to tax in it, and I control the courts and the police and the tax authorities, I can make people stick to this currency. You have a window of opportunity where you can abuse that power in certain circumstances. If you put it into demand, it's not going to end prettily.

If you put it into supply to actually get things done, like, okay, let's throw a couple of billion or tens of billions of dollars into research on green energy or, you know, any cutting-edge technology that we think can push the productivity frontier, that can help, you know, reduce the intensity in which we have to use a finite resource within the physical production process. Let's do that with it. Yeah, that just stretches your entire production function. Do we have any guess in the US or elsewhere? What percentage of MMT or

deficit spending is going to the supply side and investments in that way and how much is going to consumption? Well, let's look at it from a fiscal perspective. Because right now we're not doing MMT. You know, we're not. The Fed is no longer really monetizing the fiscal deficit. If anything, the Fed is doing QT so that they're selling bonds rather than buying them right now. So it would be disingenuous to say that that is what's happening. If you look at the fiscal side of it.

It was happening in COVID and into 21 though for a while. It did. And that was all into demand. All into demand. And it wasn't just in the U.S. You saw it in Europe too. Like, for example, like Italian government bonds on net were bought completely by the ECB. All issuance on net in some countries for a while was bought by the ECB.

That's MMT. Unless you intend to sell them back to the market, and we know pretty much they don't, right? Let's be realistic. So we did that temporarily in COVID for demand. In terms of supply, sorry, in terms of the supply side, yeah, right now it's about linking out with fiscal policy. So in the US case, for example, of course, you've got the Chips Act, which isn't really achieving very much. You've got the IRA, which is achieving, you know, stuff to a certain extent.

Whether it's efficient or not is a different question, whether it's well allocated or not is a different question. And then you have to look at, okay, so how much of the deficit is being run up because of that, and then what is the Fed doing with it? So in other words, there are supply-side fiscal measures which you can argue about whether they're good or bad, and I'm not getting into the politics of each individual one. There are very valid arguments that some of the parts are good and bad for all of them. But then you have to link that up with the central banks. And that's when it comes back to the philosophy of are the central banks willing to admit they need to do this? And let's go back then. And apologies, I'm kind of going in many different directions,

but there is a central thesis to this. I'm not quite sure if it's coming through. That the politics of the ism of what am I allowed to do have to tell you, are you allowed to do it before you do it? Like if you're a bureaucrat, you can't just be radical. You have to know this is what's acceptable. So a few years ago there was no ESG, then there has been ESG, maybe now we're backing off of that because actually it doesn't really do everything that it promised and it does things that we didn't think it would do. But look at Europe, just for a moment, okay? So Europe, again, is talking about re-arming aggressively in the face of the threat from Russia, at least, if not others. And it can't quite work out politically how to do it.

How does militarism work in a pacifist free-trading bloc? Well, they're now looking at, okay, maybe we need to use things like the European Investment Bank, which are kind of existing infrastructure, and say, well, if they issue lots more debt, which can be spent on defence factories, like production plants, which can make the planes, etc., because they can't even do that at the moment, the ECB, their central bank, could buy the bonds of the EIB, which produce the goods, which then the government can use another mechanism to then purchase. You're moving in that direction.

It's not as simplistic as this like, you know, ka-kching, kaching, kaching, kaching, kaching, kaching, kaching. It doesn't operate like that. But you're moving in that direction. But it's the military impetus or the I'm worried about whether I'm going to be invaded tomorrow that is the ism that then opens the door for the bureaucrats that then turn around and say, well, if we can do it for that, we can do it for this because this is also important.

Well, a common currency works for investments and bonds, but does it work when each of those individual countries have their own military and have a different response to, for instance, the Ukrainian situation? It makes it more thorny. Well, that's a bigger question. I mean, in Europe's case, they're trying to determine where does the national level come in and the supranational level come in. And that's Europe in a nutshell. I think they are now a poly crisis or a meta crisis moment more than for anyone else. You know, what's Europe for? Can it step up to this challenge? And I can tell you that the wheels are turning. I mean, they're not turning fast enough, as is always the case in Europe. I don't think the wheels are big enough.

But there are definitely cogs worrying saying Europe needs to adapt and change. The financial architecture will have to change, brings us back to Minsky and Bannon sheets and from Marx and to Lenin to all of it together in order to allow us to take a step forward or else we crumble one way or another internally or from external pressure. And so change, I think, will happen. So getting back to the debt question, what's the intermediate and end game of European countries and countries like Japan that are solving some of our, domestic problems with more bonds, more deficit spending, more debt. And you said that in the near term,

that's okay, but there's a lag and it eventually becomes a problem for the currency. Is that on the horizon that we have currency debasement or even currency reform as we have more and more financial claims on a static or even declining biophysical reality in coming decades? Well, let's take the biophysical part and just put it on the side just for a second. Even from a traditional neoclassical and neoliberal framework, everyone recognizes that debt is worryingly high, deficits are worryingly big, and in the longer run, you only have a few ways out, which is you can grow your way out, and we show no sign of doing that at the moment. although I do think part of the shift to a different economic model of like higher interest rates and higher investment and a more militaristic GDP or whatever could potentially be part of that. I mean in Russia's case, for example, their economy is currently booming on the back of a war economy

crazily enough, but it is. But if you can't grow your way out, you're either going to default or you're going to inflate your way out. So this is nothing mysterious. Even traditional theory understands that. You know, Austrian theory, which I have a lot of time for up to a certain point, obviously thinks that everything's going to collapse and default. And you know what? That could happen in some countries.

I don't think it happens in any of the big ones. Because when you get that default, it's never clean and easy. You're wiping out your rich when you're doing that. So everyone who think that's going to happen, you have to think that the rich in that country have absolutely no power at all. The rich tend to have quite a lot of power most of the time. So I don't see that happening. So inflation obviously is a risk. But I think before we get there, one of the reasons why I have the thesis I do is that I think we will end up with an attempt to try and reflate the economy

with some inflation and at the same time some growth, at least high nominal growth, by, as I said, seizing value chains that you haven't had in the past and using fiscal stimulus usefully rather than uselessly to try and pump up sectors that they think will generate growth. Now, ideally, yeah, that wants to be something that improves your supply side. And ideally, you want that to be sustainable in all manner of the word, or all meanings of the word. But I do suspect that the near-term thrust is going to be more militaristic

alongside that. And that is contradictory to a degree, because military stuff is not very green, it's khaki. So let me ask a question on that. The making of bombs and planes and such instead of gardens and new local transportation doesn't help the poor. higher interest rates hurt the poor as well. AI is going to hurt the lower income portions of society.

Does the wealth inequality at some point become a rubber band that stretches so far that it breaks and that there's a countervailing force, be it a revolution or something else? Is that something that could unfold in countries like China or the United States, if not elsewhere? It's a great question. I mean, if you read obviously not just Marx and Lenin, which people should, by the way, to dismiss it, but read them. But Piccote or Peter Turchin, I've got a lot of time for, I have done for a long time, they would say, say, yeah, absolutely. And I think you can certainly see around us the consternation from the mainstream press and financial press that, wow, the far right are getting like 30 to 35 percent

of the vote in the G7 economies. It's like, yeah, they are. And the far left are getting like 10, 15, like yeah, they are. So you're getting out to half the population prepared to roll the dice. And that's with an economic rebound. So, you know, project forward X number of years. And you start to worry. But let me pivot back to what you just said, because I want to pick one hole in it, if I may, or poke one hole in it. And then that opens up part of a different thesis that I've had for a while. It's not a forecast. I want to stress that, but it's a thesis. And that's this. When you said, first of all, AI will hurt the poor. I don't think it will. I don't think the poor will notice at all. I think it will hurt the middle class who have useless jobs right now.

Like if your job is basically doing something very functionary and easily replicable, yeah, you're in trouble. You're not poor. You've got a middle class job now. So you're going to lose it. And when the middle class go, things really, really get bad fast. You can screw the poor for generations and they just get drunk and angry and sing songs. But when you start screwing the middle class, you get serious instability.

That's one thing to note. But you noticed about AI, you said higher interest rates at the, poor. Again, no, the poor don't really, they're borrowing at 28% usually or 32%. You raise interest rates two or three percentage points. They don't even care. They don't know what their interest rate is. Again, it's the middle class that you're screwing with. In terms of the military side, funnily enough, we had a data point from Russia I saw yesterday. In their war economy, the bottom tranche of society is seeing 20% wage gains. because so many people, so many young men are dying,

the wage labor rates are being bid through the roof as the government's buying everything it can for the war machine. So the poor in Russia are doing really well if they're not being shot out of this particular economy. So that does run in the opposite direction. But the broader point I want to make is this. Where I think we have to go is a combination of everything I've been saying

in terms of trying to narrow this gap domestically, narrow the gaps internationally, which is going to have a national security dimension, and a part of that needs to be energy. It needs to be sustainability too at the same time. I'm not trying to underplay that. I'm just saying that won't be what you sell first, because people don't panic talking about sustainability. They panic talking about the military and invasion.

That's how you generate the impetus. But what you're going to need is higher interest rates and lower interest rates. and you're going to need very tight fiscal policy, and you're going to need very loose fiscal policy. I don't understand. Okay, well, this is the key point. If you look at where we are now, to get from where we are now to an economy that makes more sense

requires a staggering degree of spending on some things and massive belt tightening in others. It requires a crippling interest rate in sectors which are frankly useless and stupid, but you have complete freedom to do them today and a low interest rate for things that are a national priority. Like in a war, you need low interest rates, not high. But you need high interest rates to stop people saying, well, I'm just going to borrow a huge amount of money from the bank and speculate on commodity futures, which will make it more expensive to pay in my army.

How do you do that when all the market interest rates are just tethered to the 10-year note plus a spread with with government rules and intervention and strategy or how does that happen? Yeah, this is exactly it. If you look at the way the world used to work, and I'm painting very, very broad brush here, okay, but if you look at the way the world used to work pre the 1980s where we moved over to this neoliberal, neoclassical model where everything was deregulated, first of all in the West, and then after communism collapsed everywhere, but China and not. Korea and Vietnam and Cuba, everywhere else.

So basically, you know, one world economy pretty much, even if you had a different political system on top. Yeah, Fed funds is your base rate, or your 10-year U.S., if you want to look at that. Everyone can borrow that. The money flows wherever they want in the world. Every market and every country is free to take that with a spread and think, where can I invest that to try and make some money today? That's the fundamental precept on which we build our entire society.

And it's really stupid. It's really stupid. Let me just give you one anecdote before I get back to the point I want to make. I'm sure you've heard of Schumpeter, right, the great economist. I actually found the time the other day to skim read and I will only pretend, I will stress skim read it rather than pretending I read it in the detail it deserved. Just one of the telephone directory scale books that he wrote during his luminous career as an economist and a thinker, which was his history of economic analysis.

I mean, just a staggering degree of intellectualism. There's no one alive today who comes anywhere close to what that guy was doing. And that was only one of the books he wrote. Anyway, he was an Austrian economist. He was literally the finance minister of Austria for a while. But he leaned very much to the Austrian school, that if you set interest rates too low, you create artificial bubbles and et cetera, et cetera, everything blows up, et cetera.

Less government is better. you're very familiar with the school of thought I'm sure but before Shumpeter died he had a damascene conversion where he said in a nutshell look if you have too much government intervention we know how badly that goes bureaucrats are bureaucrats politicians are politicians

intervention is intervention I don't have to spell it out for you doesn't work well in the long run equally he said if you have a completely free market as we just described where you have the Fed funds rate, okay, you can say the Fed sets the Fed fund rate. It's not completely free, but ignore that, right? You have the Fed fund rate or the 10-year U.S.,

and money can go anywhere and anyone can borrow it and do whatever they want. That doesn't work either because freedom in markets doesn't work without morality. If you remember, when you used to have that bracelet, what would Jesus do? Remember when people used to wear them? What Shumbatur was saying effectively is you won't get a good economic outcome for society

unless when you have freedom of choice, free will economically, you have the morality of a bracelet on your wrist, economically saying, what would Jesus do with this money? If you don't have that, free markets are useless. And what he said is we need Catholic economics, where everyone has a moral band around them, saying, of course I can speculate on this. and make money doing that,

but that will make other people poorer and hungrier, and that's a stupid thing to do. So I'm going to take the money which I've got and use that freedom in a way to make the world better. That's what Schupta said, Chumper said before he died, and we ignore it completely. And we're never going to get there,

unless we have a moral revolution where everyone suddenly changes their mindset, that's not going to happen. So what's the best solution that isn't that? That's what I'm trying to say. I'm going to let you get to your broader point in a second, but let me just interject there, Michael. We've only spoken once before, and I don't know how much you know about my podcast. But I think, I hope your employers won't mind me saying this that you're being underutilized in your current role.

It's unfortunately 9 p.m. here, and I'm having trouble. keeping up with you, but I think if it was new in my time, I would have trouble keeping up with you. I really, really like the way you think and your authenticity. And I hope that we can have you back to maybe have a debate with Steve Keene and Stephanie Kelton and other people on these issues, because these, what you just said is at the core. It is at the core issue of our time. I hadn't heard of Catholic economics in that sense. Just that interjection. So please carry on with your low interest rate, high interest rate anecdote.

Well, thank you. And it's a big, thank you very much for the compliment. I'll make sure to clip this and send it to my boss. But the point being, there is no good solution. The religion that we have now is that free markets will do it for us. I think we're realizing there is no God in that respect. So free markets, by definition, cannot solve the metacrisis. Not if, well, first of all, it won't do given that they have a centrifugal effect.

They push inequality. They push some countries to specialize and become net exporters and others to become net importers. They say to the people, what's the long-run benefit of having an army? None. Let's not have one, which Europe is waking up and realizing doesn't work, right? So that as a simplistic, do whatever you want, be whatever you want, invest however you want, philosophy doesn't work. You can see it all around you. Elements of it can work if they're carefully regulated.

And in fact, if you go back to Polanyi and the Great Transformation, from a constructivist perspective, then he makes it very, very clear that where markets think they work is actually in a beautiful playing field carved out of a jungle with violence. That's when, you know, and if you don't believe that, ask yourself how much trading was done last weekend. The answer is none. We didn't work on Saturday or Sunday. The market's shut. Why? Why do markets not work on Saturday or Sunday?

We should be doing them 24-7. We don't, for, you know, cultural and religious reasons. Nothing happens for two days. I'm all in favour of that, by the way, but it's a social construct that we've decided. Okay? So markets themselves won't solve the problem unless we put in place things like Saturday and Sunday to give you a a breather so you don't drop dead from exhaustion that allow you to have bookends on what you can and can't do.

So Saturdays and Sundays are not part of the market. Some that are, we don't have a full market economy. Otherwise, we would be working every single day. Yeah. And some workers have to, right? And that's very disruptive for society as well. When you all used to have a day off at the same time, everyone could go and watch a sports game together, go to their local community or local church.

Now you don't. People that family lives disrupted. there's a cost of that, even if, from a broader perspective, even if from a narrow one, it's better for profits or whatever, okay? So if that doesn't work, what does? I'm not a believer in big government on that scale, just because, you know, I've worked for large organizations, I've had to deal with governments,

and efficiency is not their byword, right? We know that. We know that. On the other hand, we've just made it very clear that just saying, here's a religion of, free markets, that doesn't work either, unless you have your own religion. If everyone behave completely morally like I choose not to do that, then they would work, but they don't. So then you have one other choice, which is you have to have some kind of awkward middle ground, which is not good. I'm not selling this as something good. I'm saying if you eliminate what

can't work and what isn't working now, what will be rejected, what's left, logically, Sherlock Holmes style is what we will gravitate towards, one step forward, two steps back. And that's, okay, we're going to try and keep as much of the free market as possible with as little government as possible, but more than we've got now, which has a broader social focus and which says, okay, for example, I'm a company, I want to borrow to find a more sustainable way to produce food, to feed people, to bring down the cost of food, but with a minimal environmental impact. Can we do that at a lower cost?

Can we do that at a low cost or a high cost? and the market says, well, it's got to be a high cost. And equally, someone says, I've got an idea for an app that when you take a photograph of your dog makes it look like a cat. And the market says, well, the advertising opportunities are just phenomenal. Everyone's got a dog or a cat. Everyone's going to want to transmute there at one element to another. Right, food company, you borrow at 8% because you're a bit dodgy and, you know, food smoot.

Dogs and cats, I mean, what's not to like? You can borrow at zero. And this gets to us as quote-unquote consumers. There has to be an awareness and a change in consciousness of the times we are alive so that we choose a sustainable food company over the dopamine we get from seeing the dog as a cat. So it's not just the markets and the government and the corporations. We as citizens have to change our choices. As human beings, we do.

I agree. But within the framework I'm describing here, because that's my agreement, I can't even change myself. Again, my long-suffering wife outside the door will tell you completely that, you know, physician heal thyself. She would say, wagging a finger at me. But if you look at that,

the current framework now clearly is dysfunctional. Clearly, from a national security perspective, from a sustainability perspective. Now, we've played around with saying, okay, you're going to get slightly cheaper borrowing if you follow green criteria. We're moving down that path. We are moving down that path.

part. More rapidly, I suspect we will get to one where from a US perspective, let's say, we create some mechanism, and I don't know exactly how, but I've got, you know, theories, where you will do a Steve Keene-style MMT to pay for the Pentagon. That gets ring-fenced, or maybe a massive new infrastructure program. Everything else doesn't get it. That stays within a normal remit. And interest rates, Janet Yellen was saying, now, I know this won't go out immediately after I'm speaking, but Janet Ellen was just saying recently, interest rates won't go back down when they do come down to where they were pre-COVID. They're not going to be zero anymore. They're going to be much higher. She also said there would never be another financial crisis in her

lifetime. Yeah, and she apologized for saying inflation was transitory. So, you know, there's a couple of things to watch there with Mrs. Yellen. But the key point, I think you need to keep tight fiscal policy in some areas, which are not helpful, an ultra-loose MMT style in others, into the supply side, the supply side, not the demand side. When you spend the money, it's got to be to bring back the whole supply chain into you or a country that you trust completely where your monetary systems are linked. And on the interest rate side, and again, this is a hypothesis, it's not a forecast. I'm not forecasting Fed funds or the ECB rate.

I'm talking theoretically, big picture, you would logically say, okay, you're going to keep a relatively high interest rate because you know what, people shouldn't have second or third or fourth mortgages. I don't want to see speculation in the housing market or in commodity markets, etc. I don't want to see money going to companies with the cat, dog, transmute app, but I do want to see a low interest rate if it's going to go to something useful right now on the supply site. And so you're making choices to incentivize the economy towards supply, not demand, and national security and sustainability, not consumerism. And to extend that, you're making choices to support and subsidize supply side, but also maybe regenerative agriculture or things that help reduce wealth inequality. because if there's one thing that stabilizes a country, it's reducing wealth and income inequality.

So it extends down that avenue as well, yes? It does. I think if you try and do it wrong, it won't work. Let me give you a headline. You've probably seen recently that there's a lot of new semiconductor fabs, as they call them, that were due to be built in the US to try and onshore those supply chains. Well, just recently we've seen South Korea say that three of the big South Korean firms who were going to build those fabs in the US have put them on hold. Not only is there a shortage of skilled labor, which is part of the problem that only building them will address.

You only get those skills back by building. You don't get them back any other way. But they're saying that the DEI component that the White House insisted on, which was really, really stringent for every one of these factories, makes it so expensive. and impossible to meet the criteria in some cases, like you have to employ X number of people who simply don't exist, you can't do it. So if you're going to try and fight inequality on that manner, this is the big government thesis again. But it's not like I'm shooting down how to do it. The point is, if you move towards more investment in supply domestically and higher interest to stop speculation. So in other words, you're making money from productive investment.

The banks are lending to actually build things rather than speculate on assets. By doing that alone, you reduce inequality. That, from a mathematical perspective in terms of how the balance sheets work, it's a bit complicated to maybe peel all the layers of the onion here for everyone watching. But by doing that, inequality will automatically be reduced without any any need for acronyms, it will happen. So I really like these ideas, and you've spelled them out quite well in the last five minutes or so, what's missing? Is it governance or knowledge or these ideas themselves or polarization and identity or standing in the way? what would be the mechanism to get these ideas into practice on a higher scale?

I'm thinking of Shakespeare again. I'd already have physician heal yourself. Now I'm thinking first kill all the lawyers. That's the phrase. But it's first kill all the lawyers and everyone on Wall Street because effectively you have vested interests that will never allow this to happen. Right. This is the complete antithesis of the political economy that's been constructed for the past couple of decades, which is all about financialization, assets, balance sheet, light, no productive investment, offshoring, increasing inequality, and magazines and media that lionize billionaires, you know, who produce apps and make cats look like dogs, rather than, you know, the humble worker somewhere who's actually keeping the country running or, you know, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the. the limited U.S. merchant marine that's out there risking their lives moving goods around

on the sea, for example. These guys and women get absolutely no thanks whatsoever. Now, it's a cultural shift, it's a political shift. It's happened in the past in the US and in other countries, usually after a crisis, but it has happened. It's not to me to predict whether it will or won't. I'm just saying that if you want to avoid very bad outcomes, this is what would have to happen and here are parts by which it may but it will be trial and error and I don't think all of it will happen and it won't happen

quickly and not in the way one would like. So this platform, this website, this podcast is generally apolitical but I'll ask you a political question, not a prediction, but what do you anticipate

the effects of a Trump re-election would mean the terms the things you were just saying or in fiscal policy in general with our debt and interest rates and such, if that were to happen, which right now it's 50-50 or a little bit higher than 50-50. Sure. Well, let me start by saying that I'd uncovered the US. We have an excellent US analyst called Philip Murray, and I want to just bang the drumfow,

what a good US analyst he is. And I'll talk about some of these ideas more in just one second. But, you know, purely as an aside in 2016, I, I was saying to people not in print per se, but he would say, people would say to me, clients, who do things can do in the election? In 2016, I said, Trump. And I was laughed at. And they said, well, how can you say that?

You know, it's a joke. He's a joke candidate. And I said, he says the economy is crap. Anyone who says the economy is crap in 2016 will win because he'd never been done before. Every presidential candidate was always saying the economy was amazing and America's amazing. You say it's crap, you'll win. And in a nutshell, that analysis worked, right? So Philippe is now taking, I think, the very pragmatic step of instead of doing what many people

in Wall Street do, which is presume that everything will be exactly the same going forward as it is today, to say, let's just look at the opinion polls, the balance of the opinion polls, and let's presume that they're right. And on that basis, Trump wins. That's what he's saying. And let's presume Trump then does what he says, which has introduced tariffs. Now, how you map out what Trump will or won't do comes down to the vagaries of Trump himself and then the international reaction like Trump does X, what does Europe do, what does China do? We're currently mapping all that out. It's a pretty complicating exercise and the methodology you use determines the outcome.

So if you use neoclassical neoliberal, only one outcome is possible. It ends badly. If you use the alternative thinking that I'm putting forward here, which is, something closer to Keene and Pettis and my own special source on top, there are a variety of different ways it can play out. That's still an ongoing modelling exercise. But let me just take the headline snapshot, the simpler version, is this. If Trump tries to do what he is talking about doing,

he's talking about reintroducing a neo-Hamiltonian model, which is you have very low cost of production in the US with cheap energy and very low taxation, but you have very high tariffs, so you can't afford to bring anything in. from outside the US. That can go one of two ways in a nutshell. Either it's a stagflationary collapse

because the price of everything goes to the roof and you don't make anything and you can't afford to buy anything and it's a disaster. Or it works incredibly well and everything is on short in pretty rapid time. And of course you'll have obstacles

and you will have inflation at first. But we have one of the highest costs of labor in the world. I don't know how likely that would be that... So? If it's more expensive to produce everything outside and you can afford to, you can employ people and pay them more and they can afford to buy the domestic product, which is how things used to work, it can work. It can't work to everyone who's internalized the religion that it can't work. Cheap is always better. And this is part of what we've all internalized. I can assure you from a balance sheet perspective, it could. I'm not saying it will happen or it will. I'm saying it could. But to show you again the two different ways that this could go, depending on the vagaries of Trump. The other headline we've all just seen is that the candidates he's considering to be Treasury Secretary, if he gets in, are as varied as a hedge fund billionaire, which again would be so New York Trump, in which case Wall Street

isn't going anywhere and you wonder how this can actually work, because it is the Wall Street speculative financial complex you have to change. as part and parcel to get this framework I'm putting forward. And on the other hand, just talking about Robert Lightheiser, who was the former US trade representative, who is arguing with a great deal of intellectual consistency for something more along the lines of what I'm talking about,

which is now you have a neo-Hamiltonian re-industrialization policy where you give everyone a timeframe to invest in America again, to make in America again, and to get money capital circulating domestically, you don't need foreign capital, you don't need anywhere near as many foreign goods, and America is much more re-industrialized. If he goes that route, the world changes dramatically. All the international intersecting balance sheets shift dramatically in one direction.

And if he goes the hedge fund route, things shift dramatically, but in a very different direction. Both of them are inflationary for a while, but with very different long-run outcomes. and very different patterns of how all the US balance sheets and international balance sheets stick. Maybe you should write up a little memo or white paper to that effect, and maybe he'll read it in October or so. I don't fully understand what you're saying because it's new to me, but it makes sense.

Well, I appreciate that. I will attempt to try and do so. I mean, there are other people out there, I'm sure, who are doing it and will do it better than me. I'm happy to throw in my two cents worth. I will just add one anecdote that a few years ago I was giving a presentation in Asia on the global outlook. And I wasn't on the interest rate component of this. I was much more on the national security component, which is that at some point everyone will realize that this is a Leninist world, not a Marxist world,

at which point your policies will have to shift. And there will be a distinct move away from free trade back towards this protectionism that we're seeing everywhere. and it will be logical for the following reasons. And one guy in the audience was the former deputy U.S. trade representative, very nice gentleman. And he came up to me afterwards and said, well, I'd never heard anything like that. He said, except from Peter Navarro. And I said, well, yeah, okay, but I have my own reasons for saying it, you know, completely apolitical. But I think the logic holds up.

And he did say, can I have a copy of the presentation? and I shared it with him. And I said, can I ask why? He said, yeah, I'm meeting Robert Lightheiser for lunch next week. Okay. And so I don't know if that got shown to Lighthizer, and I don't know if Lighthizer showed it to Trump. I'm not trying to put myself in any circles where I don't belong.

But it's not impossible that a small element of this may have flown in that direction. But again, I'm sure there are far, far larger minds than me that have been thinking this far more deeply than I have. I haven't, like I said, I mean, we just met, I might have to have you back in five months before the election and look at what are the policies that would be good for the world, just speculation-wise. You have a big brain and a big heart. And yeah, I'm kind of fascinated by all this. This is a unique conversation for me. I want to be respectful of your work day. They're in Thailand now.

But I do have a couple questions that I wanted to ask you. And then I have some closing questions. I wanted to ask you because I've been reading your work. You were one of the few that correctly suggested the risk of Ukraine invasion two years ago was far higher than most expected. How today are most investors missing geopolitical risks, in your opinion? Thank you for recognizing that because it didn't get a lot of play outside of the Netherlands, working for a Dutch bank. What they're failing to recognize is understandably how bad the situation is, but how it plays out.

Because what you often see in the space that I work in, which is markets and macroeconomics, that people will use the word geopolitics. geopolitics, you know, it's gone through the roof. This is the equivalent of going to see your doctor and saying, you know, I've got a pain here and a pain there. And I say, you know what your problem is? Biology. And what, you know, what should I do about it? Oh, something biological. It's absolutely bloody useless.

It's absolutely abstract and useless. What you need to have done is studied international relations and history. and regional studies and language and culture as much as possible, and economics, and national security to a degree, and heterodox economics, because the traditional, as I said, doesn't account for economic war and grey zone, et cetera, et cetera, and the way we're looking at things now. And you put all that together, and that's actually what Susan Strange years ago called international political economy. You could also call it grand strategy. If you understand that, you understand the fact that, you know,

the things like the hooties emerging to throttle the Red Sea and the Suez Canal is a problem. When there's a financial times op-ed today saying, it's fine, it's not a problem. We've shrugged it off. It's like, no, the initial impact was bad, and now we're rearranging and, you know, dealing with it. But, A, it can get a lot worse than this.

There are many different ways that can play out and get worse and more inflationary. And B, it's already having an impact you don't see with a lag in some products and particularly in things like distillates and diesel where the price is going up which will push out the price of everything so people take a simplistic surface level narrow headline driven view just saying geopolitics and they think as an analyst that's deep I mean saying geopolitics is there nothing well I have specific questions one about ukraine and Russia but let me build on your your diesel question and one of your recent

daily reports, you flagged a report by the New Zealand government, which considers a scenario of an oil shock with oil going to $250 a barrel leading to a 7.5% drop in economic output in GDP. So just hypothetically, and there could be a number of ways this happens in the Suez Canal or the Straits of Hormuz or other things, but what would globally play out in, the interest rate debt financial system architecture that you explained earlier in this conversation if let's say five million barrels a day were to go offline somewhere at some time in the next couple of years well i asked that question to our excellent energy analyst joe de laura because i like to give credit where credit is due i don't do everything we have experts at rabo who are experts in those

fields and I interact with them regularly and we have a cross flow of ideas. So I said to Joe exactly that, Joe, let's say we lose five million barrels per day. Where's Brent? Brent crude. And he said, well, the first option that would be taken out instantly is $150 a barrel. Instantly. But he said, depending on the environment, instead of there being a decimal place when you look at the oil price, there might be a comma. X? Yeah. So he's being slightly facetious because this is just a chat and this is not a forecast. But he's saying you would pretty much double where you are right now because usually, as he put it, the oil market is pretty evenly balanced supply and demand, usually. That's the way it's set up.

If you have a 500,000 barrel per day shortfall, one side or the other, you, you're you can have a major market move for half a million. So if you're going five million in the current environment, this is just to keep things consistent. You're going to double oil prices fairly quickly. And if it doesn't get resolved and you get flow-through effects, he was being facetious, but trying to make a key point that it's very, very, very inflationary. But how do we, we're already having, you know, fingers in the dike to keep the financial system, Rube Goldberg machine, as you mentioned earlier, if there's $200 oil or higher, I mean, how do we use

MMT or the Fed bazookas to keep, I mean, I don't know what happens then. You would logically think, given what happened to gas in Europe, that central banks will step in and say, this is transitory. Right. They do like that word. and say we are going to offer subsidies, which will then, of course, probably add another X percent on top because if that's a permanent thing, for whatever reason,

rather than a one-week shock or a one-month shock, yeah, then you're in a 1970s loop. And in fact, one of the key points we've had in the recent inflationary episode is this, and it's part of the meta-crisis, all of the architecture we set up post-1970s, which was neoliberal, neoclassical, globalisation, break the back of unions, offshore, outsource, deregulate, downsized. Do everything you can to make sure unions and labour has no power at all to prevent the 70s happening again. All the infrastructure we put in place, inflation targeting, fiscal prudence, all of this.

And we, you know, patted ourselves on the back that we're ready to win this war against inflation at any time. because we didn't understand how the economy actually works. And again, I'm reluting back to the earlier parts of the conversation. As soon as we got a real supply shock, again, which we did, and as soon as we got a Labor versus Capital shock again, where Labor said, you know, during COVID, we've had enough of this. We actually want more for the first time in a while. Everything started to collapse.

You immediately saw central banks happen to raise rates in a way they said they would never do again, and they did instantly. you immediately saw them coming under pressure saying, oh, we don't know what to do. Do we keep them high? Do we cut them? We don't know. Government's saying we don't know.

We should tighten belts. Should we spend? All of our bravado was basically wearing the uniform of our grandfathers in World War II. And then as soon as the bullet started firing, we're like cowering under the desk and we're not quite sure what we should do. And if we were to see a repeat, and I don't mean in the physical world, I hope we don't, but we could. you know, again, logically we could anywhere, I guess. But just in terms of the supply shock, again, on that kind of scale, which is no one's forecast.

This is you asking me, hypothetically. Yeah, I'm sure all the infrastructure would just come crumbling down again. We're not prepared for it in the slightest. Tangentially, what about the de-dollarization that's in the news? I think you have a different take than a lot of commentators that U.S. debt and China and Russia developing other ways. to use the banking system. What is the intermediate and maybe long-term trajectory of the US dollar?

Well, I'm a dollar ball. Our chief FX strategies Jane Foley also is. So I'm echoing her thoughts there. Structurally, the dollar isn't going anywhere. because this global system that I'm describing rests on the US dollar. Yeah. All the offshore dollar debt that you've got

has to be paid back and paid back with interest. So you constantly need more dollars in order to pay it back. Now, de-dollarization is happening at the margin. I've done a lot of work on this. And I got into kind of intellectual, I wouldn't call it a battle,

given that we were never in the same room or in the same intellectual space at the same time. So it was kind of arguing past each other. But I got into a bit of a debate with Zoltan Pozar, who has, of course, formed this new group. Is it ex-uno-plurz? Oh, I didn't know that. Yeah, instead of E pluribus unum, is ex-unos. And my joke was that actually is please exit through the gift shop, you know, given it.

So, anyway. He's talking about a new Bretton Woods and such. Brett and Woods 3 is calling it. And my thesis was, and people who are looking for it, if you Google it, you can probably find it on the web, why Bretton Woods 3 won't work. And I went to a great deal of historical and nitty-gritty balance sheet detail to really show that can't work. But what you are having, in that the other group doesn't mesh.

Basically, they are net exporters to the group they're trying to get rid of. So how are they going to be net exporters to us in their own currency when we don't have their currency and we won't borrow it from them in order to make that network work? It can't work balance sheet wise. So the only way it can work is if you have two world economies. They go away, we go away, we onshore, they lose all those jobs. They sell gas and oil and commodities to each other. Why they would do that, I don't know. And China has far too much products it can't sell to anyone in the West anymore. so they really suffer. And it doesn't work from their perspective. But where we do see it happening, and it is happening on this marginal level, is within parts of the global south, you are starting to see commodity trading, upstream commodity trading, being priced in US dollars.

Because if you don't do that, how do you have any concept about world GDP? What is world GDP? Well, it's seven of these and five of those and three of these and two of these and a bucket and a spade and some spanners. You know, no, you need to have one common denominator, and it's the dollar for now. But in the global south, they're saying, okay, here's an upstream commodity.

I'm pricing in dollars in my head. It's worth X. I'm going to sell it to you. You sell me back an equivalent dollar price of your product, and we'll transact in local currency and just clear. And I don't send you any dollars, and you don't send me any dollars.

What's the word for that? Barter. Is that happening? Yes. It's bilateral barter priced in dollars, not cleared in dollars, to avoid using the dollar. Does it mean you need fewer dollars internationally? Yes. What about all the dollar debt those countries still have, which have to be serviced with dollars which they're now no longer earning?

They still need it. They need it. So the dollar, unless you're going to blow up the entire global financial system, which will be violent. Not just in markets, but violent everywhere. They still need them. So they're not helping themselves by doing that. But it is happening at the margin.

What they're hoping is over time, if they do that with enough scale, for example, if Russia starts doing that with Brazil, Russian fertilizer to Brazil, although I'm not sure what Brazil sells back to Russia, and then Brazilian soybeans to China for Chinese mobile phones to Brazil. the whole thing eventually you can net out enough that you start to build a large scale alternative.

But it doesn't work, as I said, because it still ends up with China producing too much. Russia doesn't need what Brazil produces and China sells to us. So it still doesn't work. But they're hoping they can move from the upstream over time to the downstream on scale. And then, and I'm going to change tone here completely, it becomes very much like the South Pants – sorry, South Park Underpants gnomes. Are you familiar with that mean? No.

So I'm a big fan of South Park. Even though it's completely crude, I love it. And very often it's some of the best social and political commentary out there, even while it's offensive. So they had a piece a few years back in which they had these gnomes, these little guys who were appearing. And they were stealing everyone in South Park's underpants and just building a big pile of them.

And the chief gnome was explaining why. And it was like, three point plan, three point plan. Number one, we get all the underpants. Like, okay. Number two, question mark. Number three, profits. And that was the business model. And so, you know, that basically, it made me laugh a lot.

There's a lot of that going on. You got it, you had it with zero interest rates, obviously with the tech sector, and that's what they were mocking. You've got it with this bricks plus de-dollarization. It's like, we have all the intra-bricks trade. Question mark, we rule the world. It's, yeah. Here's how I look at it.

If you look at the U.S. and you look at the debt and the declining productivity, well, higher productivity, but declining in absolute, you can say, boy, that currency doesn't look so good, given the past. But then relative to the rest of the world, it's the best of the worst, and our entire global financial system and military backing is supported by it. So it will survive unless it doesn't. And if it doesn't, that that's a violent situation of that magnitude. You know, while you were talking and I want to ask you one more content related question and I want to respect your time.

I heard a bird in the background in Thailand. So I recommend you get a Merlin app on your phone and you can identify which birds are there. But the birds made me think of how we originally were introduced by an environmentally, environmentally conscious friend of mine. Let me ask you this. Can or will Wall Street analysts, such as yourself, ever incorporate ecosystem impacts into their analysis in future macro papers and such? or will climate change, ocean issues, biodiversity, all that, remain externalities outside of the system until they unavoidably start to affect company bottom lines.

And we can argue that's already starting to happen. First of all, I'd like to think I'm not a Wall Street analyst, but okay, I understand what you mean. But I would say from what I see around me, they already are, problem is the models they use to do it. And that comes back to the ism again, to the what form of economics are you using, how are you pricing these things?

If your conceptual foundation is wrong, all your forecasts are wrong. And I'm not saying everyone's are wrong. I don't work in that field, so therefore I couldn't dissect everything everyone is doing. But I strongly suspect, given the Wall Street analyst title that we're addressing here, most of it will be wrong. It would have to be what Wall Street Bank would be allowing a framework for analysis that would point out you're doing everything wrong. Okay, maybe I framed it wrong.

So we're going to have to change as humans, and we're going to have to change the incentives, which would change the prices, and then Wall Street analysts would incorporate these things. Oh, yeah, and I think that will happen. The question is whether it happens the easy way or the hard way. And that alludes, again, to concepts of what is value, environmental economics and how that's all incorporated.

And there are lots of different schools of that. And again, you can get a neoliberal version, you can get a Marxist version, you can get a green version. So you're not a Wall Street analyst. You work for a Dutch bank, but you talk to people all over the world. How many of your clients or the people that you come across at conferences and such all over the world talk to you or either as professional colleagues or as individuals about their, about climate change and about the oceans and the ecological consequences of what are happening on the planet? Is it a tiny minority or is it growing? What can you say about that?

Well, I have to give an honest answer as I try to with everything. There's a selection bias here. In the Rabo Bank, who I work for, we're a Dutch bank with obviously an international presence too, but particularly the international presence is focused on food and agriculture. So whilst I'm interfacing with clients as stakeholders in lots of geographies and lots of sectors, The people I'm dealing with are, they're not just aware of the environment. They're in the environment. They are part of the environment.

So these conversations, even if they're not what I focus on, so I don't have that interaction with them per se, someone else in the room will. Absolutely. It's a core part of what they do. You know, if you're talking to an Australian farmer or a New Zealand farmer, how can you not be talking about the environment? If you're talking at an international commodity conference, how can you not be talking about the climate

and where you can and can't grow things and what the sustainability of that particular crop is? So my bias is towards people who are already doing that. But if you then go into the Wall Street space, and I do talk to what we call FI, financial institution clients too, and podcasts like this, quite a few of them are more on the money management side. No, far, far less. You know, much more of that.

about, well, should I buy Bitcoin overnight or, you know, et cetera, et cetera. And look, fair enough, people have to eat, right? Particularly if you're in a job with, frankly, crappy wages, no prospect in front of you, you can't afford rent or a home. And you're trying to think, how do I keep ahead in a really unfair society? One of the ways is to say, if you can't beat them, join them, which is to try and actually just speculate on assets around you to try and make sure you have a little financial dignity. And it's not that they don't worry about these things.

things, they're thinking about bread on the table, right? So those guys, maybe you don't have quite the same conversation with. But I understand why. It's not their bad people. They're Masloff pyramid. They're in a different level. This has been really great. Let me ask you the closing questions I ask all my guests. For people that are aware of the metacrisis, either your definition or the broader ecological systems definition, what advice do you have to people watching this show trying to take this all on board knowing the risks ahead to our economies and to our society and our world. Okay, I'm going to be again quite blunt. Please don't stick to traditional disciplines and traditional ways of seeing things. Modern traditions I'm talking about. And don't

even read the news. Like most of the news is just completely incapable of joining all the dots the way that it should. You know, you can get a headline and you're outraged about one thing and you'll look at that with monomania that won't link into all the other elements of it. It's too segmented. I would say, read far more,

you know, be passionate about trying to understand what's going on and try and look at people who are thinking in terms of systems theories. And there are lots of excellent thinkers. We've mentioned a few here. There are so many others I could throw in and I'm sure you could too.

You know, within a Venn diagram of interesting voices you should listen to, listen to them. You know, read, think. But don't just swallow headlines or the spoon-fed kind of curricula that they'll try and give you because it's not going to address the problem. I totally agree with that. And I appreciate that advice. I don't read newspapers ever. I haven't in a long time. I read a lot of people like you.

So people listening to this, can they sign up somehow to read your daily missives or get on an email list or something like that? Well, you can find me, obviously, as a Rabbo client, that's the easiest way. I do have a public profile. If you Google my name with Rabbo Bank, a lot of stuff will come up. I'm on LinkedIn, so you can look for some of my work goes there. and I'm also on X at the Michael Evry. At the Michael Evry.

It's slightly, you might want to put that up. It's slightly egotistical, but I couldn't fit the real Michael Evry. The characters wouldn't allow it. So I thought rather than real Michael Evry, the Michael Evry was better. So I'm there in various different ways, and I'm happy to have conversations with people where that technology allows to continue this discussion, because I'm always learning. There's always someone who can teach you something, some aspect of something you haven't seen. So it's always a two-way street.

What do you care most about in the world, Michael? I don't want to give you the clichéed kind of beauty queen answer of like, well, peace or my family. Because obviously these are true for everyone. And so that would be a disingenuous kind of answer because you take that as base, you know. As I said, my long-suffering wife just outside the door. But, no, I would say above and beyond that human calling, it's trying to understand what the hell is going on. That's what's always motivated me since I was a little kid, just asking why, why, why is it like this? And discussing and debating what is the operating system around us and is it fair?

Maybe it's not fair in terms of generating an equitable outcome for everyone. Maybe it can't do that, but is it not generating an equitable outcome just because, like, some people are taller, some people are shorter, some people are born with terrible disabilities. There's nothing, no lifestyle choice was made there. There's a certain level of randomness. and obviously we should and could try and do everything we can to ameliorate inequities wherever we see them but as a total system how do things work

and how can we make them work better than they do now without the almost inevitable logical reaction of when you cut one head off the hydra to grow back you know how do we create something that doesn't just blow back in our faces. Does that make any sense? It does make sense, but I would assume, given your long career in this, that you're approaching an asymptote of understanding the mechanics of the system and are probably spending more time on figuring out what would be the policies and

ways out of this cul-de-sac we're approaching. Well, yeah, I mean, exactly, from a practical perspective, because I was doing the bigger picture, like, what is it that wakes you up in the morning since you're young and drives you and motivates you to read late at night and on the weekend when no one's paying you to do it. You know, it's that. But from a practical, yeah, what would I hope to get out of it? It's thinking is any crumb, any tiny, tiny slither of anything that I can produce one of many ingredients that could go into a recipe

that might be of some use. That's all it is. Well, I'll give you the mic. on that more than a crumb. If you had a magic wand, what is one thing that you would do? If there was no personal recourse to you or your family or your reputation, what's one thing you would do to improve human and or planetary futures? I have to confess to everyone watching.

You had told me you were going to ask me this question. And I therefore want to make it really clear that of all the discussion points that we floated we might bring up, that gave me the biggest headache. Because I sat there and I thought, I like to give really honest answers to everything. And my gut level response to that one was, well, I want to be like Thanos and the Avengers and able to click my fingers and just get rid of the half of humanity that are the problem. And then I realized, of course, the issue is that's a completely disgusting, horrible impulse that's coming from you.

and everyone else is exactly the same. Everyone else, on the other side of the fence, on the other side of every balance sheet, is thinking the same thing. So I guess, from a system's perspective, having the ability to click your fingers and get rid of all Thanoses, that everyone realizes that they can't do that.

You can't get rid of the other people. You can't get rid of the other argument. It won't go away. You have to deal with the people you don't like. You have to all live with them. How do we do that? So I think that would be what I would wish for, that the ability to click my fingers

so that no one anymore thinks they can click their fingers. Clever and wise. Thank you. Any closing words for our viewers, and thank you for getting up at 6 a.m. Thailand time to do this. Well, thank you for staying away late US time. No, thank you for the opportunity. I've enjoyed it very much.

I hope it was coherent and cogent. It's early in the morning and here and late a night there. And, you know, I certainly hope we can continue this discussion as we collectively work towards doing whatever we can, where we are with what we have, to try and make the world a better place. We will and you will. I have a sense about you, Michael. I think you're going to play a role in what's ahead. Thank you very much. If you enjoyed or learned from this episode of The Great Simplification, please follow us on your own.

your favorite podcast platform and visit the great simplification.com for more information on future releases. This show is hosted by Nate Hagan's edited by No Troublemakers Media and curated by Leslie Batlutes and Lizzie Siriani.