The Pragmatic Apocalypse with Balaji Srinivasan

Balaji, how are you, man?

I'm good. Good to be here. What is this? My third WBD appearance.

So we did our first one together in San Francisco, 2019. I think we did a sec. Yeah. Then we did a second one, just you and me. Then we did one with Glenn Green walled. So this is our fourth.

Fourth or something like that. Yeah, but doesn't feel like. Feels, you know, good, Good cadence. It's frequent, but yeah, we get to.

Chat privately a lot. So I get to pick your brain on this crazy world and say I go get my balaji take. If I'm confused, I'm so I was like, balaji, what, what, how the. What do I. How do I interpret this? So I feel lucky to get that privately. But listen, look, the show you made with Marty, I'm not being hyperbolic here. It's the best podcast I've heard all year, maybe for a couple of years. It's answered well. It answered a lot of questions for me or it rationalized some things I don't completely understand because we live in this super polarized world of tribes and sticking with your tribes and people not given any ground. And as somebody who's trying to understand the truth between tribes, it becomes difficult. So either answered questions for me or pointed me in the direction of things that I was trying to understand. Took me about a week to get through it because I listened to podcasts when I was walking, so I. Sure it was about. Over about four walks, but I loved it. And big shout out to Marty for that as well. Congratulations. Great show. So we don't want to re walk that one. And anyone listening should probably go and listen to that before this. My first question might be.

This is.

Well, I didn't know. It's not. That's not for a Marty, because Marty should do the sequel for his review. But. But there are questions. We've got. But as best as you can, and I don't know how long this will take you. Can you tldr that show so people understand what frames what we're going to talk about?

Yes. Okay. So the show is called Fiat Crisis. It's on the TFTC podcast, and it is a survey of kind of where the world is as of right now and fundamentally the two premises. If I reduce to just two premises, can the US print infinite money? And does the US have an invincible military? If you believe one or both of these premises, that puts you on kind of one side where you think that the current order has a lot of hit points. It has a lot of energy. It can keep going for a while. It has a huge lead and so on and so forth. It can tolerate all the mistakes it's been making. If, however, you don't believe either of those points, that puts you in a totally different world. That puts you in a world where we're about to have. We're on the brink of very serious changes to the world order, and it's important to kind of prepare for that. Now, of course, this being like a bitcoin show, a lot of people will trivially agree with the first point, okay, that the US can't print infinite money. It's actually the second point, though, which is interesting there, because a lot of, certainly not all, but a good chunk of bitcoin people are small c. Conservative. You know, they. They supported the military or something at some point, right? And. And often they haven't heard a story about why the US military might be weaker than it looks. They've only actually, in fact, heard the opposite. They've seen Transformers, they've seen Independence Day. They've seen all these movies where, you know, gov is portrayed as God, right? The government is portrayed as literally God. Whether you dislike or like the US military, whether it's portrayed negatively or positively, it's always portrayed as powerful, right? And that is an implicit thing that shapes your worldview. If, if, for example, it was the Bolivian military that was called on to save the day, or if the decision went to the, you know, Bangladeshi, you know, leaders desk for the, for the big decision in the movie, it would break the suspension of disbelief because, wait, you know, they. They can't project power and so on. Nothing against those countries or perfectly fine people. But that, that second point on the US military, maybe not being like infinitely powerful, not saying it doesn't have power, but that being infinitely powerful, if you take both those two things together, you get into a different world and you know why? Actually, those two premises are equivalent that being able to print infinite money and having invincible energy. They seem different, but arguably one is sort of the left statist and one is the right statist, right, in the sense that the left status believes that you can print infinite money for domestic programs. The right status believes in the strong father model that the US military can go and beat up anybody abroad. But these two are almost like two different pillars that support each other. Because if you can print infinite money, well, of course you can buy all the guns and weapons and soldiers and so on that you want. Conversely, if you have an invincible military, then no matter how much you devalue your currency, others will be forced to accept it. No matter how many sanctions, freezes, et cetera, you have no option because, you know, you could also frame in a positive way as the defense umbrella is worth the cost of everything else. Right. With the invincible military on your side, no one can invade you. And that's worth more than even losing half your savings over time. Okay, and so the thing is that I actually put up a poll on this, and you know what it came out as. I was surprised at the results here. I'll bring it up. But why don't you guess what poll.

Of, of both of those questions. Yeah, well, your audience is going to be skewed.

Yes.

Yeah. So I, I would have, I would have loved to have seen that poll with, from you, but maybe a couple of other people, but I would have thought can. So my expectation is people would have thought, no, they cannot print infinite money. But no, the US Military cannot be defeated.

So here's the results, which were. Actually, I thought this was going to be an obvious poll, but it turned out that I felt I hit the nail on the head. This is the branch point philosophically. Okay, so do you see the results here? 25% of my followers said infinite money. Now, of course, what I really mean here is print infinite money without consequence. Does it have an invincible military? Practically invincible relative to everybody else. Right. Obviously, you know, you could imagine something that defeated. So I'm not, you know, but, but the results were surprising to me where 10%, roughly of my followers said invincible military, and a full 55% said yes to one or the other, and 45% said no to both. Okay, that's surprising because. Go ahead.

Well, because I would have voted no to both because I think they're intrinsically linked.

Yes.

I don't think you can have an invincible military with infinite money because you weaken your state. But even more importantly is, does anybody want to test the invincibility of the military?

Well, Russia and China kind of do want to test invincibility. Right. You know, or, or rather what is happening. I mean, and so, so I don't want to recap the entire TFTC podcast, but I'll just show you a couple of graphs. Okay, so here's, here's just a couple of graphs on that. The, the thing is that people have to just be realistic. And, you know, you should know the greatest strength is to know one's own weakness. And if you're operating from a position of reality, you'll do better than not. Right. So, for example, Take this graph. Okay, this. This tweet over here got. I thought it was totally obvious. It got 3.3 million views. Because this is not part of the narrative, right? Basically, people think the US Is just completely dominant and it can force countries to decouple from China. Here is a graph showing in the year 2000, which country was a bigger trade partner. And China only had, like, you know, African countries in Central Asia and so on and so forth. By 2020, that had completely flipped. The vast majority of the world has its primary trade partner being China. And this has only accelerated in the last three years. So if the US Pushes the country to decouple and to choose the US Or China, the country probably doesn't want to decouple. But if it's forced to choose, it may not pick the U.S. okay, number one. Number two is this is a graph of steel production. Okay? Can you see that on screen? And, you know, lots of people are like, oh, the US Will look, you know, it'll turn it around like it did in the 40s or the 50s. You know, don't you remember we. We did World War II scale production? I'm like, you know, the world is completely different from that era. We recognize how different it is socially. Okay. All kinds of social change has happened since then, but it's also different geopolitically, industrially. This just puts a figure on it. Where, you know, in. In. This is like at the. Over there. This X axis is time. That's about like 1967, 68. And the US to China ratio of steel was like, about 10 to 1, and the US favored that way. China's just a thin sliver of red now. Today, China makes more steel than the rest of the world combined with. And it's a 10 to 1 ratio the other way. Okay, so if it went from 1 to 10 to 10 to 1, that's like 100x turnaround in steel production. It's just a completely different world. Right? You cannot assume that the US Is effortlessly dominant, because any kind of conventional war is about who can crank out more ships and planes and, you know, bombs and drones and whatever. Right? And, you know, the. The scale of what China can do is just so, so insane that people don't realize it. Just to give one more. Okay. You know. You know, like, people will say, oh, China doesn't have a blue water Navy, therefore the U.S. you know, this is like Zion's line, right? Like, China, you know, China can't build a navy or whatever. You've heard that before. Yep. Yeah. Okay, again, to put some numbers on it, the ratio of China's Merchant Shipbuilding to US Tonnage is on the order of 100x to 300x. They built 23 million gross tons of shipping. And if you've seen these shipyards, they're just these gigantic things and US yards built like 70 to 200,000. This is reality that we're talking about. This is basically 100x turnaround. And of course that makes sense. It comports with our general observations. The west de industrialized, it shipped all of its low margin things overseas and for 45 years the Chinese were grinding in sweatshops while Americans were watching friends in the 90s. Right. And you know, that was like a good trade seemingly at that time, right. For both parties. But it's like, you know, the, the, the concept that you could just turn around the US and turn it into what it was in 1945 and have cranking out bolts and ships and planes and so on and then, you know, beat China in a war. I, the analogy I made in the TFTC thing and just to wrap that up is it's like a, an 80 year old guy who still, who remembers that he could once bench press 225, 300, okay. And he walks over to the rack because he remembers that was him 60 years ago. Okay. And he walks over and he tries to do 225 for reps. What's going to happen, you know, if he hasn't worked out in 60 years? Yeah, exactly. Right. That, that is the mental model of all these guys who have been raised on World War II movies and stuff and they think, they think the 80 year old man version of the US is the 20 year old man version. Now I'm not saying there can't be rebirth and regeneration. There can be. That's what, you know, when we have a child, that child is somebody who in their teens is strong and healthy just like the old man or whatever. Right. But that's a whole thing to regenerate and rebirth the civilization. India has done it, China has done it. Arguably Russia did it to some extent after the Soviet Union, not great. Poland has done it, Estonia has done it. It is possible to have a civilizational rebirth. Okay. I'm not a doomer in that sense of it's over forever. Sometimes it's over. You know, the Assyrians aren't around, you know, the Chaldeans, all the guys that the, that got slain in the Bible, whatever. Right. But, but it doesn't have to be over. You can have a rebirth but not unless you're, you're realistic about it, you know, and so, so fortunately, some degree of realism is starting to filter in on this a little bit. People aren't as in denial on this stuff like a year and a half ago. Okay. I, I'd say over the last six months, there's a great degree of realism on the foreign policy side of. Wait a second. China is actually a formidable force. Right. They're not going to zero. But the, the reason I say these two things is it leads to a totally different world and it requires a lot more words and graphs to describe that world. And here's why, to just say the world will continue as it is. I don't need to update your world model. You know, where the borders are, you know, where the laws are, you know, who's in charge. One of the reasons that something like the, you know, attempted Russian mutiny, coup, whatever you want to call it, attracted so much attention is everybody understood that if that happened, it would have ripple effects for the whole world order. All kinds of things could break and change quickly, and it's still an unstable situation. Who the heck knows what happens? That's what I would call a rational thing to pay attention to as opposed to, let's say the, the Titanic sub thing. Right. I know it's very, that dates us to exactly when this discussion is happening, but the tank something. I feel bad for those people, but it doesn't really matter in the grand scheme of things, you know, the coup or whatever that really matters, you know, and so, so the issue is that when, if the world is going to change, first of all, it could change a lot of different ways. And second, requires a lot of words to describe that. All right, but, but first, I do think that those two premises, A, the, that the US can't print infinite money, and B, that doesn't have an invincible military. Now let's go into that direction with me so far.

So, so where I'd want to focus in on that is, is that we're clearly seeing a shift in the, the world order and certainly on the outside.

You're Brits.

Yeah.

Right. So you can see it. But the closer you are to the US the less they want to see it, the more than denial they are about it.

Yeah. So, I mean, it's. To us or to me, it's really obvious, you know, traveling between Europe and the US and, and, and seeing what's happening. And I, I even, I had lunch with Rock Robert Breedlove this week, and even just his experience of coming into Europe, spending time in the uk. I think he can see a different world. Even though we speak the same language, a different world. And the way he referred to it, he said, what he believes is that the US is like a petulant child in some ways. In immature countries it's like that petulant teenager, whereas we've got a more mature, grown up, wise society. And so I think that's a fair way of explaining it because I see this changing world order and I'm definitely, we all seen it on the financial side of things. We've seen what's the rise of the BRICS nations. We've seen Saudi pulling away from its relationship with the us. We've seen countries discussing different ideas, maybe a different global reserve currency. We've seen people move into Bitcoin. And I think Balaji, most people listen to the show, in the end what they really care about is what is going to happen to me if this world order shifts? What is going to happen to me? What is going to happen to my money? What is going to happen to my savings? That's in the end what they're going to care about. I care about one slightly different thing. You talk about the infinite money printer and the invincible army. We've had probably two decades now of proxy wars that we've seen. Syria and now in Ukraine.

Very expensive also very, very expensive for all trillions and trillions and trillions of dollars. Yep. And lots of people dead, obviously. Yep. Yeah.

And to achieve what it's, it's almost like some of it seems like posturing to, to show that they still have a military or they still have influence on the world. But I think what I'm trying to get to is that when you talk about an invincible military, I don't want to see that tested. You know, if there's a change in the balance of powers, so be it. But I don't want to see a world where the US has to, on a global scale, prove the invisibility of its military. Because world wars to me is something that happened in the past. It's something in the history books. Even yesterday, my, me and my son were looking for a film to watch. He said, you know what, dad, I've never seen Saving Private Ryan. I was like, well, you need to see this film. And so I want him to understand the context of a world war. But to me, that's history, that's in the past. I don't want to live through a world war.

Sure.

And so if there is a changing of the world powers how's it going to happen? Or is there anything America as a country can do to warp back its current position? So there's a. Sorry, there's a lot there.

Yeah, there's a lot there. So a couple of thoughts on that. One is, have you been to Asia recently?

No, last time. When's the last time? I've been to. No, I haven't been for probably about four years. Three years.

Okay, all right, so. So you've been, you've been like. But you've been like three years ago. Right. So how do you. But which parts of Asia?

I've been to Cambodia, Vietnam, Thailand and Japan.

Okay, so. All right, so that, that. So that's a wide variation because Cambodia is a lot, you know, port. Right. But Vietnam is doing quite well nowadays. You can feel the energy on the ground. Right. And in general it's funny because I think there's asp. So the UK versus the US is tricky right now because the UK is along with Germany getting going to be hit by this upcoming FIAT crisis first and very hard. You know, living standards. I don't have to tell you guys, you're living, living through that now, but your infrastructure and other things are better. You have a greater sense, that's I think the sense in which you mean by maturity, where there is a greater sense of the public good. There's less acting out and crazy things happening in public. There is more of that than there was in the old posh Britain. But it's, it's not as bad as the fight club that a lot of, you know, unfortunately the, the U.S. has become. And you see that streamed on Twitter. But it's a ref. I don't think it's atypical. That's the unfortunate part, right? Like you see a lot of world star type fights among, you know, in many places that in the middle of San Francisco, in downtown, it's not like just a few people. It's actually a larger and larger thing in society. Now conversely, in Asia you see order for the most part, right. You don't see for the most part random fights. And in general, I think, I mean this is, this to me is like completely obvious, but it's also controversial, I guess. But let me say it anyway, right? If the 1800s was the European century and the 1900s was the American century, this is the Asian century and the Internet century, okay? Those are the things like what am I Very, very high level, what am I bullish on? Technology? India, China, Asia and individual Americans, like there's individual gray tribe Americans like tech Americans, who I still think are world class. What I'm bearish on is basically the Western world order, the closer you are to the G7 and so on. That's what I'm bearish on. Okay. And I can give a ton of graphs and so on on this, but. But that's a different world. Right. And one way of thinking about this is there are plenty of individual Indian people and Chinese people who did well over the 20th century. But did their countries, did their regions do well? Not really. They were under socialism, they're under communism. Wasn't a great century for Indian and Chinese people as a whole. You know, in terms of their country. Right. Individuals did fine. Some of them, if they could make it to stable jurisdictions. There were, you know, there was Singapore and there was Taiwan and there was Hong Kong and you know, it wasn't easy to found Taiwan, but, but, but broadly speaking, wasn't a great century for them. And I think that that's unfortunately what's going to happen with the G7 countries. It's almost like a flipping of the 20th century. This is my thesis of history running in reverse. Again, I'm not going to recap the whole TFTC podcast. You can listen to that. Okay, but now to your question is what do people do next? Again, I could be totally wrong. I'm just giving my worldview and this is how I see it. And you can totally ignore me and so and so forth. So with all those disclaimers and caveats up front, here's at least what, how I think about it, okay? Allocation, location, organization. Right? So allocation is kind of obvious in the sense if you're watching this podcast or whatever, you're in what, what episode are you guys on?

680.

680. Okay. If you're watching the 680th episode of a bitcoin podcast, you're probably, I mean, you're probably allocated somewhat into bitcoin. Okay. And if you're not, you should get on that or whatever. Right. Um, but allocation is kind of the easy part in some ways. But let me go, go a little more depth in that. If you saw what happened with the Russians or the Canadian truckers, that I think is just a preview of what's to come. I mean, think about the 2010s. Okay? At the beginning of the 2010s with social media, Twitter was called. They. They were calling themselves the Free Speech wing of the Free Speech Party. It was so outside of spec to believe that they do censorship, deplatforming all the kind of things that became not just standard, but endorsed by huge swaths of society towards the end of the 2010s. Okay? It was a total U turn on the social contract. You had gone and built up a bunch of followers within this network, Right. And then you'd built up political or social capital and then suddenly was weaponized against you. Right, okay. And there's reasons for that because in the middle of the 2010s, social media went from a completely unimportant thing, a fad, a bubble, et cetera, to threat to democracy. Right. And so because of that, well, to protect our democracy, we must restrict your speech. You know, like to protect the votes, we must restrict the upvotes. All right? Haha. And I, I think that's funny. And so, so there was a, there was an institutional defense and push on this. Okay. In the same way it took a long time for people to realize that the legacy media had been weaponized against them, that social media had been weaponized against them. People are going to need to learn faster that the legacy financial system is and will be weaponized against you. When I say weaponized against you, I mean all the stuff that sort of like in test, you know, freezing Russian assets, justifying seizure of Russian assets, freezing Canadian truckers unbanking, you know, dissidents unbanking, you know, sex workers and so on and so forth, it's happening actually across the political spectrum and it's basically that group that doesn't have social support that, that that financial system is no longer impartial towards them. Okay. And of course this Fed now I know they're calling it not a cbdc, but that's just a linguistic thing. It is centralized central bank digital control, even if it's not a central bank digital currency. Okay, that's crucial. So, so basically, you know, one way of seeing that, and I have, I have a visual on it, what they do is they often will change the words to make it seem okay, right? Oh, it's not a cbdc, therefore it's okay, you know, a CBDC is bad, it's not a cbdc, therefore it's good. Well actually here central bank digital control is not the same as cbdc. And I can just show you, just look at this visual, right? Can you see that, that, that image? Yeah. Okay. Every payment is centralized through FedNow. TADA. And what do they say? Zoom in on their own freaking documentation. Was it say the Fed now service validity payment message and sees that it complies with applicable controls. Okay, meaning what does that Mean that means that they are figuring out whether they can block the payment. Okay. And then over here, when you look at their, you know, marketing collateral for this, okay, what they talk about all the different kinds of transactions, person to person, consumer to business, etc. Here, let's focus on this. Consumer to government, meaning drain your account. Right? Government, consumer stimulus money. Right. So now I'm not saying these things can't be used for good, but this is, you know, they, they will be used for bad. Right? And it's, I mean it's kind of like, it's like a gun in the hands of a police officer versus the hands of a robber. It's a, it's a tool that can be used for good or evil. Right. I mean, there's many other things that are like that. But in theory, if you had a government that had earned a lot of trust, if it was, for example, like, I don't know, the, the US government of the mid mid century or something like that, right. Maybe you trust them with this. If you could leave with your money or something like that, you give just like you, you might put some money on a crypto exchange, they can freeze the funds, but you trust them for that time period with that fraction of money to taking a risk in return for the reward, the benefit. Okay. These are not like high trust societies anymore though, right? And so anyway, the point is the financial system is going to be weaponized and that's step two. So first the legacy media, social media is weaponized, then the financial system is weaponized and the third system is, will be, you know, unfortunately, probably military. Right? So it'll be media money, military. And how does that work? Well, media, they're lecturing you, they're telling you you're a bad person and so on. Now people don't trust the media. So if you notice that head of the hydra has kind of retreated, right? It's no longer hissing at people and trying to cancel them and going after them. Every day on Twitter there's a fallback order where that head of the hydra has retreated and there's like a period of like, I don't know, six months or whatever and suddenly another head of the hydra just comes hissing out and that's the Fed and the treasury and so on and so forth with the banking crisis. But much more is, is going to come in my view. If you, if you look at this, okay, and then if they can't do soft power and get you to submit that way, and if they can't do use the monetary system against you because you're out with Bitcoin or something else. Um, then it'll be hard power. Okay, so that is kind of how I see things playing out. Media, money, military. Because money is somewhere in between. It's not totally soft power. It's not convincing you, but it's not as in your face as hard power. The ability, you know, the ability to freeze somebody's account is not just trying to convince them otherwise or cancel them. Right? You are. You no longer can cancel them. And what's fundamentally happening here? You want to jump. You want to jump in.

Well, so, so what I'm thinking is what is, what is the decentralized counter attack? So, yeah, so when you talk about money, money, military and media, I think bitcoin, Second Amendment and Joe Rogan, that's part of it.

That's part of it, yes. I mean, that's like an American response. Right? But I think at least the way that I visualize this. Here's how I visualize this. You can take the domestic theater and the foreign theater, and you actually visualize them as the same thing. Why you visualize them on a network, okay? And I know it sounds trivial, but it's not. At the center of that network right now is called Blue Tribe. Okay? Blue Tribe is the US establishment, mostly Democrat, but also some Republicans. And Blue Tribe for the last 10 years has been at war with, with Red Tribe, the conservatives, Gray Tribe, the tech guys, okay? And those are different, right? The conservatives want, you know, a return. They want to go back to the past. The tech, tech guys, tech libertarians, want to push the future. Okay. The blue wants to hold on to the present. So it's the present against the past and the future. Right? And those that. That's actually an interesting way of thinking about. They're genuinely different, you know, groups. You can go to a four tribe or five tribe model, but let's say there's three tribes then outside, obviously Blue Tribe is at war with the Russians now. Hot war. They're at trade war with the Chinese. But they also don't like, really, there's a lot of criticism of India, Israel, you know, France, Hungary, and then even like lots of centrist members of Blue Tribe who may not be even red or gray. And so Blue Tribe is basically fighting a global battle against almost everybody that that's a threat to its power. Okay. And in 2021 or 2022, it kind of looked like it was winning all of those battles maybe, you know, until. Until basically about, let's say, late 2022, late 2022, it feels momentum has really shifted with lawn taking over. Twitter, that was a crucial, crucial thing, because now speech is free. And with speech free, you can feel the Overton window very rapidly moving in the other direction, like, with a velocity to it. Right. Things that you couldn't even say two years ago or three years ago, you can say and get much, much more support for it. And, you know Timur Kuran, Public Lies, Private Truths. Are you familiar with that?

I know the title. I don't remember his name.

Well, this is a good book. Okay. It's worth reading. It's basically about. Here, let me pull this up. So Public Lies, Private truths, Or sorry, I remembered it wrong, it's Private Truths, Public Lies, the Social consequences of Preference falsification. Okay, so preference falsification means people believe something in private, but they say something else in public, and they don't know what other people believe. And, you know, the. And so because of that, every people don't. They can't align and coordinate properly because the control of speech and beliefs in the public square doesn't. You know, they. They have a hidden belief that is not the same as public belief. Right. This is what happened in the Soviet Union once they freed up speech, once Mikhail Gorbachev did glasnost and allowed free speech and he allowed free markets with perestroika, then everybody could. Could. Could speak freely and find out, oh, you don't trust regime. I don't trust regime either. Oh, my God. Well, he doesn't trust regime. And so there was a preference cascade, and then the whole thing fell apart within a few years. Okay. And I think that, you know, Elan, Twitter, and social media more generally is digital glasnost, and cryptocurrency is digital perestroika.

I know. I absolutely love that take. There was a moment I was out walking, I listened to that, and I paused it, and I just had this moment of like, whoa, Balaci, man, my mind is blown right now. No, I thought it was brilliant. It was a genuinely brilliant. I don't know if it's your take or something.

I think it's my take.

A man very powerful.

What did you like about that? Because the thing is, many people don't know what glasnost and perestroika are, so they don't have the emotional resonance of that. Right. So you want to explain that? Go ahead.

It was just the fact that you. Well, it was two things. Firstly is that you created that comparison between the U.S. essentially, the fall of the U.S. empire and the Russian the fall of the Soviet empire, which it's hard to. If you try and compare the US Empire and the Soviet empire, it's quite difficult comparison to make because you're talking about one which was a closed empire, which was communists, which had full control over the population. And then what you've talked about is like a Western liberal democracy. But actually it is completely true because we have a different kind of restricted speech. There are views I hold that I don't say publicly because there is a career risk to me across my football club and my, and my business. And it's not that I'm scared to have those conversations, it's just to have those conversations. You need to be nuanced about it and have the time to make them. So there are certain times where I hold back on my views. I'm like, well, I don't have complete free speech. And then it's similar on the financial side of things, is that you, you know, we believe we have free money, but we don't have free money. We have a collection of IOUs. And so it was just that analogy which just, I don't know, it was a real moment of like, whoa, okay, I think I know where we are right now.

Yeah, exactly. See. So to just to extend your points there, what the west had. So obviously there's dissimilarities between the US and ussr, Many dissimilarities, okay. Communism, capitalism, gulags and so on. In general, I think the Western side was better during the Cold War. I don't think any of that is super controversial. However, there are actually similarities. And then let me go to the speech point. Both of them were multi ethnic ideological empires. People don't realize maybe the extent to which the Soviet Union was a multi ethnic thing because they say the Russians, right. But they have people of Turkic ancestry and Central Asian ancestry and Europeans and, and so on and so forth. All as like Soviet citizens. Right. So it was like, I mean, if you think about it spans like seven time zones or something like that and it has like Central Asia and whatnot. So it was, it was also a multi ethnic ideological empire knit together by essentially a proposition of communism, an abstract creed that evangelized it all over the world. Much like the west evangelizes democracy, the east evangelizes, evangelized communism. Okay. And also had nuclear weapons and thought it was a, you know, ideological showdown between good versus evil and all of these kinds of things. Right. Moreover, what has happened more recently is that there's, there's kind of A holiday, you know, a holiday from history. A honeymoon in the 90s. And maybe the, maybe you just say it. The 90s, okay? Uh, and beginning with the war on terror, the US establishment felt more and more and more under threat again, and under threat from, you know, first terrorists and then domestic, you know, people and then foreigners again and so on and so forth. And so the general direction I see them going, and I think, I think more, many things in the world are going in this way is more power over fewer people, okay? That say DC is actually gaining way more power. It is the power to freeze your funds and eavesdrop and so on, but only for those people who don't get out of the blue network. If you get into the red network or the gray network or your foreign country and so on and so forth, there are more and more places in the world that are outside of the blue network where you. Yeah, it's a different ruler. They can, you know, it's got different rules and a different ruler. It's not all positive. So you're going to have trade offs. Right. But this concept of blue receding, but also becoming more authoritarian within the blue terrain, I think is a useful metaphor, right? Not a metaphor, it's a useful visualization, right? Because it reconciles two things that they are becoming more authoritarian, but they're also losing soft power and they're losing people in the consequence. Okay, As a consequence, on, on the speech thing, I think a crucial thing that I, that I had to understand was like, oh, why are, why are we complaining about speech? Why are we complaining about speech being restricted? Well, one way of thinking about it is that during the, basically, I mean, most of the Cold war and the 80s and the 90s and early 2000s, freedom of speech in the west was an abstraction because you didn't really have it that, say you could talk to your neighbor, but you need a radio license or a TV license or a, you know, newspaper, you need to inherit a newspaper. The cost of the printing presses and all this type of stuff, the trucks to distribute the physical paper, that was all so substantial that, you know, you, you didn't practically have broadcast ability, right? And so your opinion didn't matter. You had freedom of speech, but who cared, right? You could talk to your neighbor. And this is. Have you heard the term, like a beggar's democracy? No, but you could maybe immediately get it. Okay, because you're a beggar. Yeah. You can say whatever you want, but if you, you know, you don't have any impact on what you're saying, right? So it wasn't just freedom of speech. It was the cost of speech, of practical speech was actually very high. Right. Then the Internet brought that down and gave all these people social media accounts, and at first, they were just used for tweeting your breakfast and Facebook friending and so on and so forth. All through the 2000s, even as late as 2013, journalists were writing why Facebook will never make a significant profit. This whole Internet era is actually very new. It's just the last 10 years. Okay. And it was really only after 2016 that was like maybe the first Twitter election, because it's really Twitter that elected Trump, Twitter that elected Bolsonaro, Twitter that elected Orban, and Twitter that did Brexit. Right. Twitter was upstream of all of those things because Twitter essentially meant, you may think these are bad things, you may think are good things. I'm just saying that Trump himself is a cause of techno, is caused by technological change. Right. Because he could get his voice out, he could build his follower base, he could tweet, disintermediated, and that was a totally new thing over the last 70 years of media consolidation or whatever. That. That was a breakthrough.

A.

Okay. It was kind of a return to the past when it was easier to speak, you know, outside of the mass media era. It's like more like the 1800s than it is mid 20th century.

Well, we're seeing it again. We're seeing it again right now with Robert Kennedy. Yes, I know he's. I know he's a Kennedy, which would give him a platform, but he. We're seeing a rapid growth in the awareness of him, of his views. And, you know, I don't agree with everything he says, but he's certainly an interesting character. But he's caused a social media storm. He's spreading like wildfire through social media because he has a message that resonates with people, and he has a. He has a delivery method.

Yeah. And I mean. I mean, like, you know, I tweeted a bit about rfk. I was on this. This Twitter spaces with him and Elon and Sachs a few weeks ago. And, you know, certainly there's many positions of his that I disagree with, but fundamentally, he's not like a hater. Right. That, like, that's. It sounds like such a. Like a low bar, but it's actually an important thing. You just don't get the sense that he, you know, wants to use, like, the. The state against the other people, like a billy club, you know what I mean? Which is a huge part of the tribal warfare in, in the US right now. Right. I think that's part of the appeal.

Is he great?

No, it's interesting. He's difficult to classify. Right. He's kind of at the intersection of blue, red and gray because clearly he's like, you know, Democratic, you know, like one of the biggest names ever in Democrat politics, basically. So he has a built in blue base. You know, there's a lot of people who just vote on name recognition or what have you. Right. And actually, in fact many of his positions are conventional Democrat positions. But certainly he has Republican support and certainly he has tech support, so to speak. Tech support.

Lol.

Right. So. So that's interesting. I mean, but. But the thing is that I'm less, in a sense, I'm less interested in US presidential politics than I ever was because I feel the. It's. It's this weird transitional era where it's like being interested in the Soviet Union. It's still there. Right. But will it be there in a few years? I don't know. And what I mean by that is. So let me explain that because I know that's a lot right there. The financial situation right now. I kind of flapped my arms a few weeks or months ago to try to get people's attention on it and maybe we should have a conference or something like that. But it's so in insanely serious that I'm not. The best way I could communicate in words is the Wy Coyote thing, you know where like Wy Coyotes walks off a cliff and he just hasn't looked down. He hasn't seen that there is just the, the air below. Okay. To, to give you a sense of that, did you see this Financial Times article on the Bundes bank self bailout?

No.

Oh, okay, here we go. Ready? This is all in financial ease. Okay, but here, take a look at this. So you know the Bundes bank is Germany Central bank. Right? And here. All right, all right. So, okay. Bundes bank may need recapitalization to cover bond buying losses. Okay, first of all, just say this is saying Germany Central bank, the number four economy in the world may need recapitalization means an infusion of new money. The central bank has run out of money, huh? To cover bond buying losses. Wait a second. Aren't bonds supposed to be the safe asset? How do you have such massive losses on them? All right, and fundamentally, you know, whether this is recognized in three months or six months or 12 months, I don't know how long they're going to kick the can but eventually you're going to hear that treasuries were the new toxic waste, that bonds blew up the economy. That the thing that everybody thought was the safe asset actually turned out to be the risky asset. Just like in 2008 when the mortgages were sold as AAA or mortgage backed securities were sold as AAA and they actually weren't. And everybody who bought them was a sucker. Everybody who bought long term government bonds in 2021, they were devalued in 2022, and that's why banks are popping up dead in 2023. It has nothing to do with like tech investments or anything like that. It's everything to do with basically the, the massive and rapid hike in interest rates. And you know, some of these paragraphs here in this article are so amazing, okay. And they're just written in this financial lease. You can, by the way, if you want to, if you want to believe my interpretation, take this and put this into chat GPT and you ask it if it's a reasonable interpretation. Okay? Do you see this paragraph here? Okay. Basically, if you take that paragraph from the Financial Times, uh, depending on how closely you nitpick it, I think it's basically diplomatic understatement as to, I mean, you know how Milton Friedman used to say that if communists were running, you know, the Sahara, it would run out of sand. Right. You have the central bank running out of money. Okay, but right, this is like, it's actually insane that that's happened, right, and.

And scary in Europe with it being Germany.

Yeah. Because they're the most reliable, right? Yeah, they're like the center of the whole thing. And of course, you know, the British were also known for many generations for their financial acumen, Right? You know, I mean, you guys were like the inventors of the Joint Stock Corporation and all kinds of stuff, right? So if like the UK and Germany, which are pretty important engines of the west, are conking out, right? And of course you just spent like 800 billion euros on the energy crisis and what have you. Point is, I could go, I could. I actually did a whole PIN tweet on this. You know, if you look at my PIN tweet now, like I burned a million to tell you they're printing trillions, right? I go through a bunch of headlines on this. The thing is that actually, Let me, let me actually give you an analogy with the financial crisis, okay? You're, you're watching the Big Short, of course.

Love that film.

Okay, so it's worth going back and watching the Big Short Margin Call Inside Job Too big to Fail. They're good movies, they all give a different view, but they don't actually give the most important view. So the big short is the view of the outsiders who are shorting the system. Margin Call is a view from within a bank where they're like offloading these assets and trying to screw somebody by selling it as if it was valid, valuable and not telling them it's not valuable. Inside Job is kind of like a left wing argument for more regulation and so and so forth. And then Too Big to Fail is like a center left west wing ification of the whole thing where the heroic government comes in to try and put the, the whole system together. And Even the bank CEOs are portrayed as mostly good and just like there's one bad apple like the Lehman guy failing. Right. What isn't portrayed is that the government actually caused a financial crisis. Okay, and you know, what is that? So basically I'll show you just two articles and you can sometimes get, I mentioned this on the, on the other pod and then we'll get to kind of next steps, but let's see, here we go. So sometimes if you read both the right and the left, you can get stereo vision where often they're criticisms of each other are correct. Right, so here is NYT article. Okay. From 2008, right. When the financial crisis was still Bush drive for homeownership fueled housing bubble. How about that? Okay. Part of it is encouraging, you know, working together as a nation to encourage folks to own their own home. Essentially they pushed a bunch of policies that got loans to folks who couldn't pay them back. And they justified in the name of like anti redlining and so on and so forth and, and this basically blew up the whole thing.

Right, but hold on, hold on, hold on. But that, that started under Clinton.

Yeah, exactly. The Clinton era roots of the financial crisis. Yeah, see, so I got you Boro, I got you.

Yeah, they started under Clinton that, you.

Know, so you didn't see the other tab? You didn't see the other tab here I just went to the other tab. The Clinton era roots of the financial crisis. Right, that was the other tab I brought up. Okay, right, so, so it's both. Right, it's basically, you know, it was a project, it was started under Clinton, continued under Bush and you know, made 28 million high risk loans to be made because the regulations were essentially they thought that it was a good thing to get people of color or people who had not previously gotten loans into the system and they justified Getting somebody into debt as like a moral imperative. Okay? Now a debt that both sides, one guy can't pay is actually bad for both sides because, you know, the lender is booking it as if it's this great asset and it's not. And the guy who can't pay is having their wages garnished. Right? So it was. And then of course, every third party who, you know, kind of thought this part of the economy was doing well is also screwed. So it actually screws everybody. Right? And this is a consequence of having like just fundamentally wrong beliefs and then justifying them of, you know. No, no, no, you, you must, you know, want to redline people. Point is, that was a bipartisan failure and to my knowledge, there hasn't been a movie made on it. It's only blamed the banks. It's only blamed the. And to be clear, sure, the banks have tons of, tons of blame, okay? But they're fundamentally downstream of the central actor, which is the government that put the regulations that made the banks do these things.

I mean, it'd be difficult to make, it'd be difficult to make a film that at any point would blame Clinton or a Democrat era because essentially Hollywood is blue.

True, but, but we have AI now.

True, true, but like the, you could.

Do it totally, you could totally do it on the Internet now, I think. And, and to be clear, it's bipartisan. But yes, you're right. Part of it is because Democrats, you know, Hollywood is mostly Democrat and wouldn't want to put something out there. But, but now Hollywood doesn't even matter. What does Hollywood make? Hollywood doesn't make serious movies. What's it making? Superman 19. Go ahead.

Yeah, Marvel. It's making Marvel.

Yeah, yeah, it's all comic book stuff, right. So they have just abandoned the field and serious content has moved to the Internet. And now with AI, you can do reasonably high production value things. I mean, probably just from news articles. See, that's the thing is often the story is there, right? It's just the emphasis. And what is gets repeated and echoed down through the, like, you know, you're not hearing about this constantly, that you still remember the financial crisis maybe a little bit. Just, just kind of within the range of what people remember. But, but it's, but you go and watch those movies. The reason I say to watch those movies is you're like, oh yeah, those bankers, they really did screw everybody. Right? Because we're now 15 years in and people are like, why wouldn't I trust the banks with my money? Like, you remember the financial crisis, all the same, people are still in power. Okay, like, you know, for example, nobody went to jail. Yeah, there's one guy who went to jail. But, but, yeah, but the reason for that, by the way, is the school of fish strategy in my view. I mean, like, you know, basically, what's his name? They got guys like Bernie Madoff, but it wasn't really housing related. So do you see this? October 20th, Yellen feared housing bust but did not raise public alarm. Okay. She was president of the Federal Reserve bank of San Francisco. A massive real estate bubble was building in the vast nine state area that overseas her staff alerted her, the banks were investing. But she conveyed two starkly different messages. So the point is like, you know, she's the Treasury Secretary now, right? She understood that, that if you're like a major financial regulator, you can't come out and say, hey, we all screwed it up. Hey, you know, we crashed the economy again, we destroyed the economy again. Right. Like you can't say that. And actually, you know, let me show you an article that I haven't discussed. I mean, I published it, but I just hadn't discussed it on video. I'm going to show you this one. All right. I think this is a really important article. And so it's called too fake to tell. Get it? Like too big to fail. Right? Too fake to tell. US Government stats aren't reliable. More importantly, neither are US Government bonds. Okay, so you can read this. And it's kind of about how, you know, Sachs and I were basically like skeptical of the jobs report from a while back. There's a whole thing on social media. People lost their minds. Oh my God. How dare you question US government statistics, especially by like making your own personal observations. Don't you know these are brave civil servants, you're anti American, blah, blah, blah. But of course, public trust in government is at historic lows. And you know, people believe that news organizations mislead them. So you want to actually be able to look at it and then, you know, you can talk about the jobs data specifically. That, that doesn't matter to me that much. Other than even the defenders of the jobs data said it's hard to get accurate real time data on something as complex as a country's job market. Which is why we shouldn't put too much stock in one month or even one quarter of data. Yeah, but that's actually, that data is being used by the Fed to set interest rates. But here's the point though, right? I'm, you know, the trust issue generally I'm just going to go through, just to give a sense of all of the lies of the financial system over the last 20 years. Okay, so here is Bernanke and actually, let me, let me. I mean, I'm going to screen share in a different way so I can just show slide by slide. Okay, Bernanke on the great moderation. Right? This is 2004, right? The great moderation, one of the most striking features has been a substantial decline in macroeconomic volatility. You know, this has reduced benefit. You know, reduced macroeconomic volatility has, has numerous benefits. In other words, we've solved macro. We're never going to have recessions or anything like that anymore. A few years before the financial crisis, okay, these are, these are. They actually think this, that macro as they do it is a science, even though they can't do replicate experiments. Here's Cheney around the same time saying deficits don'. Matter. Okay? Deficit spending can go on forever. I just did the Bush and Clinton helping blow up the mortgage bubbles, right? Here is Bernanke in April 2008 saying, you know, we might have a, a mild recession. Okay, April 10, 2008. What happened a few months later? They acknowledged it was a global financial crisis that required the largest bailouts in U.S. history. They either can't forecast or they won't forecast. Right? Just like the Yellen thing. Here are the ratings agencies in 2008. Okay? And why did they do such a bad job rating, you know, subprime securities? They just completely failed. They, you know, issued AAA ratings to these things. Right. Why'd they do it? Well, partly because of corporate pressure because, you know, they wouldn't get business from raters, but partly because of government pressure because here we saw what would happen if you did downrate things from AAA. You know what happens when you downgrade things from AAA? The US government sues you S&P. In 2011, they downgraded US debt from AAA. And basically they said that the US government had retaliated against them for stripping the country of its triple A credit rating. So that shows you why the ratings are screwed. Because all these government agents will yell at you or even sue you for billions of dollars if you say that their debt isn't perfect. Okay, here's Bernanke in the 2000 and tens explaining why QE is not money printing. Okay, this was their narrative then. And then here is Jerome Powell saying simply flooded the system with money. Yes, we did. That's another way to think about it. We did. Where does it come from? Do you just print it?

We print it digitally.

So we, you know, we, as a central bank, we have the ability to create money digitally, and we do that by buying treasury bills or bonds. Right. So they denied that it was printing during the thing. Okay. And then years later, you know, Powell's like, shrug. Yes, we did. We print the money digitally. Right after Bernanke saying it wasn't money printing. All right, here is Greenspan saying again, you know, basically saying, you know, that the. The US can pay any debt it has because we can always print money to do that. So there is zero probability of default. The United States can pay any debt it has because we can always print money to do that. So there is zero probability of default. You know, and then you can see. It's funny when he says this because you'll see the expression on this guy Austin Goolby's face. He says, we can print the money. Who cares?

And he's like, yeah, look at that face.

Look at that face. He. Because he's. He's like a slightly more. I mean, he's also like on the Federal Reserve Board and so on, and he's like, I wouldn't say it quite that way. You're saying it too explicitly. Right. Okay, here are the projections. Whenever the macro guys make projections right here, can you see that unemployment rate with and without the recovery plan?

Yep.

Okay, so here they said the recovery plan is going to reduce unemployment rate. It's going to recover like this, the thick blue line. And they said without the recovery plan, it's going to be the light blue line. But actually it was the red dots.

Okay.

Okay, go ahead.

I was gonna say all the. So all this lying, because I don't believe it's. They're just completely terrible at making projections. Is all this line a little bit like parenting in that you kind of tell white lies to your children because you don't want them to know the. The reality. Because the reality is, is sometimes a little bit too scary. Like, if my daughter starts asking me about the Ukraine, Russia, war, I won't tell her everything, you know, And. And only if she gets older, maybe I will. But, like, you keep things from children. You tell. Take these white lies. Are they almost treating us like children? Just. Or is it. Is it something more evil? What do you think's going on?

It's a combination of several things at the same time. And by the way, I actually want to go through all of these, because this is. No, I'll answer your question, then let's resume going through all these because the full scope of 20 years of total financial deception, I don't think people have actually seen it all in one place like this. This itself is a useful clip that you could probably put out there because it's just the same people, Bernanke and Yellen and Powell and the FDIC and the Fed and so on. It's not like a short term thing. It is 20 years of like complete rug pulls. Right? This is the thing. Like all these bitcoin maximals, by the way, just. And like come to your question, they're all like shitcoin, shitcoins. I'm like, the ultimate ShitCoin is the US treasury bond. Right? And you need to be putting a lot more. Like if they're not saying Fed and Treasury and specifics 50 times a day, they're basically. I, it's like, I don't know, it's like, it's like complaining about some like some petty vandal when your country's ruled by the cartels or something like that. Right? It's a total. Go ahead. But anyway, coming back to your point, so are they. It is a combination of all of the above. Okay. Because I actually say this in, in. In this. In this too fake to tell article. Right. So what's going on? Right. 20 years of economic fakery. It's a mix of error, revision, spin, tribalism, pseudoscience and outright fraud. Okay? Yeah, so sometimes it's like error where they're actually making like a technical projection, like the stimulus impact. Sometimes they make an error and they revise it and they say, oh, you know, hey, we make errors but we fix it, so therefore we're good. So first of all, you're terrible for questioning it and then they fix it. And then you're terrible for saying that they wouldn't fix it, but. But they wouldn't fix it without you saying something. Okay. Sometimes it's spin, sometimes it's tribalism that the debt ceiling doesn't matter or whatever. Sometimes it's Keynesian pseudoscience, like the Great Moderation, the AAA securities were outright fraud and the current fiat crisis is all of. Or the transitory inflation which basically helped cause this is all of the above. It's error, revision, spin, tribalism. So these. It's kind of like the, you know, the Keynesians are like the communists, right, where they have a pseudoscience which they believe in, which gives incorrect predictions but maintains their power. It's not about making right predictions for them, it's about political power. Have you noticed all these people who got the Forecast wrong are still in political power, right? They don't pay a personal price. If as an investor you make a wrong prediction, you lose money. When Yellen and Powell and Bernanke make wrong predictions, everybody else loses money. They don't personally lose money, right? So one aspect of it is they're just caught in this stupid Keynesian pseudoscience. Another aspect is they've got political motivations. Another aspect is exactly what you just said, which is that they are like, what's going to call it? They think it's a noble lie. Okay? And you're a great example of this. A simple one is during the pandemic where at first people stopped buying masks, right? Masks don't work. And they were lying and saying this because they thought, they thought they needed the masks for, you know, hospital personnel only. Why they didn't just say that masks work. But we're going to ask you to not buy them because we need them for first responders or whatever. In the early days of the pandemic, when we didn't know how severe the virus is going to be and, or it was actually most severe because it's hitting those people who were the least, you know, the least naturally immune at the beginning, right. They could have said that. Instead they lied. They said masks don't work. And then masks became mandatory. Right. And there's so many things like that where it's like a, it's like a mustache twirling, transparent lie. Okay. And, but you know, it actually reminds me of, it's like the souls and it's in thing right here on. But this is the state of the regime that we're at now, right? We know that they are lying. They know they're lying.

Yeah, I know this.

They even know that we know that they're lying. We also know that they know we know they're lying. But they are still lying. Right? Right. That's it. Right. Like so, you know, it's complicated because they're lying to themselves or lying to others. And then what happens is, and this is a crucial thing, they're not individuals. You know, the NPC thing, you know, if you heard the NPC meme, the NPC meme actually, it cuts them deep, but it actually is also a big part of their strength. Why Another way of thinking of the NPC is they're part of a school of fish. And a while ago I talked about this actually relates to what we do next. Right, so I'll explain. The school of fish strategy, right, is basically just repeat what everyone else is saying if it's proven wrong, well, everyone was wrong together. And so you can't be individually punished. So you basically, it's, it's a guaranteed way of achieving a mediocre outcome, right? So two of this, a few years ago school of fish strategy repeat what everyone's saying. It's proven wrong. Everyone was wrong together. The establishment's consensus algorithm, just like, you know, bitcoin as a consensus algorithm. This how they come to consensus. It works until falsified by the outside world. Right? And the only times, if you think about this strategy, it works incredibly well. This is how all these people, you know, promoted the Iraq war. And they're all wrong together. So there's no one person to single out. Maybe Bush, okay, like one guy maybe gets a ceremonial whack. But all the same people are still in the Department of Defense and the foreign policy establishment, and nothing happens to them really. The blob continues. Right? And when you think about this, it's so deep, because this is why singling out Fauci or some journalist doesn't matter. Because it's like an organism that has a thousand or ten thousand heads. It's a, it's a, it's a network. It's a, it's a blue network of establishment figures. And they all say the same thing at the same time. And then they switch to saying something different. Inflation is a right wing conspiracy. Inflation is transitory. We were always fighting inflation. Right? Masks don't work. Masks are mandatory. Right. The Iraq war is ridiculously important and WMDs are in rock. Okay? There were no WMDs, but we, we meant well, right? You can come up with 500 other examples like this, okay? And the issue is that you, as an individual, if you go and you take a dissident position, you can be singled out, right? If you are an individual. And so this is actually why, you know, one of the big themes of, you know, the network state book is it's not just about centralization and decentralization. You know what the most important and most unpopular word in the world is right now, in my view, Toby? Recentralization. Okay, okay. Recentralization. Why? Because the people who are centralized, who run the current establishment, say, why would you want to bother with recentralizing? That seems like the new boss, same as the old boss. You know, you're not even making a moral argument against, you know, Right. And the decentralizing guys will say the same thing. Why would, why would we ever want to recentralize? We just saw the problems of a Centralized system and so on and so forth, right? But if you think of like my helical theory of history, right, where, yeah, there's some things that run in cycles, you know, rise and fall of civilizations, but technological progress is kind of being ascending. You know, the torch, it's like the Olympic torch. It's like, you know, the Indians invent zero and the Arabs invent algebra, and then like there's Isaac Newton and then the US Puts a man on the moon and now like China and India are rising and so on and so forth, right? It's like an Olympic torch getting past. And you know, even as one civilization falls, it can write down and advance science and technology enough that there is, there's, there's a genuine sec. Secular rise long term, right? So the, the reason I say that is if you, if you think about that in the context of societies, you've got a society and it goes through a cycle of rise and fall and collapse, but then you need to build a new society and that'll also rise and fall and collapse, and then you build a new one and a new one. And it's circular in one sense. You're coming back to where you started, but it's progress in another because ancient Rome was then exceeded by Britain, was exceeded by the US and then will be exceeded by whatever the successor is. And what that means is another word for recentralization is tribalization. Find your tribe, build your tribe. This is a huge part of what I'm working on and working on next and explicitly. So now, now it's okay. We just finished the introduction to the, to the podcast. Okay, now let me, let me get to the meat of it. Right, So I mentioned earlier, allocation, location, organization. Okay? So allocation is just take care of your financial position. The reason I mentioned all the weaponization of the financial system is I think the closer you are to blue states, the more will be seized. And what I mean by that is like your, your stocks on an exchange can be frozen and they can be sold for you. Just like, for example, in Robinhood, they just market soldier Solana, right? Russians, they just free froze their assets. Any ledger you don't control, those assets aren't yours. That includes, by the way, real estate and blue states that could just get seized, okay? Any asset which, you know, you can't, either you have to carry it on your person or it's on a ledger that you trust, like Bitcoin, right? Or it's on a fiat ledger that you trust in a country that you trust. Right. For some people that's like a red state, potentially, if it's got its own ledger. For some people it's like Hungary or Poland. For some people it's India. Okay. You know, because I saw for the first time Indian founders actually going back to India and storing their money in Indian banks after the SUV thing, something I had never seen in 40 plus years on this planet, were very sophisticated Indian tech guys who it's their entire treasuries at risk making the calculation that Indian banks were more stable than American banks with all their downsides. Right.

Crazy.

That's insane. Okay. For, you know, like. And by the way, India's payment system has actually gotten quite good now with UPI and other kinds of things. But that's quite a flippening. Right. And so, and, and that propagates out to the rest of society because you have all these tech founders who are the early adopters. Early adopters. Right. You know, they're the ones who influence all kinds of other people. You know, think about it. Just, I mean, you're kind of. You're a founder even if you're not a tech founder. I'm sure people in your family or immediate network will kind of ask you for tech support kind of things and what to do and so on. So they're very influential nodes that have flipped in this way. Right. So allocation is just getting as far away from blue controlled ledgers as possible. Blue states as possible. That's related to location. Right. Getting away from blue states. The more G7 controlled it is, probably the worse off it's going to be with the center of like, you can kind of think of D.C. and New York and so on. San Francisco may being like the worst hit. And then you can go away from that in different directions. You can go from the. In terms of red states, you can go for that in terms of India, you can go away from that in terms of. There's Chinese immigrants who have gone back to China and so on. Right. And you can go away from that in terms of Bitcoin. And I know you're. There's. And you go away from it in terms of blank. The coin that Shalom mentioned on your guy's pod. We're fine. Right. Point being that there are other. There are other avenues. Right. People will move in different directions and that gets you to the third, which is organization. Right. So allocation is purely financial location. You start thinking about physical risk. And this, by the way, is so different. 2023. And what's to come is, I think, very different than 2008. In that sense, because 2008 was just a financial crisis and the central bank was able to print and bail out the banks with this fiat crisis. There's no other level to bail it out. That's why it's a self bailout, right? It is a mass seizure of assets. It makes the entire hidden part of the government come out and show its truncheon, right? Because what is inflation? Inflation is dilution. Inflation is dilution is taxation. It's basically taking some portion of your assets invisibly. Like for example, if we all had a hundred dollars, the three of us, and then the government prints another $300, we've all been diluted down 50%. You have 50% of your purchasing power, right? But you don't see it. What happens instead is the government, with that new 300 starts buying stuff and then your prices go up as a consequence because they're crowding you out, right? They're outbidding you, but it's not visible to you. And in fact, actually, did I show you that graph on who paid for 2008? This is a really important graph.

No, show me it.

So this I also talked about in the Marty podcast, but I think it's, it's one of these things which is so important. Okay, so did Republicans pay for 2008? And let me just explain this graph, okay? And there's an animated version of it, all right? But basically this is US Congressional districts, okay? Each thing there represents a little patch of land, okay? And, and this is their gdp. So this is like a poor district, this is a rich district. And in 2008, the solid outline, okay, if you see the solid outline, right, you can see that the outline of red and Blue in 2008 is very similar, right? Here are some of the poorer districts, here are some of the richer districts. And in 2008, blue and red tribe were equally matched, right, in terms of their, their, their district's wealth. Okay? But by 2018, the solid dots, you know, are the 2018 distribution. Blue had become much wealthier than red, okay? The median for the Blue distribution by 2018 is like, you know, 50 billion GDP. And the median for the blue distribution is somewhere around 30 billion GDP. And all of the richest districts are blue. How did that happen? Well, all the printed money went to blue regions first. And because they were coastal regions, they were connected to the banks and so on. And the bankers knew people on the east coast more than they did in Oklahoma or whatever. So that Oklahoma cashier was silently diluted and everybody thought they were doing A good thing at this time. The Fed saved the world and the financial crisis and so on and so forth. And basically what it was was just this gigantic tax on Republicans, but it was invisible. Right. And now, of course, people will deny this. Right. Because basically, maybe it's just a coincidence that 2008-2016 was a Democrat administration and during this period, Republicans were pauperized.

So. So the Cantillan Effect isn't just the. Well, there's a political tribal aspect of the Cantillon effect.

Exactly.

Yeah.

This is the tribal Cantillon effect. That's exactly.

Yeah. Wow.

Holy crap. Right?

Yeah.

Because this is how. I don't know if you remember this, but 20 something years ago, when I was growing up, at least you remember how like the stereotype of Republicans was that they were suit and tie wearing tos. Right. They were like, you know, upper class or. And the Democrats were the fight. The power rebels or whatever. And now it. The Republican is wearing like a trucker hat and they're poor. How did that happen? Right. Well, in 10 years they went from essentially parody with Democrats to much, much poorer. And maybe it's just a coincidence that this happened, but it certainly does seem like the cost of the print was imposed on the political opposition in a deniable and invisible way, unconscious even to those doing the imposing. Okay, and now here's another version of this. Basically there's another group that got hit by the print. You know who that was?

The poorest.

Yes. Right. And strictly the Arabs. Right. Arab Spring was. Was triggered by food prices and all of these riots and revolutions and all of this uncertainty. You know, countries are still in chaos ten years after the Arab Spring. Right. Ten years of war. I mean, people are like, oh, the world didn't end after the financial crisis. Well, it did for them. Right. The cost of that inflation, the level. Because you're seizing wealth and now somebody who was able to have their daily bread now can't. Right. That cost of that inflation was. And. And how much of it caused the Arab Spring? The whole. I mean, it's not like we've got a ledger where we can track everything. It's not like Bitcoin where it's all public. Right. You have to just kind of guess at the impact. And it's like. It's like tidal waves moving on an ocean of money. It's really hard to see this stuff. Right. Still, if even 20% of the Arab Spring was caused by the prince of 2008, that's 20% of a lot of deaths and a lot of chaos and a lot of instability. That's guys with AKs, you know, on trucks. Because society is broken down in some places, right? So that's why it's not correct to say 2008. It was fine, you know, not a big deal. It result. It was basically something where Republicans disproportionately paid for it, seemingly, and many Arabs paid for it with their lives. Right? And so now the question is, will 2023 be like that or will it be different?

Well, it's like the end of the Big Short, right? I've referred to this a bunch of times in the shows. The really interesting thing about the Big Short is it kind of romanticizes the financial crisis. It makes it exciting. It's like there's a guy listening to Mastodon, playing his drum kit, figuring out where to short the market. There's people looking at opportunities and they make it entertaining with, you know, Margot Robbie. Margot Robbie in a bath, drink champagne. But then you get that very end moment and you see that family pack up their car because they've lost their home.

Right?

But actually there's another layer to that. You could have also add another layer where you show people in the Middle east losing their lives because of this.

Exactly. That's.

Tell the real story.

That's right, exactly. And that movie should be made, right? Like that this thing is. Is still within our memory, but it's 15 years ago. And. And it's, you know, like the thing about Twitter and the thing about our modern environment is that's like 3,000 current things ago. Do you know what I mean? Right. Like what happened just this last week? I mean, the Russian coup or mutiny or whatever is already sort of receding in. In, you know, like this massive world. It's like the dopamine shock from that is already receding. And people are like, oh, yeah, that thing which is like this huge event, right? So this, like the memory of this is like a distant memory, but it should be brought up. And here's the big thing. So there's a big chart, but also margin call. The margin call mindset is when there's only 50 bucks on hand to pay 100 bucks in debts, when the Bundesbank has negative equity and its liabilities exceed its assets. We should put that know part of what that means. Then you should withdraw first. It's. It's Uncle Sam Bankman Freed. Right, I mentioned that before. But basically it's like their liabilities exceed their assets. And it's a huge, complicated financial system where they're denying it Denying it, denying it. It's just like lockdown. They denied it, denied it. No, it's not going to happen. Blah, blah. Everybody in California is under house arrest. That came in 45 days, by the way, from when all kinds of people were swarming me and attacking me on Twitter in like January 2020. Right. To total lockdown of the largest state in the union by like early March of, of 2020. That came in less than two months. That huge transition, right. And they were denying it until they did it. This is actually, you know, Jean Claude Junker, the Euro European banker? You know his big saying.

No.

Do you know this guy? Have you heard of him before?

Another name? Yeah, of course.

Yeah. He says is. And this is kind of relates to your earlier point also. When it becomes really serious, you have to lie.

Sake. Well, yeah, but it is that point. It is that point because they kind of. But, but then they do question though, Balaji, is that, you know, you talked about two decades of lies, but is it really always been lies? But two decades ago we had an Internet which could fact check and we had social media that could start fact checking people. Is it just the fact that it's getting harder for them to lie? Because we can, you know, it's like we have community notes now. I mean, what a wild world where we see the President of the USA having community notes against him.

I know.

Explaining that he's lying. I mean, I was talking about it with Danny yesterday. We had Rishi Sunak in the UK came out this week. Because interest rates again are so high, lots of people's mortgages are coming up for renewal. If they're going from previous 2% to now 6.5% variable rates. Some people cannot afford their mortgages. It's a massive increase in their payments. And they were questioning, will there be help for homeowners. And he came out and said, no, our job is to halve inflation because if we halve inflation, that will lead to more. That will give people more money in their pocket. So I was like, that is a straight up lie. Reducing inflation doesn't mean more money in their pockets. It still means less money in their pockets. You've just reduced the amount that you're taking away. But even if you reduce inflation, you're still leaving them less money in their pockets. Inflation isn't going negative. If we go from 9% to 5%, you've just reduced the impact of that inflation. But people will not have more money in their pockets. So either he's straight up lying, it.

Is true that well, here's the thing. It is true that 9, 5% is better than 9%. So it's more, you could, you could argue that he's saying it relative to 9%. But I, but I understand. You go ahead. Yeah, yeah.

But the net impact is you still going to have less money in your pockets. He said this will give homeowners more money in their pockets. That is a straight mark.

Sure. Okay, so it's true that it's not more money in their pockets in an absolute sense, it is more money relative to 9%, but it's a straight lie. Okay, yeah, I'm not, I, I, I understand, I understand your point. He basically, basically finish, finish what you're saying.

So, But I guess where I'm really going with this now is that we do have this rise of the, the, I call it the Rogan era. The fact that we can challenge, we have community notes, you can't. We're getting away with it less and less. You talked about it with Marty saying cancel culture's kind of dead, which is a good thing. Right. And so are we just in this? Is it like turning an oil tanker? Is it just this slow transition away where their ability to lie to us is getting, they have less and less ability to lie to us. And what we're going to see is this transition where maybe we're going to see start to get new politicians come in who won't lie to us. Will we see more trumps? Will we see more RFKs? People who recognize the public aren't buying this anymore.

So this is very complicated and I think about this a lot. Okay. But my current mental model is that it's like the heads of the hydra thing, where that head of the hydra of media basically was hiss, hiss, like this. And it's pulled back for both, both because it won and because it lost. Why did it win? Basically, media spent down all of their trust. And I've seen the graphs there. Just like a total calamus collapse trust. The US Media and more generally the western media spent down all their trust in return for recapturing the US establishment and capturing many of the big tech companies and staffing them with NPCs and wokes and so on and so forth. So it traded it in. It took this declining asset which was the US media and just suicide bombed. Right. In a sense, it did a, like a kamikaze attack. It blew up the credibility of the US Media in return for grabbing the levers of hard power over the establishment and over tech companies. And now, yeah, Elon. In doing so, it lost many of the tech founders, it lost Elon, it lost Glenn Greenwald, some of their most brilliant writers, Matt Taibi, Barry Weiss. Right. A lot of the personalities it lost and it lost a lot of the most brilliant entrepreneurs. But it did grab the center, the, the central mass of Western society. Right. All of the three letter agencies, all that stuff is back under their control. Okay, so one answer is Cancel Culture isn't happening because they're strong enough that they don't care what you're saying anymore. You can say whatever you want. They're back in control of the Fed, they're back in control of this, back in control of that. Right. Whatever you can yell, knock yourself out. You're going to go away in two days. And we're still in control of the Fed. Right. The other version is Cancel Culture has gone away because they're too weak. They don't have enough troops to go. Like, the Rogan Spotify thing was a crucial turning point. There's different kinds of things. You probably, you probably graph it, but some of the fights with the journals during 2020, and I actually do sometimes graph these things. Okay. And the thing is, back in the 2010s, when someone is getting canceled to even like a tweet, defending them would get you canceled as well, which meant that you were outnumbered like 99 to 1 and there were just Gestapo looking over everything you were saying. Right. With the Rogan Spotify thing, it was interesting because they were only able to grind out a 5149 victory. They couldn't cancel the defenders as well. Okay. So even though it was still a cancellation and he still had some economic impact and censorship or whatever, from was a much more hard fought victory, which meant that if you look at the dynamics of it, rather than just analyzing every incident in itself, you look at dynamics and plot over a larger time, I could see their power decreasing. Right. And now we're at the point where because of law and free Twitter that you know, that they're too weak. They don't have enough troops. Right. To do it. Okay. However they do still. So it's a. It's a mixed bag. It's a Pyrrhic victory where they captured institutions but lost a lot of the people, especially, they lost a lot of their best people. Right. The Greenwalds and, and Elon. Elon and so on. I think the next step after Cancel Culture is confiscation culture. How's that for a sound bite? Okay, so. Okay. Do you understand what I'm Saying confiscation culture to pay. Basically think of it like this. When you, when your liabilities exceed your assets on a civilizational scale, okay? When Western civilization has been living on its credit card for a long time and credit card debt set a trillion and the US national debt said 30 trillion and the German central bank may have negative equity and you know, every, everybody who bought Treasuries has massive underlies, losses and in it like 5,000 things, it's auto loans, it's student loans, everybody, both personal and corporate and at the government level, with the exception of a few tech companies, is basically insolvent, you know, mark to market basis. Okay? I should say everybody, but a lot of people are right and a lot of institutions are. And you can look at my PIN tweet for, for more on this, okay? But when that happens, you know, eventually the correction is like a black hole. Everything must go. Think about like FTX or something. Everything is just dragged into the maw of that bankruptcy, right? And then if you're still near that, you're lucky to get 10 cents on the dollar or something like that on your assets. If you're sm, you pulled out your assets way before and you got free before the thing imploded and became a black hole, pulling in every chair and table and piece of real estate and so on. And by the way, you know the, I mentioned this on the TFTC podcast, but what's the justification for seizing blue state real estate? Well, didn't the Fed bail out your mortgage with buying mortgage backed securities? Therefore it owns a slice of your house. Therefore you need to allow these newly homeless people to go and live in your house, okay? Like they, they bought and didn't they pump up your house during the whole mortgage? Boom. Now you, you now you have to give back to the state that which you know, you owe. I mean, this is just one possibility, one justification, right? But the thing is that, that everything must go sale, right? The thing about it is if you, if you don't want a repeat of 2008, in 2008, the Republicans, the Arabs, all these people didn't see it coming. They still trusted the system, right? And again, is the system lying? Is it lying to itself? Is it an error? Is it pseudoscientific, God only knows some combination of all of these? Is it, is it lying to you as it would, you know, a noble lie where it thinks it's taking care of you? Is it lying to you because it wants to, you know, to abuse you? Who the hell knows? Point is, get to the exit first. Get to the exit first. I'm not saying every single dollar get out, you might need to. You probably need some to keep going. You don't know when this fiat crisis is going to hit, right? So I'm not saying like liquid everything get into big. But what I am saying is allocation, location, organization, reduce your allocation as much as you can to things that they. Anything they could seize from the Canadian truckers or the Russians is something that can be seized from you and will be seized from you. In my view. If you're in a blue state location, get to a red state or get to El Salvador or get to wherever you. Whatever you think is stable. Basically, you know, for me, India, right. Because I know the country. I think it's on the general upswing. I don't really have like a huge need for possessions or whatever and it's actually done quite well recently and it's great, great place, right. Singapore I think is a great place. UAE is a great place actually. Australia and New Zealand I think are air gapped relative to the rest of the G7 in terms of their financial management.

Can I just point out a strange kind of paradox here is that bitcoiners who espouse about freedom, some of the safest places for them to go to protect their assets are more authoritarian states.

Well, so the thing is obviously the conventional wisdom is democratic states versus authoritarian states and so on and so forth. I would push back on that in the following way. Right. First is most of people who are saying that are American Democrats. And so we can take. So I talked about this in tftc but let me, let me kind of elaborate on this a little bit, right? If you ask an American Democrat whether they'll vote for a Republican nowadays, vast majority of them will say no. Why? Because the Republican is against democracy, right? So they have put themselves into this state where democracy means a one party state. To vote for the other party is an attack on democracy. Therefore you need a one party state. And that's what California is. Yeah, right. That's what actually a lot of blue states are like. That's what it means in practice is just a total Democrat hold on everything. And what is a real election? The real election is who is endorsed by the party for the primary position. So it's like the communist smoke filled back room where it's all internal party maneuvering for that person who gets to run as a Democrat party candidate and win with 67% of the vote against a totally useless Republican. See what I'm saying?

Sorry, Balaji, just. I hate interrupt, but there are Republican versions of that as well. I mean, why.

Exactly. So that's also happening. So that's. Yeah, that's right. So I'm coming to that. So, so basically this is a model of democracy as ruled by American democrats, right? Just like, you know, in China, communism is whatever the Chinese Communists say it is. Okay? What I mean by that is think of the Chinese Communist Party as again, being at like the center of society. And they're against the tech libertarians, like, like Jack Ma, who's actually like very similar to like a tech founder in the US they're against like the left, like Bo Xi Lee, right. He was like trying to do a, a Maoist revival. Okay. They're against Falun Gong, which is like religious. Right. And they're, you know, kind of conservative. Okay. They're against actually even extreme Chinese nationalists who are pushing for war with Taiwan. Those guys also get deplatformed or if they get out of line, right? So point is, they are. Communism is whatever the Chinese Communist Party says it is. It can be having capitalists in the Communist Party, that's communism. Right? But if you're boili and you're pushing for Maoism, that's not communism. Okay? So it's just whatever they say it is, right? It means communism is whatever the Chinese Communist Party said is. It's like capital C communism, Right? Whatever they say it is. Similarly, democracy is whatever the American Democrat Party says it is. Whether there's surveillance by the nsa, whether you're in, you know, inflating the currency and seizing assets, whether you're bombing a country, whether you are censoring doesn't matter. That's all to protect democracy. But if someone else wins an election they don't like, that's an attack on democracy, right? Bolsonaro, Modi, etc. Now what's happened is Reds have now adopted this. They have said, you know what? We're going to do the same thing in Florida, we're going to do the same thing in Texas. Just like you built a one party Democrat state in California, in Washington, one party Democrat state and call it democracy. They're going to build a one party Republican state and call it a republic. Right? And that's why even NYT is acknowledging this. Blue states here. It's like, I've been talking about this for some time, but basically blue states are becoming bluer and red states are becoming redder, right? Make America states again. See, red states got redder and blue states got bluer, right? What this is, is it's not, it's not exactly civil war. The best analogy is it's American partition. Right. You know, there's. Go ahead.

Because I feel like this, for me the most where this kind of started was bush, Gore in 2000.

Yeah.

It's been going on for South Florida. Yeah. This article, when you explain it in terms of blue states, I, I can objectively see red states doing the same. I mean, I think that's what you said, right? Yeah. But I would say Democrats would say that January 6th was an attack on democracy. I think, I think, I think it's going on in both size. The analogy for me is actually as somebody who's divorced, this feels like the end of a relationship where you just cannot agree on anything. You fight on everything and really you just, you, you need to be divorced and go and live in separate houses.

That, yeah, so, so that's actually, that's why I say American partition. Some people have talked about a civil war, some people have talked about national divorce. I'm going to show you a couple of things here. So this is a book from 15 years ago, 14 years ago, the big sort. While the clustering of like minded Americans is tearing us apart, right. Fifteen years ago these trends were visible. Okay. It's not the big short, the big sort. S O R T. Okay. And basically you know why America is so culturally and politically divided. Right. And the thing is you can see this in graph after graph after graph, right? So this is this thread I did where it was like, it's not one country, it's two parties. Right. And this is a 70 year trend where the uniparty that FDR built where, and that's the thing is the functional America when you know, America was ostensibly a democracy in the middle of the 20th century, but it was basically a uniparty where everybody, essentially the partisan differences weren't that much. Right. So they were colored differently. And I'm not saying it was zero. But for the most part they voted with each other on lots of things and then various kinds of things contributed to breaking this down. For example, the, you know, the Fairness Doctrine repeal and also the end of pork barrel spending meant that you couldn't just trade money between one, one guy and another and the Mississippi guy and the New York guy didn't have any shared interest with the deal anymore. So they couldn't. It's funny, like, I'm not praising pork barrel, but pork barrel is actually a way that you had a more unified republic because it could both sort of, you Know, trade things with each other that weren't supposed to be traded. Now you've got just totally polarized kinds of things. And this is, this is as of 2011, by the way. And what's being shown here is an edge between two nodes is if they vote together on a bill and you can see Democrats problems, just don't vote. It's all party line votes. This was as of 12 years ago, right. And a totally different graph is the graph on. So this is votes, right? At the leadership level. This is a totally different graph. This is in social networks, okay. And this is showing who follows who or who shares what on social networks. And even by 2017, the population was separated into blue and red this way. Okay? And so when you see it completely, I mean, the same phenomenon reoccurring in a totally different data set over and over again, right? Here's another one. Only four in this study.

Only 4% mad.

This is crazy. Right? So this means, as I've said, like ideology becomes biology in one generation. Democrats don't marry Republicans. Okay? Going further, Democrats don't hire Republicans either. Right? And so that's what's happened. They've partitioned at the level of both network and state. Right. First the partition happened at the network level. Over here, the separation, and now it's being manifested in the physical world. Make America states again where they're diverging on gun laws, on abortion laws, on marijuana laws, on homeschooling laws. Right. And basically all the things, in fact, both Wokeism and nationalism are, in my view, failed attempts to kind of put the country together. Wokeism is trying. Is Democrats trying to get Republicans to knuckle under by accusing them of being insufficiently anti racist. Nationalism is Republicans trying to get Democrats to knuckle under by accusing them of being insufficiently anti China.

And your great analogy here, which really resonated with me, you said they're essentially Sunnis and Shiites. And I was like, yes, yeah, it is.

That's right. And, and it's like, it's. It's basically something where. Here's another way of seeing that. If you, you know, you remember during the pandemic, everybody switched sides, like four times. Okay. For example, at first it was Republicans. Okay, sure, fine. But you know, at first it was Republicans that were concerned about the virus, right? In early January, China virus. Then Trump was like, oh, we need to stop the testing. And it flipped. So now Democrats were concerned and they wanted lockdowns and Republicans were against it. Then Democrats did the BLM riots and were like, the actual threat to public health is racism. And after just saying that, you die from being on the beach, they have these massive crowds of everybody close together. And now it's Trump that's pushing Operation Warp Speed to develop a vaccine. Kamala Harris actually said then that she wouldn't trust Trump's endorsement of a vaccine. And many Democrats were vaccine hesitant because it was coming from Republicans. Then that switched, and Democrats became the biggest proponents of a vaccine after the election and so on. And the thing about this is it's a mistake to call that ideology. Right. Because, I mean, you can retroactively say I was on the right side each time as new information came in or whatever. Right. But I think it's really just I believe what my tribe believes, and I side with my tribe. And my tribe is. Has, you know, they've moved from the valley to the mountains. So I'm up in the mountains. Right. Like, you know, if your tribe to move in physical space, you'd follow your tribe. And so what happens is when your tribe moves in ideological space, you also follow your tribe. That's actually the key thing. Right. Go ahead, go.

And. And so that points me to what I wish I could know. And you can never know, but if Trump had won that election and Russia had invaded Ukraine, how would the US Government have reacted under a Trump presidency? Would they have supported Ukraine? And if so, would they have provided weapons support? And would the Republican commentators and the more conservative kind of or libertarian influences been like, you have to do this. You have to stop the danger of Russia? And then would it have been the Democrats saying, why are you interfering in this? You know, what would have happened? And ignoring the fact that Trump said the war wouldn't have happened under him? Because we don't know that. But I'm just so intrigued to know that.

Okay, so let me give actually an interesting maybe third view on that. I don't know what would happen. Okay, but before I show you this. Okay. Name the top three events of 2017.

Oh, 2017. God, you're asking me a lot. That's good. The launch of what bitcoin did as a podcast. 2017. I just. It's hard. I can't.

Okay, how about. How about, like, just military events?

I don't know. I just don't have that recall by year.

Sure. Okay.

So it wasn't.

Yeah, exactly. You're just basically drawing the blank. It's not like there's some obvious thing that you're saying. Right. Okay.

Yeah.

Guess what? One of the largest. All right, ready? The Battle of mosul, okay? From October 16th to July 2017. The most grueling urban warfare since WW2 prior to the war in Ukraine. Okay? 482 SVB IEDs, meaning suicide bombing vehicles blew up, they sent ICE. This is basically the war against ISIS was this massive military conflict in 2017 with this video is horrendous. It's crazy. Just like, literally include this clip, okay? And because it's like put to music and so on, every single one of those things is a gigantic suicide bombing attack that's killing whatever number of people, Right. And just look at how many of them there are. Right. And like all this is caught on high def. Normally you'd say that if it bleeds, it leads. But you guys were completely unaware of this. It wasn't like you're like, oh, musoul, obviously, right?

Yeah.

If I said, you know, 2016, I said, what happened? You say, oh, Trump got elected. Right. That was covered to an infinite level. Mosul wasn't covered at all. Despite being this enormous conflict.

I mean, I feel like I have some like, vague awareness that IEDs were a thing and ISIS things weren't going well.

Yeah, you kind of knew ISIS existed. Vaguely. But this is the difference between, first of all, just to know that something that big could happen that we were completely unaware of, or should say completely, let's say on a 10 scale, you were aware of it at a 0.1. Yeah, right. Like you did know that ISIS existed, but how did ISIS get beat or whatever? Point is, that's another option besides the two that you mentioned. A is it's mass coverage and there's a giant military operation. B is maybe people oppose it, like Iraq. C is something as insane as 2017 where you have a World War II level media operation with a media blackout. World War II level military operation with a media blackout. Like what that's possible to do?

Why? What's the reason not to.

I think in 2017, what happened? I'm just surmising here, I'm not an expert in the particular coverage decisions and so on, but the first thing to understand is editorial decisions are real. There's a million events happening in the world. What you put on the front page, it's just like the ranking algorithm for social, for social media network. Right? You're picking from all these posts and picking something and putting on the front page and making it big font or putting it on page A3 or whatever. Right. And in this case, I would argue that in mid-2017, this was the first Trump year right. Democrats didn't want to make Trump into a wartime hero. And Trump for every reason didn't stress the Middle Eastern conflict because he may not known if he was going to win or he had inherited it from Obama. But basically it was just like this giant military campaign that he inherited. So neither side had an incentive to talk up this old storyline politically. So thus it just got totally suppressed.

It's also the 14th year of a 17 year war. Essentially Iraq, which has ignore the early days where it was relative. Like the US had a lot of success in Iraq, the kind of first year it then became urban warfare, guerrilla warfare, different factions, different. It's not a clean war. It's not a clean war to explain.

Exciting.

Yeah. Whereas Russia, one of the two old superpowers of the world, invading another country in Europe. Yeah, it's a, it's a cleaner thing to explain.

It's.

It's a, it's a cleaner thing to identify who the enemy is. And so to me it's, it's only natural why one's more newsworthy than the other.

I don't know. I think that's a, I think that's retconning it because Iraq was very newsworthy in the late 2000s when it was something that was useful against Bush.

But is it new? But also isn't news. Something about. Isn't news. Also entertainment. And it's, you know, look at those.

I mean those explosions are like any Jerry Bruckheimer film. Right.

But when you put them all together, it's, it's horrific to see. I'm saying I'm seeing there's one happening.

Yeah, but there's one happening every single day. You know, like basically. Do you remember a time when every terrorist attack got a lot of coverage?

So when you say every terrorist, I mean there's different types of terrorist attacks. There's London underground bombings, there's September 11th, there's the embassy in, in. Was it Kenya? I can't remember.

Okay, but just in your perception, I think your perception is true. Have terrorist attacks had more or less coverage than the 2000s and the early 2010s as of today? I think it's not a lot less.

Yeah, but I think it's a tricky thing. I mean, you, they become normalized. It's, you know, when they, when you first hear of suicide bombers, you know, somebody, you know, driving a car outside an embassy and blowing up and 200 people being killed, it's kind of new. Or the USS Cole, these things are new at the time. And then it Becomes normalized, which itself is terrible. Sure, but it's. But every time you put a suicide bombing at a army recruitment barracks in Iraq, I mean, it's the same story being retold. So. Yeah, I still. The problem with news is news is entertainment. So how much of it is control of the news? How much is it just given what people want to hear?

Yeah, well, I, I think it's very. I mean, one way of looking at this is think about what happened with Wokeness. Right? Basically that was literally something that was an editorial decision, right?

The.

Here, you see the screen there? Okay. New York Times word usage frequency. Okay. Yeah. And basically everything just went vertical in 2013. Okay? Mansplaining, toxic masculinity. Those just went vertical into. There's nothing. There's nothing. You know, they just started using the language of an Oberlin graduate then. Whereas the controls, like, let's say Amazon or China, those show like a more organic trend where it's like a real thing, right? Intersectionality, all the stuff went vertical. And now, now that they've captured recaptured institutions, they don't need the same level of race hatred. So it has all come down, right? And here is actually a good graph of that. Basically, the transition is from Wokeism to statism. All right, so here, how much of.

That is the pendulum swung too far?

Well, it's like in the 90s, there was political correctness. In the 2000s, there was war. In the 2010s, it was another political correctness thing like Wokeism and the 2000s, it's war. I mean, it's very cynical, but it's like every 10 years they swap it out and they have a left wing narrative or a right wing narrative. And here, take a look at this. See, like all race racist racism, they've just stopped dumping that poison into the water supply to the same extent. Instead, it's no longer in the establishment's interest to say that, you know, the US is systemically racist and institutionally racist and so on and so forth. Instead, it's the champion of democracy and African countries and India all needs to get behind it in its glorious, you know, crusade for democracy against the authoritarians. Right? It's complete reversal of what they were saying in 2020 when Joe Biden himself was saying that the US is institutionally racist. Now African countries are supposed to trust it. What? Wait, if it's institutionally racist, you're telling me that was solved in 18 months? You know. No, you're saying it's like fun. Institutional racist means fundamentally bad. But now suddenly it's the champion democracy. So it's like this is the same thing as, are they lying? Are they? Or, you know, what's going on? And the answer, if you want to be very cynical about it, is, or I think realistic, is that in 2020, blue, blue team, their primary enemies were Republicans and they wanted to win the domestic battle, and so they called them racist. And then in 2022, their primary enemies are now Russians. And so they need to win the foreign battles. They have a totally new script. Right. It's like. It's like. It's like Orwell, where they're like, you know, we're at war with this, we're at war with that. And they just have enough distribution that they push that script through, but they're losing that distribution because there's enough skeptics. The fact that you and I could talk, the fact that we can broadcast this and so on, means they've lost a lot around the edges. And only the Most NPC of NPCs, the center of that school of fish, goes with them through every one of these turns back and forth. And actually with the memory of a goldfish, oh, of course, we're the champions of democracy. They don't even remember 2020. They're surprised when you bring up 2020. They're surprised by that. Right. Go ahead.

That. That works for America. Yes, but how do you explain this, the case for Europe and the uk, where we are also reporting in the same way and we don't have that blue, red divide.

You do not in the same. Not the same level. Right. It's kind of proximity to D.C. for example, on the front page of your newspaper. Right. Do you have U.S. news?

Occasionally, yes, we will. A huge U.S. story will make it. Make it to the front pages, but not. Not always, I think.

So I have to. Actually, it would be good to get five of your newspapers and just put them up there. Right. See how many things reference America and then see how many US newspapers reference the UK on a deal.

So what I will say is I am aware of things going on in the US from UK publications. When I'm in the us I never hear anything about the uk.

Exactly. That's right. So it's asymmetric in that sense, which means that G7 countries are culturally downstream of the U.S. they have more awareness of the U.S. and vice versa.

Sure. But at the same time. At the same time, I don't believe we're downstream in terms of, oh, this is how the US is reporting. So we're going to report it. I don't believe that the BBC or Sky News works in that way. I think, I think there is genuine concern in the UK and Europe for Ukraine and there's genuine support for them and. And it's genuinely newsworthy.

Right. So, sorry, let me be more clear. You know, I've mentioned this multiple times, but I was actually one of the first Estonian east citizens. I completely understand. The thing about this is there's more than two views. There's not. It's not just a Russian view and the American view. There's a Western European view, there's Eastern European and especially the Ukrainian view. There's the Indian view, there's the Chinese view, there's a Middle Eastern view. Everybody's got a different view on this giant fight. Right. And I'm very sympathetic to all the Eastern Europeans and the Ukrainians and, you know, Estonians and so on that don't want to be forcibly reintegrated into Russia. This is like a disastrous mistake by Putin both for Russians, for Ukraine, like all that stuff. It's true. I mean, even if he thought Ukraine was going to become a Russian satellite, he's basically turned Russia into a Chinese satellite, you know, in the sense of he's only afloat because he, you know, it could trade with. That said, there's lots of wars happening on the planet and this is something which got the level of attention. It did. Yeah. Because in Europe and, and whatnot. But, you know, I feel like, you know, for example, with Taiwan in 2011, there was an article in the New York Times that appeared, I think I showed you, which was like, basically, why don't we sell Taiwan to China for a trillion dollars? Did you see that?

No.

Oh, you didn't see this?

Oh, that's insane.

Amazing stuff. Here. It's like again, just like even recent history, the past is a different country. Okay. To save our economy, ditch Taiwan. Do you see this? November 10, 2011 Paul V. NYT. Go ahead.

An opinion piece.

It's an opinion piece, but it was like, you don't, you know, that doesn't get published without a lot of copy editing or whatever.

Right.

It's a serious. Right. So propose the USL Taiwan to China for $1 trillion in debt forgiveness. Right. And, you know, basically write off the 1.1 trillion of American debt in exchange for a deal to end American military citizen RCL. Sorry. So the US didn't care about Taiwan in 2011. Okay. And to just give you a sense of, you know, even in 2019, Obama made a documentary called American Factory, which was positive on China. Even in 2019, Democrats were ostensibly pro China. At least Obama was, right? And, you know, in 2015, 2016, I was making fun of Trump for saying, China, China, China. And then here in 2016, when Trump spoke with Taiwan's leader first, that this is phrased as Trump speaks with Taiwan's leader, an affront to China. This is a change of historic proportions. The real question is, what are the Chinese going to do, right? So relatively recently, there's a completely different posture on Taiwan and China. Essentially it was something which was, we don't care about Taiwan. We don't want to anger China. Trump's crazy for doing this. China is a trade partner and so on. Similarly, on Russia, do you remember the Russian reset?

Remind me.

Oh, so this is something where it's. It, you know, it's this here. I don't have all of the links there, but here Russian reset was basically Clinton and Lavrov in, you know, 2009 saying, let's hit this reset button to reset Russian relations. Right? And go back from the Cold War era type stuff, right. Obama and Romney on Russia was basically like, you know, the, at, at the time, you know, Obama made fun of Romney for saying, you know, that Russia was our enemy in 2012. Right. The 80s called. It's like, here it is flashback, Obama's debate singer and Romney's 1980s foreign policy. Right? And it's basically, he said, you know, Romney said, russia is our number one geopolitical flow. And Obama said, no, you know, the 1980s called wants our foreign policy back. That was as late as 2012. Okay. And so in the early 2010s, it was a completely different world. Even Crimea in, in 2014, right? When Russia took Crimea in 2014, did you care? Did you even remember when that happened?

Yeah, I did, actually. So that was, that was pretty widely reported here. And that's the thing. There is.

It wasn't. It wasn't in the U.S. right.

Yeah. And when you travel between the two, you get to see both. And, you know, I take a lot of flack for some of the positions I hold with Americans, and I get a lot of thanks for Europeans for having them, because you get to see both. And there's a proximity thing here. Balaji. The closer you get to Ukraine, the more support you see for Ukraine and more rejection of Russia and the further away. So if you speak to anyone in like Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, there's universal support for Ukraine, universal hatred towards the Russian establishment, let's say. And then as you get into Europe, you know, it's Western Europe to the uk, there's pretty strong support for Europe. Then you will find some people who are just kind of like weary of it all. It's only when you start to get more towards America that you start to see actually people almost sympathetic to Putin or repeating Russian propaganda. And that proximity thing exists and I can't explain why.

Here's why. Actually, I actually do disagree. The reason is 85% of the world is not sanctioning Russia. Most of the world GDP is not sanctioning Russia. Russia is. You're aware of that, right?

I'm talking, I'm talking about the general public, I'm talking about, I'm not talking about foreign policy, I'm talking about.

What I mean is if you go so, so I think your perception there is, I think a big part of what you said is correct. And then there's a part that I disagree with. Right, okay. The part I agree with is the closer you get to Russia, the more you are encountering Eastern Europeans, you know, people in the Baltic states that have direct experience of living under the Soviet boot and just got their independence 30 years ago. And you know, even during peacetime Russia was like messing with Estonia with the cyber.

Go ahead and look. And look how they flourish. Look how Estonia, Lithuania flourished.

Yeah, that's right. I mean they've had, they've had a better life on their own. Right. So I, as I said, I, I'm very sympathetic to that. The, the thing is that. What's the right way of putting this? Okay. How much do you care about India versus Pakistan?

It's a good point. A little bit in that.

Exactly.

A little bit like. Yeah, but, but, but, but when I hear about it, you know, you hear about these conflicts in Kashmir and you know, I live in Bedford where I am, it's a very multicultural place. We have a large, both Pakistan and we've also seen hotspots flare up in the UK with, you know, these, I think Leicester, there was a, you know, in a couple of years ago, Danny might remind me of that, where there were these flashpoints of, you know, these, these kind of like both side violent protests, British Pakistanis against British Indians. Like I'm aware of it. I just want peace everywhere. So I'm aware of it and I care totally.

Okay, okay, but just take that right now. Take that. That's like the Indian perspective on Ukraine, Russia. They're aware of the flare ups between these guys beating each other up. They just want peace everywhere. Right. That's the first order of the Indian perspective, it's like a faraway thing. They recognize there's like an issue, but it's like a conflict and everybody's shooting each other, so we just want peace. Right. The second order, it's something where India would say, well, the west literally funded Pakistan. It set up this, you know, I'm not saying, like I'm going to say this in a more aggressive way than I actually, you know, pro subscribe to, but let's say if you talk to an Indian nationalist, they'll say the US Funded Pakistan, this terrorist state that funds terrorists that kill Indians and did the Mumbai massacre. It's not even in American interest because they were harboring Osama bin Laden. They've propped up this rickety, you know, nuclear weapons, you know, terrorist state on our border and caused us enormous problems. It's a huge part of our military budget for years and years. They wouldn't even be functional without this Western aid. And now they're telling us that the grand champions of global democracy and India is bad for not going and getting involved in, you know, this Ukraine, Russia war. When all India wants to do is, you know, basically just continue trading with people and it's not taking a side in this conflict. Right. And that's like the Indian perspective, this is what I meant where on every kind of fight, something like this, you have the Russian and the American and the Eastern European and Western European. But India is a player now, right? People care about India's view in a way that they didn't in 10 years ago, since India has risen. Right.

Well, can I interject there? Can I interject there? One more point, so please. Conflict between India and Pakistan is mainly fought over Kashmir. Right.

But it's not the world that's part of it. But it's more than that. It's like it's Pakistan funding terrorism within India. There's like, it's a long list of.

Stuff, of course, but when you say how much do I care? 2008, we did care. The world cared because the fight was taken onto the streets of Mumbai. It was an awful terrorist attack, sure, but if you talk about Russia and Ukraine, look, 2014 mattered when they annexed Crimea, but from 2015 to just over, say 18 months ago, there was still border conflict, probably similar ish, comparable to border conflict, but people didn't care. But now we're at the point where if you switch on the news, I mean, only two days ago a missile was hitting a restaurant and people are killed, children are being killed, totally. Children are Being against UN Conventions are being taken across borders. And so I think that's why we care, because it harks back to things that happened in World War II. I mean, this. This matters.

I. So here's thing. I'm. I'm not the. Look, let me. Let me separate out a few things. I'm not saying I'm actually sympathetic to Ukraine. As I said, a. I'm not saying you shouldn't care about Ukraine. I recognize, of course, it's in your backyard. Of course you're going to care. I think where I'm, you know, essentially pointing out is, number one, huge wars like the Mosul thing have been totally memory hold that people didn't care about or even know about at all. Okay? Massive wars that the U.S. caused right, in the Middle east, number one. Number two, huge conflicts that the west has fueled on the other side of the world, like India, Pakistan. Also, people don't really care about in the west, even though they helped cause them in many ways from. From partition itself to. And so on. And you. You do point out, it's true that the attention of the world came with the Mumbai massacre of several years ago, but it's not like everybody suddenly unified behind India, and, And. And India threatened countries with a cutoff of trade unless it sanctioned Pakistan. And immediately. The bombing started in five minutes. You know, it wasn't like that, right? It was like, oh, I'm so sorry for you. Okay, what's next on tv? Right? That's different. You know, that's. That's more disconnected. And. And the reason I brought the Taiwan example is until very recently, Americans didn't care about Taiwan. And by the way, you know what? They didn't care about Ukraine either. And I can prove it. You know, why. How many people know who Walter Durante was?

You know, I mean, how do you answer that question?

Do you know who is.

I mean, again, it's a name. I know, but. And I'll probably know if you remind me.

Okay, so Walt Drante is the correspondent for the New York Times Company who covered up the intentional starvation of millions of Ukrainians by Stalin. Okay? 5 million people were starved out, right? They literally won a Pulitzer Prize for these lies, right? And the same family that made money from literally helping to choke Ukrainians to death has now reinvented themselves as a cheerleader for Ukraine. Right? And. And it's basically like, you know, I mean, we're literally talking. You want children dead. They got starved to death on the streets, right? And, you know, there's all this stuff about Addressing historical transgressions, you know, Dutch firms, you know, paid for the Holocaust. New York Times is 4.8 billion in market cap. Ukraine needs 7 billion a month in aid. Why not liquidate the New York Times for its historical transgression of literally causing the holodomor, which is the Ukrainian famine, and give that money to Ukraine, Right. Instead, what you have is something where that role in, in, you know, basically helping subjugate Ukraine in the first place, which is part of the reason this conflict is even happening, has been totally whitewashed, right? And when I bring it up, when I used to bring it up in the past and I talked about the Ukrainian famine and so on and so forth, you know, and this is before 2022, you know what people told me when I brought Ultra Duranty or whatever?

Don't tell me biology.

No one cares about Ukraine. That's what they said. No one cares about what the New York Times. It's Ukraine. And now you see my point, right? Basically, like, for the New York Times to have reinvented itself as a cheerleader for Ukraine is like Dura Sturmer reinventing itself as a cheerleader for Israel. Yeah, but I mean, like, they were the most anti Ukrainian outlet in the entire world. They literally caused the genocide of millions of Ukrainians. They lied about it, they covered up, they won a Pulitzer for it. They made money for it. And you never even hear about this. You never even see a story like troubled history of the west in, you know, troubled history of, you know, the New York Times, in doing this right, they should be paying reparations, right? It just has a completely different light on the whole thing than what it currently is. It's a very selective view of history and a very selective setup of events that erases everything other than the parts that, you know, make it a very clean kind of thing. Right?

Yeah, but look, listen, I'm no fan of the New York Times. I think it's absolute garbage, propaganda. Sure, but that was 1932, and we're nearly as we're nearly a century on.

Oh, yeah, but what do they publish about in 2020, 1619, they went 400 years ago, right? 1619, that was a live event with thousands of articles on it that, you know, the United States was supposedly founded on slavery. 1619 Project. You remember all this, right? Okay, maybe. Okay, so if 1619 is important still, it's a pressing issue. Why isn't 1933? And frankly, why isn't, you know, look, the fact that you didn't know Walter Duranty's name. But you do know.

Oh, I know the story. No, no, no, I know. I know the story. Yeah.

Okay. So I'm not. I'm not attacking. Right. But what I'm saying is I still think, actually most people on. On Twitter or whatever who know, like, they. They now know the Dnieper river or whatever, they know. They know places in Ukraine, but many of them don't know Duranty. They don't know. I mean, it's just a totally different kind of thing. It would be. What it is, is you are made to care about something in proportion to how much the establishment cares about it.

That's what. I'm sorry, that's the thing.

That's where you disagree about.

Yeah, that's the thing I want to push back on, but it's like. Like I said, I cannot stand the New York Times. It's a propaganda hellhole. But Walter Durante was 1932. It's nearly a century ago. What are we expecting the current editors and journalists to do? If they believe that Russia is an evil empire and that is illegally invaded Ukraine and is sending missiles into homes and restaurants and killing children and blowing up trains, why not report on that as being an evil act?

I didn't say not to report on Ukraine. I am saying why aren't there 500 articles talking about the Western press's complicity in putting Ukraine in this position in the first place?

Yeah, I mean, look, sometimes people don't want to dig up old things now.

Okay, so now we're getting to the thing.

It goes back to those. It goes back to that list of things. Remember you talked about. It's the same as Jerome Powell. Why are they doing this? It's the same list of reasons. It's. It's.

Sure.

Fraud, lies, whatever.

Let me give you another example. Right? So think about. All right. Have you heard what the. This is something that's big in China. Most people in the US don't know about it. You know what the eight nations alliance was? No.

Tell me.

It's basically the US Allied with a bunch of other countries to invade China.

Okay.

Do you know that? Did the US Invaded China? No. Right. All Chinese people know that. Right. So that's like an example of what? I mean, like, if there's a piece of history that's foremost in your mind, and it's a motive. And so now that just when, you know, the US Helped invade China, the US Helped subjugate China, then the entire U. S. Defense, posturing around democracy, authoritarianism, blah, blah, it gets blown up As a narrative within China, it's like, this is all just. It's basically the Americans justifying imperialism against us like they did in the past. They were also democracy back then. They imperialized us. They're imperializing us. That is a Chinese narrative. Do you see what I'm saying? Right. So the, the thing is that, you know, I'm not saying that they, you know, they're the good guys. I'm just saying that they're. That is their domestic narrative. I find that the global conflict of democracy versus authoritarianism really just means blue tribe dominance, because Republicans aren't. Are supposed to be against democracy. Russians are against democracy. Chinese are against democracy. Indians are against democracy. Israelis are against democracy. Now France, it comes in for a pasting. South Africa because it said something nice about Putin or whatever. They're finally getting negative reporting on South Africa. You're seeing more negative stories on South Africa than I've seen in a while. Right. And so what it is, is. Let me, let me see if I can be concise with the point on this. It's a. Have you heard that saying, find me a man, I will find you a crime? Okay. If you apply them, right. You apply the magnifying glass closely enough to somebody, find me a man, I'll find your crime. Or Richelio said, give me three lines written by the most honest of men, and I will find something in them with which to hang him. Right. And so. Or. Or the, you know, a federal prosecutor can indict a ham sandwich. Right. So have you heard that one also? Right.

So I love it.

If you're, if you're an enemy of the regime, then they'll find something. I mean, of course, Putin gave them an enormous thing, and, you know, he's. He's in the wrong on this. Right. But if it's okay. Actually, here's a good example. The Yemen war. How much have you heard about that?

A lot. And that. And this.

This. Oh, you have. Yeah.

And this is.

Americans haven't.

Yeah. And this is the. This is why I think I push back. And look, people listen to this, are going to get pissed off, but this is why I push back, is the BBC has covered the Yemen war a lot of.

Okay.

A huge amount. And, you know, we've even had a lot of question in our houses, in Parliament because of our support for the House of Saudi. We've been weapon suppliers to Saudi and the horrific war in Yemen. So that is, that has been covered. And this is why I would say difficult being in both when I've got one foot in America, one foot in the UK. I see both worlds.

Okay. I would say 90. I don't know what percentage. Just a guess. Okay. Now it's like, seems to have wound down. You know, China seems to have helped bring peace to the Middle east, which is insane. Saudi and Iran, you know, the Yemen, Yemen thing winding down. But I would say 90, maybe 95% of Americans weren't even aware the Yemen war was happening or that the US was indirectly assisting it. Right. By.

They probably don't even know there's a country called Yemen.

Right, right. But, but like so, so that's what I mean about like Mosul totally wiped, you know, that entire war. We didn't even know about it. Right. The Yemen thing just not even on people's radars, like kept away. Taiwan was a non issue and discussed in a completely different tone just 10 years ago. Ukraine, when I brought up ultra Duranty Before 2022, people would say who cares about Ukraine? That's what they tell me. Right. And so what I'm just trying to get at is that's quite a few different examples there of essentially something where there's giant wars or famines or conflicts that are underplayed because it's not in the interest to play it up of the regime. Right. And that's not to say that these crimes aren't real crimes or that Putin's. I mean, of course these things are bad, but what attention on what badness is. But like what badness gets your attention or is given your attention at every given point there, there are folks who are literally at the sluices on that. Just like the wokeness graph I showed you. Right. There's a few editors in chief that can control where your attention is going now that it's starting to change with decentralized social media, they are losing the grip. Right. And so you're seeing like the Overton windows moved more in some ways in the last six to nine months than it's moved in a long time. Lots of new things are pumping up on Twitter and that's why it's digital glass. Announcer would have. Anyway, with all that said, you know, like, you know, should Putin withdraw to the like, you know, pre war borders? Yeah, of course, like, you know, that's, that's obvious but it's. And here's the thing, if you're actually in the middle of a war in Eastern Europe or something, you're like, I don't care about this meta stuff. Let me just win the war or whatever. Totally. Right. I, I, I, I, I'm totally sympathetic. Let me give one more other point, okay? The war on terror was for 10 years, just this completely dominating event in the US psyche. All the coverage was around Islamic terrorism as the big problem of our age. And, you know, like, obviously 9, 11 showed it was a real issue. And, you know, our boys are fighting over there, so they won't have to fight them over here. And you heard all of that. And now it's just so gone. It's like 10 current things ago. But $8 trillion were spent. Huge amounts of the Middle east was just totally blown up, right? Places plunged into civil war. And it's just on to the next war with Russia, and then some people want to go on to the next war with China, right? And so, I mean, you go from fighting the Middle Eastern wars and losing, and by the like, the US's loss in the Middle Eastern wars is very, very dramatic, right? It's like here, when did they last win a war? Well, that's the thing is, you know, here, let me show you this. Just to do a retro, you know. You know, a retro is, it's like, okay, we blew up all these things. War on terror retrospective. $8 trillion spent. Iraq is now trading in Yuan. Assad won the Syrian civil war. Afghanistan is controlled by the Taliban. Saudi and Iran aligns against the us. Millions dead and displaced. Conclusion. Let's fight Russia and China next. Okay, so, you know, $8 trillion and, you know, like 900,000 deaths. It's probably an underestimate, but fine. Iraq to allow trade with China and Yuan. So even the country that was invaded has kind of flipped to the other side. Not yet for oil, but for other things, right? Here's Assad shaking hands. And even though the US threatened sanctions on the whole Middle east for doing this, relations have been normalized. Okay? Here is the Taliban controlling Afghanistan, and Blinken is fruitlessly calling on them to reverse a ban on women, right? Here is China brokering peace between the Saudis and the Iranians. Three very different cultures that are now unified by basically being non us, right? Here's the tens of millions of people, including, you know, Syrian refugees that came to Europe that were displaced by the war on terror, right? And after all of this, we are suddenly taking on China and Russia at the same time. What? Right, like, and, and by the way, that that war was faked, right? Iraq's alleged weapons of mass destruction, that was, you know, that was a government conspiracy. Like, this is literally fakes, you know, fake stuff that convinced people to go to war, right? And, you know, so basically, why bring up the trillions spent, the millions displaced, the soldiers killed, the countries destabilized, or the total strategic failure that delivered the entire region to Russia, China, and Iran? I mean, are you, are you trying to undermine support for the next war? Right? And so it's like, you know, this is. That is a broader context, right? Of, in a sense, I, you know, you can argue that after the retreat From Afghanistan in August 2021, that's actually part of what caused Ukraine 2022, because Russia and Putin thought the US was weaker, and they said to roll the dice and take a chance. And the US Military was smarting after that defeat, and they wanted to show that they were tough, arguably. And actually, you know, the combination of those two things, Putin thinking the US Is weak and the US Wanting to sort of prove a point, I think led to this. And, and you'll find people talking about that, because if Russia just waltzed in and taken it, then, you know, then the US World order is over, right? And who the hell knows how it's going to play out, right? You know, like, I think as of a week or two ago, it looked like the counter offensive had failed and that Russia was gradually winning. And I remember, I was just saying to someone, I'm like, as long as Putin doesn't set off a nuke or something dramatic doesn't happen, then, like, it's on track. If you just track, like, the public support, it's just like a gradual decline in public support. And Ukraine isn't going anywhere relative to, I mean, like, it's like, physically located there. But the US Will eventually turn its attention to something else, just like it turns attention away from the war on terror. So if Russia can just keep it going at a slow burn, then, like, eventually, like, the US will probably pull its century. It might take five or 10 years. Who the heck knows? But it eventually will because it's not, not going anywhere. And then, of course, this whole coup thing happened, and that was like a giant surge. That's like the worst thing for Russia that could have happened in some ways, right? Besides a nuke blowing up. Because now there's a huge surge of attention, people. So that, I don't know, has added whatever number of years to this conflict. Who knows, right? I may be wrong. It's very unpredictable as to what happens. But in a sense, actually, the biggest winner is just. I mean, we got into the Ukraine thing, and we talked about that for a long time to talk about. But, yeah, the, the biggest Winners of the war in Ukraine are arguably everybody who isn't in it. It's in Asia. It's a Middle east, right. Asia's got an example of what China Taiwan war might be like, and that's cooled everybody down. And China's strategy is just to win a cultural victory. You know what I mean by that? You know, two out of the three parties in, in Taiwan are actually not for independence or it's, it's a complicated, very fine gradations there. Let's say they're like, whether they're pro Chinese reunification or at least pro Chinese detente. Right. They've been gaining on the dpp, which is the, the, the party that's like pro American. Right. And the, the thing about this is China is right next door to Taiwan. They speak the same language. Taiwan is the biggest trade partner, or China's Taiwan's biggest trade partner. They're like wildly dependent on China for a bunch of things. And they're an island, so it'd be really difficult to supply them. And China's right next door with the biggest manufacturing build out in history, right? Maybe. And so what China's strategy is is just flip Taiwan culturally. Right. They might not be able to do that to, I don't know, like Alabama or something like that was very different culturally. Right. But Taiwan is right next door, speaks the same language, same culture, same history, really the same people in many ways. And so their goal is basically probably to get like some referendum or some vote for unification in a few years as opposed to an invasion. Right. And that's talked about over there. Right. And also the Taiwanese recently. Because basically, you know, one of the questions is, is just like with Iraq, right, With the Middle east, was, was the US interest in the, you know, the rights of Middle Eastern women? That was a huge thing that they talked about in the 2000s. Is that a big issue right now?

Yes, it is. Still in Iran?

No, no, but I mean in the American press.

It'S hard because I don't see it, so you might say it isn't. But all I know is it's still a big issue in Iran itself.

Well, in Iran. Sorry, sorry. To be clear, what I mean is, I'm not saying that Middle Eastern women have a great time of it, though the region has secularized. I'm saying, is this made into a human rights issue on the front pages every day in the Western press?

No, because we can only really have one, maybe two current things.

That's right. Okay, so that's another. So basically, as heartfelt as that was back in the day, as heartfelt as oh yay, you know, or blm. Just a few years ago, people were really fist bumping about that and they were really fist bumping about COVID vaccines and now they're fist bumping about Ukraine. They'll fist bump about something else, you.

Know, but it depends on the news cycle. There was, I'm gonna look her up. The murder of what's her name, Mahsa Amini, who was like beaten by the morality police in Iran. And that did bring up the news. So, you know, it's hard to keep so many stories in the public.

No, I know, but. But okay, let me show you something else also, right? So this is something. TSMC. There was a, there was a U.S. guy who said they were going to blow up TSMC if the Chinese attacked. And the defense minister of Taiwan said they will shoot down US planes or they will, you know, they're not going to let the US Blow US. Tsmc. Right. This is a great example of the difference between what's in actually Taiwan's interests and Taiwan being used for proxy war with China. Right. Like basically, you know, the ideal would have been deterrence. Ukraine is now blown to smithereens. And there's people who will on the one hand admit that, you know, Ukraine is like a way to kill Russians and so on and so forth. Right. But then again, you know, pretend that they're like really concerned about the Ukrainians who didn't even know about like a few years ago. This is not to say that Ukraine's cause isn't just. But it's like the, the Iraqi women, right? Like, oh, you know, there's all kinds of news coverage on their plight. Their plight was a real plight and now it's forgotten because there's just a justification for the use of force or is justification for what the establishment wanted to do at that time. It wasn't like something they didn't actually really care about the human rights. They cared about Midas. Right. You know, and so this kind of thing which shows the gap there where, you know, Taiwan doesn't want to be used as a tool against China. They've got their own interests. And so what are they saying now? They're saying things like they're going to produce most of valuable chips still in Taiwan. They're not going to send all this technology to the usa. They're basically, you know, here's, you know, here's a few things, right. The. Well, there's actually, I won't get to all these Articles basically, point is that Taiwan doesn't want to be used for proxy war against China. At least there's factions within Taiwan that don't. So that's why the biggest beneficiary of, in a sense, Ukraine, Ukraine like sacrifice itself or Russia blew itself up so that Asia could have peace. Because it's like an example on the other side of the world of what you definitely do not want. Right? Not to say, you know, maybe, maybe we'll all be stupid and sleepwalk into another war, but it feels like a deterrent. All right, let me pause there. Why don't we, why don't we recurse back up? Because we've talked way.

Yeah, we need to, we need to circle back here, back to the money.

Coming back up because I don't have particular insight on the Ukraine war or whatever relative to, you know, I mean, I know, I know a little bit about it, but certainly don't speak Russian or Ukrainian, don't have sources there or anything like that. Coming back to what I think, at least at the macro level, allocation, location, organization. So allocation is get out of blue states physically location or get out of blue states financially. Locations. Get out of blue states physically. And actually Ray Dalio also talks about this, you know, is like, you know, location is a risk. That's a really, it's funny. Hold on, I'm going to find you this Ray Dalio. Yeah, here we go. This is so abstract and it's hilarious, right? Yeah. I have a lot of respect for Dalio, but just the way this is said in this article is funny, which is not, I think, his phrasing, but he's saying why billionaire Ray Dalio thinks another economic disaster is coming and how he recommends preparing for it. Do you see that? Okay, so one risk, for example, could be location, meaning the physical place where you live and work. Right. The health index, rates of destinations. So moving is a hassle, but it's worth considering under financially worrying circumstances. Right. Measure your financial risk and inflation adjusted terms. Right. And so the thing is, by the way, this is a, this is a way of saying something without actually raising. I mean, translation, where you live may become physically unsafe. BLM and Jan6, like mobs, may accompany asset seizures in your jurisdiction if it's running out of money. That's the translation of what that's saying. Right? It's the, the most abstract, desiccated way. It's, it's like saying mortgage backed security securities were impaired in their value which may cause financial shocks to the economy. Okay, yeah, that's True, but that's like a massively understated way of saying what the financial crisis was. Right. So saying location is a risk means 2023 onward isn't like 2008. 2008, you could basically just trade it and stay in the same place. 2023 and whatever comes, you basically don't want to be caught in a blue government's black hole. Yeah. And you know, it may turn out, by the way, the Ukraine war has been very costly to Western Europe. Like the energy costs, the, you know, the. It. We will see what happens there because it looks like Western Europe has taken a massive economic hit for this massive. Right, go ahead. Actually, what is your perception on the ground there?

Yeah, no, absolutely. I mean, like our energy prices here have gone through the roof and people having to choose between heating the homes of feeding their families. It has, it has come down a bit. I think the energy cap dropped by 17%. So it's starting to reset.

But, but how much demand destruction was there for that? Like businesses going bust. And that's how, you know, you don't.

There was, there was some, and you got news reports to say some cafes that couldn't afford. But I don't think there was. I think the fear of it was more than the reality. I think a lot of people have survived. But there is a, there is a counterpoint to this, is that where there is now a push for energy sovereignty and there is a. You know, I think I saw today that, yes, Sweden, Sweden is going back towards nuclear. The UK is. And so look, there is a positive that's coming out of the back of that, the realization that you need energy sovereignty because even with their crumbling infrastructure, France was essentially the savior of the UK at certain points because they were able to supply us with energy that we didn't have. And so, like I say, the fear was worse than the reality. That definitely impacted some people, but energy prices are dropping and at a time when we're heading to the summer, which is fortunate, and there has been this focus on energy sovereignty and we're seeing nuclear growth across Europe. So that's my summary.

Sure. So it's good, it's good that nuclear is happening in some places. It does seem like the thing cost almost a trillion dollars. By the way, I saw a headline that was 800 billion in euros was spent just on energy compensation. Right. That's pretty expensive. By the way, if Iraq and Afghanistan and so on cost 8 trillion over like 20 years, this is easily costing more than a trillion per year just on that number it's probably more than that. Right. We're not even talking arms and other stuff. Right. So I mean a trillion here, a trillion there. After the world was just recovering from COVID and supply chain shocks, this stuff, you know, starts to add up. Right. And not everything is immediately obvious. Like some of the, the consequences of COVID and the printing that happened. It's like the thing gets destabilized but only collapses like a few years later. You know, it has. You don't. The feedback effects in such a large system are not as instantaneous. Right?

Yeah.

But the thing I wanted to kind of say about this is then I'll get to the last point on location is if, if I just go back to that too fake to tell thing. Right. Okay. So the big thing about this is you're basically just not going to get a warning. Right here is Yellen feared housing bus but to not raise public alarm. Right here is Yellen saying no new financial crisis in our lifetimes. Right here is Powell and Yellen saying they're downplaying inflation risks as Yellen. So this is when they're saying inflation isn't going to happen. Right here is Kashkari saying rates would be held Near 0 through 2023. This is in mid 2021 and as a consequence all these bonds got bought. Here is Gary Cohn saying that the, you know, the public has more. You're seeing this on screen, right? This video? Yes.

Yeah, I've got it.

Right. I almost think you'd scare the public if you put this out. Why are they telling me this? Should be concerned about my bank. I'd be careful about the unintended consequences of starting to blast too much just out in the general public. FDIC November 9, 2022, just a few months before the bank failures began. Okay. And they're basically arguing for not telling people that. You know, he even says, you know, we might have more confidence in the banks and the general public. Everybody laughs. Hahaha. Right. You should watch that video. It's like out of a movie, honestly. All right, here is Powell in marsh. Oops. Once this goes. Point is that clip shows Powell in March 2023 saying US banks have strong capital. Three days before the banking crisis started. Here is, you know, the vice chair Michael Barry saying the banks they regulate are well protected from bank runs. On the morning the bank run started, right here is Biden saying that the U.S. has, you know, never defaulted. Right. But of course it's defaulted multiple times, including the gold seizures. Right here is, you know, basically this Is like a small thing. But the BLS like revised its hourly compensation numbers. They were saying that people gained 5% in hourly compensation, but actually fell by 0.7%. And so they had totally wrong data where they're saying people are making money. No, they're actually losing money. That's like a huge revision, by the way. That's like saying we made 5% profit, but actually, no, we lost. You know, we made, we made a 0.7% loss. Massive, massive change. Underreported. This actually guided all these decisions. Oh, the economy's so great. No, it actually isn't. And then here is Krugman from a few weeks ago saying that a trillion dollar coin would be totally fine. But the reason that you should not talk about platinum coins, you should talk about premium bonds, it's because they're harder to understand, which makes it harder because it's hard to understand. Then people can't argue against it. So you, you know, they feel dumb. They don't understand what a premium bond is. Right. So the system is optimized for opacity. Right? It's meant to be hard to understand. Okay, and, and that's like a natural selection thing. If it was easy to understand, you see exactly how they're scamming you. But it's hard to understand with lots of gimmicks and stuff. You can't see it. Okay, and the reason I just brought up all this stuff is that is 20 years. And those are pretty big things, right? We're talking about the financial crisis, we're talking about transitory inflation, we're talking about the stimulus act. That's 20 years of the same macro guys and the same macro names, either not warning you intentionally or not warning you because there's an error and so on and so forth. So one fine day, a trapdoor is just going to open and all, you know, whether it'll be announced or acknowledged. Go ahead.

Well, I'm just recognizing that essentially kicking the can down the road, no one wants to admit it, at some point there's going to be a collapse and who gets out first? It's. It's like ftx, it's like Prime Trust. I'm out. I'm out. Now. I've got my protection, I've got my bitcoin, I've got my physical cash hidden in different parts of the country for. In case I need it. I don't have any gold, but I'm thinking of getting some. You know, I'm seeing the FTX collapse before it's happening.

Yeah, exactly right. Uncle Sam, bankman fried. Now what timescale it happens on God only knows. Because their core competency is can kicking and obfuscation. You know, Michael Burry thought the financial crisis was going to happen April 2007. Okay. And he. There's a famous clip on this from the big short where he's saying the justice will break mortgages, they kick in, then the defaults are spiking. So he thought that was when the crisis. There is zero probability because rating agencies and the big banks and so on kind of control their own reports in a sense. And the, the crisis wasn't really acknowledged until September 2008, almost 18 months later. Right. And so during that year he had to pay $80,000,008 $0,000,000 in premiums per year because he basically to keep his big short alive. Okay. Then he made a ton of money at the end of it. Right. But the point is that he looked dumb before he looked really, really smart. But he looked really dumb for a while before he looked smart because he.

Potentially faced a market being irrational longer than he could stay solvent.

As famous saying. Yes, correct. That's right. So right now, I mean if it took 18 months for Bari's from, from it being obvious to somebody who was looking to being obvious to people who weren't looking. Right. God only knows, you know. You know, it's funny, just like Bernanke said, it was going to be a mild recession April 2008, the economy collapses or it's acknowledged to have collapsed by September 2008. Similarly, Jerome Powell, he's he almost 15 years to the day after the financial crisis, you know, opening bars of April 2008. He also said it's going to be a mild recession in April 2008. So do we have is September when it all blows up? Who the heck knows? Is it next year during the election year? Could be anything, right? I kind of have a feeling that the election year is going to contribute to this because there's actually an incentive for people to bring up these issues. And now there's decentralized social media. Right. So it's possible that you get out first. All right, with that said, we now discuss that a bit. It's allocation, location, organization. The third part is the non libertarian part because like you hit a fire alarm and you run out of the building and then you kind of, you need a gathering point because you know it's a burning building. But you don't want to like live on the street, right? You want to rebuild a building. That's what I mean by recentralization or tribalization. So the next step is to find or found your tribe. Okay. So that's what I'm doing next. And you know, when will this episode come out? Like in a week or two.

Probably Monday. Right.

Hopefully can get out Monday. The reason is I want to get out a couple of articles before then. Okay. And the reason is that I'm going to be funding, I'm going to start by funding 100 startup communities. Okay. And like Cul de Sac, which is a car free community. Have you seen these? Do you know what I'm talking about?

No, but. No, tell me.

Okay, here, let me show you. So Cul de Sac, the first car free neighborhood built from scratch in the U.S. okay. Walkable community, looks beautiful. Cheap studios built for remote workers. Right. 700 plus apartments for rent. Okay. And it's got a great gym and courtyard. Basically it's the place to live that you'd want to live. Right. Here's a totally different one called Kift. This is van life. Right. So you're in a community of folks who drive around, you know, and live in nature and save money and live in their van and have Starlink. And here's yet a third one which is Prospera. So Prospera, build new cities, maximize human prosperity. Right. And they've, they've got their first one in Roton near South America, Latin America. And they're building more. Right. And there's a whole, I've got a whole table of these at.

Well, you're recognizing what's coming.

Yes.

And you're building or funding some first lines of defense for those who recognize it, who want to exit.

So here's. Yeah, because here's the thing. I'm sympathetic to the book the Sovereign Individual, but I think people actually want to, they want sovereign collectives and startup societies and eventually network states. And what exactly does that mean? Right. So what is a startup community? Well, we know what a startup company is. Right. Startup company is like the Y Combinator style model that's now being turned into an assembly line, an industrialized process for the last 20 years, which is you have a tech innovation. You, you come and you, you found like a US Delaware C corp and you try to build it into the next Google or Facebook or Amazon or Apple. Right. And your business model can vary. It can be software as a service, can be other kinds of things. And fundamentally you've got a tech innovation, there's some flaw in the market and you're trying to address it. Right. Okay. By contrast, a Startup community is not the same as a startup company. A startup community, you start with a moral or social innovation. For example, like what I just showed. Car free is good, right? Or the opposite, living in a van is good. Being free of everything but a car. Or, you know, let's say you want to build a self driving car city, right? Those are like three different things just on cars. Or you could do a keto kosher society where people are only keto. You could have a society where the Internet turns off from 9pm to 9am like they do in some colleges in China to stop people from playing video games all night. You could do like a formal wear society where people are just always well dressed because they're showing respect for each other and so on and so forth. Okay, you have some crazy idea of a social innovation that's as crazy as, you know, Elon, Elon saying, let's go to space, right? You have some idea of what a social innovation should be and then you recruit people because you're a creator or an influencer and you do meetups and eventually you go from crowdfunding brunches to crowdfunding buildings.

Okay, let me throw this one in there and tell me if this works, could you do it based around a football team?

I knew you were going to say.

That because what you. Because what resonated with me there is we went from a football team. Now this season we have 56 teams playing under us. Three senior teams, one men's, two ladies, 20 junior girls teams, seven to 16. We have 30 junior boys teams under seven to under 16. Our next thing is the infrastructure. We need to build the ground, the training facilities, the academy where kids can leave school. You know, it is a social project within my community based around a sport. But we have meetups, we have shared ideas, and we're trying to do something for the community. Does it fit within that?

So a. Potentially yes. And first of all, I got to say I'm impressed with your logistical skills. Right? That's actually, you have an unusual thing there, Peter, where you have both the skills of a content creator and the skills of like a logistics person, or you can at least recruit that person, right? Which means you, you indirectly have the skills. And those are kind of the two things that you need, right? You need to be able to inspire people and build a community online and then you need to be able to organize them offline to actually do things in the physical world. Right. And, and so, you know, in a sense, what the community organizes around, you know, whether it's a football team, Whether it's bitcoin, whether it's, whether it's a religion, whether it's X or Y or Z. Its success for a startup community is measured by how many paying subscribers you can get who will move to your community or one of the nodes of that community.

Because the thing is that the interesting thing about the network state is we have these bitcoin meet spaces and nodes building up. We have El Zonte in El Salvador. We.