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March 13, 2022 - The Delingpod - James Delingpole

01:36:54

David Murrin

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	I love Danny Paul!
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	I love Danny Paul!
	And there's another time, subscribe with me!
	I love Danny Paul!
	Welcome to The Deling Pod with me, James Delingpole, and I know I always say I'm really excited about this week's special guest, but I am.
	His name is David Murrin and his nickname is Mr Sunshine and Jolity, because what he's about to tell us, I think, is going to be how the world is just going to get better and better, and we're all going to get more and more prosperous, and we needn't worry about anything.
	Is that more or less what you're going to say, David?
	James, I think you've got the wrong guest on.
	Oh, really?
	My name's David Murrin, actually.
	Anyone else you wanted to interview?
	Oh, shit.
	Well, I may have made a mistake here.
	Anyway, look, let's run with David Murrin and see what he's got to say.
	Now, you're a global forecaster.
	Is that the correct title for what you do?
	That's exactly the brand that I work under, yes.
	And I looked at your CV.
	It's very long and distinguished.
	I mean, you seem to have worked in finance.
	You've been around the block.
	Tell us a bit about what you've done, which makes you a credible predictor of the future.
	So when I first published Breaking the Code of History, Someone asked me, why did you do this work?
	Because it seems so obvious now when you read it.
	And I said, well, it's really interesting.
	It's a confluence of events.
	And those events were a family upbringing with one half of my family coming from the Indian empire.
	So my mother was born in Pune and my grandmother was part of the empire.
	She was an army wife of a senior officer.
	And so there was a culture really of a memory of empire within our family and then my father who was really an apprentice in aviation and he was truly gifted, worked hard and went through the top of the aviation industry but he represented two halves of a social structure that really we don't see now but was very prevalent when I was born in the 60s.
	A very unique couple but most importantly they were worldly So essentially, I was brought up traveling around the world at a time when the empire collapsed and people didn't travel.
	So I saw it as one small globe that we were all similar, whereas most people isolated back in Britain and not traveling.
	That was really me.
	And I was fascinated by military history, absolutely fascinated from the early stage to the to the concern of my mother when she asked me, what would I like to read?
	And I think that fascination derived some genetic link to one half of my family.
	And a curiosity and understanding that you couldn't understand humanity unless you understood our wars and how we fought them and why we fought them and their outcomes.
	Even from literally two or three, it was difficult to describe how I was drawn to it.
	So there was a fascinating in military history, there was a sense of travel and global perspective on the world.
	There was a link to empire.
	And then I started to make decisions about things that I wanted to do and I studied physics at university and I chose it essentially because I thought it would be really difficult and I loved the idea of creating the mental exercise that went with understanding concepts and ideas and it turned to be one of the most rewarding things I'd done up until that process because there was a massive wall to scale and once you're over the top everything changed in the thought process and rationale.
	And I specialized as a geophysicist because I didn't want to go into the city, which I always laugh about.
	I wanted to be adventurous and travel, so I became a seismologist looking for oil with shell via one of the subsequent attractive companies.
	And through hook or by crook, I ended up in the Sepik Basin.
	I didn't know where that was at the time.
	Many of you don't.
	It's in the middle of Papua New Guinea to the north.
	It's the second biggest river course in the world and 500 miles from the coast.
	It's a mile and a half wide.
	It's a monster.
	And so I spent my time working with the tribe Papua New Guineans.
	We had 700 initially on our crew with 15 expats and then expanded to 1850 expats.
	Four helicopters manned by ex-Vietnam pilots who were really just for a young 21 year old, you know, working with them was just spectacular.
	If you managed to get all the stuff off the helicopter.
	This is a great anecdote.
	Yeah, yeah, Chicken Hawk, exactly.
	Oh, by the way, sorry, before you go on... David, before you do your Chicken Hawk anecdote, which I'm dying to hear, can you move your head more up?
	At the moment, I'm being disturbed by the fact your chin's on the bottom of the screen.
	So move your camera, or... So you're more... Do you want to redo that?
	Just so you're more middle.
	Better?
	Now you're down a bit.
	I'm truncated.
	No, that's perfect.
	Okay, carry on with these NAM helicopter pilots in Papua New Guinea.
	I love the fact you've done that.
	I'm so envious.
	What a thing!
	Well, in fact, before I talk about Papua New Guinea and pilots, I need to talk about what, you know, like my first experiences.
	So I flew to Singapore and, you know, got on an aeroplane and then flew to Port Moresby, then flew from Port Moresby on a two-hour flight to Wiwak, which is in the north of Papua New Guinea, And that's a 24 hour trip and I was really buggered and I thought well someone's going to let me have a sleep now.
	And this trip this airport was just a tarmac from an old World War Two airfield with grass, you know, to one side and beach to the other.
	And there was this 212, essentially like a Vietnam helicopter, a 205 to most people, waiting on the runway.
	And I thought, well, we're bound to get some kip.
	And then we said, no, you're getting on the helicopter now.
	So it was my first encounter in a helicopter.
	And this feeling of the thing lifting off the ground was spectacular.
	I've never forgotten it.
	It was almost this feeling of becoming godlike.
	It was addictive.
	And we turned away from this beautiful azure ocean.
	into a scene from, you know, Vietnam.
	A jungle everywhere, over the top of the hill, green everywhere and we got up to 2,000 feet and we were chugging along and I was thinking this is unbelievable experience.
	He was a little tired and suddenly the helicopter dropped from the sky.
	Literally he just dropped.
	Now I'd been warned by my father who was in fixed-wing aviation that they were bloody dangerous, these rotor blade chaps.
	And so the whole thing was coming through my mind as we were free-falling through the air.
	At the last minute they auto-rotated and we flared and he landed in this grass patch outside the village.
	The rotor blades shut down and the pilot had 5,000 hours of experience.
	He was a combat pilot, phenomenal pilot, and he said, man that was close.
	I saw this mist on my windscreen And essentially, most people would have thought it was water, vapour, but it wasn't.
	It was hydraulic oil from the hydraulic box, and we had 30 seconds before it seized, hence I auto-rotated, and we got to the ground.
	And at that moment, things became really weird, because suddenly the village people started coming towards us, and they split into men and women.
	And so the women basically carried all these yabs and they put at the front of the helicopter and the men started probing the tail of the helicopter to work out whether it was male or female.
	And that was a stage when I thought this is otherworldly.
	This is first day at work.
	Super strange.
	Anyway, the day kind of got weirder because another helicopter picked us up while they repaired that one, and off we flew to where the Sea Pic was, which is, you know, a good hour by chopper, so talking about 100 miles inland.
	And I remember my first sight of this, this huge wide river, and there was an accommodation boat and a couple of huts, and that was the base camp for the operation.
	And we landed, I thought, finally I must get some sleep, please.
	Chopper Khan like Rotorblades went down again.
	There was another graduate with me about the same size and out came this what I thought was this wizened old bastard.
	He's probably 26.
	I was 21.
	I mean age is a funny thing when you look back and he just came over and said all right I need someone to do a job for me and I went hmm doesn't sound good.
	He said which one of you is the strongest?
	I thought that's a really bad question.
	I went him and the other guy went him and the surveyor looked at me and said you you're going to get back on the helicopter.
	You're going to fly 50 miles just before sunset.
	You've got a cutting crew of 60 Papua New Guineans waiting for you and you'll hear from us by radio.
	You cut on the compass bearing a kilometer a day and we'll see you in four weeks and we'll supply you on the way.
	I cut a helipad by the way every two kilometers.
	So I was thinking this is interesting and prepared so I'm going to get again and this helicopter left me in this football sized clearing of primary jungle which they'd chopped down and as it disappeared my workforce appeared from around me and they were literally Well, they were all cannibals.
	They'd been eating flesh only recently, bones through their noses, machetes, bows and arrows.
	And they were Melanesians.
	Now, even now, most people don't want to know what a Melanesian is.
	It's a unique culture that's in that region.
	And one of the tenets of their culture is you own the land, you own the spirits on the land.
	So why should you ever work on the land?
	So the concept of work was alien to them as I found out the next day.
	And that night I went to go and you know light a fire and some clever chap had booby-trapped my cooker which took my eyebrows off in a ball of flame so that didn't work.
	Went to use my radio that had been booby-trapped.
	So there I was cooking around a campfire.
	I hadn't slept for a long time and 60 pairs of eyes watching me.
	I remember thinking this is nothing prepares you for this experience.
	And so I went to sleep and you know mosquitoes are everywhere.
	All the stuff you hear about.
	Buzzing noises and I woke up in the morning.
	It was raining and of course it rains every morning in the jungle.
	So I said to my interpreter look get the guys on the helipad.
	I'll address them at eight o'clock and we'll start work.
	He said they don't work in the rain boss.
	I said of course they work in the rain.
	What's the problem?
	And so anyway, I said just get them out there.
	I thought this was a test of will and I was 21 and a bit at the time.
	I hadn't even like gone to my graduation before I was out there.
	I'd just taken a job and gone.
	And so there I stood on this helipad and sort of elevated platform looking down at my workforce.
	it kind of every orifice had bones through it and bits through it and I mean they were a sinewy really strong looking group of human beings but small by our standards quite fearsome I have to say and so I said look in my country Working in the rain's okay.
	Horrible mumbles.
	I said, look, what is the problem?
	Horrible mumbles.
	Spoke to my boss.
	I said, just tell him in my country women and babies work in the rain.
	What's the problem?
	I think he was a motivational moment.
	Anyway, Augustus, the son of the chief, Went this funny color and started pogoing up and down.
	I thought, that's a very strange response.
	I remember this slow motion sort of realizing what the situation was in.
	I thought, he's looking very angry.
	In fact, I've never seen anyone as angry as that with a machete, 50 miles away from anyone who can help me.
	And then I went, oh my goodness, they're all starting to pogo up and down.
	And literally, it was like the ripples in a pond.
	And one by one, they all became apoplectically angry at me.
	And I remember it was a palpable wave of pain straight for me.
	And I remember thinking, shit, I'm not going to survive my first day at work.
	I'm really going to, I'm really, this is really bad news.
	So what are you going to do?
	I thought, I can't fight them all.
	I can't run away from them.
	So you know what?
	My grandmother, she'd jump into the middle of them.
	So I jumped in the middle.
	And I thought if I confronted them, I might have a chance to move forward confronting them.
	Staring them out as everyone they pulled up a machete.
	Don't you dare!
	Don't you dare think about it!
	And I tiptoed a bit like in the scene of the Pink Panther when they do that.
	I remember thinking that's how it felt with slow motion and somehow I got through expecting a blade to the back of the head or whatever else and I kind of walked over, got to my tent and I looked back and they were gathering around.
	Only later I understood that normally by now the aforementioned person had run and they'd chased him and chopped him up.
	They didn't culturally know how to understand to respond.
	So then they came along and they said another tactic.
	They come in and someone hit me and someone else had come and hit me.
	I decided not to engage them simply because if I did, they'd all pile in.
	And a couple of hours later, after I'd been writing a letter, dear mum, surrounded by carnivores, first day of work, not going so well, might not make it home.
	And I genuinely did write the letter funnily enough.
	They had all calmed down and I got them back to work.
	And I ruminated on this.
	It was like two things I'd observed.
	One is that one person's energy could spread to everyone else, like the charge on a capacitor.
	And time decay meant that over time, the energy dissipated.
	And then afterwards, I had no ill will to me whatsoever.
	They just carried on as if nothing had happened, which in our country, you've got a death wish for someone for months and years after being that angry.
	And the other one was essentially, they obviously had a low threshold of individuality because they shared these emotions so easily, like the ripples that spread in a pond.
	And that was my first social observation.
	I didn't realize it, but it would change my life forevermore.
	I spent two and a half years out there.
	I did the most, this is just the tip of the iceberg, this is day one.
	So I did the most wonderful things, you know, and became sort of number two in an operation that was of an enormous size by 23, which was just a great experience.
	But I contracted an ear infection and I also had a problem with an organization that didn't value life and didn't really value people that wanted to be exceptional.
	So there was an anomaly there and I decided that My ear infection was a sign.
	So I came back, had some leave and thought, well, where else do you go?
	Where do you go where you can be rewarded?
	Where do you go where if you want to be good, you can be recognized and paid?
	And of course, the only place was in the city at the time.
	Everything else was the moribund English economy.
	And there was nothing to do.
	And by hook or by crook, I ended up at an interview at J.P.
	Morgan, where I tried to sabotage the interview, by the way, because I didn't really want to be a bank teller.
	That's what I thought it was.
	I didn't understand it was more than banking than that at that stage.
	And they ended up offering me a job on the trading floor, sending me to Harvard Business School, all the things you would dream of.
	And I'd really landed in one of two shops on the street that was really exceptional.
	And so next I found myself on a trading floor.
	And I thought, well, what do I know about trading?
	You know, I'm a physicist.
	So who knows economists?
	Let's watch the economists and see how good they are.
	Took me about three days to work out they were useless.
	They couldn't predict that tea time came at four o'clock.
	It was just appalling.
	As a scientist, there was something fundamentally flawed with their thought process.
	I looked around at some of the traders from the East End, and they were really quite good at working out what was going on.
	And then I looked around and thought, oh my goodness, I've seen this before.
	They're all sharing their emotions, like the tribes in Papua New Guinea.
	We're not different from them.
	Modern man is really just a slightly different threshold of individuality, but we're a collective organism.
	That was when the light bulb went on.
	Then I realized that markets and price were linked to collective behavioral patterns.
	And from there, I became one of the first prop traders in the bank.
	I started to use price patterns and systems other people hadn't used in ways they hadn't thought about using.
	And the result of that was I was able to see things very differently and produce different results.
	And so I was asked to set up an organization which worked for a senior guy in the bank in Europe, and we changed the whole way the bank took risk.
	Now that first day on the helipad, I decided that I didn't really want to work for someone else beyond the age of 30.
	So I saw myself developing skills that could go somewhere.
	And in those days, hedge funds were an unknown word and proprietary risk-taking was again, relatively unknown.
	But I knew what I wanted to be doing by 30, which is running my own hedge fund.
	And so all the things, skills I gathered moved towards that point.
	On my 30th birthday, I walked in, announced that I was leaving.
	and set up my first hedge fund.
	And Europe in '93, no one knew what a hedge fund was.
	It's hilarious.
	And I started to do things in the journey as well.
	I'd had the privilege of knowing all of our traders on the trading floor.
	There were some hundred.
	These are the best on the street.
	But I'd also worked out that maybe only 5% of them were really good at saying what happened tomorrow or could happen tomorrow or the next day.
	And then the rest of them really were just in the middle of a flow in JP Morgan that facilitated money.
	And I couldn't understand what it was that I had and they had that was common.
	And at the time I was learning to shoot and there was a CPSA coach.
	And of course, the first thing he did was check my mark.
	He said, well, you're left-eyed and you're right-handed.
	So I tried everything to look at the patterns of what made allowed people to see beyond tomorrow and anticipate behavior.
	So I took my toilet roll around the trading floor and lo and behold, the five people that could see better and were better predictive traders were all left eyed and right brained.
	And that was the beginning of a theory which I've evolved over the past four decades, of the difference between lateral thinkers and linear thinkers, and the way society is structured, which is a hidden stuff that we'll talk about later on.
	Can I ask you a question?
	Before you go on, this is just purely for me, because I'm quite interested in this.
	I discovered recently, I'm a fairly crap shot, but I went to a shooting school, And they told me that I was shooting from the wrong shoulder.
	So I'm right-handed, so I was shooting from the right shoulder.
	But they said that my eye was... the other eye was dominant.
	So I now have to shoot... So your left eye is dominant?
	Yeah.
	So we're having a conversation, which is a classic lateral conversation, I'm not surprised.
	Because lateral people have different conversations from linear people.
	Right.
	So I am right-handed, but I shoot off my left shoulder.
	Yeah, that's what I do as well.
	And from the time that I... and the time I did that, Otherwise you cross the barrels.
	Yeah.
	So does that mean I've got the same brain as you?
	Yes.
	Or different?
	Yeah.
	You'll be a lateral thinking person.
	Right.
	Which doesn't surprise you.
	Is that a good thing or a bad thing?
	What does it mean?
	Well, we're jumping ahead our story a little bit.
	Okay.
	Ask me that later on.
	Okay.
	Listen, you're a rapper man.
	I don't want to ruin your flow.
	You had a great start and I interrupted you.
	Just go with it.
	That's okay.
	That's all right.
	No, I do want to cover lateral and linear thinking because it's very relevant to the situation we are in right now in the world.
	So essentially, from that position, I set up my first hedge funds.
	I was able to understand what it was that gave me an advantage.
	And then we set up the second hedge fund, which was Emerging Markets, which is just fantastic.
	We did some amazing things.
	And then we picked the high of the Asian crisis, bought the low of it, sold the 0.1 high, bought the 0.3 low, picked up the high of the Argentine crisis, bought the low in that.
	I mean, truly things that make epic trading stories in the art form of what I do.
	Then 9-11 came along and I remember exactly where I was.
	Anyone who saw it would remember where they are and I remember the commentator saying there must be a problem with the navigational beacon and I came from a family of aviation.
	I just knew immediately what it was.
	It was a terrorist action and afterwards I found myself thinking what if the decision that we were making that the Victory, inverted commas, dominance of the communist Cold War paradigm meant that, you know, we all thought that democracy would last for a century.
	What if we were deluded and hubris?
	And what if that 9-11 was a product of two intelligence agencies competing rather than cooperating and the immune system failure led to the attack?
	Because there are many cases where successfully they work together and they thwarted every attack for a decade.
	From that premise, that singular thought, I thought, well, okay, so what happens if we are sitting at the end of the Western Christian Empire cycle?
	How could I, using my price models, which really only go back a hundred years, detect a wave that's coming towards us that has a 500 year origin?
	And that was my initial, the two questions that started to change my life.
	And then I thought, OK, so I'm going to do something.
	I'm going to create a model for the rise and fall of a system based on the price models I use in markets, because they're all fractal.
	That means that small patterns are the same as bigger patterns.
	Bigger patterns are the same as much bigger time degree patterns.
	They're like Russian dolls.
	They're all similar.
	And so I created a thing called the Five Stages of Empire, which was this idea of how an empire went through five stages, regionalization, expansion to empire, maturity over extension and decline, and they each had personalities and reasons and drivers.
	So having created this, being a good physicist, I decided to study through history.
	I've had every empire I could, and I was falling off my chair because it all did the same thing.
	Similar times, slightly different durations, same process, same mechanisms.
	It was uncanny what I'd walked into.
	And from that, very quickly, I started to derive another theory, which is there was a thing called a super empire.
	So the problem I faced was that the empires of Portugal, Spain, Holland, France, all had much shorter durations than the 350 to 400 year duration that was common over history.
	So that was a question of did technology change duration?
	And that's the obvious technology, shorter duration, accelerated life cycle, all of those questions to go with it.
	I thought, OK.
	And then suddenly I had a moment.
	If you viewed this Western Christian world as a religious construct, the empire of Christianity, these smaller empires were the pistons that drove the bigger system.
	And suddenly it had the same duration as all the other empires.
	That was a huge moment.
	So initially it started as a Catholic world and then when the Catholics shifted the Protestant world, the freedom of thought created this huge expansion of maritime power and a global empire, the first ever order.
	Now that suddenly was really significant because now America was the last of the Western Christian empires and it was in decline.
	That's a big end of reality check that hit me like a sledgehammer.
	We're at the end of days of the Western Christian world and it's going to come in my lifetime.
	That was a shock and so then I started to talk about what this really meant because the next implication
	was that nature abhors a vacuum and human systems when one falls another rises so all I had to do was really look across to Asia and suddenly think what if they have a super system and what if the Japanese were the first nation just like the Portuguese were or the Spanish and China is the second and India is the third of this super system of a nation cycle and of course its acceleration into the vacuum created by America in decline would be really quick
	So that was when I was able to make the prediction that China, after starting a new cycle in the Boxer Revolution, was going to rapidly expand beyond our wildest dreams, because it was in the second phase and it would move into the space of American decline.
	Now in that, you ask, where is Europe?
	Europe was truly in legacy, a position beyond decline of moribund structure, with negative demographics in its core countries of Germany and France and Italy, That then tried to create the EU under the protection of a nuclear umbrella, but actually was always doomed to failure because you need positive demographics to create social agglomeration.
	And you can't compensate by adding populous countries on the periphery because you change its character.
	So very quickly, I could make the assumption that the EU was going to fail.
	And at that stage, I thought Britain was part of that European construct.
	But my views changed around 2012.
	But we can come on to that.
	Right, there's so many questions I want to ask you, just a very trivial one.
	When do you think that the Christian Empire began?
	Presumably the empire that it superseded was the Roman Empire, is that right?
	Yes, so if you, I mean, you know, there's periods of order, so we tend to think of, if you tend to think about In China, people say it's the longest contiguous empire in the world.
	But if you draw an area the same size as China, you can include the Egyptian empire, you can include the Greek empire, you can include the Roman empire, you can include then the super Western Christian empire, you can include the Byzantine empire.
	So in fact the West has an equal number of empire cycles over duration as does China.
	The difference is they're slightly differently located and there's quite a considerable diversity in their character whereas the Chinese character is rarely consistent and many of the you know the Taoist concepts that started in 600 BC have been all the way through the process fairly contiguous.
	So This cycle probably started, I would say, properly, if you go back to the 1400s somewhere, you know, the origins of that process really started with the Portuguese.
	Right, okay, yeah.
	And I suppose, do you think the beginning of the decline of the Christian Empire was actually probably earlier than we might think?
	I mean, was the Enlightenment, in a way, the death of No, funny enough, the shift between, so Catholicism basically was the regional stage of the super Western Christian Empire.
	So there was always a revolution at the end of regionalization.
	And the revolution is about mobilizing far more people with lateral thought processes than the linear leadership of its time who are enfranchised.
	So when you think about the protestant movement, the protester movement, it was about disintermediating the Catholics hold between God and man.
	And all of a sudden freedom of thought came with it.
	So that revolution was the end of regionalization of Europe.
	And the expansion to empire of Europe was a Protestant affair between Holland and Britain.
	And they indeed, Britain came to be the greatest of the empires.
	And democracy is something that's quite fascinating.
	So I would argue, and now we're on to your lateral linear concept, is that hunter-gatherers were lateral thinkers.
	Every day they had to adapt and change and use skills that were highly variable from day to day.
	Lateral thinking human beings in small packs and tribes.
	Then about 10,000 years ago we became agrarian.
	An agrarian has one thing it changes, it produces regularity.
	And regularity begats a more linear thought process.
	I plant my crops in March, I pick them up here, I do this here.
	So the regularity made that sector of society more linear when we suddenly expanded.
	So our culture at the moment is roughly 70% linear and 30% lateral.
	Which I would argue goes back to that expansion of our population with the arrival of an agrarian society.
	Now, what's really intriguing about the where did democracy come from?
	Why?
	Because hierarchies are the common human structure.
	And so if you go and look at, for example, in ancient Greece, it's no coincidence that Athens was the main sea power.
	And as a sea power, it became the first democracy.
	Not quite like us, but it was a democracy.
	And I would argue, because I'm a sailor myself, the sea is a lateral environment.
	It's a multivariable, complex environment that constantly changes.
	The last thing you want to do is take a linear thought process out to sea because you're not going to come back.
	The other thing that all seafarers have is a sense of self-responsibility.
	Their survival is based on their captain, their integration.
	If you lose a captain, the first lieutenant will replace it.
	The whole system is lateral by nature.
	Work together, collective organization.
	So I would argue the greatest lateral war machine ever created in man's history is Nelson's Navy, because those ships were sailed by an officer down to men that were lateral in their thought process.
	They came from a culture that was based on the sea.
	Most of the British population lived by the sea.
	They weren't the people in the middle of the land who were linear agrarian thinkers.
	So Britain was a highly lateral society, and it's no coincidence that from the meritocracy of the sea, we engendered a concept of democracy, which is self responsibility, and the idea of being equal and the idea of raising ourselves through the system.
	It took centuries to make that really work.
	But you can't take the democracy and self-responsibility to a landlocked country that's linear.
	We tried to do that.
	We watched it fail in Russia.
	We watched it fail in Iraq.
	And I believe there's a genetic disposition in the ratio of lateral and linear that essentially allows it to be fertile or not.
	In the case of India, for example, we had to stay there for many, many, you know, almost a century and a half or two, three centuries to indoctrinate them with our concepts.
	The same with Japan and the same with Germany.
	That's interesting.
	So you're saying that the reason Britain's never, never, never shall be slaves is partly because we have this linear mindset, which is the same that one of the Greeks... Sorry, lateral mindset, which is the same reason... Individualistic and lateral.
	And you think about Salamis, which was the birth of democracy, really.
	I mean, that was when the Greek city-states defeated the Persians in this massive... But democracy was long before that.
	That was a cumulative point.
	And Sammis represents sea power over land power.
	It represents an adaptable strategy.
	I mean, basically, this is really interesting.
	So, for example, the Persians were not a sea power thinking they were a land power.
	And that's why they didn't use their forces in the same way the Greeks did, or the Athenians who led the Navy at the time.
	And similarly, the Carthaginians, for example, were a sea power, and Rome was a land power initially, and its story of how it reverse-engineered a Carthaginian galley with a corvus, which is a ramp with a spike, that you spike the other boat and then you become a land battle at sea, and your soldiers run across the bridge and kill the population in the other Carthaginian galley, was the way they became land power to sea power.
	Interesting, yeah.
	I'd love to go down the rabbit hole, which I discovered the other day, about the Carthaginians and about how actually they were secretly nipping across to America, which is an area of history which has been erased.
	I think there is so much more communication in our society towards continents and for example the Sumerian world of a city with square grids and accountants and lawyers doesn't appear out of just zero.
	I think mankind is way older as a civilization than we appreciate and in the previous ice age many of the civilized littoral things that should have been left behind are now under the ocean.
	Yeah, no, I'm totally with you.
	But that's a whole other podcast.
	That's another conversation, James.
	So you think there are linear dominant cultures and lateral dominant cultures?
	Well, no, you see what's very fascinating about it?
	It's all leadership is lateral.
	So I'll give you an example of two really poor, poor leaders within British culture.
	And one was Brown and one was May.
	They shouldn't have been leaders because they were linear.
	Right.
	Everyone expects to be led by a lateral person.
	So in America, for example, in nine presidents, you have five left handers, you have two right handers with left eyes, and you have two completely linear people.
	One was, and we all know what happened to him.
	And the other is Joe Biden, which is why we're in trouble.
	It's because his enemies can predict every move he makes.
	Right.
	But presumably... I don't want to... Actually, here I am getting us bogged down in this thing, but presumably linear people have virtues as well.
	Look, that's the whole thing.
	We're very symbiotic.
	So, for example, process, iteration, mass, All of those things are linear processes where many lateral people lose interest.
	So we are a symbiotic social system, but we are designed to do some things differently from each other.
	And when one person ends up in the wrong slot, it's a disaster.
	I will say this, that empires, like entrepreneurial businesses, are built by lateral people who are far more orientated and see opportunity before others.
	As the system goes towards the top and it now dominates its world, of course variability is not a characteristic it faces because it's in control of its world.
	So actually the linear people start to move into top positions and they displace the lateral mavericks.
	And that's the civil war at the top of the cycle.
	And so then what you end up with is this all-powerful system which loses its ability to self-replicate and adapt.
	And the linear people start to dominate the process and literally competitive and productivity drops over the phases of decline.
	And the lateral leaders that could correct it are locked out, which is exactly where the West is right now.
	Yes!
	I mean, I don't think I'm saying anything controversial here.
	I have, which is unlike me, I have very very very low opinion of our governing classes and our corporate CEOs who I think are simultaneously plodders and psychopaths.
	And you look at so many of the big companies that used to be the staple of pension funds, so Unilever.
	I mean, Paul Polman came in and completely fucked it up, didn't he?
	And his replacement's even worse, with all these kind of crazy woke values which didn't have nothing to do with the bottom line or providing service to consumers, who are, after all, ought to be the main target of a company specializing in food products and stuff.
	The whole of the corporate sector seems to have become completely detached from its job, which is to provide goods and services.
	So may I explain why I think that's been happening?
	Yeah, please.
	Okay, so in decline, the fifth stage, which took place in America after 9-11, The things that we saw on the outside is the loss of moral imperative.
	It was driven by the neoconservative agenda, which produced torture, rendition, we do anything, and destroyed the moral imperative of America in Bush Jr's term, by thanks to Rumsfeld and Cheney, truly the dark pair in my opinion.
	They were truly evil.
	They were everything that the Sith would aspire to in Star Wars and they basically destroyed the moral fabric of an empire and empires need moral fabric to have the right to rule and their subjects accept that because they're ruled by a system that's stronger and better than their own and they're destroyed completely in those processes.
	At the same time competitive Dynamics within the American economy were slowing down.
	And so what they did was start to print money.
	There's lots of different words for it.
	But by the end of the 0102 dot-com bubble and linked also to 9-11, they were about three times leveraged their economy.
	So they trundled through again and we get to the 07-08 crisis.
	So that worked the last time.
	Let's just crank it up to 10 times leverage.
	And now we're somewhere around 40 times leverage.
	When you see 0.4% American growth, that means the real growth without the debt leverage is probably about 0.1%.
	No economist will ever address this issue I've ever spoken to.
	I call it what is the underlying real growth if you extract the leverage from printed money.
	It's bugger all.
	And if anyone who knows what it's like to have a leverage fund, when you lose 0.1% to 0% which doesn't sound like much, you go from 4% to 0%, then you go to negative 1% and you've gone down well 40% you've collapsed.
	Just like that.
	And that's where America is right now.
	Now, the printing of money continued with the illusion of American hegemony.
	And of course, that stability meant that who needs a maverick?
	The Fed keep printing money.
	Every time the stock market goes down, they buy the dip.
	So the investment is full of linear thinkers who believe the Fed's their backstop and you just buy every dip in town and you just like roll out.
	Every maverick who says this is a load of bollocks, like this is going to end in tears, basically gets sort of completely timed out because it lasts longer than they think.
	So right now, not only does the investment community populated by a decade of beta trend followers who don't understand the world around them, who just reflexively relied on the Fed to bail them out, That all the CEOs of companies are in the same position.
	So, linear thinking CEOs are everywhere.
	That means they don't have creativity, don't understand the paradigm around them, and so when the change happens, and we're talking about a vault-face change, none of them are adapted to change, and they'll all be swept aside in a disastrous event.
	Yes, yes.
	Well, we're about to move on, I can tell, to the main event.
	Which is... There is no main event, really.
	I mean, this is the construct of... And now we're going to get to the... I think we're about to get raped, aren't we?
	It's not going to be fun.
	What's coming up?
	I think, at the moment, we are bending over very badly and we need to stand up.
	Yeah, you might want to edit that, actually.
	Yeah, well, so, okay.
	So, the West is in end-of-empire decline.
	There's a thing that surprised me that came into the mix, which I need to actually talk about.
	I created an advanced warning system for what I call national energy, an energy of a social system that was expanding and not contracting.
	Without, and when I first mentioned this 20 years ago, no one had gotten onto this.
	Occasionally you'll see people talk about it.
	I suspect it goes back to that original idea.
	Yeah.
	But essentially, if you look at the gold medal table, you can see rising national energy in the USSR.
	You can see it in Germany in the 30s.
	You can see it in China into the four.
	And so lo and behold, Britain came third.
	And I remember afterwards going, what was that?
	Hang on a second.
	That's really strange.
	That's one of my signals.
	And I thought, what if...
	That all the time we thought we were like Europe and America in decline.
	But in fact, our low was 79.
	And Thatcher booted us into a new cycle of productivity and change.
	And the Falklands War was not just a war that saved the Cold War from ending hot because we showed that there was strength in democracy through deterrence, but also it started our national identity in a new cycle.
	And so what we were looking at in the Farage's Brexit party, which I happened to support early on because I saw Europe as being the Titanic that hit the iceberg and you either left it voluntarily or it left you.
	Then I added on to that that Britain had actually started a new cycle and we were coming up to the phase of the civil war regionalization.
	And Brexit was our civil war because it was about creating a separate identity and a more lateral leadership that would be adaptive to a world that was changing.
	So my conclusion then, and it allowed me to predict every step of Brexit, and it was shocking from the beginning to the end.
	Including the frustration of Brexit by the deep state forces?
	So let's just run through this, okay?
	Let's describe Brexit as the lateral linear battle of a civil war of regionalization.
	So although Cameron is left-handed and he was actually lateral, he was a very linear process lateral person on the spectrum.
	He was crap lateral.
	And also highly enfranchised.
	Basically we had people at the top who were very wealthy and people at the bottom where there's no wealth distribution, which is one of the core drivers always towards this social change at the end of regionalisation.
	And then you ended up with Nigel Farage and there's an interview actually that he rang me up and asked me if I'd do an interview and there's one on my site with him.
	It was really interesting to speak to him actually.
	And so essentially what Nigel represented was the revolutionary lateral energy and he acted like the lightning rod for it.
	That's better alone than we are with a failing system and we can believe in ourselves.
	And that was a message using the five phases of empire.
	That's exactly what I described that process was.
	So what I understood was the moment that he forced a referendum, that the referendum would always be in the favour of leaving.
	Now, at the time, that was not.
	And you can see I wrote about it.
	I predicted it.
	It's to do with this hidden lateralization, because the people in the linear people are very bad at empathizing with other people's thoughts as anyone else thinking about the world.
	But the same way they did, they couldn't understand there were different perspectives.
	Yes.
	And in many ways, the things that led to it were Merkel's arrogance in the Lisbon Treaty and also when Cameron asked, could we have more power?
	The Europeans also helped the process.
	What's really interesting is, as that battle went through, the thing that Farage did next, that was brilliant, forced the Conservative Party to ultimately elect a lateral leader.
	Now, Boris has many failings, but he is fully lateral.
	In fact, his failings are, he has no linear qualities of discipline, no linear qualities of rational leadership, so he's just a loose-cannon lateral version, but ideally suited for that adaptable change that was needed.
	Now in a civil war, to win a civil war in a military conflict, your army, your leaders, your subset, your government become lateral and that's how they sweep away the opposition that's the incumbent power.
	We did achieve something that was only in history once in Brexit have I found a case where a regional civil war didn't involve bloodletting.
	Now that's a huge piece of hope for humanity that we can make social changes of this magnitude without killing each other.
	Truly we should be really proud of it.
	But the problem was it didn't complete the social transformation.
	So we ended up with a lateral leadership as in Boris Coe, Dominic Cummings, who again was natural but no discipline and no strategic rationale to implement it.
	And then you ended up with a linear leadership, a linear government system that was still surviving through the civil war at the end of it, who then sit there and I'm quite convinced that the civil service are at war with the lateral leadership because the two mindsets don't mix.
	So Some of the failings of our government come because the whole system hasn't been purged and it needs to be in some process that lateralises all the sub-levels.
	We should have had a few civil service heads on pikes, shouldn't we, really?
	Well, the interesting thing is that, just as Cummings failed the system totally, because he was the agent of change, but he couldn't deliver change because he was just chips on every shoulder and he was not rational.
	And once the civil service got rid of him, there was no one to replace him, so they've just been sitting there ever since in their collective incompetence.
	And I feel very much for the government because they are at odds, I'm convinced, with the civil service underneath it, who has a linear process of thought and will find, just like Yes Minister, many ways to constrict good governance.
	Yeah, that's very interesting.
	I mean, I must say, it is anathema to me that you're finding anything positive to say about Britain.
	I mean, in as much as I used to be like you.
	I used to believe that the Thatcher revolution sort of galvanized everything, and I used to believe in Brexit.
	I used to get very excited, and I remember how I felt that morning when the result came through.
	But now I just think that the whole thing was a psyop, that basically the deep state has always been in charge, that even Boris, I mean, you know, whatever his skills as a lateral thinker, he's basically part of the problem as well.
	He never really believed in Brexit.
	And so, let me finish my point.
	I helped make this thing called, or rather I appeared in a film called Brexit the Movie, in which all of us who took part of it were very excited about the prospects of Britain outside Europe, and we imagined that Our role was to be like the Singapore of Europe.
	We were going to be low tax, free booting, free trade, and it was going to be great.
	Instead, look at the shit fest we find ourselves in.
	It's absolutely... If anything, we're now more constrained than we would have been under the EU.
	I mean, certainly not significantly less constrained.
	I don't think we're more constrained, okay?
	So I'm going to bring a voice of rationale in this process, because having studied social change through the times of history, I have a slightly different time perspective than it's not happening for me now.
	And I'm frustrated.
	And I see process in it rather than just individual interception.
	So this argument of the administrative arms of the government will be linear and thwarting the lateral shift I stand by.
	And we need that fundamental change.
	The next problem is that I do think that Boris we have now and the Boris we had before has a different energy because of his partnership.
	And I, from personal experience, have learned...
	Yes.
	Oh, well, yeah.
	Just like Harry...
	Well, she's a Henry Sessions spy, isn't she?
	Basically.
	Well, just like Harry has a Meghan Markle, I think Boris has a Carrie.
	And the truth is that we are the sum of our partnership.
	We all know that good partners bring out the best in us and bad partnerships can bring out the worst in us and I think our country has suffered because we are seeing the worst version of Boris in his current position and he's proven to be spectacularly incompetent in every decision he's taken.
	I mean if he was a Russian agent you'd understand it but he's ended up always with the wrong strategic decision.
	Ever since I read his book I was slightly, I was very aware of the fact that he is strategically incompetent in the way he wrote about Churchill.
	Churchill was a master strategist and Boris has no strategy.
	And it was very interesting with respect to his interpretation of World War II.
	I was horrified that he actually understood so little.
	So having him as a potential war leader terrifies me.
	Can you give me a concrete example of how he's got How he got it wrong on World War II?
	What is, where is analysis?
	Well, I've forgotten.
	It's a long time back.
	I think it was to do with the analysis of Greece.
	Greece versus the timing of it and the decisions.
	When the truth was, Churchill's decision to go into the Balklands delayed Hitler's invasion of Russia sufficiently that his launch date was the same as Napoleon.
	And it gave them six weeks.
	We did lose some of our forces in the process, but we know those extra six weeks were the difference between success and failure at Moscow.
	So you could argue that strategy was entirely appropriate because Stalin wouldn't listen to Churchill and essentially he took the singular action to sacrifice some of those forces in the Eighth Army deployed north to delay the onset of Operation Barbarossa.
	So it was just around it I saw very little.
	Understanding of strategy.
	And when I look at his decisions, whether it's defense, and I managed to get, I did a, I've done two strategic defense reviews, but this time I wrote it and published it early called Now or Never, and essentially argued that the threat from China was overwhelming, The threat from Russia was absolutely opportunistic and unless we displayed strong intention to defend and spend money on defense on a new level at 5% it would be perceived by weakness and we'd end up where we are now with Ukraine.
	It was called the Now or Never Strategic Defense Review and I managed to get that review into number 10, into the Ministry of Defense and the Treasury simultaneously.
	And I remember all my friends, it was a time of the pandemic, they said you're wasting your time, never going to happen.
	And then within Boris came out and said defence is really important and used all the words in my report about how important it was to remember that was November 2020.
	And I thought, wow, that's really interesting.
	I managed to get something in there that's made a difference.
	No one called me.
	Obviously, someone took the ideas for their own in the process, which I thought was rather alarming.
	And then we had a defence review that was truly disastrous.
	Yeah.
	And the defense review that was, that literally dropped our pants to the world.
	If people appreciated the lack of combat power our armed forces have right now, they'll realize why Putin is doing what he's doing.
	Yes.
	I mean, that's certainly true.
	Although, personally, I think that the Ukraine is a complete distraction.
	I mean, from what's happening in the rest of the world.
	I mean, obviously China is...
	So I'm afraid it isn't, because it's a chain of events.
	So the ultimate threat we face to our way of life is China.
	And rest assured, as you know from my work, I think that Xi is seeking to dominate the world by 2030 and eradicate all forms of democracy.
	As we can see with Putin, democracy is a virus that dictators cannot tolerate, and the CCP cannot tolerate a jot of democracy anywhere in the world, given the power to remove it.
	Their arms race and military expansion is terrifying, even more so that they've created adaptable weapon systems to respond to the weaknesses in American hegemonic power that now lays Taiwan bare and open and almost indefensible by the US Navy.
	So the chain of events that really have started to go wrong for us was Biden's route from Afghanistan.
	He may have wanted to save two billion dollars, but he opened the door to the barbarians.
	Because if you don't have the intention and skills to manage your forces, however large they are, they are not going to count to deter aggression.
	Ukraine is a direct product of that.
	And right now we're seeing a rush from Putin and Xi because they're terrified that Biden might die in office and they might lose the best possible opposition they could ever have.
	A linear thinker who's old and decrepit and was incompetent when he was young.
	It couldn't be better for them.
	Well Kamala Harris will be no better.
	What was that?
	Kamala Harris is going to be no better.
	I can't imagine.
	I agree.
	And Norris Polosky.
	I mean you've literally got right now you're teed up with three levels of leadership that are all Shockingly incompetent.
	What a perfect time to go and take on America.
	Well, yeah, but I mean, this was all written when, with the CCP's help, Biden stole, well, rather Biden's people, his handlers, because obviously he doesn't make decisions himself, stole the American presidential election.
	So I'm going to say, and again, some things are covered up.
	But many would argue are social dynamics.
	I predicted that Biden would win, predicted he would win very quickly into Trump's term.
	And the reason why it was obvious it was going to happen is because whilst the printing of money, a huge number of ultra wealthy people at the top, the bottom of the pyramid and the poverty line was rising rapidly to include more and more Americans.
	So there are two forms of politics.
	Wealth creation and wealth distribution.
	And on the way up in an empire, you create it and you distribute it a bit.
	On the way down, you distribute as much as you have because people have less.
	Trump failed to distribute wealth and arrest the moving up of that poverty line.
	And it now got to a critical point where more than 51% of the electorate were in poverty or poor or moving, which meant that when you came with a wealth distribution policy like the Democrats and especially Biden, it was always going to happen.
	There was only one.
	So if you go and look at the presidents of decline, you look at Bush, Junior who lost the moral imperative.
	You then have this moment when Obama arrives and I'm not in one jot racist so I say that because about to say what people might turn the other way around.
	All empires have underclasses and those underclasses as a system matures breed faster than the overclasses and over time they become demographically significant And by the time you find the underclasses are so populous that they can vote their representative in.
	So the moment the underclasses are represented, that's the moment when essentially you're seeing fundamental change in decline.
	So the arrival of Obama represented that confirmed moment.
	When the structure of the people that built the empire was replaced by the people that were at the bottom of the chain of it.
	And what happens at that stage is they always focus on social integration and they never focus on the maintenance of the borders of the empire.
	And I made the prediction the day Obama arrived that you'd see the greatest power loss in American history in his term because of that mindset.
	And sure enough that was the mindset the Chinese moved into.
	He lost so much power that there's this corrective moment in the system when everyone goes, Oh my God, we've lost all our power.
	And when someone says, I'm going to make you great again, you go, I'll vote for you.
	And Trump occupied the make me great slot that he even intuitively said the words.
	But he didn't do it.
	In fact, he made it worse.
	He broke his promise and he occupied the one slot the Western world had to literally delay the onset of World War 3 past the peak of the 25 commodity cycle.
	And he used it for his own egocentric use.
	He made the system weaker, not stronger.
	Right.
	By doing what?
	By not doing what?
	Okay, so let's just look at his policies.
	So basically, he promised to push the Chinese back.
	He didn't.
	He turned their challenge from a covert challenge into an overt challenge.
	So now they're really pissed off because now they've got to move.
	Yeah, so he didn't disable them.
	He just said, you're our enemy and then we are, we're coming for you, right?
	What he should have done is flatten them.
	He should have spent, yes, he spent more money on defense, inverted commas.
	It looks on the outside like that raise was big, but he left the Navy in disarray and the Navy is a first-line defense for America in the Pacific.
	So, his term saw the Navy in a really bad shape and it's still in a bad shape.
	So, our frontline defense has collapsed.
	He even went to Xi and said, hey, I'd like to get re-elected.
	Could you help me?
	And that was in the middle of the trade wars.
	You're talking about someone that used the words, but all he cared about was himself.
	He lost all of the sense of integrity.
	At a time in decline, an empire and hegemon needs its allies more than ever.
	You need to be together to hold on to what you've got.
	And he created cracks in every relationship, in every setup America had constructed to contain its enemies.
	He undermined them.
	And then he also undermined the whole construct of democracy.
	I'm not one that believes that it was a... the whole voting system... I know we don't like to agree with something so we can say it's not fair.
	I don't believe that the voting system was biased or made fraud in any way.
	That's just his falseness and his egocentric narcissism which was... it got to the point when it was extreme It was useful in the first two years because the necklace of generals controlled his random moments and his uncertainty and his just unpredictability actually was an asset.
	But by the time he'd broken the necklace and run riot as a narcissist, the damage was just inside and out, too high to bear.
	And the product is Biden.
	And Biden is even more destructive for other reasons.
	So we've just had a string of destructive presidents, all each of them doing damage in their different ways, which is typically how decline works.
	Right.
	Well, we can differ slightly on certain... We can differ all the time!
	Well, yeah, I mean, you're quite a normie, basically, David.
	That's the problem.
	I was warned.
	Your analysis is great, but those of us down the rabbit hole listening to you on stuff like 9-11 and the stolen election and we're thinking, you know, there are bits of the picture that you're either choosing not to acknowledge or you just don't know.
	No, I don't believe the election was stolen.
	I think that is exactly what narcissists would like to portray.
	It's very consistent with narcissism.
	So I don't believe that.
	But I do think there are other things that are hidden from us in society.
	I mean, for example, the origins of the pandemic.
	Well, yeah.
	Well, where are you on this?
	Because I mean, I don't want to take you out of your your comfort zone because you've got so much stuff that you can talk about that actually is new to my audience.
	And I actually I do talk to a lot of people who are very sceptical and justifiably so about the pandemic.
	But what do you I mean, where are you?
	Do you think it was real?
	I mean, do you think it was a pandemic?
	So strap yourself in, right?
	Yeah.
	In Breaking the Code of History there is a section on empires and disease.
	Yeah.
	And I made a prediction the next global pandemic would be a viral pandemic that originated from a Chinese PLNA and weapons laboratory.
	Yeah.
	As a function of a program seeking asymmetric economic advantage in some shape or form.
	Right.
	That was in 2009.
	So when I saw the thing, Global Forecast was about seeing and predicting way before anyone else.
	So when I saw what was happening in Wuhan, I understood very quickly that this was a highly transmissible agent with no ramp up.
	It just suddenly was highly transmissible.
	And I immediately identified it as a weapons release of some kind, accidental or intentional.
	It came from a laboratory.
	I was probably one of the first people to state that in January, but not it was a pandemic coming, it was a weapons grade release of some kind, so therefore even more concerning.
	You can imagine how that was met by many people, now actually accepted it came from a laboratory.
	But the next bit is really interesting.
	I quickly identified they weaponized its release and there's huge amounts on my website and there's a 72 page report about all of the evidence around it.
	So we know that it was a weapons laboratory that was doing something and they've effectively created a weapon that's transmitted with low lethality and we know that once it released they made sure we all got it.
	They didn't spread it, they weaponized it.
	So you've only got this little thing.
	Did they do it on purpose or did they not?
	Now, I created in this paper the eight criteria whereby, if I was a planner, that I would want these things, want eight criteria to be available before you could release it.
	If one was missing, you couldn't do it.
	All eight are there.
	The probability of all eight is zero.
	So then you come to the intention of it.
	Well, under my analysis of China, Xi has to believe that he has dominated the world by 2030.
	He hasn't got much time.
	And the one thing Trump did, he revealed his goals.
	Even though he didn't inhibit them, he revealed them sufficiently that it was slowing down.
	There was resistance from the outside world.
	So the arrival of the pandemic in disabling the Western economies, specifically by creating this construct lockdowns work, and we the Chinese are really disciplined.
	If you're like us, then you know, you can lock down too.
	And yep, you can bugger your economy in the process.
	It was the message that they sent out, guaranteed to make sure, and we almost went Swedish, but thanks to the incompetence of our government, thinking we forgot about the old people, we were banned from the full lockdowns, which never worked, and the most disgusting policy you could ever come up with, because they disabled ourselves.
	So we were not only infected by a weapons of the great agent, I think intentionally.
	We also completely took hook, like and sinker, the process whereby the lockdowns worked and then we did it and we inflicted that upon ourselves.
	The net effect is that we question our government but more importantly in the arms race that we desperately have to match China and Russia with now, we find that hard because we blew our debt ward essentially to survive the constriction of lockdown.
	So we've been socially disabled on an epic scale and we did it to ourselves.
	Yeah, it's very interesting.
	I mean, I think that there are two intelligent analyses of what's been happening, and one is yours and what I would call the Michael Senger version, which is that essentially it's China, it's the CCP, because we do know that President Xi effectively invented the lockdown, and it's amazing that the Western nations actually went, oh yeah, that's a good idea, this thing that's invented by...
	Yeah.
	But there is at the same time the alternative theory, and I think actually the truth lies somewhere between the two.
	I think that the bad actors can be both China and the deep state, the powers that be, whatever you want to call them.
	But there was that evil alliance between big tech The pharmaceutical industry and the central bankers who are really responsible for all the evils in the world, I mean, along with communist China, they orchestrated this fake pandemic to hide the coming financial collapse and to escape with their ill-gotten gains.
	I've come across a lot of them.
	I'm afraid they're just not intelligent enough to do that.
	Really, I think you're over-crediting that.
	You know, they're really remarkably unimaginative about the world.
	It was definitely from China.
	But what I do think, and this is well over, is I call them the lockdown brigade.
	So the problem that we had was we had, led by Gove, who sought power covertly, and the people around him, Hancock and Witte and Vallance, we had a whole agency that sought power by constricting us.
	And there was a power battle between them and Boris.
	Boris wasn't an advocate of that process, but they outflanked him.
	So we saw a real struggle inside our democracy of a dark force and I'm afraid I'll go right to the top of the tree of the dark force.
	I'm with you.
	And then dark forces attract dark forces and last I should have dinner with you know the Astra Zeneca team and essentially the guys that did it.
	Trust me they're not dark.
	Their intention is one of healing people from the people that actually created it, but the pharmaceutical companies and the agenda that goes with how they produce vaccines and people like the Lockdown Brigade, now that becomes a desperate mix, which over time became a habit of control.
	And how we lock down a second time is criminal.
	How we try to lock down or even think about it over Omicron, when the evidence in South Africa was overwhelmingly that it was the fourth attenuated wave, I think that's actually, that's fraud, and people should go to prison for it.
	And I've written extensively, real time about my predictions.
	So I predicted in the 28th of November, that Omicron was the end of the pandemic, because I first of all predicted its onset.
	In March predicted it would have three waves and then predicted the end of it being the fourth attenuated wave.
	So it's not complicated.
	If I can do it, then someone else should have done it.
	Yes.
	But the franchise groups that basically had their own agendas that came to play upon us and they should all be held accountable.
	Do you think, do you think Gobe is lateral or linear?
	I think he's lateral.
	I mean I think Hitler was lateral.
	Just because you're lateral doesn't mean you're good.
	Lateral is a way of thinking and you can harness that purpose for light or dark.
	In this case I'm afraid... I'm enjoying your your Gove equals Hitler.
	Yeah, more like someone in the Sith, I think is probably better.
	Yeah.
	Someone who realizes they're never going to wield overt power because the Electra wouldn't tolerate it.
	So Ben wields covert power.
	Oh, he's Littlefinger or something like that.
	He's, he's, yeah.
	Yes.
	Yeah.
	Good, good analogy.
	So, so, um, I mean, look, I say 90% you and I agree on stuff.
	There are just areas of disagreement.
	And I value, you know, I mean, you're obviously really good at recognizing patterns and seeing how things are going.
	What you say about China confirms what I've heard from so many different... I mean, China have infiltrated the hell out of every institution, haven't they?
	I mean, they own the universities, they own the political class, they own the businesses... So what's interesting is, I...
	And how Putin has ended up at the moment where he's invaded Ukraine.
	I do not condone it.
	And I think he is now our enemy.
	But I would argue the mix of circumstances that led to this moment are as much the West's responsibility as his.
	And it is the accidental war by incompetence and the West has a huge part to play and responsibility in my opinion.
	If they were going to migrate east then they needed to maintain sufficient deterrence to make sure this didn't happen.
	But we migrated east and we let our defenses down.
	That's a terrible combination.
	Now China is completely different.
	from the third Taiwan Straits crisis in 96.
	So I'm going to go back even further actually.
	So on my curve of empires this Chinese cycle started the Boxer Revolution.
	Regionalization took place all the way up until the civil war broke out between the nationalists and the communists and the end of regionalization took place at the end of their civil war.
	And here we go for all those people who think China's peaceful.
	Go and look at its history.
	It was fully militarized and it basically attacked any neighbor it could and grabbed any piece of land it could.
	And it just kept on doing it.
	And it only came to a halt when it was at places like Vietnam where we met Americans.
	And finally, in the Taiwan Straits crisis in 96, when two carriers and a MEU went through, they thought, oh, my goodness, we're not going to front it out with these guys.
	So we need to have another plan.
	And the other plan became a covert plan.
	And the cornerstone of that was to use the liberal Western belief that if we gave them money and they became capitalists, they would become like us and democratic.
	Stupid idea and they led us with a bloody great carrot and the Americans walked swiftly into it and their plan was really simple let me into the WTO let me into the world organizations and we'll subvert them from the beginning Now I want you to go and fund our manufacturing business, so you bring your production to us, we'll destroy your manufacturing process in the business, we'll take all your IP because you make it, we make it, and we'll keep stealing anything else you don't send to us.
	And you're going to do that because you think that we're going to become like you.
	Great plan.
	So that's what we did.
	They duped us from the outset.
	They manipulated us and we were stupid enough to do it because we didn't understand what the CCP was.
	Just like we didn't understand that Putin was a dictator.
	Liberal blindness was everywhere.
	Yes.
	And greed.
	So what we did in that process was we exported a new, so in 2000, a new commodity cycle started.
	The first one was 1950 roughly through to 2000 and that commodity cycle peaked in 75.
	Interestingly in the Cold War terms America and the West consumed commodities and Russia made commodities.
	So it's no coincidence that Russia and its economy was strongest at the peak of the commodity cycle because they were making them and selling them for high prices and the Western world was having high price commodities and except the inflation.
	So if you go to 75, we didn't think we'd win the Cold War.
	It was looking very tenuous at that period.
	And then the commodity cycle started to abate.
	Inflation abated and the whole thing turned around.
	By 1990 they were bankrupt.
	That inefficient economy subsidized by the production of commodities and the opposite happened with technology and money and low inflation in America.
	Putin arrived essentially at the beginning of a new cycle.
	So Putin's victory in reclaiming Russia came as a commodity cycle replenished his coffers.
	And with it he became bolder and bolder.
	And finally, when you came to sort of 2013, he'd accumulated enough money that basically he could push back when it came to the issues around Ukraine.
	And we talked about those earlier.
	All of that was a cycle the West didn't appreciate.
	But over in China, they have essentially stripped our manufacturing.
	We've exported our inflation.
	So we've got low inflation because they made things cheaply.
	And the result is that we're about to lose that because we're going to go into conflict with them and they're going to stop it and they are already.
	So we're going to see inflation returning on an epic scale as you find a new supply chain.
	We're going to find inflation from the commodity cycle killing us and we're going to find essentially the inflation builds up through printing too much money to just add up to make this horrible perfect storm.
	So inflation is not temporary, it's rampant.
	What sort of inflation are you expecting?
	Well, if you think of America's core CPI is around 7%, treble it, quadruple it, go and have a look at Turkey and actually half of that We're going to have a true crisis of cost of living on an epic scale.
	Right.
	And it's to do with structures of manufacturing and structurally the way we did certain things from the printing of money to the exporting to China.
	And now it's going to be used against us in the most horrendous way.
	So you reckon that already the real inflation, as opposed to the kind of official inflation, is approaching 30% already?
	No, no, no.
	I think that's where we go over the next few years.
	We're around 70% in America now.
	Because what time is it?
	We're around 70% in America now.
	Core inflation.
	7%?
	Yeah, which is staggering.
	Okay.
	And so by, say, by the third or fourth quarter of this year, what do you, what do you, what does your crystal ball tell you?
	Look, so this year was a perfect storm.
	And I called this year, the year to look up, because the film was brilliant.
	The film represented a collective denial of the annihilation of mankind as you probably have seen and how society behaved.
	Now there's something very similar that's happened in that I call it the super bubble and the printing of money over 20 years is this is the doomsday bubble.
	America is printed and pumped up its system and what something is very interesting happens is that collective herds of people When they're in a euphoric state as you pump up the stock market and get richer, are absolutely saturated with dopamine.
	And dopamine-filled human beings cannot see a threat, which sort of explains the undercurrent of why America wouldn't address China or Russia in the way they should have done, because the system was doped up with dopamine printed by the Fed.
	Yeah.
	So as you go over the top, and the top I was able to predict in the Nasdaq in November very precisely, now we're over the top.
	That dopamine has been withdrawn from the system and cortisol is starting to come in.
	The moment the herd If China becomes cortisol dominant, they will see China as a true threat.
	Russia is a threat, which is a cascade of problems.
	And they're going to see a financial threat from inflation on an epic scale.
	And the stock markets are going to collapse in a bigger move than 1929, probably.
	Certainly in a very deep move, if we're lucky.
	And if we're unlucky, we'll dislocate because everyone is one way.
	And that's a direct product of the bubble created by the Federal Reserve.
	It's one of the byproducts that people don't fully understand.
	So we're going to go in the next period into a shock realization of all the threats around us.
	Now if demand collapses as deeply as I think it is, there might be a drop in input prices from commodity demand for a time.
	But that will only be a temporary period because this arms race between China and the world will mop up the rest in the most huge way.
	But we've also, on top of that, got supply chain inflation, which is going to get worse as China has a go at Taiwan because it'll suddenly be a brick wall.
	And we've still got the problem that the dollar printing money through M2 is so high that inflation is just like a percolating Toxic gas that's coming through our whole system.
	So I think inflation will keep going even though the stock markets fall and we're going to move into a hyper stagflation environment.
	Yes, this is the bit I was looking forward to when I said you were Mr Sunshine and Jolity, because I knew it was coming.
	I knew I'd squeeze it out of you in the end.
	Am I being squeezed?
	Well, yeah, you're like an aphid, just dropping its honeydew of despair, ruining our roses.
	What do we do apart from like kill ourselves?
	Okay, so what policies should we be seeing in Britain?
	And I say in Britain because we have the choice to be Singapore on Thames and the only way you can basically escape a high inflation environment is to make super high growth.
	So we do need to lower taxes to a flat rate of 20% to attract every jot of capital out of Europe and America to come to us and to harness that money to invest and build a new stage of self-manufacturing and innovation.
	We need to essentially do that yesterday because there's a delay in that process.
	But attracting the capital from the old world as it collapses to us is critical.
	I do see sterling as being a safe haven.
	So the attractive thing, whoever brings their money in here at 1.30, 1.35, they're going to see two.
	So they'll make the money on the exchange rate.
	Because an awful lot of dollar problems are going to obviously be there.
	Euro problems.
	And these are huge buckets of foreign exchange.
	And there's a little teeny sterling bucket.
	When some of that tries to get in, the price is going to go through the roof.
	So I'm a huge fan of sterling.
	I'm a huge fan of gold and silver as the only safe haven available.
	And that's anti-inflationary, anti-shock, anti-decline, which goes to a certain stage until the government seeks to expropriate everyone's gold and silver, like the Americans did in the mid-30s, to go back to a gold standard.
	So you've got to be timing your exit quite well.
	But long before that, the price, I think, will hugely rally.
	Hugely.
	So is the answer to make sure your gold, your physical gold and silver, is restored in a country which your government doesn't control?
	Or do you think I think that's a very sound concept, actually.
	So Switzerland is a good place to do that, although I'm not sure I ever trust a scientist.
	But yes, you're right.
	And the other thing that's really critical is that all of that means nothing unless our society survives.
	We've entered into what I call the age of war, something I predicted back in 2000 as we came into the peak of the commodity cycle.
	The last moments of war and the last cycle were 1975, the peak of the Cold War, 1914, the onset of World War One and the American Civil War, all brought about through commodity dynamics.
	We have now entered that this liberal process where no one's going to attack us and aren't we lovely happy people has got to end.
	We are in severe danger from the eradication of our society through armed conflict from Russia and China.
	We forced Russia into the arms of China when they really would have liked to be with us I would argue, but now it's too late.
	We need to be able to deal with both of them and the only way you can do that spend between five and ten percent of GDP which is a water Be now with an emergency program to deploy your weapon systems within two years, not a decade, not five years, two years, because literally time is running out.
	And every single electorate, every voter should be focused on self-defense first.
	And then secondly, the other issues, you better work through them because you're still alive, still free.
	Right.
	But you've gone from Cassandra to Pollyanna because there's no way any of this shit that you would like to happen is going to happen.
	I mean, you look at Boris, look at his potential replacements, look at our economy.
	There's no understanding at all.
	Shall I tell you why I think they are going to?
	This cortisol response I described is going to wash over us.
	We're going to see Ukraine invaded and we're going to see a bloodbath.
	When you see Taiwan soon threatened afterwards, and people will start to feel visceral fear.
	And that fear will also transmit through the loss of their security and financial investments.
	And you see, and societies and herds behave quantumly differently.
	And the politicians demand or demand upon them completely change.
	So no, in this current situation, they're all asleep.
	But this current situation is about to change dramatically.
	Yeah, I can see why there might be a kind of flight to safety, but that in itself is not necessarily a good thing.
	I can see that people sort of wanting, like as if we haven't got enough already, more big government, more control.
	I'm not seeing that that's going to be, we're going to be seeing lower taxes, deregulation, exploitation.
	That's one of the necessities of strategic advancement in a stagflationary environment.
	And the trouble is our Chancellor is just too linear to see that.
	He's a single stock analyst.
	He doesn't.
	But what is interesting about this is I've learned this about my analysis of social systems.
	They are remarkably, at certain times, they manifest desires and needs.
	Like, for example, I've been saying that the electorate will not tolerate incompetence after the civil war regionalization.
	Well, it would have done before.
	And just as you are frustrated, I am frustrated.
	The level of frustration with our leadership is higher than ever before, because we don't and cannot unconsciously tolerate useless people at the top, because we feel the urge to expand and grow.
	And so I think there are all sorts of collective pressures that I'm discussing here that find fascinating ways to manifest individuals that enact those policies.
	And I still believe very strongly in that.
	Just like Thatcher came out of nowhere, Boris's replacement will be somewhere in the bowels of the Conservative Party.
	Won't be any of the big Grazing giants that people think are going to be there.
	Right.
	Well, we certainly need something like that.
	I mean, one thing you haven't mentioned, and I was going to pick you up on because I noticed in one of the talks you gave, On your whiteboard or your screen or whatever, you were suggesting that climate change is any kind of issue or threat, which I don't buy into at all.
	I mean, we should be exploiting madly our shale gas reserve, should we not?
	I mean... So, you've asked two questions there.
	Yeah.
	So there is a chapter in Breaking the Code of History on climate change.
	I'm a geophysicist by training, right?
	So when I looked at the evidence, I was gobsmacked back in 2003 how obviously we have created a dramatic change.
	The most powerful evidence that's never talked about is 800 years of Vladislav ice cores and the correlation between temperature and CO2.
	Hang on, before you say, before you say no, like this is, this is, this is evidence that sits in front of us, right?
	The correlation between CO2 and temperature is irrevocable.
	It was self-containing that created a multiple waves of sine waves, which was self-limiting.
	We are now at the top of that self-limit, and it may take a number of years, and I talked about this back in 02, and before temperature catches up with CO2.
	I think, based on the evidence, we've baked in 11 degrees already.
	And I have made a hypothesis.
	So the reason why you didn't see temperature change is because the oceans were heat sinks, just like a thick frying pan, and you could keep dabbing it for as you made it hot until suddenly it's hot.
	And all the evidence of higher climatic energy, sea changes, they're all there, ice changes.
	So I do think it's very real.
	I don't think it's our priority right now because our priority is to survive the aggression of these dictatorships but it's something that we do and we'll have to seriously address.
	And if you can do both together that's even better.
	We'll have to totally disagree on that one because I mean I don't buy the... I would love you to go to the chat I'm a physicist, I know.
	I've heard this so many times.
	I'm a climate scientist, I know.
	It's like, trust me, I'm a doctor.
	What I would ask you to do is go to the chapter in my book, Breaking the Code of History, and read it, and then we can debate what you don't agree about the scientific points.
	I'd love to do that.
	I mean, just to pick you up on that, I shouldn't have done this, I shouldn't have raised the subject, but here we are.
	We've had our energy economy...
	If China had been writing our policy, which they effectively have, there was nothing we could have done to help the Chinese better than not exploiting our shale gas reserves.
	I completely agree with you.
	Covering the country with wind turbines and offshore wind and diverting...
	So don't confuse my observation of the underlying trend in our weather with how we should respond to it.
	I completely agree with you.
	We should have nuclear power.
	Honestly, like we should have thorium reactors everywhere.
	And we should have it for two reasons.
	It's baseline cheap and the commodity cycle increase.
	It's carbon negative or neutral because you can use it to get shit out and it would give a strategic independence.
	So the policies we've enacted are stupid.
	Suicidal.
	I don't support those policies.
	I'm talking about the evidence of the reality of what we face.
	How we face it is completely different.
	One thing we've seen since 1880 ain't very much and I'm not buying the idea that it's going to be a sudden acceleration.
	Shall I tell you one statistic, James?
	Interesting.
	If you look at the rate of average wave height, because they put satellites up as a sailor to find average wave height in the oceans, you can see statistically the energy in the oceans has been relentlessly increasing over the past two decades.
	That is a clear indication of energy input.
	What was it?
	Yeah.
	I hadn't heard that one before.
	I mean, I always appreciate... You mean I've come up with a new one that you haven't heard of before?
	Yeah, yeah.
	But I have to say, I'm not going, fuck, wave heights?
	Well, that's persuading me to bomb the economy in the Dark Ages, to deal with this threat.
	But you know what?
	The thing is, James, if you're going to discuss from a scientific argument basis, you should.
	If you're going to discuss emotionally, then you can just...
	No, no, I'm not discussing emotionally.
	Like you, I didn't just write one chapter on this thing, I wrote a whole bloody book on it.
	And I've been overwhelmed by the immense stupidity of the climate change and the dishonesty.
	That all this stuff exists in the form of computer projections, never in observed reality.
	All the doomsday predictions... I agree with that.
	Everything from... So I agree with you about... The reason why computer projections don't work is they don't understand all the variables and how they interrelate.
	Right, exactly.
	That's why I'd never use it as a prediction.
	But one thing that is available to us is the evidence from the ICE course.
	No, I'm not even buying that one because they've got it the wrong way around.
	The ice cores do not persuade me at all.
	That's a hackneyed argument which carries no weight at all.
	You don't think temperature is a function of CO2, you think CO2 is a function of temperature.
	Yeah.
	And we're not going to resolve that one in the course of this.
	No, no, no.
	But that's the basis of our difference, which is really good.
	It's always good to say, you think, you think, I think temperature is correlated to CO2, you think CO2 is correlated to temperature.
	Yeah.
	Then it's a lie.
	And so what happens when you break the self-regulatory system, which we've broken?
	We don't know.
	I don't know.
	I just know that there are so many worse things to be worrying about right now.
	And I think that... You know what, James?
	We agree on that.
	The reason I get kind of quite passionate about this subject, apart from having studied it for about 15 years, and I'm to the point where I'm actually bored with it, is that I see that this... and I don't think it's just Carrie.
	I think that it is a mechanism, it is a governance mechanism which takes place at a supranational level through things like the UN's Agenda 2030, through things like the European Union's various directives, through obviously COP.
	We've got a notionally conservative government which is committing us to net zero, which is entirely risible, worthy of Stalin's tractor production targets.
	We're having people being denied the chance to heat their homes because they're being forced to have these crappy new boilers.
	I so agree with you.
	And meanwhile, here you are talking about how we're going to have to have a high-growth, low-tax economy.
	How does that square with what's going on?
	So you must not confuse me advocating the policies we've seen with the recognition of a phenomena, right?
	They're different.
	I do not support how we've done this in any shape or form.
	It's ultimate stupidity.
	And how we've gone away from nuclear reactors stuns me.
	When you have all these wind farms, which are variable power inputs, and you get a high over the country and all our lights go out, and the rest of the time we pay for gas, which is part of a commodity cycle, it's bizarre.
	And so I agree with you and the ultimate input is people can't live.
	Inflation goes through the roof if your energy price increases and the drag on your system then becomes unbearable and it's basically strategic blindness.
	It's the inability of our ship to prioritize the threats in front of us and to create integrated strategy therein.
	They are liberal enough to think the war never happens again so we're going to close our eyes at dictators and attack people.
	And they've crossed many of the threats off with a liberal blind set of glasses and then we've ended up focusing on things which aren't first degree priorities and then we become vulnerable in other ways.
	It's a sign of phenomenally poor leadership.
	Yes yeah well I so but do you have um I think we should we should we should close on on a try and get a shard of of optimism in the in a whole sort of rock face of just depressing awfulness your understanding of history and the cycles of empires and stuff I mean If we're doomed, we're doomed, aren't we?
	I mean, never mind, you know, what... So look, I am, you won't believe this, I'm an innate optimist, James.
	Okay, so when I identified these things, I'm dyslexic and people in 0203 when I talked about the changes I saw said you've got to write about these things and I said I really am dyslexic and there's not a snowflake in hell's chance that's going to happen.
	I found myself giving milk to my twins who are my second and third children on 2005 thinking what sort of world have I brought them into and I've now got to commit to making it as good as it can be and the next day I started to write a bit.
	I'm not religious but it was like the gangs and breaking the code of history was the product.
	So my work is about first of all explaining to people what we face and it's pretty dire, why we face it and how we can mitigate it.
	I think we're incredibly resourceful.
	But I do think humanity and our society is coming to a precipice that if we sleepwalk to that precipice, we will just fall over it.
	But if we wake up and face the reality of what we face, we can start to mitigate those changes.
	We can start to spend money on deterrence on an epic scale, and we can actually meet aggression with strict deterrence, and we can find ways to sort our economies out, and we will actually evolve as a race.
	And that's what I've committed my work to a global forecaster.
	And that's really why I decided to be public about it because I believe it is possible but we're at the 11th hour and it does really need people to truly wake up and have the courage to recognize if they didn't believe it was happening it is happening in front of our eyes and history tells us what happens to people that sleepwalk.
	So I'm optimistic but coming on your show is about waking people up and explain to people however dire it is when you first confront the mess we're in there is a way out and part of that is about looking for different types of leadership The forecaster provides an alternative perspective that then feeds right to the top of our system in different ways and makes a difference.
	So that's my commitment in the work that I do.
	The only sad thing is that you're kind of, my audience, you're kind of preaching to the choir.
	They're already ahead of you in their analysis of the despair.
	And they're being ignored.
	Well, okay, so this is the news that I'm going to say to everyone who feels ignored.
	Change is a cascade.
	And I would say that change starts with five to six percent of lateral thinkers.
	And once they all start to realize change is needed, it's like the Second monkey.
	The whole troop changes.
	So it doesn't have to be from 6 to 7 to 8 to 10.
	It's actually quite a small percentage of this group through lateral thinkers that have clear thoughts about the priorities of their threats and they talk about them and they echonate them and it resonates.
	So don't feel despair.
	Redouble your efforts to speak and communicate and that does enact change, especially when the backdrop of this cortisol response is about to come through.
	I've got one more tiny question but tell me first of all where people can see your stuff and where they can read you and sell your product?
	They can go to Global Forecaster which is davidmurray.co.uk site which is enormous about information, theories on social dynamics, all about how to predict what comes next.
	I'm not an academic.
	I'm a practical person that believes in how you predict what comes next and create strategies to mitigate it.
	And the site is full of everything from geopolitics, to markets, to how you understand and interpret your life cycle.
	And it's really about self-awareness in these patterns, which is available to people.
	And with them, you're then forearmed and mobilized to understand why you feel something.
	Because you're not the only one.
	You feel it because of your place, your lateral.
	You feel it because you pick up the cycle.
	So it's about empowering the frustrated people to redouble their efforts.
	That sounds good.
	Okay, and I was going to briefly plug my stuff.
	I really appreciate your support, my dear beloved viewers and listeners.
	You can support me on Patreon, on Subscribestar, and my latest avenues, which are Locals, and uh what's the other one substack yeah and um so please feel free to support me um i really appreciate it um david the final question i wanted to ask you is when those um uh tribesmen um sort of almost almost killed you what
	what was the thing that upset upset them what Was it simply that you wanted them to work in the rain?
	Or was it the idea that you were suggesting that they were like women and children?
	Or what?
	Did you ever work out from your interpreter what the problem was?
	Yeah, I did actually.
	So what I didn't know was the surveyor that I mentioned that approached us when we landed on the helicopter had been in charge of that crew.
	And they had threatened to kill him and like beat him up a bit.
	He didn't tell anyone and left it and came back and thought I'll find some sucker to go and take my job.
	Hence I walked into a hornet's nest that he had already stirred up.
	What a total wanker!
	Did you have it out with him?
	That's appalling behaviour.
	I'm really shocked.
	Honestly, it was a rough, rough social system.
	Truly.
	I mean, if I told you the stories, it was rough and that was just one aspect of Darwinistic survival.
	Yeah, but did you ever have it out with him?
	Yeah, I did.
	But it didn't make any difference to other people.
	And the company didn't really, you know, in those days, it was just no, it was a really rough environment.
	It was, you know, the toughest survived and the weakest broke down.
	So we had a lot of labor rights.
	The fundamental reason why they rioted is because they didn't understand the concept of work.
	They own the land.
	Therefore, they should just get paid for it.
	So they just didn't know what work was.
	And that happened time and time again, and there were expats like myself who weren't culturally briefed.
	The crew had eventually come out of Brunei, and they'd been in Thailand before, and they had no idea about the Melanesian culture.
	So much so, the chief of the operation was brilliant, but we'd been telling him about these riots and he just didn't believe it.
	And I'd gone in for one of my sort of breaks in the base camp for every two weeks you got a night and like I think 200 had been put in these canoes without life jackets and there had been a monsoon and half of them had sunk and they'd all survived but they were apoplectic and they'd got back up to the base camp and they marched in and I'll never forget it they marched this chief of operations out by twisting his ears because they couldn't reach and they frog marched him out with twisted ears and we looked around thinking we won't be seeing him again
	And he was a very loquacious Welshman.
	And he talked his way.
	And it was that was when he realized we had a huge cultural problem that he just wasn't open to before.
	That was his opening.
	Wow.
	I think that's how we should we should treat CEOs actually.
	I think I think anyone that doesn't understand what goes on in the real in the bottom line of an operation should have their ears twisted.
	You're right.
	Yeah, absolutely.
	David, despite a slight disagreement on climate change, I've a nice cause.
	I've totally loved our conversation.
	Thank you for depressing us all and offer us a tiny glimmer of hope as well.
	It's been great talking to you.
	Thanks a lot.
	James, it's been an enormous pleasure and disagreement is nothing to be apologised.
	That's basically how we come to the right conclusion, so love a bit of fruity conversation.
	Good.
	Thanks a lot then.
	All right.
	Have a lovely evening.

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