Rune is a bestselling author, a skilled speaker and a popular podcast guest. He is a lawyer by education, with 25 years of experience from consulting in both the private and public sector, including three years as a National Expert with the European Commission.
Rune’s most valuable qualifications are processing and analysing vast amounts of complex information in many different fields, presenting his findings in a way that is engaging and easy to understand, and thereby enabling people to formulate conclusions and plans of action.
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I know I always say I'm excited about this week's special guest, but I really am.
Welcome to the DellingPod with me, James Dellingpole.
And I know I always say I'm excited about this week's special guest, but I really am.
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Thank you.
Well, welcome to the Delling Pod, Rune Ostgaard.
Thank you.
Thank you, James.
Nice to be with you.
Go on, say it correctly so that people can hear how to pronounce your name correctly.
Rune Ostgaard.
Ostgaard.
Yeah, so the thing is, I...
I love the idea of the Scandinavian languages and all those sort of weird tiny O's you've got on top and that change the pronunciation of the vowels.
But I ought to be able to get a handle on this.
I studied Anglo-Saxon at university, one of the things, and obviously there's been a Nordic influence on the English language.
I mean, some of our words we still share.
I sometimes watch Netflix shows in Swedish and in Norwegian, and there are moments where you can understand what people are saying without the translation.
Definitely.
Yeah.
Anyway...
We are going to talk today about your area of expertise.
And I'm really happy about this because a lot of my podcasts are really quite esoteric and down the rabbit hole.
But I think that this is going to be one of those podcasts that even normie folk can listen to without going, what, this is crazy.
And you've been studying the history of inflation through the ages.
And I don't know where to start.
Um, because it's a big subject, isn't it?
Okay, I know where I'm going to start.
I've noticed when I go to my supermarket how increasingly bloody expensive everything is.
And I noticed that not only is the price of things going up, but for example, when you buy butter, You used to buy it in packets of, I think, 250 grams.
And now what they've started doing is selling it in 200 gram packets.
They deceive the eye.
They don't say, we have reduced our package size.
That you think it's still normal.
So this has been happening to us for millennia, hasn't it?
This way of sort of making us poorer through different forms of inflation.
Yes, that's absolutely correct and I have managed to trace it down to at least back to the 5th century before Christ.
So we know that this was a policy that started in Athens, in the Greek city-state of Athens.
They decided to introduce inflation as a policy and as a means to finance their war against Sparta.
So the Spartan Empire, you know.
And in the end, they lost the war.
And after they were besieged by the Spartans, and that was the end of their dominance in that area.
So the Spartans didn't have an inflationary policy, but the Athenians did.
They had a monetary policy, but my impression is that the Spartans made sure that they didn't inflate their money supply.
And that's the whole trick here, to keep...
To keep the supply of money stable in order to avoid having price inflation.
Do you think, I'm just flirting a theory here which you may not be able to enlighten me on, Do you think that the inflationary policy adopted by the Athenians could explain the reason they lost?
Or was it just a coincidence?
Yes, I think that might be one of the reasons, because it's sort of an artificial stimulus when you use inflation to finance something.
So it's very cheap money, you know.
The way they did it, I could try to explain that a little bit as well.
What they did probably was to say to the people of Athens that you now have to use the coins that our mint has made.
So you have to bring your silver to the mint and it will create new coins for you.
And then the Mint handed over coins to their customers.
And the coins, they had less silver in them in total compared to what the people gave to the Mint.
So the rulers of the city-state, they could keep some of the silver for themselves and create more silver coins that they can spend to finance the war.
What this means, basically, is that you can extract wealth from the population.
So it's an alternative to extract wealth Compared to, for instance, taxation, because taxes, they are very unpopular often.
So they do the same by inflation, and they do it sort of in a... It's not open, what they do.
It's a fraud, basically.
And when you do this, it's easy to finance whatever ambitions you have as a ruler.
And history quite clearly demonstrates that it goes to the heads of the rulers.
They believe that they are invisible and they do many stupid things.
Yeah.
So it can be that it enabled them to fight a long war and to win some of the battles.
But also, it can be part of the explanation of why they lost in the end.
Yes.
I was just thinking, it's not quite inflation, but it's a similar thing, that income tax in the UK was initially launched as a temporary measure to finance the Napoleonic Wars, which I seem to recall ended Quite a while ago, but income tax has stayed.
So they're finding all sorts of ways to rip us off.
Do we know the name of the guy in Athens?
Because ancient Athens is held up to us as a kind of exemplar of democracy and the beginning of Western civilization.
And yet what you're saying is that it was also the beginning of the ruination of civilization.
Do we know the name of the guy who introduced it?
In the case of Athens, I don't think that we have too much evidence at all of what was going on.
As far as I understand, it has been written about this in sort of a theatre play or something like that.
So I don't think we find many other sources than that.
So we don't know many of the details.
But I haven't studied it in detail.
What I have done, on the other hand, is to study in quite some detail how this policy came about in Norway, which happened in 1050 after Christ.
I was reading your Norway story.
Tell me the name of the book again.
You've written three, haven't you?
Tell me your book names.
Yeah, the first book about money is called Fraud Coin, and the subtitle is 1000 Years with Inflation as a Policy.
Yep.
And what's the next one?
And the next one, which we just recently launched, it's called Unbar.
U-N-B-A-R.
And what does that mean?
To unbar something, which means to sort of remove, like if you have the bars in a prison, you remove the bars, so you open up.
And here it's all about opening up your intellect enabling your brain to understand better what globalization is all about and how it relates to people's belief systems and also the monetary system.
And it's quite a good... I read it this morning.
It's a very, very quick, punchy read.
And it's quite a good way of Showing people who, most people, as you know, are far too trusting about the world and particularly about authority.
They think that the authorities must somehow have our best interests at heart because otherwise, you know, we wouldn't allow them to do this stuff.
I mean, surely there'd have to be a law against exploitation by greedy predators.
So we give them far too much credit and what you explain very clearly is how fake money has been used by the ruling orders to make us poorer and to constantly exploit us while making them richer.
I love the Viking story.
Tell me about this part of Norway or Sweden.
This was in Norway, yes.
Yeah, the story about how inflation started as a policy in Norway.
It actually began a little bit before 1000 years after Christ, because at that time we had some Kings who tried to rule and dominate also my part of Norway, which is called Trøndelag.
It's in the very middle part of Norway.
And my people, my ancestors, they didn't like kings at all.
They hated kings, actually, and wanted to be left alone.
So it was kind of natural elites who guided or ruled my region and they had an obligation to kill any king who tried to dominate them and to take their property etc without the consent of the people.
So it was kind of a harsh obligation for every individual but in this way The trenders, as they were called, they were able to have what we called monetary freedom.
And monetary freedom implies that you can use whatever money you like best.
And we used money from all over the world, at least from the parts of the world that we traded with.
from the Arab countries and many European countries.
And typically we used silver and gold coins, which had a high content of silver and gold, which wasn't debased and which was easily recognizable.
So that was sort of the situation before the introduction of the inflation policy.
Okay, just tell me briefly, how could they tell whether the coins had been debased?
How could they tell that you had a high silver or gold content?
Yes, when you have metal coins, and especially with silver and gold, it's quite easy to test if it's proper silver and proper gold coins.
At least back then, your ability to commit fraud by creating fake coins wasn't that easy at that time.
It's easier today with the tools and the metals we can make.
Did you bite it or what?
I mean, is it?
Yes.
You could.
You could bite it and you could, of course, you heard the sound when you sort of dropped a coin on a table and let it spin around.
You can hear that this is the proper sound, the correct sound of a proper gold coin.
So it But are there things that you can mix with gold or silver to make them look like silver and gold, but which aren't?
Or not really?
Yes, you can create coins with a core which consists of, it could be iron or it could be typically copper.
And then have a thin coat of silver on the surface, you know, so it looks like silver.
But it won't give you the same ring, you know, the same tone if you drop it on the floor or something like that.
So people in those days, I mean, I can imagine this would make sense, that people were very attuned.
Just everyone had this skill that they could hear just by dropping a coin on the table.
What its metallic qualities were.
So because it was kind of much, it was easier at that time to detect that something fishy was going on, you know.
Much easier then to understand also why prices increased when they sort of, if they were flooded with bad coins.
They would see that the prices would go up because the guy who sold bread, he saw that these coins, they aren't any good at all.
I want twice as many coins as normal.
So people understood this intuitively.
It's much more difficult today because the system has become more complex and we use digital currencies.
Money are flowing in and out of our pockets at high speed, so we don't understand what's going on.
Yeah.
I want to hear more about this particular period in Norwegian history.
Because in your book, there was a special word, wasn't there, for this obligation to kill the king if he misbehaved himself.
What was the phrase for that?
The phrase for that was the resistance provisions.
So, the Frosta-Ting law, that was our regional law, it has this provision which said that people are obliged, not just allowed, but people are obliged to kill the king if he takes the property of someone in Trøndelag without the consent of the Frosta-Ting, that was the regional sort of
Like a sort of council of elders or a sort of... Yeah, for the landowners and the farmers which had the power in Trøndelag at that time.
Right.
And if you weren't able to kill the king, you were then obliged to chase him out of Norway.
And the king would never be allowed to come back again to Norway.
Yeah.
And this happened several times.
Did it?
As I understand it, there was a rule where they devised a method of spreading the word as quickly as possible so that the king wouldn't have time to react or defend himself, so they could all get him.
How did that work?
So you had to get the message that now the king has done something illegal.
And the way this was done was that they cut a wooden arrow.
We call it a war arrow in Norway.
And in English, I think the more widely used term is a bidding stick.
And this stick could be sort of planted on the outside of your house and typically in the door.
So when you came back from the fields, you saw that the bidding stick was plugged into your door and you read the message there.
It said that you have to meet at the local court place, the thing, you know, as we call it, and be ready for battle.
And you have to pass on this war arrow to your neighbor as quickly as possible.
And if the people didn't do this, they could be punished having to pay a fine of 640 grams or something like that of silver.
That was quite a harsh penalty.
But the much worse penalty was that if they didn't succeed in chasing away or or better, kill the king, they would probably lose their freedom.
Yeah.
He would come back and kill them and rule them, etc.
So this was sort of something which was integral.
It was a sort of basic understanding with all the people of Trendlag.
They understood that if I want to protect my freedom, I have the obligation to fight for this freedom.
I can't pay anybody else to do this for me.
It's my individual obligation.
And this was kind of, it created a A system that made it possible for them to have a whole lot of freedom, very low taxes, and very few obligations to any state.
It wasn't any state, basically.
And they were probably quite prosperous people.
Yes.
So, and one of the freedoms, and this is very important, one of the freedoms that this made them have was the freedom to use whichever money they liked best.
Do you know, you say it in a very dry way, but there's going to be people, Rune, listening to this going, yes!
This freedom really, really matters.
It matters so much that we've got to be prepared to take responsibility for it and fight for it.
And you've given me the most perfect historical example.
And I think you're about to tell me, because there aren't many Norwegian kings that we have heard of in England, in Britain.
But the one whose name we do know is Harald Hardrada.
The guy that our King Harold Godwinson killed at the Battle of Stamford Bridge in 1066, which is probably the reason he lost the Battle of Hastings, because he then had to march with his army down from Yorkshire to go and fight the Battle of Hastings.
But anyway, Harald Hardrada appears in your story, doesn't he?
Yes, Harald Hardrada.
He was the half-brother of the King Olaf, Haraldsson.
And he is called, he's better known as Saint Olaf.
King Saint Olaf.
And he was one of the kings who was chased away.
They tried to kill him in 1028.
He escaped to Sweden and to Russia and came back in 1030 together with Harald, later named Hardrada.
And then my ancestors killed Olaf.
But Harald, unfortunately, he escaped.
He was hurt, but he survived.
And he went to Constantinople.
It was sort of the capital of the Eastern Roman Empire.
And there he learned the skill of debasing money.
using yeah yeah okay so he came back in 1046 and he became the sole king of Norway in 1047 and And then he wanted to raise taxes, also in my area, in Trøndelag.
And the people said no.
The leader, his name was Einar Tambarselva, he said to the farmers, you shouldn't support or you shouldn't accommodate the king's request for paying higher taxes.
And then in 1050, Harald managed to assassinate Einar, the leader of the farmers, and he also killed his son, and then set out immediately afterwards to introduce a monopoly in money creation.
So that's how it started.
Right, okay.
So your part of Norway, which I keep failing to be able to pronounce, was that in a minority?
Were the other parts of Norway much more lie down and let them roll over us?
I think at least until the year 1000 or something like that, My region was the most powerful one, but I don't think that the people living in my region had the sort of ambitions to rule others.
They didn't want to rule their own people even, you know.
So they had freedom, but you can say that they didn't have much power, if you understand.
But the kings, they had a better Foothold down south around Oslo and further south and to the west of Norway, around Bergen, for instance, and that area.
But it was very difficult to handle the people in my region.
We were sort of unruly, basically.
I like your people, Rune.
Me too, I'm very proud of them.
I'll bet.
I wish your spirit would infuse us all today.
So, okay, so we killed, we did you a favor by killing your Hardrada.
at Stamford Bridge, but it obviously didn't do any good because presumably his heirs took over and imposed this debased coinage on you all?
Yes, you know, this is almost like a virus because when the ruler learned to use this instrument It's so tempting to go on and on forever.
So Harald, he set out and debased his silver coins from about 90% of silver content and down towards almost 30%.
So he could Probably triple his fortune, you know, his wealth and he could triple the money supply and probably most likely the prices for everything in society tripled as well, creating havoc to society and creating a lot of hardship for my ancestors, I would believe.
And, but this went straight to his head.
So he decided that he wanted to rule England as well.
So that's why he set out with, I think it was 200 long boats, approximately, and almost, yeah, around 7,000, 6,000 to 9,000 soldiers he took to England in order to try to conquer your great country and the people there.
So, but he didn't manage to do that.
Unfortunately, the inflation policy continued after he died.
His son, Magnus, he continued with it and it has been the same up to now, but in a sort of a different and more modern shape.
Yeah, but it's the same policy.
It's exactly the same.
You have argued that this debasement of the currency brought about the end of the Viking Age.
Yes, I think that most historians, they agree that 1066, the year of the battle at the Stamford Bridge, it marks the end of the Viking Age.
So this inflationist king, Harald Hardrada, he was the last Viking king.
That's sort of agreed and settled.
But I don't think that many others than me have said that this was something that happened because he overextended due to the inflation scheme.
But I think that's very likely.
That's pretty much the same as what happened with the Athenians in the 5th century BC.
So it's quite likely.
So that was one of the last gasps of sound money, because it sounds like if Hadrata nicked the idea from Constantinople, that must mean that it was already well established in the Eastern Empire, the that must mean that it was already well established in the Eastern Empire, the Eastern Roman Empire, that this is how That's not fair.
And presumably, even in England, they'd learned this dirty trick as well, hadn't they?
I would imagine.
I think that you have already been using it for quite a while.
And from what I know, my area, my region in Norway was the last place in the western part of civilization which managed to preserve this principle of monetary freedom.
But it's not the last.
So tell me about the Dutch.
such a principle in the western part of the world because it was reintroduced later on, both in the Netherlands and also in the United States.
Few people are aware of this, but those stories are some of the most important parts of our history, I would argue.
So tell me about the Dutch.
How did they break free temporarily from the system and when was that?
So the Dutch, they had been under the rule of the Habsburg Empire for centuries, and they basically were sick and tired of being ruled by them, and especially due to the inflation policy that and especially due to the inflation policy that they installed, which was in place all over Europe.
So they felt abused.
Literally.
And they rebelled against the Empire and in 1566 they started to break free from them.
And one of the first things that they decided was that it should be a monetary freedom in the Netherlands.
What they also did was that they said you can come to our mint And we will give you proper coins, giving your gold and silver a standardized shape.
But we won't debase these coins.
So if people wanted, they could do this.
And actually what they did was that the people, they liked that idea.
They were able to use other coins as well, but they preferred to use the Dutch guilden.
Because they trusted the central bank.
They trusted the Bank of Amsterdam and its mint, yes.
And this was a golden age for the Dutch, the Dutch economy, wasn't it?
That's correct.
Was that when you started getting the Dutch outposts in the Far East, places like Java?
Was that when they were a great maritime nation and developing an empire?
Yes, I think that these rebels, they forgot probably where they came from.
So when they had some success afterwards in the Netherlands, their gaze were directed outwards to other countries and also to Yeah, the colonies.
I think they took over some of the Portuguese colonies.
When you have too much success, things happen with you.
But they managed to have a very sound monetary system in the Netherlands for, I think, about 150 years or something like that.
And then they fell for the temptation themselves to start allowing the bank to issue more credit than they had in reserves.
And then, yeah, sort of the inflation policy was more or less introduced again, almost by stealth.
So that spelt the end of the golden age of the Dutch.
But I think I would like to add what actually happens when you sort of create an island in the middle of Europe.
An island, so to speak, where all your neighbors, they are abusing their monetary system.
And the people and even the rich people in those countries, the neighboring countries, they see that their silver and gold, it's not that much valuable in my country because I have a greedy king or an emperor.
So I would rather like to spend my wealth and invest my wealth in a country where I don't have this debasement policy.
So what happened was that the Netherlands attracted a lot of investments from foreigners and also attracted a lot of talent from the other countries.
So that explains why they became so prosperous and also why, I would assume, they had so many great artists, you know, Rembrandt and all the others.
So it goes hand in hand.
Sound money, you attract investments, you attract the best talents, the best people, the most industrious and entrepreneurial people.
And then you create wealth and you create a good society for the people.
Well, thank you for explaining that, because I think a lot of us have never really asked the question, why is so much of the art one sees in galleries around the world from the 17th century, What gave us all these Dutch interiors?
Why do we have Vermeer and so on?
What was it about the Netherlands that made them so successful?
Maybe there have been books written about this, but I don't think that historians generally have made the connection between sound money and prosperity.
That's correct.
And they are probably victims of the same sort as you and me, James, because when we went to school, I spent 18 years in total in schools and in universities studying, learning all kinds of things, but never about money, never about the monetary system and how important it is for society.
And in my last book, in Anbar, I quite rudely just spell out that a historian who doesn't understand money, he isn't an historian.
He's not?
God, name him!
Name that man!
And they can't be because they will, unfortunately, not be able to understand, to interpret what happened.
in the history of humankind after we became civilized and started using money.
Because it's such a fundamental importance to how society develops and how it shapes politics, how it distributes power, how it affects freedom, etc.
So if you as an historian doesn't understand money and the monetary system, I'm sorry, Then you're not a historian!
You're being too polite, Rune.
I'm going to mention his name because it's very interesting.
This guy has had several international bestsellers.
Which, with respect, you're never going to have.
And it's not because what you're saying isn't true, or because your book isn't readable.
It's because you are saying something that the powers that be, the people who run the publishing industry and the bookshops, really don't want getting massive publicity.
We're talking about Yuval Harari, who is a stalwart of the World Economic Forum.
He's massively behind Yes, I don't say that it's dishonest.
I don't say that he knows how this works with the inflation policy at all.
been pushing the line about money which i think you've argued is a dishonest one or an inaccurate one let's say let's let's be polite yes um i don't say that it's dishonest i don't say that he knows how this works with the inflation policy at all
i just say that because he doesn't describe the different types of monetary systems with monetary freedom on the one hand which is the very opposite of creating a monopoly in the creation of money a monopoly in production which is basically the system that we have had for quite a time quite some time now
When he doesn't describe those two different forms of monetary systems, then he will be bound to make bad calls, wrong interpretations of our history, and why policies have developed in certain ways, and why civilization has developed in a certain way.
So, let's continue our whistle-stop tour of monetary history and go to the United States in that brief period where they too had sound money.
Was this after the War of Independence?
I'm presuming it was.
Yes, so the revolution ended in 1783.
And you know, one of the most hated institutions was the Bank of England.
The people in the colonies, they hated the Bank of England because they knew that it financed the British Crown's warfare against them.
And they weren't allowed to develop their own monetary system in the United States.
The British said that they had to use the British Pound And when they sort of won their freedom in 1783, they were probably very much aware of how bad it is when you have a ruler who can create money at his will, you know, and force people to use it.
Because that's what they do.
I haven't said that previously in this interview, but What they do is that they demand that the people pay the taxes with the coins coming out of the mint that the ruler owns.
And in Norway, when Harald Hardroda introduced this policy, he said that people who don't accept my coins as payment from anybody, they can be punished by death.
So this completes the picture of the policy.
So after 1783 in the United States, they didn't establish monetary freedom as a sort of legal principle.
They introduced monetary freedom as a de facto principle throughout the former colonies.
So people were allowed to use whatever coins and paper bills they would like to use.
Yeah, it was like that until 1857 when they introduced a law which outlawed foreign coins as what you call legal tender.
Right.
So, yes, didn't they use things like Maria Theresa Thales and things like that?
Am I making that up?
It might be.
I haven't heard about that, but you might be correct.
But they especially liked the Spanish silver dollar.
Right.
Yeah, that was probably the most popular forms of money until the Coinage Act of 1857, I would assume.
And I would just hazard a guess that in that period the American economy flourished and everyone became more prosperous.
Definitely, definitely.
And this is also something which is not widely known.
People think that the reason why we saw so much wealth creation in the United States in the 19th century was because they took all the land which formerly belonged to the natives and things like that.
While the extremely important principle of monetary freedom is sort of forgotten.
But I'm quite sure that they knew at that time how important it was for the society and the possibility of keeping the freedom.
That's the most important thing and also for attracting capital and talent from other countries.
And I can also mention that in Norway, in the year 1800, we had a population of 900,000 Norwegians.
1800, we had a population of 900,000 Norwegians.
And in the period between 1836 and 1915, 750,000 Norwegians fled to the United States Norwegians fled to the United States and to Canada.
So it was a total meltdown in many of the European countries in terms of losing so many skilled people, you know, losing so much talent.
They went to the country where the freedom was the greatest and I think What contributed to that was the monetary freedom.
Funny that, isn't it?
If they're given the chance, people will gravitate towards freedom and sound money.
Yeah, it's a strange thing, huh?
It's funny, isn't it?
And do you think it's any... I mean, this is a bit of a kind of leading question, but do you think that it's any coincidence that within 10 years of the America abandoning sound money, They'd entered the civil war.
Hmm.
I haven't thought much about that, but I think once you start to infringe on the principle of monetary freedom, people get more and more tempted, you know, they
Probably those who have the most power, they start to think, what if I can create my monopoly in the production of money, and look at how enormously rich the rulers became in the European countries, and how much power they got.
So, once you start to walk down that path, I think it's almost inevitable that you will have a lot of unrest and also can very much end with civil war.
Yeah.
Of course, this sounds like I am explaining everything, both the wars with the inflation policy and also the prosperity with monetary freedom.
You have many other aspects, many other details.
Which of course are very important for how society, civilization develops.
But this is sort of the foundational feature, I would say, the monetary system.
What we saw, I mean presumably it was a problem even in the early days of the United States, but what we saw in the latter part of the
19th century in the US was the spectacular accumulation of wealth by a few individuals, the robber barons, who were also involved in the creation when they had their secret meeting on Jekyll Island.
when they created the Federal Reserve in 1913.
So tell me a bit about what... because obviously things started going bad in 1857, but they presumably got an order of magnitude worse from 1913 onwards.
Yes, that's correct, but it had already started towards the end of the 19th century.
So if you compare, for instance, the enormous supply of additional money, additional US dollars in the past, I would say, 15 years or something like that, since the great financial crisis in 2008, it has been a massive influx of new US dollars in the society and throughout the world.
You know, this is the What they call the reserve currency, so the US dollars is just exported to the rest of the world.
But if you compare it with, I think it was between 1880 and 1895, they had the exact same magnitude of money creation.
So the banks had started to issue a lot of credit, and those who could make best use of that was probably the richest people, the most wealthy, you know, those who you refer to as the Robert Barons.
And when you can borrow cheaply, it's the same thing today.
You borrow very cheaply from the bank, you get the lowest interest, then you try to borrow as much money as you can get hold of.
Then you start buying up things.
You buy up other competing companies, you know, you buy land, you hire skilled laborers, etc.
And gradually you sort of secure a greater and greater share of the total wealth and assets in society.
So that's probably what happened towards the end of the 19th century in the United States.
Yes, at this point maybe we can mention, is it pronounced Cantillon or Cantillon?
It was Irish French, so I think it's probably Cantillon.
Cantillon, okay.
So the Cantillon effect, you can correct me, but as I understand it, the people who have the earliest access to the money Get ahead, because they know that the value of the money is going to diminish.
So if they can borrow it earlier from the source, that means they can buy up stuff before the ordinary people get hold of it, and they really don't get a look in.
Maybe you can put it better than me.
Yeah, just to get hold of a lot more money than everybody else means that you get immediate access to more of the society's wealth.
You can buy up land, et cetera, and get to control a whole lot more of everything in society just by having the access.
And it can almost be compared to... If you are of the clever type who managed to create a machine that can create US dollar bills or something like that, you know, paper bills in your basement.
Then if you go out and start spending that money, for instance, you have a Lamborghini dealer in your neighborhood.
So you go down to your car dealer and you say, I have some money here.
I won in the lottery.
I need to buy a new car.
So you buy a car, you pay perhaps £200,000 for that car.
And he gets one extra sale because of the money that you have created.
And you get one extra Lamborghini because you have created this money.
So both of you benefit.
You are the first user of the money and he is then the second holder of the newly created money.
And then So the car dealer, that's a corporation, and they pay a bonus to the salesperson who sold you this car.
So he gets hold of his third in line here, and then he can go out and buy stuff for his family.
He can buy A trip to Spain or something like that and spend his Christmas holiday there with his family.
He can buy a property in Southampton or something like that, if that's what he wants to do with this.
He brings new money with him, which represents an additional demand for all the goods in society.
And once this newly created money starts to seep into the economy, the prices start to rise, because it represents an additional demand.
The supply was the same, but this is additional demand, your new money.
So, over time, the prices will increase.
And you know, it's not many people who get hold of your fraudulent US pound bills, you know.
It's just a few who do that.
But all the others, they will have to pay the increased prices.
Yes.
And that's the Cantillon effect.
Tell me, a dollar In 1913 is worth what now in real terms?
In 1913 I think we have had a price increase measured in terms of consumer prices which isn't a very good measure at all but I think that the prices have increased Over that period, around 35 times.
So, they are 35 times higher today than they were then.
So, just about.
In Norway, they have increased by 65.
So, it's twice as much.
But you say that consumer prices is not the best gauge.
What's the best gauge?
The best gauge is the additional money that you create.
So if you look at the 20 last years, 2002 to 2022, both in Norway and in the United States, it has been on average about 7% additional new Norwegian kroner and new US dollars inserted into the economy by the means of credit expansion.
So that means that every year everything is going up, the cost of living is going up 7%?
It means that the value of your money, compared to a situation where they didn't expand the production of money, diminishes at about 7% per year.
That's painful!
Yeah.
And the consumer prices, you know, they are sort of measured by a governmental institution in, I don't remember what it's called in the UK, but it's in Norway, it's Statistics Norway, which is a government agency.
And they sort of keep track of how much do the consumer prices increase every year.
But they do a whole lot of trickery with this statistics.
Basically what they do is that they say that we have this basket of goods and services, which are typically consumer goods and consumer services.
And then they say that we have this much bread and this many jeans, for instance, and you have a part of a car here, you have your Netflix bills, you have your electricity bills, etc.
So they put this together and have a certain amount of all these typical consumer items, you might call it.
Yes.
But what happens is that you have something which is called change in people's taste.
So we don't buy the same thing today as we did 50 years ago, for instance.
And also we have quality improvements, et cetera.
So your car is safer, it's more luxurious today than compared to a standard car 20 years ago.
So they say.
So they say, yes.
But what they do, at least, is that they change the content of the basket that they measure the consumer prices with.
And this gives them a whole lot of flexibility in terms of picking new things and adding it to the basket and making it look like prices don't increase that much.
So it doesn't reflect what you and I experience when we go to the grocery store and see how much the prices have increased.
So your take on this would be presumably that this is what ruling elites have done since at least 5th century BC Athens and that it spread like a virus around the world and
And apart from a few brief moments of resistance, we've been pretty much powerless in the face of this kind of raping of our money.
And debasing of it and stuff.
Who's behind all this now?
Who is big evil?
Is it the Bank of International Settlements and the people that that works for or what?
I would say that at least the last 100 years or since the Federal Reserve was created and at least after The First World War ended in 1919.
It has been sort of the Federal Reserve, American bankers, the most wealthy people in the US and also some of them in Europe, they have been pretty much in control of this.
I think a lot of people are misled by the name Federal Reserve into thinking, well, federal, it must have something to do with the government.
It's part of the system.
But it's not.
It's a private bank owned by very rich individuals who control the money supply.
Isn't that right?
Yes, people tend to focus a lot on that question.
They say in the United States it's privately owned, but luckily in Norway, for instance, the central bank is owned by the government.
But it doesn't make any difference at all.
That's my understanding, at least, having studied this subject for years and years.
So it doesn't matter.
The main thing is that the central bank coordinates all the other private banks, coordinates the interest rate that they offer to the customers when they want to borrow money from the banks.
So by doing that, it coordinates a cartel of private banks and enable them to slowly or quickly increase or reduce the money supply in a coordinated manner.
So that's the main thing.
And so the main thing is that to, for instance, own a bank is the first sort of Beneficiary of the newly created money.
It creates new money when it issues a loan to a customer.
So it requires that the customer pay interest on money created out of nothing, basically.
So the banks are the first ones who have the benefits today.
So it's much more important to be sort of being able to lend out money to someone.
And also to be the big borrowers, to own the companies, the corporations who can borrow the most money.
That's the main thing.
Whether the central bank is privately owned or owned by the state, it doesn't matter that much.
Right, right.
Now I know that you are positive about Bitcoin as a way out of this mess, because the Bitcoin is Presumably there's no backdoor built into the system by the CIA, say, which is quite a big if.
But presuming that Satoshi is not a deep state operative, there is a limited supply of Bitcoin that will ever be produced.
And I get that.
And I like the principle of crypto.
But my question to you is, Our governments and the people who control our governments do not have our best interests at heart.
They're all Harold Hardrada's in their way.
Are they not going to arrange it whereby we are forced to use their own central bank digital currencies?
For example, they might say, well, you can only pay taxes in CBDCs.
You can't use Bitcoin or whatever.
Aren't they going to make damn sure that any benefits from Bitcoin, we don't get to see them?
They might try, but it's very difficult for them to do this.
And if they, for instance, say that no people in the United States are allowed to own or use Bitcoin, what will happen then is that First of all, a lot of the Bitcoin will flow into other countries.
For instance, to Norway and to the United Kingdom and to many other countries.
And when that happens, the same thing will happen as it did with When the Netherlands introduced monetary freedom and also when the United States did that after the revolution, a lot of capital and talent and masses of people will move to those parts of the world where you most freely can use and own Bitcoin.
So it's sort of chasing capital and people out of your country if you ban people from owning and using Bitcoin.
Except!
But what they will do is that they will try to squeeze us much Bitcoin out of the private sector of the people as possible and try to control it themselves.
So the state want to control it and the most wealthy people will try to get hold of as much Bitcoin as possible.
And That's the big game going on these days.
Using regulations, using threats, all kinds of things to convince people to just sell their Bitcoin.
I get that.
You can never say never, of course, but it's very difficult to just crush Bitcoin as a technology and as a form of money totally.
It will be present on Earth always, most likely.
And just to add one more thing, and this is very important.
You say that Bitcoin, we know that it is a fixed amount of Bitcoin that will ever be created.
It's important to understand why Bitcoin is created at all.
Because it's a sort of an issuing schedule.
In the beginning, in 2009, they issued a lot of Bitcoin as payment to those who protected The network and the transactions using the network, the Bitcoin transactions.
Those are called the miners.
Miners, it sounds like they are digging Bitcoin out of the ground, you know, which they are not.
They are spending a lot of money and capital on protecting the network by using huge amounts of electricity and also cryptographic hashing, as they call it.
So this keeps the network very safe.
And they receive Bitcoin as payment.
And the schedule is designed in such a way that they are paid less and less Bitcoin, nominally speaking, until the year 2140, when the last Bitcoin will be earned by a miner.
So what we have here is we have a fixed inflation schedule in terms of the money supply, the supply of Bitcoin.
And it goes down and down and down towards zero.
And the idea then is that this is money which we will see the value of it will increase all the time.
So you can say that Bitcoin is money that has been programmed to increase over time.
So that is what you have to consider.
And just one final thing.
The money we are using today, whether it is the British Pound or Norwegian Kroner, US Dollars, those type of money is the very opposite.
Yes.
It's programmed to lose their value over time.
Yes.
And it's on that basis you have to make your own judgment.
Yeah.
Should I start to use and own Bitcoin?
Or should I start to continue just to use the shitty national currency that I'm part of today?
I like your evangelism.
Go away.
How do I turn this off?
I do hate people who just call me randomly.
Yes, I share some of your optimism for the potential of Bitcoin and I appreciate all the principles that you've outlined.
But I'm alive to the fact that the people who run the world are essentially working for the devil.
And they will use every devious method they can.
I mean, you saw what happened in the 1930s when FDR made private holding of gold illegal, which up to that point must have been considered just beyond the realms which up to that point must have been considered just beyond the realms You know, talk about abuse of power.
How could in the land of the free, how could any government confiscate your actual gold coins?
And the idea that people, when they went into their vaults in their banks, there were metal detectors to make sure they weren't walking out with their gold coins in their pockets.
That was in the 1930s, since when, thanks to people like the Rockefellers, who've been massively behind one world government, we now have de facto one world government.
I mean, you know, El Salvador, lovely plucky free market El Salvador has adopted Bitcoin.
But I don't think that the United States, which Completely run South America in one way or another.
I don't think the US is going to allow the El Salvador to become the 16th century Netherlands of South America.
It ain't going to be allowed to happen.
I don't see President Xi in China or Putin.
It seems to me on some level they're all part of the Globalist agenda, whether they admit it or not.
Do you not think that it's going to become impossible for individual states to have any kind of freedom or autonomy?
I don't see how it's going to work.
I think the situation today is very dynamic.
So this can very well be the development that we see in the future that more and more countries will embrace Bitcoin and it's already happening today.
So it's only El Salvador who has introduced Bitcoin or said that Bitcoin is legal tender in addition to the US dollars and you can pay taxes with US dollars in El Salvador.
It will most likely happen in many other countries.
And you know, this is a matter of, it's a question also of speed in terms of how fast can you move your wealth?
And how fast can you move yourself?
Because just imagine, in the 19th century, in 1845, for instance, the people who went from Norway fled to the United States.
They spent more than two weeks in a ship in order to get there.
Still 900,000 people took that trip.
It meant that much to them, you know?
Yes.
Yes.
And today, for instance, if you want to go to El Salvador, it will take you about I think 16-17 hours on a plane.
Go to Argentina, 14 hours from London and to Buenos Aires.
14 hours in a plane and then you are there.
You are settled.
And the new president, you know, Javier Mele, he wants to have monetary freedom in his country.
First by adopting the US dollars as a legal tender and then later on introducing monetary freedom.
So I think People need to understand how fast we can move these days.
And if you compare gold, for instance, gold is quite tricky to get out of the country.
For most people in the United States, it wasn't an alternative in 1933 to try to move their gold holdings, get them from the United States to Switzerland or something like that.
So, but what about Bitcoin?
It can be Shipped out of the country using the internet in a matter of seconds.
If you want to send large amounts you will probably use the safest method and that's to use the core network and then it will take about 10 to 60 minutes and then you can ship out of the country bitcoin worth billions of dollars, you know.
Yeah.
So it's so much easier today to move both people and capital than it was at that time and it will happen.
Do you not think it's surely not beyond the realms of possibility that the powers that be are going to develop or perhaps already have developed ways of stopping people moving Bitcoin around?
I think they are on their heels now because this moves so quickly and I haven't seen that they have introduced regulation and institutions, etc., which can stop this in an effective which can stop this in an effective way.
It will take time for them to develop that.
What they try to do is to sort of stem the tide or whatever you call it.
I don't But try to make people start using central bank digital currencies instead, and try to get people used to that idea instead of investing in Bitcoin.
So that's sort of, they try to create a competitor which they will make people use voluntarily.
Or by coercion, if that's necessary.
But it's very difficult to do that.
It's extremely difficult to do that.
Because, you know, the reason why people try to escape out of currencies which are bad for them to earn and save in, Which the United States dollar and the Norwegian Krona and British Pound is examples of.
And even more so in, for instance, in Argentina, where the inflation is even a lot higher.
So, it's so difficult to sort of build something on top of that shitty system and tell people that we have this central bank digital currencies now.
It's the same as before, but it's faster.
So that makes it better.
It's very difficult because people will Here that the CBDCs can be used to control them, to track their movements, etc.
and can be combined with the digital ID, vaccine passports, etc.
And quite many people will be hesitant and they won't accept this as their new form of money.
I'm quite convinced about that.
I would love to share your optimism about the human spirit, and I totally get what you're saying.
But you've probably noticed that in 2020 and 2021, the governments of the world conducted an experiment to test us.
And maybe 5% of us were resistant to this experiment.
90% of the people complied.
I don't know whether you had the similar thing in Norway, but you had people putting on these face nappies.
We had the same thing, yes.
And we had rules like, for example, if you went and sat in a restaurant, you could take your mask off as long as you were sitting down, but if you stood up, You had to put a mask on because somehow the germs or whatever it was that was causing this mystery disease just stopped working at a certain height.
WTF?
I'm not buying this bullshit.
People not only went along with it, but assiduously policed.
I mean, they did the job of the state for them, but by enforcing these regulations, which made no sense.
And on the same principle, people accepted that the thing that had hitherto been part of their The most enjoyable aspects of their life, that they were allowed to travel where they wanted in the world, fly anywhere in the world.
Suddenly they completely accepted that they couldn't leave their country, for the reasons that the government told them, that they couldn't fly.
And it would be very easy for my government and your government to shut the airports down, because there doesn't seem to be that much resistance to it, and shut down the borders, because they've already tried it once and gone away with it.
So how would you... With it.
With it.
I think people realise how costly it was now, in terms of not only the economic cost, but also the cost to society.
And even the mainstream media now start to cover more and more news about the harm that the vaccines caused.
Quite reluctant.
More and more.
Is that happening in Norway?
I'm not finding it.
Just the odd story creeping here and there about particular manufacturers.
Like we're told AstraZeneca was bad, but we're not told that Pfizer was bad.
Yeah, it's not much, but I see that the tendency is there.
It was nothing, and then it was some of it here and there, and now it's more often that we see it.
And I think that's a reflection of the people talking.
You and I, we are talking here now on this podcast, and I talk to my family about this.
We talk about this experience with those two years of lockdown with our friends and people at the office where we work.
Other people we don't know also.
We talk about how crazy it was, you know.
So I think if it's correct that, for instance, 5% was against this and sort of fought against those regulations, etc., when that happened, I think that if something of the same would happen today, at least twice as many people would fight against it.
That's my amateur estimate.
And then the question is, how many people do you need in order to fight measures like that?
Do you need to convince half of the population?
You know, we have a democracy, everything is ruled by the majority, etc.
Or is it enough to have a dedicated minority of some Some size.
How many people do we need to be?
So I'm quite optimistic.
I think that those who now realize that they were correct when they fought against it, they now feel a little bit empowered because they see that more and more of the others who didn't fight it, they agree with them.
So I think it's much more difficult to do something of the same today than it was in 2020.
Except, Rune, I'm looking at you, and I'm looking at me, and I'm thinking, we're part of the resistance, but we're not exactly built like Harold Hardrada, are we?
I mean, all your ancestors Who were fighting against tyranny and recognized their obligation to go and kill the king as soon as he got out of order.
That physical prowess and sense of direct understanding of what needs to be done seems to be lacking.
These days.
I mean, it's been bred out of us apart from anything else.
We've been estrogen and we've had generations of female teachers so that there are no male role models and we've had this transgender thing.
Every which way, they found ways of making us weak, haven't they?
Yes, they did.
But I think it's very easy to fall for the temptation and generalize about them and about us.
I think that good ideas, for instance, the idea that It's worth fighting for your freedom.
It can be very infectious.
It's a benevolent virus, you can say, if you understand the idea.
For instance, when I explain the monetary system and monetary policy, the inflation policy, in such simple words as I make use of in my book and also when I discuss this in podcasts, It makes so many more people understand what this is all about.
And it's hard for them to find counter-arguments, because it's so simple.
It's very simple to understand it.
So, that's one thing.
The knowledge.
Or more, I like to speak of the understanding of it, more than knowing all the facts about it.
It's more important to understand what this is all about, to feel it more, so to speak.
To understand the story, you know, that's most important.
And to understand what kind of values that our ancestors had not very long ago, Yeah.
And understand that this is part of us also today.
We just have to wake up to the fact and remember what it was like.
Yes.
I totally agree with you.
And I think this is one of the very, very rare points where we might agree with Yuval Harari.
I think he said something about how humans like to tell stories.
Although his interpretation of that was that money is a fiction and blah, blah, blah.
We won't mention him again.
But I think we are creatures of narratives.
We've got Beowulf.
What are all the Icelandic sagas called?
The Icelandic sagas?
I can't remember.
What's the Norwegian equivalent?
What's your great early literature called?
The early literature?
The oldest ones?
The royal sagas?
Yeah.
So we've all got these.
We've got the Bible.
We've got the Gilgamesh.
It's how we make sense of our world by telling stories.
And I really like the fact... I was slightly worried.
I was thinking, okay, so he's an expert on inflation.
How is he going to make this arid subject, how is he going to make it exciting or interesting?
But I really think there is something very emotionally involving about that period of Norwegian history that you've described.
And I love the idea, what are they called?
The Council of the Elders?
What's the word?
Frostating.
F-R-O-S-T-A-T-I-N-G.
What does that mean in English?
Frosta is a place some 50 kilometres south over here.
It's called Frosta.
And ting is the same as a court.
Frostating.
Yeah, and the obligation, not just a kind of an option, but the absolute obligation to kill the king if he starts overreaching.
It's extraordinary.
It's extraordinary.
And just to add one more thing, I'm Often talking about sharing ideas and the power of sharing ideas and the understanding of the importance of the monetary system and our history.
But the exciting thing is that, you know, the monetary system is probably the most powerful of all social networks.
It's much more powerful than Facebook, It's much more powerful than the internet even, I would say.
It helps us not only to distribute an exchange value, you might say, and offering us a means of exchange, but it also conveys knowledge.
For instance, If you have a totally unsound monetary system, which we have all over the world, almost all over the world today, with the traditional national currencies, it's very unsound and people can feel it.
They don't just realize how it works.
Very few do at this moment.
But when you start to add into the system sound money, for instance, Bitcoin, which has grown faster than any other asset in human history.
Yeah.
So if you receive, for instance, on your birthday, a Bitcoin or something like that.
That would be a nice present.
It doesn't only transfer wealth from the one who gives it to you, but it also becomes a topic that you have to discuss Why did he do this?
Why did he give you Bitcoin instead of British Pound or anything else?
And you have to reflect on it for a moment, why he's doing this.
You ask questions and you see.
So it's almost like adding medicine to a completely sick system.
And it makes people talk, it makes people start to reflect on this.
So it's an enormously powerful social network in many aspects.
So the monetary system helps distribute knowledge and ideas very, very fast.
And that's what the Bitcoin community has taken such a huge advantage of.
They have managed to teach people all over the world about the importance of the monetary system and the function of money and especially sound money versus unsound money.
So I think this might actually develop much faster than you believe, James, and most other people believe as well.
So, I think I'm allowed to be optimistic, and I've got good reason to be optimistic.
We just have to make good use of these opportunities.
Before we go, Rune, I've got to ask you, tell me a bit about yourself.
What's your story?
Okay, so my background is as a lawyer, so I have a small-town law practice here in Stenskjer in the middle of Norway.
And I've also been working three years in the European Commission in Brussels.
That was a very mixed experience.
I'll bet.
But while I was there, I started reading Austrian economics, studying the monetary system, etc.
So it gave me a whole new understanding of society.
You must have felt a bit lonely while you were working for the European Commission.
I can't imagine there were many fellow travellers.
Not at all.
I was very lonesome until around 2010, intellectually speaking, and I didn't have anybody to talk to about the sound monitoring system, etc.
So I just gave up on the project and abandoned reading and didn't pay attention to news and politics for almost 10 years until the pandemic hit us all in 2020.
Or what they tell us was a pandemic.
Yeah, that's correct.
I see.
And what's it like in Norway in terms of how many awake people are there as a percentage?
It's difficult to make that estimate, but what I'm noticing is that it's growing immensely fast.
Is it?
Yeah, because you know, Norway has been one of the countries where people trust the governments the most.
And it's rapidly deteriorating.
And also thanks to the downfall of the Norwegian Kron, it has performed worse than almost any other national currencies throughout the world the last year.
So people wake up, they're pissed, they're mad, and many intellectuals are waking up.
I think many people with resources are protesting on many levels against many types of policies.
So people are definitely waking up.
That's also one of the reasons why I am perhaps a little bit more optimistic than you, James.
Well, that's good.
No, I'm really glad to hear this.
I'm always looking for causes for optimism because I don't see much around at the moment.
So how does this manifest itself?
Is it just the conversations down in the sauna or whatever?
How do you detect these signs?
Okay, so in 2020, when I woke up, I didn't know anything about what existed in Norway in terms of people being awake I didn't know anything about what existed in Norway in terms of people being awake Because in 2010, there was nobody for me to talk to.
And when I released Fraudcoin, my book about inflation in October 2022, people came to me.
The Bitcoiners came to me and many of the people skeptical to big government, they came to me and I've been immensely embraced by so many people, both in Norway and also outside of Norway.
So people get in touch with me and tell me their story and they show me their communities and they invite me to their conferences and it's definitely a growing movement I would say.
Definitely.
That's really good to hear and it sounds like it's been good for you as well because you know it's much better to find a community of like-minded folk than being on your own and thinking there's no point.
Yeah definitely and last Sunday I had a long podcast recording down at the Frostating.
And actually when he made me reflect on these things, how lonely I was just 13 years ago, and sort of the community that I've become a part of now, basically I started to cry.
So I couldn't talk for a minute or something like that.
Yeah, I have mixed feelings with that.
It was sort of a Jordan Peters moment.
No, no, no.
Don't say that.
It's not.
It's legitimate.
It's absolutely... I'm very touched with that story.
No one's looking at you and going, you are Jordan Peterson.
Don't worry.
Although, I have to ask you a final rude question.
Are you recording this in your bathroom?
Is that because you've got tiles at the back?
Yes, these tiles are very rare, actually.
A company, a local company, they started producing it some years ago, and then they went bankrupt before almost anybody had been able to buy them.
So it's wooden tiles made of, I think it's made of Birch.
Birch, yes.
They look like birch.
Now I can see the grain in them.
Yes.
So it's natural.
That makes sense.
Yes.
They're very nice.
I like them a lot.
I'm sorry for mistaking it for a bathroom.
I get it now.
I get it now.
So, Rune, tell us where we can find your stuff and read your books.
Have you got a website?
Yes, please join me on X, formerly known as Twitter.
You find me, if you put my handle in the show notes, they can find me there.
Just follow me.
If you want to get to know more about my books, our projects, you find it on Undoku, that's U-N-D-O-Q-O, Undoku.
It means the core, the essence.
In an African language.
Oh, okay.
So go to Ndoko.com.
There you find more about the books.
You can order the books on Amazon, of course.
Okay.
I will put the details below.
Thank you, Rune, very much for a fascinating podcast.
And thank you everyone for listening.
I really appreciate the support.
I'm going to introduce a slight change to my business model.
I'm now going to delay my podcast for non-paying I love you all.
I mean, you're welcome to watch for free as you know, but I'm going to leave it a week now before I release my podcast so that the people who generously subscribe to me and support me, and I really appreciate your support and I need your support.
It's my only source of income, can get ahead of the game.
It's unfair for people who pay not to get some kind of benefit.
So I hope you're all up for that and I hope that might encourage you Those who haven't found time to go through the rigmarole of supporting me on Locals, on Subscribestar, on Patreon or Substack, to do so.
These are difficult times and it's getting harder.
And I'm not very good at the American style, you know, help me, you know.
And it's not about whether you think I'm a nice guy or not.
I mean, I'm an evil bastard probably in some ways.
But basically you're supporting me because you like the stuff I do and you want to support me and help me continue doing it.
Not because I help drowning kittens out of bags or whatever.
Although I probably would help a drowning kitten out of a bag if I were, if a mew, mew, mew, mew, mew, mew, mew, mew, glug, glug, glug.
I would dive into that river and rescue the kittens.
So I'm not that bad.
But yeah, please help me.
Please support me.
I really appreciate it.
Or if you can't do that, buy me a coffee.
I like it when you buy me coffees, and I like your messages.
The reason I don't reply to them, by the way, is because I haven't worked out how to do the reply thing.
Otherwise, I would be there replying to you all the time.
Does that make sense, Rune?
Definitely.
Yeah, 100%.
Good.
Well, it's been great, and I very much hope that if I ever come to Norway again, I will be able to come to the Froststätting, or come and see you, and have a pint of beer, sorry, a litre of beer.
Which will cost me about £300, as I understand.
I would assume.
Great.
Yeah, looking forward to meet you in person.
This has been a great talk with you, James.
Excellent questions and I enjoyed it a lot.
Good.
Thank you.
Thanks for inviting me.
It's been a pleasure.
Thank you very much and good luck with your mission.
