Nick Hudson is a private equity fund manager by day, thorn in the establishment side by night; a father of four so far, amateur ornithologist, wine collector and conversationalist; infatuated with Cape Town, generally curious and not scared of carbon or viruses.↓ ↓ ↓If you need silver and gold bullion - and who wouldn't in these dark times? - then the place to go is The Pure Gold Company. Either they can deliver worldwide to your door - or store it for you in vaults in London and Zurich. You even use it for your pension. Cash out of gold whenever you like: liquidate within 24 hours. https://bit.ly/James-Delingpole-Gold
↓ ↓ How environmentalists are killing the planet, destroying the economy and stealing your children's future.
In Watermelons, an updated edition of his ground-breaking 2011 book, JD tells the shocking true story of how a handful of political activists, green campaigners, voodoo scientists and psychopathic billionaires teamed up to invent a fake crisis called ‘global warming’.This updated edition includes two new chapters which, like a geo-engineered flood, pour cold water on some of the original’s sunny optimism and provide new insights into the diabolical nature of the climate alarmists’ sinister master plan.Purchase Watermelons by James Delingpole here: https://jamesdelingpole.co.uk/Shop/↓ ↓ ↓
Buy James a Coffee at:https://www.buymeacoffee.com/jamesdelingpole
The official website of James Delingpole:https://jamesdelingpole.co.uk
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There is no evidence whatsoever that man-made climate change is a problem, that it's going to kill us, that we need to amend our lifestyle in order to deal with it.
It's a non-existent problem.
But how do you explain this stuff to your normie friends?
Well, I've just brought out the revised edition to my 2012 classic book, Watermelons, which captures the story of how some really nasty people decided to invent the global warming scare in order to fleece you, to take away your freedoms, to take away your land.
It's a shocking story.
I wrote it, as I say, in 2011 actually, the first edition came out.
And it's a snapshot of a particular era.
The era when the people behind the climate change scam got caught red-handed tinkering with the data, torturing till it screamed in a scandal that I helped christen Climategate.
So I give you the background to the skull juggery that went on in these seats of learning where these supposed experts were informing us, we've got to act now.
I rumbled their scam.
I then asked the question, okay, if it is a scam, who's doing this and why?
It's a good story.
I've kept the original book pretty much as is, but I've written two new chapters, one at the beginning and one at the end, explaining how it's even worse than we thought.
I think it still stands out.
I think it's a good read.
Obviously, I'm biased, but I'd recommend it.
You can buy it from jamesdellingpole.co.uk forward slash shop.
You'll probably find it won't.
Just go to my website and look for it, jamesdellingpole.co.uk.
And I hope it helps keep you informed and gives you the material you need to bring around all those people who are still persuaded that, oh, it's a disaster.
We must amend our ways and appease the gods, appease Mother Gaia.
No, we don't.
It's a scam.
I love Dellingpole.
Go and subscribe to the podcast, baby.
I love Dellingpole.
And listen, mother down, subscribe with me.
Welcome to the Dellingpod.
With me, James Dellingpole.
And I know I always say, I'm excited about this week's special guest.
But before we meet him, let's have a quick word from one of our sponsors.
Probably a gold company or something, because gold's going crazy right now and I'm quite happy.
Have you seen what the price of gold has been doing recently?
It's been going bonkers.
I hate to say I told you so, but I did kind of tell you so.
But if it's any consolation, even though I do have some gold and bought some a while back, I didn't buy nearly enough.
It's like when you go to the casino and you win on 36 and you only put down a fiver and you think, why didn't I put down 50?
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I mean, I'm no expert, but I've been right so far.
I think gold and silver right now are an essential, maybe even more so silver, actually, because silver, I think, has yet to take off.
Just my opinion.
I'm not a financial advisor.
I reckon that it's worth holding both of them at the moment.
And you don't want them, of course, you don't want to buy paper gold.
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Go to the pure gold company and you will be put in touch with one of their advisors.
And they will talk you through the process, which you want to do, whether you want to have it in bullion or in coins.
I mean, there are advantages to having coins because coins are considered, well, Britannia is anyway, considered legal tender, which means that you don't pay tax.
Weirdly, this, but even my accountant didn't know this.
You don't pay tax at the moment on your profits.
Go to the Pure Gold Company.
They will talk you through all these things and follow the link.
Follow the link below this podcast and it will give you all the details.
Go to the Pure Gold Company and they will give you what you need, be it gold or silver.
Do it before it goes up even more.
I think you'd be mad not to.
Welcome to the Dellingpod, Nick Hudson.
It's been a while since I saw you.
I mean, we were sort of there in the trenches in the early days, weren't we?
When we both sort of woke up at about the same time, we realized that the world was not as we imagined it to be.
And we've been on quite a long journey, quite a sort of meandering journey since, I'd say.
We've learned stuff that I think we, I think we were quite, quite naive at the time.
When I last saw you, we were probably a bit easily, we thought, let me put it this way.
We thought that the awake crowd were all one happy band of warriors, all united by the same cause.
And now we realize that it's been kind of infiltrated, hasn't it?
Yeah, it's more than infiltrated, or maybe I should say less than infiltrated.
I think what goes on is there's a range of a spectrum of opposition views on a variety of issues.
And what happens is that the convenient opposition gets promoted.
So I, for one, reject this idea of controlled opposition.
There's this idea that somebody is knowingly controlled and is kind of in the pocket of one or another person to curtail the range of permitted dissidents.
I reject that idea.
I think what happens is there is a range of dissidents.
And then what happens is a certain area of it gets promoted algorithmically and by means of control of the media.
And so you have, let's say, the less awake people in the dissident community getting the most airtime.
i'm happy with that theory look i i'm who and who isn't controlled opposition is not is it's not a hill yeah i'm particularly interested in dying or don't you It doesn't matter.
I think there are different ways of dividing the opposition.
And you've described one of them there very, very plausibly.
I think.
Yeah, of course they're going to use our algorithms.
I think one of the things that we've both learned, though, is that if there's a big group, don't join it.
Because that has been all the big groups have been co-opted.
Well, I seem to have done very well at that because I find myself in the tiniest of groups.
So, for example, with respect to the COVID story, I don't believe that there was a pandemic.
I don't believe that there was a characterizable disease, et cetera, et cetera.
I think that the whole story was a scam.
And I have similar views with regard to Ukraine and Russia, that it was really a NATO playbook and by extension, a US playbook that's being rolled out there.
It has nothing to do with Putin waking up on the wrong side of bed one day, even though he may well and probably is a complete thug.
And I've kind of come to realize, with the help of a few more astute observers around me, that if there's a big story, it is either serving to be inflamed as a distraction or it's a complete scam.
There really isn't anything these days that is viral or highly profiled that I don't regard with intense skepticism.
I'm totally with you.
I was thinking, before we go on, we ought to introduce you to those people who don't know you.
I mean, I kind of know you, but not everyone does.
Tell us about yourself.
Yeah, I'll just do the quick potted history.
I mean, by day, for the last, what, 20-something years, I've been a private equity fund manager.
And for people who don't know what that is, it's basically a career pursued by overly curious generalists.
And by qualification prior to that, I qualified as an actuary, although I was hopelessly unsuited to the career and left the confines of actuarial professional careers very quickly, pretty much within weeks.
But by night, when the COVID story erupted, I started an organization that pushed back on the lockdowns.
And I realized there was something wrong very early in February of 2020, before the lockdowns even occurred.
There was what seemed clear to me to be a complete hype around and absolute nothing.
And I started speaking to my investors about my concern about that.
Got very strange reactions out of people.
That was my first warning sign that there was possibly something in the water, something coming.
And very early on, we wrote a letter as this organization got going.
We wrote a letter to the president of South Africa just saying that whatever the risk is from this disease, the effect of the lockdowns is going to be far worse.
And that caught a lot of attention because the censorship apparatus was not yet in place nearly to the degree that it was, say, a year or a year and a half later when people started getting thrown out of their social media accounts and so on.
So it garnered a lot of attention and the sort of informal membership of this group grew very quickly.
And then I never expected at the time that I was going to spend the next four years or more railing against the horrible socialist trajectory that the whole world was taking.
That was not what I had in mind.
I thought the lockdowns would be over in a couple of weeks.
And that's the naivety, I think, that I had.
Well, James, if I may, just a little diversion.
I had a very interesting conversation with somebody who you know, who I've been talking to for years, Leo Biddle.
I had a chat with him the other day and he said, you know, He has a frustration with people in the skeptical community who, as you suggested earlier, are maybe not seeing the whole picture, who kind of say, oh, well, you know, with COVID, it was the response that was wrong.
And with that, all these theories of there being a planning element to the rollout of central bank digital currencies and digital IDs and COVID.
They're conspiracy theorists and it's just emergent media hype taking over politicians' minds and persuading them to do the wrong things repeatedly and around the world because everybody sees the same media.
You know, he said he has a frustration with that, that there's so many normies amongst the people who spoke out earlier.
And he thinks it's because they only woke up when the COVID phenomenon rolled out.
And I pointed out to him that I didn't believe that that was the case.
I think the people who were early starters had a high degree of skepticism going in.
There was something in their pasts that provoked them into think about the world differently.
And so what I've noticed is that actually among the early voices, virtually none have any profile whatsoever.
And I think it's precisely because those early voices were much more likely to take a very, very hard read on what was going on.
They weren't going to say this is just a government whoopsie, you know, people overreacting to something like a seasonal flu.
They were more likely to say, no, this is showing clear signs of premeditation and planning.
There's something devilish in the works.
And those are the voices that are not to be heard anymore.
Whereas the people who sort of woke up maybe at the time that the vaccine mandates came along have now got positions in the Trump administration.
Oh, you're talking about Asim Malhotra, for example.
Yeah, exactly.
He'd be a classical example.
I mean, I'm pretty sure he believes that there was a deadly virus pandemic and that maybe there was an overreaction to it, but that the worst thing was these vaccine mandates.
That was the worst thing.
You know, I have had first-hand engagement with him and we disagreed on this topic, disagreed profoundly.
So he'd be an example, but there are many.
I mean, Rob Malone, Peter McCullough, Brett Weinstein, these are all people who came to the party very, very late.
And by my read of the situation, have it completely and utterly wrong and have had it wrong from the get-go.
Yeah, this is where you and I would disagree.
I think I think they were always wrongs.
They were always working for the enemy.
We just didn't know it.
You think they're actively working for the enemy?
That they know that they're definitely McCulloch.
He's got too many interests which are indicative of.
When it comes to sort of spotting Rongs, I've got two main tells.
One, you shall know them by their fruits.
So if you see somebody stirring the narrative in an agenda, in a direction favourable to the powers that be, or and or undermining the cause of skeptics, then that's a tell.
But the other thing is their connections, their sort of business relationships and things like that, follow the money.
So those two things.
And I think it's important to remain agnostic on these issues.
You don't want to condemn somebody until you're absolutely sure.
But I just go with my gut feeling.
I don't trust McCarlo.
I don't trust a lot of, I don't trust a lot of the names.
Yeah, I mean, I think the difficulty is, let's suppose the model is, as you say, that they're benefiting, being paid, and knowingly so.
And you can tell this by the fruits of their labors and their connections.
Let's accept that.
But let's also accept that there would be people who have got it wrong and who are allowed to be promoted and have profile in social media because they've got it wrong.
How would you tell the difference between those two?
Oh, I see, because they got it wrong.
Yeah, I'm sure it's the case that say, for example, I had decided after the early days that, yeah, the main thing about the main problem with COVID was the lockdown, the draconian lockdowns, and the damage it did to the economy.
And, you know, there's nothing, the vaccines were not kill shots deliberately rolled out to reduce the population and to enslave us with graphene oxide hydrogels.
That's just crazy stuff.
Let's deal with, let's be sensible, shall we?
If I'd taken this line, I'd probably have a column on the Telegraph now or something.
I'd be promoted.
I'd be on platforms with Toby Young.
I might be even in the House of Lords.
So I take your point that if you are stupid enough, I mean, I think, you know, what I mean by that is if you are lacking in the intellectual clarity and you are somehow able to make your brain deny the obvious,
then rich rewards will follow because you will be welcomed into the system, welcomed by the establishment, which likes people like you, it needs idiots to help promote its cause.
So, yeah, maybe they're not evil, maybe they're just stupid, but they're one or the other.
Yeah, I tend to agree with you there.
And the funny thing is, the way I go about trying to make that distinction is I actually meet people to the greatest extent possible.
That's so important.
And then I respond to my tummy feel.
Is your tummy feel?
For example, you know, I met Malone on more than one occasion and worked out what behavior I could test the man with.
And when I tested him, he did exactly what you'd expect of a charlatan and a scamster.
I don't think the man's for real at all.
But then I've also met other people where I had some doubts and then managing to get them around a bottle of wine and a little bit sloppy and to talk to them and realize that there was a hell of a lot of passion and fire and that was incompatible with the idea that there were spooks.
So to me, I guess it comes from my private equity background.
You're always having to sit across the table and try and work out who the pigeon is.
And if you haven't worked it out, then it's you, as the saying goes.
But that's kind of been my way to muddle around.
And I take kind of sharp views on a few people and then just, as you say, agnostic, skeptical views on a lot.
When I get sent to hell, if I get sent to hell, the reason it's going to happen is because I've got the worst sin of all, which is, and I try not to, but I can't help it.
It's terrible.
I'm flawed.
Is pride.
I have the most appalling intellectual arrogance, which makes me very unforgiving of people who can't think logically through what's going on.
And okay, partly it's a perception thing.
It's an intuition thing.
It's a discernment thing.
I accept that.
And sometimes our pineal glands having been calcified by the enemy, it's excusable not to always get it.
But when I see logically flawed arguments, patently, blatantly logically flawed arguments being brandished by people on our side in order to shoot down people like me, in order to belittle us and accuse us of being divisive or tarnishing the brand, all the other things that we're accused of doing.
I find it very hard to reach out with Christian forgiveness to these people because at worst, they are deliberately working for the enemy.
But at the very best, they are allowing their intellectual weakness to bring down their superiors, frankly, the people who get it.
I feel the same as everybody else.
But I think when somebody tries to bring me down from a position of stupidity, then that's not really a great thing to be doing, is it?
I don't see why I should love them.
Do you get what I'm saying?
Yeah, I totally get it.
It's been a huge challenge for me.
I think if I go and put myself back into Nick's head in 2019, I had a much more favorable disposition towards people in general than I have now.
Which is why I got suspicious of you for a time, Nick, I have to say.
I thought he's just going along with too many.
What was that terrible conference thing you went to that really...
Well, you see, this is to the point, you know.
I wanted to go and meet the people and line them up and have one-on-one conversations and work out who was the fraud and who was behind this whole thing and where were the spooks.
And I mean, at the one conference I went to, it was absolutely crazy.
Almost everybody in the room had a CIA connection.
Which one was that?
Can you name them?
That was it called the International COVID Summit.
I went to two or three of them.
I think three of them.
And of course, that thing turned out to be a complete energy sink and distraction event.
I think all of the website is now deleted and it's gone.
But I mean, that was the one where I had the best test.
I was on kind of the strategy committee, you know, which was this thing that ostensibly was running the story, but you knew it had all been planned elsewhere.
And at the one committee, I said, listen, I don't think the next conference should have any doctors because COVID is not a medical phenomenon.
And that was when the room erupted.
And when Malone absolutely went bananas, you know, and within a week, he'd banned me on social media under the pretext that I'd offended him somewhere and not sorry, not banned me, blocked me, and that kind of thing had happened.
So all the clothes came off the emperor, you know.
But so I went to that one and then I also went to the ARC conference.
Oh, you shouldn't go to the ARC conference.
But it was very revealing because I got to see what were the engines behind this machine.
It was US evangelicals and a bunch of neocons getting together to organize a fake dissident conference.
And to actually talk to these guys and try and figure out who knew that they were Patsys and who didn't.
That was a fascinating experience.
What did you find?
So, are they for real?
Well, I mean, what did I find?
Well, first of all, I found that out that it was evangelicals and neocons.
You know, I didn't know who was behind that.
You know, ostensibly, it was held out as being this is an initiative of Jordan Peterson and what's the economist Neil Ferguson and a bunch of other luminaries.
You know, they were all getting together to the speaker of the Rothschilds, the authorized biographer of the Rothschilds.
Sorry, say, you're breaking up at the moment.
I don't know if I'm breaking up on your side, but I didn't hear that.
Neil Ferguson is the authorized biographer of the Rothschilds and Kissinger.
Those are talents, aren't they?
Maybe just a hint.
Yes, they are.
But I mean, what they did, what you had there when you went, and you can't tell this from the outside, it's when you're in that room, the breakout session, and you realize, oh my goodness, you know, there's the neocon group over there.
There are like 30 of them because it's the speakers and then all their sort of acolytes and followers.
And there's the evangelical group and all their hangers-on and so on.
And it suddenly takes shape for you, and you get a clearer picture.
So, like, I completely would differ that, you know, do not if you if you imagine you're going into war and somebody gives you a pass to go and you know, fraternize with the enemy in their mess, in the officer's mess.
Of course, you do it.
You go and listen as well as you can.
You go and look.
You know, it's not like I was donating money to them or something like that.
No, no, no, no, no, no.
So, did you see you when you went drinking with them?
What was the vibe you got from these people?
Do they believe it?
Well, the very curious thing was that the pretty quick question you could ask to find out what people where people lay was, why do you think they're not talking about COVID?
Because they never, they almost didn't.
The word was hardly mentioned, you know.
And you got then, then you got you saw very quickly, like there were a minority of people, people who'd gone into the thing, like me, maybe, um, or even completely naively, who were kind of, yeah, I'm very angry about that.
How on earth do we go through a whole week of conferences when the biggest event that's happened in history is not even on the agenda, you know, and those people are your genuine people.
But the people who kind of like treat you as if you just asked the most embarrassing question and you're entirely clueless and edge themselves away from you when you ask that question, well, those are the ones that give themselves away.
You know, did you talk to any of the names, any of the speakers?
Yes, I did.
I spoke to a fair range of people.
The speakers were less accessible than some of the big names who weren't on the speaking register, you know.
But largely because what happens is, it's not because they were, I think, necessarily trying to avoid contact with the Hoi Poloi, but what happens is everybody wants to speak to the speakers.
So there's like a cluster of them, people around them after their talks and in the evenings and so on.
And so you can't, it's harder to get near to them.
You have to be more patient and you have to evaluate, well, am I going to stand in line to speak to, I don't know, Jordan Peterson and have to listen to one and a half hour of other people asking him stupid questions before I get in there with my targeted question that I aim to use, you know, to unmask something or whatever.
So you have to evaluate that and you maybe go for a lesser target and go and sidle up to Eric Weinstein or something like that and listen to him tell you about the biggest problem in the world being the lack of regulation of physicists.
That was an interesting one.
It keeps me awake at night, certainly.
Yes, I have a big worry about the whole world turning into a black hole.
And in fact, I should just stop worrying about politics altogether.
Yeah.
So, yeah, I mean, and I do, I kind of have been amused by allegations of being, you know, a grifter of some sort or pain in some way because I certainly haven't.
Sorry?
Accusations leveled against you.
Yes, yes.
I've had this sort of, you know, that I'm in the pocket of the reinsurance industry or the insurance industry or the bankers or whatever.
Oh, there was one very curious one.
I was said to be the owner of a nutraceuticals business.
That was the really funny one.
But yeah, I kind of get amused by it, but I'm at the same time sympathetic because I know that it's difficult to tell whether a person is being reticent so as not to come across as a crazy conspiracy theorizing loon, you know, and just trying to talk in a more measured way to reach a broader group of people.
You know, that's a kind of difficult needle to thread for anybody who's speaking out.
I mean, something you probably don't know, at the beginning, when I sent this organization up, Panda, the main tell for me about the COVID phenomenon was nothing to do with the statistics that we went out talking about.
You know, our sort of whole approach was to appear to be completely rational and just looking at the data and giving a factual and very steady and very measured contrary argument, counter-argument to lockdowns.
But that was at the cost of suppressing my greater instinct because the single biggest data point for me was the falling man video.
The fact that these absolutely obvious fake videos were out there and ostensibly from China, and that Western intelligence was doing nothing to address them meant one of two things.
Either the videos weren't from China and they were actually from Western intelligence, or Western intelligence was in on the scam.
And when you read it like that in February of 2020 and you wanted to say that, you had a lot of people around you saying, don't talk in those terms.
That sounds crazy.
Rather, just address the issues.
And I kind of went along with that and ended up by even by March of 2021 when I was presenting, I did that viral presentation that got banned after being viewed half a million times on YouTube, you know, in four days or something like that.
It was the sort of the big anti-lockdown presentation that went around the world very quickly.
Even by then, I was still being heavily contained and advised by people, don't say that, don't go after the vaccines yet, you know, that kind of thing.
Just try and get the message out there.
And it was very difficult.
You want to say, look, no, this all fits in with the SDGs and it fits in with the broader trajectory towards technocracy and all of that.
And people are saying to you, most people will think you're crazy.
And you think about that and you say, yeah, you're right.
And so you have to navigate it.
I've in many ways given up now.
I can't actually deal with the dissonance of needing to fit myself into something that's slightly bigger than the Overton window all the time.
If you speak to people who are in the public relations industry, they will say to you, you want to just go a little bit outside the Overton window, otherwise you'll fail completely.
And you can sort of understand that as a strategy.
If you go way out of it, you will convince two people.
and have been completely ineffectual.
Whereas if you go slightly out of it, you'll push the boundaries, you know?
So it's not straightforward.
Well, that explains a lot.
Yeah, I had been worried slightly at your restraint, almost to the point of cuckishness.
But now I realize that this was just the strategy.
It's relieved to hear that you're actually as batshit crazy as I am.
You just don't show it so often.
By the way, I was listening to you.
I was trying to work out the reference, the relevance of the falling man.
I was thinking the guy falling out of Twin Towns in 9-11, the famous shots.
And I suddenly realized you meant a different falling man.
Yeah, the guy who died.
I know, I know now.
I know now.
By the way, that wasn't awful.
That's good.
We did.
I was taken in by that nonsense.
I was looking at this stuff coming out of China and thinking, well, this stuff's getting, shit's getting real here.
They don't want us to know, but it's leaking out of China.
But you see, now you understand my frustration because when I saw that immediately, I went, bullshit.
It didn't take me two seconds.
You know, this guy, nobody dies of a respiratory virus while they're walking down the street.
You know, that doesn't happen.
It was a new virus.
It was unprecedented.
It was just like the worst virus ever.
Surely you must have realized that.
I'll tell you one thing.
At that stage, in February 2020, I believed in infectious diseases as a threat.
But a personal threat.
I didn't see the sort of pandemic story as being a real threat.
I saw a personal risk, you might contract a communicable disease.
I now no longer believe that and haven't done since when.
It was about October of 2020 when I looked at the first statistics demonstrating a complete absence of any of the signals of transmission.
And that stuff absolutely flawed me and completely shifted my mindset.
By the way, there was another tell there, a massive tell that was almost stronger than the data.
We had an internal conversation, as in this is a private conversation that we loaded up as a private video where this information was discussed.
And so what we're looking at is granular geolocation data for COVID cases, and it doesn't contain the signals for spread.
So it's completely incompatible with communicable disease.
We had a private conversation about that, uploaded it as a private, unsearchable video on YouTube, and within 34 minutes, it had been taken down by YouTube.
Sorry, and that is a video that was like an hour and a half long.
So it was taken down within 34 minutes of public uploading by YouTube.
And then I thought, wow, nothing we've said.
Lots of things have been censored that we've done, you know, but that has never happened.
Where even just the existence of that information in private hands was so deadly and so toxic to the narrative that it had to go now.
And so that was like a very strong reinforcement for me that we were onto something.
And so, you know, between February and October, I pretty much believed that there was a communicable disease around.
And from October of 2020, that idea was shot.
But for me, but I had to carry on talking in the language of, okay, we had a response and these were the things that were wrong with the response.
And this thing is not as bad as it seems.
When I actually believed that that thing was a nothing burger.
There was nothing there.
Yeah, yeah.
It was just terrible.
Is that not what you've just described?
If they, if, let's call them the powers that be.
If the powers that be are capable of micromanaging the message to that degree, if they, which they do, and I've been, I don't want to get distracted by this too much, but I'm reading a book about the origins of the First and Second World Wars, and it's clear they were planned by what you might call Anglo-American elites.
Every last detail.
Every last detail.
Your boy, Cecil Rhodes.
Oh, amazing.
But Milner Rhodes.
In it up to the neck.
What a toss up.
Lord Milner.
By the way, I apologise for the Boer Wars.
I mean, I don't know what side you lot were on, but my lot were definitely on the wrong side.
So I'm in the interesting position of coming from the English side of South Africa, but being married into the Afrikaans side.
So, you know, and my son, my recently born son, will attend an Afrikaan school.
So I don't have prejudices about that, but it was another very highly what what our friend Pierce Robinson refers to as a structural deep event.
Who's he channeling when he says that?
Because it's not actually his phrase.
But yeah, that was not like a natural emergent phenomenon, something organic that came out of like animosities and territorial disputes.
Far from it.
It was the elites cracking down.
They wanted that territory.
They wanted the diamond mines.
They wanted the gold mines.
Yeah.
And I mean, the same is true, I think, for all wars at least of the 20th century, and I'd say the majority of wars of the last 300 years.
Surely.
Surely.
All wars are bankers' wars, some people like to say, but and banking is the sort of heart of the Anglo-American establishment, and it couldn't be otherwise, right?
But yeah, there's a lot of truth to that, and it's very hard for people to believe.
For example, people believe it.
I know people who believe it about the First World War and the Second World War and the Ukraine conflict, but who can't see it when it comes to Israel and Gaza.
Cannot see it.
I wonder whether there are as many people as you say who are capable of seeing the Second World War one, I think, because we've Hitler has been so imprinted on my consciousness.
It was a just war because we were fighting the Nazis.
Even though nobody at the time referred to the Germans as the Nazis.
I mean, even when I was younger, it was always the Germans.
When we were playing machine gunning, the term the Huns.
Disparaging term.
Yeah, I don't know.
The Hun was more of a sort of World War I specific term.
It was the Germans, really.
But we never called them the Nazis.
That's much more recent.
That's happened in my lifetime, this rebranding of it as a war against Nazism, which is another psyop.
Just going back to the point I was before I distracted you with the Boer War, I think if they're capable of micromanaging everything down to the last detail, surely, surely they would have thought through the fact that they needed to infiltrate opposition groups with it, well, with bad actors.
Yeah, I mean, I was aware of some in our own organization, you know, they revealed themselves by trying to persuade you to do or say something crazy.
Sorry?
You had baddies in Panda.
Yeah, there was this one instance where a very attractive woman sort of rocked up in the organization, happened to be in Cape Town and could we meet for a coffee?
And she was attracting me.
And I went along there.
Sorry.
And she was attractive, so what's not to like?
Yeah.
And she really did try and charm me.
And I sort of realized what was going on.
And then I went along with the game a little bit to try and see what it was that she actually was going to try and persuade me to do.
And it was actually around the whole her main story she wanted to inject and get me to say silly things about was nanotechnology.
She wanted you to talk more about it.
Yeah, she wanted to make she wanted to push me into making claims that were not in evidence about the astonishing ability of nanotechnology.
Right.
And coupled with that, transhumanism.
Again, it's two similar, very sort of, you know, because actually, and something you said just now, I want to pick up on.
You said micromanaging.
I do, there is management of information flow clearly, but a lot of the instruments used are actually very blunt.
You know, they can paper over an error.
It's like they've got a massive weapon that's hugely funded.
And if they push a story and it backfires, they push a counter story and erase the error because there's so much weight of money.
So the micromanagement, I don't think is, and the intelligence behind it is not nearly what people, I think a lot of people conceive of.
It's the sheer weight of criminality that is the major problem.
It's not the smartness, intelligence of the sort of architects.
It's the position of power that they occupy, the resources that they command.
Yeah, I'll buy that.
I mean, certainly for their system, I'll give you an example.
Everything we know about the First World War and the Second World War is fake.
How could they have pulled that off?
Because wouldn't that mean that all the teachers are lying?
And of course, the answer is no.
History teachers teach bad history because they haven't a bloody clue.
Because they were taught by people, who were taught by people, who were taught by people, none of whom probably had a clue.
Most of them didn't have a clue.
But we know, this is one of the theses of this book that I'm reading, that when the Milner Group were planning the First World War, one of the things they made absolutely sure of was to co-opt the historians.
So there was a great connection between Oxford, particularly Balliol College, and All Souls, which is the sort of the creme de la creme post-grad.
I mean, to get into all souls, that's the ultimate magna cum laude accolade kind of thing.
And you'd get given a profession, a professorship at Oxford if you pushed the correct narrative, which is that the nasty Germans started the First World War and Britain and France and Russia had no idea that this thing was going to, it was sprung on them in August 1914, etc., etc.
So all they need to do is to nobble the top-level historians.
And everyone else just reads their books and regurgitates it.
And that's how these conspiracies work.
Most people are just, well, useful idiots.
It takes very little to be in the know.
Oxford University showed up in the COVID story because they, you know, it served the purpose of adding weight behind the complete fraud of PCR and genomics and nucleotide sequences and their meanings and the phylogenetic trees and all that complete and utter crap, the models that are used to call a variant and all that kind of nonsense.
A lot of the substance came from the Oxford network.
Yes.
Culminating in that excruciating moment where the woman who developed the Oxford kill shot got given a standing ovation at Wimbledon.
Yes, the AstraZeneca thing.
Was it AstraZeneca?
Yeah, well, I can't remember what the Oxford vaccine was.
Yeah.
Okay.
Yeah.
I was going to ask something, and I've completely forgotten what it was.
It was going to be a little bit more.
I'll pull you back.
You were going down the road of wars being very often the product of the actions of the Anglo-American elite.
I think that was where you were heading.
Yeah, yeah.
But when you think about the whole Oxford thing, like I was before I, it was my, up until I got into Oxford, the years leading up to it, my dream was to get into Oxford.
And when I got admitted, it was like the best thing that ever happened to me.
Now, what I'm asking now is, why was it so important to me?
I must have sensed that Oxford was the key to a lot.
I must have intuited it.
And now that one knows that Oxford is like one of the epicenters of evil, you think, whoa, what kind of world am I living in?
And what are all my fellow undergraduates, fellow graduates?
What are they?
How much to what degree are they culpable or aware?
Yeah, this kind of conditioning is strong and it works at different levels in the sort of social hierarchy in different ways.
I came from a very middle-class provincial background in South Africa.
I wasn't even born into one of the large towns of South Africa.
It was a small town kind of place.
And in my world, the aspiration was to become a professional.
And so that was the way forward in life.
You went and you got into a university and you came out as a doctor, a lawyer, an accountant, an actuary or an engineer.
And when I began to doubt whether my designated profession, the one that I'd been coached to be from the age of two or three, which was to be a doctor, when I began to doubt the wisdom of my becoming a doctor, my rebellious act was to become an actuary instead, you know.
And you've got to look at it and say, well, actually, now that I've abandoned all of that and went the entrepreneurial route and started my own business and have consorted with enough billionaires to see what they do, multi-generational wealth families and that kind of thing.
That's not how they behave.
Not at all.
So, where did this idea come from that the way forward in life is to become a professional and to get a job with a big company or a big hospital chain or whatever the case may be?
Well, tell me about these generational wealth because I had this chat the other day with John Waters and we were talking about what it would be like to spend a weekend with one of the say the Satanic Bloodlines families or even lower tier.
The people who run the world, are you suggesting to me that you've met some of them?
I've met enough billionaires in my time.
Not your sort of, I think you might be referring to the very big names, the sort of yeah, the trillionaires and so on.
I haven't met, I don't think I've met any of those.
No.
Billionaires you've met.
What side of the story?
My generation.
What side are they on?
Well, I mean, they very they groom successive generations by putting them into into much more commercial applications.
So they, you know, they will, they will be schooled in the in the real world to a much greater degree and sent for a much more general education.
They couldn't care less what they actually study as long as they're sort of doing something and having some fun and getting the sort of energy out of the system, sowing the wild oats, that kind of thing.
And then they go into a much more practical, almost like apprenticeship of learning the ropes with people who know the ropes.
And so, I mean, by the time it comes around to me, looking at my teenage children right now, what am I saying to them, having watched that pattern of behavior?
I'm saying, listen, if you find the university sickeningly woke and stultifying and full of propaganda and you don't feel like going to a university, I'm very happy to pay for you to fail in a couple of businesses.
Okay, right.
That's interesting.
So they don't go to the so-called elite universities.
They may well do, but it's not about becoming for a moment under the illusion that that is the ticket to their success.
Right.
Yeah.
It's more of a social sort of networking kind of experience.
And so this kind of rule that I grew up with was the important thing was the qualification.
And then you'd get a job with a nice big company.
And I pretty much played that game in weakening forms for the first sort of call it decade to two decades of my career.
And then I finally realized, no, you've got to get out of this story.
Because it's, yeah, I mean, the extent to which that hamster wheel is, or that treadmill has become indistinct from slavery is quite extreme.
I mean, that's been a real revelation for me recently of how life in the corporate world or the world of an investment bank entails so many inhibitions on freedom that it is very hard to distinguish from slavery.
Do you know my friend, my South African friend, Simon Lincoln Reader?
Very well.
Yes, very well.
He's having a hard time at the hands of the UK government right now.
Yeah, yeah.
So, so, Simon, we were talking about How all these graduate training schemes that they have, in order to get on the ladder of investment banking or accountancy or whatever, they're basically like sort of communist brainwashing exercises.
They have nothing to do with the business objectives or anything like that.
They're all about creating, for want of a better word, woke slaves.
Yeah.
Brainwash.
They're brainwashing programs.
And it's extraordinary.
Very much so.
I think the global, what is that, the World Economic Forum's version, the Global Young Leaders or whatever they're called, that program exactly the same.
And if you showed any sign of dissent, you would be summarily ejected from the program.
You were there to be brainwashed, not to come up with ideas of how to solve problems.
That's not what you're there for.
You're there to learn a kind of dogma.
So how does a young man or a woman who wants a decent standard of living, how do you get around this?
Where do you find work that doesn't involve sort of corporate slavery?
Well, there's a constant sort of ebb and flux.
I mean, what I'm noticing at the moment, people don't realize, but over the last year, there's been a rash of large company collapses, bankruptcies in effect, at a level that has not been seen since the global financial crisis of 2006 to 2008.
And I think that that is an inevitable consequence of eventually hiring so many people who can't solve problems and of following so many bad doctrines that lead your organization into a horrible position.
So they become financially distressed and with no ability to solve their way out of their own problems.
We're talking about diversity hires.
For example, diversity programs, ESG, stakeholder capitalism.
In South Africa, we have this absurdity called black economic empowerment, which is a flavor of DEI.
So you've got all of these programs and things dragging them away from rational, entrepreneurial, creative, problem-solving commerce, and they get dragged and dragged and dragged.
And that creates opportunities for fleet-footed entrepreneurial people.
At the same time, the powers that be are trying to make the world as hard as possible for the entrepreneur and the small business.
That was what happened with COVID, right?
They shut down all the restaurants and small businesses.
And Walmart and McDonald carried on trading.
But even that wasn't enough to kill small businesses because they're much smarter than large businesses.
And so what you have is this ebb and flow.
It's a tug of war.
You've got them trying to regulate small businesses and medium enterprises to death.
But on the other hand, the large businesses are now beginning to succumb to the terrible toxic waste that's been shoved down their throats and that they indeed have been trying to propagate around the world.
And that tug of war is ever present.
And it creates windows of opportunity for young people to set off and do something.
My generation of white South Africans was actually 20 years ahead of all of this in the rest of the world because what happened was when we got out of school, our local world was suddenly against us, right?
You were not going to be shown the routes to positions of power or you were not going to be favored and given bursaries and scholarships, et cetera, et cetera.
You were now, this was like a 20-year-ago version of toxic masculinity.
You were just the shunned members of society overnight.
You were basically the blacks.
Sorry, you were the blacks.
Yes.
And what that caused was absolute legions of people in my community being forced out of the corporate world or even unable to access it, starting up businesses.
And those guys flew, absolutely flew.
They made it like the bandits because that was what they always should have been doing.
Instead of going down this narrow path into the corporate world, they needed to start businesses.
So my world is full of people who were forced into generating wealth for themselves instead of working like a slave.
And they literally have to be forced.
And I think the same thing is happening again now, but on a more global basis.
People are just opting out.
I mean, I was introduced last night.
As I said, I have teenage boys.
One is at university now, and I got introduced to some of his new friends last night.
We went out to the town.
And the one kid, I asked him, well, where are you studying?
And he said, no, I'm not studying at all.
I've started a company.
And this is a guy who came up through the best private school at grade sufficient to go into any university in South Africa with a bit of hard work.
But he just decided, I'm not doing it.
I'm starting a business.
And it's palpable this kind of thing is happening.
And the opportunities are rife.
Like in my private equity world, it's like shooting fish in a barrel because these large corporations are getting financially distressed.
They have to sell off assets in order to pay off debt.
And I sit there buying them and just not, all you have to do is buy the division and stop doing the entirely stupid shit that large corporations do.
That's brilliant.
Yeah.
That's money going on rope.
It's like, you know, I've spent 20 years learning all the subtle features of the arts of private equity.
And right now, I could actually be drunk as a sailor on shore leave and get it right because the large corporations are just doing things in such absurd fashions that the opportunity set created when you acquire a division out of one of them is enormous.
That is – who aren't you?
Can you name some of the big companies that have gone under?
I've got to be very careful because they won't sell to me again.
I don't want to call them too many names in too public a fashion.
No.
But given that you're describing every company in the world, every big company in the world, you're kind of covered.
I'll give you an example of the kind of shit that goes on.
A business that we were looking at had a division that was a little bit different from the rest of the divisions in this company because they had at some stage decided to do bolt-on acquisitions.
This is how it all goes.
The corporates get to a stage where they've got their rich with cash and then start acquiring unrelated businesses to diversify or some such McKinsey bullshit.
And so they're going to acquire a lot of companies.
And then they get to a point of financial distress, either because of a business cycle or because corporate bloat has made the organization impossible to manage.
And then they have to go and focus on their core business and they start having to sell things.
This is how it's always dressed up in their announcements and press releases and so on.
So they're now on the core business focus side of the cycle.
And we found out that this business, which is atypical for the organization, but which is very much a business-to-business, face-to-face marketing kind of business, was the victim of a commercial travel ban, which, you know, the rest of the company is a retail business.
People don't need to travel around.
They just need to run their damn stores.
And yet, this commercial B2B business was subject to the same rule that the retail business was in its cost-cutting exercise.
And so the business was unable to market at all.
How crazy is that?
Yeah, yeah.
You know, that's a kind of, and that's before we get to the level of the DEI and ESG and stakeholder capitalism and all of this kind of crap, which is unbelievably pernicious stuff, not just having direct costs in terms of compliance and everything, but indirect costs in terms of absolute corporate mayhem when people get confused about exactly what their objective is and what they're trying to do in the world and what constitutes a good outcome.
They're confused about that because that's what ESG does.
It replaces building value of the organization in dollars and cents with a whole scorecard of things for which no trade-offs are presented.
Given that, and this is really interesting, and I want to return to that thread in a moment.
But given that we know that this is all planned and deliberate, ESG, diversity, the whole sustainability thing, all this bollocks is designed to undermine and destroy business.
People of a normy persuasion would naturally ask, well, what's the motivation?
Why do they want to do this?
Don't they want a healthy global economy?
No, they want control and a big slice of the action.
So concentration of power and concentration of wealth.
And that all entails centralization.
So they want to kill small businesses.
They want to diminish freedom in general.
And you can't have a free market system operating under a centralized system.
That doesn't work.
The two are completely incompatible.
So if you read all of these actions in terms of doing exactly what the Stalinists attempted to do, which is to run a command economy, a protocol-driven algorithmic economy, that is the objective.
Now, it's doomed to failure, but there's a subtlety there.
Amongst the people, the technocratic people who support this kind of trajectory are absolute idiots who believe it's for the good of humankind.
They believe that technocracy can work and really lead to the flourishing of humanity.
Those are your pathologically stupid people.
And then there are your pathologically criminal people who know very well that it doesn't work and fully intend to see whatever the result will be, depopulation, degrowth, own nothing and be happy kind of people.
They know that those will be the bad results and they want them because it suits them personally.
Where do your billionaires fit into this?
Are they aware what's going on?
Yeah, again, there is a diversity there.
I know a couple of billionaires who are wise to what's going on and kind of a little bit paralyzed, you know, because they're also vulnerable.
You'd think that being a billionaire would sort of give you a certain amount of power in the world, but very often these guys have the government as a large customer and the policymaker could flick a switch and basically destroy their empires you know um but there they're also a lot who are duped they kind of they would here's a classical picture i've seen this more than once entrepreneur starts a business is spectacularly successful he builds the thing out very well manages to
transition to professional management get alignment with them uh over 20 or 30 years has become a multi-billionaire But he started off as a guy with like no undergraduate degree and he's a little bit socially awkward and he's always felt a little bit embarrassed in, let's call it classy company.
And so he's eager to impress other billionaires and so on.
And that kind of person is very easily manipulated.
He gets invited to one major conference where he gets to shake hands with, you know, the queen or some actress, you know, from Hollywood.
They're very impressed by that and they want more of it.
And then they sponsor the opera in London.
And then they, you know, they're starting to do all these things to crack a perceived social circle.
And the virtue signaling becomes very important to them.
They don't want to step out of line.
They don't want to be heard to say something negative about climate crisis or something like that.
That is social disaster for them.
And I think a lot of these people get manipulated into swallowing a whole lot of absolute stinking bullshit and internalizing it.
And it becomes part of their, it's built into their way of thinking about the world, you know.
I was going to ask you right at the beginning whether knowing what you know about everything, has that made you better at your business already?
Does a business exist independently of that knowledge?
It's a great question because it's made me better at my business the way I do it.
But I have had to consciously not do it the way a lot of people of that ilk would encourage me to do it.
So what I've done is maintain a very concentrated fund of there are very few people in my universe.
We outsource absolutely anything that has not to do with material decisions that really move the needle in our business.
I only recently hired for the first time, you know, sorry, not for the first time, but the first time in a long time, direct reports, people who actually, you know, report to me and do stuff for me.
For the last four years, I ran my business with one other partner and no other employees.
And we run a concentrated portfolio.
We don't raise, our objective is not to raise lots of money.
Our objective is to deploy the money we do raise very, very well.
And so whereas what almost every other private equity firm has been encouraged to do, and it's been made very easy for them to do it, is to raise more and more money and to start making money by way of extraction.
So by charging an annual fee against a huge base of money, rather than concentrating on returns, they become wealthy.
So in my world, the fees that I raise are completely pittance.
They're irrelevant to me.
I spend them on the business.
Until a few months ago, I didn't earn a salary at all.
And I made my money if the returns for my investors were good.
And they were very good.
So over my 20 years in private equity, I've averaged about 39% internal rate of return on small amounts of money, but 39% compounds very quickly.
And so I've made money, but by pursuing the opposite route of what a lot of people would have perceived is good for me.
So knowing what I know is good for me, the way I practice private equity, because I concentrate a lot on things like alignment of interests with other people.
I concentrate a lot on the topic of meaning and purpose in life.
You know, that philosophical aspect is very important to me.
I want to work with people and help people in a business derive a sense of meaning and purpose from what they do there.
And that's very genuine.
And I read very widely to try and understand that.
What is that about?
What are people about?
How do you get that kind of relationship with people in your commercial life?
As opposed to, for example, the larger private equity firms, they would view the world very much through the lens of carrots and sticks.
It's about incentives.
You know, what you've got to do is get that munchkin over there to behave in a certain way, to jump when you wanted them to jump.
And it's this manipulative kind of control-organized or control-oriented view of the world.
And so I guess I could imagine that I could have become wealthier if I'd gone with the spirit of the time style of doing things.
But I would not be happy.
I'm very happy.
I'm very energized in my world.
I love my life.
And I wouldn't if I had to go down that sort of more that whole mindset of viewing other human beings as instruments of your desire, as means to an end rather than ends in themselves, you know.
When you buy up a company, which has been sort of offloaded by an ailing behemoth, are you able to just sack with impunity?
Or are you constrained by the same regulations that afflict the big businesses?
I've never done it.
I have a rule that I don't mind doing retrenchment exercises as long as they start with the CEO.
Because you shouldn't, if you're running a business properly, you should never, you know, you actually, you should be hungry for resources.
And this kind of mindset that says it's all about efficiency and I must cut costs.
No, if you're trying to create value in business, it's all about problem solving.
And the only things that are in the observable universe capable of solving problems are human beings.
Computers can't solve problems.
Protocols can't solve problems.
Algorithms can't solve problems.
So I've never taken a been involved in a cost-cutting exercise in a private equity company that involved reducing the number of people in an organization.
That is completely alien to me.
I mean, you sound like the exception to the rule, but private equity, I mean, it does some terrible things.
I think I can think of some examples of private equity in action whereby, okay, Hunter Wellington Boots, for example, or Barber or Belstaff.
And what they do is they discover an undervalued heritage brand, which is just like I used to wear Hunter Wellington boots, Barber, and a barber.
Belstaff is great.
It was what T. Lawrence was wearing when he was bumped off by the security services on his motorbike.
And what these companies do is that they do things like put cheaper raw materials into the like, like the well is not such good rubber or whatever.
And they ramp up the marketing and they ramp up the costs.
And at the end of it, the company is producing stuff that's not nearly as good as it used to produce.
Yeah.
And then they sell it.
They sell this kind of shell.
Absolutely.
I mean, and that's not structural to private equity.
That's a reflection of the spirit of the times.
Yeah.
It's not a feature of private equity.
Yeah, so completely the opposite.
So what do we do?
We try to make every company we buy much better at solving problems.
It's as simple as that.
And you do that by application of human curiosity.
So you need to do the things that stimulate that curiosity.
And that's a very technical and involved topic.
It's not just a sentiment.
You've got to actually really think through what you do with an organization if you want to stimulate curiosity and problem solving in that organization.
I mean, one of the things you absolutely have to do is you have to convince people that they're going to be allowed to eat their own cooking.
Because people will not be, human beings are intrinsically curious.
And to draw that out of them, they need to sense some meaning in what they're doing.
Otherwise, that curiosity is not focused on that thing.
You don't scare people or threaten them into being curious.
You entice them into being curious.
So you start getting them to see the myriad problems in the company for which they work as really fascinating and things that are there to be solved and that they can benefit from in the solving and be part of something that's bigger than themselves and that kind of sentiment.
And that's where value is created.
The economic growth only comes from problem solving.
This whole story that it's another complete psyop is this idea that it's to do with government intervention or interest rate setting or something like that.
Economic growth has nothing to do with those things.
Economic growth comes from your capacity to solve problems and problems are only solved under conditions of freedom and decentralization and ownership and concentrated ownership as well.
So for me, another terrible thing in the world is the fragmented stock, listed stock holding company, joint stock company, your typical listed security or share on a stock market.
That form of managing society is, I think, totally pernicious.
Because the workers haven't got skin in the game.
Helping the free market, sorry.
Because the workers haven't got skin in the game.
It's mostly.
Yeah, the people who run the business haven't got skin in the game and the owners of the business are too fragmented.
They have like one, you know, thousand shares in a company.
They don't care what's going on there.
They don't know what's going on.
They can't influence what's going on there.
And the directors don't have shares.
It's held out to be a virtue that there's an independent director who's not a shareholder of the company.
That's held out to be a clever idea.
And it's actually a damn stupid idea.
So that's the world in which I operate and the way I choose to do private equity.
But you're right.
A lot of people, I never get invited to speak at a private equity conference because I'm a heretic.
I will make those, those people will be apoplectic.
They'll be like, in the same way that the mask wearers went red in the face and called me a covidiot, I would be masked out of the auditorium if I went and talked this.
No, you're letting the side down.
Sorry?
You're letting the side down.
Totally.
And I love it.
And it's a lot of fun.
And it is.
Where is most of your business?
Is it in South Africa or elsewhere?
Yes.
Yeah, almost necessarily so.
I really do.
When I tell people localism and decentralization is the name of the game, I live that to the extreme.
So I will be involved in businesses on my doorstep.
We've got one business that has been very successful and that has gone overseas and we've externalized it and put the headquarters in London.
But I will not remain the owner of that business for much longer because that's now taking it into a domain where somebody else should be the steward.
And are you bullish at the moment for the global economy?
I mean, there's going to be a massive crash sometime soon, and engineered, of course.
The biggest frustration of my existence is that I can't see a way out of the current trajectory or a way to escape the current trajectory that does not involve carnage of some sort or another.
That is my single biggest frustration in life.
I commit myself to an enormous amount of reading and talking and engaging with people and trying to think about how you escape this absolutely awful trajectory.
And I can't see how it would be achieved without quite considerable devastation.
There are precedents for sudden collapses of regimes in mostly peaceful fashion.
For example, the end of the Soviet system and the Bernoulli Wall coming down.
I mean, make no mistake, a lot of people died between the Bolsheviks and the wall coming down.
And a lot of people suffered in the wake of the war coming down and the system coming unstuck.
So too with South African apartheid, for example.
That was much more peaceful than most people have expected.
So I have this residue of hope that there might be a way in which suddenly the pressures mount in a certain way.
And I tie that to my belief in the fundamental unpredictability of the future, because the future depends on the creation of new knowledge, which is itself fundamentally unpredictable.
Otherwise, it would be present knowledge, you know.
So I do hold hope for the emergence of a solution, and I'd love to play a part in kind of arriving at that.
But right now, I just don't see it, and it's a major frustration.
I see one of two things.
Either they go quite far down the road of the implementation of the control grid, which I think will involve an incredible amount of violence, both kinetic and psychological.
And then there's a kind of desperate and quite catastrophic violent pushback.
Or there's kind of something, some kind of event that focuses on cutting the head off the snake, which I think has to be violence as well because of the resources involved or the resources are arrayed against us.
So I'm just not seeing a nice glide path.
No, I mean, if you could play it right, when there's blood in the streets, that would be the time to buy out businesses and rebuild them.
But you'd need money to do that.
And where would you hold cash right now?
Where would you even get gold?
I mean, when the markets crash, gold's going to go down initially because people need to cover their positions.
Yeah.
That's it.
I mean, I'm not seeing an alternate in the crypto space, for example.
There isn't a properly decentralized stable coin that you can reliably say will be remote from the clutches of the establishment.
I'm not seeing that yet.
I'm not seeing an alternate social media platform that is kind of built on simple algorithms where your feed is constructed from who you follow and retweets and likes and so on are organic as opposed to manipulated by algorithms.
I'm not seeing either of those two fundamental building blocks for a large-scale pushback.
So what do you think?
We haven't got free speech.
We haven't got stable currency or anything else.
We haven't got property rights.
We haven't got...
I mean, it's just like...
No, and we're very in a very a lot of our remaining rights are an incredibly tenuous position.
So for example, I think we're one more Basel accord away from banks being unable to lend to a whole bunch of people who don't tick ideological boxes.
And so liquidity dies up for entrepreneurs who are not playing the game in certain ways.
Up until now, the risk measures have been oriented around the actual financial risk.
It's been around gearing ratios and probabilities of default and things like that.
But now what's creeping into the system is, have you earned enough carbon credits?
Are you complying with ESG reporting?
And if you aren't, then you go into a risk bucket, an artificial risk bucket that results in more capital being allocated against your loan.
The loan then becomes unbearably expensive or unobtainable.
And so your entire class of people is unable to get finance.
That's how the Bank of International Settlements supervenes in this very impactful fashion.
And as I say, that's one more Basel Accord away.
They've just had one where the stuff is starting to creep in.
And the next one, I believe, will make a much bigger move in that direction.
And that's how it operates at an organizational institutional level.
The thing that attracts the attention of genuine skeptics and fake skeptics alike is the digital ID, central bank digital currency, because that's how you get it to supervene over the individual.
But the really destructive move will be to take out the small and medium enterprises with the next Basel Accord.
Yes.
It's an argument for going back to the ways of the Bible where people just lend to one another without usury being involved.
How possible will that be?
Yeah, peer-to-peer lending.
Again, it comes down to freedom.
Can those systems be shut down?
Can they be outlawed?
It seems that a combination of commercial pressure and threat has led to all the social media companies towing the line.
I mean, one of the most absurd ideas is that Twitter or X has become a free speech platform.
That's just so ridiculous.
If you believe that, then I've got a bridge to sell you.
If we go back to the beginning of our conversation, I would say that's 90% of the skeptic community, the dissident community, nominally dissident community, believe that X is a free speech platform now.
Where it's far from that.
Yeah, just unbelievable fools, aren't they?
So if you could, I think that was the promise of the internet, is it set up the possibility of truly decentralized models breaking the stranglehold of oligopolistic banking and setting up a whole financial system that operates outside of the scope of the Bank of International settlements.
That was the battle that was on and I think perceived very early by the establishment.
And the moves of recent years make it clear that they thought through very clearly what would have to be done to inhibit freedoms in order to prevent that decentralization from happening.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I think it's always a mistake to underestimate the evil of our overlords in that if there's something bad they can do it do, then it's not a question of will they do it.
It's just a question of how long will it take them to do it and what measures can we take to slow down the process.
But we know what their plan is.
The plan is always to do the worst thing for us.
Well, here's an edgy psyop for you.
I have a thesis that the notion of the existence of darkness and the evil was kind of deliberately rendered unfashionable.
People who talk in terms of evil are often sort of regarded as antiquated religious freaks.
And I detected this in the Q ⁇ A sessions of a couple of presentations that I managed to do in front of normie audiences.
You get this question, well, I don't know if you should really call it evil, that kind of response.
I thought, well, wait a second, why should I not call it evil?
And it's this sort of pushback against readings of the world that present it in terms of a struggle between good and evil, you know.
And so, yes, I've lost my train of thought a little bit, but I think it's really salubrious to entertain the world, to entertain the idea that there is an incredibly dark force at work.
I'd like to amplify that point you've just made, which is that I've even noticed it among some God-fearing Christians.
They try and argue against the existence of evil on a kind of on the warped theological grounds that God, if evil exists, God would have had to have created it or something like that.
And I'm thinking, no, that's not the deal.
That's not the story.
The Bible's fairly clear on how evil emerged, and we live in a world of dualities.
Good can have no meaning unless it has its opposite, just as hot and cold and so on.
I don't find as a Christian that I think, well, we shouldn't talk about evil, we shouldn't think about evil, and we shouldn't think about Satan as a wicked entity because that would be that would imply that God somehow is responsible for this.
No, I'm not so I think you're onto something there.
I think there is a satanic plan to play down evil.
That's more or less it.
I mean, and I was a victim of that plan because it took me 20 years and two readings of Milton's Paradise Lost to work out that it was actually an important book.
You know, the first time it was complete, I don't know what it was about, and it's absolutely boring, and there was nothing interesting about it.
The second one was, uh, okay, there I got it.
And then, you know, after a couple of those questions, well, I don't want to call it evil.
And I suddenly started seeing, oh shit, people have stopped believing in evil.
Yes.
And that's a starting point for a whole other podcast.
Before we go, I wanted to ask you, going back to the Ark conference, which seems ancient history now, but here's something that's puzzled me: I can understand where the neocons are coming from, because the neocons are who they are and they believe what they believe, and they're well dodgy.
But evangelicals, you'd think that evangelicals would be basically ardent Christians who are particularly keen on proselytizing and stuff.
But ultimately, they believe in God, they believe in Jesus, they read the Bible.
How can these evangelicals be pouring so much money into causes which a moment's thought would reveal as satanic?
I mean, these evangelicals are funding the satanic master plan.
How can they not see it?
Yeah.
So that's a topic for a whole podcast, but I'll try and encapsulate it quickly.
The way I read it now, the thing that Protestantism in general and evangelicism specifically really stripped religion of is the emphasis on orienting your mind in a particular way,
in a way that took you out of your humdrum day-to-day existence and shifted your orientation towards the divine and the transcendent.
That was the work of traditional religion with its ceremonies and liturgies of built up and developed and honed and refined over thousands of years.
And they stripped religion of that.
And it became a series of just-so stories of little moral comforter blankets, simplistic view of the world.
You know, there were these notions of all you had to do was just rock up in church and praise the Lord, and then riches would accrue to you.
There's a specific name for that kind of doctrine.
It's alive and well in the evangelical faith.
And the whole idea of the orientation, that you go to church every week to remove yourself from the earthly muck And to spend enough time there in an environment that is meditative and transcendent to orient yourself away from that.
And what we saw, what did we see when Protestantism created that vacuum by stripping away all of the accoutrements of liturgy and tradition?
What rush to fill the void?
Therapy, transcendental meditation, help groups, just absolute thin gruel of a space occupied by charlatans and life coaches and psychologists and tons of people who were just invented yesterday suddenly were the people you went to consult.
And so the whole, it sucked the soul out of society, you know, and that's why I think these guys are just, they're kind of like the really dumb end of religion.
It doesn't even, I don't even regard it as religion.
It's charlatanry.
And so I think those people are incredibly susceptible to missing the plot entirely on any number of dimensions.
But that's a really deep conversation.
It's interesting, though, because I know I've met a few evangelicals.
And most of the ones I've met are really filled with the Holy Spirit.
It is like, as I keep saying, like going into the book of Acts and meeting that they almost, they're almost capable of working miracles and healing the sick and stuff.
I don't see any lack of sincerity there.
And I don't see any lack of spiritual conviction.
And yet there is clearly an element in the evangelical movement, which you saw sponsoring Arc, which is clearly a sort of branch of the technocratic movement and the transhumanist movement.
Sure.
That's the part of it I don't get.
How can you be a Christian and into transhumanism, which is essentially the Tower of Babel?
It's quintessentially satanic.
You see, I hear you around the conviction and sincerity.
They have high levels of, the way I like to put it is they have high levels of metaphysical conviction, but their metaphysical conviction is about a caricature.
This man in the sky with a beard, you know, who is a human, by the way.
I was not born a Catholic.
I could get into that and I'd be happy to.
It wasn't a loaded question.
I hear the line you're arguing quite a lot from Catholics.
And I'm not unsympathetic to the points you're making.
You should try speaking to Orthodox people because they regard the Catholics as having, you know, as lost brothers.
Do you know where I'm going?
Do you know where I'm going shortly?
Which is why I'm doing a load of podcasts.
Where are you going?
I've been invited to Russia by the Orthodox patriarch to go and hang out in the churches, with the monks and stuff.
So a couple of things for you to jump on to.
Number one, I'm terribly envious.
I would love to do that.
But number two, take note, do some homework on the difference in the organizational structure between the Catholic Church and the Orthodox Church.
And go back to the schism, you know?
What was that really about?
People like to say, oh, it was about the, you know, the, does the Holy Spirit proceed from the Father or from the Father and the Son?
What's that called again?
The earthquake.
They say this is the big story of the schism.
But actually, there was a more fundamental issue at play was a difference over just how much authority the Pope ought to have and how centralized the faith should be.
And so the patriarch is what they call primum interpares, first among equals.
It is a much lower status kind of role than that of the Bishop of Rome.
And so that organizational structure difference is interesting.
And then also pay attention to the difference in the memetic structure that conserves.
Because that's the important thing.
That's what we're talking about thing.
You want to have a core of a faith that's very robust to progression, to change.
You want it to sort of be like a thing that migrates closer to the speed of biological evolution than to the speed of cultural evolution.
Yeah.
Because anything that's worth preserving is an evolved entity.
There's nothing that comes out of a spreadsheet that's worth preserving.
So to pay attention to the memetic content, the memetic core of the religion that leads to that preservation.
It is fascinating.
I'm in for a treat, aren't I?
And you, Nick, thank you.
You've given me a treat.
I'm really, I kind of gut it.
If I can make it happen anyway, I'd love to see you when you come over to London.
It's just that it's that thing where you're about to go away and you don't really want to be filling your schedule with stuff when you really should be thinking about getting your affairs in order and stuff and worrying about visas and stuff.
But you come to England quite regularly, don't you?
Yeah, I'm here next week, there next week.
Yeah.
Yeah, no, but after that, you keep hopping back and forth, don't you?
Yeah, every two or three months I'm over there.
I think my next trip will probably be, I'm getting married in October and doing a bit of personal travel after that.
So I might not be back until about March.
Okay.
I've really enjoyed talking to you.
It's been fantastic.
Do you want to advertise anything on this?
No, nothing in particular.
I mean, I see you were kind enough to put my Twitter handle up, or maybe I did that, but for what it's worth, I likewise enjoyed the conversation and hope we repeat it.
And I hope you have a great time in Russia.
Pand, did you want me to advertise Panda?
Is that still going?
Yeah, the organization that I started is Panda.
Our website is pandata.org.
And that might be worth a visit, but that largely concentrates on COVID.
I'm still working out how to organize my thoughts and where to organize them when it comes to broader political and commercial issues.
That's a bit of a work in progress.
But yeah, I do at the moment I'm on Substack and on X, but they're struggling to work out how to achieve real engagement on either of those platforms.
Yeah, they don't make it easy.
I fear that Substat might be another trap.
I'm worried about that too.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I think, hello, everyone in our position on Substack is worried about that.
It's just like they're making it so obvious now.
It's really annoying.
Anyway, if you've enjoyed this podcast, and of course you have, you know you have, please find a way of supporting me.
I really appreciate those of you who do make the effort.
Try Substack.
They may let you become a paid supporter.
I hope so.
Support my sponsors.
Buy me a coffee.
Send me money direct.
That's what you can do as well.
Yeah, send me an email, james delingpole at iCloud.com.
