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 gonna 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 normy friends?
Well, I've just brought out the revised edition 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 the well, 2011 actually, it the first edition came out, and it's a snapshot of a particular era.
The era when the people behind the Chine Climate Change scan got caught red-handed tinkering with the data, torturing till it's screamed in a scandal that I helped christen Climate Gate.
So I give you the background to to the skullduggery that went on in these seats of learning where these supposed experts were informing us, we've got to act now.
I rumbled their 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 I've kept the the 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's a I think it still stands out.
I think it's it's a good read.
I'd obviously I'm biased, but I'd recommend it.
You can buy it from James Dellingpole.co.uk forward slash shop.
You'll probably find that mic, just go to my website and look for it, James Dellingpole.co.uk.
And I hope it helps keep you informed and gives you the material you need to bring round all those people who are still persuaded that oh, it's a disaster, we must amend our ways and appease the gods, appease Mother Gyam.
No, we don't.
It's a scam.
I love Dead Bowl!
God subscribe to the podcast, baby!
I love dead pole!
Welcome to the Delling Pod with me, James Delling Paul.
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 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.
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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.
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Just just my opinion.
I'm not a financial advisor.
I reckon that they're it's worth holding both of them at the moment.
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Go to the pure gold company and you will be put in touch with one of their advisers.
And they will talk you through the process, the w which which you want to do, whether you want to want to have it in in bullion or in coins.
I mean, there are advantages to having it having coins because coins are considered, well, battalions 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.
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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 Delling Pot.
Nick Hudson.
It's been a while since I saw you.
I mean, we we we were sort of there in the in the trenches in the early days, weren't we?
Um when we we both sort of woke up at 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 big quite a long journey, uh 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 when I last saw you, we were probably a bit easily we thought we th let me put it this way.
We thought that the awake crowd were all one happy band of of warriors, all united by the same cause.
And now we realise that it's been kind of infiltrated, hasn't it?
Um yeah, it's it's more than infiltrated uh or or or maybe I should say less than infiltrated.
I think I think what goes on is is there uh there's a range of uh uh kind of a spectrum of opposition views on on a variety of issues, and what happens is that the convenient opposition gets promoted.
So I I for one reject this idea of controlled opposition.
There's this idea that somebody is is knowingly controlled and and is kind of in the pocket of one or another person to to curtail the the 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 uh by the by means of control of the media.
And so you have uh let's let's say that the less awake people in the dissident community getting the most air time.
That's I I'm I'm happy with that theory.
Look, I I I'm who and who isn't controlled opposition is not is is it's not a hill I'm particularly interested in dying on.
It doesn't matter.
I think I think there are different ways of dividing the opposition.
And you've you've described one of them there very plausibly, I think.
Yeah, of course they're gonna use our algorithms to 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 that has been co-op all the big groups have been co-opted.
Well, the I I seem to have done very well at that because I find myself in the tiniest of groups.
You know, so for example, with respect to the to the COVID story, I don't believe that there was a pandemic, I don't believe that there was a characterizable disease, etc.
etc.
I think that the whole story was a scam.
And I have a similar views with regard to Ukraine and Russia, um, that it was really a NATO playbook and by by extension a US playbook uh that's being rolled out there, 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 dug.
Um and I I've kind of come to realise with the help of a few uh more astute observers around me that if there's a big story, it is either serving uh to be inflamed as a distraction, or it's a complete scam.
Um there really isn't uh anything these days that is uh viral or or highly um profiled that that I don't regard with intense skepticism.
I'm totally with you.
But I I was thinking before we go on, we ought to introduce you to those people who don't know you.
I mean, I'm talking I I kind of know you, but not everyone does.
Tell us about yourself.
Yeah, I'll just do the quick pot of history.
I mean, by day, for the last what, 20 something years, I've been a private equity fund manager.
And um for people who don't know what that is, it's basically a career pursued by uh overly curious generalists.
Um and by qualification prior to that, I I qualified as an actor of yours, although I was hopefully hopelessly unsuited to the to the career and and and left the confines of the of actor professional careers uh very quickly, pretty much within weeks.
But um uh by night, uh, 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 uh what seemed cleared to me to be a complete hype around an absolute nothing.
And um 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 and very early on, um I I I we wrote a letter as this uh in this organization got going.
We wrote a letter to our the president of South Africa just to saying that you know whatever the whatever the risk is on from this disease, uh the effect of the lockdowns is going to be far worse.
And 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.
Um but so it garnered a lot of attention and and the the sort of the informal membership of this group uh grew very quickly.
Um and then I I never expected at the time that I was going to spend the next four years or more um railing against uh the horrible socialist trajectory that the whole world was taking.
Um that was not what I had in mind.
I thought you know the lockdowns would be over in a couple of weeks.
And that's the naivety I think that I had.
Um that James, if I may, just a little diversion.
I had a very interesting uh conversation with uh somebody who you know, uh uh uh who's uh who I've been talking to for years, Leo Biddle.
Um I I had a chat with him the other day, and and he said, you know, that he he has a frustration with people in the in the skeptical community who uh as you suggested earlier are maybe not seeing the whole picture, who who kind of say, oh well, you know, with COVID, it was the response that was wrong.
And um with uh yeah, that that all these uh theories of there being a planning element to the rollout of uh central bank digital currencies and uh and digital IDs and COVID, uh they're conspiracy theorists,
and it's it's just it's just emergent um 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 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 in when the COVID phenomenon rolled out.
And and I pointed out to him that I 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 past that uh provoked them into to think about the world differently.
Um and so what I've noticed is that actually uh among the early voices, virtually none have any profile whatsoever.
And I I think it's precisely because those early voices were were much more likely to take a very, very hard read on what was going on.
They weren't gonna say this is just a government whoopsie, you know, people overreacting to something like a seasonal flu.
They they were more likely to say, no, there's this this is showing clear signs of premeditation and planning.
Uh there's something devilish in the works.
Um and those are the voices that are not to be heard anymore.
Uh 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 and how.
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 there maybe there was an overreaction to it, uh, but that the worst thing was these vaccine mandates, that was the worst thing.
Um, you know, I have had first hand engagement with him and we disagreed on this this topic, disagreed profoundly.
So he'd be an example, but there are many.
I mean, Rob Malone, uh Peter McCullough, uh Brett Weinstein, these are all people who who came to the party very, very late.
And in by my read of the 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.
Um I think they were always wrongs, they were always um working for the enemy.
We just didn't know it.
But you think you think they are actively working for the enemy that they know that they're the enemy.
Definitely um McCulloch.
He's got too many interests which which are indicative of uh I've got uh when it when it comes to sort of spotting Romans, I've got two main tales.
One, you shall know them by their fruits.
So if you see somebody steering the the the narrative in a in a in a j agenda in a direction favorable to the to the powers that be.
Uh or or and or undermining the cause of of um skeptics, then that's a tell.
But the other thing is their connections, their the sort of business relationships and and and things like that, follow the money.
So those two things.
And I I think it's important to to uh r remain agnostic um on these issues.
I just go with my gut feeling.
I d I don't trust Mac Carlo, I don't trust a lot of I I don't trust a lot of the a lot of the names.
Yeah, I mean I I think the difficulty is l let's suppose the model is as you say, that they're uh that they're benefiting being paid um and knowingly so.
Um and you can tell this by their the fruits of their labours and their connections.
Let let's let's accept that.
But let's also accept that there would be people who got 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 um had decided after the early days that yeah, the main thing about the main problem with COVID was was the lockdown,
the draconian lockdowns and and 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 with um graphene oxide hydro gels.
That's just that's just crazy stuff.
Uh let's let's deal with let's let's be sensible, shall we?
If I'd taken this line, I'd probably have a column on the telegraph now or something.
Yeah, I'd be promoted, I'd be on platforms with Toby Young.
I might be even even in the House of Lords.
So I I take your point that if you if you are stupid enough.
I mean, I think you know, uh what I mean by that is if you are lacking in the in intellectual clarity, and you are you are somehow able to make your brain deny the obvious,
then rich rewards will follow because you will be welcomed into the into the system, welcomed by the establishment, which which which likes people like you, like it it needs idiots to to help promote its cause.
So yeah, yeah.
Maybe they're not evil, maybe they're just stupid, but they're one or the other.
Yeah, I I I I tend to I agree with you there.
And and uh the the funny thing is the way the way I go about trying to make that distinction is I'm I actually meet people as much to the greatest extent possible.
You get it.
And can I respond to my tummy feel?
Is your tummy so good?
you know, I I met Malone on more than one occasion and uh worked out what behavior I could test the man with, and when I tested him, he did exactly what you'd expect of a of a of a of a charlatan and a scamster.
Um I don't think the man's for real at all.
Um but I I then I've also in you know met other people where I had some doubts, and then you know, managing to get them around a bottle of wine and and a little bit sloppy uh and to talk to them and realised that there was a hell of a lot of passion and fire, and that was incompatible with uh um with the idea that there was there were spooks, you know.
Right.
Um so it's so to me that that uh I guess it comes from my private equity background, you know, you're always having to sit across the table and try and work out who the pigeon is, you know.
Um and if you haven't worked it out, then it's you, as the saying goes.
But uh you know that that's kind of been my way to muddle around, and and I take you know, kind of sharp, sharp views on a few people, and then just as you say, agnostic skeptical views on a lot.
When I when I get sent to hell, if I get sent to hell, the reason it's gonna 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.
Uh I'm I'm flawed, is pride.
I have uh the most appalling um intellectual arrogance, um which makes me very unforgiving of people who can't think logically through what's going on, and I okay.
Partly it's a perception thing.
It's it's an intuition thing, it's a discernment thing.
I I accept that, and sometimes our pineal glands having been calcified by by the enemy, i it's excusable not to not to always get it.
But when I see logically flawed arguments, patently, blatantly logically flawed arguments being brandished by people on our side, uh, in order to shoot down people like me, in order to belittle us and accuse us of being divisive and and or 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 but at the very best, they are allowing their intellectual weakness uh to to bring down their superiors,
frankly, the people the people I mean the people who get it, well, I I 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 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.
Uh, you know, I I think if I 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 he's just going along with too many.
What was that terrible conference thing you went to that really Well you see?
This was 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 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.
So which one was that?
Can you name them?
That was the the what is 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 this the website is now deleted and it's gone.
But I mean, that that was the one where I had the best test.
I was on kind of this 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 um and when Malone absolutely went bananas, you know.
Um and you know, within a week he'd banned me on social media under the pretext that I'd offended him somewhere and not sorry, not ban me, blocked me, and that kind of thing had happened.
So it all the 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 on it was you 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 that they were patsies and who didn't, you know, that that was a fascinating experience.
I haven't been back.
What did you find?
Well so are they for real?
Well, I mean, what did I find?
Well, 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 it it was held out as being this is an initiative of Jordan Peterson and uh and what's the economist Neil Ferguson um and uh bunch of other luminaries, you know, they they were all getting together to the Rothschilds, the authorized biographer of the Rothschilds.
Sorry, say I I uh 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 and Kissinger.
And those are towels, aren't they?
Maybe just a hint.
Yes, they are, you know.
But but I mean, uh what they did, what what what you had there when you went and you can't tell this from the outside.
It's 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, they're like 30 of them, because it's not it's the speakers and then all their sort of acolytes and followers, and there's the evangelical group and and and all their their uh hang their you know 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 if you if imagine you're going into war and somebody gives you a pass to go and you know fraternise with the enemy in their mess in the officers' 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 say you you when you went drinking with them?
What what what was the vibe you got from these people?
Do they believe it well the the the the cure the very curious thing was that uh the pretty quick question you could ask uh to find out what people where people lay uh was why do you think they're not talking about COVID?
Because they never they almost didn't.
The word was not hardly mentioned, you know.
And and uh you got then you got you you saw very quickly, like there were a minority of people, people who'd gone into the thing like like me, maybe, um, or even completely naively, who were kind of, yeah, I'm very angry about that.
How 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 who kind of like treat you as if you just asked the most embarrassing question and and you 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 any of the the the speakers?
Yes, I did.
I spoke to a fair range of people.
Um the speakers were less accessible than some of the big names who weren't on the speaking register, you know.
Right.
Um but uh largely because what happens is that's not because they were, I think, necessarily trying to avoid contact with the Hoi Pay.
But 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 then 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 you know sidle up to Eric Weinstein or something like that.
Um and listen to him tell you about the biggest problem in the world being the lack of regulation of physicists, you know.
So that was an interesting one.
But um keeps me awake at night, certainly.
Yes, now I have a big worry about the whole world turning into a black hole, and uh and in fact I should just stop worrying about politics altogether.
But yeah, um, so yeah, I mean and I I I do I I kind of have been amused by by allegations of being you know a grifter of some sort or pain in some way, because I certainly haven't been sorry.
Well 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.
Um, uh there was one very curious one.
I I was said to be the owner of a nutraceuticals business.
That was uh um uh the really funny one.
But um uh yeah, I I kind of get amused by it, but the but and 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 uh crazy conspiracy theorizing loon, you know, and and just trying to talk in more in a more measured way to reach a broader group of people, you know.
That's a kind of difficult uh uh needle to thread for anybody who's speaking out.
I mean, uh maybe something you probably don't know.
At the beginning, when I sent this organization up, Panda, that the main tell for me about the COVID phenomenon was nothing to do with the statistics that we went out talking about, you know.
That the our our sort of uh 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 uh contrary argument, counter-argument to lockdowns.
Um, but that that was at the cost of suppressing my greater instinct because the 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 uh that got banned after being viewed half a million times on on YouTube, you know, in four days or something like that.
It was the the sort of the big anti-lockdown presentation that that um went around the world very quickly.
Um 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 just try and get the message out there.
And it was very difficult.
It's you want to you want to say, look, no, this all fits in with the SDGs and it fits in with the the broader trajectory towards technocracy and all of that.
And people are saying to you, you can most people will think you're crazy.
And you think about that and you say, Yeah, you're right, you know.
Um, and so you have to navigate it.
I've kind of in many ways given up now.
I I just I just 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, you know.
That there was that if you speak to people who are in the the public relations uh industry, they will say to you, you want to just go a little bit outside the overton window, otherwise you'll fail completely.
Yeah.
And you can sort of understand that as a strategy.
You know, you 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 it's not straightforward.
Well that explains a lot.
Yeah, I I I had been worried slightly at your restraint, almost to the point of cuckishness.
But now I realize that this was just a strategy.
It's relief to hear that you're 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 thinking I was trying to work out the reference the the the relevance of the falling man.
I was thinking the guy falling out of n uh out of Twin Towers in 911 the the the famous shots and then I suddenly realize you meant a different falling man.
Yeah you know the guy who just now I knew now by the way that we also we did I was taken in by that nonsense in the I was I was looking at this stuff coming out of China and thinking well you know this stuff's getting shit's getting real here that that they don't want us to know but it's leaking out of China.
But you see but 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 that's not it was a new virus.
It was unprecedented we it was just like the worst virus ever.
Surely you must have realized that I I tell you one thing at that stage in in February 2020 I believed in infectious diseases as a threat.
Yeah.
But a personal threat I didn't I didn't see the the the sort of pandemic story as being a real a real threat.
I saw per you know as a as a personal risk you might contract a communicable disease.
I know um I now no longer believe that and haven't done uh 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 uh communicable disease okay 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's that is that is a video that was like an hour and a half long so it was taken down within 34 minutes of public of uploading by YouTube.
So and and then I thought wow nothing's nothing we've said and 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 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 but for me but I can't I had to carry on talking in the language of okay you know that we had a response and the the the 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 you know which is terrible it's very difficult.
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 the message to that degree if they which they do I I've been re I 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 detail.
Every last detail was Cecilia.
Your boy Cecil Rhodes was amazing.
The Milner Rhodes.
In it up to the net.
What a toss up.
Lord Milner.
By the way, I I I apologize for the Boer Wars wars.
I mean, I don't know what side you you lot were on, but my lot was definitely on the wrong side.
Um so I'm I'm in the interesting position of uh coming from the the English side of South Africa, but being married into the Afrikan side.
So you know, and my my son will my my recently born son will attend an Afrikan school.
Um so I I don't have uh prejudices about that, but it was uh another very um a highly uh what what what our friend Pierce Robinson refers to as a structural deep event.
Uh who's he channeling when he says that because it's not actually his phrase, but yeah, it it that that was not like a natural emergent phenomenon, something organic that came out of like animosities and territorial disputes.
Far from it.
It was it was the elites cracking down, they they wanted that territory, they wanted the diamond mines, they wanted the gold mines, they wanted yeah.
And and I mean the the same is true for I think for all wars uh at at least of the 20th century and the m I'd say the majority of wars of the last 300 years.
I surely surely um all wars are bankers' wars, some people like to say, but but uh bankers and and banking is the sort of heart of the the Anglo-American establishment, and and it couldn't be otherwise, right?
Um but uh yeah, there's a lot of there's a lot of truth to that, and it's very hard for people to believe.
For example, you know 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 Gaza.
Cannot see it.
I 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 we've Mo Hitler has has been so imprinted on my consciousness.
Uh 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.
No when we were playing machine gunning, yeah, you're you're not gonna be able to do that.
Yeah, we have the term the Huns.
Disparaging term.
Yeah, we I I don't know the hunt, the hung was was more of a sort of World War One specific term.
It was the Germans, really, but we never called them the Nazis.
That's a that's a much more recent that's happened in my lifetime, this rebranding of it as a war against Nazism, which is which is another psyop.
But just going back to my the point I was uh before I uh 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 with it, well, with with with bad actors.
Yeah, I mean I was aware of some in our own organization, you know, they they revealed themselves by trying you to trying to persuade you to do or say something crazy.
Sorry.
You had baddies in Panda.
Yeah, there was I mean there was this one instance where a uh 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 I went along there and sorry?
And she was attractive, so what's not to like?
Yeah.
And and she really did try and charm me, and I I sort of realized what was going on, and then I went along with the game a little bit to try and see it, see what it was that she actually was going to try and persuade me to do.
And um it was actually around uh the the whole uh the 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 m if she wanted to push me into making claims that were not in evidence about about the astonishing ability of nanotechnology.
Right.
Uh sorry, and coupled with that, transhumanism.
Again, it's two similar very sort of uh you know because it actually, and something you said just now I want to pick up on.
You said micromanaging.
Uh I I I do uh there is There is management of information flow, clearly, but a lot of the instruments used are actually very blunt.
You know, they can they can paper over an error.
Like that it's it's like they've got a massive weapon with that's hugely funded.
And if they push a story and it backfires, they push a counter-story and and and erase the error, because there's so much weight of money.
So the micromanagement, I don't think is and the intelligence spine that is not nearly what uh people I think a lot of people conceive of.
It's the sheer weight of criminality that that is the major problem.
It's not the smartness, intelligence of the the sort of architects.
It's 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 I'll I'll give you an example.
Um everything we know about the the first world war and the second world war is fake.
Uh 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 schools, 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 it had a clue.
Well most of them didn't have a clue.
But we know, this is one of the theses of the this book that I'm reading, that that one of them 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 there was a great connection between Oxford, particularly Balliol College and All Souls, which is the 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.
Um and you'd get given a a profession a professorship at Oxford if you pushed the correct narrative, which is that the nasty Germans started the first world war and and Britain, Britain and France and Russia had no idea that this thing was gonna it was sprung on them in August 1914, etc.
etc.
Um so all they need to do is to knobble the the top level historians, and everyone else just reads their books and regurgitates it.
That's how these conspiracies work.
Most people are just well, useful idiots.
It takes very difficult to be in the know.
Oxford University showed up in the COVID story because the they you know uh it served the purpose of uh 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, you know, that that are used to call a variant and all that kind of nonsense.
That the this a lot of the substance came from the Oxford network.
Yes.
Um 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 I can't remember what the Oxford vaccine was.
Yeah.
Okay.
Um yeah.
I was gonna ask you something, and then I've completely forgotten what what it was.
It was it was gonna be a good one.
I'll pull you back.
You were going down the the road of wars being uh very often the the product of the actions of the Anglo-American elite.
I think that was where you were heading.
Um Yeah, yeah.
Um when you think about the whole Oxford thing, like I was before I it was my my up until I got into Oxford, the years leading up to it, my my dream was to get into Oxford.
And when I 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?
Why I must have sensed that Oxford was the key to a lot.
I it must have intuited it.
And it but now that one knows that Oxford is like one of the epicenters of evil, it kind of you think, whoa, what kind of world am I living in?
And what are all my fellow undergraduates, fellow graduates?
What what are they how much to what degree are they culpable or aware?
Yeah, the this kind of conditioning is strong and it it works at different levels in the sort of social hierarchy in different ways.
You know, I came from a very middle class uh provincial background in South Africa, you know, I wasn't even in born into one of the large towns of South Africa, it was a small town kind of place.
And in in my world, uh the aspiration was to become a professional.
And so, you know, that that was the way forward in life.
You you went and you you got into a university and you came out as a doctor, a lawyer, uh, an accountant, an actuary or an engineer.
And you know, when when I began to doubt whether I my de my designated uh profession, the one that I'd been coached to be from the age of two or three, uh, which was to be a doctor, when I began to doubt the wisdom of my becoming a doctor, you know, my my rebellious act was to become an actuary instead, you know.
Um and you've got to look at it and say, well, actually now that I've that I abandoned all of that and and and went the entrepreneurial route and started my own business and have you know consorted with enough billionaires to see what they do, you know, multi-generational wealth families and that kind of thing, that's not how they behave.
You know, 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 I had this chat the other day with um 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 or even to the lower tier.
That the these the people who run the world, you you what are you are you suggesting to me that you've you've met some of them?
I've met enough billionaires in my time.
Um not not your sort of I I think you might be referring to the very big names, the sort of yeah, the trillionaires and so on.
I I haven't met I don't think I've met any of those.
Um the billionaires you've met, how how what's my generation?
Yeah what side what side are they on?
Well the what the I mean they're very they groom uh uh success generations by putting them into much more commercial applications.
Um so that you know they will they will be schooled in the in the real world to a much greater degree and 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 and getting the sort of energy out of the system, the 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.
Um and the uh so I mean by the time it comes around to me looking at my uh teenage children right now, what am I saying to them, having watched that pattern of behaviour, I'm saying, listen, if if you find the university is sickeningly woke and 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 that's interesting.
So they don't go to the so-called elite universities, or they all they may well do, but it's not about becoming uh that they're not for a moment under the 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.
Um and 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 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 the story.
Because it's, yeah.
I mean, the extent to which that hamster wheel 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?
You can become a personal.
Very well.
Yes, very well.
He's having a hard time at the hands of the UK government right now.
Yeah.
Yeah, yeah.
So Simon, we were talking about how all these graduate training training schemes that they have, you know, in order to get on the ladder of investment banking or accountancy or whatever.
They're basically like sort of communist brainwashing exercises that have nothing to do with the with the with the business objectives or anything like that.
They're all about creating for want of a better word, woke woke slaves.
Yeah.
Brainwash.
They're brainwashing programs.
And it's just very much so.
I think you know the global, the what is that, the World Economic Forum's version, the global young leaders or whatever they're called.
Um that program exactly the same.
And if you if you showed any sign of dissent, you would be you're summarily ejected from the program.
You were there to be brainwashed, not to come up with ideas of how to solve problems.
You know, 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 who wants a decent standard of living, how do you get around this?
How do you where do you find work that isn't doesn't involve sort of corporate slavery?
Well, there's a there's a there's a constant sort of ebb and flux.
I mean, what I'm noticing at the moment, uh you know people don't realize that in in over the last year there's been a rash of large company um collapses, uh, you know, d uh bankruptcies in effect.
Um at a level that has uh not been seen since the global financial crisis of 2006 to 2008.
Um and I think that that is an inevitable consequence of eventually hiring so many people who you can't solve problems, um, and of following so many bad doctrines that lead your organization into a horrible position.
So they become financially distressed and and with no ability to solve their way out of their own problems.
Um for example, diversity programs, you ESG, stakeholder capitalism, uh in South Africa we have this absurdity called black economic empowerment, um, but which is a flavor of DEI.
Okay, 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 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 it's a tug of war.
You've got them trying to regulate small businesses and and and medium enterprises to death.
But on the other Hand, the large businesses are now beginning to succumb to the terrible toxic waste that they've been uh that's been shoved down their throats, and that they indeed have been trying to propagate around the world, and and that tug of war is is ever present, and 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, the world, uh our local world was suddenly against us, right?
You you were not in uh you were not going to be shown the the routes to positions of power, or yes, you were not going to be favored and given bursaries and scholarships, etc.
etc.
You you were now uh we this was like uh a 20-year-ago version of toxic max masculinity, you know.
You were you were just uh the the shunned members of society overnight.
You were basically the blacks.
Sorry.
You were the blacks.
You you yes, sort of shift with and and what what that caused was absolute legions of people in 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 that was what they always should have been doing.
You know, instead of going down this narrow path into the corporate world, they should have they needed to start businesses.
So my world is full of people who by were forced into generating wealth, you know, for themselves instead of working like a slave.
And and they literally had to be forced.
And I think the same thing's happening again now, but on a more global basis, people are just opting out.
I mean, I I was introduced last night.
I've got T as I said, I have uh teenage boys, one who's at university now, and I got introduced to his new some of his new friends last night.
We went out to the town, and um, 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 and this is a guy who came up through uh uh the best private school uh at grain sufficient to go into any university in South Africa with a bit of hard work, but um he just decided I'm not doing it, I'm starting a business.
And I and and I it it it's palpable.
This this kind of thing is happening.
Um and and the opportunities are rife.
Like in my private equity world, it it's like shooting fish in a barrel because these large corporations are getting financially distressed, they have to sell off assets to in order to pay off debt, and I sit there buying them, and just not you 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's in a rope.
It it it it 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 the large corporations are just doing things in such absurd fashions that the the up the opportunity set created when you acquire a division out of one of them is enormous.
That is who who aren't you can you name some of the big companies that have gone under be very careful because they won't sell to me again, but you know.
No.
But given that you're describing every company in the world, every big company in the world, that that you're kind of covered.
I'll give you an example of the kind of shit that goes on.
A business that that we were looking at has has it had a division that was a little bit different from the the rest of the divisions in this company because you know that it they had at some stage uh decided to do bolt-on acquisitions.
But this is how it all goes though.
They did they the corporates get to a stage where they've got their rich with cash and then start acquiring unrelated businesses, you know, to diversify or some such McKinsey bullshit.
Yeah, and um, 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 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 their uh announcements and press releases and so on.
So they're now on the the core business focus uh uh side of the cycle.
And we found out that this business, which is atypical for the organization, but which is very much a uh uh a business to business, face-to-face marketing kind of business, was the victim of uh of a uh a commercial travel ban.
Which, you know, the 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.
Crazy is that.
Yeah, yeah.
You know?
That's a kind of and and that's before we get to the level of the DEI and ESG and and uh uh stakeholder capitalism and all of this kind of crap, which which 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 there no trade trade-offs are presented.
Given that this is this is really interesting, and I I I want to I want to cut return to that thread in a moment.
But given that we know that this is all planned and deliberate, ESG, diversity, um the whole sustainability thing, all this bollocks is designed to undermine and destroy business.
People will people of a normally 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 they want control and um a big slice of the action.
So concentration of power and concentration of wealth.
And and that all entails centralization.
So they want to kill small businesses, they want to uh diminish freedom in general.
And you can't 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 the Stalinists attempted to do, which is to run a command economy, a protocol-driven algorithmic economy.
That that is the objective.
Now it's it's doomed to failure, but the it 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.
Okay, they believe that technocracy can work and really be 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, uh degrowth, uh own nothing and be happy kind of people.
They they they know that those will be the bad results, and they want them because it suits them personally.
Where do your your billionaires put into the this?
So are they aware what's going on?
Yeah, again, it's it's there's a there is a diverse uh diversity there.
I 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 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 uh the government as a large customer and and um uh a policymaker could flick a switch and basically destroy their empires, you know.
Um but they're they're also a lot who are duped.
They're kind of they would here's a classical picture.
I've seen this more than once.
Entrepreneur starts a business, is spectacularly successful, he 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 multibilionaire.
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 uh let's call it classy company.
Um 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 uh the queen or some actress, you know, from from Hollywood.
Uh 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 and their 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 and internalizing it, and it becomes part of their their bills, but it's built into the way of thinking about the world, you know.
I was gonna ask you, right at the beginning, um, whether knowing what you know about um everything.
Has that made you better at your business already?
Exist independently of that knowledge.
It's a great question because it's it's made me better at my business the way I do it.
But I had 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 uh there are very few people in my universe.
We outsource absolutely anything that is not to do with material decisions that really move the needle in our business.
Um I only recently hired for the first time, you know, and sorry, not for the first time, but uh the first time in a long time, uh, direct reports, people who actually you know report to me and do stuff for me.
I uh uh 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 and so whereas what almost every other private equity firm has been encouraged to do, uh, and and it's been made it 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 can they become wealthy.
So in my world, the fees that I raise are completely pittance, they're they're irrelevant to me.
I spend them on the business that I don't earn a uh until a few months ago, I didn't earn a salary at all.
Um and uh and and I made my money if the returns for my investors were good, and they were very good.
You know, we 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 by pursuing the opposite route of what a lot of people would have perceived as 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 of 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 I read I read very widely to try and understand that what is that about?
What are people about?
How do you get uh that kind of uh relationship with people in your in your commercial life, as opposed to, for example, the the larger 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 to do it's this manipulative kind of control-organized or control-oriented view of the world.
And and so I guess I 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 be not, I would not be happy.
I'm very happy, I'm very energizing in my world.
I I I love my life.
And I wouldn't if I had to go down that sort of uh more that that that whole mindset of viewing other human beings as instruments of your desire, um as as as means to an end rather than ends in themselves, you know.
When you buy up a company, um which is being sort of offloaded by an ailing ailing behemoth, um are you able to just sack with impunity or or uh are you constrained by the same regulations that are afflict the big businesses?
I've never done it.
I I have a uh a rule um that we 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 you you you're you're actually you should be hungry for resources, and um this kind of mindset that 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 c uh been involved in a cost-cutting exercise in a private equity company that involved uh reducing the number of people in an organization.
That that is completely alien to me.
That's it's quite I my I mean you sound like the exception to the rule, but private equity.
I mean, it's it does some terrible things.
I I think I can think of some examples of private equity in action whereby okay, Hunter Wellington boots, for example, or Barber, or um Bellstaff.
And what they do is they discover an undervalued heritage brand, which is just like uh I used to wear Hunter Wellington boots, barber and and a barber.
Uh uh Bellstaff is great.
It was what it was what T. Lawrence was wearing when he when he died when he was bumped off by the security services on his motorbike.
Um what these companies do is that they do things like put cheaper raw materials into the like the the well is not such good rubber or whatever, and they ramp up the marketing and they ram up the costs, and at the end of it, the the company is producing stuff that's not nearly as good as it used to produce.
Yeah.
And then they they sell it.
They they they sell this kind of shell.
Yeah.
No, absolutely.
I mean, business and and that's 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.
Um completely the opposite, you know, so what what what do we do?
We we we try to make every company we buy much better at solving problems.
It's as simple as that.
And and you do that by application of human curiosity.
Uh so you need to do the things that stimulate that curiosity, and and that that's a very technical and and uh involved topic.
It's it's uh it's not just a sentiment.
You 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 gonna be allowed to eat their own cooking, you know.
Right.
Um and and because that because people will not be uh you know human beings are intrinsically curious, and to to to to draw that out of them, you need they need to sense some meaning in what they're doing.
You know, otherwise that curiosity is not focused on on that thing.
You don't you don't scare people or threaten them into being curious.
You entice them into being curious.
So you you you start getting them to see the myriad problems in in the company for which they work as really fascinating and and things that they 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 and that kind of that kind of sentiment.
And and that's where value is created.
The economic growth only comes from problem solving.
This whole story that it's it's 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 and and you know, um, and concentrated ownership as well.
So for me, like another terrible thing in the world is the is the fragmented uh stock listed stock holding company, joint stock company, you know, your typical listed security or or share on a on a stock market.
That that form of managing society is I think totally pernicious.
Because I don't think the workers haven't got skin in the game.
Because the workers haven't got skin in the game.
It's mostly 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 there, they can't influence what's going on there.
And the directors don't have shares.
You know, this the 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, you know.
Um but so that 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, you know.
I I will make those people those people will be apoplectic.
They'll be like in the same way that the mask wearers went red in the face and caused me a called me a covid, I would be you know masked out of the the auditorium if I went and talked this way.
Yeah, you're letting the side down equity.
Sorry.
Yeah.
You're letting the side down.
Totally, and I love it.
And it's a lot of fun.
And um where is most of your business?
Is it in South Africa or elsewhere?
Yes, uh yeah, almost necessarily so.
I I really do.
When I tell people localism and decentralization is the name of the game, I live that to the extreme.
You know, so I I'm I I will be involved in businesses on my doorstep.
Um, you know, we've got one business that we that has been very successful and that has gone overseas and we've we've externalized and put the headquarters in London, but I will not remain the owner of that business for much longer because uh that's now taking it into a domain where where uh somebody else should be the steward.
Um are you bullish at the moment for global economy?
I mean, there's gonna be a massive crash sometime soon, and engineered, of course.
The big 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's that's the that is my single biggest frustration in life.
I uh 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 and I can't see how it would be achieved without quite considerable devastation.
Um there are there are precedents for sudden collapses of regimes in uh in mostly peaceful fashion.
For example, the the end of the of the Soviet system and the the burn and wall coming down.
I mean, make no mistake, a lot of people died between the Bolsheviks and uh and and the war coming down, and a lot of people suffered in the wake of the war coming down and the system coming unstuck.
Um say so too with South African apartheid, for example.
There was a that 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 you know suddenly there's a the pressures mount in a certain way.
And and I tie that to my belief in the un the fundamental unpredictability of the future, because the future create depends on the creation of new knowledge, which is itself fundly fundamentally unpredictable, otherwise it would be present knowledge, you know.
Um so I I do hold hope for the emergence of a solution, and I'd love to play a part in in kind of arriving at that, but right now I just don't see it, and it's a major frustration.
It I I see one of two things, either they go quite far down the line the road of the implement of the implementation of the control grid, uh, which I think will involve an incredible amount of uh violence, both you know, kinetic and and psychological.
Um and then there's a kind of desperate and and quite catastrophic violent pushback.
Um or there's kind of something some kind of event that focuses on cutting their head off the snake, uh which I think has to be violence as well because of the resources involved or the resources are uh arrayed against us.
So I'm just not I'm not seeing uh 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 where would you hold cash right now?
Where would you you even get gold?
I mean, when the markets crash, gold's gonna go down initially because people need to cover their positions.
Yeah.
Yeah, look.
That that's it.
I mean, I'm not seeing an alternate in the in the crypto space, for example.
There isn't a properly decentralized stable coin um that you can reliably say will be uh remote from the clutches of the the establishment.
Um I'm not seeing that yet.
Uh I'm not seeing an alternate uh uh social media platform that that is kind of uh built on simple algorithms where it's it's your feed is constructed from who you follow and retweets and likes and so on are uh 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 are you looking for then 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 and we're very clear in a very a lot of our remaining rights are an incredibly uh tenuous position.
Um so for example, I think we won more baseline away from uh banks being unable to lend to uh whole bunch of people who don't tick ideological boxes.
Yeah.
And so liquidity dies up for uh entrepreneurs who are not playing the game in certain ways.
You know, up until now, the risk measures have been oriented around uh the the actual actual financial risk.
It's been around gearing ratios and uh uh probabilities of default and things like that.
But now what's creeping into the system is have you earned enough carbon credits?
Uh are you complying with ESG reporting?
And if you want, 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 um and so your entire class of people is unable to uh get get finance.
That that's how the Bank of International Settlements supervenes in a this very impactful fashion.
And and as I say, that's one more basel 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 basal 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.
Yeah, again, you know, it's it comes down to freedom.
Can those systems be shut down?
Can they be outlawed?
It seems that a combination of uh of commercial pressure and 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.
You know, that's just so ridiculous.
If you believe that, then I've got a bridge to sell you.
Yeah.
That I that you're to uh if we go back to the beginning of our conversation, I would say that's 90% of the skeptic community, uh, the dissident community, nominally dissident community believe that X is a free speech platform now.
Um, where it's far from far from that.
Um, just unbelievable fools, aren't they?
But um so we if you could, yeah.
I I think I think that was the promise of the internet is to set up the the possibility of truly decentralized uh models um breaking the stranglehole of oligopolistic banking and uh 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 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 and what what measures can we take to slow down the process.
But the we know what their plan is.
It's it the plan is always to do the worst thing for us.
Well, here's an edgy psyop for you.
Yeah.
I have a thesis that the notion of their 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 uh antiquated religious freaks, you know.
Um I I detected this in in the QA sessions of a couple of presentations that I managed to do to normally in front of normie audiences, you know.
You get this question, well, well, I don't know if you should really call it evil, you know, that kind of response.
I thought, well, wait a second, why should I not call it evil?
And and it's this this sort of uh pushback against um readings of the world uh that present it in terms of uh uh of a struggle between good and evil, you know.
Um and and so yes, I had I I I've lost my train of thought a little bit, but but it I think it's really uh salubrious to entertain the world to entertain the idea that there is an incredibly dark force at work.
I I'd I'd like to amplify that point you've just made, which is that I've even noticed it about among some God-fearing Christians, they try and argue against the existence of evil on a kind of war on the warped theol theological grounds that God if evil exists, God would have had to have created it, or something something like that.
And I'm thinking, no, that's not 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.
Yeah, the good can have no meaning with unless it has it has its opposite, just as hot and cold and so on.
I I don't find as a Christian that I I think, well, we shouldn't talk about evil, we shouldn't think about evil, we and we shouldn't think we shouldn't think about Satan as a as a wicked entity, because that would be that would imply that that God's God somehow was responsible for this.
No, I'm not.
So I think you're on to something there.
I think there was a satanic plan to play down evil.
That's that's more or less it.
I mean, and 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.
I I could the first time it was complete, I don't know what it was about, and 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.
Uh and this is that's the starting point for a whole other podcast.
I before we go, I wanted to ask you, um, going back to the ARC conference, which seems ancient history now.
Here's something that's puzzled me.
Is 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 were basically ardent Christians who are particularly keen on proselytizing and stuff, and but but ultimately they 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, the the these evangelicals are funding the satanic master plan.
How can they not see it?
Yeah.
So uh that's a topic for a whole podcast, but I'll try and encapsulate it quickly.
Um the way I read it now, the the thing that Protestantism in general and evangelicism in uh specifically 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.
Um and they stripped religion of that.
And it became a series of just so stories of little moral comfortable blankets, um simplistic view of of uh the world, you know.
Uh 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.
Uh there's a specific name for that kind of doctrine, it's alive and well in the evangelical faith.
And and the whole idea of the the orientation that 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 yours yourself away from that.
And what we saw, what did we see when this when when Protestant when Protestantism created this that vacuum by stripping away all of the accoutrement of liturgy and tradition?
What shoved what rushed to fill the void, therapy, transcendental meditation, help groups, um, uh, you know, just absolute thin gruel of sh a space occupied by charlatans and life coaches and psychologists and the tons of people who were just invented yesterday suddenly were the people you went to consult.
And so the the whole it sucked the soul out of society, you know, and and and that's why I think these guys are just they're they're kind of like the really dumb end of religion.
It doesn't even I don't I don't even regard it as religion.
It's it's charlatanry, and and so it I think those people are incredibly susceptible to missing the plot entirely on any number of dimensions.
But that's a that's a really deep conversation.
It's interesting though, because I know I know I've I've met a few evangelicals, and most of the ones I met I've met are really filled with the Holy Spirit.
They are they it 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 uh and stuff.
I don't I I don't see any any lack of sincerity there, and I don't see any lack of spiritual conviction.
Um yet there is clearly uh an element in the evangelical movement which you saw sponsoring Ark.
And which is clearly a which is clearly uh a sort of branch of the the technocratic movement and the transhumanist movement, sure.
That's that's that's the 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 a it it's quintessentially satanic.
Yeah.
You see, uh, I hear you're around the conviction and sincerity.
That they have high levels of the way I like to put it is they have high levels of metaphysical conviction, yeah, but their metaphysical conviction is about a caricature.
This man in the sky with a beard, you know, who uses your by the way.
I'm I was not born a Catholic.
I could get into that and I'll be happy to, but uh I it I it wasn't a loaded question, it just it just I I hear the line you're arguing uh quite a lot from Catholics, and I'm not unsympathetic to the points you're making.
I'm just you should try speaking to Orthodox people because they regard the Catholics as having you know as lost brothers, you know.
Um do you know where I'm going shortly?
Well, this is which is why I'm I'm doing a load of podcasts.
I've been I've been invited to Russia by the Orthodox Patriarch to go and hang out with the in the churches with the monks and stuff.
So a couple of things for you to jump on to.
Uh one number one, I'm terribly envious.
Yeah, Christian, yeah.
I would love to do that.
Yeah.
Um, but number two, take note, do some homework on the difference in the organizational structure between the Catholic Church and the Orthodox Church.
Right.
It's and go back to the schism, you know.
What was that really about?
People like to say, oh, it was about the the you know the um the does the the Holy Spirit proceed from the Father or from the Father and the Son.
What's that called again?
The filioqua.
Um they say this is the big story of the schism.
But actually, there was the 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.
Um and so the the um the patriarch is is what they call pre primum into power race, uh, first among equals, it is a much lower status kind of role than that of the uh Yes, the Bishop of Rome.
And and so that that organizational structure difference is interesting, and then also pay attention to the the difference in the the memetic structure that conserves because that's the important thing.
That's what we're talking about thing.
You you you want to make you want to have a core of a faith that's very robust to uh progression to change.
You you want it to to sort of be like a thing that migrates at the closer to the speed of biological evolution than to the speed of cultural evolution.
Yeah, you know.
Because because anything that's worth preserving is an evolved entity.
Right.
Uh there's there's no there's no nothing that comes out of a spreadsheet that's worth preserv preserving.
Um so so to pay attention to the memetic content that the the the memetic core of the religion that leads to that preservation, it is fascinating.
I'm in for a treat, aren't I?
And and you Nick, thank you.
You've given me a treat.
I I'm I'm really I kind of gutted.
If I can make it happen anyway, I'd love to cut 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 uh and stuff and worrying about visas and stuff.
Um but you come to you come to England quite regularly, don't you?
Yeah, I'm here next week, uh there next week, yeah.
Yeah, no, but but after that, do you I mean do you you you keep hopping back and forth, don't you?
Yeah, every every two or three months I'm over there.
Um I I think my next trip will probably be uh yeah I'm I'm getting married in October and uh doing bit of doing a bit of personal travel uh after that.
So I I might not be back until about March.
Okay.
Um I've really enjoyed talking to you.
Um it's been fantastic.
Do you want to advertise anything on your on this?
No, nothing in particular.
I mean, I I see you were kind enough to put my Twitter handle up, or maybe I did that, but uh for what it's worth.
Um I uh I likewise enjoyed the conversation and hope we repeat it, and I hope you have a great time uh in Russia.
Pand uh do you want me to advertise Panda?
Is that still going?
Yeah, the organization that I started is Panda, our website is pandata.org.
Um and that 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.
Um that's a bit of a work in progress.
Um but yeah, I I do at the moment I'm on Substack and and uh on X. Um but struggling to work out how to uh achieve real engagement on either of those platforms.
Yeah, they don't make it easy.
Uh I 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, um if you've enjoyed this podcast, and of course you have, you know you have.
Um please find a way of supporting me.
I really appreciate those of you who do make the effort.
Try Substack.
They may let you let you uh become a paid paid supporter.
I hope so.
Uh support my sponsors, buy me a coffee, send me money direct, that's what you can do as well.
