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Aug. 3, 2022 - The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters

01:32:39

The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters #450

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	Hello and welcome to the podcast of the Lotus Eaters for today, Wednesday the 3rd of August.
	I'm your host, Conor, and today I'm joined by lyrical genius, Dominic Frisby.
	How are you?
	Very well, thank you, Conor.
	Pleasure to be here.
	Fantastic.
	Today we'll be discussing Zelensky's Madonna moment, strike a pose, why don't you?
	How Dominic is not going to be giving you financial advice for these trying times, and the World Economic Forum's war on farmers.
	So to start off for today, we'll be shilling how the Russian establishment views the Ukraine conflict, our latest article for premium subscribers by John Tangney, If you're a Silver's Tear subscriber, you can go over and get the audio track for that and listen to it.
	We can get some insights after especially Russia Today's been banned, etc.
	in the West, as to how the Russians themselves view the conflict as it drags out.
	So speaking of the conflict, Volodymyr Zelenskyy decided to, and his wife, strike a pose.
	This is a nicely performative photoshoot with Vogue magazine.
	Now, you've said to me that you haven't seen this yet, so you're going to have the pleasure of witnessing this, I suppose, car crash of optics with raw eyes.
	So brace yourself for possibly the worst feminist diatribe we've seen in a modern war zone and comparisons to literally 1984 and literally The Hunger Games.
	So fantastic.
	So, John, if you just scroll through, we can look at some of these glamorous photos, and I'll read some extracts from the article.
	I mean, that reminds me of, do you remember the Yoko Ono John Lennon album cover where he's naked and clinging to a life raft?
	There is something just particularly odd about this.
	As photo goes, the guy obviously was a film star, and so he likes attention, and he likes the camera, and he's been brilliantly telegenic throughout this war, and he's probably certainly won the media war, and she's obviously equally hot.
	And they photograph very well.
	And, you know, it's not a bad photo.
	I think it's probably quite a good photo.
	But as soon as you put it in the context of the fact that, you know, their country's being invaded and there are people dying every day to defend their country and so on and so forth, you think, what on earth are you doing?
	Posing for Vogue!
	Of all magazines, the most superficial...
	You know, beggars belief, so I think it's a serious misjudgment.
	It could only look worse if you'd pose for literally Vanity Fair.
	Yeah, or Tatler.
	Yeah, the egotism of this is just disconcerting given the gravity of the situation.
	And this by no means, our laughing at this undercuts the tragedy of the actual people that are getting bombed in Ukraine.
	The point is, if you're doing this sort of performative gesture, it doesn't help the civilians who are the casualties in this situation.
	In many respects, proxy war for resources.
	Yes, and, you know, I've been a big fan of his, and a lot of my friends are saying he's a WEF puppet and don't believe what you read and all that stuff.
	And I'm like, oh, come on, his country's just been invaded, he's doing a great job.
	So I was sort of on his side, but this is a misjudgment.
	And, you know, you think of previous wars, like just the first one that obviously springs to mind is World War II, and there were some iconic photos of Churchill taken, the one with his two fingers up springs to mind immediately.
	And, you know, the Vietnam War, the iconic photo of the girl who just got the napalm on her running away from the explosion.
	And so, you know, there are...
	Iconic photos taken in a war and photography plays an important role in the propaganda battle that always comes with war.
	But Vogue?
	But it's not even that.
	They were all caught in the act.
	Yes.
	That was during a moment of either speech giving or an actual crisis scenario.
	Whereas this, it reminds me of, I don't know if you saw the TikTok of the nurse who had set her phone up And then the caption was, when one of your patients dies on shift, and she stands there and weeps into her own hands silently, and she's got the music pre-selected to be the maximally sad.
	It's performative.
	It's a false sense of stress.
	What's her name?
	Cortez, Alexandra, whatever her name is, Cortez, holding her arms behind her back.
	The worst one, do you remember her old photo shoot where she was at the gate, supposedly weeping at the border, and then someone else was there filming it, and it was just an empty parking lot?
	And it's just golden.
	So if we can actually scroll down, John, as I just talk through this, because there's an amazing one, particularly where they're standing with the soldiers who are actually on the front line, and it just looks, it's just such a ridiculous juxtaposition.
	I mean, that is Vogue.
	It's always been ridiculous.
	I remember...
	I entering the Vogue Young Writers Competition when I was 19 and having a go at how ludicrous, because it would portray some woman being practical or something while wearing a 250-pound Hermes scarf and, you know what I mean, Armani, whatever she was doing.
	And it's always been a bit...
	I mean, they're good photos, but just the context is so awful.
	Yeah, they're inappropriate.
	There is no script for First Ladies in wartime, and so Elena Zelenska is writing her own.
	Her husband, a comedian turned politician, his presidency may yet determine the fate of the free world glowed in the limelight.
	But ever since Russia has invaded Ukraine on February the 24th, Zelenska has suddenly found herself center stage in a tragedy.
	These have been the most horrible months of my life and the lives of every Ukrainian, she said, speaking her country's language through a translator.
	Frankly, I don't think anyone is aware of how we have managed emotionally.
	We have no doubt we will prevail and that is what keeps us going.
	So this is being marketed very much as they are the emotional core of the nation.
	They are what keeps them together.
	They are a pillar of strength.
	But as you said, dropping the veil of this, the fact that all of these are staged, does hollow out that emotional sentiment immediately.
	It takes it away from, you know, the president's going to the front line and he's there with them in the trenches, to, well, now he's in basically a palace with supplies hoarded up, and he's got some of the most well-paid photographers in the world to come around and do a PR campaign.
	It's not authentic.
	And what were they paid?
	One wonders what they were paid.
	That would be very interesting, yes.
	But then they're exploiting the war for their own pockets, unless they give the money to whoever.
	I mean, I just think it's such a bad call.
	Well, this is...
	But here's the utilitarian justification for it.
	Whether Zelenska's visit to Washington, when she went over, holding the grain of wheat...
	Yields real results.
	It was a reminder of the power of image making, and images matter.
	Tetiana Solovey, a London-based former editor at Vogue, Ukraine, says Zelenska's emergence has been critical.
	The female voices in this war need to be heard, need to be represented, she says.
	Zelenska is the first to speak about the human experience of the war.
	And the First Lady has helped Ukraine assert its own voice.
	At the start of the war, the whole media landscape was, Biden said, Boris Johnson said, Olaf Scholz said, what the bigger players are thinking about in Ukraine, what Putin wants.
	Her presence in the media helps give us the urgency, the agency to Ukraine as a country which has the right to be heard, to speak, to be considered relevant.
	And so it's coached in this progressive language of, oh, the war wasn't human until the woman spoke about it.
	Well, if I was writing their school report, I would put disappointed, see me.
	Entirely accurate.
	But it's also, okay, it'd be far more compelling to tell the stories of the actual women who have lost sons to the war itself.
	Yeah.
	I mean, I don't doubt, of course, she wasn't She didn't sign up for, being Zelensky's husband, entering a global conflict.
	But at the same time, you are, as far as it goes, relatively safe to probably the best protected people in Ukraine.
	And so if you're trying to personify Ukraine's struggle, perhaps don't go for her, perhaps go for...
	I know the Russians themselves, their propaganda was probably quite effective because they went for the babushka instead, just the patriotic Russian mother who sends her sons off to war gladly, whereas this seems very elite, hence the narrative about him being a white snood.
	It's fighting climate change through the medium of private jets.
	Yes.
	And this is possibly the most ridiculous photo I've seen.
	I mean, please.
	There she is in her £2,000 cashmere long coat.
	Yeah.
	And the carefully selected female Ukrainian soldier at the front as well, just for the diversity.
	It does make you realise when you watch this war and you watch what happened and you read some of the stories and you see the footage and...
	I suppose, in a way, it's the first war where, you know, it's live on Twitter, because, you know, everyone can make it happen with their mobile phones and so on.
	And my belief is, had we had mobile phones in World War I, World War I would have stopped, because everyone would have seen the atrocities that were going on, and the war would have, you know, what happened on the Western Front could not have been allowed to continue, that people wouldn't have stood for it.
	I mean, it's slightly different when somebody's invading you.
	But the So that's one side of it, but it also makes you realise just how trivial and stupid all these arguments that we're having in the culture wars about whatever it is, you know, women this, trans this, all these stuff, in the context of a war, you realise actually there's much bigger and more important stuff going on.
	Well, I think the problem with that is that that's a subversive dismantling of your defensive to incite conflict.
	And so I actually think the cultural war is instrumental to be fought so it doesn't turn into a hot war.
	Oh, I'm not saying we shouldn't fight the cultural war.
	And by the way, in part two, we'll discuss the solution.
	What is the equivalent of throwing the ring into Mount Doom?
	But I'm not saying we shouldn't fight it.
	We absolutely should.
	I'm just saying what has become important to some people and the issues raised are when a real war happens and bombs and lives and guns and everything else, you suddenly realise how trivial it all is.
	Yeah.
	So the last part of this particular article I wanted to focus on was this paragraph.
	It's a more heartfelt version of the message her husband has been making all along, that the war in Ukraine is about more than Ukraine.
	It is about who will uphold the values of the West and the post-war rules-based order.
	Now that's a very interesting phrase we'll come back to later.
	If Vladimir Putin can invade a sovereign country to fulfill his ambition to reunite the former Russian Empire, where will he stop?
	It's not clear whether Zelenska or her husband will convince Ukraine's Western allies to get even more deeply involved in a conflict that shows no sign of clear resolution is also weighing down the global economy.
	Quick side note, Vogue.
	Employ writers that know how to use commas, please.
	The same day Zelensky addressed Congress, Russia's foreign minister said Russia would consider expanding into further territory if Western countries gave Ukraine more long-range weaponry.
	Zelensky, meanwhile, wants to push Russians back to the pre-February 24 borders, if not further, before considering negotiations with Russia.
	And therein lies the true reason for photo shoots like this.
	This is a propaganda attempt to remoralise slumping NATO support for the war effort, whereas the Russians are...
	Sort of emboldened in the belief that they're going to have a victory and in the fact that our sanctions haven't worked as well as they should have, they are still pressing on.
	So if we go into the next...
	Well, in that case, if that is the reason, and this article doesn't get seen in Ukraine or barely gets seen or isn't made available in Ukraine, Then there is some justification for it.
	But I think it's a failure.
	Because, as we've just seen, it's not remoralised us.
	It's made us very sceptical about how...
	Fair enough.
	So, in the next article, just a reminder...
	But at least we know there's...
	We can appreciate the underlying logic behind it, even if that logic is flawed.
	True, but I prefer truth and transparency rather than performativity, particularly when the policies that it's produced are like this.
	The Russian ruble has rebounded while the EU's sanctions backfire.
	We are crumbling, and as we'll talk about in the next segment, our economy is in tatters.
	Meanwhile, the ruble was 1.9% against the dollar...
	By midnight, when this article was written, after sliding to 61.20 in the early trade, its weakest point since July 11th.
	It gained 2.3% to trade at 60.27 versus the euro, recovering from a more than two-week low of 62, touched earlier.
	In a further boost for Putin, the International Monetary Fund said it was now only predicting a 6% decline in Russian GDP, despite earlier April predictions forecasting 8.5% fall.
	The IMF said the Russian economy should have contracted less than expected in the second quarter, with the exports of crude oil and non-energy products holding up better than expected.
	EU sanctions do not include restrictions on gas, quite crucially, and those on oil will only start kicking in later this year in 2023.
	So technically, the EU, many countries are still buying from Russian oil, the ones that Russia hasn't personally cut off, and BRICS, the Brazil, Russia, India slash Iran, China and South Africa trading bloc, is keeping all their economies afloat.
	Meanwhile, because we've pursued the green policies, which haven't worked, because a lot of renewables aren't up to scratch, because we sabotaged our own nuclear power, because we offshored our gas supplies to our enemies, we are in the pit right now.
	And Russia aren't hurting nearly as bad as us, hence why the West support is slumping for Ukraine.
	Yeah, well, there's nothing like a bit of inflation to demoralize the enemy, and Lenin was famously recognized that back in the 1920s.
	You destroy a culture when you destroy the currency, and a culture is as sound as its currency.
	And amazingly, this year, I mean, you guessed they're manipulating the market a bit.
	I mean, I don't believe one article has sent the Russian ruble...
	Soaring because forex markets are so enormous.
	They're way bigger than stock markets.
	But nevertheless, the best performing currency or the best performing major currency on earth this year has been the Russian ruble.
	And that's with the US dollar having a bonanza year as well.
	Yeah, thanks for quantitative easing.
	Thanks very much, Joe Biden.
	Well, no.
	With quantitative easing and debasing, you would expect the currency to sell off.
	But actually, the US dollar, to a certain extent, has behaved like gold in that, you know, with falling stock markets and everything, the first call of safety, the first port of safety is the US dollar.
	But the Russian ruble has been even stronger.
	Both currencies have been very strong.
	The euro has been a disaster.
	The pound has been pretty weak, slightly stronger than the euro.
	And, you know, name me a currency, the Turkish lira.
	I'm going there at the end of the month, and I've been told that the inflation is staggering, so that will be very interesting.
	Great for tourists, terrible for the people living there.
	Yes.
	So apparently we're terrible though, so we're not allowed to criticise this.
	I would bring some Euros with you.
	Okay.
	Or even some US dollars.
	Apparently they like British Pounds most at the moment.
	Oh?
	Well, they'll like them as well, but I mean, what I'm saying is non...
	Non-Lira.
	Non-Lira cash.
	Yes.
	Definitely.
	So, we've been sitting here criticising the photoshoot, but apparently we're not allowed to.
	Here's why, according to The Independent, we're wrong about Elena Zelenska's photoshoot.
	Since conservatives are asking why Zelenska and her husband have time to take glamorous photos for a fashion magazine, let's give them an honest answer.
	After the digital photoshoot was published by Vogue, Republican Congresswoman Lauren Boebert in the USA... Tweeted an image of Ukraine's presidential couple with a scathing message.
	While we send Ukraine 60 billion in aid, Zelensky is doing photo shoots for Vogue.
	These people think we're nothing but a bunch of suckers.
	But in reacting to Zelensky's images in Vogue, we should, too, consider why we expect people in war zones to look and behave a certain way.
	Life on the ground in Ukraine is hard, undoubtedly, but there is still nuance in the suffering.
	People who live in conflict can still enjoy fashion, tell jokes, pose for photographs, and talk about superficial subjects.
	One moment of glamour captured on camera doesn't invalidate a months-long war, and saying so only emboldens Putin.
	So, if you criticise this for being slightly performative, and rather than showing the actual suffering of the people on the ground, it shows, you know, people that are slightly more protected from very well-paid photographers, apparently we're Putin apologists.
	So, that hasn't poisoned the well at all, has it?
	Love that.
	Apparently the tasteless photo shoot was necessary because we weren't supporting Ukraine enough.
	So this comes down to the critique that our morale in the war in Ukraine is slumping just because we're facing economic sanctions.
	And Zelensky actually said to Piers Morgan in his interview, I believe, COVID and inflation is nothing compared to the suffering we're going through.
	And it's like, okay, true, we can be sympathetic to that, but it also is relative.
	And most people aren't talking in the pubs about Ukrainian war.
	They're talking about how high their gas bill is.
	So hard getting people online.
	When the war began, the West, and most vocally the US, promised Ukrainians unwavering support.
	But in the past few weeks, the country has fallen off the news and social media agenda.
	Celebrities are less vocal.
	Powerful companies are no longer pledging the money in support they once did.
	After pleading with Biden to do more for Ukraine in March, several US senators voted against a $40 billion humanitarian aid package for the besieged country.
	The bill eventually passed, but the lack of unanimous decision was seen as a symptom of waning support.
	Lawmakers who once hailed Ukrainian leaders and citizens as heroes now decried Biden's excessive spending in the war-torn country, citing America's own comparably small woes at the gas pump.
	So do you think it's fair that 40 billion was sent towards Ukraine while the Americans seem to be economically suffering?
	What's your thoughts on that?
	Cool, asked me a difficult question.
	The...
	The reason for inflation, particularly in energy, it's a combination of factors, printing too much money over too long a period, basically since 2008, but actually it goes back way further than that.
	But in specific to oil, it's had At least a decade of attack.
	People vilifying oil, saying it's terrible, we need to do this, that and the other.
	And as a result, oil has suffered from dramatic underinvestment.
	I mean, we're going to cover this in the second part of the programme.
	And, you know, commodity prices, whether it's gas, whether it's...
	Grains, whether it's metals, they always rise and fall.
	They have always risen and fallen since ancient Babylon.
	And when there is too much of said commodity produced, it becomes very cheap, and producers stop producing that commodity, and then suddenly there's a shortage of supply, and so everyone needs this commodity, and so the price rises, so producers are incentivized to produce more of it, and that's sort of how a functioning market is supposed to work.
	But, you know, the oil industry has suffered from lack of investment.
	It gets attacked both by government through its policies, whether it's windfall taxes or, you know, not making, getting permission for pipelines owners.
	You know, Biden banned that pipe.
	Yep, he did three executive orders that banned oil and gas leases on federal lands and also cut the Keystone XL pipeline, which would have created a fair few hundred thousand jobs and made America even more energy independent than it was under Trump.
	It's just sabotage.
	Yeah, and you know, America got lucky with fracking, with the technological, you know, because in 2008, the narrative, you know, the oil price was 150, 147 to be precise.
	And there was this narrative, peak oil, we are running out of oil.
	And then fracking came along and they found ways of extracting at low cost And suddenly the oil price collapsed and, you know, America got five or ten years of cheap oil.
	But now, you know, oil has made so many things possible for people.
	If you look at the world in which we live and the phones we enjoy and the internet and...
	Cheap goods from China and amazing healthcare.
	Everything we have is because of oil.
	Cheap energy.
	And humans have always consumed energy, and as we've evolved, we've consumed more energy, but we've also got better at consuming energy.
	The lack of investment and the narrative that oil is evil and that we have to go to alternative investments and so on, as well as the money printing, are what have caused the spike in the oil price.
	Well, speaking of oil and spiking prices and Joe Biden's terrible policies, I'd like to just remind you why America is suffering through high oil prices.
	This is Brian Dees, one of Biden's economic advisors, and he said this is about the future of the liberal world order and we have to stand firm as the reason as to why Americans were paying higher prices for the oil at the gas pump.
	So Biden is obviously blaming oil prices on Putin's price hike and neglecting to blame his own policies.
	And if we speak about Biden's policies, we can look next.
	Biden has been emptying the American oil reserves for Europe, apparently, to lower the wholesale price around the world.
	The US is selling off an additional 20 million barrels of oil from its strategic reserves.
	The Biden administration on Tuesday said it will sell an additional 20 million barrels of oil as part of a previous plan to tap the facility to calm oil prices boosted by Russia's invasion of Ukraine.
	And as demand recovers from the pandemic, the administration said in late March it would release a record 1 million barrels of oil a day for six months from the SPR, held in hollowed-out salt caverns on the coast of Louisiana and Texas.
	The United States will take bids in autumn to begin the process of buying back 60 million barrels of crude for reserve, a first step in replenishing the stockpile after the 180 million barrel release, the Department of Energy said in May.
	The United States has already sold 125 million barrels from a reserve from nearly 70 million barrels oil delivered to purchases, a senior administration official told reporters.
	And this reminds me, especially when they're talking about the buyback of when Trump said, I replenish our strategic reserves.
	I think he only brought it up to about 70%, but he was going to do 100%, but the Democrats actually voted against replenishing it.
	And it's like you said, the federal government sabotages their own energy security because of these ideological anti-oil narratives.
	Now, do you know who these oil purchases might be?
	Any guess?
	I don't know, but I will say 20 million barrels is about maybe a quarter, a fifth of one day's annual production.
	We consume roughly 100 million barrels a day, the world.
	So in the context of that, 20 million barrels is not that much.
	It's not that much.
	However, it depends who you're selling it to.
	Yes.
	So if we go to the next one, Biden sells oil to China from the Strategic Oil Reserves.
	And this is the Institute for Energy Research, who do some great work on how China's basically captured things like 80% of global battery manufacturing capacity.
	The Biden administration's Energy Department in April announced the sale of 950,000 barrels from the SPR to Unipec, the trading arm of the China Petrol Corporation, which is wholly owned by the Chinese government.
	China purchased the oil from US emergency reserves to bolster its own stockpile.
	China has been buying large amounts of oil for its reserves since the COVID lockdowns.
	Biden ordered the Department of Energy to release a total of about 260 million barrels stored in the SPR over the last eight months.
	The SPR's level has fallen to about 492 million barrels of oil, the lowest since December 1985, according to the Energy Information Administration.
	This is in contrast to President Trump, who in March 2020 ordered the Department of Energy to fill the SPR to maximum capacity by purchasing 77 million barrels of oil, American-made oil, with an initial purchase of 30 million barrels.
	And this is actually enriching Russia too, because China has spent 18.9 billion on Russian oil, gas, and coal in the last three months that ended in May.
	So if they're getting it cheap from the US, that means they're saving money to then buy from Russians to then fund the war effort.
	Almost double the amount from a year earlier according to the customs data.
	China's imports of oil increased 28% in May from the previous month, hitting a record high and helping Russia overtake Saudi Arabia as China's largest supplier.
	Russian oil sales dropped by 554 barrels a day to Europe in March to May, while Asian refiners increased their intake by 503,000 barrels a day, nearly a replacement one for one.
	Gosh.
	So what's the motivation for him selling to China, do you think?
	Well, I don't know.
	And why would you sell your strategy?
	You're going to tell me, aren't you?
	I am going to tell you.
	Well, okay.
	I mean, it seems nuts.
	But I'm going to guess that it's incompetence.
	but you're going to tell me it's not.
	I'm going to say it's malice, because Joe Biden sold nearly 1 million barrels of oil from emergency reserves to state-owned Chinese gas giant that Hunter's private equity firm had a 1.7 billion stake in.
	If we go to the next article, John, of course the big man is taking another cut.
	Joe Biden sold the 950,000 barrels that I mentioned before to a Chinese-owned firm that Hunter Biden's private equity firm held a 1.7 billion stake in.
	These were sold to Unipec, but this is also better known as Sinopec, and it's tied to the private equity firm BHR Partners, which Hunter co-founded in 2013.
	In 2015, BHR bought a $1.7 billion stake in Sinopec.
	Lawyers for Hunter Biden in November actually told the New York Times that he no longer holds any interest directly or indirectly in BHR. But the Washington Examiner reported as recently as March, he was listed as part owner on China's national credit information publicity system.
	So all of the times you see him and his dad sharing a bank account, sharing a phone number, having businesses in China and saying there's a 10% stake for the big guy, could it be, and this is purely alleged, that Joe Biden is somehow indirectly profiting from his own oil policies here?
	Gosh, well, I don't know.
	I can't possibly comment.
	There has to be another explanation, but if there isn't, then it's extraordinary.
	Well, hopefully we're going to get one, because the House Republicans in the next piece, they're looking into doing an investigation on this, and obviously this will be a lot more thorough should they win in the midterms, though we shouldn't hold our breath for the Republicans actually doing anything in America, because they're often as useless as conservatives in this country.
	So the reason Joe Biden's doing this, if we go to the next article, is because Europe is facing a terrible energy crisis.
	European countries are at risk of descending into very, very strong conflicts and strife because there is no energy.
	Franz Timmermans, the vice president of the European Commission, told The Guardian, Putin is using all the means he has to create strife in our societies, so we have to brace ourselves for a very difficult period.
	Germany, Italy, Austria, and the Netherlands announced they would restart coal power plants as they grapple with shrinking supplies.
	That anti-nuclear strategy really worked out great for you, didn't it?
	The potential outcomes that European nations are grappling with reveals how this crisis is occurring on a scale that has only been seen in times of war.
	In the worst case scenario, we're talking about rationing gas supplies, and this is not something that Europe has had to contend to any time of the wartime.
	That's essentially where things have got to go now.
	This is an energy war.
	So in the midst of all of these crises, we're actually seeing that places like America, the European Union, and The British intelligence are having their love affair with Walensky start to wane.
	And so don't allow the title to deceive you in the final piece we're going to look at, because this actually covers, in the New York Times, Pelosi's visit to Taiwan.
	But buried in here by Thomas Friedman is something very revelatory.
	Privately, US officials are a lot more concerned about Ukraine's leadership than they're letting on.
	There was a deep mistrust between the White House and Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky, considerably more than has been reported.
	There is funny business going on in Kiev.
	On July 17th, Zelensky fired his country's prosecutor general and the leader of its domestic intelligence agency, the most significant shakeup in his government since the Russian invasion in February.
	It would be the equivalent of Biden firing Merrick Garland and Bill Burns on the same day.
	So that's their head of the FBI and their attorney general.
	But I have still not seen any reporting that convincingly explains what this was all about.
	It is as if we don't want to look too closely under the hood in Kiev for fear of what corruptional antics we might see when we have invested so much there.
	Senior US officials still believe that Putin is quite prepared to consider using a small nuclear weapon against Ukraine if he sees an army facing certain defeat.
	So, we've backed Putin up against the wall.
	He believes he's going to win, but if we press any further, they believe that he's mad enough to launch a nuclear weapon.
	I'm not qualified to speak on that psychology.
	But they're also concerned that Zelensky is firing internal members of his government, that he's blocked opposition parties, and then now he's doing this sort of performative activism to obfuscate from the fact that we're suffering financially and that he isn't being a very transparent and democratic leader.
	Things aren't going so well for Ukraine at the moment, and it's only the people that are going to suffer.
	So you obviously started...
	Having said to your friends that you have quite a lot of faith in him and the war being foisted on him, how do you feel having heard this as someone who's supported him?
	Well, you have changed my perspective.
	Okay.
	And, you know, I don't follow the news that closely.
	I used to because I used to do a program on GB News, which we had to review the papers, but I haven't been doing it for a few months, so I haven't...
	I've stopped following the news.
	So, you know, in my head still exist all the narratives that were around in, you know, March, April.
	And, you know, it doesn't look good, but, you know, I'm pretty basic and probably there are lots of other people who think like me is, do I like him or don't I like him?
	And, you know, I always quite liked Zelensky and now I don't like him quite as much.
	Well, that's fair.
	I think that's how people think.
	I agree.
	The facts over feelings argument isn't always true.
	People would have a gut-level reaction to someone, whether or not...
	And the problem is, when you make someone a paragon of truth, transparency, and democracy, and you pin all your war hopes on him as the outlet for propaganda, and that's not to say all propaganda is bad, it's just messaging for your side, when he starts to slip up, when distrust and seeds of doubt start to be sown, when people feel the impacts of poor policy...
	Then his fallibility comes to the surface.
	And this isn't to say, of course, that we support the illegal invasion of Ukraine.
	It's not a very contentious position to say, illegal war bad.
	The problem you have is that the people on the ground, whereas it's in this country economically, or in Ukraine physically, are going to suffer by the incompetence of their leaders.
	And unfortunately, it seems that Zelensky, his image is serving only to serve what, as Brian Dee said, the liberal world order being buffeted, rather than the actual integrity of his country, And the lives of his people.
	And that's a core shame.
	Possibly.
	Were you about to go to an interview?
	No, that's fine.
	I mean, possibly.
	There's two things spring to mind listening to what you just said.
	Firstly, at the end of the day, he's an actor.
	And, you know, I went to drama school.
	I suppose at the end of the day, I'm an actor.
	But I sort of know, you know, actors like attention.
	It's all about them.
	They like to be the star.
	They like to look good on camera.
	There's all that stuff.
	And it's also why, superficially, he came across so well early in the war, because he knew what to do, he knew how to behave, and he won the propaganda wars early on.
	But a lot of the time, actors maybe don't have the substance behind the varnish, and maybe that's what's going on.
	But also, the longer the war goes on, the harder it gets for Ukraine, because the more bored the West gets of it, the less interested, and so the funding and the weapons and everything else starts to dry up.
	And it's a bit like, you know, if you have a bull market, if you have a stock market where everything's going up, Every company is great and the CEO's brilliant and the company's got a wonderful business, but as soon as you get a bear market and the stocks start going down, that's when the frauds get uncovered,
	that's when all the maldealings, that's when the incompetence gets revealed, and I suppose he's going through his own little bear market at the moment, and so that's when all the less good stuff gets exposed and people suddenly become interested in it.
	Yeah, Ukraine's going through a crisis of investor confidence, and unfortunately, it's only the people that suffer.
	That's a shame.
	So, if we go on to your discussion about oil and economics, shall we?
	So first, we're going to plug in these trying times of economics in the UK, Harry and Josh's premium podcast, How the Left Doesn't Understand Economics, and it discusses modern monetary theory and how it got us into this mess rather largely.
	But we're fortunate to have you on hand today to explain...
	Well, some non-binding, non-legal economic advice as to how to handle the current state of our energy and economics.
	I understand you've prepared a few things for us, and this is particularly inflation.
	I remember the last inflation forecast was 11%, but it seems now it's forecasted to hit 15%.
	Yeah, the forecast is for 15%, and this is from one of the think tanks, I think it's the resolution think tank, so it's just a forecast, it's not an actual fact.
	But I was just really using that forecast as a hook, because I just saw it on my Daily Telegraph app as I was coming in on the train this morning.
	but it's really just a hook to talk about what inflation actually is what causes it and do you know what i mean when i talk about semantic shifts when the meaning of words change over time yes so inflation is one of these terms that has had an extraordinary semantic shift and whether this is a conspiracy by central bankers or it's just one of those things that's happened because of the way the words have been used i don't know probably a little bit of both but the
	if you go back and you look at a dictionary from 50 years ago an old webster's dictionary you will see that inflation is defined as the inflating the blowing up the expanding of the money supply and and the credit supply the supply of money and credit with the consequence of higher prices So you increase the money supply and you get higher prices.
	And by the way, the way that money gets created today in today's age, some of it gets created through quantitative easing, which is like printing money but with computers, so you don't even have the expense of the printer.
	But most money gets created simply when debt gets issued.
	So, for example, if I want to buy a house, I go to the bank and I say I need £100,000 to buy this house.
	Sorry, that's a 20-year figure, 20-year out-of-date figure because of the inflation.
	I need a million pounds to buy this house.
	I've got 10%.
	There's 10%.
	You give me the rest.
	That million pounds gets created by the bank out of nothing.
	It did not previously exist.
	And suddenly there is a million pounds in the economy that did not previously exist.
	So that's the process by which modern money gets created.
	So over time, Inflation has stopped meaning the expansion of the money supply and it now simply means higher prices.
	But it's gone one stage further than that because house prices, for example, are not included in official inflation measures.
	And house prices have been going up at 10% a year since I can remember.
	I remember buying my first flat in 1993 and I thought it was a rip-off then.
	It turned out it was right at the bottom of the crash.
	1989-1984 crash.
	And I thought houses were expensive then.
	They've been basically going up, with a few exceptions, 10% a year since the 1970s.
	Now, if the central bank included house prices in its measures of inflation, then interest rates would have to reflect 10% inflation, rather than 2% or 3% inflation.
	And so they don't include house prices.
	So house prices get ignored, and house prices are able to just keep going up, going up, and the consequence that, you know, a whole generation has been priced out and impoverished.
	Including me.
	Including you.
	And so...
	It is a fraudulent measure.
	Now if you actually look at the goods and services that are included in inflation, it's things like energy prices, but it's also household goods, services and so on.
	And most of them are prone to the deflationary forces of improved productivity.
	So in other words, we got better at making stuff, we got better at producing food, you know, shipping costs have fallen because we've invented really good shipping containers and that's brought down costs.
	So, and of course the big deflationary thing has been exporting all our manufacturing to China, which is, we benefit from Chinese cheap labour costs, and so everything, or almost everything, in the central bank's measures of inflation, have been falling in price, because we literally improved productivity, we got better at making stuff.
	So inflation no longer means rising prices.
	It now means rising prices in the basket of goods in the core price index, in the Bank of England's measure.
	And so it's a totally bogus figure.
	And the reality is, for years, the Bank of England has been saying, or the Federal Reserve, or the ECB, whoever it is, have been going, look, inflation's only 2%, so we can keep interest rates at 2%.
	And do you know what?
	We can print a load of money as well.
	In reality, inflation has been 10%, 12%, 15% for a long time.
	You look at house prices, you look at, you know, even something like the cost of a Mars bar.
	You know, now to hide inflation, what they do with a lot of food is they shrink the size of the product.
	It's called shrinkflation, so they disguise it.
	The joke of my generation was when we used to ride our bicycles to the corner shop, Freddo the Frog used to be 5p, and now you have to take out a mortgage.
	Yeah, I mean, what happened to Penny Chews?
	Yeah.
	You know, and you probably don't remember Penny Chews.
	No, no, I don't.
	There were three!
	When I was a kid, you got three Penny Chews for a penny.
	You know, and then anyway, so the whole thing is a great big fraud.
	And the worrying situation now is that it's so out of control that even the goods and services in the CPI index are rising in value.
	And it's a big problem.
	And the only solution is sound money.
	Right.
	And this is all being caused, you know, we talked about high energy prices being as a result of energy policy and the narrative and attacking energy and all the rest of it.
	So it's government caused.
	Inflation is caused by government.
	And my great, you know, I often think about, you think of the Lord of the Rings.
	You've just won our audience over immediately.
	Oh, haven't I? Okay, so the way to defeat Mordor is to, or the way to defeat Sauron is, and I always thought it was Sauron when I read the book, but I discovered on seeing the films it's Sauron, is to throw the Ring of Power into Mount Doom, and nothing else matters.
	You know, Gondor can beat Mordor in its big battle, but if they don't get the Ring into Mount Doom...
	So I've always wondered, what is the...
	In our today's society, what is the ring of power?
	What is the way, you know, so we're having these culture wars and we're arguing about everything we're arguing about in the culture war, left, right, this, that, energy policy, green, whatever it is.
	And these are all battles that are going on, you know, the Rohan and Minas Tirith and the skirmishes.
	Yeah, we're trying to retake Old Skilioth, yeah.
	Exactly.
	But the ring of power is money.
	It is our system of money.
	And while we have a system of money that governments can print, that governments can create at no cost to themselves...
	It is inevitable that you are going to have a society that is disproportionately...
	if one body in a society has power to create money at no cost to itself, then society will be disproportionately weighed into that body, and that body will have disproportionate power.
	And that is the state in our modern lives.
	That is government.
	And, you know, what is government now?
	50% of GDP or something like that?
	You know, whatever the...
	Yeah, we're a country...
	we're an NHS with a country attached at this point, yeah.
	Basically, and we are not going to, you know, every ideological war that goes on, the way the war gets won is by controlling the BBC, getting your people in this institution.
	It all ends up being state-funded and state-controlled and having this argument and there should be this subsidy and this policy and all the rest of it.
	But it's all money creation.
	And there's a great saying amongst WeBitcoiners, Bitcoin fixes this.
	And it does, because once you have an independent system of money, whether it's gold or Bitcoin, whatever it is, that nobody can print, then suddenly everything else falls into place.
	So a sound society starts with sound money.
	So can I interject before we go on to the Bitcoin story in a minute, which is hilarious when you told me about it, but are you not concerned as I am, particularly with the likes of Rishi Sinek proposing central bank digital currencies?
	The financial technologies of blockchain and things like Bitcoin will be elite captured and used against us.
	Oh, awful.
	Yeah.
	The ability, like what you do, like we all say one thing.
	But what we do with our money says way more about you.
	So, you know, the standard attack for, you know, the Guardian or whatever is, you know, it attacks tax evaders and then it goes and sells auto trader and it locks all its funds offshore and doesn't pay any tax on its gains.
	And, you know, but that's the standard thing.
	You say one thing and you do something else.
	You know, you fight green wars through a private jet.
	Whatever the hypocrisy you want to do.
	You do BLM and then you go buy a huge house in Beverly Hills.
	Yeah, exactly.
	Whatever the hypocrisy is.
	There's no shortage of double standards.
	But the power...
	Of not just the surveillance powers of money, but of programmable money.
	So it's not just the ability to create money that the government would now have, but with programmable money, the central bank can go, no, you can't buy that.
	Yeah.
	It happens already.
	Like, if I want to buy Bitcoins, my bank won't let me send Bitcoin more than £5,000 to a Bitcoin exchange.
	So it happens already.
	But with programmable money, it will be set in code.
	And you will be rewarded.
	Like, if you are a good citizen, you will be rewarded with a favourable interest rate or favourable borrowing rates for your social credit score and all of that.
	Programmable money gives a scope for state control that has not been seen outside of dystopian novels.
	It's a good thing, then, that Rishi Sunak's father-in-law didn't run an infosize, the data gathering, basically infrastructure of the Chinese social credit system, isn't it?
	But speaking of Bitcoin, you drew my attention to this amusing story, and I don't think I'd ever get over this if this was me, but why don't you tell the band of this lad?
	Well, this dude, James Howells, you know, I've met him actually once upon a time, and he's a nice guy.
	And, I mean, the poor man, he bought 8,000 bitcoins, 7,500, 8,000 bitcoins, back in whenever it was, 2010, 2011.
	I think he didn't even buy them.
	He mined them on his computer, on his laptop.
	I remember when graphics cards were incredibly expensive because of that.
	Yeah, there was the great graphics card shortage.
	And so 7,500 bitcoins at $20,000 a bitcoin would be the best part of $200 million today.
	$210 million, something like that.
	And, which is what?
	£150, £160 million.
	Actually, today's exchange rate, probably even more than that.
	And it's the kind of fortune that comes along once in a lifetime, if you're lucky.
	Yeah, it's lottery money.
	It's more than lottery money.
	It's the EU lottery, whatever that one's called.
	And so the poor guy, and I know this because I was very early into Bitcoin and I got hacked back in the day and I had all my Bitcoin stolen.
	And, you know, I have a comfortable life and I do perfectly well, but I would be gazillionaire.
	And I remember this was in 2014, 2015, they were hacked off me and then Bitcoin went to $20,000 in 2016.
	And I was so angry about having had them stolen that I didn't buy back in because effectively I'd be realising the loss.
	So effectively I was watching everything I said was going to happen happen and all these people become millionaires overnight and I missed out and it used to give me nightmares and it took a lot of getting over.
	So I have untold sympathy with that guy.
	And, you know, he'd be worth a great deal of money.
	So he had his coins on a laptop, and either he threw the laptop away or his girlfriend threw the laptop away.
	Something very similar happened to me.
	I'll kick that story out of it.
	But, yeah, my computer went walkabout with all of my files on it with an ex-girlfriend.
	Got it back in the end, but...
	I hope you got your bitcoins.
	Yeah, well, I haven't bought in at the time, but I don't actually own that much now, and you're going to shame me for it.
	But I missed out on the price hike towards the end of last year, and obviously it took a dump.
	It's steadily climbing now, which isn't...
	Well, yeah, a little bit, a little bit.
	It's going through one of its going nowhere phases.
	But it's going through one of its limbo phases.
	But anyway, the...
	So...
	His laptop got dumped, and it got dumped in wherever Newport County Council dumped their stuff.
	And for years, he's been going to Newport County Council, can I search your dumps and try and get my laptop back?
	And of course, with each day passing, more rubbish gets dumped, and it gets that much harder to find.
	And Newport County Council, for whatever reason, said no, no, no.
	And I think at one stage, he approached them and offered them 50-50 if he gets his laptop back, which, you know, that would be $90 million, $100 million, which probably...
	You know, Newport Council would be unwise to do, but I'm sure they have their reasons.
	Or it might just be that they don't like him or they don't like Bitcoin or whatever.
	But they've never given him permission.
	And now he's managed to get some funding from someone in Germany.
	And he's offered Newport County Council £10 million or £11 million.
	And I guess he said to the company in Germany, we'll do a 50-50 thing.
	But he's offered them...
	10 or 11 million pounds, and they will go on with robot dogs, and they will search the dump in an environmentally friendly way, and yada, yada, yada.
	And that way, he's hoping to retrieve his Bitcoins, and I hope for his sake he does.
	I always just drive a bulldozer in and then pay off the legal fees with my multi-millions after, but...
	I think you're right.
	This is a classic case of seek forgiveness afterwards rather than permission first.
	Yeah, definitely.
	So if we go on to the next one, you also wanted to bring up how the inverse is sort of happening where a lot of the large companies have obviously benefited from the economic downturn, but of course they're selling a product we all need.
	So we were speaking about how governments were sabotaging our energy security.
	How does that tie into the inflationary pressures?
	Well, BP has tripled its profits.
	It's had its best year in 15 years or something, and people are angry about it.
	But, you know, and it's paying its shareholders a dividend, as it promised it would, and that's what companies are supposed to do.
	They're supposed to make money, and then they're supposed to pay their dividends.
	They're being attacked for not sharing their profits more with the people, but it's a business.
	It's not a charity.
	If it was set up as a charity...
	Then fine.
	But if the shareholders have a vote and we vote to share the money with the people, then fair enough.
	But that's not the case.
	And it's betraying its company if it does that.
	Now, I'm a big believer in Adam Smith's invisible hand that everyone acts in their own self-interest and people seeking profit.
	I'm a mobile phone maker, and if I can make the best mobile phone in the world, I will make the most money.
	So I'm incentivized to make the best mobile phone in the world.
	But as a result of making the best mobile phone in the world, everyone gets a new and better mobile phone than they ever had.
	That's how profit works.
	I'm a comedian.
	If I write the funniest songs in the world, the more people will listen to my songs.
	I benefit from having more fans, but they benefit from having better songs.
	So that's how profit works.
	And charity doesn't work like that.
	And so, you know, we talked already about how essential oil is to the world, how it's made the world a better place.
	I think BP is a bit limp and I think it's trying to turn itself into a green company and it should champion fossil fuels and what it produces and go, hey, look, fossil fuels are great.
	And they're complaining that BP isn't reinvesting the money in the North Sea and onshore.
	But why should it?
	Because the North Sea gets attacked for windfall tax if you make any money.
	And, you know, try developing fracking in the UK. It's an absolute environmental impossibility.
	So it doesn't.
	And then it's attacked for not doing it.
	Well, you'd, like, make the investment landscape.
	If government stayed out of the investment landscape and just let BP get on with it.
	You know, I remember when BP had that fire on its oil rig in...
	It was when Obama was president, probably...
	This is the Deepwater Horizon spill, yes.
	The spill, exactly.
	And, you know, BP's share price halved.
	And nobody was going, oh, bail out BP's shareholders then.
	You know, everyone's quite happy to watch it halve.
	And that's the risk you take when you speculate, invest in a company.
	And similarly, when the oil price went negative in 2020, it went to minus $30, the oil price, in 2020.
	Nobody was going, oh, we need to bail out BP. But as soon as BP, you know, it's a...
	Fossil fuel extraction is a difficult business.
	You have to go to difficult places in the world and it's not easy and you have to pay people who do it a lot of money to do it.
	And we should be doing everything we can to encourage fossil fuel production because human beings have always consumed energy.
	Now, you know, before we would build a ditch and then burn the wood down and hope the animals run into the ditch and we catch the animals that way, you know, in Stone Age Man.
	That's pretty environmentally damaging to burn a whole forest down just to get your dinner.
	You know, as human beings have evolved, we consume more and more energy.
	We probably consume more energy per capita than any time in history.
	And it's all very well us in the West going, yes, yes, we consume too much energy.
	You people in the developing world with your polluting ways, you need to do it like this, that and the other.
	But it's like being in the treehouse and then pulling up the ladder so that nobody else can come up the ladder.
	You know, fossil fuels are the best way to get people out of poverty.
	And once you're out of poverty, then you can afford to have...
	These principles are non-polluting principles.
	I'm not saying we need to pollute the world.
	I hate pollution of the world.
	Controversial take.
	Yeah, but as human beings progress, we get better at consuming energy and we consume it more cleanly.
	Yeah, this is the environmental Kuznet's curve idea of where you crest the curve of the peak emissions as you're keeping track of economic growth, and then after a while your economic growth continues in that direction, but your emissions decrease because you're innovating clean technologies, you've developed sustainable energy consumption habits, and so after a certain point they negatively correlate emissions and economics.
	And so that's why an MIT scientist told Michael Schellenberger in his book Apocalypse Never, the fastest way to get India to reduce emissions is increase their coal burning, because that'll bring their grids online, that'll upgrade their regional infrastructure in the rural areas, and then eventually when renewables are in a good enough state that we can actually run a grid off them, they'll adopt them overnight.
	Yeah.
	The bizarre thing is, it is easier to be a good person when you have money, when you are comfortably off, because you can afford to have these principles.
	Luxury beliefs.
	Yeah.
	And so, I mean, at this point, we should go on to our next story, the one of the...
	Oh, well, we've done that one.
	Let's skip on to the next one.
	This is the wind turbine that's caught fire.
	And then you look at the, this is in Hull, and this is a wind turbine that's caught fire in Hull.
	Look at the pollution!
	It genuinely looks like 9-11.
	The hilarious thing, the stories I always tell is, okay, so it takes carbon fibre to build these things, fibreglass as well.
	I went to Whitley Wind Farm, which is the largest inland wind farm in the UK, and they said they never make back the amount of emissions offsetted that it took to make them, or the energy, and that they need a dispatchable baseload alternative, so gas or nuclear, to run concurrently because they don't make enough power to justify it and then when they freeze up in the winter like any fan does do you know how they de-ice them?
	I'm going to guess diesel or something like that.
	They get in a helicopter with a flamethrower.
	How astoundingly environmentally friendly that is.
	Well, it's just so hypocritical, and you measure these things in carbon footprints, but, you know, to get electric vehicles, to get wind turbines, it involves the production of extraordinary amounts of metal.
	Now, that means a heck of a lot of fossil fuel needs to be burned, and mining is an environmentally damaging business, even if it's done in a green way.
	And all the copper and the lithium and everything else that's required to make this green energy revolution happen It means that extraordinary amounts of fossil fuel need to be burnt, which is one of the reasons why the oil price is so high.
	And then you look at a picture like that and you realise, actually, it's not that green because it can catch fire and cause all this pollution.
	Then there's all the arguments about the damage they do to the landscape and the birds and they're not being in keeping with the landscape and so on.
	But the...
	Amount of fossil fuel that is required to be burnt to make the green energy revolution happen is hypocritical.
	So what would you recommend we do policy-wise to get us out of this hole?
	Not just the adoption of Bitcoin, but should we be looking at more fracking in the UK? Should we be abandoning our renewables development commitments?
	What would you say?
	I think the government should stay out of it.
	Okay.
	It's totally fair.
	And let the market work it out.
	And the market will work it out in the best way.
	Yeah.
	I would say so.
	In my green policy career, I've always said about attempting to attract more private capital investments so you're not picking and choosing winners and losers in terms of the energy sector.
	Perhaps the realities of the economic downturn caused by pursuing these green policies might change their minds on this, but I suppose we shouldn't hold our breaths, should we?
	You know, there's a strong argument that if an industry cannot survive without subsidy, then that industry shouldn't be there because it's a net drain.
	And green energy in its current form, for the most part, cannot survive without subsidy.
	For the life of me, I don't understand why they don't spend more on tidal...
	Because that's consistent.
	Wind isn't consistent.
	Tidal is consistent.
	And they never do.
	It's always wind.
	And I bet it's in vested interests of some kind.
	And nuclear is such a problem solver.
	These small modular reactors and all the rest.
	You seem very clued up on your energy policy.
	Did you used to work in energy or something?
	I did.
	So you remember when Boris Johnson did that terrible speech at the UN where he made the Kermit the Frog joke?
	Right.
	That might have come from the title of my paper that we sent to his office.
	Ha ha!
	So I'll take on that, but basically my very brief sentence on it, my policy on funding new nuclear power plants with, rather than state subsidies, but energy company bills over time, made it into the Nuclear Financing Act of 2022.
	So hopefully that'll get more small modular reactors online, but I suppose we shouldn't hold our breath.
	Yeah, I mean, they are a problem-solver, and they've existed in submarines, and so, you know, the test case is already there, and, you know, to get a proper nuclear reactor on, when I say a proper one, I mean a big one, it just takes so long, and it's such a big fight, and there's so many regulatory problems.
	These small modular things are, well, hopefully now, with the rising oil price and rising energy prices, the narrative will change.
	So, just to wrap up then, are you optimistic about the trajectory we're headed in terms of energy in the economy?
	I think we've sort of had the initial pain, but when the pain becomes ongoing, you know, people think with their pockets.
	But until we throw our monetary system into the fires of Mount Doom, I don't think we're going to win the culture war.
	Brilliant.
	So on that note, let's talk about how the World Economic Forum are waging war on our farmers, shall we?
	Hot off the heels of pestilence and war, the third horseman famine is riding in right behind them.
	But before we discuss that, let's discuss just a plug for an article on our website.
	If you'd like to subscribe to lotuseaters.com, you'll have access to this.
	My deep think on why the WEF's ESG system, the Environmental, Social and Government scores, which are Ruining things like energy businesses and things like that and sabotaging the get-woke-go-broke dictum of markets are basically equivalent to a biblical system of having a mark on your skin so you can work and trade.
	I think at this point, calling the World Economic Forum satanic is kind of an understatement.
	So first, the Guardian's resident eco-communist himself, George Monbiot.
	George Monbiot is a very intelligent solution to why there are agricultural emissions.
	Let's listen to this brief clip, shall we?
	In this country, George, there's a big emphasis on agriculture and how agriculture needs to cut its emissions.
	And I know it's an issue you feel very strongly about.
	You've said that agriculture is arguably the most destructive industry on earth.
	Explain, and do you still believe that, George?
	It's by far and away the greatest cause of habitat destruction, the greatest cause of wildlife loss, the greatest cause of extinction, greatest cause of soil loss, greatest source of fresh water use.
	It's one of the greatest causes of climate breakdown, bigger than transport, one of the primary causes of water pollution and of air pollution.
	So it's right at the top.
	Oh, I'm sorry, I forgot to say land use, the biggest issue of all.
	It's by far and away The greatest form of land use that humans inflict on the planet, which means all that land is land which can't be used for wild ecosystems.
	And while obviously we need farming, we need to minimize those impacts.
	We need to act as drastically within that sector as any other sector to prevent the collapse of our life support systems.
	And what that means above all else, It's getting out of livestock farming.
	It's really shutting down animal farming altogether because that has massively disproportionate impacts on the living planet.
	And we need to switch towards other sources of food, plant-based diets, which are far more efficient, far lower environmental impacts, but also switch out of farming altogether to produce protein-rich foods, which we can do through precision fermentation, brewing microbes.
	I can hear farmers all over the small country of ours shocked and perhaps screaming at their televisions.
	Are you saying all animal farming, in your opinion, really needs to stop?
	Yes, it does.
	It really does.
	It's a bit like leaving fossil fuels in the ground.
	Unless we do that, we've really got very little chance indeed of preventing this domino effect of system collapse right across Earth systems, which basically makes the planet uninhabitable.
	So eating meat and milk and eggs is an indulgence we cannot afford.
	So the last time that a misanthrope from England intervened in Ireland's agricultural policy, it didn't go too well.
	I specifically remember an absence of potatoes killed quite a few people, and I'm struggling to consider whether or not the large space between George's eyebrows is larger than the large space between his ears, because there's clearly nothing in that empty head of his.
	The unfortunate thing is that this kind of mindset has actually infected a lot of institutions and governments.
	So if we move over to the next article, this small change to farming could reduce agriculture's climate impact by 30%, our friends at the World Economic Forum.
	Agriculture accounts for 26% of all greenhouse emissions.
	Tractor fuel, fertilizer, and methane from cattle are some of the main contributing factors.
	Tilling soil by breaking it up with plows exposes carbon buried in the soil.
	So they propose something called no-till farming.
	So that doesn't disturb the soil, and instead involves planting seeds in drilled holes in the earth.
	This could slash greenhouse emissions and crop production by nearly a third, and increase how much carbon soils can store.
	So this to me sounds a lot like, if we go to the next one, we're not going to read much from here, but Lysenkoism?
	I don't know if you're familiar with that term.
	No.
	So a Soviet biologist named Lysenko, funnily enough, proposed the idea that seeds have class consciousness, and that if you plant them in shallow plots altogether, because they're from the same species, they wouldn't compete for sunlight.
	And of course, when they did that, and the crop harvests happened in Pol Pot's Cambodia, in Soviet Russia, and obviously Soviet-occupy Ukraine, And in Mao's China, massive famines across the board.
	Because it's stupid, but it sounds like screwing with farming will lead to more famines.
	So then let's look at more anti-farming policies in action, shall we?
	The Netherlands.
	So here was two years ago.
	How the World Economic Forum is telling farmers in the Netherlands to grow less food using less resources.
	So why don't we cut to now, two years after, shall we?
	The worldwide working-class counter-revolution.
	So your policies from Davos clearly went well, didn't they?
	Demonstrations have been going on and off since 2019 when the Dutch legislature proposed a crackdown on nitrogen emissions.
	Nitrogen is heavily emitted by livestock and fertilizer, which means regulations are hitting Dutch agriculture especially hard.
	July 2022 is when the protests really took off and gained media steam.
	The Western European nation is the second largest food exporter on the Earth, only after the United States, which is 237 times larger.
	In the same world, this would be celebrated and copycatted...
	Michael Schellenberger actually points out that Dutch farms aren't using any more nitrogen fertiliser than they were back in the 1960s, so they've come leaps and bounds in terms of the innovation you were talking about earlier.
	But instead, the Dutch government has planned to sabotage this by, in compliance with a court order from the EU to cut nitrogen emissions by 50%, they're actually confiscating Dutch farmers' lands and culling livestock to reduce the amount of nitrogen emissions that are being leaked into their swamps.
	Because they're saying, oh God, the mosquito population's dropping and there's going to be more emissions.
	Quick, let's starve to death to save the planet.
	And now even Germany's farmers have crossed the borders to join the Dutch.
	And then the French have actually protested the fertiliser bans.
	The Italian farmers are kicking off as well, I think.
	I've heard there's a stirring there, and especially considering their government is in tumult right now, I wouldn't be surprised that something kicks off there as well.
	Then there's the next one that just says this is due to the World Economic Forum's dictums filtering through to the Dutch government to the point of where the Dutch president denied that he'd ever read Klaus Schwab's book or knew who he was, but it turns out he'd sent a letter saying that he had a fantastic book.
	So clearly this unelected institution is influencing Dutch policy.
	The Dutch government have planned to reduce their nitrogen output by 95% by culling livestock herds and confiscating farmland, as I already said.
	So this...
	The whole protest movement has actually gained in the next piece some support from European politicians.
	So it turns out this sort of thing is working.
	We're pushing back against the unelected bureaucrats.
	On Thursday, farmers got local support, official support from the Polish government, which is trying to get Brussels to back down from its plans to cut emissions from the agricultural sector.
	Agriculture Minister Henry Kowalski, I hope I've pronounced that right, probably not.
	I love this quote.
	You see angry farmers, the far right sees opportunity.
	I know.
	It's always about the far-right pounce and our totally terrible idea in the crisis that we've engineered.
	Sorry to interrupt.
	That's alright.
	Never apologise.
	Kowalczyk of the ruling right-wing Law and Justice Party.
	What a terrible name.
	How could you be for law and justice rather than disorder and social justice?
	Met with Dutch farmers in Warsaw and endorsed their cause.
	I will support in the EU the position of the Dutch farmers to maintain production, and I hope that their government will change its mind, Kowalsik said.
	I will be looking for allies among EU ministers.
	I have already found some for our position on stopping measures that could lead to a reduction in food production in the EU.
	This is a common, important task.
	Now, this would seem very sensible to rally against, I don't know, state-engineered famines.
	But this is being replicated around the world, and this phenomenon is not just happening in Europe, it's also happening in Asia.
	So if you look at Sri Lanka, for example, four years ago, this was an article written for the World Economic Forum by their former president.
	And I say former because he's been ousted by a revolution there.
	How I will make my country rich by 2025.
	So let's look at now as well as another...
	Party in the palace.
	Sri Lankans roam the president's compound enjoying pillow fights, cricket, trying his private gym and swimming pool hours before the protesters torched the prime minister's house and the president and PM say they will quit.
	So the revolution has been waged because they outlawed in Sri Lanka the use of fertilizer and decided to go for organic farming.
	And people said, well, this is expensive and I'm starving to death, so I'm just going to take to the streets.
	So a new president has actually been elected, but it turns out there's more protests for that as well.
	And the reason is Sri Lanka's unpopular prime minister was elected president on Wednesday in a secret parliamentary ballot that risks reuniting turmoil among the public outraged by the economic collapse.
	22 million people have been left struggling with shortages of essentials, including medicine, fuel, and food.
	Much of the protest'sire is focused on the new president and his family's political dynasty, which ruled Sri Lanka for the most of the past two decades.
	But they also blame the recent prime minister that was run out, protecting him and seeing him as part of the same problematic rule.
	So, The new guy was also the prior Prime Minister's Finance Minister and became Acting President after he fled the country.
	He is, as we see in the next tab, a World Economic Forum contributor.
	So they've got one stooge out that wrote for the WEF, ending with a new one.
	So it's unlikely the policies are going to change.
	And that's why we see now...
	Sri Lanka has entered a state of emergency, so the policies aren't changing, they're just becoming more draconian.
	Two activists who led mass demonstrations that toppled Sri Lanka's president have been arrested, and the parliament has extended tough emergency laws intended to impose order.
	Then acting president, I can't pronounce his name, it's Rick Remjinshi, it's terrible but I apologise, has declared a state of emergency on 17th of July, allows the military to be given powers to detain people, limit public gatherings and search private property.
	The emergency ordinance would have lapsed on Wednesday if it would not have been ratified by Parliament, which it was.
	So we see on the flip side of the Dutch, the Sri Lankans are descending into more and more tyranny and...
	The famines do not seem to be being alleviated, so that's very concerning.
	So with these tale of two cities, where will the rest of the West go?
	Well, in the most loyal of the World Economic Forum's penetrated cabinets, Justin Trudeau is seeking to implement a similar policy that was protested by the Dutch farmers in Canada.
	Seems like a sensible plan, doesn't it?
	In 2020, Trudeau's Liberals announced their goal was to reduce emissions from fertilizer by 50% over the next eight years.
	In a report compiled by Myers Norris Penny, they suggest that the regulated fertilizer reduction could cost Canadian farmers 48 billion by 2030 and reduce crop sizes.
	The Toronto Sun reports fertilizer is the most expensive crop for farmers and they tend to use only as much as needed.
	But under the plan, farmers will be likely to be forced to use costlier, greener fertilizer, in turn translating to higher prices for consumers.
	So it's an inflationary pressure, as you spoke about in our prior segments, of less supply.
	And also, the farmers have got to internalize non-innovative utilities in producing the food in the first place.
	So from a production side, and also from a diminished supply side, all the costs are going to shoot up.
	I see you basically putting your head in your hands because this should all be foreseen as not sensible, right?
	Well, there's a famous Milton Friedman quote that if the Saharan government was in charge of providing sand, there'd be...
	Sand shortage.
	Whatever the quote is.
	And whenever government gets involved in any industry, it does not function as well.
	It gets way more expensive for its participants.
	And, you know, the countries that have had great, great famines...
	Almost every time is when government was in charge of producing food.
	And in the case of Ireland, which we mentioned before, it was because the stupid corn laws meant that they couldn't import grain because the British were protecting their own land-owning farmers.
	But the, you just see it here, and I keep coming back to my Mount Doom, you know, when a government can afford to do all this, because it has control of money.
	And, you know, so you lobby the government, and the government's like, yeah, well, we need to regulate this and that food.
	If the government cannot print money, it becomes suddenly much more limited in what it's able to do, and food would be one of those areas where people operating in the food industry would be left to get along with it.
	But because we've got this huge government overreach, you know, its tentacles are in everything.
	And then you get these stupid ideologies that start wherever they start.
	And in this case, this is a WEF, Save the World Green ideology.
	And it just spreads through and it just makes life very difficult for everyone.
	This is the Mises knowledge problem that you can't have one centralized state apparatus doling out things like prices at an accurate rate and setting them better than the market.
	Because by the time the real time supply side amount reaches shelves.
	the state's information is going to be out of date.
	And so the only people that suffer are the people that are trying to buy the goods when either they aren't there or they're ten times the amount they expected.
	And that's why controlled economies never work.
	But that hasn't deterred Trudeau, for example, from clamping down on voices like ours in Canada because he's unveiled a new censorship law that would remove hate from the internet.
	Bill C-36, an act to amend the criminal code, allows Trudeau to censor the press and social media with punitive measures such as house arrest or large fines of up to £70,000.
	And I think it's to pre-eminate another trucker protest by the farmers.
	I think it's so he can stop it before it even starts.
	They can't even organise it.
	Yeah, of course it is.
	So what's with this war on nitrogen all of a sudden?
	Specifically fertilisers, isn't it?
	Now it seems key to food production, but as we've already seen with the Dutch government, they're complaining about the consistency of their swamps and why would we care about carbon sequestration when we can always develop carbon capture instead of our food?
	Well, the World Economic Forum have written continually about this.
	Nitrogen build-up is in the ocean, so they're complaining that nitrogen emissions are acidifying oceans and producing algae that's toxic to some plants and animals.
	It seems that we'd have a novel technological solution to that rather than starving ourselves.
	But there's also Scientific American who are complaining that protein in our diets is making our pee too laden with nitrogen, and so human consumption is killing the planet.
	Put down the burgers, eat the bugs, unless the world is going to burn.
	That's genuinely their line.
	Protein-packed diets add excess nitrogen to the environment through urine, rivaling pollution from agricultural fertilizers.
	I love how they say excess nitrogen, as if protein for me to eat is not vital to my continuation of my existence.
	Once it enters the environment, the nitrogen in urea can trigger a spectrum of ecological impacts known as the nitrogen cascade.
	Under certain chemical conditions, and in the presence of particular microbes, urea can break down to form gases of oxidized nitrogen.
	These gases can reach the atmosphere.
	Where nitrous oxide can contribute via the greenhouse effect, and nitrogen oxides can cause acid rain.
	Remember the old acid rain line from the 80s and 90s?
	It never materialized that all our marble statues melted and our skin fell off.
	Well, they're bringing it out now.
	Isn't that brilliant?
	Researchers calculated the amount of nitrogen that would enter the environment if people ate today's American diet and if they instead reduced their protein intake to only what was nutritionally needed.
	That's very variable per person.
	This shift in diet alone could reduce the amount of nitrogen reaching aquatic ecosystems by 12% today and nearly 30% in the future, according to the study's results.
	Are you willing to...
	No, they just want to control what you eat.
	Yeah.
	Genuinely.
	That's it.
	Speaking of which, what will we eat in 2030 for the World Economic Forum?
	So what might we eat in 2030?
	I think demand will be shifting and more people will want to eat a healthy diet, one that is less intensive and wasteful of resources.
	The increasing emergence of localism, whole foods, organic, artisanal and real food movements are a sign of this, at least for the rich and dedicated.
	So the poor will just starve to death.
	So our diets may be more veg and fruit, whole grains and vegetarian food or new alternatives, soy products or perhaps insects and artificial meat.
	Genuinely, it's all come from here.
	And less fried and sugary things, which I actually endorse, will still eat meat, but perhaps more like our parents and grandparents see it as a treat to savour every few days.
	And that's why, if you remember the You Will Own Nothing and Be Happy video, item four was You Will Eat Less Meat.
	It wasn't a prediction, it was a threat.
	So they're pushing, basically, protein starvation under the guise of climate change.
	And if anyone is in doubt about the fact that this is controlled, as you said, they want to control what we eat, the founder of Kellogg's, for example, do you know he invented his cereals to reduce libido, to reduce the population?
	I didn't know that.
	I'm not making that up.
	Mr.
	Kellogg believed masturbation and sexual desires caused disease, and he was also a eugenicist, and he believed in breeding out disabilities and races.
	He invented plain cereal to stop self-pleasuring.
	Yeah.
	So these crazy people, whether or not it's true, and it definitely isn't, these people genuinely believe this and are willing to inflict it on us.
	So, it's never in doubt of whether or not there is a malicious intent behind making you eat the bugs.
	It's just, we just dispute that it works or not.
	And I don't want to do it, and it definitely won't save the planet, but it will make you miserable.
	And that seems to be the goal.
	How is the World Economic Forum funded?
	A bunch of hedge funds that come together.
	They have something called their New Business Leaders.
	It's things like BlackRock, State Street, Vanguard.
	They all get together.
	Because they've got lots of shares in various companies.
	If you look up any of the publicly traded companies, there's always BlackRock on there.
	They can set the tone and they say, okay...
	Rather than pursuing the shareholder model, we're going to shift to a stakeholder model.
	And that is social activism rather than corporate accountability.
	And we understand that's not profitable in the interim, but by pursuing this social action, we will bankroll you with subsidies.
	And that's the ESG score system.
	That is, if you do our environmental, our social, and our transparent corporate governance metrics, then we'll subsidize you.
	And so it's moving...
	The business world away from shareholder accountability and towards socially conscious corporate action, which is basically fashion.
	Oh, ESG just makes...
	It just makes...
	Because oil companies and mining companies don't score well on ESG, so they don't attract any investment.
	And then the oil price goes up and everyone wonders why.
	That's why they're divesting the green stuff.
	This is the root of our...
	And it is, basically, an effort to sabotage working economic systems to moralise the market towards their end.
	So it's the apparatus of the Great Reset.
	Yeah.
	And if you want more on that, you can read my article at Lotuses.com.
	So, where have we heard narratives about...
	I was, like, not into all this great reset stuff.
	But, like, you might have converted me over the course of today's interview.
	It's disturbing.
	Every time I talk about something, you've read the guiding text on it, and you're able to cite what the theory is.
	You know when Hunter wants to try and understand the movements of a lion?
	I desperately want to understand exactly what these sort of predatory villains from Mordor, essentially, think when they're trying to besiege our Shire.
	So I suppose we're both trying to define what one ring we're trying to find to Mount Doom here.
	And I'm just like Gandalf sprinting to Gondor to find out exactly if we've got the ring on ourselves.
	I'm sort of shaking you and going, is it secret?
	Is it safe?
	Anyway, not to drag out this metaphor too long.
	As soon as you remove their ability to create money, the whole game changes.
	Agreed.
	Which is why they want to capture the money supply.
	Unfortunately.
	They've already got it.
	So where have we heard narratives about a class of useless eaters being a plague on the planet before?
	Well, we've got to control what they eat and stop themselves from breeding.
	Well, it's from Yuval Harari talking to the World Economic Forum.
	Funnily enough, I'll read it out a little paragraph.
	In Davos, we hear so much about the enormous promises of technology.
	And these promises are certainly real.
	But technology might also disrupt human society and the very meaning of human life in numerous ways.
	Ranging from the creation of global useless classes to the rise of data colonialism and digital dictatorships.
	Those who fall in the struggle against irrelevance would constitute a new useless class.
	People who are useless not from the viewpoint of their friends and family, but useless from the viewpoint of the economic and political system.
	This useless class will be separated by an ever-growing gap from the more powerful elite, which means biological knowledge combined by computing power multiplied by data equals the ability to hack humans.
	So he was talking about transhumanism and how this could overcome the useless classes.
	We plant a chip into their brain and get them to do what we want.
	And this was an opening speech, by the way.
	This isn't like a caricature of a villain.
	The power to hack humans can be used for good purposes, like providing much better healthcare.
	But if this power falls into the hands of 21st century Joseph Stalin, the result will be the most totalitarian regime in human history.
	And we already have a number of applicants for the job of 21st century Stalin.
	I would argue they're all at the World Economic Forum, so that is a staggering amount of...
	Non-self-reflection there.
	But it's exactly as you said.
	They're not only trying to control the money supply, they're trying to control literally the thoughts in your head using a computer chip.
	And if you're one of the useless classes, well then you're a drone.
	You'll eat bugs and you'll do what we tell you to.
	Yeah, my ludicrously rich, well, one of my ludicrously rich Bitcoin billionaire mates who's a sort of Silicon Valley, one of those Silicon Valley dudes who's holed out in New Zealand somewhere, you know, that kind of thing.
	And he's early on every trend and he's always right.
	And you'd like, how do you do it?
	He says to me that he thinks we're going into a world where everyone, we're going to be all in like, you know, like a Club Med or a Butlins or a Center Parks, one of those kind of resorts.
	And we're all going to be in there on VR headsets.
	And that's where we're going.
	Yeah, well, it's obviously renewably powered, isn't it?
	So it's literally the Matrix where you're in a pod and you're hooked up.
	So if you think that some of these policies might be worth doing to save the planet, worth pursuing...
	I'll just finish off with a little reading from this book, Alexander Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago, probably the most harrowing account of what happened in the Soviet Union.
	Constantine was talking about this the other day.
	If there is one book I recommend people to read, it's this.
	And we will cover it at some point in the podcast.
	It's just that no one else in the office can actually sit through and get through it because it's so depressing.
	And it is inspiring in just how awful totalitarianism was.
	And if you'd like a passage on why we cannot pursue these policies because they will result in starvation, I will read the following paragraph to you.
	It's had more five-star.
	Look at all those five-star reviews.
	It's had 5,912 five-star reviews.
	None of them came from Antifa, I can tell you now.
	Not from Klaus Schwab.
	No.
	Hunger rules every human being, unless he has himself consciously decided to die.
	The starving man grows weaker, weaker, and the bigger he is, the faster it goes.
	He grows deaf and stupid.
	He loses all capacity to weep, even when he is being dragged along the ground behind a sledge.
	He is no longer afraid of death.
	He is wrapped in a submissive, rosy glow.
	He has crossed all boundaries and has forgotten the name of his wife, of his children, and finally his own name too.
	Sometimes the entire body of a dying man of starvation is covered with blue, black pimples like peas, with pus-filled heads smaller than a pinhead.
	His face, arms, legs, his trunk, even his scrotum.
	It is so painful he cannot be touched.
	The tiny boils come to a head and burst, and a thick, worm-like string of pus is forced out of them.
	The man is rotting alive.
	We cannot afford to repeat the horrors of history.
	We cannot afford to pursue incompetent environmental policies at the expense of feud security.
	And we cannot afford to allow these unelected crazy people to control what we eat and treat us like useless classes worthy of extermination.
	To all the farmers that go out on their tractors and protest this nonsense, God bless you, and I hope for our sake you succeed.
	As we are strapped for time, we will cover the video comments, and I hope we still get time to do some, and I hope I haven't depressed you too much.
	No, it's just interesting.
	This battle between people and those who would control has been going on through history.
	I'm thinking of the savants in the French Revolution and the ordinary people, and this battle between the technocrats, the metropolitan liberal elite, whatever word you want to use, and all the rest of us.
	It never stops going away.
	And what is it, this urge, that people have to control everyone else?
	Imperial utopianism.
	They believe they have the best rationalistic framework to impose on the world.
	And so if you are disagreeing with this inevitable end point of humanity, like the communist resolution always arriving out of capitalism, then you're just an impediment to utopia.
	And so we can get rid of you for everyone's collective benefit.
	You're just in the way.
	But my utopia is not necessarily your utopia, and that's the thing they never seem to grasp.
	But they believe that it is everyone's utopia, and that just by standing in the way of that, you're one of the bourgeois enemy class.
	You know if you're anti-globalist, you're a fascist?
	Well, fascists themselves have the exact same governmental structure as that, so I reject that framing.
	They can go to hell.
	So, a little update on the gold-tier subscriber comments.
	Every single video comment will be beneath the video from now on, but the ones that will be played on the podcast are at the discretion of our editor just for relevance and things like that.
	And if you'd like to send us a comment or question via video, you can subscribe to be a gold-tier subscriber at lotusheaters.com.
	Let's play the first one.
	Greetings to my new favorite Lotus Eater, Connor.
	I gotta admit, I've never been compared to Amy Adams before, but who am I to say that you're wrong?
	I would never.
	I'm just going to agree with everything you're ever going to say in the future.
	Because you're fitting right in with the Lotus Eater and the other base Brit boys.
	I'm enjoying your content and everybody else's as usual.
	So thank you and keep up the good work.
	Oh, well, thanks very much.
	And that was sincere, because I think she does actually look like Amy Adams.
	And I would hope there's a compliment from me, and Harry's going to yell at me when he hears this, but Man of Steel is my favourite film of all time, and she was a very good Lois Lane.
	But anyway, I won't bore you with nerd stuff.
	Since Connor's talking about him collecting Western comics, I was wondering what his favorite non-Cape nonsense is, and if he's aware of Archive.org, which actually has a lot of the really old comics in it already.
	I found the entire work of the Turok series, which started in the 1950s, before Chuck Wendig happened.
	That Bookwalker manga website actually has a modest number of Bond-designé stuff on it as well.
	That's where I actually found Death of Stalin way back before the movie showed up on the scene.
	Interesting that it was actually a very serious story and the movie managed to take it all and make it into a comedy.
	Off the top of my head, I can't actually think of what my favourite non-Western cape comic would be.
	I'd need to consult my library because I've moved away from it, unfortunately.
	Yeah, okay.
	I'll get back to you on that answer.
	But I did enjoy that one of our viewers sent us in a comic to review that she sold, and it's called The Bear and Karl Marx.
	And it's Karl Marx sitting in the wilderness, and a bear walks up to him and asks to eat him.
	And he just goes, okay, well, if by the end of the conversation I've convinced you to communism, you won't have to eat me, will you?
	So they take a walk in the woods.
	And by the end of it, Karl Marx has questioned all his beliefs, and he realises that the labour theory of value doesn't work, and he's ended up in dictatorship, and he's kind of ashamed, and he doesn't shower, and he's got boils under his armpits, and he abandoned his kids, and he goes, but at least I've had a contribution to humanity.
	At least I've put communism forward.
	That's my contribution to humanity.
	And the bear goes, and here's mine, and just eats him and walks away.
	So I really enjoyed that comic that wasn't superheroes, so we'll go with that one.
	next one if Biden's economy is transitory does that mean a failing economy can identify as booming trans economics I guess is now the new part of the LGBTQ have you heard about this uh Joe Biden redefining the term um recession Oh yeah.
	Where he said, it's not two quarters of negative growth, and it turns out there's economic divisor that we played earlier, the guy that said the Liberal World Order mandates that gas prices should be high.
	He actually wrote in 2008 the exact definition of, the technical definition of a recession is two quarters of negative growth.
	And then he got up on the podium and said...
	Well, it's not the technical definition that it's two quarters of negative growth.
	So he completely contradicts himself just to bolster the narrative.
	It's what we were talking about with inflation before, semantic shifts.
	When the reality doesn't suit the narrative.
	Yeah.
	So we have time for a couple of website comments.
	Top one, actually.
	Freewill2112.
	I would like to ask, Dominic, if there's going to be a period of stagflation, if it's worth buying gold or platinum to protect one's assets from the effects of inflation.
	If not these, what would his advice be?
	Obviously non-binding economic advice.
	To protect one's assets from inflation and the government.
	Well, the problem with platinum is that, you know, in theory, platinum should be one and a quarter the gold price because platinum is more expensive than gold and that's the historical average.
	But at the moment, platinum is half the gold price.
	It's extraordinary.
	And the reason is that most platinum is used in diesel catalytic converters and there just isn't the diesel demand anymore since the Volkswagen diesel scandal.
	So until some new use can be found for platinum, and it might be that it's used in electric vehicles or hydrogen converters or something in the future, you know, the outlet for platinum is a bit...
	So-so.
	So-so.
	And, you know, I always recommend people to own a bit of gold.
	It's money outside of the system.
	It's nobody else's liability.
	A bit of gold, a bit of Bitcoin, you're storing your money You know, you're making your money and sticking it to the man a little bit when you own that because, you know, you never know.
	Part of the Great Reset might be going back to some kind of gold standard because Russia and China...
	China's got probably about 10 times more gold than it says it does and China's gold reserves are probably bigger than the United States and if China were to declare its gold holdings, that would be the biggest declaration of war it could make because...
	You know, 75% of US dollar foreign exchange reserves are, sorry, American foreign exchange reserves are its gold.
	And, you know, they talk about the war on the dollar.
	When is it going to come?
	Well, you know, when all that happens, I'm sure gold will have a role to play in all of that.
	Well, coinciding with the possible collapse of the petrodollar because they're pursuing green energy at the expense.
	And also, I have a bit of a conspiracy theory, I suppose, about the Chinese involved with the WEF, because the WEF are very much fetishist for China.
	Like, Klaus Schwab introduced Xi Jinping at the Davos summit.
	He's done incredible work on uplifting his people from poverty, and the whole world should be one big boat rather than...
	251 little boats and things like this.
	But I think the Chinese are just using the West to basically collapse the West and rise as the global hegemon, completely unchecked and unquestionable out of that.
	And you can see that with the fact that Russia, as soon as they invaded Ukraine, Vladimir Putin was a member of their Young Global Leaders Scheme, which is basically a summer camp for world leaders.
	And Trudeau, Ardern, Macron, former Merkel, they all went there as well.
	So they were basically groomed into being leaders.
	Vladimir Putin was part of that.
	But as soon as he invaded Ukraine, taken off the website.
	So, yes.
	Deus Vult.
	On the economic woes, any thoughts on Bitcoin's performance, Dominic, since it is apart from government control?
	Do you think they're obviously going to try and co-opt that with legislation?
	Well, they'll try and legislate it.
	I mean, Bitcoin is...
	It's kind of doing what it's always done, is it has these huge monster rallies, and then it has these huge monster corrections, and then it goes nowhere.
	And it's in one of its going nowhere periods.
	Its monster correction usually goes back to around about the level of the previous high from the previous cycle, and it's done that this time.
	And, you know, again, I think everyone should own a little bit of Bitcoin, if only to familiarize themselves with the technology.
	You don't have to own a whole Bitcoin, which is, you know, a lot of money, $20,000, but own a little bit.
	And, you know, again, it's money outside of the system, and I just think by owning it, you're doing your little bit in the wall to bring down Sauron.
	Yeah, well, I often think of it as sort of investing in dot-coms in the 90s before the internet properly took off.
	You're buying into the tech, even if this specific coin is not the emergent technology which brings us...
	Well, I think in the case of Bitcoin, it probably is because of the network effect.
	So even though there might be another coin that's a bit slicker or a bit faster or whatever, you know, Betamax was probably better than VHS, but VHS won, and Minidisc was probably better than CD, but CD won because just more people had them and used them.
	Okay, that's fine.
	Kevin Fox, so we can't stay with cash currency because the governments keep printing and devaluing what we have and cryptocurrency could be hacked, co-opted by governments so they can control what we can buy, etc.
	So what's our other option?
	Do we go back on the gold standard or do we lean fully into decentralized digital currencies?
	Well, you know, it amazes me how Bitcoin and gold bugs, Bitcoin and gold bugs seem at loggerheads because I think there's a role for both.
	Bitcoin is...
	You know, it's powered by energy, as we know, and it's an extraordinarily, the most powerful computer network in all recorded history.
	And, you know, that is made possible by the extraordinary amount of energy that it consumes.
	And it's sort of, you know, a digital asset in a digital world where all the value is digital and gold is the most analog asset that there is.
	And it's the first metal human beings ever used however many thousands of years before.
	You know, we were using gold way before we discovered smelting in the Bronze Age.
	We were using gold.
	So, you know, own a bit of both.
	It might be that we were using the horse as transport and then we invented the car and now we're no longer the user of the horse.
	Gold might be similar to that.
	But I just think in all these...
	You know, you look at how the US weaponized the dollar when Russia enraided Ukraine.
	We are looking at the weaponization of currencies, but we're also looking at the decline in their value.
	And so to seek some safe harbor in non-government money, to me, makes sense, whether it's Bitcoin or gold.
	So it's almost like we're going for an economic great reset.
	Well, I think we...
	Every 100 years, I call it the 100-year cycle in money, and it's something that I've observed.
	But in the 1500s, in the 16th century, we started using paper money for the first time, running cash notes in the UK. And then in, what was it, 1697 or something like that, we got the founding, no, 1694 I think it was, we got the founding of the Bank of England, because it was trying to raise money to pay for a war.
	And, you know, we had inflation and the rest of it.
	And then in 1716, Isaac Newton, head of the Bank of England, the first great re-coinage, and he put England on the gold standard officially, and we had the Guinea.
	And then 100 years later, we've come off the gold standard to pay for the Napoleonic Wars.
	We've got runaway inflation, yada, yada, yada.
	Second Great Reset, 1816, 100 years after the first one.
	1914 comes along.
	UK, French and German governments all take our countries off the gold standard to print the money to pay for World War I. If we'd stayed on the gold standard, we would have had to stop the war when the When the gold ran out and those wars could never have gone on for as long as they did.
	But we came off the gold standard in 1914, went back on it again in the mid-20s.
	So that was another, you know, the beginning of the year of fiat money.
	And here we are 100 years later, the invention of Bitcoin, cryptocurrencies, and so on and so forth.
	And we are at a turning point in the cycle of money.
	One last one then, before we run out of time.
	I apologise for not getting to everyone's comments, because I have a tendency to witter on.
	I think it's me that's doing the wittering.
	No, no, obviously we brought you in as a guest because you have incredible insight, and so I didn't want to talk over to you too much.
	Bleach Demon, what a name.
	Wind farms are a worse blight on the land than strip mining ever was, but the envirofascists who push them for these wind farms never see the hideousness they have inflicted on the environment, economy and humanity.
	Now, I've got quite a controversial take on this.
	I don't think wind farms look that bad.
	I think they're just a massive waste of money and don't work.
	I think they look horrendous.
	All I see when I see wind farms, I just see regulation, intervention, false idols and all the rest of it.
	So they're symbolic and totemic for the economic constriction by the incompetent state, yeah?
	Yeah.
	I just thought they looked alright and futuristic, but apparently I've got no taste.
	Anyway, thank you very much for watching.
	We are out of time.
	Thank you very much to Dominic for coming in today.
	It's been a pleasure to co-host with you.
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