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May 2, 2023 - The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters

01:30:42

The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters #644

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	Hello and welcome to the podcast of Low Seaters episode 644 for today, Tuesday the 2nd of May 2023.
	I am your host, Connor, joined by a slightly poorly Dan.
	How you doing, my friend?
	Well, I'm getting by.
	I mean, first thing I did after getting to Swindon is to head into town and get a large bottle of Lucozade.
	Well, heading into town was probably where you picked up the infection.
	Yeah.
	A packet of beachums and a baggie of crystal meth.
	Although, obviously, being Swindon, I wasn't absolutely certain I was going to be able to get my hands on the beachums.
	Yeah, well, the least expensive thing was the crystal meth at this point as well.
	Yeah.
	Anyway, so we'll be actually discussing some news today, and that is that the First Republic Bank has collapsed, and we'll be going through all of that, why the Bank of England should be telling you to have fun staying poor, because they're clearly looking out for our best interests, and how we've now got the names from Jeffrey Epstein's client calendar, and They're some of what we expected.
	We haven't got the staging link up, but at three o'clock today there will be a brand new Broconomics out.
	What's this one's topic?
	Oh, this one's gonna be a good one.
	This one's on the film Margin Call.
	What's that?
	It's a film about the 2008 financial crisis.
	So yeah, you get to see lots of famous people in it and me dissecting the movie.
	So yeah, that'd be a good one.
	All right, there you go.
	So if you haven't subscribed already, it's five quid a month and you can go and listen to Dan's film review.
	But without further ado, let's jump straight into the first story.
	So First Republic is a bank that has just collapsed.
	It's now the fourth financial institution to go under in 2023, but it won't be the last.
	I think today we should have a look at all of the various economic bubbles that are about to burst because pending the next month, things are going to get really bad.
	Now, I don't take much pleasure in saying that I called this in a video a little while ago that got your stamp of approval as an economist, so I appreciate that.
	That is our Wile E. Coyote economy.
	So, if anyone remembers any cartoons like Scooby-Doo or Looney Tunes, you know that moment where a cartoon character hands over the edge of the cliff and it isn't until they look down and realise they're not standing on anything?
	Exactly, until they plummet.
	That's kind of where we are economically, because we're just waiting for the debt bubble to pop.
	And I said some things specifically in here that are going to be coming up in this little report on First Republic and all of the other institutions that are going to go by the wayside very imminently.
	This video is free, but of course we are demonetised on YouTube, so if you fancy paying us £5 a month to keep the lights on, we would greatly appreciate it.
	Anyway, let's get into First Republic.
	So we have some reporting from the AP here.
	So this is the second largest bank failure in US history, and that's right behind the Washington Mutual, which collapsed at the height of the 2008 financial crash, which was then also taken over by J.P.
	Morgan in some interesting circumstances.
	It seems like the government really likes allowing to have J.P.
	Morgan snap up these ailing institutions.
	Maybe they favour them for some reason, and it's also the fourth regional lender to collapse since... Well, to put this into perspective, The three of the four largest bank collapses in US history have all occurred in the last 60 days.
	Yes.
	And yet the mainstream media and the administration is telling us that everything's fine, carry on as usual.
	Yeah, we will have a quote from Biden later that basically says, nothing to panic, please disperse.
	But you're referring to Silicon Valley Bank, Signature Bank, then Credit Suisse have had a bit of a hiccup, and then Silvergate also, and then now this has happened.
	So, this is the fifth atop four actual banks.
	It's starting to look like maybe something's going on.
	Yeah, could say that.
	Not great.
	So, we have a timeline of the collapse in this article.
	So, coalition of a dozen banks had pooled together 30 billion as a funding package for First Republic last month.
	So, that was in April slash March.
	For a while, that seemed to stanch the bleeding of the deposits.
	This came alongside the firing of 7,200 staff to also cut costs, so at the same time it looks like they were trying to stabilise.
	Last Monday, First Republic reported its first quarter results and stunned analysts and investors when it revealed that £100 billion in deposits had flowed out of the bank, most in mid-March, immediately after the failure of Silicon Valley Bank and Signature.
	So this was the runs that you predicted would end up happening from very wealthy people.
	Well, the thing is, across the entire banking sector at the moment, there is a, if not a bank run, there's a bank walk.
	Money is just flowing out of the banking sector because they can go to a money market fund or they can go to, you know, federal paper and then get 4%.
	Or you can keep it in a bank account and you can get 0%.
	So people, every week, people are looking at that and going, oh, okay, well, why do I keep my money in the bank then?
	And they're just walking out.
	So this is just an entire sector of the money is just draining out of it.
	Yeah, the dominoes are inevitably falling.
	Yeah.
	As was the case with Silicon Valley Bank and Signature Bank, First Republic clients with large accounts were quick to pull their money out at the first sign of trouble, because they've got no loyalty if they're not getting a return on their investment.
	So what was JPMorgan's chase role here?
	First Republic's 84 branches opened this Monday as branches of JPMorgan Chase, which acquired the bank's $92 billion in deposits and $203 billion in loans and other securities.
	The bank's shareholders are likely to be wiped out as part of this deal.
	JPMorgan, which has $3 trillion in assets, is so big that by law it would not have been allowed to buy First Republic because no one bank can have more than a 10% market share of deposits in the US.
	But it's only because First Republic failed that the US government didn't step in and allowed JPMorgan to step in and snatch it up instead.
	So it's almost like they were waiting for it to fail and knew it would ahead of time for JPMorgan to swallow up this asset.
	So this is kind of the deal that we had coming out of 2008.
	We're going to classify a small handful of the biggest banks as too big to fail, and we're going to put protections around them, but you can't get any bigger.
	Except when there's a crisis when you can buy a smaller bank, and in fact this isn't even a small bank, this is like the 14th largest bank in the US by assets.
	So when a crisis comes along you can buy that for pennies on the dollar.
	Yeah.
	So they are getting bigger even though they're not supposed to.
	And it actually benefits them to allow the collapses to happen in conjunction with government because they buy it at a depreciated price.
	Well not only that but also the FDIC will basically take out the most toxic bits so they get to buy the bit that they actually want for pennies on the dollar and then the FDIC, the taxpayer, gets to deal with the rest of it.
	It's almost like it's a slightly rigged game.
	One might suggest.
	Yeah.
	The banking sector, surely not.
	Interesting.
	J.P.
	Morgan expects the addition of First Republic to add $500 million to its net income per year.
	So that explains why they bought it then.
	Although it expects to incur $2 billion in costs in integrating First Republic into its operations over the next 18 months.
	So what's that?
	Four years?
	And it's turning a tidy profit for them.
	Yes.
	Hmm.
	Okay.
	Seems like something they want to risk worth taking.
	Go to this Reuters reporting.
	So JP Morgan are paying $10.6 billion to the US Federal Deposit Insurance Corp, which is the FDIC, and the deal will cost the FDIC's deposit insurance fund about $13 billion.
	So there's going to be an unsecured couple of billion there that taxpayers pick up.
	Well, also I think the FDIC are running a finance line for JP Morgan to pull this deal off as well.
	Right.
	And I think it's $50 billion, and it's like, well, where are they getting that money from?
	Because they're not supposed to have that.
	Yeah, well, we're going to find out later that they shouldn't really have any money at all, according to Janet Yellen herself, which is quite concerning.
	The J.P.
	Morgan chairman and CEO, which is Jamie Dimon, said, our government invited us and others to step up, and we did!
	Right.
	So the government and the J.P.
	Morgan CEO are just saying, yeah, we worked together on this.
	We wanted to make sure they increased their market share, even though it should be illegal were the bank still solvent and they tried to buy it.
	Right.
	Interesting.
	So why did First Republic make such big losses?
	So if we go over to this Wall Street Journal reporting here, they blame the Federal Reserve's rapid series of interest rate increases, which led the depositors to seek better returns elsewhere in money market funds.
	This impacted its unsecured loans to the wealthy property buyers.
	And the reason they were booming, and I think there's a chart in here if you scroll down, John, there was a point of where they were trading much higher than JPMorgan themselves.
	Here we go.
	So the First Republic quite some time, were trading higher than JPMorgan and Chase.
	And the reason was they were courting very wealthy clients, and then they paid them minimal interest and used their deposits to fund their mortgages.
	More deposits meant that more loans for condo projects in Manhattan or second homes in Hawaii.
	First Republic got back far more than these borrowers, 3.03% interest charged on the average in 2021, and then paid it out to depositors on 0.12% interest on average.
	And these loans also had bespoke features, so they almost never went bad.
	One guy, for example, lost a load of money on a Japan trip that he didn't do, and they secured him the rate of exchange so that he didn't lose all the money that he'd already transferred over.
	So they made a... they wrote a lot of checks they couldn't quite cash.
	Yeah.
	Is it worth very quickly explaining that for the audience?
	So basically banks have got two lots of money.
	They've got short-term money and they've got long-term money.
	The money comes into the bank short-term, which is you go and put your deposits in there, but you can take that out any time.
	And then you've got the long-term money, which is where you make your money.
	So you get your money here and you lend it out here to make your money.
	The long-term money is things like mortgages, which could be for a period of 20 or 30 years.
	Now, what happened is both of these levels used to be really low, and then, because interest rates have gone up so rapidly, short-term money is now expensive, but long-term money is still earning, you know, a very low amount.
	So it fundamentally breaks the bank's business model, because they've got to bring money in at 4%, and then lend it out, and they're lending it out at this really low basis.
	So, of course, what they've been doing is not doing that.
	So they've been keeping the price of short-term deposits really low, at basically 0%.
	And that's why all this money is walking out of the banking sector.
	Except for the big globally systemic important banks, so the JP Morgans, because those guys, they also pay zero on deposits when they should be paying about four percent, and people are happy to do that because they know that that money is going to be protected because it's one of the big four.
	So it's too big to fail.
	So they can get away with paying zero, but the only reason they're able to get away with zero and all these other banks are failing, they can't, is because of this protected status.
	So another way of looking at that is to say, OK, well, JP Morgan, they've got about 2.3 trillion in deposits.
	If you should be paying 4% on that, well, so that's 90 billion that they should be paying out.
	So they are effectively getting a subsidy of 90 billion by being classified as a regulatory systemically important bank now if you think about that in other terms so there's about 150 us taxpayers so you divide 90 billion by 150 that's about 600 600 dollars per year is the basically the subsidy that you are kind of paying to jp morgan if you're an american taxpayer so Right, yeah.
	What a rip-off all the way down.
	When you're getting 0% interest on your own bank account.
	Yes, and you're getting zero as well.
	Right, yeah.
	So actually, with First Republic Bank's model of promising these large, low-interest loans plus benefits to wealthy donors was a really good idea for quite a while, but then it was precariously reliant on the low-interest money bubble, which was never going to last.
	So this works all the time that the clients of First Republic don't realise that they can get 4% by taking their money out and going elsewhere.
	Yeah, and that's only possible because the way the Fed has done interest rates meant that there's now no incentive to keep it in there in the first place.
	So they were really reliant on a legislator that wasn't favourable to them because they already had their favorites they were picking and playing with yeah the bank certainly yeah yeah right great okay so if you had the money in these guys um sorry i suppose the fed just doesn't care at the end of 2022
	the bank had 176.4 billion in deposits 68 of which exceeded the federal deposit insurance cause 250 000 insurance limit which meant customers were not guaranteed to get that cash back if the bank failed which it has deposits accounted for 92 of the bank's funding for First Republic increased deposits 13% in 2022, but it dearly paid for them in the fourth quarter.
	First Republic paid out $428 million in interest on deposits, up from $20 million a year earlier.
	So they were just hemorrhaging money.
	In 2022, more than half of First Republic's loans were residential mortgages with an average interest rate of 2.89%.
	Rising rates shaved off some 22 billion off of their market value.
	So, again, writing checks they couldn't quite cash because of the economic circumstances that the Fed had created.
	And then they also heavily invested in the tech sector, which is quite interesting, similar to Silicon Valley Bank.
	The bank had struck deals with companies to target their employees and staffers of Alphabet's Google, who set up an account earned a sign-up bonus of more than $2,000, said people familiar with the matter.
	It set up a branch inside Facebook's headquarters and routinely offered wealthy tech employees long-term mortgages at 2.5% or less.
	As we can see with Silicon Valley, especially considering the people pouring out of it because of all the job cuts and the fact that San Francisco is a hellhole, San Francisco real estate is not doing so well right now.
	So that's also a precarious gamble.
	One customer is Mark Zuckerberg.
	In 2012, First Republic gave the Facebook founder and CEO a $5.95 million mortgage with a starting rate of 1.05%.
	So, low percent mortgages, very expensive, as soon as your wealthy investors realise they could go elsewhere, they're just pulling all the business out, and the tech sector itself is something I mentioned in my Wile E. Coyote video, because I said, Elon Musk buying Twitter and realising that the overheads are unsustainable because it's really bloated, you're going to push lots of people out of the sector.
	And if that's your main clientele, not great.
	So that's a big factor, but the other thing that's just worth noting is, why does Mark Zuckerberg have a mortgage?
	Why do all of these billionaires have mortgages?
	Is it because they think that the US dollar is going to hold its value over the next few years?
	Or do they think that the money printer is going to be turned on?
	Yeah, that's actually a really interesting point.
	There we go.
	So the property bubble also is going to get way, way worse, speaking of property, because the Biden administration is going for mortgage equity?
	I don't know if you've heard about this.
	Yeah, I heard about this.
	It was funny.
	For those who don't know, in January 2023, the Federal Housing Finance Agency announced that two major government-sponsored entities, the Federal National Mortgage Association, which is Fannie Mae, and the Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation, Freddie Mac, Two organisations which have never been responsible for any financial crash ever will be adjusting their single-family pricing framework starting on May 1st.
	This will change the fees known as loan-level price adjustments and affect all future homebuyers' mortgage rates right in the middle of the spring housing market and in the face of what many economists predict is a coming recession.
	With the new fees, a home buyer with a credit score of 680 or above will now have to pay a 1% LLPA fee.
	So if you have a good credit, you have to subsidize people in bad credit.
	Those who make a 15% to 20% down payment will see the biggest increase, about $40 or more on their monthly mortgage payments.
	In contrast, people with credit scores below 680, riskier borrowers, would receive a 1.75% discounted LLPA fee.
	So they're actively incentivizing you to have poor credit.
	So they're making people that are financially stable subsidise people who have not made good financial decisions to make sure you have property equity.
	I think you still pay a lower rate if you've got better credit, but the disparity between the two has been sort of warped to basically send the incentive signal to people with good credit to buy fewer or spend less money in this way to take on less debt, and it's incentivising people with bad credit who can't pay back to take on more debt because, you know, obviously, you know, that and it's incentivising people with bad credit who can't pay back to take on more debt because, you know, obviously, you know, that Why not try that again?
	Yeah, something in the back of my mind screams subprime mortgage crisis to do with Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.
	It's almost like someone in the Obama administration at the time should know better, but then expecting Joe Biden to know anything...
	It's not quite as blatant as it was then, but it's basically doing the same thing again.
	It's just starting that process of disincentivizing people who can actually afford loans from taking them.
	Yeah, and we've got a massive problem with property in the UK coming up as well.
	So if we go on to this next one, there's an unheard article on the fact that since lockdown, lots of people have just stopped showing up to work in the office.
	They've either worked remote, so Businesses can lower their overhead costs by not putting everyone in, or if you go to London on a Friday, TfL, dead.
	All transport completely empty, all the stations are empty, because everyone's taking three-day weeks.
	Or they're working remotely, which means that they're taking, basically, three-day weeks.
	And this article here points out the fact that...
	There are dire headlines everywhere you look about commercial property.
	So in Canada, analysts have expected a 50% decline in commercial property.
	In San Francisco, which we just mentioned, they've attempted to sell an empty $300 million office tower and it just hasn't happened very well because they've sold for 80% less than the investors have expected.
	In Britain, money is flowing into commercial property and it's fallen precipitously.
	Vacant office space in Britain has risen by 65% in the past three years, so since the pandemic.
	Which means that for businesses that want to expand, do things like new studios, will be great for some people.
	But for other people who are not capable of getting many people to the office, and all the people that have been renting this out, that means that there's going to be a large number of real estate agents with absolutely no one to sell to.
	And a lot of this stuff is just going to get demolished.
	Because first hand you think, okay, well if there's lots of commercial property, I'll just turn it into flats.
	But it doesn't work like that, because the plumbing's all wrong, and the building regs aren't the same, and basically it costs about as much to change it to residential as it does to demolish it and start again.
	So, yeah, loads of this stuff is gonna get demolished.
	Yeah, and it says in here as well, if you aren't building more of this stuff, and you can't retrofit into housing, employment and construction makes up about 5-7% of jobs in Britain, so if the construction rate goes down, you're gonna see loads of unemployment to similar levels that you saw in 2008-2009.
	And the other thing is, your local council has probably bought up loads of office space as well, because they did a lot of that over the last 20 years.
	Didn't they take on loads of these places to take on loads and loads of debt to buy up loads of this property as well?
	So if the debt bubble's gonna burst, the property bubble's gonna burst, and inflation's running high, we're all screwed?
	Yeah, it's not looking good, that's why I revert to my thinking that the money printer's gonna make a big comeback fairly soon.
	Great, okay, right, so the cycle's just gonna start again.
	Yes, except property would be even more unaffordable.
	Oh, okay.
	So there is that.
	Okay, brilliant.
	So we're all living in giant Chinese ghost cities and they're all about to be pulled down around us, but you still can't get a house.
	Brilliant.
	Biden has obviously come out and commented on the First Republic situation, and he's given a very presidential address in the Rose Garden.
	He says, these actions are going to make sure that the banking system is safe and sound.
	While depositors are being protected, Other than having to bail the bank out, shareholders are losing their investments, and critically, taxpayers are not the ones on the hook.
	Right.
	Sure they are.
	Well, they're going to be even more on the hook, because if we go to this article here, from the New York Times, basically the debt ceiling is about to explode.
	So, Congress are currently fighting amongst themselves, and it hasn't been kicked to the Senate yet, and Biden's wanting to veto it, but What's happening is, the GOP have been asked by the Democrats to raise the debt ceiling, and the GOP has said, okay, marginally, as long as you have some spending cuts.
	And so they've drafted a bill, and they're infighting over it.
	So, the legislation would raise the debt ceiling into the next year in exchange for freezing spending at last year's levels for a decade, nearly 14% cuts, as well as rolling back part of Biden's landmark health, climate, and tax laws, so those are the giant pork bills for the Inflation Reduction Act, which worsened inflation, and things like that.
	uh imposing work requirements and social programs and expanding mining and fossil fuel production so rolling back all of that anti-gas legislation that biden did on day one even republicans conceded that the legislation was headed nowhere mr biden has threatened to veto it and the measure is dead on arrival in the democratic-led senate without action by congress to raise the debt limit which is projected to be reached as early as this summer the u.s government faces a potentially catastrophic default and by the way in the senate
	Only Joe Manchin, who is Bill Gates' personal puppet, by the way, and John Tester are the only Democrat senators that are saying, maybe we should listen to the Republicans and get around a negotiating table for this, but Biden's just saying no.
	So he wants to raise the debt ceiling and raise spending all at once, and sees absolutely nothing wrong with his strategy.
	It's so insane.
	One person that does see something wrong with it, who goes to Zero Hedge articles, Janet Yellen, Do you remember that letter that was left by Gordon Brown's Chancellor that says, we've got no money left?
	Oh yeah, all the money's gone, yeah.
	Janet Yellen's written one of those herself to the sitting administration, so she's literally said the US Treasury is due to run out of money on June 1st, so if we don't do this debt ceiling, the US will default on its debt.
	Yeah.
	That seems really bad for the whole world.
	Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen sent a letter to Congress in which she said the result of the recent slowdown in tax receipts, which has been I think about 35% since the last year, because obviously MMT folks don't understand Laffer curves, or the fact that just sending IRS agents knocking door to door won't make up for the fact that their global corporate tax level has meant that less investing is going to happen.
	They said the Treasury could run out of money due to emergency debt limit measures.
	As soon as June 1st, absent the debt ceiling deal, a revision to her previous January 13th letter which she said that it was unlikely that cash and extraordinary measures would be exhausted before early June.
	So, again, they couldn't have forecast inflation, they couldn't have forecast the fact they're running out of money.
	Why are you employing these people unless you're deliberately trying to demolish the dollar?
	Boggles the mind.
	Yellen wrote, if Congress fails to increase the debt limit, it would cause a severe hardship to American families, harm our global leadership position, as if you haven't been doing that already, and raise questions about our ability to defend our national security interests.
	During the first calendar quarter of 2023, the Treasury borrowed $657 billion and ended the quarter with a cash balance of $178 billion.
	This is a huge difference from the forecast made just three months ago, in January 2023, when the Treasury had estimated a borrowing of $932 billion and assumed an end of March cash balance of $500 billion.
	So they're coming up just over $300 billion short.
	Yeah.
	Seems to be... Well, the US is going to default, and it's either going to default by it doesn't pay the interest on its bonds, so a nominal default, or it's going to default by printing loads of money and those bonds not being worth anything.
	So it's going to default one way.
	It's only a question of how that default happens.
	Yeah, so rather than bite the bullet and reduce spending and reduce money printing... Oh, and obviously you can't do that.
	Yeah, yeah, because of course there's too many entitlement programs on the line and you wouldn't get votes that way in the most safe and secure elections ever.
	So what a lot of people are worrying about with this collapse being precipitated is the fact that this will be a great time if all of your banks collapse to go, don't worry, we've secured your deposits.
	All you've got to do is sign up to federalgovernmentcryptocurrency.com and all of your money's been transferred into there, plus a sign-up bonus because we can just print money out of thin air right about now.
	And I'm sure that would just be a conspiracy theory if, as we've already heard from the CEO of JPMorgan Chase, the government weren't working with the banks to coordinate some kind of merger.
	Because if we go over to this Reuters reporting, JPMorgan bought First Republic on Monday in a government auction, culminating weeks of failed rescue attempts and aborted discussions involving some of the most powerful Wall Street executives and US officials.
	Right, so they saw this total collapse coming from quite a while away, so they were totally lying when they said that there's going to be no bank collapse, and they knew that JPMorgan Chase was going to be a bank.
	Morgan couldn't snatch it up until they'd failed spectacularly, and so they just waited to allow their preferred partner to snatch this up.
	So is this going to be replicated for all the other banks that are going to be collapsing regionally?
	Well, it sort of looks that way, because they're basically not doing anything differently.
	They're just continuing the same formula, which is resulting in bank collapse.
	Yeah.
	So something has to give.
	So it's either going to be a continual run of more and more bank collapses, or something fundamentally changes, you know, a drastic drop in interest rates and money printing, but that will just completely blow inflation through the roof.
	Yeah.
	So they basically have no good options from here, and, you know, I don't know if they are using this, I mean, I know they want the CBDC, whether they're using this as a play for it right now, whether the technology is ready behind the scenes, I have no idea, but It fits.
	It fits the scenario.
	Well, it seems that they've had this in the works for a little while because we go over to this next one.
	I always love coming back to this document.
	This is the World Economic Forum's blueprint for digital identity.
	If you just keep scrolling down, John, there should be a page here of where they have all their partners.
	You can pause, just go up.
	There we go.
	Perfect, yeah.
	So, involved in this is the White House Treasury Department and also JPMorgan Chase, along with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the UK government.
	So, it seems they've been working on at least digital identity and digital currency for quite some time, and the most convenient time would be when all of their competitors seem to be merging into one, and lots of people are worried about losing their deposits, to incentivise them to sign up to this particular programme.
	So, not excellent, but I thought I'd end on some good news.
	Global financial collapse would at least bring something good from fun, um, vice going bankrupt.
	So at least one leftist rag is running out of money.
	It was once considered one of the most successful news startups of all time, when investors valued it at 5.7 billion in 2017, and since wokeness happened, it's now struggling to sell itself for more than 1 billion for the entire enterprise.
	That includes all its documentaries and news.
	And I just thought I'd finish on the glee of President GigaChad.
	This is President Bukele of El Salvador, who has tweeted out, it seems like Soros' money also run out.
	Now, that's great.
	I'm glad we're all smiles.
	Just a shame the entire financial sector is going the same way, I suppose.
	So, um, get used to roasting cats, everyone.
	Yes, well, I'd like to give you some good news, but I'm not going to.
	We're going to talk about the Bank of England, about how they have basically decided that you are going to be poor, and you basically just have to put up with it and stop complaining.
	Now, before I do so, I'm going to quickly mention the website, because as you know, YouTube is evil, and they have decided to demonetise us.
	So you should go over there and sign up for an account, even if you don't do a premium subscription, you can get a free account and then you can stay in touch with us next time we get booted off for a week or permanently because that's obviously gonna be coming because as I mentioned, YouTube is evil.
	Now, before I get into the meat and potatoes of this particular segment, I'm just going to remind you that I have been really ill for the last week.
	Not been feeling good at all.
	And you know what?
	You've got some footage to play in the background while I make this simple point.
	Here's what I didn't do when I was ill.
	I did not shut 90 year olds into solitary confinement so they could spend their last year in agonising isolation.
	I didn't do that.
	I did not force any small businesses to close.
	I did not introduce any authoritarian movement controls on the population.
	And I did not start getting the police to baton people who were trying to assert their right of association.
	I didn't do any of those things, and the other thing that I didn't do while I was ill was I didn't run up a massive amount of debt and print a huge amount of money.
	Yes, but do you have shares in Madonna?
	No, didn't do that either.
	Well, that's why you didn't do any of those things.
	Yes.
	No, no, all I did was basically sit in a chair, um, staring out the window, apart from in the afternoon when the sun came round, and then I put a cushion over my head.
	So a bit like Joe Biden?
	Yes.
	Yeah, exactly, yeah, I spent the week being like Joe Biden.
	Um, so, and one thing I certainly did not do is start hammering the self-destruct button on the economy.
	However, We have an elite who basically did decide to do that a couple of years ago, and now we're dealing with the fallout from it.
	And last week, the chief economist at the Bank of England basically decided to explain to us plebs that we are just going to have to accept being poor.
	Let's go to those comments now.
	Have we got those comments?
	Yeah, let's listen to this.
	In the end, the UK, which is a big net importer of natural gas, is facing a situation that the price of what you're buying from the rest of the world has gone up a lot relative to the price of what you're selling to the rest of the world, which is mainly services in the case of the UK.
	And so that means you don't need to be much of an economist to realize if what you're buying has gone up a lot relative to what you're selling, you're going to be worse off.
	So somehow in the UK, someone needs to accept that they're worse off and stop trying to maintain their real spending power by bidding up prices, whether higher wages or passing the energy costs through onto customers, et cetera.
	And what we're facing now is that reluctance to accept that, yes, we're all worse off and we all have to take our share, to try and pass that cost onto one of our compatriots and saying, we'll be all right, but they will have to take our share too.
	That past the parcel game that's going on here, that game is one that is just generating inflation.
	And that part of inflation can persist.
	That just sounds like Stalin saying the failures of collectivisation weren't really our fault, we all have to take our fair share.
	There is so much wrong with that.
	I mean, first of all, his definition of inflation is all being turned around.
	I'm going to come to that later.
	The idea that it can all be, so basically what he's saying there is it can all be pinned on Putin.
	No.
	Because gas rises have been coming up.
	Well, first of all, whose policy was it to sanction that in the first place?
	Well, whose policy was it to sell off all our shale gas reserves?
	Who is stopping us from tapping just 10% of the North Sea oil reserves, which would make us energy independent for 50 years?
	Shale, investment in nuclear, all of that stuff.
	And even without that stuff, well, why is the value... I mean, yes, partly it is because of the sanction policy that the same elites decided to implement, But it's also because we diluted the value of the pound by printing so much of it.
	So there is that attempt to try and say, okay, through a series of policies that we guys have taken, you guys are going to have to be poor, stop complaining about it, just accept that your wages aren't going to match your cost of living.
	So thoroughly disingenuous.
	Anyway, so here's the Telegraph article that did quite a good write-up on it.
	I'm going to quote bits from there so we get a sense of it.
	Britain's have to accept they are becoming poorer, a senior Bank of England official said, claiming that an unwillingness to accept the nation's downward mobility was fuelling inflation.
	What a load of nonsense.
	He said that businesses were trying to maintain their standards of living and profits by demanding higher pay or putting up prices.
	His name is Hugh Pill?
	Yes.
	I hope this is suppository.
	He said this parcel-parcel game is going on here.
	The game is that one is generating inflation, and that part of inflation can persist.
	Again, this is nonsense.
	Inflation is expansion of the money supply.
	That's what it is.
	And the prices rising are the downstream effects of that.
	But they need us to believe that it is otherwise, because otherwise we are not going to accept our lower standard of living.
	Because the elites are stealing so much from us through their taxes and their excessive debt.
	Well otherwise we'll be blaming them rather than the suppliers, as Joe Biden keeps saying, we need to stop the energy suppliers from making too much profit in this time of crisis.
	It's like, no Joe, who constricted the supply of gas and who increased the supply of money?
	And who did the exact same thing over here in the UK?
	Well it is literally US policy to have expensive energy.
	And in fact, while I say Joe Biden, one of the people who changes... His handlers.
	Yeah, one of the people who changes his nappy put out a tweet today saying that he wanted... he said there's no reason why America can't lead the world in manufacturing.
	Well, yes there is, because to be competitive in manufacturing you need cheap energy.
	And it is literally Joe Biden's policy to have expensive energy.
	He's actually said that he wants expensive energy.
	His energy secretaries have gone out and said they want expensive energy because they want people to use it less.
	Well, you're not going to be leading in manufacturing then, are you?
	Yeah, so basically, it's all our fault, and at least they need to frame it, and all central bankers are doing it, not just the Bank of England, they're all doing it, they're trying to frame it as workers versus employers.
	The employers are trying to put up their prices, and they're trying to hold down wages, and employers are being greedy by asking for more wages because they're trying to meet the cost of living.
	Curiously, the government's effect in all of this isn't noticed.
	Yeah, it's been omitted, yeah.
	Yeah, the inflation that they're generating, which is robbing us of our purchasing power, that isn't getting there.
	The taxes that are in there are not going in there.
	So according to this narrative, we weren't greedy three years ago, but now we are.
	And, you know, has anything else happened in that last three-year period?
	Let's have a look at this.
	So this is the M2 money supply.
	So this is the amount of money, um, that, um, that, uh, was out there in the UK.
	And, oh, look at that!
	Takes off like a rocket after about December 2019.
	Yes!
	Someone, uh, in the words of Tom Harwood, something happened Yes.
	So all of that extra money has sort of got geysered into existence under the excuse that it's a pandemic and therefore, you know, pay no attention to this.
	And it was remarkable.
	Remarkable looking back.
	We had this pandemic come along and I was initially a bit concerned because on top of this and then we got the Prince's Cruises data and I thought, oh hang on a minute, there's actually nothing to be worried about.
	So I stopped worrying about it and then all of a sudden they started printing a vast amount of money and bringing in authoritarian measures.
	Wow.
	Yeah.
	Color me surprised by that one.
	Anyway, so, the amount of money has been increased, and what has that done?
	Well, let's have a look at Trueflation.
	So I'm not going to go... If you can change it from the US to the UK... So what this website... Just above there.
	Yeah, that's it.
	So what this website does is they basically run their own calculation of what inflation is, because the official number is doctored.
	Right, and they're putting it at 15.60% at the moment.
	Yes.
	Now, a couple of points to make on that.
	First of all, the only reason why that is as low as it is, is because inflation is a rate of change metric.
	So it compares to where we were a year ago.
	So if you remember that this time a year ago, we already had a lot of inflation.
	you know, that was already when we saw gas prices going up significantly and inflation was, was it this time last year, maybe 6%, something like that.
	And because inflation is a rate of change metric, it's like acceleration.
	You know, if you start out from the lights, you know, you cruise up to the lights and then you floor the accelerator, you might have sort of 50% acceleration once you get going.
	But then after a while, the acceleration craps out because you don't end up at light speed, do you?
	The acceleration, but you're still going really fast.
	And that's the same with inflation is the rate of change will only start to look like it's slowing down because the comparables from 12 months earlier are themselves so high that the inflation number comes down.
	But the price level is still massively high.
	So the fact that we've got 15% inflation, even after the comparables of last year, which were themselves excessively high, tells you we've got a massive problem.
	And it's certainly above the reported figure that the Bank of England is coming out with at 10%.
	So, you know, why is it that we're in this situation?
	Well, I found an absolutely brilliant little video on Twitter, which I wouldn't... It's about three minutes long, and I wouldn't normally play this sort of stuff in 4, but it was so good, I thought, I have to.
	So, let's see what this guy says.
	The central bankers of the world, apparently losing confidence that they can fix the inflation they created, are turning to plan B. Blame the rest of us, so we fight each other.
	Yesterday, the chief economist of the Bank of England, one Hugh Pill, said the quiet part out loud that, quote, "British households and businesses need to accept they are poorer and stop seeking pay increases and pushing prices higher." Note inflation in the UK is currently running double digits with grocery prices up 19% year on year.
	So not seeking a raise may well mean cutting a meal.
	Meanwhile, a poll from a major British insurer found 57% of small businesses in Britain are at risk of closure from rising prices.
	So, you plebes need to drop a meal and maybe close the family business so we can keep stealing from you.
	According to the Guardian, central bankers actually have a name for this scapegoating.
	Greedflation.
	As in, double-digit inflation has nothing to do with central bankers printing up trillions and handing it to governments, bankers, and surely by accident to the rich at the fastest pace in 50 years.
	In fact, last year, one in four pounds in existence, and almost one in three dollars, had been printed in just the previous three years.
	But you see, that was all a sheer coincidence.
	What's really happening here is that, for some bizarre reason, everybody got really greedy.
	We weren't greedy before, mind you, but now we are, and it's gotta stop.
	The beauty of the greedflation excuse is not only does it dodge blame for central bankers' institutionalized pillaging, it sets the masses against one another, whilst the elite use their central banks to thieve away.
	And they're quite open about this.
	A couple weeks ago, the European Central Bank put out a tweet asking, quote, What really drives inflation?
	Profits or wages?
	So, get it, voter?
	Is it the greedy right-wing capitalists or is it the greedy left-wing unions?
	Now, they do this because if they can get half the country to blame the other half, the bankers and the bureaucrats who actually cause the problems are off the hook.
	They can get back to siphoning away all of our life savings and future prospects whilst we fight.
	It's almost enough to make you wonder if maybe Americans or Britons or Europeans don't actually hate each other, that perhaps we actually agree the system is broken, but our elite does everything they can to set us against one another.
	This divide-the-masses campaign has been going on for a long time, certainly since the founding of the Federal Reserve.
	Indeed, ever since Western governments took on an activist role that converted them from responsible custodians of the common good Fixing potholes, dredging ports, the sort of night watchman state, and turn them into existential political footballs in service to the elite and to be weaponized against the masses.
	They ran this playbook perfectly last financial crisis, setting the right populist Tea Party and the left populist Occupy movement, turning them away from bankers who had just pillaged the country and turning them against each other.
	They will, no doubt, try again.
	End your part in all this, make do with less, take one for the team, fight against your neighbour so the elite can go on robbing all of us, and all of our children, blind.
	Alright, we'll be watching.
	See you next time.
	He's absolutely right about the divide and conquer agenda that was waged on the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street.
	Tim Pauls talked about this from the on-the-ground perspective before.
	What ended up happening was lots of agent provocateurs came into the Occupy camp and started dividing it up into intersectional grievance constituencies.
	And then all of the corporate press outlets started reporting an exponential rate about transphobia, racism, homophobia, misogyny, all of these intersexual buzzwords.
	well at the time for about two three weeks right and left were in total alignment yes we were all looking at the banks the system the system of government we were basically all focused on the right target and then all of a sudden identity politics got massive corporate sponsorship from the top it was
	i mean it was so noticeable at the time that suddenly something changed and they managed to steer the left away and then because the right basically defined themselves as being not whatever the left is for, we ended up just fighting.
	Yeah, this is why it's fair to conceptualise ESG's environmental social governance scores, for those that don't know, as a kind of tithe to a new religion, sure, but you could also see it more cynically as Larry Fink would quite like to create an ideological hegemony to cement market capture.
	And that's a really easy way of ensuring if you're all infighting about woke stuff, you're not actually looking at material system restructure that would dethrone him.
	Yeah.
	Yeah, that's exactly what it was.
	I'm going to give you... So that was brilliant.
	I should get the guy on economics at some point.
	So a number of good points he made there.
	57% of small businesses in the UK are at the risk of closure.
	Remarkable.
	And that's why I started this segment with, you know, I was a bit ill and I basically just sat there in a chair.
	I didn't destroy the world in the process, but for some reason we had to do that.
	That's why there's so many cash barbershops opening up from brand new immigrant entrepreneurs, because they're the only ones that aren't paying any tax and are going off the grid.
	Yeah, well, good for them.
	The greedflation idea, absolutely, as we've just talked about, you know, set one against each other.
	And I always love reiterating that point that he made in there.
	One in four pounds got printed in the last few years.
	One in three dollars got printed in the last couple of years.
	Is it any wonder that we're experiencing inflation?
	And in fact, I want to hone down on that inflation lie aspect of it.
	But first of all, I'm going to give you a quote from Olivia Blanchard, who is the Chief Economist at the International Monetary Fund.
	She said, Inflation is fundamentally the outcome of a distribution conflict between firms, workers and taxpayers.
	It stops when the various players are forced to accept the outcome.
	This is a lie.
	That is not what inflation is.
	And the only reason they're able to get away with this is because they have changed the meaning of the word inflation over the last couple of decades.
	So, I'll put this challenge to you.
	If you have in your house an old dictionary, you know, something from, you know, maybe even the 80s, but certainly any earlier than that, go and look at it and see what inflation is defined as.
	And it is defined as the expansion of the money supply.
	and then what we talk about now what they used to call price rises are the consequence because of course if there is more money sloshing around you know if you play a game of monopoly and you at some random point you basically just give everybody double the amount of money when you get that effect by going around a number of times anyway stuff stuff starts bidding up You start paying more for the same amount of stuff.
	It's the same.
	If there were more pounds and dollars in circulation, then asset prices go up.
	But the other thing it does is it lowers the real value of debt.
	Because, of course, if you borrow £100 from me, it matters very much whether you're borrowing £100 from me today, 10 years ago, or 10 years' time, because of that inflation effect, the real ability to pay that back.
	So let's have a look at this website.
	This is World Debt Clock.
	Now, this gives you a list of the amount of debt that are in various countries.
	So you can see at the top there, that's the US, where basically the debt... I mean, it's the same for the UK, actually.
	The debt is basically 100% of GDP.
	And this is what I've talked about a number of times.
	If the amount of debt is the same size as the economy, then it becomes very simple.
	What's growing faster?
	The debt or the economy?
	And if the debt is growing faster, then you're in a debt spiral.
	That basically leads you to a bad place.
	Because the cost of the debt is about 4% and the economy is growing about 1.5%.
	So therefore the debt is always going to get larger than the economy.
	And you know, that is just the debt that's the official debt.
	That's the amount of money that we've already borrowed.
	The UK and the US has other obligations such as they've got Medicare, they've got Social Security, we've got the same things where we've got a whole series of payments that are basically booked into law that we are going to have to make.
	These are going to be guaranteed future borrowings.
	And when you add that up as well, we are well past 100% debt at this point.
	This system cannot be resolved without them finding a bag holder.
	This is a phenomena that happens regularly in history.
	So that's the reason why I showed that epoch at the beginning of this segment, the one that I did with Bo, because we talked about past financial crises, and they always have the same dynamic.
	We go right back to the early days in that particular segment, but we had 1637, we had 1797, we had 1819, 1837, 1857, 1884, 1901, 1929, 1937, 1974, 1987, 1937, 1974, 1987, 1992, 2000, 2008, and then now.
	What happens is the debt builds up and it gets to the point where it cannot be paid back without it getting pushed onto somebody and somebody taking massive losses.
	Now why do I mention those previous dates?
	Because what has happened in all of those previous times is Oh, it's not the elite.
	It's basically the masses are the bag carrier and they get regularly wiped out because we have this debt-based system where everybody just gets carried away and over-leveraged.
	Now, the only difference is this time...
	is we have a well-developed social media.
	We have independent media.
	So this time, unlike all those other times that I mentioned, you get to find out that they are going to be robbing us and we get to talk about it in advance so we can shine a spotlight on these people as they do it and we can call bullshit on them when they start saying stuff like the Bank of England is saying at the moment.
	So, let's keep an eye on these guys, but that was pretty depressing, so let's see if we can segue into something a bit more cheery, perhaps where the elites are getting their comeuppance.
	I wouldn't use this phrase, come, in this particular context, but there you go.
	No, no, Conor!
	So the Wall Street Journal have published contents of Jeffrey Epstein's calendar, an exclusive article on Sunday.
	We don't have all of the names, of all of the people that Jeffrey Epstein, Ghislaine Maxwell and their associates trafficked children to.
	We have some, and it's a start, a damn sight better than the absolutely nobody that Ghislaine Maxwell was convicted of before, and that Jeffrey Epstein definitely killed himself over.
	Yes.
	Yes.
	Speaking of people who have evaded accountability for child molestation, unfortunately it's not exclusive to the US and certain islands in the Caribbean.
	If you'd like to pay five pounds a month to get excellent journalism from the rest of my colleagues, you can listen to Carl and Callum going through the comprehensive grooming gang timeline.
	There will be a part two of this and our coverage and I will say I will keep people's names out of it, but there is a figurehead in mainstream media who has done lots of research on this topic too, and they passed along their commendation.
	So this really is a great resource to rebut the mainstream narratives that, for example, as some of the hack academics and rags like the Guardian have come out with, there are more white sex offenders.
	That's just not the issue, is it?
	And please try and understand per capita and religious discrimination, but that would undermine your push for diversity.
	Speaking of disingenuous leftist elites, let's go on to the Wall Street Journal coverage, where we'll be mainly reading from today.
	So the documents don't reveal the purpose of most of the meetings in Epstein's calendar, though we can probably guess that it's at least currying favour because we can't really allege much more for legal reasons, can we Dan?
	Oh, this is me being told to behave myself in this segment, I think.
	Yes, we are big supporters of the Clintons and have absolutely no knowledge that would lead to their arrest.
	Please don't shoot me.
	And we would probably suicide ourselves if we did.
	Yes, with a shotgun that's been thrown multiple metres away.
	That has been shot while we're hanging ourselves from a tree.
	Exactly, yeah.
	The Wall Street Journal couldn't verify whether every one of the scheduled meetings took place, though some of the people on this calendar decided to verify it for us, so that's quite convenient.
	Most of these people told the Journal they visited Epstein for reasons related to his wealth and connections.
	Nothing to do with the noncing, then.
	Several said they thought he had served his time and had rehabilitated himself.
	Now, I don't know about you, But I wouldn't hang around with a sex offender even if they'd said sorry.
	I don't really happen to know any, funnily enough.
	It's quite difficult.
	It's not like it was, I dunno, petty theft of a Freddo from a corner shop when he was 15.
	He's running the world's largest international child trafficking ring.
	Yes.
	Slight problem with the company you keep, but whatever.
	Let's go on to their names, okay?
	I assume they're not very high-profile people.
	William Burns, Director of the CIA.
	Since 2021.
	So, would William Burns, would he be the sort of person who could say to an underling, I'm going to have a meeting with this person, could you do a quick background check on them and just see if they've got anything iffy in there?
	Well, the CIA could also Erase security footage or have inconvenient political opponents killed?
	No, no, no, no.
	They would never do such a thing, I'm sure.
	Oh, inform the Kennedy family, I suppose.
	Mr. Burns met with Epstein about a decade ago as he was preparing to leave the government service, said CIA spokeswoman Tammy Cupperman-Thorpe.
	Ah, and then he promptly was appointed the head of the CIA by Biden in 2021.
	When he had three meetings with Epstein in 2014, he was deputy secretary of state.
	So under Hillary Clinton.
	Documents show.
	They first met in Washington, and then Mr. Burns visited Epstein's townhouse in Manhattan.
	Thorpe continues, the director did not know anything about him, other than that he was introduced as an expert in the financial services sector, and offered general advice on the transition to the private sector.
	They had no relationship.
	Now, bear in mind, it's very interesting that the CIA has a heavy recruiting ground in Miami, the CIA were aware of Epstein's activities, they actually intervened in the prosecution in Miami, I believe in 2014, and the Miami Herald, a local outlet, was the one that reported it.
	So it all centered around this particular area that Epstein was operating out of.
	So, hang on, am I to understand that we are expected to believe that he met with Epstein because he could give him career advice?
	Yes.
	Right, three times.
	Yes.
	Okay, in person.
	In different locations.
	Right.
	In Epstein's own apartment.
	But he didn't know who he was.
	Okay.
	Right.
	Something smells about that.
	Yeah, just a humble university professor with millions and millions of dollars.
	Mr Burns, 67, was a career diplomat and former ambassador to Russia, and he had meetings with Epstein in 2014.
	A lunch was planned that August in the office of a law of Steptoe and Johnson in Washington.
	Epstein scheduled two evening appointments that September with Mr Burns at his townhouse.
	After one of the scheduled meetings, so we know these did at least happen, Epstein planned for his driver to take Mr Burns to the airport.
	Less said about that, the better.
	Mr Burns recalls being introduced in Washington by a mutual friend and meeting Epstein once briefly in New York, says Miss Thorpe.
	The director does not recall any further contact, including receiving a ride to the airport.
	The following month, October 2014, Mr Burns stepped down from his role at the State Department to serve as President of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
	A think tank.
	International Peace.
	Friend of Jeffrey Epstein.
	He ran the Carnegie Endowment until he was nominated in early 2021 by President Biden to serve as CIA director, with absolutely no compromising materials on him, I am sure.
	Next person.
	Leon Botstein, the president of Bard College, invited Epstein, who brought a group of young female guests to the campus.
	Noam Chomsky, a professor, author, and political activist, Notorious leftist and darling of the anti-war left, was scheduled to fly with Epstein to have dinner at Epstein's Manhattan townhouse in 2015.
	We'll get on to Noam Chomsky shortly.
	Mr. Botstein said he was trying to get Epstein to donate to his school.
	Mr. Chomsky said he and Epstein had discussed political and academic topics.
	I wonder if, given Epstein's line of work, Chomsky's concept of manufactured consent ever came up.
	I assume not.
	Mr Botstein said also the longtime music director for the American Symphony Orchestra had invited Epstein to an opera at Bard in 2013, then a concert at the college in 2016, and Epstein had planned each time to bring some of his young female assistants and arrive by helicopter.
	So Botstein was saying, I was just trying to get some money from investors to my university, pay no attention to the fact that he basically possibly brought his sex slaves with him.
	So, these young female assistants, are they also supposed to be experts in career advice?
	Music, perhaps.
	Possible students of this prestigious course.
	Because I'm thinking as you're going through this list, I mean, the director of the CIA, did he not have an office?
	I mean, is the director of the CIA not a sufficiently important person that somebody who gives career advice would go to him and meet him in his office?
	I'm just wondering why it was the other way.
	And with all of this, it's like... Wouldn't it have looked really bad to possibly have a convicted sex offender and someone on the CIA's register visiting his office?
	Would it look less bad to go to his home?
	Well, it could if the only place it turned up in documentation was the guy's private calendar, so it wasn't on any security footage like there would be in a government building.
	Ah, right.
	Oh, that's a good point.
	Though, to be fair, we do know from federal prisons in New York that sometimes the security footage does fail.
	Multiple cameras, yes.
	Yes.
	When substitute guards are working that one night over.
	Yes, when they're asleep.
	And he hangs himself with very thin bedsheets from about two feet off the ground.
	Stranger things have happened.
	I'm sure they have, Mr. Clinton.
	Despite all these meetings, Mr. Botstein said Epstein never made a donation.
	Oh, right, so he wasn't even a successful meeting, then.
	No.
	No, he just met with him multiple times with young female attendants for absolutely no financial return.
	It was a blessing in disguise, he said, that we never got any more money.
	Right.
	Moving swiftly on.
	Maybe those young girls weren't such experts in fundraising, after all.
	No.
	No.
	They played a damn good flute, though, according to Mr Botstein, I'm sure.
	Catherine Romola, a White House counsel under President Barack Obama.
	She had dozens of meetings with Epstein in the years after her White House service and before she became a top lawyer at Goldman Sachs that generated Rishi Sunak in 2020.
	He also planned for her to join a 2015 trip to Paris and a 2017 visit to Epstein's private island in the Caribbean.
	Yep.
	I'm sure it's just another private island.
	Hmm.
	Interesting fact as well, totally unrelated to the Clintons.
	From 2000 to 2001, she was associate counsel to President Bill Clinton.
	Bugger.
	That must look really bad on old Bill.
	I'm sure he's got a squeaky clean record otherwise.
	It's not like Geoffrey had a painting of him in the house, on the island, in the Monica Lewinsky dress.
	Oh yes, he did, didn't he?
	Because you've got to wonder, if he... I mean, it's almost... If they weren't meeting for sex on this island, it's almost worse, because... Because what else?
	Because it's obviously not career advice, is it?
	We can only assume because we can't imagine the other way.
	Is he some sort of spook or something?
	Or is he just harvesting... Well, I would want to know where he got his money.
	Well, that'd be nice, yeah.
	We might find out about his political connections shortly, and I would like to say I cannot believe the Wall Street Journal released an article this anti-Semitic.
	Really... It's not on, guys.
	It's not on at all.
	If I want to find the full list of names, can I get that?
	This is all we have from the article.
	Oh, okay.
	Because, of course, all the rest of the people that they trafficked children to allegedly was nobody.
	Yes.
	Even though there was a black book of the flight logs released, but people like Bill Gates and Bill Clinton have never properly been questioned on stand about that.
	Yes.
	Even though they went about 13 times with no security detail.
	I'm sure that's quite common, to ditch your security detail if you're an ex-president and you're going to a tropical island.
	Yeah, absolutely.
	Or a registered sex offender.
	Just like Matt Groening, I, too, fly on private jets from registered sex offenders.
	That's gonna get clipped, isn't it?
	Bloody hell.
	We can also suspect she's in contact with the Biden administration.
	Given the correspondence between Goldman Sachs and the World Economic Forum, of course, and the US Treasury Department, so she's still quite high up in government, yeah, and her relations, from the article, Ms Romola had a professional relationship with Epstein in connection with her role at Lawthorne, Latham and Watkins LLP, and didn't travel with him, a Goldman Sachs spokesperson said.
	Right.
	So the calendar is all just made up.
	That's what they're saying.
	Yes.
	Okay.
	Sure.
	Whatever.
	Epstein introduced her to potential legal clients, such as Microsoft Corp co-founder Bill Gates.
	She was representing the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
	It's not possible that she met up with him just to say, have you got a videotape of this person because we're thinking of putting them in a senior position and we want to make sure we've got dirt on them so that we can control them.
	Couldn't be that, could it?
	I couldn't possibly allege that.
	Right.
	Though she does say, I regret ever knowing Jeffrey Epstein.
	That's a direct quote from Rummler.
	I regret getting caught.
	I bet you do, love.
	Spokesperson for Latham and Watkins said Epstein wasn't a client of the firm.
	Just met a lot with one of their executives, right?
	The documents show that Epstein appeared to know some of the guests quite well.
	He asked for avocado sushi rolls to be on hand when meeting with Ms.
	Rumler, according to the documents.
	He visited a department she was considering buying.
	In October 2014, Epstein knew her travel plans and told an assistant to look into her flight, see if there's a first class seat, he wrote, so I can upgrade her.
	Now bear in mind, if this woman's name still doesn't ring any bells, it goes to this Atlantic article.
	She was nearly Attorney General for the Obama administration.
	So when Eric Holder resigned, because he was too close to Barack Obama and a bunch of scandals, this is from the Atlantic article, it became clear that the nomination of a close advisor to the president in this partisan, polarized climate would prolong and distort the confirmation process into an opportunity for partisan attacks rather than an examination of the needs of the Department of Justice, a person familiar with Rummler's decision said Friday.
	So she basically backed out of the high-profile role because she was too worried about media scrutiny.
	I wonder why.
	Couldn't allege anything whatsoever.
	Anyway, back to the article, let's move on.
	Epstein called Ms.
	Rumler within weeks of her leaving the Obama White House.
	Epstein planned a launch in August 2014 at his townhouse, followed by a series of meetings to introduce her to a wider circle of his acquaintances.
	Ah, it really was just career advice.
	Nothing to do with the fact that she'd just left the Obama administration as almost the Attorney General.
	Someone very high up in legal defence.
	Miss Rummler met Epstein after he called to ask if she would be interested in representing Bill Gates for the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
	So Epstein made the connection with Bill Gates for her.
	Oh, that's nice.
	So he got her a job, at least.
	A spokeswoman for Mr Gates said Epstein never worked for Mr Gates, misrepresented their relationship, and that Mr Gates regretted ever meeting him.
	Do you remember when Bill Gates, when asked about this, he said, well, he's dead now anyway.
	Yeah.
	That was a very curious answer, that one.
	Nothing says transparency like that, old man boobs, does it?
	Anyway, Epstein and his staff discussed whether Miss Rommeler, now 52, would be uncomfortable with the presence of young women who worked as assistants and staffers at the townhouse, the documents show.
	Women emailed Epstein on two occasions to ask if they should avoid the home while Miss Rommeler was there.
	So, suspicious aged women walking around Jeffrey Epstein's house, and they said, should we hide this if Miss Rommel is going to visit?
	Well, presumably they're all in business attire because, I mean, they're all experts in career advice and... Yes.
	Tax planning and whatever else.
	Average LinkedIn employee.
	Yes.
	Epstein told one of the women he didn't want her around, and another that it was a problem.
	Miss Romola didn't see anything that would lead her to be concerned at the townhouse and didn't express any concern, the Goldman Sachs spokesperson said, with total honesty.
	Several people who visited Epstein during this time said they noticed young women at his townhouse.
	One of the visitors, Helen Fisher, an anthropologist who studies romantic love and attachment, Had lunch with Jeffrey Epstein in January 2016 to discuss her work.
	Dr. Fisher said that after lunch, Epstein invited her to speak with his staff.
	And then it unfiled, I would say six young women, all of them good looking, all of them young.
	Dr. Fisher said, Epstein never funded her work, they weren't friends, and they didn't stay in touch.
	I didn't have anything to do with Jeffrey Epstein, she says, but I remembered it because of his spectacular house and because of the six young women.
	I'm sure.
	I'd imagine a specialty in romantic love and attachment would be a bit redundant in that environment.
	Yes.
	I don't imagine Jeffrey Epstein was that tender of a lover, considering he was an evil paedophile.
	Yes.
	Anyway, over the next few years, Miss Rummler, then a partner specialising in white-collar defence at Latham & Watkins, Mm-hmm.
	Had more than three dozen appointments with Epstein, including for lunch and dinners.
	In the normal course, Epstein also invited her to meetings and social gatherings, invited her to other business contacts, and made referrals, the Goldman Sachs spokesperson says.
	It was the kind of contracts and engagements she had with other contacts and clients.
	What a shame that none of those other contacts and clients trafficked children.
	Allegedly.
	Of course.
	For the other clients.
	We know Epstein did, so it doesn't look that good.
	In 2015, she was scheduled to fly with Epstein to Paris, and in 2017, he planned to stop in St.
	Lucia to take her to his island home in the US Virgin Islands for the day.
	Miss Romola never visited the island and never accepted an invitation to fly with Jeffrey Epstein anywhere.
	The Goldman Sachs spokesperson did.
	Now, if it didn't look like enough like a conspiracy, being involved with large banks, Alex Jones is going to be tearing his hair out.
	Epstein also connected Miss Romola with Adrian D. Rothschild, Yes, it's who you think.
	Who is now the chief executive of the Swiss private bank, Edmond D. Rothschild Group.
	The bank hired Miss Rummler's law firm, Latham & Watkins, after the introduction to help with US regulatory matters, according to the bank and Goldman Sachs spokesperson.
	So they're just admitting that.
	Miss Rothschild, who married into the famous banking family, had more than a dozen meetings with Epstein herself.
	He sought her help for staffing, staffing, Hmm, yes.
	That's a bit weird, isn't it?
	Especially after the last subpoena we've just done.
	I mean, I'm sure it's not the case that the banking sector would be in any way interested in being able to control powerful people.
	Yeah.
	Considering that they liaise specifically to get around US regulations.
	Yes.
	And he was speaking to the director, the now director of the CIA at the time, who was the Deputy Secretary of State.
	Oh, well that was for career advice.
	Oh, yeah, sure.
	Maybe he was hiring him as one of the new staffers.
	Maybe he's walking around in a little mailed outfit.
	I'm sure there's photos of that somewhere.
	I am actually probably sure there is.
	In September 2013, Epstein asked Miss Rothschild for an email for finding a new assistant.
	Female, multilingual and organised.
	I'll ask around, Rothschild emailed back.
	She then bought $1 million worth of auction items on Epstein's behalf in 2014 and 2015.
	Ms.
	Rothschild was named chairwoman of the bank in 2015.
	That October, Epstein and her negotiated a $25 million contract for Epstein's Southern Trust Corporation to provide risk analysis and the application and use of certain algorithms for the bank.
	In 2019, after Epstein was arrested, the bank said Ms.
	Rothschild had never met with Epstein and had no business links with him.
	The bank then acknowledged to the Journal that its earlier statement wasn't quite accurate.
	It said Ms Rothschild met with Epstein as part of her normal duties at the bank between 2013 and 2019, and that Epstein introduced the bank to US financial leaders, recommended law firms, and provided tax and risk consulting.
	I can't imagine why the bank would want to distance themselves from Jeffrey Epstein.
	Not possible.
	Absolutely.
	From what we know so far, the type of people that Epstein was meeting with on a regular basis were Rothschilds, senior people in the Obama and Clinton administration, and directors of CIA.
	So that's the general milieu of characters that he used to hang out with.
	And we have to try and work out from this why is the case that nobody that he solicited children to has been prosecuted.
	Or that nobody blew the whistle on it at any point.
	Yes.
	Because none of them knew.
	None of them knew about this, bear in mind.
	Absolutely no one had any idea, except for those that said they hung out with him because they thought he served his time.
	Well, there's no reason why, you know, to pick a name at random, the director of the CIA should be able to find out about that sort of stuff about somebody that he spends time with.
	What about Harry Kissinger?
	Do you think he would probably know?
	Oh, he's very old.
	Oh, but what about his deputies at the Bilderberg Group?
	Yeah.
	Oh, yes.
	One of Epstein's scheduled meetings with Miss Rothschild in January 2014 included another of his regular guests, Joshua Cooper Romo, the then co-chief executive of the Henry Kissinger corporate consulting firm.
	Alex Jones, right yet again.
	Epstein scheduled more than a dozen meetings in 2013-17 with Mr. Ramo, who at the time served on the boards of Starbucks Corp and FedEx, the document show.
	Epstein had special snacks on hand because he believed Mr. Ramo was a vegetarian.
	Many of Mr. Ramo's appointments with Epstein were in the evenings, typically after 5pm at the townhouse.
	He was also invited to breakfast at the townhouse in September 2013 with former Israeli Prime Minister Yud Barak.
	I don't think we can say anything that wouldn't get us pulled off YouTube here, but if we wanted to speculate about the sources of Epstein's wealth, corrupt governments might be one.
	It's definitely a possibility, isn't it?
	Yes.
	And his connection with intelligence agencies...
	Because the money had to come from somewhere.
	I'm not going Kanye West here, by the way.
	He's got connections to all sorts of powerful people, and he seems to have some sort of mechanism to maybe get leverage over them.
	Moving on.
	Mr Romo, who still sits on the board of FedEx and recently stepped down from Starbucks, didn't respond to the Wall Street Journal's request for comment.
	A spokesperson for Mr Kissinger said he wasn't aware that Mr Romo was meeting with Mr Epstein.
	I'm sure you weren't.
	Barak also met with Epstein in 2015 with Mr Chomsky, now 94.
	Mr Chomsky said Epstein had arranged the meeting with Mr Barak to discuss Israel's policies with regard to Palestinian issues in the international arena.
	So, let me get this straight.
	Jeffrey Epstein, who is, what, a maths professor, is meeting with Noam Chomsky and the former Prime Minister of Israel to discuss the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, to tell the government what to do.
	Why would they possibly go to him for that?
	Very strange, isn't it?
	Well, he also does career advice.
	Ah, okay.
	Palestinian job programme.
	Yes, so he's got a lot.
	A lot of things in his skillset, really, isn't he?
	Yes.
	When asked about his relationship with Mr Epstein, Mr Chomsky replied in an email, First response is that it's none of your business.
	Or anyone's.
	Maybe law enforcement, if they did their job.
	Second is that I knew him and we met occasionally.
	Oh, thanks for all the detail there, Noam.
	Definitely.
	Going on credibility there.
	I mean, at least we know now that either Noam Chomsky is so incompetent a judge of character that nothing that he's ever said in his entire leftist tenure can be taken seriously, or that he's just a liar.
	But again, we can't allege anything, of course.
	I actually quite like the manufacturing consent.
	He does make some good points in there.
	Yeah, it's a great idea, but he doesn't recognise the fact that the leftist media do that, especially when he's pushing for vaccine mandates.
	Oh yeah, he's completely, yeah, he's got one item song, yeah, myopia on this stuff.
	Again, Dumb.
	Or a liar.
	Allegedly.
	Absolutely.
	Couldn't say otherwise.
	In March 2015, Epstein scheduled a gathering with Mr Chomsky and Harvard University professor Martin Nowak and other academics, according to the documents.
	Mr Chomsky said they had several meetings at Mr Nowak's research institute to discuss neuroscience.
	Two months later, Epstein planned to fly with Mr Chomsky and his wife to have dinner with them and movie director Woody Allen.
	No comments about paedophilia there.
	And his wife, Suni Previn.
	If there was a flight, which I doubt, it would have been from Boston to New York, 30 minutes, said Mr Chomsky.
	I'm sure.
	I'm unaware of the principle that requires I inform you about an evening I spent with a great artist.
	And the world's leading child sex trafficker.
	That's kind of the important part, Gnome.
	Couldn't allege you're covering up for anything at all.
	None of the names appear in Epstein's now public black book, so this is a whole new set of client names, so we still have an incomplete picture.
	And of course the documents show that Epstein arranged multiple meetings with each of them after he had served jail time in 2008 for the sex crime involving a teenage girl which required him to register as a sex offender.
	The documents, which include thousands of pages of emails and schedules from 2013 to 2017, haven't been previously reported.
	And I'm sure this isn't the end of a treasure trove of incriminating details, but I'm sure we're not going to get the full picture because it would probably implicate far too many people than is convenient for the regime.
	But all of these people on the list, I am Totally sure we're on the up and up.
	I'm sure I have absolutely nothing of them doing anything untoward towards Jeffrey Epstein's staff on camera and I can't wait for them to be able to clear their name so we know the upstanding character of our elites is still intact.
	Jeffrey Epstein didn't kill himself.
	On to the video comments.
	I've always been a bit skeptical of the idea that migrants pay more into the system than they take out.
	Because I imagine it's not taking into account any of the NGO benefits they get.
	Because, you know, the NGOs are basically all paid for by, you know, Western corporations and governments.
	And I imagine that the migrants probably are getting three or five times the amount of benefits than is actually recorded.
	That's not even considering the costs of the crime and drugs that tend to follow these migrations, which would be communally attributed if they were done by white people.
	Well they also don't break it down by area or ethnicity, because what they do is they put all migrants in a large pot, and they conflate the Chinese students who can pay all of their fees and accommodation up front, and the wealthy Indian tech billionaires, of which there are like one or two of them, that make up for the complete net drain.
	And also, there was actually a study, and I can't remember where it was from, but there has been numbers run on this, and no, they are a net negative.
	Yep.
	On to the next one.
	What a lovely time I had, sipping Greek coffee on a balcony in Athens far away from the problems of the rest of the world.
	Anyway, I'd better check the news to see what I missed while I was away.
	If I had a penny for every time a war started while I was in Greece, while I'd been signed up for the Lotus Eaters, I'd have two pennies, which obviously isn't a lot, but it's very weird that it's happened twice, don't you think?
	It is definitely suspicious that I got really ill about the same time as those Sudanese biolabs blew up.
	Yeah, because there was also the Ukrainian biolabs as well.
	Are they already in Haiti?
	Do we know?
	No, I doubt it.
	Are you sure?
	With the Clinton Foundation moving in?
	No, I think they had other interests.
	Maybe related to... No, we can't say that for legal reasons, can we?
	Anyway, on to the next one.
	So Carl, what the device does is that it's a suppressor.
	Officially, when the panel was first filed, it was a silencer, but what the action does is that it's a suppressor.
	It just suppresses the noise, keeps it controlled, keeps all the blasts within reason.
	And this is basically how it fits on.
	Yeah, it basically just fits on just like that.
	And the ATF did, in fact, argue that that thing is both a gun and not a gun in a court of law.
	They did actually do that.
	Didn't the head of the ATF, when he was in congressional testimony the other day, said I'm not a firearms expert?
	I mean... I'm sure it has no bearing on the job.
	Yeah.
	Is that just a confession that he's addicted to alcohol and tobacco?
	My other areas of expertise are the things that are slowly killing me, rather than quickly, which I would elsewise advise.
	Anyway, on to the next one.
	Hey, lotus eaters.
	Well, dad got the awning put on the bus today so now when going on vacations we'll be able to bring shade with us.
	I think it looks very nice.
	And my dad also has put in blinds all over inside the bus.
	And yeah, they're pretty neat.
	So you pull down the first one if you want to make it dimmer, and then the second one is just for privacy.
	So you've got your own roaming anti-bandit fortress.
	I like that idea.
	Yeah, that's a cool way to go on holiday.
	I mean, when the collapse comes, you probably would need something like that.
	So, yeah.
	Good.
	On to the next one.
	Today I wanted to show something off.
	So over there on that hill over there, you'll see just a lot of green.
	And that's what California looks like today.
	And that's all just invasive grasses.
	But if I look behind me, you'll see this habitat restoration project in my area.
	It's kind of a little secret place.
	But you can see all of the flowers, all the different kinds of grasses and bushes and things.
	And this is a project that's been worked on for a very long time.
	And unfortunately, all of California used to look like this.
	It's rather beautiful, actually.
	I really do miss my particularly English walk that I used to have when I lived in Canterbury, because right behind the sort of new-build student apartments, there was this lovely little river.
	I think it was a stern.
	And there were loads of ducks that I just used to feed.
	So it was a nice little start to my day.
	How charming.
	Anyway, on to the next one.
	Hey, Lotus Eaters!
	So I heard a rumor that Vice is going bankrupt, which is pretty exciting.
	Oh, it's all right, bro.
	It's okay, VICE was a terrible publication.
	Don't worry about it.
	Anyways, would you guys ever consider, in the spirit of the old VICE, sending out foreign correspondents and maybe taking up the mantle that they left behind?
	They used to be pretty good.
	I used to enjoy them.
	Then they went stupid.
	But I'd love to hear the British and English perspective on the rest of the world as you go out and travel.
	I kinda like how Callum does now.
	It'd be really cool.
	Alright, bye.
	That would be a great idea if we had the budget for it.
	No, brilliant.
	Send me to Monaco.
	Yeah, no, yeah.
	I don't know why.
	Look, we've done some on-the-ground stuff.
	I'll be reporting from some conferences this year when it happens, of course.
	I'll try not to get arrested again, but as for large-scale stuff, at the moment...
	If you want us to do that kind of thing, it's just a factor of money.
	And of course, we're hopefully looking to more revenue streams soon, but... Yes, go and get all of your mates to sign up on the website and take out a subscription, and then I can go to Monaco.
	That is actually the truth of it, though.
	We'll be able to do more stuff when we just have a larger budget, but at the moment, we're in Swindon.
	So, that's just all that needs to be said.
	Anyway, on to the written comments from the website.
	Based Ape.
	Hello, mate.
	Wall Street.
	The banks are too big to fail.
	Biden.
	Hold my sippy cup.
	I don't think he can be trusted with that, can he?
	He'll still spill it down himself at some point.
	Very likely.
	JC, what's the solution for this crazy situation?
	There you go, Dan.
	Well, there isn't one.
	That's the problem.
	That's why we're in a complete mess.
	Chinese EMP, maybe?
	The system is going to either crumble spectacularly, or is going to be pushed onto the masses, who are going to be utterly impoverished, and we're going to have lower standard of living, and the East will rise.
	So basically collapse of the West as an economic power.
	Right, and we'll just become techno-serfs.
	Yes.
	So it's not a great set of outcomes.
	Or maybe technology will rescue us and there'll be a productivity revolution through AI and robotics or something like that, and God knows what we'll be doing with ourselves in the future.
	Oh, thank God for the white pill.
	For a moment there, I was about to say, has anyone told you that listening to your stories makes them want to run a bath, break out the razor blades like they're testifying against the mob?
	Yes, I have been thinking I ought to find some sort of way of injecting positivity into my segments.
	Can't think of one at the moment, but as soon as I do, positivity will be getting injected.
	Matthew Harthstone, I'm convinced that basic economics is not taught in schools because literacy in that subject is one way to keep people completely clueless when it comes to their political and financial positions.
	Well, yeah, it keeps you dependent and dumb.
	I mean, wasn't it the Rockefellers that revolutionised the American education system in order to make, basically, brain-dead factory workers?
	Yeah.
	Because we had a similar thing during the Industrial Revolution, where it was about obedience and compliance, not three-fourth.
	And then over time, even then, the curriculum itself has been dumbed down.
	Oh, it feels like the entire political system of every Western country at this point is basically livestock management.
	And we're the livestock.
	Yeah, that's a very good way to put it.
	Yeah.
	Eddie, Lodeseesers have done a few podcasts on why Zoomers are such doomers.
	The Economic Chat today should show you exactly why.
	There just doesn't seem to be a future to aspire to.
	Yeah, so Harry and Rory are going to be doing a part two and I assume that's going to be before we can add a third chair to the podcast at any point.
	I do have some things to say on that as the youngest presenter in the office and the second youngest person in the entire office.
	I think Zoomers are sort of existentially screaming for some kind of meaning, and that's expressed sometimes through their music, but they feel quite fatalistic about the prospect of it arising from the midst.
	Zoomers have music?
	Well, yeah.
	They do.
	What?
	Like Billie Eilish and The Weeknd and things like that.
	Never heard of them.
	Really?
	Okay, alright.
	That means you can't shame me for liking them.
	Right, the audience are about to.
	They're really about to, but yeah.
	Harry's going to give you a swirly in the toilets later.
	Just like going back to school.
	Anyway, Andrew Narog, nothing much to add.
	Excellent episode as always.
	Oh, cheers.
	Very glad to have the Lotuses around to cover these under-reported issues.
	Yeah, we could do some tabloid stuff, but the collapse of the West seemed a bit more pertinent, frankly.
	Silver, as someone with all his assets being liquid, seeing the increase in bank failures is having me more and more worried without being knowledgeable enough on how to protect what I've earned before government and big business piss it away.
	Yeah.
	Draw out some cash, I suppose, until they outlaw that?
	Well, you want a mix, really, because the thing is, if they start printing, you're going to want long-duration tech stocks and crypto and stuff, but then that could easily get wiped out, so you also want a balance of physical stuff, literally physical cash to a certain extent.
	Lord Nerevar, this might be a bit of a controversial thing to say, but I think the banks failing one by one just like this has the potential to be a good thing in the long run.
	Nobody knows what the hell to do at the moment.
	So that's why things are a bit swirly.
	Yeah, it's rubbish.
	Lord Nerovar, this might be a bit of a controversial thing to say, but I think the banks failing one by one just like this has the potential to be a good thing in the long run.
	It means that the big four can't just move in and capture the whole market at once, and it also means that we're slowly clearing out some of the clutter that jams up the financial system.
	Of course, it has the potential to all go tits up and make me look like a fool, but for now I'm not going to panic.
	Yeah, but I think the problem is we showed in the segment how the government are engineering it so the big few can come in and sweep up all of the straddles.
	It sort of looks like at the moment everyone's being herded into three or four big banks.
	And then that's a lot easier to flip that into a CBDC, if that is the plan, which, like I say, does fit, so, you know, could be.
	Well, the head of innovation at Barclays just did Davos Radio with the World Economic Forum, so we already know that they're majorly on board with them, and they're actually on board with ESGs and things like that, so, if you bank with them, like I do, unfortunately, one of my accounts, um, not really much else to go, I suppose?
	Great.
	Arizona Desert Rat.
	It would be bad if the USA defaulted on its debt, but maybe it just needs to happen.
	We've been spending money hand over fist since World War II.
	I don't disagree with that, but it's what the elite decide to do it.
	This is what I've dichotomized in my Wily Coyote video.
	We either get the Great Reset or the Good Reset.
	And the Good Reset is our ability to retreat back into parochial communities with our own Sort of like crypto methods of exchange between us and it's entirely decentralized and we have our own renewable energy if it ever comes online and we don't, we aren't subject to government mandates and we all get armed up or we're pod people.
	Omar, what do you think the chances are that the most successful stock trader in world history, Nancy Pelosi, also has mortgages on multiple properties, in the same way the richest and loudest sea-level alarmists sport their own beachfront property?
	What the elite do, do what the elite do, not what they say.
	JC, difference between real life and monopoly is that in monopoly there is a limited supply of liquid capital.
	Yeah, it's on paper.
	If you just wrote down promissory notes for Monopoly, it would go out of control.
	Yeah, that's not actually true.
	In the rules, it does say that the bank never runs out of money.
	They can just start nominating other things as money.
	Oh, is it really?
	Oh, okay.
	Yeah, so you could write more on pieces of paper, or you could just pick up a clock and say, right, that's worth 10,000 or whatever.
	Right, okay.
	Yeah.
	So, it's exactly like a game of Monopoly.
	Brilliant.
	Oh, that'd be nice, wouldn't it?
	I don't think we can say that.
	No, no.
	You mean the Great Depression would be lovely.
	In Minecraft, yes.
	No, I'm not going to do that meme.
	How the heck does this not end with the Great Depression at best and revolution hangings at the worst?
	Oh, that'd be nice, wouldn't it?
	I don't think we can say that.
	No, no.
	You mean the Great Depression would be lovely.
	In Minecraft, yes.
	Yes, yeah, in Minecraft.
	Well, I think the latter half, the reason that a purely hypothetical violent scenario, which we must condemn, will not happen, is because usually people are so pacified they probably don't have the constitution for it.
	I mean, so this is something that a bunch of boomers have said to me which I will not name because They, of course, would be criminally liable for it.
	They said, what you need is young people going and tearing at the gates of Parliament.
	And after I obviously condemned that, because that would be immoral, I said, it wouldn't happen anyway, because most people are too pacified.
	And even if it did start to happen, you'd get a London riot scenario where some people use it as a smash and grab, and then all the polite people who would be so sick of it that you could get them on side for some sort of anti-elite revolution would go, oh, we don't do that, we're British.
	Yeah, I mean that's all the tyranny of the establishment is that at any point for any individual it is always worth playing in the game because by rebelling against it you end up with a worse outcome.
	Yeah.
	So everybody is basically being, well it is livestock management, that's basically we're all being herded to this polar future and if we all collectively sort of said no we're not playing this game anymore but it's very difficult to do that in a legal way other than to opt out the system through gold and bitcoin.
	Yeah.
	And even if you try and physically opt out of the system, they will come and find you.
	And bear in mind, and this is something I keep seeing in YouTube comments and things like that, when we say we're frustrated with the state of things.
	You get Americans going, well, you Britbonks gave up your guns, so it's your fault.
	Okay, number one, I didn't.
	I was born in 1998, I didn't exactly get much of a say on that matter, did I?
	And two, even for Americans, for whom it is much easier to go and live off-grid and defend yourself, you will still be hunted down by the IRS, you will still be hunted down by the federal government, and you might get Bundy-ranched or Ruby-riched.
	And that's not exactly ideal.
	So, yeah, there is going to come to a point where things could come to a head if people did disconnect from the system.
	I just hope people can live peacefully till that happens.
	Still a long time.
	I think I'd rather be in, I know, Texas or, you know, one of the sound estates.
	At the moment, yeah.
	I just couldn't handle the weather.
	And also, there's still a bloody travel ban if you're unvaccinated.
	Oh, apparently that's coming to an end in three months.
	11th of May.
	Yeah, so if any of the Lotus Eaters members would like to fly us out and give us a stopgap tour of the US, because we're too broke to pay for it ourselves, I'd love to crash on some sofas, thank you very much.
	I will take a high-class hotel, thank you.
	Classy broad.
	Um, Joan of Arc, I don't know if credit unions are a thing in the UK, but if Dan's familiar with the idea, how safe are credit unions for those of us who just need somewhere to keep our paychecks to pay our bills?
	I'm not familiar with what...
	Oh, it's an older idea of, you know, basically communities banding together and providing credit to each other.
	Oh, a bit like, um... It's a Wonderful Life.
	Yeah, so they sort of got regulated out of existence, basically.
	You could do it, but then you'd end up in jail for financial regulations.
	Because how could we possibly govern ourselves, I suppose?
	Ross Diggle.
	So what Dan's saying is, his explanation of the economy is a Hugh pill to swallow.
	I'm here all week.
	Actually, I think it's Hugh as in H-E-W.
	But, you know, the pun works.
	Wall Grillington.
	I'd have a lot more money if the government stopped ceding it to pay for their stupid decisions.
	Libertarianism.
	Yes, good point.
	Hammurabi, I just love how it's the elites who are pushing hardest for financial collapse, despite all of their power coming from their soon-to-be worthless money.
	Yeah, but they can just make more for themselves anyway.
	Like, that's it.
	Well, that's why I want to lock down control before that money is recognised as properly worthless.
	I mean, there is a reason why Bill Gates has been selling out of financialised assets and buying farmland.
	Yeah, same with Black Rock, same with the Chinese.
	Sophie, well I just ordered a bunch of emergency food yesterday, glad to see I wasn't being a moron.
	Yeah.
	I've been reading Stefan Molyneux's latest fiction book called The Present, where it's a prelude to dystopia, and it's a totally unbelievable scenario, right?
	So...
	In a year's time, because of the great slowdown, because you've been hiring people based on identity characteristics rather than merit, things are not working as well, there are supply shortages, gas starts running out, and people have been whipped up into an ideological mob where they take it from
	Online ranting to offline violence in the streets as soon as resources run out and then suddenly what happens is the only people that survive are the kind of homesteader types and all of the feminists drop their feminism and just go and shack up with the first available secure man possible.
	I couldn't possibly see a scenario like that playing out whatsoever.
	Some tinned food is not a bad idea.
	Not until about three weeks on Thursday anyway.
	Yeah.
	Wolf.
	Oh, sorry, that's already been read.
	JJHW.
	The US banking system is a moral hazard writ large.
	Yeah.
	Yeah, that's an interesting point.
	So, back in 2008, there was a national debate around should we bail out the banks, or should we, you know, should we do this, because of the moral hazard issue.
	Whereas this time round, it's just, you know, they don't even break stride.
	It's like, yeah, yeah, we're just gonna do this with the banks, and we're gonna offer this bailout, and we're gonna bundle it up.
	There's absolutely no discussion of any of this.
	The dialecticus process, to the point where this is normal.
	The Rubicon has been crossed, and now it's just a question of, oh yeah, we just do that.
	Yeah, we're in a Stockholm Syndrome-style relationship with the state.
	Well, at least most people are, because we hate it.
	Someone online, 7-12 year olds give the best business advice, obviously.
	Well, they apparently give the best advice on gender transition, so that is an actual policy of Scotland in the Biden administration.
	Omar, the sad thing about Epstein's client list is that if we're learning about it now without anyone else getting suicided, I can only assume it's because anyone of import won't have to face consequences.
	In a post-Covid world, you can literally prove every single conspiracy and nothing will change.
	It seems six semper tyrannis only applies after you run out of bread and circus, but not after the industrialised noncing of kids.
	I can't really say anything after that other than truly sad.
	Do you remember a few years ago when politicians lied?
	They did it in a clever way.
	So they would find a way of looking at the statistics and you could misinterpret it in such a way as you... But as now, you watch that Jean-Pierre Diversity High or whatever from the White House.
	And she just outright lies.
	I mean, there isn't... It's not lying through interpretation.
	It's not lying through admission.
	It's just an outright, blatant lie.
	Like, they don't even pretend anymore.
	Yeah.
	It's because they don't consider us moral peers.
	Yeah.
	Like you said, cattle.
	Yes.
	Like, you don't tell the cattle when they're going to the slaughterhouse, do you?
	Yeah.
	Um, the French banker.
	Does he just keep changing his name?
	Many of the key people protecting, quote, our democracy and furthering the deep state's agenda seem to be linked to Jeffrey Epstein.
	I have to wonder, who is the black book now?
	Who is the blackmail videos and other evidence?
	Who is the master puppeteer now that Epstein is gone?
	Wasn't it the FBI who seized his safe that had the blackmail in it?
	Was it the FBI?
	Um, I don't know if it was the FBI or the CIA.
	Which one would it be?
	A vague three-letter agency.
	So one of them's got all of the blackmail.
	I suppose both of those organisations, but especially the FBI, is basically the power military wing of the Democrat Party.
	I mean, all of them are.
	That's why they're all funnelled into Twitter and things like that as well.
	Maybe this is part of the reason why they hated Trump so much, because they haven't got enough dirt on him or something.
	Well, he was the only one that did say Geoffrey Epstein out at Mar-a-Lago trying to recruit a young girl at the place, and then he was trying to tell the press, oh yeah, Geoff, great guy, he likes his girls a little bit young though.
	Like, literally the only guy blowing the whistle on it.
	But no, Netflix is going to show you loads of images of Trump and Jeffrey Epstein, just to make sure that you don't look at all of their elites that they prefer.
	Baron Von Warhawk, QAnon doesn't sound so crazy now, right guys?
	I mean, the global cabal of satanic pedophile thing, no, absolutely true.
	The whole, there's someone on the inside and Trump's going to be president accidentally tomorrow, was a psyop.
	Yeah, I never really followed that QAnon stuff.
	I don't think anyone did.
	I think most people just put it out proportionally.
	Not properly, though.
	Like 12 people on 4chan, maybe.
	But the Democrat press whips it up into a frenzy to make it so the boomers are terrified of this ghostly thing on the internet.
	I don't understand.
	Oh, yeah.
	We have some honourable mentions, and it's just as I predicted.
	There's a whole subsection.
	For those that don't know, the Backroom Team, collate your comments so that we're able to see them.
	Why are you talking about Billie Eilish?
	Because I mentioned it to Zuma Music earlier.
	I'm gonna have to Google this person now.
	She's... How do I describe her?
	Sort of smoky-voiced Zuma singer.
	If you wanted an image of insufferable Zuma fashion, look up, like, 2019 Billie Eilish with the green hair.
	Well, the version that I've got, is this a cis person?
	Right.
	Oh look, yes, you can see- I think she's quite fit, personally.
	You can see the old photos, where she looks like a normal human, and then you can see which ones are the new photos.
	Yeah, yeah.
	She's gone slightly downhill.
	But she's good at singing, is she?
	Yeah, I quite like her.
	Right, okay.
	She doesn't write any of her own songs, her brother's basically the talent behind it, but yeah, it's just a list of people just saying, um, yeah.
	God, it would hurt her to smile every once in a while, would it?
	I think that's meant to be her brand.
	She's trying to do sultry, but I think it's just sort of angsty.
	Yes.
	I mean, I quite like her.
	Did you see the latest Bond film?
	It was rubbish.
	Uh... Was it?
	No Time to Die.
	Possibly.
	She did the theme for that.
	Right.
	Yeah.
	I've forgotten it.
	Which is the only good thing about that film.
	Other than Adelaide Armis, who was quite attractive, frankly.
	I'm really not the person to ask about pop culture stuff, to be honest.
	What was the last... other than the film you just reviewed, what was the... what's your favourite film?
	Oh, Groundhog Day, obviously.
	Best film ever made.
	Best film ever made?
	Obviously.
	Why?
	I just love it.
	Okay, well, it's enjoyable, sure, but... I mean... It doesn't top Back to the Future.
	Even in the vein of those sorts of films.
	No, I think it does.
	Back to the Future 1's like a masterpiece.
	It's pretty good.
	It's no Groundhog Day, though.
	It's also incorruptible.
	It doesn't have Bill Murray in it.
	Ghostbusters has Bill Murray in it, and that's rubbish.
	No, that's quite good.
	It's annoyingly esoteric and not at all funny.
	Much like this podcast, actually.
	It's very, um... No, I don't want to say libertarian.
	You're going to say Ghostbusters is libertarian?
	Well, the bad guys are the EPA.
	Yeah, I suppose it deserves its undertones, doesn't it?
	And they make fun of academia.
	And they set up a successful small business.
	Yeah, but he does get sucked off by a ghost.
	Did he?
	Yeah, Dan... what's his name?
	Oh yeah!
	No, they didn't show it.
	Yeah, they did.
	Did they?
	Yeah.
	I'm gonna have to watch it again.
	Don't pause that scene, whatever you do.
	Anyway, speaking of Ectoplasm, we're out of time, so if you want more ramblings, I suppose, pay us five quid a month to help us keep the lights on.
	But until then, enjoy all the content we've got on our site, both for free and the previews.
	We appreciate your views.
	We're back tomorrow at one o'clock.
	Thank you very much for watching, and goodbye.

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