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Sept. 17, 2022 - Health Ranger - Mike Adams

01:33:59

Situation Update, 9/17/22 - The economic ANNIHILATION of Europe - Gonzalo Lira and Mike Adams P2

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	Welcome, Michael.
	Mike Adams here.
	We're about to jump into the second half of the interview with Gonzalo Lira.
	Already received just a wave of positive feedback about the first half of the interview.
	A lot of people were really excited to hear this long-form format with Gonzalo and myself asking questions.
	There's a lot of information in that first hour.
	If you missed it, check it out on my channel, hrreportatbrighttown.com.
	But before we jump into the second half, there have been so many things that have happened in the last 24 hours that were frankly predicted by Gonzalo and Dira.
	And things that we talked about, I've got to bring in those headlines.
	So first, Wall Street Journal reporting FedEx to close offices and park aircraft after warning about a sales shortfall.
	The CEO went on CNBC, I believe it was yesterday, saying there's a global recession in place.
	Demand for shipping packages is falling off a cliff.
	FedEx is in fact, well, contracting.
	And FedEx shares fell at one point as much as 19% in one day.
	So FedEx is contracting.
	We've got the stock market reacting to that in a strongly negative way.
	Consumer demand in many other areas is also plummeting, including in appliances.
	We're seeing consumer demand in mortgages plummeting as well.
	But just yesterday, Germany seizes control of Russian-owned oil refineries.
	This is from the Epoch Times that Berlin has taken control of three Russian-owned refineries located in Germany to try to shore up energy security before the planned embargo on oil imports from Russia kicks in.
	So here we have the West, Western nation, Germany, Germany, which is part of the cabal of Western nations that already stole what was rumored to be over $300 billion in foreign currency reserves that were owned by Russia but held in Western central banks.
	The West just confiscated $300 billion, and now they're stealing Russia's refineries that have been set up in Germany.
	And this is what Western nations are resorting to now is just stealing everything.
	They've also stolen oil off of ships.
	In the seas, there's just like piracy of the high seas.
	This is what Western nations are resorting to.
	It's just incredible.
	There's nothing they won't do, you know, to try to destroy Russia, but also save themselves from the impending energy collapse.
	A couple more important stories over the last 24 hours.
	This one from Freight Waves.
	Imports to Los Angeles, America's largest port, plunged 17% in August.
	That's right.
	International cargo shipping is collapsing in one month, down 17%.
	Why?
	Because consumers aren't buying the same level of goods that they used to buy.
	The Wall Street Journal also reporting that Scott's Miracle-Gro is buried in fertilizer.
	They have way too much fertilizer now.
	They overproduce, thinking that people were going to engage in home gardening because they would be locked down at home with nothing else to do.
	And, of course, smart people are growing some of their own food.
	But not enough of them.
	So Scott's Miracle-Gro is, well, they've had to lay off people.
	They've cut 450 jobs, which is about 6% of their workforce.
	More layoffs are coming.
	Cash is dwindling, says the Wall Street Journal.
	Nobody's getting bonuses.
	Instead, quote, the company is in full-blown crisis mode because they overproduced and now consumer demand has plummeted.
	Reuters is also reporting that household wealth fell by a record $6.1 trillion in the second quarter of 2022.
	Also, so far in 2022, NASDAQ has dropped 26%.
	S&P 500, 18%.
	Bitcoin plunged 57%.
	30-year fixed mortgage rates went up from just 2.65% in January of 2021 to now 6.28% in September of 2022.
	And inflation went from 1.4% in January of 2021 to now officially 8.3%.
	Hmm.
	Seems like everybody's suddenly getting poorer.
	Except not the military-industrial complex.
	No, no, no indeed.
	From Zero Hedge, new $600 million arms package for Ukraine marks the 21st time U.S. draws from its own stockpiles.
	So, and this is something that Gonzalo Lira and myself talked about in some detail in our interview here, which is, again, the second half is coming up here shortly.
	But the United States of America is...
	Just ransacking its own military munitions and weapons and supplies and sending them to Ukraine.
	On top of, of course, tens of billions of dollars that nobody knows where that's going.
	It's all going to Ukraine.
	The weapons, the munitions, the money, and it is vanishing into a black hole.
	Amazing how that works, isn't it?
	So the Biden administration just announcing yet another new weapons package for Ukraine brings the total U.S. military aid pledged since the start of the conflict to $15.1 billion.
	And it seems like it's getting close to maybe a billion dollars a week at this point.
	It's accelerating.
	The story says the arms are being sent under the Presidential Drawdown Authority, which allows the White House to take arms directly from U.S. military stockpiles.
	In order to allow them to be used by foreign allied forces.
	This is the 21st time that it has drawn from Pentagon stockpiles.
	This is all authorized by, of course, Joe Biden.
	So it's not just that money is being printed to manufacture weapons that are being sent to Ukraine.
	It's that weapons are being taken from domestic stockpiles from the U.S. military and sent to Ukraine to be largely destroyed by Russia.
	The new $600 million package will include ammunition for the HIMARS long-range artillery system, 36,000 artillery rounds at 105 millimeters there, 1,000 precision-guided 155-millimeter artillery rounds.
	Let's see, what is this?
	Four counter-artillery radars, which I'm sure Russia will have no trouble blowing up very quickly.
	Four trucks and eight trailers to transport heavy equipment.
	Really?
	Four trucks!
	It's going to be four smoking carcasses of trucks, probably, before very long.
	Let's see.
	Mine clearing equipment, anti-personnel munitions, demolition munitions, small arms and night vision devices, cold weather gear, and other field equipment.
	So this is all being taken from U.S. troops and sent to Ukraine, where it will vanish into a black hole of corruption, sadly.
	And by the way, in terms of news that did not happen in the last 24 hours, no, no leader in Europe came out and said, hey, we should stop committing economic suicide.
	Hey, we should negotiate peace with Russia and beg them to turn the gas back on.
	No, that did not happen.
	Nothing at all.
	That will never happen.
	Because, as Gonzalo and I discussed, the European leaders are insane.
	I mean, they're arrogant.
	They're incompetent.
	In a way, they're stupid.
	But they're also so stupid that they don't realize they're stupid.
	So they're actually even stupid about being stupid.
	They make the worst decisions in the world and they think it's awesome.
	And then everything blows back on them.
	Everything falls apart around them.
	And they say, what happened?
	How could this happen?
	We are the rulers of the world!
	How could this happen?
	Well, it's because they don't understand cause and effect either.
	So, with that said, we're going to jump right into the second half of the interview with Gonzalo Lira.
	This is roughly an hour and 20 minutes or so.
	We get into some personal questions, too, about Gonzalo's past and some of the projects that he's working on.
	He's got four new books he says he's working on simultaneously.
	There's an ambitious plan.
	And I don't know when they're going to come out.
	He wouldn't tell me the title, but he said it's going to get him into all kinds of trouble when he presents the title.
	Apparently, this is going to be the most controversial title of any book in the history of literature or something.
	I mean, it sounds bad, but intriguing.
	So I can't wait to hear what that is.
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	Now, on to the interview, the second half with Gonzalo Lira.
	There is significant factions in the West that would demand and get a NATO escalation, and that could spiral out of control.
	And the Russians don't want that because they don't want a war.
	It's not that they're afraid of NATO. They're afraid of having a war because it will inevitably mean loss of life, destruction of all kinds of cities and all the rest of it.
	And they don't want that.
	And frankly, I find that the Russian attitude is far more humane Thank you.
	because ultimately, who is suffering now?
	Europeans and soon enough, Americans.
	And I follow a lot of channels on YouTube of different people.
	Some have very big channels.
	Some have microscopic channels of less than 1,000 people who are talking about the situation on the ground in the United States and different regions of the United States.
	And they are all talking the same thing.
	There aren't, you know, goods necessary, technologically sophisticated devices that are on order for months on end, and probably nobody's going to see them.
	I mean, you already see in the United States, things are going south in a big way.
	We have seen...
	Yes, Gonzalo, just want to add, in the last week, I have seen personally in Central Texas a very astonishing drop-off of consumer demand at restaurants and retail stores.
	And I spoke with some restaurant owners that I know and some retail workers, and I asked them, what's going on?
	Where is everybody?
	And literally, one of them said to me, well, they stopped showing up this week, and we think they've all run out of money.
	And I said, yeah, I think you're exactly right.
	You know, the stimulus money has run out and they're spending too much on food because of inflation and too much on energy, which in the U.S. energy is still a fraction of what it is in Germany or France or the U.K. And yet the Americans are running out of money.
	And we've seen those warnings, the Electrolux company in Europe warning, you know, they make appliances warning they're shutting down partial operations because of a drop in demand all across Europe as well.
	Yeah, what's happening too is that the Biden administration is doing everything that it can to keep the status quo.
	And they're doing things that are very short-sighted.
	For instance, there are strategic petroleum reserves.
	They're hitting that one like a piggy bank, you know?
	And that's how they're trying to keep the prices of gasoline relatively low.
	And whenever the price of gas goes down a little bit, a few cents here and there, they're like, oh, see, it's a great victory for the Biden administration.
	But it's like taking a little bit of morphine to ease the suffering.
	Yeah, you feel all right for a little bit, but the pain is still there, and it's not going away anytime soon.
	And so, yeah, I mean, it's incompetence.
	And here's something that I have a big disagreement with a lot of people, because a lot of people think that this is a controlled demolition, that this is a World Economic Forum, Great Reset Plan, stuff like that.
	I disagree.
	I think it's a stupidity.
	These people don't know what they're doing.
	Look, you had this Harbeck fellow in Germany.
	He's the vice chancellor and minister of economics.
	You know, he actually said, and this is the minister of economics here, he actually said that companies can shut down but keep on paying the workers.
	And I'm like, do you understand how basic economics work?
	Yeah, that's an interesting theory.
	Yeah, it's fascinating if you're high on drugs and from Mars at the same time, because it doesn't make sense on this earth when you're sober.
	Because a company that shuts down, that doesn't produce anymore, it has to fire its workers.
	It can't afford them.
	It's as simple as that.
	What are you talking about?
	But these people live in fantasy land because they have never run a business.
	We collectively in the West decided that we were going to have this professional political class that has no experience in the real world.
	I mean, think of somebody like Harry Truman.
	Whatever you might think of Harry Truman.
	What was he?
	He was a haberdasher.
	And he got into politics.
	He was a small businessman, got into politics.
	Whenever he could, he would go back to Missouri, and he would interact with his people of his town.
	He knew their concerns, their priorities.
	He was president of the United States, eventually.
	But he was not detached from the people.
	Whereas the professional political class that we have today is completely detached from the people.
	They have no experience in the real world.
	They never ran a small business.
	Most of them have never been in the military.
	And they are making economic decisions, military decisions, without any kind of even baseline background that they can draw upon.
	And so this notion that it's a great, you know, conspiracy and all the rest of it.
	Look, you and I, we have enough real world experience to know how difficult it is to get, say, six people to agree on some course of action.
	It's incredibly difficult.
	It's like wrangling cats, for crying out loud, you know?
	And so the notion that there's this big cabal, that they're all in lockstep, and this is part of a controlled demolition.
	I'm sorry, I don't buy it because I know how people are.
	And there's always somebody who disagrees, there's always somebody who doesn't want to go along with the program, and they do some random other things that goes directly against this great plan that you've got that might even be sensible.
	Okay?
	And so the notion that there's a big cabal?
	No.
	But the notion that these people are idiots, and that they have fed into each other's hysteria?
	That makes sense.
	Because you've seen a hysterical crowd.
	You've seen how people, all squeezed in together, They, like, feed into each other's hysteria, and it becomes this spiral of hysteria, and they keep on doing stupid things that are destructive to themselves, let alone the people around them, because they get locked into this crazy-ass mindset.
	What happened at the very start of this conflict is that they wanted to destroy Russia, and they said, you know, no price is too high, and now they're stuck with this disease.
	This is the best news of the night, in my mind, because I would much rather that Western civilization be run by incompetent idiots who destroy themselves rather than evil globalists who destroy us.
	I agree, but here's the problem.
	See, these people are steering the car.
	That's the problem.
	Right.
	And we're in the backseat holding on for dear life.
	Exactly.
	Without airbags.
	And not only that, they are not going to listen to you.
	They're going to put like a screen between you, i.e.
	repressive measures, to make sure that you can't be a backseat driver telling them what to do because they know better.
	And by the mere fact that they're at the wheel, they think that just because of that, they actually know better.
	Right.
	Yeah, it's a bizarre combination of factors.
	Because it's very easy to believe, it seems to me, that there is a great conspiracy or a cabal because it gives you at least the comfort that there's a plan behind all of this.
	Because that's what happens.
	A lot of times people, especially when they are powerless, as the majority of the people in the West are, they're powerless.
	We're in the back seat.
	We can't do anything.
	A lot of times, people who are powerless, and this has happened to me, we want to think that there's some power that actually has a plan, that we're actually going somewhere.
	Perhaps it's a place that we hate, that we don't want to go to, but at least they have a plan.
	But I'm sorry to say, from my experience, and I've been fortunate enough to interact with extraordinarily rich people, extraordinarily powerful people, because of different business things that I've done and just various reasons.
	I can tell you, these people, they put their pants on one leg at a time, and for the most part, shockingly, they are not very smart.
	You think that they are.
	They're very ambitious, but they're surprisingly stupid and surprisingly locked into their mentality because they tend to repeat what worked for them before.
	Yes, that's right.
	Like sanctions.
	Yeah.
	Not even like sanctions, to give you a notion.
	When they impose sanctions on Iran, for instance, it hurts the Iranians, but the Western economies were not that exposed.
	So there was no harm to them, and it seemed that they were doing something.
	Do you see?
	Because a lot of times these leaders who are incompetent think that you have to do things to show that you're actually leading.
	Which is a great difference with Vladimir Putin.
	Putin is a very sharp customer because he has the nerve to many times realize that not doing something is the smarter move.
	And to give a specific example, a few years ago in the Syrian conflict, the Turks, Turkey, Erdogan's forces shot down a Russian fighter.
	And what did the Russians do?
	What did the Kremlin do?
	What did Putin do?
	Nothing.
	He didn't do anything.
	And you would have thought, he shot down, deliberately shot down a Russian fighter.
	And what did he do?
	He didn't do anything.
	He didn't burn any bridges.
	He didn't You know, sanction Turkey, you know, or something like that.
	No, no, no.
	He just ignored it, let it slide.
	And later, of course, because he had let this issue slide, he can negotiate with Erdogan and do all kinds of other things that are beneficial to his position, you see?
	But the Western leadership class feels that they have to do something.
	In every circumstance, they always have to do one better than the opponent.
	Yes, like the West bombing the Chinese embassy in Kosovo in 1999, I think, whenever that was, and then saying, whoops, right, like you didn't mean to bomb the Chinese embassy.
	They always upped the ante.
	They never realize that sometimes a great leader has to not do anything, has to ignore something.
	They don't understand that.
	It's a peculiar mentality of Western leadership.
	They see some crisis and they say, we have to react.
	And in that reaction, you can get into much more trouble than if you just let it slide.
	Now, there's one more question I must ask you, and I think this is important for the context of where you are and the humanitarian side of your belief system and mine as well.
	But I just want to thank you in advance for taking all this time.
	You've spent way more time than I asked for.
	It's just so much fun.
	And like I said, I'm all yours because I've got nothing better to do with this.
	Everything is shut down, so I'm fine.
	I enjoy these conversations.
	And I should say, the one thing I miss since you have started the roundtable is that you do fewer of your own videos.
	And I miss those videos.
	I'm writing a book.
	That's why.
	Oh, really?
	Okay.
	Yeah.
	And when I'm done with it, I'm going to hit you up.
	And you're going to have to promote it.
	I'm going to have to promote it.
	Remember that time that I took all that time to talk to you?
	We'll come back.
	We'll have you back on.
	You owe me.
	Yeah, we'll have you back on.
	We'd love to talk about your book.
	Keep us posted about when that's going to be available.
	Yeah, I'm working on it diligently as hard as I can.
	That's why I haven't been posting videos.
	But I am doing the roundtables.
	Alright, excellent.
	So, yes, the question I want to ask you is about the people of Ukraine.
	Now, you live in Ukraine.
	You know a lot of Ukrainian people.
	I I know people, some people, not as many as you, but I know some people who live in Ukraine, in Kiev in particular, extraordinary individuals, loving families, good people, good humans.
	You and I care about the people of Ukraine.
	I know you do because we've spoken about this before.
	In your opinion, what is the best outcome to prevent suffering and to help the people of Ukraine?
	How can that ever happen?
	Okay, just before I answer that very good question, let me give a little background to your listeners so that they know why I'm in Ukraine.
	I mean, why is this Chilean slash American writer in Ukraine, right?
	And for a very simple reason.
	My wife is Ukrainian.
	I met her when I was living in Paris in the early 2010 and 2011, and she was the au pair of some college friends.
	And, you know, typical, we met, fell in love.
	We have a couple of kids.
	They're small.
	They're seven and nine.
	And so that's why I've been coming off and on to Ukraine since 2012.
	And I've been living here semi-permanently since 2016.
	I spent some time since 2016 in London and in Amsterdam because of business that I had.
	But yeah, I have a permanent home in Kharkov, which is the region where my wife is from.
	And so, because there are some people who have slandered me saying that, oh, I'm like a sex tourist here in Ukraine.
	Not at all.
	You know, I mean, no.
	The reasons for my being here are not pernicious in any way.
	So that said, I just wanted to give that background so people understand who they're talking to.
	And I know Ukrainians because they're a family of my wife.
	They're acquaintances I've come to know, some business acquaintances I've come to know.
	And so that's my background.
	I don't hang out with the expat crowd here because a lot of the expat crowd here are sex tourists or trying to score some Ukrainian girl because they're incredibly attractive.
	I mean, they really are.
	I mean, all the stereotype is true.
	Stereotypes are stereotypes because they tend to be true.
	And so anyway, I'm giving that background to answer your question, and your question stood my mind.
	Oh, how is this affecting the Ukrainian people?
	Yeah, and how do we help end the human suffering of the people of Ukraine?
	Well, the short answer is nobody can't.
	I mean, it's too late for that.
	There was a huge exodus of people from Ukraine, mostly pro-Western educated Ukrainians, who fled to the West.
	And because of the rules that the Zelensky regime imposed that Military-aged men could not leave.
	That is, young men could not leave.
	There has been a drain of women.
	And they have gone to Europe.
	And of course, what naturally happens, they find a place for themselves to live, a job of some sort.
	I mean, we've gone on seven months.
	Nobody's going to be unemployed for seven months waiting to come back to their country.
	And so they found places for themselves in the West.
	And they're not coming back.
	And it's estimated, credibly estimated, Of an original population of about 45 million people, at least 12 million had left.
	Wow.
	That's extraordinary.
	Yeah.
	I mean, think of it as if it were the United States, it would be almost 100 million people leaving the United States.
	And so the Ukrainians who have left, a good 3 to 4 million left to Russia.
	And they've made their lives in Russia.
	They're going to continue to live there.
	And the remaining 8 million or so, 7 million or so have gone to the West, principally to Poland, but all spread out throughout Europe.
	They're not coming back.
	It's as simple as that.
	And they're not coming back.
	Here in Kharkov, I arrived here.
	I was in Kiev at the start of the special military operation because I happened to be there on business.
	I arrived the night before the start of this war.
	And I spent a week there, and then I came down here on the 1st of March, and I've been here ever since.
	And in March, Kharkov was a ghost town.
	And more people have come back.
	The people who have come back are ethnic Russians.
	Now, this whole region, be they ethnic Ukrainians or ethnic Russians, they all speak Russian.
	So they're not going to have any kind of problem reintegrating themselves into Russian society if Russia were to eventually, as I believe they will, take over this city and this whole region.
	And so my thinking is that the The Ukraine, as it was known, is gone forever.
	It's never coming back.
	Because all these territories that the Russians have captured, they're going to hold on to them.
	And they're going to increase their territorial gains, inevitably, as they chase the Zelensky regime forces and wind up annihilating all of them to a man.
	And so they are going to take over a huge chunk of this country.
	And what remains of it, this rump Ukraine state...
	The Russians will make sure that the government in charge will be extremely friendly to Russia, much like the Lukashenko regime in Belarus is to Russia.
	That's what the Russians wanted.
	They wanted a buffer state.
	They did not want NATO on its doorstep, on its borders.
	And they were willing to put up with the Baltic states, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, because for several reasons.
	Number one, they're fairly small.
	And the geography is such that Russia could sweep in instantly and take it over in like an afternoon because it's very small.
	When you look at a map, it seems larger than it actually is.
	But when you look at a globe, Yeah, it's because of the map historians, right, up north, yeah.
	Yeah.
	You see how small these countries really are.
	They could dig it over in the afternoon.
	I mean, all of that territory of those three nations is less than half of what they took over, the Russians took over, on the first day of operations here in Ukraine.
	Okay, and there's that factor, number one.
	The second factor is that half the population of those republics are ethnic Russians, right?
	And so there's that.
	And third reason is that those countries are indefensible by NATO. Because of the geography and how they're situated and the folded gap, there is no way that NATO could defend those three countries if Russia decided to take them over.
	Geographically, it's not an issue of will or manpower or ship power.
	It's just geography.
	There is simply no way that they could defend it.
	And so, because of these three factors, the Russians were fine with the Baltic states being part of NATO because it meant nothing.
	It was a fig root.
	But they weren't willing to have it in Ukraine.
	So they are not going to let that happen.
	The rump Ukraine state that remains, which part of it might ward on Russia, well, that rump Ukraine state is going to be a satellite state.
	This is the direction of travel.
	How long this will take?
	It might take a few months.
	It might take a couple of years.
	But it's going to happen.
	There would be a state without the southern ports and without Odessa, obviously.
	Yeah.
	Because Odessa, for those of you who don't know, Odessa is a very important historical and religious city to the Russians.
	And so there are two things I know about Odessa.
	Number one, they are not going to assault the city and level it.
	Never.
	They would never do that because of these long-standing historical and religious ties to Russia.
	Number one.
	Number two, it will become part of Russia.
	Inevitably.
	There is nothing that NATO or the angels or the aliens can do to stop that.
	They are going to take it over.
	It's just going to be a matter of time.
	This slow-grinding process that they are embarked on.
	And any kind of setback that the Russians experience, like this offensive in Katarov, You have to look at the context overall.
	Is it an actual setback?
	Did they actually lose?
	Or did they, in fact, kind of like win?
	My estimation is that, to come back, to circle back in the famous phrase of Jen Psaki, to circle back to the original start of this conversation, The Kharkov Offensive achieved Russian goals, and it achieved relatively little to improve the situation of Ukraine in terms of territory gain, and in terms of loss of men and equipment, it was a catastrophe.
	I mean, it really was.
	And there's no other way to look at it if you look at it cold-bloodedly, unemotionally, realistically.
	If you buy into the propaganda, it was a great Ukrainian victory.
	And if the Zelensky regime has more of these fantastic victories, the Russian army is going to be marching in Kiev by the end of the year.
	So, you know, the Zelenskyne regime cannot afford more of these great victories, but apparently they are embarked on another couple of offensives in Zakharovia, and the Russians are preparing.
	They set up the Third Army Corps.
	In Rostov-on-Don, which is a city on the very end of the Sea of Azov.
	When you look at the map, you see Crimea, which is an insula jutting into the Black Sea.
	To the immediate right of it, to the east of it, right in the crook of it, is the city of Rostov-on-Don.
	And that's where they assembled this huge army, the Third Army Corps.
	And they've deployed those men to reinforce the southern front and They're going to take the offensive and they're going to convince me of it, like they did before, like they did in Kharkov.
	This is the danger of believing your own PR. You start doing things that are extremely damaging to your own cause, instead of doing the right thing, which is negotiating, which is ending this conflict.
	But as I said, It's too late.
	The Russians will not believe any attempt to negotiate.
	The Russians have said outright that they will not have any kind of meeting between Zelensky and Putin to end this conflict.
	They're just not going to.
	And on top of that, they don't even believe that Zelensky is the real power.
	In Ukraine, they are under no illusions.
	They know that this war is being run out of the U.S. State Department.
	They know it.
	And so they're not going to talk to Zanzi.
	They know he is literally an actor, because he actually is an actor.
	And in this conflict, he is a puppet.
	And you don't negotiate with a puppet.
	You negotiate with a puppet master.
	And the Americans, because of their hubris, their pride, They are never going to roll back, let alone negotiate with the Russians.
	And so this conflict is going to grind on.
	And so the people of Ukraine are going to suffer.
	And the people who are in the occupied areas...
	I see the videos.
	Everybody's seen the videos.
	The Russians have come in strong with Yes, right.
	You don't hear about it.
	Yeah, you know why?
	Because if you see video now coming out of Mariupol right now, they have rebuilt half the city.
	They are rebuilding it from the ground up.
	And everybody who lost an apartment, you know, an apartment building that got completely obliterated by artillery and whatnot, they leveled it and rebuilt it with remarkable speed.
	And, of course, the Russians, you know, they do their own propaganda.
	And they show these videos of, like, you know, some...
	Some elderly lady and her daughter and granddaughter.
	Here are the keys, madam.
	This is your new apartment.
	That's beautiful.
	It's got all the modern conveniences and it's freshly painted.
	I mean, brand new.
	You see the opera house.
	You see the hospitals.
	You see all the stuff in Mariupol that seemed to have been destroyed.
	The Russians are rebuilding it because they've got the money because of the sanctions.
	But another key is that that woman this winter in Mariupol, she'll be able to afford her electricity bill while the wealthy Parisians or Berlin residents will be dying from starvation and exposure because they can't pay their own bills.
	I was even having a conversation with someone I know who lives in Kiev.
	I said, would you rather be in Kiev this winter or would you rather be in Paris?
	I'd rather be in Kiev because we can go to the countryside and all the traditional homes, they have wood stoves in them.
	Yeah.
	You know, we can heat.
	Yeah.
	Yeah.
	And on top of that, the Kiev residents won't have to worry because the Russians aren't going to cut off their gas.
	Yeah.
	Because, again, they have no intention of harming the civilians.
	All this talk that civilians are suffering, no, no.
	They only suffered because the Zelensky regime placed its forces right next to apartment buildings.
	You have to keep in mind, all the structures here in Ukraine, they're built like fortresses.
	They are built.
	Big cinder blocks, but not like the hollow ones.
	Big bricks, you know?
	The whole place is built like that.
	It's built like a fortress.
	And that's why the Zelensky regime forces would hide in industrial zones.
	Like, for instance, in Mariupol.
	Why were they all in the Azov steelworks?
	Well, because that thing is like a fortress.
	It was built in Soviet times.
	To withstand a nuclear blast.
	So it is de facto a fortress.
	People ask, why is the Russian offensive in the Donbass taking so long?
	Well, because that area is heavily industrialized.
	When you look at a map, not just a blank map, but a geomap like Google Earth, You see that area, that it's heavily industrialized with all of these buildings of various sorts.
	That area in Ukraine, by the way, a little tidbit that's useful to know, the Donbass region, the territories that Russia has captured, the Donbass, Kherson, all that, that represented 85% of Ukraine's GDP. Oh, I did not know that.
	85%.
	Yeah, that's a little tidbit that people don't talk about very much, because that area was the industrialized zone of Ukraine.
	And also, it happens to have the best farmland.
	And so the reason it's been the slow grind from the point of view of the Russians is that the Ukrainians have heavily fortified that area, and there is a natural fortification of all of these buildings.
	And so that's why it's a slow-growing process.
	It takes time to, you know, shell the enemy forces, whoever is their enemy.
	If they are in a fortified position, it takes a while to shell them with artillery fires and airstrikes Until they finally start pulling back or they've been so substantially reduced that you can send in your infantry to take over that territory.
	It's not something like in the movies.
	In a movie, the war is over in two hours because it's a movie.
	But in the real war, it takes weeks and months.
	And so it's not surprising at all.
	That it's taken the Russians this long to grind through all of these fortifications and all these defenses.
	Either actually purpose-built fortifications, which the Ukraine side, the Lanty regime, and the Poroshenko regime before it was doing for the past eight years because they anticipated this war.
	Everybody knew this war was coming, by the way.
	And the natural fortifications of these apartment buildings, these hospitals, and all these areas have been cleared out.
	I mean, the civilians are long gone.
	They left ages ago.
	And so when they say, oh my God, they destroyed a hospital.
	No, they destroyed a hospital which had weeks or months before been abandoned.
	Yeah, not a hospital full of patients.
	Yeah.
	Yeah.
	And it's been taken over by Zelensky regime forces.
	There are videos on Telegram channels all over the place where you see Zelensky regime forces hanging out in kindergarten classrooms with the decorations of the little kids and all.
	Do you see a child anywhere nearby or a teacher?
	No, they're all gone.
	Long gone.
	And so it's just PR. So anyway, it takes a while to grind through.
	But the big line, the last speed bump is going to be a town called Kramatorsk.
	Once they overrun that, that is really going to be the end of the war insofar as the Donbass is concerned.
	And you have to keep in mind, after Kramatorsk, it's flat cow country.
	And it's indefensible.
	And so that's going to be the big turning point.
	And that will happen in the next month or two.
	And then we're going to see a serious action.
	And a final point insofar as the military issue is concerned.
	A lot of people say, oh, in winter you can't fight.
	That's weird.
	What about 1943?
	Last I heard, snow was not some magic fairy dust that would destroy a tank.
	I never heard that.
	That's new to me.
	It's snow, cold, these guys are prepared.
	Okay, so it's people don't know what they're talking about.
	Yeah, well, I mean, the Russians have proven again and again they can fight in the winter.
	In fact, they can fight vastly superior militarized forces effectively in the winter.
	And what's really interesting is I would recommend people check out a guy called Larry Johnson.
	He's got a website called Sonar21.
	He's a former CIA analyst, and he's a dissident.
	He doesn't buy the narrative at all.
	He looks at things realistically, and he's a very, very smart pessimist.
	And he has this website, sonar21.com, where he has these daily blog posts, and he talks about the misperceptions of the West insofar as this conflict is concerned.
	And I highly recommend it.
	Okay.
	Yeah, great.
	Well, we'll check that out.
	And finally, I want to recommend your channel again.
	Also, Gonzalo Lira, that's L-I-R-A, the second, or I-I. I'm sorry, I have trouble figuring out the best way to describe that.
	But folks, that's Gonzalo's channel on YouTube.
	And Mr.
	Lira, I just want to thank you.
	It's always fascinating speaking with you.
	And you've taken a tremendous amount of time.
	This has been highly informative.
	I can't thank you enough.
	I don't even know how long we've been going.
	It's been an hour and a half, actually.
	Really?
	Wow.
	I talk a lot.
	I mean, it doesn't seem that long to me either, because I still have questions for you, but I tell you what.
	Look, why don't you hit me up with that?
	I mean, like, in for a penny, in for a pound.
	I'm perfectly fine to go.
	I've got coffee that'll last me most of the morning, so I'm good.
	I've got coffee and cigarettes, so keep on trucking, man.
	What other thing is on your mind?
	I'm curious.
	Okay, all right.
	Well, if you don't mind, then let me ask you something else on my list.
	Let me bring in, let me play devil's advocate for a second about the Western narrative.
	So, for those listening, the Western narrative hyperventilating in the Western press has been that this counteroffensive by Ukraine has shown that Russia has been defeated already, and that Ukrainian forces are very close to the Russian border, and that as a result, oh, and by the way, the assumption is that What has happened is Russia's best effort, like Russia's running at 100% with the best troops, the best equipment, the best missile systems.
	This is the best they can do.
	And then the theory is then that because of this frustrating failure, Putin is going to lash out in an irrational way, and the world needs to make sure that Putin doesn't do something crazy at this point because he's been so defeated.
	That's the narrative.
	Even on Fox News, by the way.
	Yeah.
	Totally wrong.
	Totally incorrect.
	I'm incorrect on all kinds of ways.
	They don't even realize what's really going on in the Donbass, because the Donbass is the eastern area, right?
	And people are under the assumption that it's Russian troops that are fighting.
	It's actually not.
	And this is going to be something that a lot of people are not going to quite understand.
	But you see, the soldiers, most of the soldiers, not all, But most of the soldiers that are fighting in the Donbass are not Russian soldiers.
	The Russians are providing artillery, air support, intelligence, command and control.
	The actual soldiers fighting are the Donbass militia, the actual Russian army.
	As people are starting to realize this, I mean, this isn't commented because it hasn't been obvious and sometimes hard to figure out.
	But it seems that what has happened is in the Donbass and Mariupol, it was mostly DPR, that is Donetsk People's Republic and Lugansk People's Republic militiamen.
	Who have been doing the actual fighting in the Donbass.
	They're the ones who have been bearing the brunt of the fighting.
	In the Kursov front and the Zaporozhye front, that has been Russian military, Russian army.
	Because they came out of Crimea, and they're professional contract soldiers.
	They're top of the line people.
	I mean, people you do not want to mess with.
	But in the Donbass, the soldiers who are on the ground actually fighting are, for the most part, DPR and LPR militiamen.
	And also, the Russians have very cleverly, it seems to me, used what's known as a Wagner Group, after the composer Richard Magner.
	The Wagner Group, which are basically military contractors that the Russians have.
	And also Chechen fighters.
	Okay?
	Now, it's very interesting.
	There's a lot of commentary about this.
	And this might be a minutia, but your audience might be interested in this.
	See, the Wagner group, it seems, because this is kind of shadowy and the Russians don't put out press releases about them, It seems that they are basically former Russian soldiers and also soldiers from other places in the Russian territory, because they're not just ethnic Russians.
	They're from different ethnicities in Russia, because Russia is a huge country.
	It has all kinds of ethnicities, right?
	Muslims and whatnot.
	The Chechen fighters are Muslim.
	And so what the Wagner Group seems to be is the equivalent of the French Foreign Legion, okay, or the equivalent of the British Sikh fighters.
	These guys are razors.
	I mean, they are razors.
	These guys are tough, hardened soldiers.
	A lot of combat experience in different places.
	And it seems that the Russians use them as what's known as a stiffening agent.
	You know like when you have like a wheel that's made out of carbon fiber, but you put a little bit of tin in the middle of it and it stiffens it.
	It's like rebar.
	You know, concrete on its own is fairly brittle.
	But if you put steel rods in it, it becomes impenetrable, right?
	And the steel by itself, it's fairly strong, but it's just a little stick.
	But if it's surrounded by concrete, it's incredibly hard.
	That's how they're using the Wagner Group.
	That's how they're using the Chechen fighters.
	The Chechen fighters are nobody to mess with, okay?
	They are tough hombres, right?
	And so that's the force that they've been using in the Donbass.
	And that should scare anybody, because these guys know what they're doing.
	And so consistently, you start seeing that in the Donbass region, when there's an attack, it's usually led by Chechen fighters or the Wagner group.
	And these guys are the tip of the spear.
	And they are extremely effective.
	And to go back to the main point is that, see, for the Russians, this has been a fairly reduced operation in terms of manpower.
	It's hard to believe.
	But they haven't used that many troops of their own.
	And the troops that they have used, they've concentrated them in Kursan and Zaporizhia, the south of the country.
	Rather than in the east, in the Donbatch region.
	And this is something that's really interesting because all of a sudden you start to realize, hey, then the Russians have a lot more troops in reserve and their casualties, the Russian casualties, Russian army casualties, are fairly low.
	The Russians, after this offensive, as I said at the beginning, insofar as the Kharkov offensive, they had pulled out the majority of their people there because the Izium position, it wasn't that it was no longer tenable.
	It was pointless to hold it.
	And so they pulled back.
	They had maybe 1,000, 2,000 troops that weren't even troops, combat troops.
	They were basically military police and they annihilated the Ukraine offensive to the tune of 4,000 dead, perhaps twice that number of incapacitated And so they're doing it on the cheap.
	And so the Russians are not desperate at all.
	And the notion that Vladimir Putin is going to panic, first of all, he's not a guy who panics.
	You don't get to be the president of Russia with all the internal politics going on and all the...
	Intrigue and whatnot.
	You never get to be the president for 20-odd years if you panic.
	That guy doesn't panic.
	He doesn't panic over anything.
	And so the notion that he's panicking because of this great loss, it's laughable.
	Because number one, there was no great loss.
	They lost territory, big deal.
	Like you said before, on a chessboard, you're happy to give up some squares here and there if you're taking out the pieces of your opponent.
	And that's what happened.
	And so he's not panicking.
	It's the West that's panicking.
	And this is something very interesting, because you start to realize that most of the time, it's the West that is projecting onto the Russians their own fears, their own frustrations, their own panic, because they're panicking, and with good reason, because they screwed the pooch.
	Yes, yes, exactly.
	And we've seen that again and again throughout this conflict.
	Now, I'm going to ask to wrap it up here just out of the interest of our listeners, too, but I want to make sure that we have you back, especially as your book comes to fruition.
	Are you able to share a title yet, or is it too early for that?
	It's a little too early for that.
	But it's not about the war.
	It's not about a war.
	It's a separate issue, but it ties into the war.
	The ultimate reasons for the war.
	Because I've...
	I'll delve into a little personal background.
	I hope this doesn't sound arrogant or like I'm full of myself.
	I mean, I am full of myself, but not that full of myself, okay?
	So, if I may indulge in the patience of both you and your audience.
	I was fortunate enough to be raised in a fairly well-to-do background, and I was expected to go to the best universities and get a solid position in leadership class.
	I did.
	I went to an Ivy League university.
	I went to Dartmouth.
	I had opportunities to be part of the program.
	I was offered a position at Goldman Sachs back in the day.
	Wow.
	And, yeah, I could have done that life, but instead I decided to be a writer in Hollywood, and then I published some novels, and then I just went into business for myself.
	And I made a very decent living, but I had the opportunity to know a lot of people of the leadership class, because a lot of the people of the leadership class have my background, or I have their background.
	I know more or less where they're coming from, okay?
	And so what I'm writing is this extended...
	It's actually a series of books.
	It's four books.
	And one of them is about the leadership class.
	The leadership class in the West.
	And the causes of why they are detached from the people.
	And one of the things that I want to emphasize is that the leadership class doesn't have anything in common with the common people of the West.
	They don't understand them.
	And in fact, they view them as inferior.
	They view them as people without the right credentials.
	And this leadership class, they live by credentialism.
	By having the right credential from the right university.
	One of the things that frustrates them a great deal is that they can't dismiss me because I went to an Ivy League school.
	I have their background.
	I'm not an idiot.
	I'm not that big of an idiot.
	You know what I mean?
	And so they are totally sealed off from the people.
	And they view the people of the West much like...
	Colonizers.
	Like conquerors.
	Like occupiers.
	And they're afraid of the people.
	You have to understand that.
	Because they view the people with contempt.
	Because they do.
	I've seen it.
	I've seen their attitudes.
	And we all have.
	The attitude of the leadership class.
	I'm not talking about the political leadership class.
	I'm talking about the entire leadership class.
	The entire leadership cadre of the Western democracies.
	The people in industry.
	The people in the C-suites.
	The people in media.
	The people in their entertainments.
	They view the people with contempt.
	They look down upon them.
	And at the same time, and this is key, they're afraid of them.
	Never forget that.
	They are very afraid of people.
	And one of the things that really scares them is the fact that the people of the United States are so heavily armed.
	I mean, everybody's got a gun, which makes complete sense because, you know, North American continent was an open continent, you know, and you needed to have a gun.
	And so the, not merely the tradition, but the need to have a weapon has always been there.
	I was in Alaska one time years ago.
	I spent a lot of time in Alaska.
	Driving around, I went everywhere.
	I went to Dead Horse on the far northern shore of Alaska, Anchorage, Fairbanks, the whole kit and caboodle.
	And the thing is, even the most leftist guy out of Alaska was heavily armed because there were bears.
	He needed them, right?
	And so the point is that the Western leadership class is terrified of the people and terrified especially of the American armed population.
	Yeah.
	And so what I believe is going to happen when you're seeing this is repression, repression on an unprecedented scale.
	And there's something else, too, that people don't seem to realize that they ought to be paying attention to is that the police forces in most of the United States, they are not representative of the people.
	In fact, they are paid by the federal government.
	You'd be surprised if you start looking into the details of how the police forces are financed.
	And they're financed by federal grants, federal monies.
	And ultimately, you owe your allegiance to whoever assigns your paycheck.
	And the local police forces, the professional police forces in the United States, for the most part, they're not even from that area.
	They're hired from away, and they move to the town to police it.
	And so they don't have any point of contact with people.
	So people in the United States ought to understand that your local police, they're not your friends.
	They are federal law enforcement in all but name.
	Mm-hmm.
	And that is deliberate, because they are afraid of the people.
	That's something that a lot of people, hardworking, decent people who have not had any exposure to these elites, does not understand, but should internalize, of how afraid they really are of the people.
	We've seen recently Homeland Security and Mayorkas, who's the chief of that, saying that anybody who doesn't agree with the government is a, quote, extremist.
	So if you disagree with any narrative, he says if you get narratives off the internet that contradict official narratives, then you're an extremist.
	That's exactly what you're talking about.
	Yeah.
	But I always ask, well, which government narrative should we believe today?
	And which government of the world?
	The narrative of Belgium?
	It's the narrative of the day.
	Yes.
	Who can keep track, though?
	You've got to believe the lie that they tell you every morning.
	What's over that life?
	Yesterday they said that the sky is green, and today they say the sky is purple.
	You've got to tell the line, man, or else it's true.
	These people are like that.
	But you have to understand something that...
	People who have not had exposure to the leadership classes do not understand, and it's the following.
	Number one, they are not particularly smart in the ways that matter.
	They might have high IQ points.
	They might speak several languages.
	Many do.
	They're not stupid in the sense of being dum-dums, of being sub-100 IQ points.
	No, no, no.
	A lot of these people are very, very smart.
	But the thing is, see, they don't have judgment because they have not had any life experience.
	They've only had the experience of being in this leadership bubble that's separated from the rest of the people.
	And so they're afraid of them because we're always afraid of those things that we are unfamiliar with.
	And so they are afraid of the common people.
	What has led them to success is not sticking out and saying something that goes against the flow of everybody else.
	No, they've gotten ahead by doing what everybody else is doing.
	And I can give you a specific example, which is really interesting.
	For various reasons, I've had to deal with hedge funds.
	Sometimes I put money with hedge funds back when I was running money, but that's not important for this conversation.
	What's important is that, see, these hedge funds, right?
	If you look down and drill down at their investment strategies, they're almost all identical.
	Now, the people who run these hedge funds, they all come from this leadership class.
	I call it the ziggurat, you know, the stepped pyramid of different civilizations.
	Because what it is, is that, see, in a ziggurat, you start at the bottom, and you have to climb the steep side of it until you get to, like, a plateau.
	And you think of like, for instance, the first step that you have to get up is be the good boy in high school, in private high school, better yet, and get the good grades and climb that very steep ladder until you get to the first plateau, which is getting into the quote-unquote good college.
	And you're on that plateau for a while with other people like you.
	And then after that, you want to go up the next step, which is also equally steep, to your first career, whatsoever it is.
	So you work as an assistant in some business or some drone in an office somewhere to learn the ropes of the business, but it's really just showing people that you comply.
	And you get to that second step up where you have a solid career, whatsoever that career may be.
	And then there's another one if you want to have leadership positions in political power or corporate power.
	It's a series of steep inclines and then plateaus.
	Think of it like that.
	Now, how do you get up these plateaus?
	You obey.
	You comply.
	You obey.
	You comply.
	You do what everybody else is doing.
	When I would talk to these various hedge funds, I would meet them like 3 in the morning and 3 in the afternoon to have them pitch me whatever strategy they had.
	Ultimately, it was the same strategy.
	They all had the same strategy.
	And you know why?
	They didn't want to deviate from one another.
	They actually asked me what the other hedge funds were, their basic strategy was.
	They wanted to know that they were doing what everybody else was doing.
	So if they screwed up, they could say, oh, well, everybody else was doing it, so that's why I was doing it.
	They would rather fail as a group than be individually successful but be alone.
	You see what's going on, the mentality of it.
	And they are failing as a group of nations.
	Yes, exactly.
	They're lemmings.
	I insist people don't understand this.
	There is a difference between intelligence and independent judgment.
	They are not the same thing.
	You can be a very stupid person in terms of IQ, just not very clever, but have very good judgment.
	You can be very uneducated and have very good commonsensical judgment.
	But this leadership, this ziggurat, it does not reward people for having independent judgment.
	It rewards people for complying and jumping through all these hoops.
	And these hoops, you need to be very smart to jump through the hoop, okay?
	But you don't have to have particularly good judgment.
	In fact, it disincentivizes independent judgment.
	And morals as well.
	You don't need morality.
	Well, it's not only that.
	See, the morality, and that's one of the essays.
	One of the essays is called Ethics, which is precisely this issue.
	You see, morality comes from complying to the expectations and the beliefs of your collective group, whatsoever that collective group may be.
	So if you're one of the people in this leadership class in New York City, or in Washington, or in Palo Alto in California, Your morality, what you consider good, what you consider evil, is what the people around you consider good or consider evil.
	I mean, think of it in these terms.
	See, back in Mesopotamia, you know, the Aztecs, they would do these human sacrifices, right?
	And we think that's horrible.
	It's horrible to, you know, split somebody's chest open and devour their still beating heart at the top of the temple.
	We think that that's insane, right?
	But there were hundreds of thousands of people watching this, and they all thought it was great.
	I mean, look at Apocalypto, the Mel Gibson movie, right?
	Why did everybody think that this was fine?
	Because it was their belief system.
	Their belief system, you know, led them to conclude that sacrificing, you know, enemies or slaves or whomever was good because they would curry favor with the gods.
	And everybody cheered when the high priest would devour the still beating heart of some poor guy that they captured, right?
	And why is that?
	Why did they have that morality?
	Why didn't 100,000 people surround that pyramid and cheer on when this barbarity was taking place?
	Because they all shared that belief system.
	See?
	That collective shared that belief system, which we today, 500 years later, think is horrifying.
	The leadership class, they have a separate and distinct morality from the common people of the United States.
	That's why you have this woke nonsense.
	You and I think that it's crazy.
	It's just nonsense.
	But they think it's good.
	Because all of them share this belief system of wokeness and all the rest of it.
	Critical race theory, and that it's perfectly fine to transition five-year-old children.
	We don't let five-year-old children decide what to eat.
	But we're perfectly fine with allowing them to decide their gender.
	I mean, come on!
	That's insane!
	But just as insane as it is to have a human sacrifice and devour somebody's heart for the sake of bringing a good harvest next spring.
	Well, actually, it has more in common than you might suppose because they both involve mutilating children.
	Yes.
	Well said.
	Yes, exactly right.
	But you see my point.
	Their morality is distinct from the morality of the people they are leading.
	And so they are willing to make the people suffer because they don't think that they are doing evil.
	This is something that you've got to get into your head.
	See, they don't think that they are doing a bad thing.
	They think that what they're doing is the way things ought to be done.
	And that's why it's going to be impossible or extremely difficult to get rid of these people, because they don't think that they're doing anything wrong.
	And so when they see resistance, they view the resistance as evil.
	When Joe Biden gave his famous, you know, Dark Lord of the Sith speech, you know what I'm talking about?
	Yeah.
	When he gave that speech, he basically declared half the population were evil, were enemies of the state.
	He was sincere.
	Or the people who wrote that speech were sincere.
	I mean, the old man is so senile.
	He doesn't know which end is up and where he is.
	But the people who wrote that speech, they believe that.
	And they're sincere in their beliefs.
	They truly believe this.
	They all believe this.
	This is something that people have to understand.
	The common people, the working people, They truly believe that the lower socioeconomic classes in the United States are separate people, that they are contemptible, but they're afraid of them because, of course, there are more of them.
	And you have to understand where these people are coming from.
	Their highest value is to comply with the social expectations that their class has.
	And that's why, for instance, you have so many movies.
	When I started in the movie business, right, back in the mid-90s, I would write some script or whatever, and my aim was to write scripts that would appeal to people.
	And the people buying these scripts had the same notion.
	But what has happened is the professionalization of screenwriting with all these MFA programs.
	And so what happens is that Hollywood studios and production companies will hire somebody who has an MFA degree, a credential, because they no longer have independent judgment.
	They don't know how to judge the worth of a screenplay.
	So they'll hire some MFA buffoon.
	And because of their credential, they'll assume, oh, this script is good.
	And the script is full of this woke nonsense, because that's what they're teaching at universities, a master's of fine arts programs that teach screenwriting.
	And by the way, screenwriting, I can tell you as a professional writer, that was the first job I had, right?
	It's a craft.
	It's like carpentry.
	You don't get good by going to school for carpentry.
	You get good by doing a lot of carpentry, okay?
	It's...
	Yeah, it's with words rather than wood, but it's the same process.
	It's practice.
	Practice makes perfect, but a credential does not make you good.
	And in fact, a credential will make you do, you will be forced to comply with your teacher to get the good grade.
	will not appeal to people, to the mass of people, but will appeal to the same class, the woke class.
	So that's why all these movies are woke nonsense.
	And of course the critics, How did the critics get their job as a critic?
	Well, because they had the right credential from the right degree.
	You see?
	They complied and got the right degree.
	Yeah, exactly.
	You see how it works?
	Yeah, absolutely.
	But the rest of us watching the movie are freaking out.
	Like, how are they depicting this?
	This is insane.
	And, by the way, every action hero...
	Well, I was even...
	Every action hero now has to be a dainty, tiny woman with a 20-inch waist, but she knows jujitsu and firearms and rocket launchers, and she can beat up Navy SEALs effortlessly while there's and she can beat up Navy SEALs effortlessly while there's always a man standing around who's useless.
	Her pal guy, a useless, typically white man, is saying, save me, woman.
	You know, basically like every film is like that now.
	Exactly right.
	And of course, it's not true.
	I mean, there are videos of like some MMA fighter who's like, I mean, he's a tough guy, right?
	And he's like 5'7", 5'8", but I mean, tough as steel, right?
	But he goes up against a 6'4", fat guy who has no training whatsoever.
	The fat guy just literally bumps him with his belly and sends him flying.
	Yeah, of course, because there's a reason that in boxing you have different weight classes.
	Right.
	Size matters, yes.
	Yeah, size matters.
	You know, like quantity has a quality all its own, in Joseph Sullen's famous phrase.
	Yeah, and the thing is, see, these movies have these unrealistic expectations of women, and women internalize this notion.
	And so you see these women, these videos of, you know, home, not home videos, but, you know, random videos from eyewitnesses of some dainty little woman who thinks that she can beat up some guy who's like six inches taller than her and has at least 100 pounds on her.
	Right.
	And...
	And we're supposed to believe that.
	And he, of course, with one wave sense of flying, of course, you know.
	But the woman has internalized a reality that's not real.
	It's a narrative that is not real.
	And it gets her in danger.
	I mean, I saw this recently.
	There was some stuffle out on the sidewalk somewhere.
	And some very attractive, very skinny and small woman got into the mix of this.
	And one of the men who was there was a bigger guy.
	He just threw her flying.
	She knocked her head.
	I mean, clearly, she was damaged.
	I mean, she was personally injured severely.
	And the guy didn't even tie the hair.
	He just flung her aside.
	And she went flying.
	And who was injured there because of this lack of realism?
	The poor woman, because she was foolish enough.
	To get involved in a street fight of some sort.
	I don't know what the kerfuffle was.
	Apparently her boyfriend was getting into a tussle and whatever.
	And she stuck her nose in there.
	She got seriously injured because she did not have a realistic appraisal of her own limitations.
	She had bought into this...
	This is symptomatic of all of Western culture.
	This happens in finance, this happens in government, and so on.
	But I'm waiting for the woke remake of Rambo.
	It will be starring a transgender.
	It'll be called Mambo.
	It's Mam, you know, and she'll have a bow, and it'll be kicking ass as a transgender.
	I'm sure that's coming.
	Yeah, of course.
	How can I put it?
	All of this underscores the irreality, the detachment from reality of the leadership class.
	And, you know, there's also something else, too.
	Just to go back to entertainment, I mean, that's where I started out from.
	You know, in entertainment, it has, like you said, the woman who knows everything and knows all the answers and is so calm and cool and collected, which is completely unreal, and the man who is useless and Now, that notion of the man being useless, it percolates.
	And people always talk about the incels, right?
	The incels are evil, blah, blah, blah.
	And I tend to view the incels and Antifa as two signs of the same coin.
	And hear me out.
	Because Antifa and the incels, they are men, young men.
	People are completely disenfranchised from mainstream society.
	And they've been told repeatedly that a woman can do anything that he can do, that he is nothing special, that he is a fool, he's just excess baggage, he has no worth.
	And so the incels wind up staring at their computer screens, looking at Pornhub videos obsessively and doing, you know, an onamistic existence, which is just pathetic.
	And they're stuck there and they're just feeding on their resentment.
	Whereas the Antifa are equally resentful, but they express their resentment by way of violence.
	And violence and let's not kill ourselves, you know, the whole BLM thing and all of those riots.
	It was very clear that the Democratic National Committee cynically used these Antifa kids who are lost and misguided and semi-brainwashed to be the shock troops I think that a lot of attention directed towards incels is somehow a collective realization that incels represent a potential army of
	opposition against Antifa.
	That's why there's so much hatred towards incels.
	And look at what incels are, the name, involuntary celibate.
	That is, he is not sexually successful.
	The young man who's not sexually successful, he's not socially successful.
	He's not a part of the mainstream culture.
	He's alienated.
	And there's this, you know, like he's evil.
	He's an evil guy.
	I mean, I used to do videos as Coach Red Pill.
	And I've gotten a lot of flack for that because they said it was all about pickup artistry and, you know, seducing girls and safely manipulating them.
	No, my videos are all about giving the practical advice to young men to get on with their lives insofar as having a successful social life.
	I mean, one of my most popular videos, for instance, was a video on how to tip, you know, how to give a gratuity.
	And not just the mechanics of giving the gratuity, but whom should you give a gratuity to?
	And it was a 20-minute video about that, about tipping, okay?
	The whole point of that channel was I was trying to make videos for young men because the origin of the channel, of the videos, is that I'm 54 and my son is seven years old.
	And I figured that by the time he was in his late 20s, 30s, when he would need good advice from an adult, I would be either senile like Joe Biden or just dead, you know, just out of old age or whatever.
	So I did these videos and they garnered an audience and I got 300,000 subscribers.
	It's like a time capsule for your kid.
	That's awesome.
	Yeah.
	Yeah, exactly.
	And it was practical advice.
	Like, one of the videos I did was I discussed, you know, never give a personal loan.
	Because if you give a personal loan, inevitably, you'll wind up, you know, having a fight with that friend or family member, and you'll never talk again, and it'll be a big disaster.
	And I used a case of my own.
	I went like 20 grand to a cousin of my mother's.
	It was a big disaster, you know.
	That's the kind of advice I gave.
	And of course, rather than that, they said, oh, it was all about picking up girls.
	I did do videos about girls, but not about picking them up.
	I was telling them, for instance, don't date a single mother, for instance, if you're a young single guy, because you're going to take on all this additional responsibility that is beyond your purview.
	And what happens if you grow attached to the child of your girlfriend, who's a single mother, and you break up with the girlfriend?
	You've never seen that boy or girl ever again that you've grown attached to because we naturally grow attached to children that are around us because it's part of human nature.
	We want to look after the little kid and make sure that he's okay and all the rest of it.
	I'm not talking about anything perverted or anything.
	I'm not Jeffrey Epstein kind of stuff.
	No, just fatherly type of positive influence for...
	Growth, exactly.
	And I explained why for a single guy with no kids of their own, it was a disaster.
	And you should never do that.
	And, you know, and for instance, another video, I got a lot of slack where I said, don't date a girl who tells you that she has been the victim of sexual assault of some sort.
	Because, and I explained it very clear-headedly, which was, you see, there are two possibilities.
	If you go out on a date with somebody, and she immediately tells you that she was the victim of some sexual assault, rape, or something horrible like that, I said you should not date her for a very simple reason.
	There are two possibilities.
	Either she is telling the truth or she is lying.
	Because people lie about all kinds of stuff.
	And a lot of times we lie to make ourselves more interesting.
	And so if she's lying, then she's making stuff up.
	She's fabulous.
	You don't want to be with somebody like that.
	And don't date her.
	And if she's telling the truth, and it's the first thing she tells you on the first or second date, Then she has psychological problems that you are not prepared to deal with.
	You do not have the training or experience to deal with.
	And if she's bringing it up right away, don't date her because you will not be able to help her.
	And on the contrary, her problems will become your own and it will affect you negatively in a big, big way.
	And so I made that video, for instance, which I would think that most people would think it's insensible.
	Perhaps you could say it's a little cold-blooded, which it is, but you have to be realistic in this life.
	You have to understand your own limitations.
	I'm sure you took a lot of heat for that because the overall culture today is, no, you're supposed to save everybody.
	You're supposed to rescue people around you and take on their trauma because everybody has to be...
	Right.
	That's not fair.
	I mean, like, look at you and I were talking.
	We're a couple of guys talking here.
	And suppose I told you, you know, oh, I have this...
	I don't have this problem, but let's...
	I have this serious heroin problem, man.
	I mean, I need you to help me out.
	Can I crash at your place for a while while I try to wean myself off heroin?
	And I'll do heroin once in a while in the bathroom, but it'll be real quiet.
	What would you say to that?
	Oh, man.
	Heck no.
	Are you kidding me?
	Oh, yeah.
	Yeah, exactly.
	And are you evil?
	No, you're being sensible.
	Remember, this is hypothetical.
	If somebody comes to you and says that they have a serious drug habit, you just met them.
	You met them, I don't know, bowling or...
	You know, at the corporate, you know, weekend baseball or something like that.
	And you get to be friends with somebody.
	You know, you have a great time.
	And then he says, you know, I need somebody to help me out with my heroin addiction.
	You'd be like, I'm sorry, man.
	I mean, I'll get you the number for some good psychiatrist or some, you know, rehab center.
	But I'm not going to let you move into my house and move into my life and potentially wreak havoc.
	Exactly.
	Yeah.
	No, you can't take that on.
	And so I did this video, and oh man, I was like evil incarnate.
	I was like the most evil, evil And it's like, you know, no, it's being sensible.
	But again, like you say, you're expected to save everyone.
	There are, on the one hand, unrealistic expectations on young men that they have to save everybody.
	And on the other hand, contradicting that, there's the notion that, oh, you're an idiot.
	You're a guy.
	You know nothing.
	You're a fool.
	You're stupid.
	You're useless.
	You're just excess baggage.
	Well, we're part of a society where we're always told that everybody is special.
	And I'll take heat for saying this, but matter of fact, some people, not so special.
	In fact, a whole lot of people are not special at all.
	Now, you know, the people listening to this are probably pretty exceptional individuals, especially...
	For the length that we've been talking here, they're interested in thinking, right?
	But the average oblivious person doesn't actually matter.
	Really don't matter.
	No, I mean, look, in statistics, there's what's known as the Pareto distribution.
	And the Pareto distribution is an 80-20 rule, okay?
	That in any group of people, you take, you know, a thousand random people, and 200 of them are going to be fairly exceptional in any quality, you care to name.
	Maybe they run faster, maybe they have better eyesight, maybe they make more money.
	It doesn't matter what the quality is.
	20% is going to be much, much better.
	And the 80% are going to go right on down the line.
	I mean, like, for instance, in my case, I have horrible eyesight.
	I mean, horrible.
	I'm near the bottom of the Pareto curve, right?
	And, you know, my sister, she has better than 20-20 vision.
	She can see, like, Jesus.
	She can read a newspaper from across the room for quite a while, right?
	And so, you see, we are all different, right?
	We are all different.
	And some of us have more qualities or less qualities, as the case may be.
	And a natural part of growing up is bumping up against your limitations and realizing, hey, you know, I'm not good at this.
	Early on as a child, and I remember very clearly in second grade, I realized I was just not a fast runner.
	And there was no way that I would ever be faster.
	Because there were other kids who just smoked me.
	And we're talking seven-year-old kids, eight-year-old kids.
	I forget the age.
	I remember I was in second grade.
	But, you know, the point remains.
	We all have limitations.
	And what's important in education is learning our limitations.
	Just as it's important to learn by discovering our limitations, by bumping up against all the things that we are limited in, We eventually hit upon those things that we're actually good at.
	And we realize, oh, you know, I suck at, my eyesight is terrible and I suck at running, but I'm very good at, in my own case, I'm good at writing.
	You know, I'm good at other things.
	You see?
	But our educational system has become this, you know, a trophy for all, participation trophies.
	And so it's pernicious to children and young men because they never learn their limitations.
	And they become afraid of bumping up against their limitations.
	Good point.
	Their whole lives, they are taught not to bump up against their limitations.
	Because, you know, here's a trophy.
	Don't cry.
	But you see, crying over a failure is a natural part of life.
	And you want to have that happen to you when you're young.
	See?
	Because it's not going to hurt that bad.
	Not when you're working at Goldman Sachs.
	Yeah, exactly.
	And so, like, you know, the story I was telling you about that street scuffle of some sort and this girl, this skinny young woman who's short and skinny and got into the fray as if she was actually going to make a difference, she had not been taught her limitations.
	Right?
	To turn it back to the leadership class, they do not understand their limitations.
	They think that American power, Western power, is limitless and that it has no limits whatsoever and therefore they can do whatever they want.
	And all of a sudden they're shocked and panicked over the fact that the Western power, economic power, is certainly limited, extremely limited.
	And we're seeing this now.
	And it's a failure of our society that we feel bad when the little kid cries because he doesn't win in the 100-meter race.
	He comes in dead last.
	We feel bad for him.
	That's understandable.
	I mean, you would be inhuman if you didn't.
	But what is the correct approach is to explain to them, look, you suck at running.
	Big deal.
	There are lots of other things that you're going to be good at, and you suck at this.
	But instead of doing that, we give them a participation program.
	And we make them feel as good, if not better, than the winner.
	And this also has a pernicious effect on the winner, on the people who are better.
	Because they realize, well, it doesn't matter if I give it my best effort.
	I'm going to get the same medal as the guy who came in last, so I'm not going to really try.
	Why would I bother trying?
	Yes.
	No, it's about trying to push the equality of outcomes to say that no matter what your ability, you all deserve the same rewards or recognition, more importantly, in this area.
	Gonzalo, I hate to interrupt because we've got to wrap this interview up, but we have to continue at some point because this is a fascinating discussion.
	I mean, we started out with Ukraine and Russia, and we went through so many scenarios here, and now we're talking about culture and, you know, essentially philosophy and society.
	You are a fascinating individual.
	I love being able to wrap with you on all these things.
	I take a lot of drugs, man.
	Yeah.
	I'm stoned right now.
	I'm stoned on coffee.
	My caffeine has worn out now.
	It's so late in the morning here in Texas.
	Yeah, I'm sorry.
	I forgot what time it was over there.
	I'm so sorry.
	No, it's quite all right.
	I do this late at night on purpose, but it also allows me to be able to interview people like you who are in Europe in your timeline so you don't have to stay up crazy hours.
	No, it's been my pleasure.
	And I'm so sorry to have kept you up.
	No, this has been incredibly enjoyable.
	I just want to make sure we can do it again, and especially as your book comes out.
	And so, you know, we'll reach out to you to do this again.
	But also, I want to invite you, if you've got something that you're dying to share with us, and I think you'll get a very big reaction from this interview, please reach out and we can get you on, you know, almost any time.
	Sure, it'd be my pleasure.
	Thank you so much.
	That's such a kind offer.
	I very much appreciate it.
	I'm going to take you up on it, Leon.
	Please do.
	You're fool enough to give this incredibly kind invitation, but you're a fool because I'm going to take advantage of it to the hilt.
	So that's a threat.
	That's not a problem, that's a threat.
	Okay.
	All right.
	No, I'm serious about that.
	So please do so.
	My pleasure.
	My real pleasure.
	But you got to give me, you got to post a couple of your own videos.
	Because I'm going into a little bit of Gonzalo Lira video drought right now.
	Yeah, I know, I know.
	Do a couple of things.
	This book has got me totally wrapped up.
	If you want, I'll tell you.
	There are four essays, and it's about, number one, ethics.
	I'm going to finish them simultaneously, because they're just supposed to be one thing, but it's grown into these four book-linked essays.
	The first one is about ethics.
	The second is about industrial society and the pros and cons of it.
	Because we live in an industrial society.
	This industrial society that we have is incredibly efficient in providing us with goods and services and making our lives filled with comfort.
	Common people today live in ways that an ancient king could not dream of living.
	Forget about the technology of iPhones and stuff like that.
	I'm talking about clean water, the best food from all sorts of places.
	Industrial society has been very beneficial, but it's come at enormous costs.
	And so that's the second essay.
	And the third and fourth essays are about the Western leadership class and why they have driven us off a cliff.
	And I'll tell you right now, they're going to be extremely controversial.
	And I'm going to get a lot of slack.
	I'm definitely going to be canceled because of that.
	Well, good.
	And I think you gave us, maybe tonight, here a little bit of a preview of some of the topics you're going to touch on in the books.
	Yeah, because a lot of the stuff I've been chewing on it, you know, munching on it like a cow for months now.
	So, yeah, I can talk about this stuff all day because it's part of these essays that I'm writing.
	But, yeah, I'll take you up on your offer.
	Thank you so much.
	Okay.
	Well, that's excellent.
	So, if you're going to be cancelled, you're going to become, what, the Salman Rushdie of Western culture?
	Is that?
	No, no, no.
	They're going to hate my guts for it.
	I mean, I'm under no illusions.
	And in fact, what I plan to do is I'm going to release these essays for free because I'm interested in people engaging with what I have to say.
	And also because if I try to make any money off of them, I'll be cancelled even quicker.
	But if I just release them for free and have anybody read them and...
	Engage with the ideas that I talk about.
	I think that's the only way that I'll avoid the ban hammer, at least initially.
	Because I think that...
	Look, the title of one of them, of the fourth one, is enough to get me labeled all kinds of nasty things.
	The title alone will be enough to get me cancelled, permanently cancelled.
	And they'll call me the worst names imaginable and all the rest of it.
	Because, you see...
	How can I put it?
	I am not against anybody or anything.
	The kind of life that I live, I can live completely independent from...
	I am literally a lone and drifting Adam in this world, okay?
	And so this affords me a privilege of being able to actually speak my mind and say exactly what I see.
	Because I'm not interested in making up stories of fantastical things.
	I can do that.
	I can write novels, no problem.
	But I'm not interested.
	I'm interested in looking at the world as it actually is and putting that down on paper.
	And that very fact of approaching things as they actually are, and not as we would wish them to be, or as we lie to ourselves that they are.
	Now, I'm interested in the truth, okay?
	As an end in itself.
	And quite frankly, I realize that I have a limited time on this earth, so I might as well use it productively for something worthwhile.
	And so that's why I'm writing these essays.
	And yeah, when they come out, you'll know.
	You'll know.
	Okay.
	There's going to be a lot of manure flung my way.
	It'll be fun, actually.
	So, yeah.
	Well, post them on Substack, and then we can test the free speech capacity of Substack.
	No, no.
	Substack wouldn't allow them.
	No, really?
	Yeah.
	Just for the title.
	Just for the title.
	Wow.
	Okay.
	You've got me wondering.
	That's a really great teaser there, Gonzalo.
	You're actually a really good marketer for a book that's not yet done.
	I suppose so.
	If all goes well, I should have it done by the spring.
	Because it's long.
	It's long, long.
	You'll see it soon.
	I think people will enjoy it.
	I think they'll enjoy these essays.
	If NATO launches artillery, and I mean NATO, if they take out the power grid in your city to shut you up, we'll know why.
	They don't want you to have electricity to finish your book.
	Yeah, it's all about me.
	Because, you know, I could have been in Antarctica, and there'd be a war going on around me.
	They would have melted the ice for you.
	Yeah, exactly.
	Screw global warming.
	Get the liver died in Antarctica.
	Anyway, it's been a delight.
	Absolutely.
	Thank you for taking the time and your thoughts and your courage and all of that, for being uncensored.
	Thank you so much.
	Well, there we go, folks.
	Hope you enjoyed that interview.
	And my apologies.
	I was getting kind of sleepy-eyed at the end of that thing because I was up really, really late Texas time while Gonzalo was enjoying his morning coffee in Ukraine.
	I was like, I can't stay awake.
	But we had a great time, great conversation.
	Hope you enjoyed it.
	Hope you learned a lot from it.
	I'm going to have Gonzalo back.
	We'll talk about what's going on.
	We'll see where things are in the world.
	Overall, I want you to know that both he and I, we pray for the peace of the Ukrainian people.
	We pray for an ending of the suffering.
	We don't want to see any conflict in the world.
	We would rather everybody get along, but it's got to be based on reason.
	It's got to be based on principles of Civilization and civility.
	And you know, we're all enslaved right now under these tyrannical globalist rulers and incompetent national leaders and so on.
	So of course, there's going to be all kinds of human suffering.
	And especially with all the money printing and all the government theft and all the censorship and everything else that's going on, the culture wars, targeting your children, the whole thing.
	I mean, yeah, most of the suffering in the world comes from You know, incompetent rulers who make bad decisions and we'd all be better off if they just left us all alone, frankly.
	But that is not to be.
	In any case, I conduct about five interviews a week.
	With, I think, fascinating people.
	Very informative people.
	If you'd like to check out my other interviews, my channel is on Brighteon.com.
	It's called HR Report, which stands for Health Ranger Report.
	And I've got a channel on Bitchute and also on Rumble.
	And also you can get the podcast audio versions of everything at HealthRanger.com or check out my website, NaturalNews.com.
	Or check out my online store with hundreds of lab-tested organic foods and superfoods and personal care products that we manufacture in Texas.
	That's healthrangerstore.com.
	Thank you for all your support.
	Hope you enjoyed this interview.
	There's a lot more coming.
	And we hope to have Gonzalo Lira back again soon with more commentary.
	Have a great weekend, everybody.
	God bless you.
	Take care.
	A global reset is coming.
	And that's why I've recorded a new nine-hour audiobook.
	It's called The Global Reset Survival Guide.
	You can download it for free by subscribing to the naturalnews.com email newsletter, which is also free.
	I'll describe how the monetary system fails.
	I also cover emergency medicine and first aid and what to buy to help you avoid infections.
	So download this guide.
	It's free.

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