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July 10, 2024 - Health Ranger - Mike Adams
58:18
RUNNING ON EMPTY: Author Alexander Macris joins Mike Adams for powerful discussion...
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Welcome to today's interview here on Brighteon.com.
I'm Mike Adams, the founder of Brighteon, and we've got a special first-time guest for you today.
His name is Alexander McCreese.
He's the author of a book called Running on Empty, How the Eminent Collapse of the Petrodollar System Sets the Stage for World War III, and his website is treeofwoe.substack.com.
That's woe as in W-O-E. Welcome to the show, Alexander McCreese.
It's an honor to have you on.
Thanks so much for having me on.
I'm glad to be here.
I'm happy to have you here.
And as I mentioned to you, we had, well, a friend of mine sent me a link to your book, which I then purchased, Running on Empty, The Eminent Collapse of the Petrodollar System, and how that sets the stage for World War III. So I'd like you to walk us through this.
You can see there, I picked up the book myself.
Walk us through this because, of course, the establishment narrative is that, oh, the petrodollar is going to be fine.
It's good for another 100 years, and you can buy treasury bonds 30 years away, blah, blah, blah.
And don't worry, World War III is never going to happen because the Russians are bluffing.
We, America, we can threaten anything, but everybody else is bluffing.
So how do you counter all that?
Wow.
Do I want to assume that people even know what the petrodollar is, or do we need to actually explain how that works?
Our audience is very well informed on that subject, so yeah, we can skip the basic definitions.
They're already on board.
Okay, great.
So, most people don't understand that in order to sustain the petrodollar, you have to have the ability to project force internationally via control of the seas.
And there's a geostrategic concept of world island versus world ocean that I discuss in the book.
The world island is essentially Africa, Europe, and Asia, with Eastern Europe, Ukraine, and Russia as the heartland of the world island.
And then the world ocean is, of course, the ocean that surrounds it, the Pacific plus the Atlantic, etc.
The United States is a world ocean power.
It's the dominant world ocean power.
Russia and China have come together to become the dominant world island power, which is a geostrategic problem that the United States had always attempted to prevent.
It's the Wolfowitz Doctrine that was set up after the fall of the Soviet Union.
So in order to maintain control over the sea lanes, which is where 90% of all commercial traffic occurs, including energy traffic and petroleum, You need to be able to project power right up to the continents, you need to be able to control the straits and the isthmus, and you need to be able to make amphibious landings where necessary.
Historically, the United States has been able to do that, and it's partly been able to do that by keeping its enemies from uniting and creating a monolith on that world island.
And if you think of China's recent efforts, you know, the great, the New Silk Road Initiative, etc., That's all about building that world island that won't need the world ocean.
Simultaneously, they've been investing in missiles and Anti-ship weaponry and area denial.
And, you know, we're seeing now even a sub-rate power like Yemen can keep out the almighty U.S. Navy.
So once we lose control of the ocean, we will no longer have the military might to enforce the petrodollar.
And we know that the petrodollar must be enforced with force because we see a lot happen in the Gulf War, the Iran War.
We saw it happen in Libya, etc.
Okay, this is really fascinating to hear because this is the first time you and I have spoken.
And although I purchased your book, I haven't read it yet, but you and I have come to the exact same conclusions here.
And what you just described is, I think it's historically accurate as well because you look at, for example, how the United Kingdom, how the British lost their world reserve currency status of the British pound sterling at the same time that they lost British naval power.
So if you can't project naval power, your currency becomes less valuable and less needed in world trade.
And then before that, it was the French.
And then before that, it was Spain, I believe.
So talk about that.
Isn't this a natural cycle, in essence?
And we're at the end of the current cycle, which is the petrodollar cycle.
It is a natural cycle.
In a sense, the petrodollar is actually an artificial sustainment of the cycle.
The United States became, the dollar became the reserve currency in 1945 after World War II. And for the first 35 years, it was backed by gold when we were the industrial powerhouse.
No one else could compete with us.
By 1971, the United States was no longer the most competitive nation in the world.
You had the rising Asian tigers, you had Germany, had re-industrialized.
In the meantime, we had had massive expenses on the Korean War, the Vietnam War, the Great Society.
And so Nixon was forced to take us off the gold standard.
As soon as he did that, of course, we got the hyperinflation and the stagnation of the 1970s.
We got oil prices going up, and they needed to find a solution on what to do about that.
And that's the origin of the petrodollar.
It's an attempt to avoid that cycle of the US dollar losing its reserve currency status.
And essentially, we're the first people to come up with the innovation of backing our currency with another person's commodity by saying, if you don't honor this deal, we'll kill you.
Yeah, that's right.
And the Saudis went along with that deal for a very long time.
And only now has it begun to unravel.
I recall, I think, Putin even saying recently that 90 plus percent of the trade between Russia and China is now settled in non-dollar currencies.
And that trend is happening across many other countries as well.
And didn't Turkey recently say that they want to join the BRICS ecosystem as well?
Yes, they did.
Yes, they did.
So if they've got, I mean, Turkey's a NATO country.
I mean, you've got NATO countries now saying, we don't really want to dominate or use predominantly the dollar in trade.
Yeah, you've got a problem there with the petrodollar.
They do.
I mean, the petrodollar is at this point over.
The only reason they're not acknowledging that it's over is that kind of shifted the definition.
Initially, the petrodollar was you are only allowed to purchase oil with dollars from OPEC nations.
And that simply is no longer the case.
There are now OPEC nations that are trading oil for other currencies.
And there are many countries you can buy oil from for other currencies than the dollar.
But what they've done is they've kind of redefined it.
And now they say, oh, no, no, the petrodollar just means that you can use the dollar to buy oil.
Right.
But not really the same thing.
They've shifted the needle.
And we're seeing the result already.
Like the inflation that's happened, people say, oh, it's because of, you know, the U.S. money printing.
Well, the U.S. has been printing a lot of money for a really long time without inflation.
And it's because with the petrodollar, we were always able to offshore our inflation.
Right.
And then it ends up in the hands of the oil producing countries who then recycle those petrodollars and drive up our assets.
And so we have this really virtuous circle going for a while where inflation went overseas, U.S. assets went up, imports stayed cheap, oil and gas were cheap.
And that is coming to an end.
It's over.
And I want to ask you about this term eminent that's in your title and ask you to expand on that.
What do you consider to be eminent?
But what you just said there is really important.
The U.S. is now paying more or spending more, the federal government, more on the interest on the debt than they are on the entire United States military.
That is a huge issue.
That's the kind of thing that you typically see in banana republics or third world countries that are about to default.
That's right.
$900 billion versus $600 billion now.
Yeah.
I mean, at some point, it seems like a default is coming, or just rampant hyperinflation, because at some point, I feel like we're only one Treasury auction away from an essential default, a technical default, and then the Fed will just step in and say, well, we'll just print the money to buy all the Treasuries, and then what do you have?
You end up in a hyperinflation spiral, don't you?
You do.
We have only two options as things are structured, debt deflation or hyperinflation.
If we default, we get a debt deflationary depression, and if we don't default and we print money, then we get a hyperinflationary cycle.
Either one is very, very bad.
Absolutely.
And they can't hide this anymore, even as the White House tells us that inflation is only 3%.
You see now a lot of viral posts of people who are repurchasing shopping lists from two or three years ago and finding it's double or triple the price of what it was.
Well, that's not 3% compounded inflation.
That's like 50% inflation.
Exactly.
Well, the government figured out a really clever game.
What you do is everything that actually is going up in price, you remove it from the inflation index.
So housing...
Food, energy.
And then when you print money and the money recycles back into the United States, asset prices go up.
And then the way our GDP is calculated, a percentage of the value of your home is considered to be imputed rent.
So when your home appreciates, according to the US government, our GDP is going up because the imputed rent of your home is now worth more.
And so we're able to just artificially inflate our GDP, claim there's no inflation, and meanwhile everyone who actually has to work begins to suffer and they can't afford to pay their bills.
Right, right, exactly.
And insurance.
People are paying, in some cases, double or triple of what they recently paid in terms of not just health insurance, but auto insurance and home insurance and commercial building insurance.
Even us, we almost couldn't find an insurer willing to offer commercial insurance.
And we ended up paying, I think, double of what we used to pay.
But I'm not sure the federal government takes that into account either.
Do you know?
Do they?
I don't know if insurance is in the inflation index, but I sure have experienced the exact same thing.
Both my automobile and my home insurance practically doubled.
Absolutely.
Now, so let's get to this term eminent.
You say there's going to be an eminent collapse.
Now, I suppose in terms of the timetables of history, five years could be all of a sudden.
You know what I mean?
But when you say eminent, what do you mean by that?
Well, I wrote that article in May 2022.
And then I later edited it into the book, which I released about 12 months later.
So many of the things that I was writing about in the book have actually already started to take place.
Like when I wrote the book and released the book, You know, China and Russia weren't doing 90% of their trade in their own currency.
They were still using the dollar.
So many of the imminent predictions that I make have already come true.
And we are now in exactly where I described, which hadn't yet manifested.
The inflation is going up.
The value of the dollar is going down.
People are abandoning the currency.
So the part that hasn't triggered yet is the major global war.
When that happens, I'm not sure, but if I had to guess, it's within the next two to three years.
Yeah, I want to ask you about that quite a bit more with the sea lanes as well, but I have one other question about inflation and money printing and, of course, the upcoming election.
The Republican Party just released their platform, which is mostly a Donald Trump platform, and in that platform, out of 20 things, two of those are, I think point number three was they want to end inflation, Sounds like they need a magic wand, right, for that.
And then somewhere like number 17, I think, was they want to save, they want to preserve the world currency status of the dollar.
But then I heard Trump say a couple of weeks ago, well, if I'm president, we're going to have a lot more economic sanctions against our enemies.
We're going to sanction China.
We're going to sanction.
And I'm thinking these goals are in opposition.
If you keep weaponizing the dollar, you're going to accelerate your loss of world reserve currency status.
And if you're going to keep printing money, you're going to accelerate inflation.
So I'd like you to comment on this, like this idea that even among the GOP, or I guess it doesn't matter which political party, they want to have outcomes, but they think they live in a magical world where they can just cast spells and make it happen instead of following the laws of economics.
Does that make sense?
It makes total sense.
I think the problem we face is that All of the solutions to the problems of our country fall outside the Overton window of our political class.
Good way to put it, yeah.
They simply cannot even think of the solutions that would need to actually occur to accomplish their objectives.
At present, the entire amount of the tax revenue of the United States government is spent on mandatory spending, with $900 billion of that being the debt The rest, primarily Social Security and medical care.
So all other spending, all discretionary spending, the entire defense spending, all of that is deficit spending.
And of course, that's just going to keep going up and up and up because the debt goes up and up and the interest rates are going up.
Without radically restructuring the way our government operates, there's no way to accomplish the Republican platform.
And nothing I've read, even in the so-called Radical Project 2025, tells me that they're going to be making the radical changes necessary.
No, no.
It seems like, I mean, they would need to first restore the gold standard, have honest money, and stop the money printing, and that would necessitate slashing the size of the federal government by 80 or 90 percent.
Right.
Which sounds great to me, but nobody's going to be talking about that kind of idea.
Like you said, it's not even in the Overton window, but how high of a level would a wizard have to be to cast a successful spell of diminishing inflation?
Right.
Yeah, if only they could come up with something.
But this is the thing, you know, we live in a world, the economic world is a world of cause and effect, and yet we have leaders across all the parties, and this is true in Europe, this is true in France and the UK and Germany and elsewhere, where they want to initiate these causes, but they don't want to deal with the effects.
Right.
And yet, that's what happens because time flows in a linear, forward fashion, as far as I know.
So the only solution is collapse.
I mean, not solution, but the inevitable outcome is collapse.
Right, right.
So what does that look like?
Well, there's an interesting story I read once about the collapse of Rome, and they said that if you went back in time, and imagine you actually had the year of the emperor, and you said, look, Rome's going to collapse, so the only thing you can do to avoid that is you need to start to decentralize power, you know, you need to shrink the size of the cities, you need to focus on local economy again, you need to let the various regions of the empire become autarkic, and then you can prevent a dark age.
And they wouldn't have done it because that would have, to them, defeated the whole point of maintaining Rome, which was a centralized bureaucracy and a centralized empire.
And if they had done it, it just would have given you the same result that you got in the Middle Ages of, you know, decentralized, localized ruralism.
You just could have gotten there without, you know, a thousand year dark age.
Like maybe they wouldn't have lost the secrets of indoor plumbing for a thousand years.
I think we're in a similar situation here in the United States.
We either will make the reforms we need to make as things get worse, or we will usher in a very severe and very, very unpleasant way of life for ourselves.
The one thing I am very confident of is that what's currently happening will not continue to happen because it cannot.
As you say, the laws of cause and effect will prevent it.
I think you're right about that.
And I've also tried to explain this to a lot of people, a lot of consumers, as they're called in America, when people say, oh, everything's expensive at Walmart.
I'm like, you have no idea.
It's actually artificially cheap because we're exporting currency inflation and we're trading it for relatively cheap goods.
Wait until America has to actually earn its trade.
Right.
Can I speak to that point?
That's something I talk about in the book.
One of the least understood third order effects of the petrodollar is it was directly responsible for the deindustrialization of the United States.
Because under free trade situations, a country will tend to specialize in wherever it has comparative advantage.
And the petrodollar system gave us a comparative advantage in printing money.
Right.
We no longer needed to manufacture goods in order to get exports.
We nearly needed to manufacture money.
And so we specialized in that.
And you see it in the financialization of the economy since 1973.
You see it in the rise of the fire percentage of the GDP versus the industrial percentage of the GDP. So what's happened is, yeah, we got cheap imports.
That was great.
But the entire earning power, the working class that was built on being an industrial powerhouse, has been stripped to the bone.
And the next logical step is going to be, we will lose the petrodollar, and then the real poverty will begin.
Yeah, exactly.
Because at some point, the companies that build washing machines in South Korea are not going to trade washing machines for debt.
Exactly.
Right.
And then the American people are going to be paying, who knows, $10,000 at the time for a washing machine, and of course that's going to thrust Americans into abject poverty.
I've got a lot more questions for you.
Let me just plug your blog here, Contemplations on the Tree of Woe, and that's treeofwoe.substack.com.
So tell us a little bit about what you cover here and where the name came from.
Well, the name is a pop culture reference.
There was a John Milius movie in the 1980s called Conan the Barbarian.
It was the movie that rocketed Arnold Schwarzenegger to stardom.
And at a certain point in the movie, Arnold Schwarzenegger rides, Conan rides off without his friends, thinking he can accomplish his tasks on his own.
And he gets captured, and his punishment is he gets crucified on the Tree of Woe, and Thulsa Doom tells him to contemplate his failures on the Tree of Woe.
And I picked the name after I got canceled from my previous career from kind of straying too far from the Overton window, I suppose.
And so I was kind of contemplating my life on the tree of woe and settled on that as the name.
May I ask roughly what was your previous career, if you're willing to speak about it?
Oh, sure.
I was a media executive, and I started a video game media company called The Escapist.
That was quite successful.
We won six Webby Awards.
We're named one of the top 50 websites in the world by Time Magazine.
I sold that to Defy Media in Los Angeles and ran that until 2017, at which point I was outed as a terrible wrong thinker.
Oh, my.
Well, welcome to the land of wrong think.
Yeah.
On this platform, yeah, we've all been accused of that.
But, of course, what's interesting about that is probably most of the things that you said have now been proven to be correct.
Yes.
And so, you know, there is this part of society that has lived in this sort of, you know, fairytale delusion, magical monetary theory, MMT, right?
That's what I call it.
And that, you know, everything's fine with Joe Biden, you know, and all these are crumbling now.
And people are shocked.
The people who lived in denial, they're shocked.
But I would say, I think you would agree with me, the shock has only just begun.
Yes.
That's, I mean, like you say, the tree of woe, beware.
So do you write mostly about economics, or what other topics do you cover?
So three different things I cover, really.
One is economics, one is philosophy, and then one is current events.
So my most popular kind of area of advancement, I suppose, on the blog has been identifying where I think the contemporary consensus is crazy.
Where we've just gotten it not just a little bit wrong, but wrong on the very foundation.
So, you know, like you talked about magical monetary theory.
So that's one of the areas where we've just gotten it foundationally wrong is in the economics of the country.
You know, also on We have this kind of eliminative materialism where we insist that the spiritual isn't real and you're an idiot if you believe in God and things like that.
That's another area I identify.
And so each week I kind of explore a different topic and I kind of show how we're prevented from solving the problems that face our country by these deeply philosophical mistakes that we've made.
And we can't really get where we need to be until we improve Our own thinking about it.
We need to broaden our minds to be able to embrace the solutions that have to come.
It's not a massively successful blog.
I have about 6,000 subscribers, but it's definitely a high IQ. I feel like the Velvet Underground.
I'm never going to be the Beatles, but everyone who visits my blog goes and becomes the Beatles.
Well, you will definitely get more subscribers after this interview because I think our audience will love your message.
Awesome.
Yeah, absolutely.
Because our audience, I mean, they are typically very critical thinkers, very successful people.
They're not just Americans, but all over the world.
But they tend to be the people who are the innovators and the entrepreneurs and the succeeders who are also completely fed up with the insanity of the current system.
So they're going to go right along with what you're talking about there.
But they will want me to ask you, what's the deal with the brick wall behind you?
What's the story there?
Why is that background here?
Yeah, so after I got cancelled and lost my career in Los Angeles, I was a little bit unsure of what to do with myself.
And my wife suggested that I start writing role-playing games and comic books because that had been my hobby most of my life.
I had really enjoyed those things.
She said, you're a really good writer.
You know how to run a business.
You should just do that.
So I set up a small publishing company called Autark and I publish role-playing games like Dungeons& Dragons type product, you know, for kind of nerdy smart people.
And at a certain point, I realized that in today's world, if you're not making media to promote yourself, no one knows who you are.
Like, there's, you know, the old days of just, you know, write a book and your publisher promotes it or over.
You need to be out there actively.
So I started doing a show talking about fantasy fiction, fantasy games, superheroes, things like that.
So this is my fake dungeon background that I use.
Oh, that's great.
That's awesome.
Well, I... Well, I match your nerdy pool and I raise you one Rubik's Cube because I'm a speed cuber.
That's how nerdy I am.
Oh, damn.
You can solve that if you're a high-speed Rubik's Cube guy?
That's impressive.
Well, I don't know about high speed, but I solve them in like 40 seconds now is kind of what I do.
45 seconds, whatever.
But it's pretty nerdy.
Yeah, it's a pretty nerdy thing to do.
I love it.
I love it.
That's my tribe, man.
I think Al Yankovic did a song about us.
It's called White and Nerdy, by the way.
Yes, yes, absolutely.
We've got to have the editor insert a little bit of that right here because that was just a classic.
I'm just too white and nerdy.
Really, really white and dirty.
First time I class there at MIT.
Got skills, I'm a champion of D&D. MC, that's my favorite MC.
Keep your 40, I'll just have an Earl Grey team.
My rims never spin.
To the contrary, you'll find that they're quite stationary.
All of my action figures at Sherry.
Stephen Hawking's in my library.
My MySpace piece, I'll totally pimped out.
Got people begging for my top eight spaces.
Yo, I know pie to a thousand places.
Ain't got no grills, but I still wear braces.
But, you know, you know what's cool about being nerdy is that you understand numbers, which means you understand economics, which means you understand what's happening in the world.
And so, you know, those of us who can grasp the situation here, it's not a surprise of what's coming.
Like, we're not going to be shocked as the dollar collapses, right?
Exactly.
So, what are you actually, like, what actions are you taking?
Or what would you recommend that other people do?
You know, how do you protect yourself from the collapsing dollar?
What do you do?
Well, it goes back to the point we said earlier that there's two paths for debt, deflation, or hyperinflation.
And the problem is depending which one occurs makes different asset classes radically different in value.
So if you have hyperinflation, holding gold is fantastic.
If you have debt deflation, it's not as fantastic as a simple example.
So I've diversified.
You know, I hold gold, I hold silver, I hold Bitcoin, AI stocks, a lot of defense industry stocks.
And then I also just prep a lot for my expectation of not necessarily the end of the world as we know it, Mad Max type environments, but just More what you see when things start to go downhill and you don't have reliable power every day of the week because the guy operating the electrical system isn't there that day or whatever.
So like prepping rather than survivalism.
That's what I'm doing.
I mean, if I had the answer to the exact investment strategy, I wouldn't have a Conan blog.
I'd have a billion dollar hedge fund, but sadly it has eluded me.
Yeah, well, I hear you, but you bring up a good point, and you can't just make investments to make it through this.
You're going to have to cover your basics.
You're going to have to probably learn how to augment your food supply with a little bit of homegrown food, like a peach tree in the backyard or whatever, or some zucchini plants.
You know, you're probably going to have to have a backup generator or some kind of a, like a solar generator, energy storage device, a little battery system to get you through brownouts.
And by the way, as we're recording this, you know, the hurricane barrel barreled through Houston, Texas, 2 million people lost power.
Wow.
I mean, I don't know.
Maybe I'm a little bit too judgmental, but I'm like, how did you not see this coming?
I mean, it's like you live on the coast of the Gulf of Mexico.
Hurricanes come through here on a regular basis.
How do you not have a generator?
I don't know.
I mean, I get it.
It's expensive.
People have run out of money, but if you don't have a generator, at least have a plan, you know?
Have some food.
That is literally why I am a prepper, because I said to myself, if you If all of these things that I've written about actually happen and I didn't prep for them, I'm going to be so mad at myself.
Like, what is your major malfunction, Alex?
Like, why did you not prep for this?
So I started allocating, you know, some of the money every month to just getting everything in order.
So, you know, get the 50-gallon water drum and get the generator, etc., etc.
Well, that's really cool.
Okay.
We may have some interesting questions.
Items to share with you, then we'll talk about that off-air because I love to help preppers get fully prepared.
Let's go back to the projection of naval power because I think this is really key for people to understand.
So the South China Sea, something like half the world's sea trade goes through the sea lanes there in the South China Sea.
China is dominating in naval production.
They have something like 200 times the capacity, the dry dock capacity of the United States.
And they're building a massive surface naval fleet.
Not exactly the same qualitatively as a U.S. aircraft carrier, but the numbers are much larger.
And the South China Sea is much closer to China than it is the United States.
You mentioned the Houthis.
The Houthis have shut down the passageway through the Red Sea for traffic that they don't want to pass.
As a result, the Suez Canal has been compromised in terms of the U.S. Navy using it for passage from the Mediterranean to, you know, the Arabian Sea and so on.
And the Panama Canal, there's a lot of Chinese influence right now in the Panama Canal.
And it's been restricted because of a lack of rainfall and, you know, the lock system and how the higher elevation lakes don't have as much water as they used to.
So the U.S. Navy is becoming obsolete.
It's not going to be able to travel like it used to because of the Suez Canal, maybe the Panama Canal, and China dominating the South China Sea, and Malaysia, which sits just north of the Strait of Malacca, through which about 25% of the world's naval traffic or commercial ship traffic goes through that strait with Indonesia on the south side.
Malaysia is joining BRICS. So it's like, how can people not see this?
The U.S. Navy will not be able to protect the sea lanes for much longer, it seems.
Correct.
Yeah, let me put it this way.
The U.S. naval dominance has already collapsed in the same way that Biden was already senile before he went on his debate.
But then the debate revealed it.
We just haven't had the equivalent of the Biden debate to reveal it yet.
But anyone who's actually paying attention It just hasn't been kind of priced into the markets yet by the average person.
And, you know, if you look at maritime production, you know, China outdoes us, as you said, 200 to one.
Now, Korea and Japan are very good at building ships, and they're our allies, and they have huge naval production, so they're the number two and the number three.
The problem, of course, is where they located Well, they're right within the sphere of influence of exactly where China is most dominant.
So the idea that we could build a navy using Japanese and South Korean infrastructure is exceptionally unlikely as well.
So we very foolishly outsourced our entire naval construction capability to the two countries that are within easy striking distance of our greatest strategic rival.
So chalk that one up to another great strategic error by the U.S. Yeah, absolutely.
I think it's critical for the American people to recognize that the affordability of the goods that people purchase today is due to the very low cost of tonnage miles of ocean traffic.
And it's dirt cheap to use a forklift, load pallets into a container, use a crane, put the container on a ship, sail that ship.
It takes almost no fuel, no additional fuel almost, to add one more container to that ship.
And all those efficiencies which have been felt in our material wealth, our relative material abundance, those can vanish when you no longer have the global supply chain functioning because you're at war with China.
And then the U.S. State Department is trying to provoke war with China.
It's like, oh my gosh, how could you people be so stupid?
Right, right.
Well, they've maneuvered themselves into a situation where they don't have really too many other options other than to try and escalate.
You know, China has proven it's willing to essentially let us self-destruct and it'll wait us out.
It's getting stronger, we're getting weaker.
So, there's a...
In World War I, part of the reason the French were so aggressive against the Germans is that their demographers had figured out that their population was going to be much smaller than Germany's within a generation.
And so they felt like, hey, we have to fight now.
Our economy is going to keep getting smaller than China's if we don't make radical changes.
And so if you're not willing to make those changes and you're worried about China's arrival, then you pick the fight now rather than in 25 years when you're starting to lose.
I think That's the strategic concept that our elites have.
I don't think it's the right concept, but I do think that's what they believe.
I think you're right, and I think the economic sanctions targeting China, especially, for example, targeting the microchip industry out of China, was designed to sabotage China.
But the world, I think, increasingly sees the U.S. empire as a sabotage operation, for example, destroying the Nord Stream pipeline.
That sabotaged the energy production or energy supply of Western Europe.
Look what it did to Germany's economy.
Major car manufacturers moving out of Germany.
Look at France.
Look at the UK.
It's like the U.S. is like, well, we don't want to compete with the world on a level playing field.
Instead, we'll just blow up their energy sources.
It's like this is not like a sustainable model of how to get along with world neighbors, it seems to me.
What do you think?
Right.
No, I agree.
We became a plundering empire at some point.
And I don't know exactly when it happened.
I remember as a younger man being so pro-American, really thinking we were the good guys on the world stage.
And somewhere along the line, we stopped being the good guys.
I'm not saying that Russia and China are good guys either, but just rather that whatever we used to have that made us special and good, we definitely don't have it anymore.
Our empire at this point is built on exploitation of our so-called allies.
Germany is de-industrializing directly because of our policies, and it's wrecking their economy.
And if the Germans were sensible, they would say, you know, enough, we're not on board with this.
Yeah, I agree.
If the Germans were sensible, they would go to Putin and say, hey, can we be friends and please sell us natural gas?
Exactly.
And then they wouldn't lose their industry.
Right.
Or I guess if they could convince other Europeans to harness the natural gas that they already have, but they've locked all that up under the climate change agenda.
They're like, we're not going to get our energy, we'll just get it from Russia.
Oops, that all got blown up, so now we have no energy.
How is it that Western civilization has turned into a suicide cult?
I mean, at least those are my words.
I don't understand how it could have happened in our lifetimes.
So quickly.
What's going on here?
So, this is something I actually talk about on the blog.
It's one of my major themes.
And I think the problem is effectively a philosophical or spiritual problem.
We convinced ourselves of certain things that weren't true.
And then having convinced ourselves of that, then the current...
The nihilistic, self-hating suicide outcome is actually logical.
And you have to really kind of dig down and unearth the roots of where we've gone wrong and then rebuild a new philosophy on that basis.
So the delusions have to be shattered at some point?
The delusions have to be shattered, right?
And do you feel like we're in the process of that beginning?
I think we're at the beginning of that process, right?
Like, I like the point you said earlier, you know, the shock has just begun.
Yeah.
Yeah, the shattering is yet to come, or I had a podcast the other day, I titled it, The Shift Has Hit the Fan.
Oh, it's great.
Yeah, but I think you and I agree that there's a lot more runway for this thing to play out, and there are a lot more delusions to be shattered, like this delusion of just endless money printing.
In fact, I want to ask you, the BRICS settlement currency proposals seem to indicate that it'll be centered around what they call a unit, and the unit will be backed 40% by gold, which of course...
Very strictly limits how many units can be created.
If you're a nation and you want to be issued units, you have to show up with 40% gold, right?
So the multiplier effect is like maximum 2.5 out of that.
And so it means that this is going to be the first, if it succeeds, the first world reserve currency not controlled by one nation and that cannot be counterfeited.
I mean, that's historic, isn't it?
It is.
It is.
It's actually very similar to what was proposed in 1945 that we ended up not adopting and instead forced the U.S. dollar as the hegemonic currency.
It's worth noting, you know, a lot of people say the U.S. dollar is a fiat currency, and it's actually it is, but it's even worse than that.
It's a debt currency.
It would be a strict fiat currency if the U.S. Treasury Department directly issued our currency, but it doesn't.
The Federal Reserve does.
The U.S. Treasury then borrows it from the Federal Reserve.
So in a sense, we actually have a system even worse than fiat currency because every time we money print, we also print the debt that we then have to pay back.
And as the interest rates go up, that debt goes up.
So like a simple reform one could do that would improve the welfare of the country would be to simply abolish the Federal Reserve and at least shift the money printing back to the Treasury the way it was under Abraham Lincoln with the greenbacks.
But, of course, anyone who proposes that gets assassinated, so no one is particularly keen to mention it.
Yeah, go figure.
Because there's still some kind of cabal in control of the system, and as you said, they're setting the Overton window of what's even allowed.
But if we don't radically reform this system, is it true that one day the American people wake up impoverished in their own country?
Yes.
Yeah, I mean, I think a lot of people are waking up impoverished.
If you look at the standard of living that the Generation Z is enjoying relative to what I enjoyed in Generation X or what the baby boomers enjoyed, and Generation Alpha is going to have it even worse off.
And it's like our entire elite infrastructure is gaslighting our young people and telling them, no, the problem is you.
Well, it's not.
It's not them.
They're just living through the consequences of 50 years of bad decisions more.
Yeah, that's a really good point.
If you think about the number of labor hours that it takes to purchase a home, for example, a starter home.
When my wife and I purchased our first home decades ago, I think we bought it for $140,000, which was a lot of money in the 1990s, and we paid it off in like five or six years.
We just paid it off early.
Today, we could not do that.
Even if we earned the same relative amount, the house would cost triple that or quadruple that.
So I can imagine a young couple or a young...
Person starting out, they're looking at what it costs to buy a house versus what they take home after taxes.
They're like, this is never going to fly.
And they're right.
It's never going to work.
The dollar's lost so much value.
Right.
And ironically, part of the reason the housing prices have appreciated so much is because of the petrodollar, because investing in U.S. real estate is one of the best ways of recycling petrodollars.
If you're an oil-producing nation and you end up with a surplus of dollars after selling your oil, what do you do?
You buy U.S. stocks and you buy U.S. real estate.
We have entire portions of Miami are essentially...
Owned by foreigners and largely unoccupied most of the year.
And this is a problem in a lot of our cities as well.
Yeah, the young people are already becoming impoverished.
It just hasn't caught up yet with the older people.
I know myself, I couldn't afford the house I currently live in if I had to go buy it now.
Well, and this is true among many farmers as well.
So you look at the food supply, where does the food come from?
Obviously the farms, but once the current farmers, if they pass away and it goes to the next generation after inheritance taxes...
Because the exemption is not very large now compared to the value of a farm, then the farms have to be sold off to pay the taxes on them.
So you end up with this government cabal that's just extracting maximum productivity earnings out of the population, leaving the people penniless, which sounds a lot like what we supposedly escaped in the You know, revolutionary war.
I thought we got away from the king, just taxing the peasants into oblivion, but here we're taxed into oblivion.
Anyway.
We're much worse off than the founding fathers were.
Like, they were having a revolt over like 2% tea taxes and things like that.
Yeah, right.
You know, if they were alive today, they would think we were shameful.
They would think we were, you know, acting like slaves.
Well, I think most people are acting like slaves, but clearly you're not.
Let me plug your book again.
It's called Running on Empty, How the Eminent Collapse of the Petrodollar System Sets the Stage for World War III. Now, I want to ask you a little bit more here about World War III, and you said this book is based on an article that you originally wrote in a series.
And this book came out in early 2023.
This war...
How do you think...
Is there an ignition to this war?
Is there a spark that is obvious?
Or could it be one of any number of things at this point?
I think it could be a number of things, but it's not an unlimited number.
The two most likely to me seem to be either going to war against Iran, so some sort of escalation there, because Iran has become a very close member of the axis of resistance to the US with China and Russia.
And the other would be either Sufficient sanctions that antagonize China into attacking Taiwan and or China smelling blood in the water with our president being senile and thinking we're weak and attacking Taiwan could also do it.
So I'm not sure which of those two is more likely.
I think it actually kind of depends probably who wins the presidential election.
I think if Biden wins the presidential election, then the inflection point being China is more likely, and if Trump wins, then the inflection point being Iran is more likely.
But those would be my big two.
Alright, that's a really interesting interpretation.
And I think most of our viewers would agree that if Biden were to be re-elected, it would really indicate that America has fallen.
And also that the election is probably rigged because, you know, who's actually going to vote for this senile person?
But Trump does project more of a, you know, a tough guy kind of attitude internationally, that's for sure.
But you did not mention Russia in that answer.
I'm curious your thoughts on Russia because, you know, it seems like NATO is really, really trying to provoke Russia into an escalatory, you know, tit for tat type of response.
What are your thoughts there?
I would say my thought is that Putin has shown incredible circumspection in running his war.
He has been antagonized several times in ways that, based on Russian doctrine, would have justified a much more aggressive response than he's given.
And we do keep, quote unquote, poking the bear.
So far, the bear, I think, has been reluctant to To permit that escalation.
Now, I've spoken to some friends that I have in Russia, and their sense, they're quite aware of the fact that they're the junior partners in the relationship with China.
And so they don't want to, their thinking is that Russia doesn't want to take any action that's going to further weaken Russia and strengthen China's power relative to them within their alliance.
And so I genuinely think Russia's going to continue to press on until it captures its territory in Ukraine that it wants to have.
And then it's probably going to stop there.
Now, it won't necessarily stop there for all time, but historically the Russians have always advanced that way.
They do an advance and then they kind of do a strategic repositioning and they pause for a while.
So I don't think the flashpoint will be Russia.
Okay.
All right.
That's really interesting to hear that.
And I agree that Putin has shown a lot of restraint, even despite a lot of internal domestic pressure from his own people.
Yeah, more aggressive.
And some in his own administration that are saying, you know, nuke the West, nuke the West.
And that would be a horrible idea for lots of reasons.
But do you think that Putin will go to all the way westward to, let's say, Kiev?
And stop there?
Or what about Odessa?
You know, what about the southern coastline of Ukraine?
Yeah, I think he'll take as much as he can get of Ukraine.
In a sense, Ukraine is already dead, right?
Like, if you look at their population, it's plummeted because of the war.
And it was something of an artificial country in the first place.
I mean, you know, the western part of Ukraine was historically more part of Eastern Europe.
Russia.
And so, if I had to guess, I would say that Russia will end up controlling all of the Russian parts of Ukraine.
They'll take a strong position on the southern coast.
And then the rump state of Ukraine will end up merging into one of the powers to the west of it.
Poland, perhaps?
Yeah, I mean, the Polish would love to have it.
They've been about that.
So, they've been open about that.
So, what I don't expect to see is I don't expect to see Russia take Ukraine and then say, hey, now we're going to attack Poland, now we're going to attack the Czech Republic.
No, I don't see that either.
That would be a suicide mission for Russia, actually, to even attempt that.
They don't have the personnel to do that.
No, they do not, right.
And remember, the other factor here in eastern Ukraine is that most of the eastern Ukrainians wanted to join Russia.
That's correct.
Right.
And so, you know, it's not like you're occupying Eastern Ukraine.
You're liberating them to join Russia.
Now, that's different with Western Ukraine.
The Western Ukrainians, like you said, they don't want to be Russian.
They want to be Western Europeans for the most part.
Yeah.
The way I described it to a friend, I had this argument recently.
I said, imagine that the United States has some rocky troubles and Florida secedes from the Union as part of a general breakup.
And then Cuba and China start building military bases in Florida.
And then Northern Florida then says it wants to secede from Cuba and Southern Florida.
And so then the rump state of the United States says, well, we're going to go in and we're going to protect the Northern Floridians.
That's essentially analogous to what's happening in Russia.
You know, the Eastern Ukrainians were Russian-speaking, Russian ethnic, had historically been part of Russia and voted to rejoin Russia, and that was prevented.
So from Russia's point of view, they're acting quite reasonably.
I mean, I sure wish they had found a better way to accomplish their objectives without, you know, hundreds of thousands of people dying.
Yeah, absolutely.
But that comes back to the State Department and people like Victoria Nuland and so on, and we don't have time to go into all that.
But I do want to ask you then, domestically, in the few minutes we have left here, and thank you for taking this time, but domestically in the United States, as the petrodollar system continues to erode, And I agree with you.
It's not going to be just overnight, one night, it's all gone, but it will just continue to erode.
The cities are becoming more and more crime-ridden.
The retailers are shutting down because how can you survive if everybody just comes in and shoplifts $1,000 worth of goods all day long?
You're like, I'm closing down.
I'm out of here.
Walgreens just announced today they're shutting down 25% of all their retail outlets, one of the reasons is shoplifting.
And Rite Aid is closing down many of their stores, grocery stores and so on.
What are the cities in America, especially what we call the blue cities, what are the cities going to look like as this petrodollar collapse runs its course?
They're going to look like Detroit.
1980s and 1990s and 2000s Detroit.
It's going to be very, very bad.
If I was living in one of those major blue cities, I would take advantage right now of the high price of real estate.
I would sell.
I would move someplace to Red State, either a small city or preferably even further out more countryside.
And I would take advantage of the current global supply lines and the ability to get cheap goods on Amazon delivered to me, get everything I needed to be as self-sufficient as possible because Once the petrodollar collapses, the cities are going to go downhill, but so are the supply chains that make getting the latest gizmo delivered to your door 12 hours later possible.
That's going to go away as well.
Yeah, exactly.
So I'm not the only one that buys O-ring sets and nuts and screws and washers because I know if I need them one day, I'm not going to be able to get them.
No, you're definitely not the only one.
I'm the same, yeah.
Well, maybe that's a white and nerdy thing that we're both into.
I don't know.
I feel like if I have a diesel generator, for example, so I buy extra belts, I buy the oil filters, I have it, like, I can run that generator for, like, 3,000 hours.
I've got all the parts for it.
Because I figure I can't get those parts one day.
Right, right.
I mean, that's not irrational, is it?
Am I weird for doing that?
Well, I think you're weird for being rational.
Yeah.
We live in a world that is founded on crazy, and so the sane man comes off as insane.
Well, I've got diesel engine parts stockpiled, that's for sure.
Anything else you want to add, Alexander, before we wrap this up?
Like, just tidbits of advice, or how people can find more of your work, or whatever you want to offer here.
Oh, well, I just want to say thank you for having me on the show.
I hope folks will check out treeofwoe.substack.com and check out the book, Running on empty on Amazon or on the blog.
It's been a delight.
Very few folks I've talked to have had the level of economic sophistication.
You have to just have this back and forth.
Normally I'm trying to explain the rule in 1971.
I mean, it's fantastic.
Oh man, we've only scratched the surface today.
We could go much deeper into this.
And I hope you'll come back and we can do this again sometime.
I'd love that.
All right, let's do that.
And especially as the situation unfolds, it's going to be really fascinating.
I mean, I did get a chance to ask you about bank bail-ins or bank closures or commercial real estate collapse that's happening or where interest rates are going.
Maybe we can cover some of those next time, but let's meet again before the election to see where we are.
Yeah, let's do that.
That's going to be really interesting.
I don't know where things are headed, but I'm buying gold.
That's right.
Okay.
Well, Alexander McCreese, thank you so much for joining us today.
It's been a pleasure speaking with you.
Love your book.
Love your blog.
And folks, again, the blog, let me give it again, treeofwoe.substack.com with a picture of Arnold Schwarzenegger right there on top.
World War 100.
What's that all about?
Oh, well, it's a joke.
100 is binary for four.
Okay.
So World War IV. And it's basically talking about this idea of, is AI actually an existential risk to humanity?
Well, did you know that while we've been recording this, did you know the background behind me is an AI augmented background?
Because we bought these loops, these video loops, but they were too fast, so we slow them down.
And when you slow them down, they jerk, right?
So we use AI software to generate interpolated frames.
So this is 120 frames per second slowed down to normal speed, and it's slightly jerky.
You can kind of see it a little bit, but it's way smoother than it was.
So that's, dude, that's AI rocking the background.
Yeah.
Oof, I feel primitive in comparison, man.
I'm in a dungeon.
You're in an actual dungeon background.
Yeah, it's actually made of Canvas, old school.
People are going to think that it's like a graphic image behind you.
Can you just tap it to show people it's real?
No, it isn't.
Yeah, see?
It's physical.
At least it's physical, yeah.
Okay, awesome.
All right, Alexander.
It's been fun, and thanks for joining me today, and we'll talk again soon.
Thank you.
All right.
Hope you enjoyed that, everybody.
Alexander McCrease.
Wow, what a great guy.
Highly intelligent.
He's ahead of the curve.
Check out his books and his blog site as well, and we'll work to have him back before the election.
And feel free to share this interview on other platforms and channels as well.
I'm Mike Adams, the founder of Brighteon.com, bringing it white and nerdy all day long.
Thanks for watching today.
Take care.
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