Welcome to the Free Cities podcast. My name is Timothy Allen and this is the official podcast
of the Free Cities Foundation.
Hello and welcome to this episode number 148 of the Free Cities podcast brought to you as always
by our wonderful sponsors of the show Veritas Villages. Veritas Villages are off-grid energy
self-sufficient luxury communities in Latin America designed specifically for freedom lovers
just like you I'm gonna go ahead and assume Bitcoin is accepted at all Veritas Villages
including for the purchase of property i think you already knew that anyway if you didn't
more info here at ecovillages.life forward slash free cities everything is in the show notes
and if you would like to dig a bit deeper patrick hibbert who's the creator of veritas villages
will be speaking at this year's free cities conference in prague not too long now 31st of
October till the 2nd of November. Tickets at freecitiesconference.com and everything in the
show note as you already knew right today's show. Well, it's a dispatch from my recent trip to Serbia
to attend Liberpolco, which is Liberland's anarchopolco collaborative festival slash
conference i would call it in attendance well definitely people tending towards the more
let's call it experimental conspiratorial you know the kind of freedom is within people
some would call it the truther community certainly a section of the truther community was there
a lot of people distrusting of government of institutions of the media etc i was speaking
there about the free cities ecosystem from intentional communities at one end of the spectrum
right over to full-blown self-sovereign places like Liberland and everything in between all the
different ways people are building in the market of living together seemed to go down well and I
got the impression that many people there were kind of new to these ideas as well which was great
today's guest he was definitely my favorite person that i met whilst i was there we talked a lot over
the duration of the trip he's a journalist broadcaster and global affairs analyst founder
of the news organization 21st century wire and a co-anchor on the uk column news program in the uk
during our conversations we talked a lot about fact checking and ai so i thought it'd be interesting
to see what ChatGPT made of Patrick Hennigson.
According to that source, he's a writer, filmmaker and global affairs analyst,
best known as the founder of the alternative media site 21st Century Wire
and host of Sunday Wire and the Patrick Hennigson Show.
It goes on to say he presents himself as a challenger of mainstream narratives,
focusing on geopolitics, propaganda and media manipulation,
and has reported from conflict zones such as Syria and Iraq.
Supporters view him as a critical voice against the establishment narratives and censorship,
whilst critics, including fact-check groups, which I'll go into in a sec,
accuse his platforms of promoting conspiracy theories, sensationalism,
and unreliable or biased reporting.
This dual reputation places him at the intersection of independent journalism and controversial alternative media.
That's actually quite a good observation.
That's where I put him as well.
However, if you media bias fact check anything, you'll face criticism.
so I asked ChatGPT to fact check media bias fact check MBFC which is the organization that
criticizes what Patrick does and ChatGPT told me that they face criticism for allegedly favoring
left-leaning sources often rating them as high credibility whilst labeling right-leaning sources
as questionable or low credibility it goes on critics argue that mbfc's evaluation criteria
reflect mainstream liberal progressive views potentially penalizing sources that diverge
from these knobs blah blah blah blah which i thought i better check that out so i went to
their site these are the fact checkers and i thought right i'll get to see what they rate a
couple of news organizations that I think I know quite well I chose Fox News and CNN
and lo and behold overall we rate Fox News right biased based on editorial positions that align
with the right and questionable due to the promotion of propaganda conspiracy theories
pseudoscience the use of poor sources and numerous false claims and failed fact checks
okay so they've given fox news a questionable rating now what would they give cnn overall we
rate cnn moderately left center biased based on editorial positions by tv hosts that consistently
favor the left while straight news reporting falls just left of center through bias by omission
we also rate them as mostly factual in reporting rather than high due to two failed checks in the
last five years what's interesting is they kind of assumed it would be high and they actually said
well look we had to call them mostly factual anyway there you have it guys fox news questionable
all cnn mostly factual and i'll let you decide whether you think you should trust uh that
particular fact checker the mbfc which is what chat gpt went to to check its facts when i asked
it anyway my two sats about patrick i like him he's a very conscientious guy who i really enjoyed
speaking to i'm definitely intending to go down and visit him another time at some point to follow
up this conversation and i'd be very interested to hear listener feedback on the subjects we spoke
about i'm guessing that there will be differences of opinion amongst you all there always are when
i discuss geopolitics right i'm going to lean on fountain.fm's episode summary to sum up what we
spoke about we covered a lot of ground it says the key topics were the uk column and alternative
media mainstream media propaganda and control geopolitics ukraine and the new world order
the role of the usa migration and destabilization of europe the state of democracy and individual
freedom and the title of this episode the grand conspiracy in inverted commas that's my words by
the way and power structures basically at the core we're discussing geopolitical landscapes
and the nature of power and control in the modern world and i've always been interested
in theories of a grand conspiracy they're very enticing as i'm sure a number of you will agree
the kind of there are puppet masters at the top of the pyramid you know making things happen on a
global scale patrick i think has an interesting and pretty balanced view of all this so i'm happy
to hear your views in the comments if you disagree anyway right some thank yous to my active
subscribers before we get on with this and please if you're listening to this and enjoy the content
from this podcast please consider subscribing on fountain.fm it's just six bucks a month that's us
dollars uh what's that a large latte in starbucks these days isn't it my dream of course would be
to fully fund this show from subscribers although the reality will probably be somewhere in between
a combination of the free cities foundation sponsors and me subsidizing it with my time
which i'm currently doing at the moment of course if you would like to reach out to our audience on
this show we have a great audience and a very loyal one please drop me a line on NOSTA or email I was going to call it snail mail podcast at free
to discuss how we might work together in promoting what you do or what you sell.
Right. Let's have some thanks, please.
Matthias, Bullish Mike, CB, Christopher Albanese, Ant, Tim, not me, another Tim, Set in Stone,
Silas Thornbrook, Chadrack. You are my OG subscribers. Many, many thanks. Right. It's
time to get into this. This week, I would advise you to pop on your flak jacket, grab a notebook
and pen. Yes, Patrick's a bit of a hack, according to me at least. And let's dive into the murky
world of global geopolitics as you sit back, relax and enjoy my conversation with Patrick Hennickson.
now i i better set the scene here and we've started by the way okay we we met in a we met
a taxi and we we talked for about three hours right off the bat which is always a good thing
because you kind of like you you normally get a lot done in that first three hours yeah right
put the world to rights as much as best you can yeah right and we we kind of did but
So what was kind of surprising to me was that I thought I was kind of in the alternative scene in the UK.
And by that, I don't necessarily mean like, you know, I mean people thinking differently.
People who, you know, what's the word for people who think outside the box?
Yeah, open-minded alternative thinkers.
There's a word.
Unconventional.
Heterodox.
heterodox right yes i thought i was in the heterodox community and which i am
but as it turns out there's a whole part of it i have no um connection to at all and i mean it's
not even the kind of crazy conspiracy theory people at all i'm talking about um the part that
you seem to frequent a little bit and and that is in the uk at least a publication or a media
company called you the uk column and that was a real eye-opener for me because you i mean i haven't
done a deep deep dive but speaking to you and looking at what they're doing etc etc you seem
to be kind of in the market of um intelligently reporting on things that the mainstream media
won't talk about is that a fair that's a pretty good assessment okay right obviously there's other
assessments of you. I'm going to read one of them out, of course. Oh, definitely. You are a conspiracy
theory on orientated online media outlet. This is hope, not hate. Yeah. You're probably far right
if I get to it. Yeah. You had a considerable boost during the COVID-19 pandemic and remains
a significant voice in the UK conspiracy theorist media. I mean, what is that UK conspiracy? This is
hope, not hate. They're one of those things that basically class everything except themselves as
far right or conspiracy theories basically yeah the standard fare that's pretty big but but but
how did i end up missing uk column because you're it's a it's a yeah how did i miss that
i think probably the the community that you're amongst and that you're you know following and
some people it just you know it just passed they're not they're not seeing it for whatever
reason. We don't fall into the Alex Jones end of the spectrum. So I would say the best way to
describe UK Column is I've been working with them since 2012, first as a writer in their newspaper,
and they used to have a print publication at a national circulation, much like the light
newspaper. You've probably seen that around, but UK Column is more grounded, more into deep politics.
But then they went full video in 2013, 2014, started going full video.
And I would say Middle England, Middle England.
So typical retired or professional military active duty ex-police officers, people in the civil servants, people who do the backbone of the country basically.
You know, that's the audience.
That's the interesting part, though, because I didn't know they were into –
I thought they all had the BBC and sitting there and having new spoon-fed to them.
So how did I get that wrong then?
I mean, yeah, how did I get that wrong?
I think we had a sizable audience before COVID, but I would say it 10xed during COVID
because the real conspiracy during COVID was so insidious
and the groupthink was being enforced at such an extreme level
and there was so much government money that was spent
to get the mainstream media basically to run on all the leads
as well as the print media, all ran with the same leads
and we found out later that was government money being pumped into
that outpaced anything in advertising.
And the government was paying above rack rate for center spreads, for front page inserts, all that.
So they were really subsidizing the mainstream media.
So the mainstream media is not going to go against the government.
Just like if the pharmaceutical company was buying up all the ads right across Murdoch's press and the Mail and the Daily Express,
which the Daily Express is basically a pharmaceutical advertising outlet for statins and whatever they're pushing on their front page.
miracle drug for Alzheimer's, cure for dementia.
But the government becomes the number one client.
And I think enough people in Britain realized something was very, very wrong with this picture
and instinctively knew that they were being had on a very, very deep and profound level
and that the BBC was absolutely skull-plugging the population
and there was gaslighting going on on a level that had never been seen before.
in modern human history. I mean, it was really a major human event. Never before in the history of
the human race has there been a global unified response to anything that penetrated so deeply
into the personal lives of people, deeply into the person, you know, restriction of freedom on a level
that you couldn't even comprehend. And it was ubiquitous across the globe. And so people were
then looking for an outlet because a lot of people come up to us years later and say,
I was going insane.
I was going crazy.
And they said, and you guys were, you kept the sane because we came out kind of fighting
against the narrative from the beginning.
And we knew what we were looking at because we had already built up to that point years
before.
So every single scandal or crisis that we covered in the previous years was practice.
So you're training for the next battle.
And by the time we got to COVID, we were already ready to go.
And so we pulled out, you know, as much as – and it took a lot out of people.
It took a lot out of me personally.
A lot of us were isolated from our families because airspace was closed.
We couldn't travel because we didn't have vaccine cards and things like that.
And so – and we're not – you're not eating particularly well as well.
So, you know, your health is going downhill.
I mean I know you didn't have to deal with all much of as much of that because you had managed to escape the
The the the colony is the prison isn't work
Well, it wasn't that difficult actually I think that the what I noticed about that whole period or one of my big sort of takeaways
Apart from the fact like you it was I was almost in awe watching this thing unfold because it was so monumental
was that there was a lot of smoke and mirrors and
and that was what was stopping most people doing things because the smoke and mirrors said you
can't travel and you could I mean we booked flights to Spain and we went to Spain then we
booked flights to Mexico and we went there and it was actually very cheap to do it at that time
and in fact I've told this story before but I was driving one Christmas when when I was supposedly
shouldn't be to go and collect someone I won't give too much away but I was going to collect
someone who I thought was having a bad time that really needed to be around people let's say
and I don't know whether you know the bridge over the um the Bristol Channel over the Severn yeah
yeah when you come you know back then um obviously there was no cars on the roads it was late at
night but they had all these um um flashing signs up that they normally put like roadworks or whatever but it like LED panels that they can write things on And they were all like go back and border crossing blah blah blah
And I remember driving down there.
It was a bit like that film, was it 28 Days Later?
I was driving down the middle of this sort of like six lane bridge
thinking, is there going to be like barbed wire
at the border between Wales and England or something?
You know, obviously I got there.
There was nothing.
I carried on, I carried on, I carried on.
I got all the way to where I was going, which was right down the end of the M4.
Yeah.
And so, so, and it was literally smoke and mirrors.
Like the way that I was being controlled was all in my mind, all in my mind.
And that I was, I've learned that lesson.
That's the kind of like one of the first things I look for now, actually, when, when anything
big happens, it's like, what's actually true?
What actually am I being said?
And how do I act?
accordingly, et cetera.
I read the mainstream media a lot, and people say,
why do you waste time?
Why do you quote the BBC?
Because they're lying to us.
Everything they say is a lie.
You hear this all the time.
But part of our job in the so-called independent or alternative media,
I have to read the mainstream media because I need to know what the state
or the government or the establishment want me to think
and want the public to think because they're sending those signals out
all the time.
how you need to think about what has just happened,
that major event that you just mentioned,
whatever it is,
that you're always going to be,
as a member of the public,
as George Orwell tried to teach us
after all his years as a propagandist
with the BBC during the war,
he was trying to warn us about this system,
this machine that's being constructed
for the purposes of manipulating public perception.
And so, yeah,
so the first thing you would do
when you look at the BBC is,
how do they want me to think? Which side do they want me to be on? Do they want me to fear,
to hate, to be reviled, to be disgusted, to be in a fit of righteous indignation over whatever it is?
And so by doing that, we can gauge the propaganda level. And then we know how serious of a propaganda
campaign is. And of course, there was no question with the so-called pandemic that this was all
all you know they they didn't they pulled out all the stops for this it was a full spectrum
campaign and uh maximum maximum public buy-in maximum uh you know compliance so you know what
what i was going to say as well to also to set the scene because the fact that i've never heard
of uk column made me think that it's probably just a little website or something and you know
But it's not either.
It's got a lot of people that watch it and subscribe to it and watch broadcasts.
You have a TV studio and everything.
And you're like the geopolitics guy, right?
Yeah, I'm international politics.
Right.
But also, you're like what?
I mean, from talking to you over the last few days, you're what I'd call a hack.
A proper travels around, goes to wars, write with a notepad.
You're that guy?
I've done a bit of that, yeah.
I've done a bit of that.
But most of what I do now is kind of in front of a camera.
But any opportunity I have to go, it's worth its weight in gold for the rest of your life because you can draw off your personal experiences and it helps to color your analysis and it anchors it in some reality.
So you at least have some – you can marry a real situation with what your theoretical and analytical assessment is and I just don't want to be that desktop journalist my whole life.
And so if I have a chance, I'll go. And I'm very used to inserting myself into countries or situations. And I know who to work with and local cameramen and local guide, translators, armed guards in some cases. And working with other journalists. You know, we all help each other out.
You probably know this in your you know this community everyone's always helping each other
It's the same in media you rely on favors from all sorts of journalists
People who work for you know the the local tv station in a country like let's say I would go to malaysia
So immediately you want to hook up with the local malaysian tv station see if there's anybody that's interested in talking to you
Then they you know help you with
Whatever you're looking for and in some cases will roll out the red carpet because you're coming from
United States or Britain or Europe or something. And yeah.
My history with journalism is very much mainstream journalism, 100%. But I do understand that
camaraderie for sure. And this is where I think sometimes I look, I feel a little bit unsure about
alternative media outlets. And rightly or wrongly, that's because I came from very bona fide
mainstream media outlets and and there is there's a way of doing things now i'm not i'm not sitting
here saying they did it correctly but there was a certain amount of gravitas to being a journalist
and what you sometimes find in the alternative space is people who just report on things and
actually i find that a lot especially in almost in these kind of communities people just say
kind of blanket statements and when you drill down on them you don't get anything you don't you just
don't get anything at all there's nothing it's derivative it's derivative of something someone
else said exactly and that person's talking about someone else's and so you don't it's virtual virtual
virtual yeah but that's what i found interesting about talking to you is you come you seem to come
from that old school hack version of journalism well i tried because i always loved all my favorite
journalists from the independent Robert Fisk Middle East correspondent yeah these
are the people that I always looked up to over the years 90s in the in the
2000s so he got caught he got caught reporting a little bit not correctly in
the Middle East you know well yes and no but he's also you know what very
knowledge he's also won awards so I mean no no no one's perfect about all the
reporting but the point is and he's not Patrick Coburn there's another one that's
That's ex-independent.
I don't know.
No, I didn't work with him.
But I said, I have to go where they are, basically.
And so that brought me to Lebanon.
And then that made me fluent in the Arabic world, enough to go to Syria and Iraq and
other countries with confidence and a knowledge of the culture, a knowledge of how to behave,
how to speak, how to engage with people, the attitude to have that you're not going to
annoy everybody kind of thing because I've traveled in press pools with mainstream BBC
AP and all the big some of the big titles and it's shocking how you know some people like
you know they're very let's say entitled is a good word and the things they demand of local
people and also people with a lot of resources but and also creating propaganda I've witnessed
it firsthand. I've reported two different versions. We're all there. And I'm reading
their version and it's completely... And you know that at that point there was more going on than
meets the eye. Obviously, you're in there with governments and you think you're with the
mainstream press, but you're also with intelligence agencies sometimes, at least tangentially. And
you're also with somebody who's really pushing a British or a NATO or a French or a US government
line and that's their job they have to deliver that point that's why they were sent in the first
place and actually i think what i've what because i you know i i do watch the news not as deeply as
you obviously but what you notice now is when ap or reuters put something out it goes everywhere
and that's that's much that's much worse than it was when i was a journalist when i was a
Journalists, there were 10 newspapers there sometimes and five agencies.
Now, I know, for example, when I was at the Independent,
we had a, I was a, well, I got to become the chief photographer
of the Sunday paper in the end.
And we had, at the highest point, we had almost sort of six to 10
jobbing photographers per day working.
And that's the Independent.
They were skinned.
They had a small, you know, like, and now obviously they have none.
they have no star photographers no contract photographers and most of their news when you
look at it is coming off the wires all of it is right almost all of it yeah right so the wires
are now the bona fide news sources people can quote them directly and just say right this is it
and then as a result when the narrative goes out now boom it seems to go out even harder than than
before you know absolutely there's no there's no plurality within the mainstream media coverage
But having said that I have respect for some Reuters reporters who do excellent excellent work on a certain range of subjects that I will go to them and their words are just as good as gold and it usually stacks up
with the research. Having said that, on anything that's ultra sensitive, different story, there's
definitely a perception, a line of perception, an agreed line of perception. So why I hope not hate
calling you, not that we trust them at all, but why are they calling you a conspiracy theory
channel? Because organizations like that, like Center for Countering Digital Hate, NGOs like
Hope Not Hate, and they feel like it is their job, and in fact they do play a role for the establishment,
to bracket any voices and label them as extremist. Anything outside of the orthodoxy or what I call,
this is the best term I've ever heard, and it's from somebody who worked in corporate marketing
at the highest levels of the UK consumer corporate marketing.
He said it's about consensus reality.
They're selling consensus reality.
And then the back end of that would be Noam Chomsky's famous book
called Manufacturing Consent.
Manufacturing Consent.
But consensus reality is what they're after.
And the public, what they call the plebs, the general public,
the sheeple as the truth community call it,
are what we call CR merchants.
consensus reality merchants and so if you're not in in the consensus reality and that's kind of
where your mainstream guardian readers are that's where your times readers are and anything outside
of that is extremism conspiracy theories uh you know whatever i mean think of the epithet
they have a whole sort of system for um you know smearing and just trying to discredit anybody
and what we're doing is really challenging that uh that you know the the consensus reality because
uh that this is the job of the media this is why they issue denotis you know the denotis is right
i don't actually what was that denotis is the government issues a series of denotis these are
things that all the papers cannot talk about and you're obligated to call up and get the latest
denotis from the organization that issues those these are things that might violate not
or they're too sensitive for national security reasons
or stories that are breaking,
but no British media can report on them.
Do you follow those?
No, we don't engage with the denotices.
Does that get you into trouble then?
In some cases, yeah, it absolutely does.
I think when you're below a certain level of audience and readership,
it's not as much of a concern.
But if you are rising above that,
I'll give you an example.
is in America is Candace Owens.
Candace Owens is swimming in international politics now.
Absolutely, yes.
And so if she was in Britain, and she is part British,
and she's married to a British gentleman,
and has family, and her kids are half British,
but she's with France, so sensitive with the Trump administration
and Macron and Trump's relationship, it became a problem,
is her reporting on Macron's personal life and that story.
And so if that was in Britain, there would be a denotis.
If this was about, let's say, the British prime minister,
there would definitely be a denotis issued across the mainstream media.
You will not give any more fuel to this story.
It's too sensitive.
It's got a national security letter on it.
What's the national security about Macron's wife's testicles?
The stability of the French state.
It's a phenomenal story.
I know.
So do you know much about that story?
Have you?
I absolutely followed it.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
And so is it true?
Well, let's just put it this way.
Candice is really working off of work that's already been done by French independent researchers and journalists.
and I've also crossed references with my French media cohort,
people that I follow and know and we talk about issues that deal with France or NATO
and they said absolutely this is credible research and it's been around for a while
and it has been absolutely blackballed in the French mainstream press
and that a lot of people are afraid to report on it, afraid to report on it.
So I think she's into a story that there's a lot there exactly how deep it goes
and if it's extreme as she is saying it is,
obviously it has profound implications
because it's really insane.
It's really insane that someone would be allowed
to rise up to the level of a head of state
of a nuclear armed country
in the UN Security Council level
means that they're heavily compromised, obviously.
But if you look at it, the Jeffrey Epstein story,
half of it is French.
Half of the Jean-Luc Renel side,
the the gillian maxwell was was was decamped in paris there's so much there so it's not just a
u.s story it's a french and u.s and british and british story it's interesting because i i when i
heard about it i mean for those for the uninitiated the story is basically that macron's wife is
actually a man or formerly a man or her father or whatever oh god i mean his father but he's married
What's undeniable is that she, his wife, or he, she did actually meet him when he was quite young.
Quite young.
And wasn't she his teacher?
The claim is that when he was 15.
I don't think it's even a claim, though, is it?
I think what Candace is referring to is the claim is 15 or 16.
In actuality, it was younger, 14, maybe even 13.
Who knows?
But the point is, it might even be worse than what is the conspiracy.
And another huge red flag on that story for me was because I subscribed to Candace Owens' podcast to find out what she's saying about it.
And obviously, I trust that she's not lying about this.
but she said that trump or either trump or trump's team may even have been trump i think himself
called her directly and told her to stand down back off yeah yeah it's true it's true right it's
true yeah yeah i mean that in itself is insane i mean we're talking about a story so outlandish
this is you know i think we discussed this in the car it's like when when when i remember when
Alex Jones was getting deplatformed. I was thinking to myself, why are they bothering
to deplatform Alex Jones? Because when you listen to him, if you're your average BBC
watching person, you look at Alex Jones and go, oh my God, that guy is just talking a load
of nonsense. But the fact that they went so hard on him to deplatform him makes you wonder,
shit, there must be a reason for this. Why would they act so seriously? And the same goes
for this thing with Macron.
Why bother trying to snub this so hard?
I would have thought it would be so easy.
Most people, when they hear that story,
will go, huh, are you having a laugh?
Of course he's not.
Well, the implication, if you follow that line,
would be that there's the establishment
or the powers that be or whatever
are trying to cover something up by going in so hard.
I mean, they did send a French lawyer to sue Candace,
and then Candace counterpunched back
and expose the lawyers being basically defending pedos and things like that,
as the establishment's go-to defense guy to do all the dirty jobs for the elite.
And then the case was dropped.
For Alex, it was the Sandy Hook story,
and the implication being that there was a cover-up there,
and Alex was not the first, nor was he the only one,
who had challenged that story publicly at the time,
but he obviously was the biggest.
so the establishment wanted to make an example out of him and not just go after him but but to
destroy his entire media footprint and and uh and he's survived and he's still brought he's still
in the air which is an incredible thing in itself that speaks to his resilience as a uh a force of
nature in in media alex is like you know amazing in that respect absolutely you know you've got to
at least respect him for that for sure what i'm surprised at and this is i obviously underestimate
the foresight of the powers that be i often sometimes think they're a bit incompetent
but i would never have touched alex jones if i was them because i think what's the point
you're just drawing attention to it and then but of it but but i think there's something in it i
I think he's causing problems.
Candace Owens is actually causing problems.
And, or someone like Tommy Robinson in the UK,
who wants the same kind of thing.
Like a couple of years ago, I'd have said,
I don't know why you're focusing so much on Tommy Robinson.
He's a minority interest.
But now, because of all that interest,
he's got Elon Musk tweeting him,
or at one point,
I think it's 1.2 million followers on Twitter.
Yeah, being an opposition figure is obviously going to turbocharge your platform, as it were.
For Alex, the establishment was going after Donald Trump at the time,
like from 2015 until, I would say, right up until the last election cycle was done in 2024.
and Alex is one of I think maybe five or six media figures who helped to propel Trump into office in 2016
and by a slim margin.
So you think all of those big media moguls like Alex Jones, Michael Savage, the radio host, these people,
by backing Trump they gave the edge to Donald Trump in the polls over Hillary Clinton
and so they're thinking that makes them consequential in the political economy.
Not just, you know, loudmouth blowhards, but they actually are pushing results in the ballot box.
And then you get that becomes a real threat.
Well, and I think we saw that in the last election.
I mean, Rogan is a friend of Alex Jones, a very old friend.
Rogan was a huge part of Trump's image sort of being raised this time around.
I think you're right.
I think this is what differentiates MPs now.
You've got the ones that can sit on a podcast and talk
and the ones that can't.
And that's basically the two types of people we get.
Keir Starmer can't sit on a podcast in the UK.
He can't do that.
He's ideologically driven.
So he has to remember the whole ideology
and then spit it out.
Someone like Rupert, what's Rupert?
Rupert Lowe.
Rupert Lowe, different.
He can sit.
He's got some understanding, some ideas.
So you can ask him any question, and he'll be able to sort of like talk about that thing.
Trump's the same.
So is Trump's VC, vice, you know.
J.D. Vance.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Yeah, they're definitely more, they've pivoted more into the new media format and the long-form, the long-form interviews.
So they're not afraid.
I mean, Trump's not afraid to do impromptu Q&A for three, I've seen him do two hours in the White House.
The large room where he ended up doing his press conferences, not that little closet that they have used for years, but the large room.
So he's not afraid to do that.
I mean, that served Trump very well.
Now he's getting more cagey, I think, because the policies are – he's having a lot more trouble now, I think, sustaining the hype.
The wave of hype has now calmed down after inauguration, and he's faced with all sorts of dilemmas on the economic front, foreign policy front.
And he has inherited a lot of disasters from the previous administration.
But then he's also declared economic warfare on like half the planet with tariffs and sanctions and things like that, which is not doing him any favors.
and he's looking for wins that he can parlay into election results at home in the upcoming midterms
because, of course, if the Republicans can't keep the House in the midterms,
then the MAGA agenda is going to stall and you're going to get impeachments again,
like repeat of the last time.
So, I mean, they're trying to stave off that sort of result.
So we'll see what happens.
But, yeah, it's a very funny time right now.
Something you mentioned a little while ago is the truth community.
I mean, I know what it is.
I don't know much about it.
I don't spend much time in it.
It seems to me my surface level understanding of the truth community is there's a lot of bullshit in there as well.
Is that fair to say?
Yeah, yeah.
I think more than ever, more than ever.
There's more. It's ironic because with all due respect to everybody and their opinions and the kaleidoscope of opinions and beliefs, there are a lot of people in the alternative community will say we've been lied to about everything.
And the mainstream media is all lies and this and that. And and I and I say, look, it's not all like I cite mainstream media sources for certain things.
I mean, Joe Rogan's not sending people to report on Supreme Court cases and do the diligent work of court reporting.
And so Joe Rogan and, you know, Lex Friedman and what they're not the replacement for the mainstream.
They can't do what Reuters do, even if we don't like necessarily what everything the mainstream is doing.
They do perform a public service on a lot of levels.
They just happen to be really poor on anything related to foreign policy and get up to that level of manipulation.
When you have intelligence services involved and you have billions and trillions of dollars of energy and continental drifts geopolitically, then it's obviously a different game.
It's way above our pay grade, all of us.
But the point is the alternative media, the independent media, is also a big source of lies and disinformation.
They are flooding the zone with equally amount of boulder dash, basically.
And I think a lot of people are confused as a result.
And a lot of people are almost paralytic and despondent.
And that brings us back to our original point.
Why do people watch the UK column?
because it's that halfway house where they can go and get some grounding on a lot of issues
and get at least some stability on the conversation.
We're not with the mainstream, obviously, but then we're not too far on the fringe
and we're doing it in a news-type format where it's comfortable for people to sit
and then they can think and then we'll present facts
and we'll present all of the links to everything that we show on the screen
after the program. So if you have any questions, so nothing is unsourced. Nothing is unsourced
on our program. So I think a lot of people appreciate that and Middle England and
professionals appreciate that because they want to bring people to watch. So they want to be
confident that they're bringing someone over to something that's not a fly-by-night operation
that's not half-baked. And so yes, there's real journalism happening there. There is a political
slant and ideological slant on certain issues um i would say very much center right on a lot of
issues but then again uh very liberal on others so but overall i would think pretty centrist
generally in the traditional sense you know what centrist was 20 30 years ago that's kind of like
where we are um maybe not by centrist 2025 mainstream standards that's different i know
what you mean though about the everything's wrong brigade and i do find myself falling into that
because these days you could tell me i mean you could you could you could point out anything to me
as ludicrous as you like that went against the mainstream narrative narrative and i would
entertain it you know i would like five ten years ago if you said to me the earth was flat i'd just
laugh at you and now if you said look the earth's flat i would say right show me the evidence
you know I'm actually doing that yeah I'm not convinced you're engaged you're engaged in the
in the debate in the dialogue yeah but I want to I mean I would I do want to engage in the but I
think that's the way that certainly in talk shows like this that's how you should if you came on
and said the world's flat I'm all ears I'd say well convince me then I wouldn't say actually right
but just just be clear on the record I wouldn't say that so just to be clear but um I'm one of
those guys i'm one of those heliocentric uh uh globe earth globe earthers i'm an extremist um
so but but again and i have to caveat this some of my best best friends really um some of them
are you know what you might call flat earthers and you know we just don't talk about it you know
it's a strange but we agree on a whole bunch of other stuff what's going on in my brain right
that I, that something so ludicrous, I mean, a lot of ludicrous things have, have some somehow
proven to be true of late. And that is the, I think the flat earth, the big daddy out of all
of them. It really is. It's ridiculous when you think about it because, but, but I'm, I'm ready
to hear like I'm, when I listen to, it's almost like I want it to be true. When I look at the,
when I look at the data, I'm, I'm, I'm trying to, to steel man it because if it was true,
That would be amazing.
Well, the reason I think it's been so successful and grown as a kind of point of interest is because it's hard to steel man some of the arguments or the sort of the opposition arguments to some of the way that they're presenting their arguments.
But it's really a case of how it's being presented and how the discussion is being framed and curated.
Obviously I could come with equally steel approach from the other side and it will be very hard for them to debunk So instead of debunking what I showing they just come up with their own and say yes but you have you need to refute this so there no real scientific
debate going on having said that you and I might think it's it's it's implausible it's ridiculous
but but other people don't and so what I'm interested in is why they don't how how convincing
is the argument what what are the and i'm very interested to see what the presentation is to a
point i can't i can't spend that much time on it because if it takes up too much bandwidth or you
know engaging in that argument it's taking time away from things that like let's say clear and
present dangers to society and our country and the world which are you know the threat of
thermonuclear war uh of world war three breaking out in the middle east or in ukraine um and you
know are we going to be dragged into that as a society like we were during covid or like we were
during uh the war on terror in 9-11 or the iraq war that's that's where i'm putting all of my
priority my time and my energy and my my worry for humankind is there and so uh and not on you know
what type of world we're living in because i think the bottom line is this i always say to them look
if it was decided or you could prove tomorrow that you're right and that, you know, it's a giant
pizza crust, how is that going to change your life in a material way, your day-to-day life
tomorrow? And the answer is not very much. You know, you still have to pay your council taxes.
The bailiffs are still going to come and demand your whatever rent and your electric and you still
able to pay the phone bill and do your chores and you know look after your kids and all that stuff
so it doesn't change anything um so i mean anyway it's uh it does take up a bigger part of the
bandwidth of a lot of the content though and i don't know what to think about that let's not
give it too much bandwidth and let's give something bandwidth which i was interested to talk to you
about this when we first met, I gave you my very simplified version of the Ukraine situation,
which was something along the lines of NATO are edging a little bit too close to Russia.
So Russia had to show some kind of like tour de force and it ended up in this scenario
and which was my best guess at what was going on.
And I think that's even a conspiracy.
But you went a lot deeper and said a lot of other things.
Would you mind summing it up in a little bit?
I found it very interesting.
Well, what you just said is true.
It is true.
That's a major factor.
That's two major powers colliding, being NATO and the Russian Federation,
two major world powers, two nuclear powers.
NATO being a confab, obviously, an alliance, a, quote,
defensive alliance that's expanding at a rapid rate.
surrounding its main adversary, Russia.
So not very defensive, I would say, not from a Russian perspective.
And certainly breaking a lot of the promises and agreements of previous U.S. and European leaders
over the years from the collapse of the Soviet Union until today.
Certainly this isn't what those diplomats and previous leaders had signed up to.
They would be horrified by what's happening today,
including some of the biggest hawks in the U.S. foreign policy establishment
like Henry Kissinger and Zbigniew Brzezinski, they would be horrified. They would be calling for
restraint. In fact, we wouldn't even have got this far. But here we are. We're there today.
But the NATO expansion isn't the main reason why Russia intervened and, you know,
quote, invaded Ukraine in February 25th, 2022. That's not the material mechanical thing,
that the mechanism, if you will, why Russia invaded was invoking something that should be
familiar to people in the West, which is the, quote, responsibility to protect. There was a
civil war going on in Donbass between Ukraine and the Ukrainian. It's important we remember that
the Donbass, Donetsk, Lugansk, the Eastern Ukrainian regions were part of Ukraine. And then
And they were then kind of declared persona non grata by the new coup government in Kiev after the Maidan coup, which was backed by the United States.
This is all very well recorded.
It's part of the historical record.
And so then they forced the change of government.
And then the U.S. handpicked the caretaker government.
They put in their first president, President Poroshenko.
They had an election, but it was an unconstitutional government after the coup.
And then a civil war began.
The Ukraine government, with the backing of the U.S. and NATO, basically raised their army to attack their own citizens in the east, the Russian-speaking regions.
And they declared Russian language illegal in some cases.
So that's a major affront to people living in that country.
So it's a civil war.
What happens in civil wars?
Well, countries split up.
You get autonomous regions, and that's exactly what happened.
The other thing that happens with civil wars is you get failed states.
throughout history and this is no different but how it's being framed in the west is
Vladimir Putin woke up on the wrong side of the bed and decided to you know rekindle the glory of
the former Soviet empire and that's that's as far as the analysis goes for any western politician or
mainstream media they're all on basically what uh what was agreed in when Theresa May was prime
minister uh in the rapid response mechanism no people don't know about this there that was a
directive passed in the latter years of Theresa May's premiership that said on
any major national security issues that all G7 and NATO countries will be on
message on media they thought it was that important the narratives have to be
the same and that's why you see the unanimity in the press as well so for
Ukraine this is absolutely in play and so so Russia basically didn't intervene
in eight years. Why? Because there was a UN Security Council Resolution 2202, which was passed
unanimously at the UN level. That never happens, does it, these days? But it was. And that was to
implement what was called the Minxed Peace Accords, the Minxed 1 and 2 peace process.
And so everybody agreed, we're going to do this because we want to stop the killing.
14,000 people were killed in the Donbass during that time. And Russia could not intervene legally,
though, because this was still part of Ukraine. So what happened? Eventually, Minsk died because
France and Germany, and they both leaders admitted later in interviews that they dragged their heels
to buy time to arm the Ukraine to NATO standard. So they knew the war was coming. They just needed
to do, the West needed to do what they could to antagonize Russia, to get them to invade,
to basically drop a package of sanctions on them that the world had never seen
sanctions like the thousands of sanctions were being prepared on the wings so that when Russia
crossed that border and Biden telegraphed this a number of times as soon if Russia cross crosses
that border they're going to regret it we will come down so hard on them with it so they were
ready for all this and then Donetsk and Lugansk eventually when when Minsk collapsed and then
Zelensky announced a major offensive in spring of 2021 to retake the Donbass. Russia knew at that
point they had to start basically preparing for some kind of a, quote, humanitarian intervention
or responsibly protect action to protect their people, the Russian-speaking people in eastern
Ukraine. And how this played out in the end was Russia sent a last-minute plea to the United
States to Antony Blinken, who is Biden's Secretary of State, saying, you know, this is unacceptable.
We need to avoid war. We need to come and sign a new agreement for a security architecture
for this region. Ukraine cannot be a NATO country. We can't risk having nuclear weapons
on Ukrainian territory.
This would be a major security affront for Russia.
It's unacceptable.
Let's come and stop the war in Donbass
and let's get the mixed peace process done,
which would give autonomous status
to Donetsk, Lugansk, and the eastern regions.
Kiev didn't want this.
NATO didn't want this.
Britain didn't want this.
And certainly Washington didn't want this.
Can I just cut in?
Why?
Why didn't they want it?
They didn't want that because they have plans, which they are now doing, to use Ukraine as a cudgel.
So that side of it is true then?
Well, 100%. You just have to go look at the policies and the actions that have played out that absolutely prove that that's exactly what would happen.
But Russia couldn move until those regions declared independence from Ukraine And when they did legally UN Charter Article 1 right to self that in the UN Charter they followed that then Russia
recognized them as independent states, and then invited them to join Ascension to the Russian
Federation, all done by the book. And so once that happened, then Russia moved their military assets
in. But those were Ukrainian militias for the most part, which were comprised of a lot of
defectors from the Ukrainian military in Donetsk and Lugansk, which is interesting.
The same, you had massive defections in Crimea after the coup.
So these were people that were worried about their future, and they're being sort of made
illegal Russian citizen or Russian speakers, not given representation in parliament in
the Rada and Kiev.
So they're like, this is a basket case, US coup going on here with Nazis running around,
basically Ukrainian nationalists spouting anti-Russian slogans marching in the street with
torches uh this is not going to work for us we want to renegotiate our relationship so that's
that's how it started Russia intervenes the rest is history and now we have you know the situation
we have right now so and is it loosely speaking was the objective according to you to draw Russia
into a war.
Yes.
Because, yeah, but was the reason
because they thought it would destabilize Russia?
Yes, 100%.
Yeah, so you have to understand,
like in Washington, people are not very creative.
So they look at things in history,
and even if they're true or not, they have a narrative.
And the narrative in the Cold War was,
we bankrupted the Soviet Union.
We bankrupted them in Afghanistan.
We drew them into their Vietnam.
And then we did Star Wars and the SDI program under Reagan, and that bankrupted the Soviets.
And we won the arms race.
We won the Cold War.
Capitalism wins.
Communism is defeated.
But it was a lot more complicated than that.
The Soviet Union kind of was already in collapse on its own economically, politically.
It could not maintain the system that it had constructed over those years.
So there are many reasons why it met its demise.
Plus, the political realities in the Soviet Union were just the people were no longer buying the dream anymore.
And a lot of these things that the U.S. take credit for are really just kind of the knockout blows,
but not even a knockout punch, just a little tap, and it was ready to fall over.
And so they think that another round of sanctions, we can defeat the Russian Empire.
So they're saying, well, let's do this round of sanctions.
We're going to bring Russia to their knees.
The people are going to rise up, throw Vladimir Putin out.
I'm giving you verbatim quotes from Lindsey Graham and all these sort of senators who was saying this stuff for months.
They believe it.
And the reality is something different.
So if they can't get the history right, if your belief of history is a series of tropes and Western propaganda that's suited for whatever the political milieu of the day is,
and then you're basing the current on old tropes, thinking you can repeat that recipe of success,
it's not going to work because you're not dealing with reality. And what they've done is hugely
underestimate the capability, resilience of the Russian Federation militarily, politically,
and economically to the point where the Russian GDP is outperforming Europe and everybody else
the last two years. How is that possible under a full global embargo? It seems impossible.
yet this is what's happened so somebody has missed a big part of the picture why for political
expediency for virtue signaling that we're still number one at nato and in i think all of this
could have been inverted within weeks of the war breaking out they had a peace deal on the table
in istanbul in march 2022 and uh it was already signed the ukrainian zelensky had already signed
off on it. Putin had signed off on it. And Russia withdrew its troops from Kiev as part of that
agreement. And then Boris Johnson came in to basically say, no, you're not going to sign that.
You're not going to do that. We're going to back you with more arms. We're going to win this thing.
Just get behind us. And we're going to bring you across the finish line, Ukraine. And look where
we are now. It's an unmitigated disaster. Right. Let's assume all that's true.
um why like why did boris johnson go over there to carry this thing on like what what's the grand
conspiracy he's the emissary for the anglo i would say they called the anglo-american empire
nato being the arm the military arm of that all the european countries are second
junior partners it is the united states and britain everybody else locks in below that okay
They're useful for the city of London, Washington, and New York.
And that's where the power is in NATO.
And the vision is, if you believe U.S. think tanks, is to overextend Russia.
I'm talking about the Iran Corporation and a whole host of other strategic think tanks.
And also from the EU, Kali Akhalas was talking about breaking Russia up into 10 different parts.
It's too big. We need to break it up.
It's too much of a threat to European democracy.
what democracy um so we need to break it up we need to clip russia's wings and you know it all
sounds great but you know europe's not willing to send one soldier they're not willing to you know
spill any blood to fight the russians but they're happy to get the ukrainians to die in large numbers
on uh to to sacrifice at the altar of uh the the european nato elite collective vanity
fine a couple hundred thousand five seven hundred thousand ukrainians for for for nato's ego for for
our our legacy glory of uh european dominance of the last millennia uh in in the world i mean that's
kind of we're at a time and that we're we're in we're in a transition period where the old world
order has you know we're in a post-colonial we're still in the post-colonial epoch where the old
world order is still holding on to the last vestiges of its global power. And the reality is
Asia is rising up financially, culturally, politically, and technologically as well.
China, of course, being the main driver. India also. These are not backwater colonies anymore.
But when Britain was in the ascendancy, when it had its empire, those were backwater economies.
But they're not anymore. But the problem is the Europeans and the Anglo-American establishment still are thinking with the 300-year-old great game playbook, which is to break up the Eurasian landmass and prevent Germany and Russia from developing ties and to sever links with Iran and Central Asia, overland trade routes, Silk Road.
That's what every single war from the mid-1900s was about.
It was to establish maritime dominance.
Because who controlled all of the maritime nodes?
British and then later the Americans.
And not just the trading and the commercial nodes, but the legal framework, the global insurance framework.
East India, right back to the East India Company and so forth.
Holland is all, the Dutch are also a very important part of that history in terms of
shipping and finance and trade.
So that's the dominant paradigm for a long time.
And only in recent years has that been challenged.
And that's a lot of what this is about.
And so is this productive?
Is this going to go anywhere?
Or is this just going to lead to more war?
That's kind of a fundamental question that we all need to ask ourselves because we're
being asked to back all this as the public and contribute to it and pay for it and give us give
our blessing to our governments that this is the right way to go we need to we need to fight the
Russians do we really need to fight the Russians though is there another way to do this where we
can all kind of be prosperous so so according to you then this is a war everything all of these wars
and everything that you see going on currently these are all geopolitical moves they're not
like um they're not sort of like um millet companies that's selling arms who are speaking
in politicians ears and telling them oh we need no it is that as well that as well right oh it is
that as well that see that's the profitable end those are the profitable ends of those geopolitical
maneuvers and and they're not the only you have the energy you have the gas the oil uh commodities
markets, you have lots of other areas.
And just look, from the United States point of view,
it's about creating dollar zones.
Because those dollar zones prop up the value of the dollar
as a world reserve currency, and that
is the source of US deficit spending which gives them a trillion dollars to have military dominance that no other country can do that Only the U can do that And it not like they have the money to do it They make the money to do it They print the money to do it
And they do that, that the value of the dollar doesn't collapse because there's so much dollars
in circulation globally.
How do you create dollar zones?
You occupy, you create military bases.
You have South Korea, North Korea, DMZ.
You have Japan, military occupied.
You have Germany, Rammstein and Stuttgart, and all of these other.
You have 47 bases around Scandinavia.
We've got Britain.
That's dollars, dollars, dollars, euro dollars.
Just the U.S. military presence, which isn't as much as it was in the 80s,
but just the military presence in Europe alone creates a demand
for a significant amount of euro dollars.
that's aside from what the banks are doing in Dusseldorf and the Frank
course the denominating assets in dollars or oil or whatever commodities
commodities yeah so that's that's also what it's about so it's it's as you said
and more but but the big shifts the big movements are geopolitical and so that's
that those tectonic plates they come first yes so that the arms the selling of
arms is downstream from the power moves of the geopolitical power moves.
Absolutely.
And then the higher level of that above the geopolitics is the civilizational direction.
Well, hold a minute.
That sounds interesting.
That's the realm in which truthers would probably say there's a grand conspiracy, right?
Yeah.
Well, historically, there would be.
So if you think about Pax Romana.
What's that?
Pax Romana is the Roman Empire.
Oh, sorry. Yeah. Everything Roman, Pax, Pax, everything Roman, Roman language, Roman money,
Roman law, Roman literature, Roman education, Roman infrastructure, Roman roads, Roman
languages, Roman arches and buildings, everything, Roman culture, you know, the, the, you go
to Bath and you can see remnants of Roman culture in England. And so that's Pax Romana.
now it's Pax Americana but before that was Pax Britannia and I will argue that Pax Britannia
was closer to Pax Romana than Pax Americana because Pax Britannia gave the English language
as the global second language of the world and America is really on piggybacked on the back of
that we're talking the education system the legal system the political systems the the democratic
it's the parliamentary systems it's all british much of it so that's a civilizational direction
and so there are people in uh you could say that the elites in the anglo-american world
their biggest concern planning forward in the next you know 100 or 200 or you know 500 years
or whatever um and and i i'm not even talking about the church and the vatican and christianity
in terms of Europe and globally.
That's part of this conversation.
So they're asking themselves,
do we want the future of the world?
Right now, the future of the world
is an English-speaking dominated direction.
The ship is being steered with an Anglo-American captain
and Pax Americana stroke Britannia, if you will,
and Europa, Pax Europa as well,
because European culture is also included in this.
but is it going to be Pax China?
You know, what's Pax China look like for the rest of the world?
Well, we know because it's a rather large country already.
Linguistically, like our kids are going to all learn Chinese
as a second language in 100 years.
Like, is that the future?
Can I ask you a quick question about Pax Europana?
Oh, no.
Europa.
We'll say Europa.
Yeah, yeah.
How does the whole migration thing fit into this?
Because one of the big memes in the alternative media is that the migration thing is some kind of plan to basically destabilize Europe, right?
Is that a deep, I mean, what do you think about that plan even in itself or that idea?
I think, well, let's just ask what's happening.
Is it destabilizing Europe politically?
I would say it's on the way to destabilizing Europe politically for sure.
and a lot of the destabilization is also coming on the back of I think a lot of ethnic and religious
strife and and what I would call sectarian issues that are developing because I've seen
sectarianism in the Middle East okay and I know what the end result is and it becomes generational
and it never ends so it's this is not a path you generally want to go on and Europe chose not to
go down that route after the enlightenment and started to build uh you know egalitarian societies
merit-based societies constitutional uh governments uh and structures where you have
rights bill of rights and things like that and um and you know for all its criticisms and the
these would include multi-ethnic uh democracies america being like the obvious example of this
And so now we're in a situation where because of the clash, this supposed clash of civilizations, there's people that are now advocating to roll back some of these principles and some of these things that have been developed or put into place.
Who's advocating that?
The remigration.
People.
Yeah.
So you think there is something, you think there's a conscious push behind that?
I think there's a conscious push, but there's also a wing of the establishment that's putting a lot of money into pushing this.
Why?
This is a good question, and this is worth investigating.
This is worth looking into, and I think this conversation needs to be developed.
There's more than a few stakeholders in this, more than a few.
Transnational corporations favor immigration for obvious reasons.
So we have different levels of the conversation.
We have the street level, which is obvious, football terraces, angry guys in the pub, you know, which crosses adorned in the cross of St. George, you know, the Muslims and whatever.
There's Tommy Robinson's kind of on that level.
Then we go up to the higher level, which is government policy level.
And so government policy have issues of they're looking at birth rates, declining white European birth rates have fallen off a cliff.
this is devastating on many levels to government institutions many of which are funded per head
or based on what what you might say you know crudely bums on seats schools nhs other institutions
whether you know whether you have a viable bank branch or a post office in your town might
might come down to in today's world of government efficiency well it's just not worth it we don't
have the customer base because we're now customers, right? We used to not be customers,
but now we're customers of everything, all these government services or privatized services.
So there's that level. Government's bringing in millions of people through normal ports of entry,
and that's clearly policy. And this was also ramped up in many ways under Tory government.
Surprise, surprise. Why was that? I thought conservatives are generally against immigration.
So obviously, if the transnational is pro-immigration, then of course, the Tory would also be pro-transnational.
Ergo, they're going to adopt policies that transnational corporations are happy about.
And immigration is one of them.
And it's not necessarily a choice.
So when you're running a country or you're running a few countries, you have to consider, are we going to shut that town down?
Are we going to shut that neighborhood down?
We're going to have empty buildings, empty businesses.
How are we going to serve?
How are we going to keep the institutions going?
How is it going to be funded?
There's a certain level of corruption as well,
self-serving corruption within the bureaucracy, of course.
And we're getting into the Soviet failure conversation there
because we've constructed similar structures,
hierarchical vertical structures,
the very thing that created failure in the Soviet system,
big, massive vertical structures.
where everything went up and you go to the top and you can come down. They didn't talk to each
other like this. They went up and then they talked at that level and then came down. And that was one
of the failures of that system. We've constructed a private public version of this in modern West.
And so now we go to the higher level of the conversation. That's what the investment banks
are being briefed on. Do we see those meetings? Do we see those PowerPoint presentations? We get
Take glimpses of them.
And those consultants are briefing the Pentagon and they're briefing the DOD and the MOD in
Britain.
And they're briefing them about trends and movements and economic movements in the Middle
East.
Europe, in Eastern Europe and so forth.
Major Wall Street banks are advising governments and our military on these issues of how to move people from a, what they call the gap,
these are third world countries, developing world countries, to what they call the core, the core being advanced modern democracies.
I'm telling you verbatim from presentations by Cantor Fitzgerald to the United States Pentagon post 9-11.
And these are long-term programs.
They're managing the globe.
They're moving people from A to B.
How do you move them?
You start a war.
And where are the biggest migrant flows coming into Europe?
Well, let's just start with Libya.
What was that?
That was a NATO intervention.
On what grounds?
No grounds at all.
And that took the safety valve off of sub-Saharan African migration into Europe from Sudan, Ethiopia, Eritrea, and so forth.
The Sudanese Civil War.
How did that happen? CIA heavily involved in the partition of Sudan. And I could go on Somalia,
Djibouti, Ethiopia, civil war, and so forth. Massive amount of sub-Saharan Africans into Europe,
into the UK, into Italy. Next, Syria. Next, Afghanistan. That's Uzbekistan, Tajikistan,
all of the Central Asian migration flows, direct result of the Afghan war. Iraq, another one.
Yugoslavia the Balkans Kosovo Albania that's a that's the bulk of UK immigration during Tony
Blair's first two terms NATO intervention didn't need to happen stable no we had to break up
Yugoslavia we're here we're in Serbia so Syria perfect example why does Syria need to be broken
up why did the government need to be overthrown in Syria where we're told back to our propaganda
a conversation. The BBC line is Bashar al-Assad was an evil dictator. He was a bloodthirsty butcher,
much like Vladimir Putin's an evil dictator. No other reason than that. They're just evil
dictators and they're killing their own people. We need to overthrow them. No, there was a specific
reason for that. Now we can see it. Now you have a terrorist in charge in Syria. The government's
long gone. And Israel has occupied the entire corridor of southern Syria, the Golan Heights,
Mount Hermon all the way up to practically Iraqi Kurdistan with the US. So that's a total
strategic reshuffle of the most important piece of real estate in the Middle East
like that. It took 15 years and what do we get in Europe? We get the migrant backlash from that.
Are we going to question our governments of why they did this in the first place?
nope that's not where the government or the media wants to have that conversation but the way you're
describing i mean that that does seem incredible that someone sits down and plans but it's like
it's like moving cars in a car park i can send you the link to the presentation but but that is it's
kind of hinting at well which what is the reason behind it i mean take that whole scenario you've
just described, the result being migration to Europe. It doesn't seem like that's the reason
they did it. It seemed, or is it? I mean, I think I, but what about all the other stuff? What about
the, the, the shifting borders in, or the breaking up countries so they're not as strong, you know?
No, that's part, that's right. So the migration is a, is a, is a byproduct of, a useful byproduct.
Yeah, and the protection of the state of Israel is probably, for the United States, is the most important Middle Eastern issue.
Yeah, why is that?
Because Israel is basically the beachhead, traditionally, of the Anglo-American Empire.
Wait a minute, I don't even understand that. What do you mean beachhead?
It is, it's the last colonial settler project practically in the world.
You mean after the war, when they decided to give Israel a homeland?
Yeah, so think about all the colonies are going independent around 1948,
and they create a new British-backed and paid for a new colonial project.
They created the State of Israel.
It was born out of the First World War.
But why is it so important?
Because it allows – I'll tell you why.
Because during the Cold War, the biggest threat to the U.S. and the West
was not communism in the Middle East.
It was Arab nationalism.
and that was after World War I, the breakup of the Ottoman Empire.
That is one of the main reasons why World War I was waged,
to keep the Ottoman Empire and Germany.
Jesus, we've got to slow down, mate.
No, but just understand, oil was just discovered in the early 20th century
and the British and the French did not want the Germans
to get a hold of the Iraqi oil fields in Kirkirk.
that's why they had to create the Arab revolt at Lawrence of Arabia you know the story to basically
defeat the Ottomans because they didn't want that in German hands because Germans were allied with
the Ottomans very important so they promised the Arabs an independent Arab state in Palestine
the British and the French as long as you fight for us against the Turks and they fought and what
happened at the end the British and the French decided behind their back to draw the borders
differently anyway. The British took Palestine and then gave it to Israel in 1948. And the Arabs
felt like they were betrayed. They had a few kings like in Jordan, Hashemite king in Jordan,
and then they gave the Saudis a couple of families of Bedouins who were, you know, may or may not
deserve to have a country named after them, but they gave them the Emirates. And so it's a very
fast digested history of the Middle East but the bottom line was that Arab
nationalism was the biggest threat to the British and to the West because they
couldn't control Arab nationalist states especially secular states and if they
happen to go socialist that would even be worse obviously and that's why Iran
was overthrown the government Iran the US and the British overthrow the Iranian
government 1953 for that very reason they went to nationalize the oil and BP
was not going to have that so was the was the Arab nationalization threat an
oil thing namely oil but also the Suez Canal oh sure of course Jesus get Gamel
Abdul Nasser was a mercurial leader of Egypt and the Suez crisis and and
everything that kind of unfolded after that that's when you started to see the
new Middle East take shape after the Suez crisis and that's when the when the
Middle East was handed from the British to the Americans. That was the result of the Suez crisis.
Slight right angle out of this, because we could go on forever here. Why is Israel so important now?
And why does everyone get so upset about it? Like, why do most people in this sort of, well,
I don't know if it's most people, but a lot of people in the kind of alternative media think
there's a cabal of Jewish people running the world and that's why they're um that's why Mossad are the
reason that everyone's in in this you know in the U.S. Senate is scared to talk about or the Epstein's
blackmailing all this kind of stuff yeah yeah well look there might be truth to some of this um and
but I don't like to kind of ruminate on you know this Jewish cabal whatever it's called because to
To me, it's not just a rabbit hole, but also a trap because you're getting sucked into ethnic or religious arguments.
All right.
To me, it's about raw power, empire, and geopolitics.
So why is Israel so bloody important?
Why does everyone seem to, certainly the States,
why is, considering it's such a small place really, and could be inconsequential,
It's not. It's made something consequential.
It's so consequential, in fact, that it enjoys unqualified support for the United States financially and militarily.
The entire U.S. military footprint in the Middle East is to protect Israel.
Yeah, so come on, why?
Because they need, there's two reasons.
Israel is allowed to pursue its greater Israel ambitions, which Netanyahu admitted recently, greater Israel.
What does that mean?
That means the expansion of the state of Israel, or at least the control of the surrounding countries under Israeli authority.
This was thought to be a conspiracy theory, but in fact this has great academic grounding.
In the Israeli political literature, right back to the 1980s,
an Israeli minister named Odi Yinnon penned a strategic paper back then that became the blueprint.
If you read it now, it's chapter and verse, everything that has happened pretty much right
up to the present moment, including the ethnic cleansing of Gaza.
And they had the Sinai Peninsula for a brief period of time after the Six War I believe and then gave it back in a peace treaty with or an interim peace agreement with the Egyptians
But, see, Israel is an important Western enclave,
Western enclave in an Arab world, okay?
And so the United States will not give that up,
but by the same token, it's developed political.
the israeli lobby in the united states enjoys unrivaled power in terms of its sponsorship and
tutelage of congressmen and senators coming through the ranks in u.s politics that are going to vote
pro-israel on all and every issue so it's it's a symbiotic relationship the u.s will support
israel so long as israel helps the u.s and the european powers and west uk advance their
geopolitical interests and objectives. And if that objective is taking down the regime in Iran
in order to prevent China from expanding the Belt and Road Initiative or
give an example, there's a middle corridor project between Russia and Iran to link up
port of Mumbai to Moscow. That's not happening. That's not happening right now. But that would
change of the economic commercial flow of the entire Eurasian continent.
And Iraq has also similar programs.
Qatar and other countries have plans for a trans-Arabian pipeline to connect the Mediterranean
to Europe.
There's all of these competing agendas going on.
So that's why we have conflict.
That's why we have war.
The minute Israel becomes a liability to global capital, then the agenda will
change. But what could that be? Because it wouldn't necessarily happen because they are,
like the way you described it, a beacon in the Arab world. They're an outpost.
They're an outpost for U.S. interests. And U.S. and European interests is to keep the Middle East
unstable. The Emirates can be stable because it's easy to control monarchies when the monarch
deposits all of their dollars in your bank accounts. In New York, the petrodollar has
propped up the United States economy and kept the Gulf Arabs rich for many decades.
But things are shifting and changing. Global capital will decide who's going to have a place
in the future. And when Israel becomes a liability is when its brand becomes so damaged globally
because of extremist political or Zionist objectives
to cleanse the whole of Gaza of the native Palestinian population
against umpteen UN resolutions
and a whole body of international law over the last 70, 80 years.
And that's seen as an affront by most of the world, but not the US.
But what matters is what the US thinks.
This is another question that's a little bit left field.
what did you make of that video Trump put out of Gaza?
Why did he do that?
What was that all about?
Insane.
Yeah, why?
I didn't understand it.
I thought it could be a funny joke if you were a really dark motherfucker.
Do you know what I mean?
But you don't do that in politics.
Not as the President of the United States to put out that type of material.
So why did he do it?
It didn't seem to serve a purpose.
You know, it brings, it calls into question what is going on in the Trump administration.
Right.
What type of people, what's the culture like?
Are they tethered to reality?
It calls corruption issues into question.
And this is not behavior that you want to see no matter who you support.
Me as an old school American, I don't want to see my president putting that stuff out on social media.
But what do you think they thought it would do?
It's a bit insidious.
It's almost like they're trolling.
Yeah.
They're trolling the Palestinians.
They're trolling people who support the end to what the international courts of justice
and now the entire body of Jewish genocide scholarship is calling,
Jewish scholarship is calling a genocide in Gaza.
Okay.
Not my opinion.
So the lobby and the people who are supporting Netanyahu and this effort,
things are getting weird you have soldiers doing tiktok videos of blowing up schools and churches
and in the background and this is not normal behavior so with the world is in a very very
strange moment this is this we never we've never seen anything like this before and there's reams
and reams of this out. And the Harvard Dataverse put out a report, dead or missing, 377,000 in Gaza.
That's a lot more than the 62,000 they have in the register, but most of the names they can't find
because the bodies are missing. So this is unprecedented. This is new territory for us.
We don't have the tools to process this as a society.
It's just nothing that we have experience with.
Well, what's going on?
Things have gotten out of control.
Yeah, what do you mean?
Is it like, you know, the berserkers or something?
Are we going berserk?
We're going into great power, you know, like World War I, great power politics.
Even go back even to medieval times.
I mean, there's a level of brutality and barbarity that I think has reared its head and does periodically in history.
And it usually is a prelude to a major global conflagration.
I hope that doesn't happen.
No one wants that to happen.
But in the collective madness, a collective people are losing their minds in powerful places.
And all that matters is power.
All that matters is power.
ethics and morals are secondary concerns right now uh you know discretion is no longer a thing
in politics just from this thing you're talking about this this this film that was put out by
trump where's the discretion doesn't matter anymore what are we dealing with here this is
i have nothing i have no vocabulary to describe this for my whole life of watching politics i
cannot put this into any context and and so there's a level of paralysis that has been
induced as a result of this it's like shock and awe we're in a shock and awe situation in history
and a lot of people just do not know how to react to it so what do they do they just stay
despondent and silent is this because we've been we've lived in a bit of a bubble for for a number
of years since the war i mean yes because when you look at when you look at what happened in
world war one and world war two it was disgusting and despicable and it was horrendous you know all
this shit that went down in world war one you know sending young boys off to rot in trenches
and all this horrendous murder and suffering you know and we've just lived through a really nice
patch so now it seems a little bit out of the ordinary but actually it's possibly the modus
operandi of the human species yeah actually born during peacetime my you know parents were born
during peacetime i was born like my kids would be born during peacetime three gen four generations
in peacetime and we we outsource our violence now we don't have to do it on european necessarily
on european shorts we don't even have to send troops it'll be missiles targeted drones targeted
missiles drones and we're getting we're not even there yet we're getting into a new paradigm
which could actually be quite dangerous because it could trigger nuclear response
and it's not like sending thousands of people to the front anymore it doesn't not going to happen
like that so so the the reason is we're all detached now from the process we're not being
conscripted in western europe not yet but they're talking about conscription in germany and other
countries and getting ready to confront the russian menace i mean is that is is that going
to get any purchase in the general public doesn't sound like it's very popular so what uh what's
going on here who the hell is going to fight for the uk or germany or macron who's going to go in
a trench for Emmanuel Macron do you know what I mean I mean maybe they maybe they'll fight for
Candace Owens but not you I mean we she's the Joan of Arc of France I mean she she could be
president I think probably oh my god so so yeah geopolitics man it's horrendous I mean it's um
it's a bloody chess game with absolutely no morals whatsoever there's no no honor amongst
thieves in that chess game no absolutely not absolutely not all the civility that we built
up just think about it all of the institutions that we put in place after the second world war
from the united nations love it or hate it the geneva conventions the genocide convention the human rights convention the wto all of these multilateral institutions that were constructed for the purpose of avoiding
the biggest crimes war crimes and crimes against humanity of all time all of these things have
been dismantled or the international courts of justice the icc the international criminal court
many of them have been hobbled in order to protect Israel, quite frankly,
and will eventually be dealt severe institutional blows.
Why? Because it's not really about Israel, it's about the United States.
The United States is protecting Israel because Israel is doing the U.S.
and the Western or Anglo establishment, Europe bidding in the region.
and but things are coming to a head and what i'm talking about is the old order
and the old order is running up against a new reality and the new reality is we have to make
a choice whether we're going to have an imagination to create systems that will work for everybody
rather than a security competition which ultimately becomes a dilemma and that dilemma
always ends in war historically.
So do we have a better playbook than this?
Because that's what we've been running for the last 300 years.
Well, I mean, I would argue the new order
is about centralization of power, isn't it?
Even further.
I mean, do we ever end?
Is it possible to head towards, like,
a lot of people say there'll be a one world government.
I find that difficult to think through
when you think about China and America.
That's the competing world. There's competing orders in the multipolar world, what people are calling a multipolar world with multi-centers of power.
And BRICS, as an example, as a network of countries, is competing to be part of that multipolar order.
It doesn't want to dominate the whole planet, but it wants to be able to look after the interests of its members, i.e. Russia, China, India, Brazil, South Africa, and about a dozen other countries.
and so that's that's competing from a unipolar hegemon which is a u.s dominated
and in the cold war it was bipolar soviet u.s uh western u.s soviet balance of power so bipolar
after the second world war unipolar after the collapse of the soviet union and then the potential
for a multipolar world now but there's people that don't want this and the kicking and screaming all
the way to the end and i think it will hopefully work itself out but the but the question that we
have is what damage could be done through that transition i think it'll work itself out eventually
i think it will i think and and and so will there be a place for decentralized systems
in in the new order but what damage can be done in the interim and and what who's going to be at
risk of that, let's say, blast zone in the interim. That's the concern. I truly believe
that we are going to transition to have better and more options in the future. And that one
world government that many of us were scared about. In America, you go to the John Birch
Society, one world government right back to the 1950s. But I think the new world that's
emerging is much more complex than what we imagine. It's not going to be Klaus Schwab
giving diktats down the pipeline from the World Economic Forum with Bill Gates behind him funding
it all. Well, that's good to hear, I must admit. In the same sense that the old world order thought
Russia would cave under by drawing them into a war, but actually it didn't work at all. That's
what the old world thinks that's what klaus schwab thinks you know yeah or that's what the
neocons think or lindsey graham or the warhawks in in washington think or you know or the uh
the blue rinse brigade you know and boris think you know the um so so really the what's that
organization that called you a conspiracy theorist network oh many of them but uh right
They were kind of right.
I mean, there is a grand conspiracy.
Power is conspiring to maintain power or whatever it is.
Yeah.
It is.
Do you think there's any legs in the grand conspiracy that it's a number of families?
Or is that?
I think for sure.
Bilderberg is a good example.
The Bilderberg group meets every year.
They met in Stockholm, Sweden this year.
And the host of the Bilderberg was really the Wallenberg family.
And the Wallenberg family are the owners of Investor AB, a Swedish conglomerate of companies, huge players in defense, telecommunications, one of the most powerful portfolios of companies in Europe.
and are now playing, you know, very central, have been playing a central role at the European, you know,
elite transnational corporate and defense and political level for a very long time is an example.
And that's a family. That's dominated by a family.
And then we have the same hereditary oligarchies in other countries, including the UK and other countries.
So it's ultimately, of course, it's going to comprise of families.
But I mean, the only reason I ask is because it could be states.
It could be, you know, states rise and fall and leaders rise and fall.
But the kind of the grand conspiracy theory about the kind of the puppet masters is that it's generational.
Is that, do you think it's true or not?
I think the problem with the alternative conspiracy theory community, if you will, or culture, is there's a proclivity to have a unifying conspiracy, like a skeleton key that unlocks all questions.
That's what I think I've got.
I'm looking for.
But you're not alone.
You're not alone.
Everyone wants to know who's in charge.
What's the top look like?
And the reality is probably a lot more complex lattice of interests.
The best metaphor is probably organized crime networks.
it's a very complex international lattice of families and organizations that could just as
easily be corporations and banks and many of them are into corporations and banks like HSBC
and so forth that got busted for laundering billions of dollars in Colombian cartel
cocaine cash as an example but the reality is it's all of those things with state power coalesces
with ruling families, the committee of 300, if you will,
because the most powerful organizing principle on the planet
is still the modern nation state, and they have the military.
So ultimately the state has power,
but if the state is under effective control of oligarchs,
then the oligarchs control that state power.
Where you have the difference is countries that have, let's say,
not state-owned banks central banks rather than a private central bank and where the
oligarch families aren't in charge but maybe a bureaucracy socialist bureaucracy is in charge
and then we're back to the ideological cold war conversation and so it does come back to that
so um and we're oscillating constantly oscillating between these things in history we're oscillating
between the frying pan and the fire, aren't we?
Yeah.
Well, where's the utopia that we all want to live in?
We want to be left alone, right?
Come on, what's your strategy going forwards in the world?
Well, you know, yeah.
I mean, I'm personally, I'm definitely more along that libertarian philosophy
of small as government as possible,
not to interfere too much with the market.
But we don't see that evolving at all, do we?
Well, we have monopolies and rent seekers that have taken advantage of those opportunities.
And so think of it like society is like a pendulum.
I mean, you're British, so you've seen this pendulum swing in your lifetime,
and your parents have seen it swing too.
And unfortunately, it swings, and sometimes we don't necessarily,
not everyone's going to like the direction it's going to be swinging in,
but there's going to be an inevitable reaction to any situation that's becoming extreme.
And if you're living in an extreme, rent-sinking, monopolistic political economy, the pendulum will eventually swing.
And it's going to swing, quote, left in many cases.
But then it might end up being co-opted and you might end up getting an entrenched fascist socialist or whatever, collectivist, super bureaucracy, technocracy.
I think that's something that people back home in the UK,
we both live in the UK, you don't mind me saying that?
Yeah yeah absolutely I think something that people in the UK don ever contemplate is that something like a communist state could appear in the UK
Because when you hang around places like we're in Serbia at the moment,
when you hang around places like this where it's recent,
or in Prague where we are, it's all recent,
it's much more real to you,
even to me as an outsider talking to people
who've lived through those kind of regimes.
And you realize just how possible it is for, and, you know, I know there's a lot of people now say the UK has got some very strong tendencies towards authoritarian states.
We've got people getting arrested for tweets.
We've got, you know, like some really bizarre things going on.
And still alarm bells aren't really ringing.
But authoritarianism and authoritarian structures aren't necessarily left communist authoritarian.
It can be right-wing authoritarian.
It can be right-wing corporatist fascist.
just as easily as the other way. I think you need to look at what's happening in China,
you look at what's happening in countries like Russia, where you have a state-directed economy,
but you have a free market for the people, but the political establishment taking the reins of
key aspects of the economy, but capital can never rise above the state or the party in China's case,
right the communist party of china the state capital can never if it goes too high if the
bird flies too high it will its wings will be clipped jack ma alibaba is a good example um so
and that's the difference but the performance is there because to make those changes and to adapt
in the ebb and flow of technology and modernity and technological revolutions and changes in
society and infrastructure and expectations, you need continuity of government. And China has that.
But they don't have the sort of liberal democracy that we think we have or have. So that's their
system. They couldn't have done what I think they've done if they had had an open democratic
system that we could then put our people in and turn them into a neocolonial vassal of Western
corporate interests and so they they've fortified themselves from that that's why they have a hard
shell this is why russia has a hard shell because of what happened in the 90s wall street uh neoliberal
economists raping the country and basically looting it that's why you got putin it was a reaction to
the 90s yeltsin was drunk wall street came in raped the country the oligarchs ran off with all
the state uh industry and the people were poor life expectancy for men was like 63 or something
crazy like that and they said never again that's that's a and so putin came in and and they've
backed him for 20 something years and look at the results you can't argue with the results
and that's why he's popular and we that's why our governments hate him they revile him they would
love to have a 75% approval rating. But we see that, we project our cynicism. We like our 25%
approval rating presidents like Biden and Macron. And we celebrate that as democracy. And we have
spitting image puppet shows to make fun of it. And that's our freedom. We've got that. But are
they performing for us? I don't think they're performing very well. Well, no, the democratic,
in its current state system is an absolute shit show and it doesn't serve the people i mean it's
it's it's i think that's the red pill people are taking at the moment because the democracy
is untouchable it's we fight for democracy religion yeah but it's a load of nonsense
it doesn't work and and you know currently starmer was voted in on 20 percent of of the country
that that's not you know like that he's hated and he still got in power yeah he's literally he failed
like if you if that was an exam result you failed massively but he's in charge yes exactly well is he
we should celebrate that that's our democracy yeah great but do you think then you know you're
talking going back to the pendulum and and the really big swinging pendulum not the not the
little four-year pendulums and stuff the big one which is i think sort of collectivism to
individualism do you know what i mean like yeah and we're kind of we're collectivism aren't we at
the moment well the other thing in that pendulum you have to pay attention to it's more than that
maybe it was that before now we have technology and the state has tools and apparatchi and
technocratic abilities through Palantir databases, surveillance, digital social credit,
central bank digital currencies, all this sort of stuff, digital ID. Now that pendulum
is a very different pendulum. And it does lean towards state. The state has accumulated great
capabilities and powers to control the individual and also to cut people off to to to contain people
based on you know their political beliefs or whether they're going to be with the program or
not or you know whatever very orwellian and so that changes things is it's a different game now
you're going against much more difficult much less freedom in many ways than ever before that does
change the discussion a lot what you're describing something we talk about a lot on this podcast is
the fact that technology is allowing authoritarianism to scale beyond the kind of
empires that we used to have, which collapsed under the weight of the fact that there literally
weren't enough people to enforce their rules in the country. They couldn't employ enough people.
But you don't have that problem now because you don't even need to employ people. You have an
algorithmic system which exists on your phone and you don't even need a legal system really,
because all that does is it stops you, it dictates what you can and can't do
before you even do it.
So committing crimes becomes much more difficult in a way
because your ability to operate in the world is dictated by a bunch of rules
which are already laid on top of you.
And you're not going to be negotiating with people at different points of the bureaucracy
where you might get clemency, you might get some sympathy,
you might get some people give you the benefit of the doubt.
Those people are disappearing.
That's already happened.
It's gone.
I have that experience continuously when I enter normie world and try and sort something out.
Yeah.
Bureaucratic or even with companies these days.
If I could just talk to a person.
So, well, let's wind it up, but let's not end on a bad note because that is a bad note.
Well, no, it is a very bad note, but it's a truthful note.
Yeah.
it's a conclusion we've come to on this podcast over many years so far is that technology here's
here's the way it goes according to us anyway technology is is empowering authoritarians okay
we know that but like everything there's always an equal and opposite force at work yes and the
digital world is now rife with people creating privacy and freedom tools right cool this is good
So, and I, and I'm using them already and you probably are and everyone, if you, if you're in this world, you can use those. The bit that I struggle with is how do we operate in the physical world when it's gate kept by these algorithms in the sense that I wouldn't in, in this, in this dystopian future, I could not come to Serbia.
how would unless i managed to do a deal with someone who sailed me over to you know and then
i picked up a car i mean we're talking about you know this is kind of world war one shit where you're
you're the resistance and you've got to do it all secretly i mean maybe that's where we're heading
maybe maybe if you want to be free that's that is where we're heading but the mainstream world
is becoming so ubiquitous and so digitized and so algorithmic sized or if that's a word
how do you how will you navigate that going forward you're you're i mean if you're in the
center of the authoritarian structures or those types of countries with those systems as the as
the law as the rule um that might be difficult uh but then you have to think about relocating to
either intentional uh communities or parallel communities or countries that aren't in that
system and you go from there and i think if you do resettle in those places then you probably even
can go back to the old place and then come back again and not have too much problems but it's
being anchored in those authoritarian centers that becomes difficult because you can't exist without
being you know tethered to the system at every single point that's kind of what's happening
you see that in reality in the truth of community or from what i see people have anchored themselves
here in the weird side and they do little forays back into them you know
I'm using the terminology matrix I see what you mean I'm a normal community
a good example of that. That's global now. Yeah, massively. I mean, it's a sensible,
it's a very logical thing to do as well. It's difficult with children, but if you're
a free independent person, it makes huge sense, even from a tax perspective, just from a general
governance perspective. Being a foreigner in a country makes you really ungovernable.
It's very difficult. Financial perspective, just cost of living. Immediately you get a 50%
discount on cost of living in many cases 100 discount in some cases like that's where you live
insanely cheap there's you and me talking we both live in very settled lives in the uk we should be
advising ourselves here probably yeah well i mean you have you have uh you know you have had you
know the little stints outside and i mean i have a long-term plan there's no question about it you've
experienced that what what it would be like you've had a chance to test yeah and i have we have a
plan we have a we have a i mean one of one of the plans that i noticed being quite prevalent at the
moment is in the uk at least people are talking about giving it till the next election right and
because basically when you think about it on paper there'll be a regime change at the next election
there must be because never say all right never say never not in british politics if it's if it
isn't a regime change. And by that, I mean, if it doesn't, if it's not conservative or
Labour, if it's not one of the new parties, then that's the signal. That's the final bell,
right? Get out, you know.
Well, it's going to be a coalition, you see. So you're still going to have one of the old
parties at some, on some level.
Might it be a coalition of the new ones though?
Well, it doesn't matter because there's going to be a, anyway, we don't get into the nuts
and bolts of it, but think of the Lib Dem, you know, Tory.
I can't think of Lib Dems.
I get too depressed.
2010, David Cameron.
So, I mean, Nick Clegg, your deputy PM.
Any stage in history, recent political history in the UK,
is depressing AF.
Everything about everything.
But going back to my plan, which is,
if one of the new parties gets in,
you give them six months, like you gave Trump six months.
Because there is a slim chart.
I don't think the fundamental things can change.
I think if you think there's too much immigration, for example, it's too late.
You're not going to change that.
If you think they're too authoritarian, that could change.
That could change.
I mean, if you think you're being taxed too much, right, that could definitely change.
That could be something.
But whether it could change in the long term, I don't think it could.
Because in order to tax people less, they've got to find the money from somewhere else.
And they've only got one other option, which is borrowing money.
Yeah, and back to the immigration thing.
you can slow down immigration, but you're not really going to alter the demographics currently.
So the fact that people are kind of campaigning on the issue, I think, is kind of a non-starter.
The other issues you said, yeah, those are movable.
But only if the person who's in charge has a radical economic vision
where they're willing to take the risk and also the heat.
And just look at that little bit, Liz Truss in her 44 days as PM.
the little sort of free marketeering that she is a day crushed her so quickly and she was out the
door that the dirt didn't even get on the rug she was out so fast sometimes though it does take
people a few goes to get their heads around that stuff i mean she's now doing the rounds of the
alternative podcast and people are sort of cleverly oh my god she was actually quite you know yeah
yeah and she's doing the right thing actually she's she's one of the smarter ones in terms of
embracing new media. So I think, you know, that's kind of like, yeah, but aside from that,
there's some good people on the left that are talking about economic in more realistic terms.
And that's interesting. I've never seen that before.
The problem is, though, within the democratic system, no one is going to risk not being elected.
That's the risk for a politician now, not to make the country better. It's can I stay in power?
and staying in power involves giving people free money.
This is the problem.
We've, or free money, we live in this system of welfare,
which is huge, the welfare budget,
is it something like 30% of the total budget or something?
It's a lot.
It's a huge amount, right?
That can't change because if you pull that,
you lose all those votes.
That a risk if you pull that and no one wants to take a risk if you want to get elected Exactly You stake with the same safe formula and that the problem We have that formula Even the new parties would get basically sucked into that format
when it comes to the campaign.
So that's always going to be the issue.
I mean, Britain, all European countries have this problem.
They have this problem because they're not transitioning, I think,
well enough to maintain their sort of liberty rights
and all those great things that I think a lot of people enjoyed
after the Second World War, along with all the benefits of the NHS
and the United Kingdom and so forth,
these great institutions that came as a result of that.
A lot of what life was like might not be able to be preserved
in a way I think that you know government's willing to you know give the people a tremendous
or significant amount of freedom because arguably we have less rights than we we did in many ways
before well certainly because governments create laws that's what they do they don't they never
they always create more laws there's always more laws than there was last year isn't it yeah that's
the job of a bureaucrat is to create laws it's like they they occasionally take some away but
they never, there's always a net gain in laws.
So yeah, we do live less free.
But by the same token, there's also, you know, the progressive tax rates that there were in
the past, we don't have those.
And there are more sort of financial opportunities in certain areas, in certain ways.
Maybe, you know, of course, then we'll get into an ideological and economic conversation
about what it should be.
And that's a different discussion.
Without going too deeply into that, I think that is one of the cruxes of the, certainly
the problem we see currently in the UK is that there are the two schools of thought. One is,
I need to manage the economy. I need, you know, as in I'm the government, I need to basically
control the economy. I need to tax people to pay for me to do this job versus if we let people
amass themselves and create wealth and be entrepreneurs, then our tax dollars will
actually be more. It'll be more. Right, exactly. Right. They're the two schools of thought.
Currently, we're with the former. They don't really, they're trying to tax us harder to get
more money, and it's actually resulting in less money. And wealth is leaving the country.
Exactly. Right. It's in Dubai. It's in other places. Yes. So the problem is, again,
Our democracy is failing on that level.
So what did Putin do in Russia to bring the oligarchs home?
Cut the tax rate, flat tax, 13%, cross the board, money comes back.
It started at 10%.
10%.
I mean, what if the British government did that?
What would happen to all the overseas money?
Because I know a lot of British that would rather have businesses
and open restaurant chains in England and employ British people
and their kids and their nephews and nieces.
They'd rather do it at home,
but because there's financial impediments to that,
there's a lot against them in terms of cost and VAT
and stuff like that.
Why bother?
Dude, it's not even remotely complicated
how you kickstart the UK again.
It's so easy.
As a middle-class business owner,
I know exactly why I'm not putting my capital in the market.
and and as as someone who who might leave the country i also know why i want to leave the
country it's absolutely simple it's not even you don't need to know much about economics you just
need to leave people to be free you need to cut the restrictions on starting businesses yeah and
you need to lower the tax rate of the middle class yeah and suddenly it's boom time and cut
business rates or payroll and all this payroll tax yeah well there's too many things getting in
way the only big conglomerates can can bird carry the burden of those even
day because no one's buying their shit anymore even that even they're
struggling yeah who's buying their stuff yeah I used to go when I was you know
ten years ago people used to go shopping every weekend yeah and now people go
buy something off Amazon every now and then but they don't go clothes shopping
every weekend and spending all this lovely money that they've got no matter
what European country you go to and I've traveled a little bit in Europe enough
to see you have people that are on entitlements You have a certain percentage of people that you know are on the dole if you will and so forth mainly my experience in france and uh you know holland and let say the uk and ireland
but you also have people that are entrepreneurial and innovative and you have a high level human
capital in that department britain is probably one of the most successful entrepreneurial
material populations in terms of innovation and smart solutions to things and very quick to pick
up trends have caught up to the America and the digital innovation after being behind for so long.
Now they're right up sort of level in terms of skills and corporate innovation and things like
that. So much so that American companies are, you know, backing startups in Britain now and so forth.
so and that wasn't the case before it is now so britain of course is very strong in human capital
but where are all that where are all the innovators going they're leaving they're leaving they're all
over the world just like all the smart irish uh entrepreneurs are everywhere but ireland
and you see the same in other european countries you meet frenchmen in china you know you meet
italians in southeast asia and these these are all the movers and the shakers because they can't
make any money back back in Europe there's something wrong with the system if the if the
brain drain is happening today in 2025 how do you reverse the brain drain why is the reason they
don't do an about turn because there'll be this period of strife in between say say say you wanted
to adopt some free market principles which would result in more money for literally everyone
including the government, okay, is the reason they don't and they just carry on down this
stupendous route of we need to tax people more to make money. Like we need to do higher rates of
tax, not lower rates of tax, right? Is the reason they do that because if they changed, there would
be this period of a number of years where they were taxing lower and the whole process hadn't
kind of get kicked off.
So they have to sort of weather this bit of the storm, you know.
See, so, you know, someone like Trump goes,
and he knows when he spoke to the, you know,
what he called the business community,
and Carl Icahn and all these billionaires,
and he goes, what do you guys want?
What do you need?
Okay, this is the tax breaks we're going to do for the rich.
Of course, the rich bring their money back,
and then it's being invested in America.
And that's generally a good plan in America to work to some success.
the British government would have to kind of do the same.
It's got to identify people who are overseas and talk to them
and say, what would you be looking for to bring your operations back home
and to have residents back in there instead of being wherever else you are?
And you really need to understand that and then take that leap of faith.
But this goes back to the thing that we were saying before,
is people in mainstream politics don't want to do any work
or take any risks in that department.
They think they have the tools,
and they're just using the same tools as before.
And City of London doesn't mind so much
because they're financialized instruments
that they're running and have giant portfolios.
But we're talking about people in SMEs,
small to medium-sized businesses
who could become large businesses one day.
We're talking about the street and the city.
These are two different things.
And so where's the priority with the government?
It's with the city.
it's not it's not with the SME sector it's not with the entrepreneur the startup sector it's
not really about growth because how many people in parliament knew anything about you know starting
a successful tech startup there's only a few and most have been kicked out of parliament already
all the smart guys you know we better stop branding it's true it's all true it's all true
And even the grand conspiracy is true.
It's just a, it's not as, it's not as, it's a bit more nuanced, would you say?
But definitely, but, but if you can zoom out far enough from this planet, you'll not only
realize it's round, but you will realize that there's a geopolitical system happening.
Is there a flat earth?
No, no, no.
We've got some flat earthers in here.
No, no.
No, but you're real.
If you could, you would see that the geopolitical moves are a form of conspiracy because power is conspiring to do things, you know.
And I mean, you know, because I think it's very hard.
The conspiracy thing is hard to ignore because it kind of does seem to be true but it just not it just been given a bad taken in a bad light
Yeah, it is.
But, you know, how does that affect me on the ground in my world?
Not so much.
I mean, it's good to know.
I mean, if you really want to zoom out, you know,
there's no borders from space
and we're just playing some funny games with each other down here
and making life hard for ourselves most of the time.
and um but you know i i think yeah i think there's a certain amount of bandwidth you can give to
you know ruminating on the grand conspiracy but at the end of the day you know that if you spend
too much time doing that um i think there's you still have to deal with real politic
in the ebb and flow of day-to-day politics you know i vote because i want i want to at least
have a minimal amount of skin in the game so that I can criticize or I can argue.
So that's why I vote, for instance, in the U.S. elections, because otherwise I'm going to say,
I'm going to criticize the president.
Well, did you vote?
Yeah, I did.
If I didn't, I'd just be some, you know, whatever.
So, I mean, not that my vote particularly is going to swing any election, but that's the
main reason, because I want to have skin in the game in the discussion.
Otherwise, what am I saying?
Who am I talking to?
what sort of values am I representing,
freedom and representative democracy,
which we are questioning today.
I was going to say, yeah.
I thought we'd just taken that one apart.
Yeah, we did.
I'm digressing a little bit.
But yeah, I think we've covered a lot of interesting topics today.
And I think, and where the intersections are on some of these things.
Yeah, but it's important.
It's important because I think, you know, we were talking about it earlier that there's a temptation to adopt a sort of anti, a theory that's an anti-everything theory.
It's all fucking bullshit.
It's all a conspiracy.
because it doesn't look like that in many senses.
And I think the way you've described it now,
it kind of does show that there's a truth in that.
Yeah.
But then you don't need to necessarily dissolve into it
and let it take you down
because it doesn't need to take you down.
This is stuff.
This is human nature.
This is human action.
This is what it is.
This is human action.
These are hierarchies that are all working together.
Networks.
Yeah.
And we're part of it.
We're part of it.
And we build our own networks.
And again, back to, if you want to end on a positive note,
any civilization that's hit the wall, any empire that's hit the wall,
there's always been break-off civilizations out of that falling empire,
out of that collapsing civilization.
Always break-off civilizations or parallel civilizations.
And it's always been the case.
So that has happened in every single instance in history.
Every single instance.
And that's going to happen here.
In fact, this is what this event is, and this is what other events are in these other communities and Bitcoin community and so forth, is kind of a breakaway civilization off the old order in a way.
And yeah, it's a fight.
You've got to fight to keep it independent, keep it decentralized.
Because they're going to fight to centralize it.
No doubt.
Expect it.
Freedom is not granted.
100%.
Well, look, Patrick, thanks, mate.
I really appreciate this.
I really enjoyed it.
I'm not sure I will remember everything you just told me,
but what has helped me to think about things in a much more coherent way,
that's assuming it's all true, of course.
I'm not doubting that you're not being truthful,
but many thanks for speaking.
And I would love to do this another time sometime.
I'm glad to have met you.
You're a fellow Brit.
well you're a limey
and you don't live too far away
so I'd definitely like to do this again sometime
when things are moving on
yeah I'll enjoy it
anytime
thank you
Thank you.