Andrii-zvorygin Peak-oil Meeting Transcript — September 3, 2026

00:00:01 Andrii Zvorygin: Greetings in the love and light of the infinite Creator.

00:00:03 Andrii Zvorygin: I'm Andrii Zvorygin.

00:00:04 SPEAKER_001: Joined here today with Gail, Dan, Ivor, Peter, Barbara, Wenches, and today Gail will be doing a presentation, and later Simon will be joining us to do one as well.

00:00:15 SPEAKER_001: So, Gail, how about you introduce yourself first?

00:00:18 SPEAKER_001: Oh, sorry, Gail.

00:00:20 SPEAKER_001: Hello, I'm Gail Tverberg.

00:00:23 SPEAKER_001: I write on the...

00:00:26 SPEAKER_001: I have a website which is called Our Finite World.

00:00:30 SPEAKER_003: I got involved with this back about 2005, which is now over 20 years ago, and I've been involved with various aspects of it.

00:00:42 SPEAKER_003: I was at what we call the Oil Drum for a while.

00:00:46 SPEAKER_003: They went out of business, but I continued on my website, Our Finite World, and I have been researching this, and I've been especially interested in the Limits to Growth aspect.

00:01:01 SPEAKER_001: Awesome, thank you.

00:01:02 SPEAKER_001: Would you like to start your presentation?

00:01:05 SPEAKER_001: Let me try.

00:01:06 SPEAKER_001: Okay.

00:01:09 SPEAKER_001: Oh, I need to...

00:01:11 SPEAKER_001: Okay, so yeah, just click on that, and then I have to find...

00:01:16 SPEAKER_001: Okay.

00:01:19 SPEAKER_001: Where did it go?

00:01:20 SPEAKER_001: Oh, oh, you didn't need to exit it.

00:01:22 SPEAKER_001: Uh, you can start screen sharing again.

00:01:26 SPEAKER_001: Yeah, you have to start screen sharing again.

00:01:27 SPEAKER_001: You accidentally exited the share screen.

00:01:30 SPEAKER_001: Oh, oh dear!

00:01:34 SPEAKER_003: I've got a problem.

00:01:35 SPEAKER_003: I've got to get my screen back up there.

00:01:37 SPEAKER_003: Otherwise, I'm going to have to have you do it.

00:01:42 SPEAKER_003: Okay.

00:01:44 SPEAKER_003: Let's see.

00:01:45 SPEAKER_003: I'll see if I can find...

00:01:54 SPEAKER_001: Okay.

00:01:55 SPEAKER_001: So you're gonna have to start the screen sharing in order for it to work.

00:02:03 SPEAKER_001: Yeah.

00:02:06 SPEAKER_001: I will.

00:02:07 SPEAKER_001: Okay, I'll get back over.

00:02:09 SPEAKER_001: Oh dear.

00:02:10 SPEAKER_001: Okay.

00:02:10 SPEAKER_001: Do you remember it was the third button on the bottom?

00:02:14 SPEAKER_003: Right.

00:02:14 SPEAKER_003: I'm out of your thing, though.

00:02:18 SPEAKER_003: Okay.

00:02:19 SPEAKER_003: Screen sharing, but...

00:02:22 SPEAKER_003: Okay.

00:02:22 SPEAKER_003: There.

00:02:22 SPEAKER_003: Okay.

00:02:23 SPEAKER_003: Good.

00:02:23 SPEAKER_003: Now, just switch over to your presentation.

00:02:28 SPEAKER_003: There you go.

00:02:29 SPEAKER_003: Yeah.

00:02:30 SPEAKER_003: Click on that.

00:02:32 SPEAKER_001: Okay.

00:02:32 SPEAKER_001: Now you can make it full screen.

00:02:36 SPEAKER_001: Yeah.

00:02:36 SPEAKER_001: Screen.

00:02:37 SPEAKER_001: Is that making?

00:02:38 SPEAKER_001: No. That's giving you the whole...

00:02:40 SPEAKER_001: Not giving you the right thing.

00:02:42 SPEAKER_001: Quite.

00:02:42 SPEAKER_001: Yeah.

00:02:42 SPEAKER_001: You can go into presentation mode.

00:02:45 SPEAKER_001: Yeah.

00:02:46 SPEAKER_001: Play from start.

00:02:49 SPEAKER_003: Okay.

00:02:50 SPEAKER_003: There you go.

00:02:51 SPEAKER_003: So I'd like to talk to you about limits to growth.

00:02:54 SPEAKER_003: You know, most of us think that growth can go on forever; the economy can grow forever, but what I have found is it tends to work in cycles.

00:03:03 SPEAKER_003: It goes up for a while, and then it comes back down, and then it goes back up, and it comes back down.

00:03:09 SPEAKER_003: An outline of what I'd like to talk about is first, economies don't behave as we might expect.

00:03:17 SPEAKER_003: They don't just keep going up.

00:03:21 SPEAKER_003: There have been various models put forth, and one was done in 1972, and there was an update in 2024, which I'm going to show you.

00:03:33 SPEAKER_003: And there are kind of insights as to what goes wrong.

00:03:38 SPEAKER_003: One of them comes from the area of physics.

00:03:41 SPEAKER_003: Another insight comes from the area of history, and a third kind of well, it's physics and history, and give us insights.

00:03:53 SPEAKER_003: And it may be possible again, but perhaps not immediately.

00:03:58 SPEAKER_003: Actually, probably not immediately.

00:04:02 SPEAKER_003: So let's look at economies not behaving the way we expect.

00:04:09 SPEAKER_003: We often hear, you know, what happens when oil supply falls too low, and the standard answer is the price of oil will rise,

00:04:17 SPEAKER_003: and the problem will be quickly resolved because people will work harder on getting more oil out.

00:04:23 SPEAKER_003: They will substitute, and the situation will go away.

00:04:27 SPEAKER_003: But what happens?

00:04:29 SPEAKER_003: And this is really an answer that's preferred by politicians, economists, because it implies there's plenty of fossil fuels left.

00:04:39 SPEAKER_003: It's easy to model.

00:04:40 SPEAKER_003: It's believed by many people.

00:04:43 SPEAKER_003: But really, there's a hidden issue, and that is: there's not just the fossil fuels; it's all kinds of other resources that are depleting at the same time.

00:04:54 SPEAKER_003: The uranium is depleting, lithium is depleting, copper is depleting, and at the same time, the population is rising.

00:05:05 SPEAKER_003: So what happens is your resources, relative to the population, aren't growing fast enough, and it's the combination of these things that leads to a different result.

00:05:18 SPEAKER_003: Instead, what tends to happen is the economy seems to behave in cycles.

00:05:28 SPEAKER_003: The general trend is towards more inventions and more specialization, and those inventions and specialization allow the economy to produce more goods and services.

00:05:42 SPEAKER_003: But what tends to happen is that there are significant recessionary periods.

00:05:46 SPEAKER_003: There are big gaps in this, and then it goes up again.

00:05:50 SPEAKER_003: It goes to a higher level, but it goes up and down.

00:05:57 SPEAKER_003: The big problem is that wages don't rise or they don't rise enough when the prices of these materials that we're trying to extract rise.

00:06:12 SPEAKER_003: So what happens is that things become more expensive, but people can't afford as much.

00:06:20 SPEAKER_003: So the leaders become very worried when they see this situation.

00:06:27 SPEAKER_003: They say, "Oh, we'll never be reelected if the price of food is going through the roof and the wages aren't going up, and we have lots of poor people."

00:06:36 SPEAKER_003: So what they tend to do, what the leaders try to do, is put brakes on the economy to try to slow things down,

00:06:44 SPEAKER_003: and one way they do this of putting the brakes on the economy is raising the interest rates.

00:06:54 SPEAKER_003: makes car and home purchases more expensive.

00:06:58 SPEAKER_003: The monthly payments go up, and what tends to happen over and over is that the economy then tends to head towards recession.

00:07:08 SPEAKER_003: So they're kind of pushing the economy back down again, saying, "Well, we got to live within our limits for a while, until we get this figured out.

00:07:17 SPEAKER_003: Maybe we'll get some more inventions, and maybe things will go better, and then we can go back up again."

00:07:23 SPEAKER_003: What happens really happens when oil supplies or other energy falls too low.

00:07:31 SPEAKER_003: The earliest insights came from what I call engineering models.

00:07:36 SPEAKER_003: These are the Limits to Growth models, and these were put together by engineers looking at the situation.

00:07:43 SPEAKER_003: And they said, "We don't understand the financial system at all.

00:07:46 SPEAKER_003: We'll just leave this out.

00:07:48 SPEAKER_003: All we'll do is we'll look at how much stuff it's going to take, and how many people there are going to be that have to be fed,

00:07:57 SPEAKER_003: and you know how much pollution will come along, and we'll look at that, and we'll see how long we can keep this system."

00:08:04 SPEAKER_003: How long we can keep the system going, and when they did that, they discovered there were limits.

00:08:10 SPEAKER_003: Yep, physics helps explain why things change in the ways that are not intuitive,

00:08:18 SPEAKER_003: and then history offers more detail regarding what happens because we've had stories over and over and over again where an economy has grown for a while and then things have collapsed.

00:08:35 SPEAKER_003: So let's talk about the Limits to Growth analyses of 1972 and 1974 and 2024.

00:08:42 SPEAKER_003: I should mention, you know, the fact that these models were put together.

00:08:47 SPEAKER_003: Well, this model was put together in 1972 or a little before that.

00:08:53 SPEAKER_003: Actually, people were talking about the issue back in the 1950s.

00:08:57 SPEAKER_003: So the issue has been well known by people for a very long time.

00:09:02 SPEAKER_003: It was kind of like, well, how does this work out?

00:09:08 SPEAKER_003: So the 1972 Limits to Growth model was made by engineers, as I said before.

00:09:15 SPEAKER_003: And physical resources, including arable land and minerals, are limited.

00:09:21 SPEAKER_003: So it's not just the oil that runs out; it's all this other stuff you need, and especially arable land, fresh water, and the fact that the population keeps growing.

00:09:34 SPEAKER_003: When they put that model together, they just looked at world totals, not finer breakdowns.

00:09:40 SPEAKER_003: And you know, trying to get history on all of these details is difficult.

00:09:46 SPEAKER_003: But they made some kind of an attempt at doing this.

00:09:50 SPEAKER_003: Their general findings were that the world population will continue to grow, if resources permit, but growth will need to stop at some point because you can't get the resources out fast enough,

00:10:03 SPEAKER_003: and there are two issues.

00:10:05 SPEAKER_003: You have to use too much material, too much stuff to get the resources out.

00:10:11 SPEAKER_003: There are diminishing returns.

00:10:15 SPEAKER_003: They talk about you take more effort to get the same amount out.

00:10:20 SPEAKER_003: But if you're doing all your work on just providing food, you're not going to have much left over or anything left over for all the frivolous things, the trips around the world,

00:10:32 SPEAKER_003: and things that you'd like to have.

00:10:35 SPEAKER_003: Right.

00:10:36 SPEAKER_003: So, this is an up-to-date graph of what the output of the 1972 Limits to Growth base case output.

00:10:48 SPEAKER_003: If we looked at the original, it would be in dotted lines, and you know, it wasn't.

00:10:53 SPEAKER_003: Nobody had colour graphs at that point in time, but what happens is that between the year 2000 and 2050, they found that things started going badly.

00:11:09 SPEAKER_003: You can see they have the total amount of resources, and we that starts in the blue up at the top.

00:11:17 SPEAKER_003: And I think they're just talking about the depletion taking out more and more of the resources that are in there.

00:11:23 SPEAKER_003: We're getting closer and closer to half of the resources.

00:11:26 SPEAKER_003: being gone.

00:11:28 SPEAKER_003: Excuse me.

00:11:30 SPEAKER_003: But what tends to happen is, well, what I call food per capita goes down.

00:11:37 SPEAKER_003: And my understanding of that food per capita is it's really a quality-adjusted food per capita.

00:11:44 SPEAKER_003: Maybe there's less meat, for example.

00:11:47 SPEAKER_003: There may still be enough calories for everybody, but people no longer can have the kind of things that they were used to.

00:11:56 SPEAKER_003: They have to have whatever is available.

00:11:59 SPEAKER_003: Oh dear, we have a lawn mower outside here.

00:12:02 SPEAKER_003: I see.

00:12:03 SPEAKER_003: Then what is the population?

00:12:12 SPEAKER_003: At least in this chart, doesn't start going down until 2050.

00:12:17 SPEAKER_003: You know, people can be poor and still live, but the situation gets worse, and anyhow, so there've been a number of updates.

00:12:29 SPEAKER_003: I add a little bit more.

00:12:31 SPEAKER_003: The industrial output per capita is likely to fall first.

00:12:36 SPEAKER_003: Yeah.

00:12:36 SPEAKER_003: Barbara had a question.

00:12:38 SPEAKER_003: I was wondering maybe it was related to that slide.

00:12:41 SPEAKER_003: Barbara, did you want to unmute and ask your question?

00:12:45 SPEAKER_003: Back one easily.

00:12:48 SPEAKER_003: Excuse me.

00:12:49 SPEAKER_003: Yeah.

00:12:49 SPEAKER_003: Okay.

00:12:50 SPEAKER_003: So deaths go up, population goes down.

00:12:55 SPEAKER_003: Am I reading this right?

00:12:56 SPEAKER_003: That births then go back up.

00:13:01 SPEAKER_003: I think what happens is that life expectancies go down.

00:13:04 SPEAKER_003: Gail, are you on mute?

00:13:06 SPEAKER_003: You can't.

00:13:07 SPEAKER_003: We can.

00:13:08 SPEAKER_003: Yeah, go ahead, Gail.

00:13:09 SPEAKER_003: I can hear you.

00:13:10 SPEAKER_003: Yeah, you can't keep up the kind of situation you've had all along with antibiotics and all of these other things.

00:13:19 SPEAKER_003: And so you know, maybe a mother has to go back to having five or six babies in order that two of them can live to maturity.

00:13:27 SPEAKER_003: Oh yes, yes, yeah.

00:13:30 SPEAKER_001: The deaths outpace the births by twenty fifty on this chart.

00:13:36 SPEAKER_001: Right, that's what's going on there.

00:13:38 SPEAKER_001: Right, right.

00:13:39 SPEAKER_003: So anyhow, so the Limits to Growth model showed that food per capita falls shortly after industrial output.

00:13:53 SPEAKER_003: There's, as I say here, perhaps as much food, but the quality falls, less meat in the mix.

00:14:00 SPEAKER_003: And as I say, that the population doesn't start falling till about 2050 in that model.

00:14:07 SPEAKER_003: Then in more recently, well, there've been various ones in between, but there was one put together by Mr. N. E. B. E. L. Nebel and others, and they tried to do the same thing,

00:14:21 SPEAKER_003: recalibrate it, still without a financial system, and it seems to indicate we are hitting limits now.

00:14:29 SPEAKER_003: And I will show you some information too that shows that we are, in fact, seem to be hitting limits right now in things like steel and concrete and critical minerals.

00:14:48 SPEAKER_003: Well, I won't show you any graphs on critical minerals such as tungsten, but these are in terribly short supply right now too.

00:14:56 SPEAKER_003: And what we do have is most of the supply coming from China, and this is what's leading to so much conflict.

00:15:04 SPEAKER_003: You know, if you have some of these things, but China has all of them, then we're kind of going, or eighty percent of them, and the rest of the world is kind of going,

00:15:13 SPEAKER_003: oh my goodness!

00:15:14 SPEAKER_003: There's not enough to go around in China.

00:15:16 SPEAKER_003: Is keeping them for self.

00:15:19 SPEAKER_003: Right.

00:15:20 SPEAKER_003: So this is the model.

00:15:22 SPEAKER_003: This is what they got for their output.

00:15:26 SPEAKER_003: They and you have to look at the dark coloured lines as opposed to the dotted lines, and you see that and they have a 2025 line shown in there,

00:15:38 SPEAKER_003: so you can tell better where we are relative to the others, and they're talking about the industrial output stopping, actually right now or earlier, and they talk about I don't understand.

00:15:54 SPEAKER_003: I was the one who typed in these words: population, industrial output, because it's hard to read all these things down the side.

00:16:02 SPEAKER_003: What they have: the food per capita is in green there, and you can see it stops starts going down about twenty.

00:16:08 SPEAKER_003: Starts going down about 2025 too, and I was just talking to my sister Lois, who has been in Uganda and corresponds with somebody there, and they are having real starvation problems right now,

00:16:25 SPEAKER_003: with issues with respect to I guess it's El Niño, and you know they're all subsistence farmers, they're not getting enough total.

00:16:37 SPEAKER_003: Well, it's hard for them to afford to buy enough beans and corn, or it's not available in their area, and they're having a hard time getting enough food.

00:16:49 SPEAKER_003: They do have some backup plants that they plant because they know that they will make it even through droughts, but those plants aren't as tasty, and they don't usually prefer those.

00:17:04 SPEAKER_003: But you know, their poor areas, especially that are running into starvation problems right now.

00:17:11 SPEAKER_003: I looked at a couple of things here.

00:17:17 SPEAKER_003: I show the World Steel Organisation, and they show that this is the total amount of steel made, and it stopped.

00:17:28 SPEAKER_003: The top they go up through 2025, but you can see that in the recent years it started coming back down, and on a per capita basis, of course, the peak is in 2021.

00:17:44 SPEAKER_003: And I looked at concrete also, and concrete you get a flat period from about 2013 going forward.

00:17:54 SPEAKER_003: And if you if if the total production is flat, then per capita, the amount of concrete is going down, and so you can't pave as many roads, and things change rather dramatically.

00:18:13 SPEAKER_003: So physics gives us some insight regarding what goes wrong.

00:18:20 SPEAKER_003: The laws of physics require energy consumption for heat and for motion.

00:18:28 SPEAKER_003: So you know if you want to cook your food, you're going to have to have some heat, you know.

00:18:35 SPEAKER_003: And if somebody's going to can food or going to produce metals, you need energy consumption for everything.

00:18:44 SPEAKER_003: So what happens is that the world economy requires energy for GDP growth, and when we graph it, it turns out the energy change seems to come before the GDP growth.

00:18:59 SPEAKER_003: If you have energies.

00:18:59 SPEAKER_003: Have energy supply abundant, cheap, fossil fuels.

00:19:06 SPEAKER_003: Your economy is going to grow faster.

00:19:09 SPEAKER_003: So what happened was back in the nineteen sixty s, the economy, world GDP was growing very rapidly.

00:19:17 SPEAKER_003: But that's not the case now.

00:19:21 SPEAKER_003: It's gone down.

00:19:23 SPEAKER_003: You know we're down at much lower levels, and this is not.

00:19:29 SPEAKER_003: This world GDP includes the growth in population, so it's not that the people have been getting a lot richer.

00:19:41 SPEAKER_003: Here on this next chart, I show a kind of my own mental model of how the economy works, and you have all kinds of different parts of the economy,

00:19:55 SPEAKER_003: and they keep growing and changing over time, you know the consumers.

00:20:00 SPEAKER_003: Some of them die off, and you get new consumers, and the total number of consumers tends to go up.

00:20:05 SPEAKER_003: And the governments grow and change, and they keep coming along.

00:20:11 SPEAKER_003: And the energy products, the total amount of them, keep growing.

00:20:15 SPEAKER_003: And businesses, some of them grow, and some of them disappear.

00:20:19 SPEAKER_003: There's new laws.

00:20:21 SPEAKER_003: There's wages and prices.

00:20:23 SPEAKER_003: On some of these charts, I have put a little note about the fact that what keeps the thing going is the fact that the consumers are also the ones that are getting paid.

00:20:37 SPEAKER_003: You know, and if their wages aren't high enough, then this whole thing starts to fall apart.

00:20:44 SPEAKER_003: If they can't get enough money to pay for what they're doing, you have a problem.

00:20:50 SPEAKER_003: And there's also another issue is that if things change, the economies that are built this way delete unneeded companies and products, making it almost impossible to go backwards.

00:21:06 SPEAKER_003: So a standard example of this is, you know, we used to use horses.

00:21:12 SPEAKER_003: If we didn't have oil and gas, well, what the problem they were running into about the time they stopped using horses was that the manure problem was just becoming an overwhelming problem in the cities,

00:21:28 SPEAKER_003: and you know you think about the population now and the size of our cities.

00:21:32 SPEAKER_003: You know what would New York City do?

00:21:35 SPEAKER_003: How much manure would you get if you came in with all of these horses?

00:21:39 SPEAKER_003: And you have all kinds of other problems you don't think about.

00:21:43 SPEAKER_003: We don't have nearly enough horses.

00:21:45 SPEAKER_003: You'd have to feed them, and what tends to happen is that the system tends to be fragile because you can't go backwards easily.

00:21:56 SPEAKER_003: You can't just say, "Oh, we'll all get a horse," because it just doesn't work.

00:22:02 SPEAKER_003: In physics terms, structures that can temporarily grow are called dissipative structures, and I've given three examples here that we can follow through.

00:22:19 SPEAKER_003: One of them is human beings.

00:22:22 SPEAKER_003: We temporarily grow and we kind of plateau for a while and then we kind of go downhill and we die.

00:22:29 SPEAKER_003: You know something that's sort of the way it goes.

00:22:32 SPEAKER_003: Hurricanes are another kind of dissipative structure.

00:22:35 SPEAKER_003: You know they temporarily grow and then they disappear.

00:22:40 SPEAKER_003: And it turns out economies are also a dissipative structure.

00:22:45 SPEAKER_003: And what we found from physics is these structures need to dissipate energy to remain alive, and the type of energy varies.

00:23:00 SPEAKER_003: Human beings require food.

00:23:02 SPEAKER_003: I think we all know that.

00:23:03 SPEAKER_003: We can.

00:23:05 SPEAKER_003: It's a variety of food.

00:23:08 SPEAKER_003: Hurricanes require warm water, and it turns out the economies require fuel to match their built infrastructure.

00:23:21 SPEAKER_003: Dissipative structures can often withstand a small shortage in energy supply.

00:23:26 SPEAKER_003: So, for human beings, we lose weight if we don't have enough food.

00:23:30 SPEAKER_003: We set aside certain amount of stores and we use them up.

00:23:34 SPEAKER_003: And with hurricanes, the wind speed falls if it temporarily goes over land and then it goes back over the ocean and it can pick up again.

00:23:44 SPEAKER_003: But that's the way it works.

00:23:46 SPEAKER_003: If you don't have enough of the heat or the energy that it gets, it can't keep going.

00:23:52 SPEAKER_003: With economies, you tend to get recession if there's not enough energy, and if it's worse, you know, even worse than what a small recession is, what you get is collapsing banks and collapsing governments,

00:24:13 SPEAKER_003: and also wars.

00:24:16 SPEAKER_003: I think of it as like musical chairs.

00:24:20 SPEAKER_003: If there's not enough, you know, when you play a game of musical chairs, you take out a chair each round.

00:24:28 SPEAKER_003: You have people marching around a group of chairs, and you take out a chair each round.

00:24:33 SPEAKER_003: Well, if there's not enough food to go around, then somebody has to get left out.

00:24:41 SPEAKER_003: Or if there's not enough diesel to operate all of the farm equipment, then somebody has to get left out, and people are not real happy about it.

00:24:53 SPEAKER_003: So that's why you get these wars, and if you think about it, governments operate on the surpluses of the economy.

00:25:03 SPEAKER_003: So if the government, you know, if the people are doing poorly, they can't.

00:25:10 SPEAKER_003: The governments don't have the resources to do the things they like to do,

00:25:15 SPEAKER_003: and the banks often get left out too because the financial system has assumed that all of this debt will pay back well.

00:25:24 SPEAKER_003: And if you're going through a recession, we know from experience that doesn't always work out.

00:25:30 SPEAKER_001: Yeah, and I just watched a collapse of the Bronze Age societies yesterday, and it had exactly what you're talking about.

00:25:38 SPEAKER_001: At exactly what you're talking about, basically, that there was like a drought across the Middle East, and that caused them to all have not enough resources,

00:25:53 SPEAKER_001: and so they weren't able to maintain their armies and things.

00:25:58 SPEAKER_001: And then they started to have the Sea Peoples, which were a collection of migrant groups who didn't have food in their homeland, and then they would go like the musical chairs and go.

00:26:09 SPEAKER_001: Who still has the food?

00:26:11 SPEAKER_001: Let's take it from them.

00:26:12 SPEAKER_001: And that's where the wars all came from.

00:26:15 SPEAKER_001: You know, right?

00:26:16 SPEAKER_003: Yeah, it is a problem that occurred over and over again, and it has to do with the population rising.

00:26:24 SPEAKER_003: And one thing that has been pointed out too is that when things are going well, when the population was low, people would know about this problem, so they would set aside reserves.

00:26:34 SPEAKER_003: They said store up.

00:26:36 SPEAKER_003: They set up store up extra food for the bad periods.

00:26:41 SPEAKER_003: Well, as things population go higher and higher, it became more and more difficult to set aside enough reserves.

00:26:49 SPEAKER_003: So they stopped doing it.

00:26:51 SPEAKER_003: So then, when the weather took a turn for the worse, then needless to say, they didn't have the reserves there, and that was at least half of the problem.

00:27:01 SPEAKER_001: Besides the weather problem, yeah.

00:27:06 SPEAKER_001: Like Egypt had some reserves, and oh, yeah, I can.

00:27:11 SPEAKER_001: Yeah, go ahead.

00:27:12 SPEAKER_001: Like it's fine.

00:27:13 SPEAKER_001: Yeah, yeah.

00:27:14 SPEAKER_001: Yeah, Egypt had reserves, right?

00:27:16 SPEAKER_003: So, of course, you can do.

00:27:19 SPEAKER_003: Sometimes you can have complexity that you can help have your problem.

00:27:23 SPEAKER_003: I guess help your problem, and so complexity could be having a government that sets aside reserves for you, and other would be.

00:27:33 SPEAKER_003: And in fact, cities in general are an example of complexity.

00:27:44 SPEAKER_003: We don't think about all these things, but anything that Hunter gathers didn't have is complexity.

00:27:49 SPEAKER_003: That's this international trade has been a big thing.

00:27:53 SPEAKER_003: More efficient vehicles, higher education, artificial intelligence is the biggest thing.

00:28:01 SPEAKER_003: That's an example of complexity, but the problem with complexity is that you're doing a whole lot of specialization, and so you get some people who come out really really well,

00:28:17 SPEAKER_003: and you get some people who are competing with the wages in India, and their wages go terribly low, and they have a horrible problem,

00:28:30 SPEAKER_003: and there's a wealth disparity because you've got the people who own all of these big firms who've done well, and you have everybody else who's kind of left out,

00:28:43 SPEAKER_003: and you get more and more debt, and the interest payments on this debt becomes a problem.

00:28:49 SPEAKER_003: And what tends to happen over and over, and we're seeing it again this time, is that the young people are especially affected by the wage and wealth disparity,

00:29:01 SPEAKER_003: they look at themselves and they say we're not doing as well as our parents.

00:29:06 SPEAKER_003: We're having a terrible time.

00:29:07 SPEAKER_003: We go to college.

00:29:09 SPEAKER_003: We've got all this debt to repay.

00:29:11 SPEAKER_003: We can't find a job that pays well enough, and so they want to revolt, or they want to go to war because it turns out the war provides jobs.

00:29:25 SPEAKER_003: I think yes.

00:29:26 SPEAKER_003: So this is why the economy.

00:29:27 SPEAKER_003: Why the economies tend to be cyclic?

00:29:30 SPEAKER_003: For a while, this added complexity is helpful, but eventually, the problems of the added complexity become too great.

00:29:40 SPEAKER_003: The debt starts to default.

00:29:42 SPEAKER_003: Unhappy young people want reform, and their jobs tend to be low-paying, and they're not happy about the situation.

00:29:54 SPEAKER_003: And I never realized this until I started looking at the data.

00:29:59 SPEAKER_003: But war often looks like a solution.

00:30:03 SPEAKER_003: You know, the jobs offered by war look like a plus to young people.

00:30:07 SPEAKER_003: Oh, I'll be able to make a name for myself serving in the military, and I'll get an income.

00:30:16 SPEAKER_003: And so the war also makes it look like the government is trying to help this bad situation.

00:30:22 SPEAKER_003: You know, if you can go to war with another country and take some of their resources.

00:30:27 SPEAKER_003: Maybe that will help your own situation.

00:30:32 SPEAKER_003: One thing I didn't realize until I looked at the data is that the GDP tends to rise during a war because the war is treated as an added service.

00:30:43 SPEAKER_003: And if you think about World War II, you know this is when all women started going to work to help the men that were drafted into the military, and huge numbers of.

00:30:53 SPEAKER_003: Huge numbers drafted in the military, so you had all of the additional output from the women added to that of the men, and that's why the GDP went up.

00:31:03 SPEAKER_003: And what happens is it allows the governments an excuse to borrow more money, and with all this money that they've borrowed, they can pay more people.

00:31:13 SPEAKER_003: So this makes war look so much better.

00:31:18 SPEAKER_003: People are saying, "Well, yeah, this is helping us."

00:31:21 SPEAKER_003: You know, I got.

00:31:21 SPEAKER_003: Helping us, you know.

00:31:22 SPEAKER_003: God, we have two incomes from the family now instead of just one.

00:31:28 SPEAKER_003: Let's talk about a little bit about history now.

00:31:32 SPEAKER_003: It gives us a little more detail about what happens.

00:31:36 SPEAKER_003: We don't often think about the fact that central governments can collapse, and the Soviet Union central government collapsed in 1991, and so back a few years ago,

00:31:53 SPEAKER_003: I was kind of following this over the years, and I said, "Well, let's see what happened to the energy consumption of the various countries that I had added together to make up the Soviet Union."

00:32:08 SPEAKER_003: And so, what we found was that the oil consumption had flattened out quite a ways way before the economy actually collapsed.

00:32:20 SPEAKER_003: And the oil is down at the bottom here.

00:32:23 SPEAKER_003: And then the coal that flattened out too quite a bit before the economy collapsed.

00:32:31 SPEAKER_003: And they started substituting natural gas.

00:32:33 SPEAKER_003: You know, hey, we can use that instead.

00:32:36 SPEAKER_003: Then nuclear added a tiny amount, and hydro added a tiny amount.

00:32:42 SPEAKER_003: And I don't know why other renewables they've never used over there.

00:32:47 SPEAKER_003: So that never came about.

00:32:50 SPEAKER_003: So then, what happened is that it kind of went down, but it didn't go straight down.

00:32:57 SPEAKER_003: You know, the amount of fuel that they used, some of the businesses, industry went away.

00:33:05 SPEAKER_003: But when you actually look at it, the population didn't go to zero.

00:33:14 SPEAKER_003: You know, there was some people who moved out from the area within the Soviet Union to other countries, I think there was an increase in alcoholism and in suicides,

00:33:26 SPEAKER_003: but you didn't see you know this huge population drop at that time.

00:33:32 SPEAKER_003: So it gives you a kind of an example of what happened when the Soviet Union central government collapsed.

00:33:40 SPEAKER_001: No, it was very hard to get food because the but but that was related to the collapse of the governments, the stores weren't working and things like that.

00:33:51 SPEAKER_001: Yeah, well, that's what happened.

00:33:52 SPEAKER_003: Yeah, when the government collapses, then you've got a problem with what do you do for money supply?

00:33:57 SPEAKER_003: You know, it'd be like if the European Union collapsed, or if the federal government of the U.S. collapsed.

00:34:05 SPEAKER_003: You know, you'd still have some other governments out there, and they say, "Oh, gee, we need to get together and put together our own Southeast."

00:34:11 SPEAKER_003: Either our own Southeast U.S. dollar or something like that, but it would not necessarily be the same money that you were talking about previously.

00:34:24 SPEAKER_003: What I found too was you know this was an exporter, and the prices they had trouble when the prices fell low, that didn't give them enough revenue to keep their system up,

00:34:40 SPEAKER_003: but with the loss of the demand that came from these countries, the world prices fell even lower.

00:34:50 SPEAKER_003: After they collapsed, the Soviet Union collapsed, and of course this was a problem for like the U.S. because the prices of oil were too low to really support the U.S.'s oil production.

00:35:05 SPEAKER_003: People were going, "Oh, this is just terrible," and that was when all of the interest came in, maybe globalization.

00:35:13 SPEAKER_003: We got to get China and India and all these countries to grow, and then maybe we get the prices back up again.

00:35:22 SPEAKER_003: So anyhow, so I think I covered this kind of a little bit here.

00:35:28 SPEAKER_003: Also, there's been interest in actually looking at different civilizations that have collapsed,

00:35:38 SPEAKER_003: and Peter Turchin and Sergey Nevidomsky put together an analysis of eight different agricultural societies that collapsed in a book they called "Secular Cycles."

00:35:52 SPEAKER_003: And these were back in the time before electricity, so it's not quite the way the situation is right now.

00:36:01 SPEAKER_003: And what they found was that there was a long period of growth and you know, it was well over a hundred years.

00:36:10 SPEAKER_003: But then, what would happen is that the population would start to reach the carrying capacity of wherever they were.

00:36:19 SPEAKER_003: So, if they had maybe won a war and they now had more land, or maybe they had cut down a large area and started the trees on a large area of land,

00:36:33 SPEAKER_003: and they could now grow crops on it, you know, and support their family.

00:36:40 SPEAKER_003: Then they could, it work.

00:36:42 SPEAKER_003: They could grow their population for a while, but eventually the population would start to get too high for that area.

00:36:51 SPEAKER_003: So they start getting to a stagflation period.

00:36:55 SPEAKER_003: But and but then they finally would hit a crisis period, and that stagflation period, at least for these eight societies that they looked at, and I just calculated these numbers myself,

00:37:10 SPEAKER_003: they came out with between fifty and sixty years.

00:37:14 SPEAKER_003: And then they went, the population, not necessarily populations, more like the output of the population of the society started going down, and they had a crisis period.

00:37:28 SPEAKER_003: But it didn't go down immediately; it went down over a period of between 20 and 50 years, and then there was a period of varying lengths, which they called the intercycle period,

00:37:42 SPEAKER_003: where you know people worked on new solutions, maybe new hydro resources.

00:37:50 SPEAKER_003: You could irrigate land to get more land, or you know whatever it is, and they could start working over again.

00:37:58 SPEAKER_003: So it didn't stay down permanently necessarily, but it was a situation when it went up and down.

00:39:49 SPEAKER_003: The way I see

00:46:13 SPEAKER_003: You know, like in the Soviet Union, you'd read these stories about people who continue to go to work even though they got paid or didn't get paid because, well,

00:46:22 SPEAKER_003: there was still the lunch programme and there was this and that.

00:46:25 SPEAKER_003: You know, somehow other things went on.

00:46:29 SPEAKER_003: And there's always some people who succeed, even if you know the general situation is now.

00:46:39 SPEAKER_003: I say near-term simplification seems likely.

00:46:44 SPEAKER_003: In you know, we were talking before.

00:46:46 SPEAKER_003: If there's not enough food, a person tends to lose weight.

00:46:51 SPEAKER_003: Well, the equivalent thing for an economy is if you have to get rid of some of the things that are not as essential.

00:47:00 SPEAKER_003: And if we think back over the last ten years, there's some of this that's already been going on.

00:47:07 SPEAKER_003: You know, you don't see as many people in three-piece suits anymore.

00:47:11 SPEAKER_003: You know, in you know celebrations, you know, young people getting married.

00:47:19 SPEAKER_003: There's quite a few of them going getting married in backyard celebrations with a few flowers that their friends have bought,

00:47:26 SPEAKER_003: and you know they don't necessarily have to follow the same rules that everybody has had before; they can continue the same general idea, but they cut back on some of the excesses.

00:47:43 SPEAKER_003: And what we have is that fewer goods and services can be made with a smaller quantity of fossil fuels.

00:47:49 SPEAKER_003: So somehow you have to work the economy around it.

00:47:54 SPEAKER_003: Each person will tend to get poorer.

00:47:57 SPEAKER_003: Actually, when I stop to think about it, the shutdowns of 2020 and 2021 worked very much like a rationing system.

00:48:10 SPEAKER_003: It was okay, everybody stay at home, and we'll just have the essentials go.

00:48:15 SPEAKER_003: Well, that is sort of a rationing system, and that is a way you know you allow the people to continue to use what they have, but you have people work from home for their jobs,

00:48:29 SPEAKER_003: for example, to conserve on oil supply.

00:48:33 SPEAKER_003: There will be need to let go of some of today's complexities.

00:48:38 SPEAKER_003: We'll see cutbacks in government services such as road paving and providing school buses, and there will be smaller,

00:48:50 SPEAKER_003: more easily repaired farm machinery instead of requiring you know some big company from somewhere to come and fix things.

00:49:00 SPEAKER_003: You know you can actually do it yourself.

00:49:02 SPEAKER_003: I think another kind of way of getting rid of some complexity is more people sharing a household.

00:49:08 SPEAKER_003: You know, multi-generation families, for example.

00:49:14 SPEAKER_003: If a large drop in per capita energy consumption is needed, it may almost be necessary need to be necessary to start over, and so.

00:49:24 SPEAKER_003: And as I was saying before, governments are formed with the surpluses of the economy, so you end up with needing a smaller government.

00:49:34 SPEAKER_003: And of course, the exaggeration of this is a single leader with a small staff, but that's the direction you tend to have.

00:49:42 SPEAKER_003: And so you have to start thinking about what can be done with what is available locally.

00:49:48 SPEAKER_003: Are current buildings of any value except as scrap?

00:49:52 SPEAKER_003: How can enough food be produced and delivered to people?

00:49:56 SPEAKER_003: The biggest business may temporarily be salvaged.

00:50:02 SPEAKER_003: I think that's one of the things that they discovered in the when the Soviet Union collapsed.

00:50:10 SPEAKER_003: Oh yeah, they were taking stuff out and using it over in a new way.

00:50:17 SPEAKER_003: Exactly how the financial system will work is uncertain.

00:50:23 SPEAKER_003: This is what I was saying before.

00:50:25 SPEAKER_003: You know, if you don't have stuff to buy, it doesn't matter what your pixel wealth is.

00:50:31 SPEAKER_003: You know, it's sort of like okay, that's nice.

00:50:33 SPEAKER_003: You have this pixel wealth, but if the system stops working the way you'd expect, that somebody's going to have to get cut out.

00:50:43 SPEAKER_003: So we just don't know.

00:50:45 SPEAKER_003: And some major government structures and some banks may be gone, and we don't know.

00:50:53 SPEAKER_003: One thing I thought was interesting was that in some situations in the past, they said some big trading companies or whatever continued even though the governments had failed.

00:51:06 SPEAKER_003: I thought, well, that's interesting.

00:51:07 SPEAKER_003: I've never thought about that.

00:51:09 SPEAKER_003: But the governments can collapse, like we saw the Soviet Union collapse.

00:51:16 SPEAKER_003: But then some other things may continue, and smaller U.S. governments, and they'll get together and they say, "Well, we lost the U.S. dollar.

00:51:24 SPEAKER_003: Well, we'll start something else to use instead."

00:51:27 SPEAKER_003: The way I see it is, if there's not enough food to go around, they're going to want to pay the productive workers first.

00:51:39 SPEAKER_003: You know, they're going to want to make sure that the people who are really working are getting enough so that they can continue to work.

00:51:47 SPEAKER_003: And so what tends to happen is people who are not really providing much benefit to the system, and I'm thinking, the elderly and the people who are disabled, who are on pension plans,

00:52:02 SPEAKER_003: are especially vulnerable to cutbacks because if you don't have enough to go around, you desperately need to keep your workers paid and fed properly.

00:52:15 SPEAKER_003: The way I see it, we don't really know whether oil products will be available at any price.

00:52:23 SPEAKER_003: You know, for just anybody walking up to get it.

00:52:26 SPEAKER_003: You know, it may be that all of the gas stations that we have, a lot of them are closed, and you have to go 50 miles to get gasoline.

00:52:36 SPEAKER_003: Well, maybe that kind of cuts back on your ability to do this.

00:52:40 SPEAKER_003: It may be that agricultural uses will be given first priority, and then other things are only going to get it as it becomes available.

00:52:50 SPEAKER_003: It is just a you just don't know how this might work, but you might think that that would be the kind of thing.

00:52:57 SPEAKER_003: And I think you know rather than formal rationing systems, I think what we would run into is something more like 2020.

00:53:07 SPEAKER_003: I expect prices and how the economy will work will depend on where economies are in their secular cycles, and so the low price of oil, the fact that it didn't go up,

00:53:21 SPEAKER_003: seems to be a temporary issue related to this part of the curve.

00:53:25 SPEAKER_003: You know, part of it is that there's so many other things that you have to.

00:53:31 SPEAKER_003: People are paying for all of the higher transport costs and all of those things.

00:53:35 SPEAKER_003: The price of the products goes up, but the amount of the actual crude oil doesn't price.

00:53:42 SPEAKER_003: Doesn't go up as high, but you know the situation how it works.

00:53:49 SPEAKER_003: You could get hyperinflation, you know, where governments make lots and lots and lots and lots of money, but there's nothing to buy, and that could be another feature of the down cycle,

00:54:01 SPEAKER_003: at least in some parts of the world.

00:54:04 SPEAKER_003: But the situation could be quite different from time to time.

00:54:08 SPEAKER_003: We've been so used to the growth situation.

00:54:11 SPEAKER_003: We can't quite imagine how it might look in a period going forward.

00:54:18 SPEAKER_003: So I think that's the end of what I have here.

00:54:22 SPEAKER_003: Barbara has a question.

00:54:24 SPEAKER_003: Gail, on on your second last, same people would give the fuel to farmers because we like to eat.

00:54:34 SPEAKER_003: Governments tend to give it to the military, and.

00:54:38 SPEAKER_003: I think that's the big thing that you've missed there.

00:54:43 SPEAKER_003: Yeah.

00:54:43 SPEAKER_003: Okay.

00:54:44 SPEAKER_003: You're right.

00:54:44 SPEAKER_003: The military would be very high, right?

00:54:48 SPEAKER_003: And whoever are the leaders at that point in time are sure to make sure that they themselves get fed, because they're going to be real concerned about that, right?

00:54:59 SPEAKER_003: And I think you end up getting stuff like the Russian mafia, right?

00:55:03 SPEAKER_003: Where you know instead of having one dictator, you have a hundred organised crime figures running the economy for their own benefit.

00:55:14 SPEAKER_003: Right.

00:55:14 SPEAKER_003: Yeah, that would be an approach.

00:55:16 SPEAKER_003: Right.

00:55:17 SPEAKER_003: You have all kinds of things that are different than what we're used to, and these new organisations may actually provide some benefit.

00:55:28 SPEAKER_003: You know, maybe a Robin Hood kind of thing or something.

00:55:31 SPEAKER_003: Not quite, but you know, organised crime figures.

00:55:34 SPEAKER_003: You know, people who are starving are not going to continue starving if they can figure a way around it.

00:55:42 SPEAKER_005: It's harder.

00:55:44 SPEAKER_005: It's harder though to do stuff when you're starving.

00:55:48 SPEAKER_005: You know, some of the studies clearly show people don't think as well.

00:55:52 SPEAKER_005: The obvious solutions that you and I today would say, well, why in the heck didn't they just walk out to the nearest farm and start digging?

00:56:04 SPEAKER_005: Right?

00:56:06 SPEAKER_005: You know, and things like that.

00:56:08 SPEAKER_005: People, you know, once you start starving, you starve the brains, and you starve the capacity to resist both physically and mentally.

00:56:20 SPEAKER_005: So, you know, once people get hungry, solutions don't come very fast.

00:56:27 SPEAKER_003: Yeah, my sister Lois is writing a book with somebody from Uganda, and she's been over to Uganda several times.

00:56:37 SPEAKER_003: And you know, she said that you know they're having problems with starvation there now too.

00:56:44 SPEAKER_003: And you know that they have well, the woman she works with, she's co-writing the book.

00:56:51 SPEAKER_003: Was says, well, we have high walls.

00:56:53 SPEAKER_003: People scale the walls to get the food, and we don't feel we can shoot these people or anything like that.

00:56:59 SPEAKER_003: But we tell them, you know, just you can take what you can get, take in your arms, and take it back.

00:57:05 SPEAKER_003: You know, but we somehow or other we have to live with these people, who are not getting enough food for themselves.

00:57:15 SPEAKER_003: And what do you do with this situation?

00:57:18 SPEAKER_003: They've developed, you know, their version of religion says that if you steal from other people, you will get sick.

00:57:27 SPEAKER_003: You'll tend to get sick, and so they try to keep the theft down, but if people are starving, they will get them however they can.

00:57:39 SPEAKER_003: Oh, especially if your kids are starving.

00:57:41 SPEAKER_005: You know, you and I might decide that we'd be perfectly happy to starve to death, but we're not going to let our five-year-olds starve to death.

00:57:48 SPEAKER_005: Let's be honest, right?

00:57:51 SPEAKER_005: And that's where it goes.

00:57:52 SPEAKER_005: You know, even when it's not starvation, in 2020, when the schools shut down, the factories around here that put milk in little half-pint containers for schools shut down,

00:58:09 SPEAKER_005: and there was no place to put the milk in larger containers for the stores.

00:58:14 SPEAKER_005: And I'm thinking, how hard would it have been just to cart those to the nearest Kroger or the nearest whatever store?

00:58:22 SPEAKER_005: Mothers would have been perfectly happy to buy a hundred half-pints to give their kids milk, right?

00:58:28 SPEAKER_005: And yet, just obvious solutions like that don't seem to be even in people's minds.

00:58:39 SPEAKER_005: You know, some things are so trivial, and yet we can't seem to come up with them.

00:58:46 SPEAKER_005: And you know, I think World War Two, some of the things that happened were much more creative and much more innovative.

00:58:54 SPEAKER_003: Well, I know around here there are certainly religious charities that are going around to stores and they're getting food that's right near the expiration date and they're handing it out to groups.

00:59:06 SPEAKER_003: You know, there's even though they know that's going to cut into the amount that they're going to be selling or could very well.

00:59:13 SPEAKER_003: Okay, just two points here.

00:59:16 SPEAKER_003: Gail, could you stop doing the screen sharing for now?

00:59:19 SPEAKER_003: Oh, is that what I?

00:59:21 SPEAKER_003: Oh, is that what I'm doing?

00:59:22 SPEAKER_003: I'm sorry.

00:59:23 SPEAKER_003: Yeah.

00:59:24 SPEAKER_003: Do I have to go back here and stop screaming?

00:59:28 SPEAKER_001: Yeah.

00:59:28 SPEAKER_001: Okay.

00:59:28 SPEAKER_001: Good.

00:59:29 SPEAKER_001: And now Dune has a question.

00:59:32 SPEAKER_001: Yeah.

00:59:32 SPEAKER_001: Thanks, Andre.

00:59:33 SPEAKER_001: Yeah.

00:59:33 SPEAKER_001: I'd like to put Barbara's theme in a slightly different context.

00:59:40 SPEAKER_001: In that, you know, one of the things that Gail has been emphasizing is efficiency and support of every as many people as possible in the population.

00:59:53 SPEAKER_006: Whereas, I think really what happens is the narcissism of leaders is going to mean that they don't really care what happens to most of the population,

01:00:08 SPEAKER_006: and you know that's that's going to be the big difficulty in the coming times.

01:00:17 SPEAKER_003: Yes.

01:00:18 SPEAKER_003: Well, one of the things that you know readers on my site offer lots of comments,

01:00:25 SPEAKER_003: and that one of the things they pointed out is that the poor people often try to have uprisings against leaders, and the history of these uprisings work.

01:00:39 SPEAKER_003: Very often, they don't work.

01:00:42 SPEAKER_003: You know that the leaders, with being able to pay the soldiers and the things, are able to put down the uprisings.

01:00:50 SPEAKER_003: And the people who tend to get squeezed out because there's not enough to go around are basically the poorest people in the hierarchy to begin with.

01:01:02 SPEAKER_003: So even though they may try to do things to keep things going, it does tend to go down.

01:01:16 SPEAKER_003: Yeah, not a very good way of looking at the future, unfortunately.

01:01:22 SPEAKER_003: No, no. Thanks.

01:01:26 SPEAKER_005: But probably a fairly reasonable way to look at it.

01:01:34 SPEAKER_005: Yeah.

01:01:54 SPEAKER_005: You're muted, Andrew.

01:01:57 SPEAKER_001: Oh, thank you, thank you, Simon.

01:02:00 SPEAKER_001: I was just seeing if we could get you, actually.

01:02:04 SPEAKER_001: Yep.

01:02:05 SPEAKER_001: Yep.

01:02:05 SPEAKER_001: There are a few YouTube channels as well.

01:02:13 SPEAKER_001: Okay.

01:02:19 SPEAKER_001: So, okay, Simon, did you have any questions for Gail before?

01:02:25 SPEAKER_001: Questions?

01:02:26 SPEAKER_001: No. I've been following Gail's work for some time now.

01:02:31 SPEAKER_001: It is top-notch, first-class.

01:02:34 SPEAKER_001: She's one of our thought leaders.

01:02:35 SPEAKER_001: So, good stuff, Gail.

01:02:39 SPEAKER_001: Once again, I probably do have some questions for you, but none sort of come to mind at the moment.

01:02:46 SPEAKER_001: But they're not necessarily related to the analysis that you've just done.

01:02:49 SPEAKER_001: It's more a case of the trouble I'm getting into at the moment.

01:02:53 SPEAKER_001: What you might think about it.

01:02:57 SPEAKER_001: So no questions.

01:02:58 SPEAKER_001: Okay, Simon, are you ready to do your presentation?

01:03:02 SPEAKER_001: Sure.

01:03:03 SPEAKER_001: Okay, right, you are.

01:03:05 SPEAKER_001: Hello, everyone.

01:03:07 SPEAKER_001: So I'm going to do a presentation on the work.

01:03:13 SPEAKER_001: It's like a summary of the work I'm doing at the moment.

01:03:16 SPEAKER_001: How do I share?

01:03:17 SPEAKER_001: Where's sharing?

01:03:19 SPEAKER_001: The third button on the bottom.

01:03:21 SPEAKER_001: Yep.

01:03:21 SPEAKER_001: Entire screen.

01:03:27 SPEAKER_001: Okay.

01:03:27 SPEAKER_001: Share.

01:03:32 SPEAKER_001: Okay.

01:03:34 SPEAKER_001: Okay.

01:03:35 SPEAKER_001: And yeah, we see it.

01:03:37 SPEAKER_001: Yep.

01:03:38 SPEAKER_001: Okay.

01:03:39 SPEAKER_001: So can everyone see and hear me?

01:03:40 SPEAKER_001: Okay.

01:03:42 SPEAKER_001: Yeah, I've got a cough at the moment, so my voice has taken a beating.

01:03:47 SPEAKER_001: Never mind.

01:03:48 SPEAKER_001: Right.

01:03:49 SPEAKER_001: So, this is actually like a bookend to what Gail just presented.

01:03:55 SPEAKER_001: This is like a given.

01:03:59 SPEAKER_001: What Gail presented.

01:04:01 SPEAKER_001: What if our world leaders actually knew this, and what would their plan be?

01:04:06 SPEAKER_001: And so, I've started to look at control of the resource sector.

01:04:13 SPEAKER_007: It's not just energy, and yeah, and so this is okay.

01:04:20 SPEAKER_007: How do I?

01:04:22 SPEAKER_007: Okay, before I start, I'm going to give an opinion.

01:04:29 SPEAKER_007: So, in my professional world, we are looking at raw materials, but we have this thing where we have these buzzwords that tend to cook our brain, and there's no bandwidth for anything else.

01:04:44 SPEAKER_007: Between 2008 and 2025, the green transition was all we could talk about to the exclusion of everything else.

01:04:51 SPEAKER_007: Around 2017, we started talking about battery minerals, metals, cobalt in particular, was the start.

01:04:58 SPEAKER_007: Then it was lithium, and then it was graphite, and then around 2025, after the Iberian Peninsula blackout in Spain and Portugal, everyone was saying, "Oh, we're not going to do wind and solar now.

01:05:12 SPEAKER_007: We're going to fall back on gas."

01:05:14 SPEAKER_007: Yeah, the gas genset fallback, and that was what, for example, the banking sector was talking about.

01:05:18 SPEAKER_007: Twenty twenty-six.

01:05:19 SPEAKER_007: Now we're talking about raw materials for AI and data centres, and very quickly over that, we've overrun our defence CRMs.

01:05:30 SPEAKER_007: Right.

01:05:31 SPEAKER_007: What's the CRM?

01:05:31 SPEAKER_007: Oh, sorry.

01:05:32 SPEAKER_007: I apologize.

01:05:32 SPEAKER_007: Sorry, I apologise.

01:05:34 SPEAKER_007: I do talk in acronyms because that's the world I'm into.

01:05:36 SPEAKER_007: But critical raw materials.

01:05:39 SPEAKER_007: Critical raw materials.

01:05:40 SPEAKER_007: There's a CRM list that multiple countries around the world are chasing.

01:05:46 SPEAKER_007: Right.

01:05:46 SPEAKER_007: Anyway, my point here is we get our best and brightest to chase one thing to the exclusion of everything else, and then every couple of years we reset the clock, the whiteboard is wiped off,

01:05:56 SPEAKER_007: and we forget what we've done.

01:05:57 SPEAKER_007: We're not talking about battery metals any much, very much anymore.

01:06:01 SPEAKER_007: So this is the thing that we often sort of talk about in the prepper community.

01:06:06 SPEAKER_007: Are we no different to a yeast culture?

01:06:08 SPEAKER_007: You know, we're just all about growth.

01:06:10 SPEAKER_007: I would add this: Are we just cats chasing a laser pointer, red dot?

01:06:15 SPEAKER_007: Now, our best and brightest are spending all their time chasing things that turn out to be later like not that important for very long.

01:06:23 SPEAKER_007: This is not so much an observation, so much as a cry for help.

01:06:27 SPEAKER_007: We could be doing so much better.

01:06:30 SPEAKER_007: Anyway, after so, what I'm presenting now is my attempt to turn this around.

01:06:37 SPEAKER_007: My attempt to do something different, do something proactive.

01:06:42 SPEAKER_007: Right.

01:06:42 SPEAKER_007: Great.

01:06:43 SPEAKER_007: We talk about control of the energy sector, oil, and that's used to control the financial system.

01:06:48 SPEAKER_007: Yeah, the petrodollar.

01:06:51 SPEAKER_007: Right, the empire petrodollar, and that for the last couple of decades has controlled planet Earth.

01:06:55 SPEAKER_007: Great.

01:06:57 SPEAKER_007: So, control of the energy system is starting to break apart.

01:07:00 SPEAKER_007: It's you know the Strait of Hormuz, Bravo Johnny, bravo.

01:07:06 SPEAKER_007: The Strait of Hormuz has shown us that that's now starting to break apart.

01:07:12 SPEAKER_007: So now the control vector is gas.

01:07:15 SPEAKER_007: You know, gas was the lever of control in Ukraine, for example, and also Strait of Hormuz.

01:07:24 SPEAKER_007: But I'm going to make the case: it's actually the real deal is the control of raw materials, and that is going to control the financial system,

01:07:31 SPEAKER_007: and what they're really talking about there is the control of manufacture, the control of stuff, and gas and coal are the energies that supply manufacture.

01:07:43 SPEAKER_007: And I think what this is all about is a transfer of one empire to another, and this is what I'm calling the empire, the Neo Han Dynasty Empire, the next Chinese Empire.

01:07:56 SPEAKER_007: So, but then there's the question: Who's doing this really?

01:07:59 SPEAKER_007: We like to think in terms of, oh, it is country X or it's country Y, but really, you've got these factions that are actually in every country.

01:08:08 SPEAKER_007: It's like one transnational company has got offices in every country and is doing battle with another transnational company that's got offices in every country.

01:08:18 SPEAKER_007: So it's not as simple as we think.

01:08:20 SPEAKER_007: And given what Gail just presented, right?

01:08:24 SPEAKER_007: I actually think this is.

01:08:25 SPEAKER_007: If there's not enough to go around, and our leaders actually understand this, what will they do about it?

01:08:32 SPEAKER_007: And we're moving into a world of who controls the stuff.

01:08:38 SPEAKER_007: And I'm going to make the case that controlling the manufacturing sector, raw materials, and trade routes is what this is all about.

01:08:47 SPEAKER_007: So, what does the financial system become?

01:08:50 SPEAKER_007: And what of what was all this look like for about to go through a contraction of available resources.

01:08:56 SPEAKER_007: Right.

01:08:56 SPEAKER_007: So this is something I did ten years ago, as it turns out.

01:09:00 SPEAKER_007: Every now and then we've got like an empire, and that empire transfers to another empire after a period of instability, usually war.

01:09:09 SPEAKER_007: And we've got a new empire coming in, and we've got that little era at the moment.

01:09:13 SPEAKER_007: And every couple of months you need to add a new word in there.

01:09:19 SPEAKER_007: Right.

01:09:19 SPEAKER_007: So this is the city's trap.

01:09:21 SPEAKER_007: Do we go to war or not?

01:09:24 SPEAKER_007: Now, the last empire, the dollar was based on oil.

01:09:27 SPEAKER_007: One before that was based on coal, and everything before that was who controlled the trade routes.

01:09:33 SPEAKER_007: Okay, excuse me.

01:09:36 SPEAKER_007: And the next one is going to be based on minerals, minerals-based energy of some sort, but which ones we don't know.

01:09:44 SPEAKER_007: Okay, so the BRICS dollar is something that's being put forward.

01:09:47 SPEAKER_007: I don't think it's going to be that.

01:09:48 SPEAKER_007: It's going to be something else, but you know, and maybe it won't even be BRICS, like a new conglomerate or form.

01:09:56 SPEAKER_007: Right.

01:09:56 SPEAKER_007: So this is the model that I've been sort of working on and to put things together.

01:10:03 SPEAKER_007: This is the basic model.

01:10:04 SPEAKER_007: I update it every now and then.

01:10:06 SPEAKER_007: Seen it before, so I won't go through it.

01:10:08 SPEAKER_007: But things are moving along, and it's proving.

01:10:11 SPEAKER_007: This is proving to be quite a useful map.

01:10:18 SPEAKER_007: Excuse me.

01:10:19 SPEAKER_007: Right.

01:10:20 SPEAKER_007: How often have we gone to war over oil?

01:10:24 SPEAKER_007: So this was an exercise I did a couple of years ago.

01:10:27 SPEAKER_007: The column on the left is a place where either oil battle has happened, like a kinetic war, or an economic sanction has happened.

01:10:39 SPEAKER_007: The column on the right is the countries that went to war, and the columns on the right are all peak oil literate, and they're all in an alliance.

01:10:50 SPEAKER_007: Okay.

01:10:50 SPEAKER_007: So the columns on the left in 2009 formulated the BRICS.

01:10:57 SPEAKER_007: Come on, I believe the BRICS economies were to get up to get those economies to get control of their own sovereignty and get out from under the petrodollar system.

01:11:09 SPEAKER_007: Both sides had oil reserves, gas reserves, production gets that capacity.

01:11:15 SPEAKER_007: Right.

01:11:16 SPEAKER_007: It's not a case of one had the oil and the other didn't.

01:11:18 SPEAKER_007: No, they both did.

01:11:19 SPEAKER_007: Who controls the oil industry as we approach peak oil?

01:11:23 SPEAKER_007: That's what I think this was all about.

01:11:25 SPEAKER_007: And what ended up happening?

01:11:28 SPEAKER_007: Let me get rid of that.

01:11:30 SPEAKER_007: What ended up happening was what was this all about?

01:11:34 SPEAKER_007: And so we are now seeing control over a series of systems, but it's all about leverage, footprint, and leverage.

01:11:44 SPEAKER_007: So the BRICS was formally established in 2009.

01:11:47 SPEAKER_007: It didn't just happen overnight.

01:11:48 SPEAKER_007: It was talked about in the early 2000s. 2006, the four emergent economies started to talk about getting together. 2009, they formed, and they've been growing ever since.

01:12:01 SPEAKER_007: Now, the purpose of the BRICS is to develop an alternative system to the petrodollar SWIFT system, which they are starting to do.

01:12:08 SPEAKER_007: It hasn't worked out very well.

01:12:10 SPEAKER_007: If the BRICS nations' currency does take hold, then the debt saturation in the fiat currencies will be a real problem, and it's all going to blow out.

01:12:20 SPEAKER_007: Ah, right.

01:12:22 SPEAKER_007: So that way they're holding off on it.

01:12:24 SPEAKER_007: I think no, not holding off.

01:12:26 SPEAKER_007: I think there is a behind-the-scenes war to prevent it from happening.

01:12:29 SPEAKER_007: I see.

01:12:30 SPEAKER_007: Yeah, but that's what I'm saying.

01:12:32 SPEAKER_007: Is gas was used as a leverage point in the Ukraine war, and the Strait of Hormuz, Bravo Johnny, was a.

01:12:40 SPEAKER_007: Johnny Bravo is one of the podcasts as I watch, and he's got this crazy haircut, and he calls it the spread of hair moose.

01:12:48 SPEAKER_007: That's funny, right?

01:12:51 SPEAKER_007: Anyway, yeah.

01:12:52 SPEAKER_007: Anyway, so we are seeing raw materials being used as leverage.

01:12:58 SPEAKER_007: I can't see the comments, by the way.

01:13:00 SPEAKER_007: So, in question, so yeah, Dan has a question.

01:13:02 SPEAKER_007: Yeah, of course he does.

01:13:03 SPEAKER_007: Hit me, Dan.

01:13:04 SPEAKER_007: It's not so much a comment as more of a sort of satirical historical, I mean, but I guess we just haven't put United States.

01:13:13 SPEAKER_007: We just haven't put enough sanctions on the countries to finally drive them into the BRICS system.

01:13:18 SPEAKER_007: But we're doing a pretty good job right now.

01:13:20 SPEAKER_007: Yeah, no, I think there is a strategy afoot, the West strategy.

01:13:25 SPEAKER_007: I think I understand it.

01:13:26 SPEAKER_007: Ethics be damned, right?

01:13:29 SPEAKER_007: But we are seeing a macro scale shift, tectonic shift.

01:13:33 SPEAKER_007: Yeah, I mean, you look at the bond market, the bond, and it's not the stock market, the bond market, the credit market.

01:13:37 SPEAKER_007: Bond market, their credit markets, the real world economy, massive sell-off in in in Treasuries, U.S. Treasuries, and it has directly to do with the war in Iran.

01:13:49 SPEAKER_007: Right.

01:13:49 SPEAKER_007: So the United States is falling.

01:13:51 SPEAKER_007: So so then the West at large was asleep for a very long time, and they woke up with a start.

01:13:58 SPEAKER_007: The Trump administration finds itself found itself in the situation where it woke up very late in the game, a few moves from checkmate, right?

01:14:09 SPEAKER_007: And it didn't really have the sophistication to do things in a sensible form, if you will.

01:14:16 SPEAKER_007: But it found itself in the position of it's when a mosquito lands on your testicles that you find out that violence is not the only answer.

01:14:23 SPEAKER_007: And that's that's I think where the US finds itself right now.

01:14:30 SPEAKER_007: The predecessor to the Trump administration, I believe, was heavily compromised.

01:14:34 SPEAKER_007: I believe was heavily compromised by the BRICS group, you know, combination of you know the Russians and the Chinese and all that.

01:14:42 SPEAKER_007: That's just an opinion, but it makes sense for what I see.

01:14:46 SPEAKER_007: Anyway, back to the data.

01:14:47 SPEAKER_007: So I've put this together.

01:14:49 SPEAKER_007: There's the BRICS alliance and the West alliance.

01:14:53 SPEAKER_007: So in the data I'm about to show you, this is the BRICS alliance.

01:14:56 SPEAKER_007: So you get the founding members, the full members, and the partner countries.

01:15:00 SPEAKER_007: These are the countries that have come together.

01:15:02 SPEAKER_007: What do they control?

01:15:04 SPEAKER_007: So we're talking about 30.6 percent of the world GDP and around 56 percent of the world population.

01:15:10 SPEAKER_007: Then you got the Western lights: see, United States, Kingdom, United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and Europe.

01:15:17 SPEAKER_007: I put Kuwait and Iraq in there.

01:15:19 SPEAKER_007: After the United States or the West in general help them with the democratic distribution of resources, they now vote all the time with regard to what the West actually wants.

01:15:28 SPEAKER_007: So they're actually the spoils of war, and I include them in the Western lights.

01:15:31 SPEAKER_007: The Them in the West Alliance, the potential members that are sitting on the fence that may or may not join BRICS, Saudi Arabia, Morocco, and Myanmar, just a coincidence.

01:15:40 SPEAKER_007: Nothing to worry about.

01:15:41 SPEAKER_007: Saudi Arabia's got oil.

01:15:43 SPEAKER_007: Morocco happens to have fifty percent of the world's phosphate rock reserves, and it happens to be right where a bottleneck is for the maritime shipping, which I'll talk about later.

01:15:54 SPEAKER_007: Myanmar happens to make the majority of the world's heavy rare earth elements.

01:16:00 SPEAKER_007: It's resources.

01:16:01 SPEAKER_007: Then you got the rest of the world.

01:16:02 SPEAKER_007: So what I've done is gone across the entire value chain for all minerals and metals and worked out which of them fall into these groups.

01:16:12 SPEAKER_007: So here's the petrodollar alliance, and so okay, so United States, United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, Europe, etc., etc. So you got the petrodollar agreement.

01:16:23 SPEAKER_007: You know the pillar of global finance.

01:16:25 SPEAKER_007: It's a conspiracy theory that's more or less public knowledge now.

01:16:29 SPEAKER_007: So they had the U.S. global reserve currency, and the SWIFT system.

01:16:35 SPEAKER_007: They controlled the banking system, and who happened to control it?

01:16:38 SPEAKER_007: Well, they did.

01:16:40 SPEAKER_007: Then you had the global footprint of something like a thousand military bases.

01:16:44 SPEAKER_007: It was over a thousand.

01:16:46 SPEAKER_007: Now it's down around seven hundred and fifty worldwide.

01:16:49 SPEAKER_007: So then you got the BRICS.

01:16:51 SPEAKER_007: So they happen to be quite a large footprint, not as large in terms of GDP, but they happen to control all the industry, all the stuff, the physical resources.

01:17:03 SPEAKER_007: And come on, come on, you can do it.

01:17:05 SPEAKER_007: All right.

01:17:05 SPEAKER_007: So here's the footprint: oil reserves, C and C oil production, gas reserves, gas production, and GDP production.

01:17:15 SPEAKER_007: What you're looking at here does the US, UK, EU, etc., go to war with Russia and China and Iran for shits and giggles?

01:17:25 SPEAKER_007: Because they can for entertainment or what?

01:17:27 SPEAKER_007: We are actually looking at two basic blocks: the Western Petrodollar Alliance versus the BRICS Commodities Alliance.

01:17:37 SPEAKER_007: So, so we're looking at the Societies Trap of this era.

01:17:41 SPEAKER_007: I'm of the opinion that the war has been going for a while, and one side has all but comprehensively outmaneuvered another side.

01:17:50 SPEAKER_007: Right.

01:17:50 SPEAKER_007: So we're going to look at this data in terms of mineral reserves, mining production, and smelting and refining.

01:17:56 SPEAKER_007: Now, traditionally, in the critical raw materials world, we look at just what was mined by country, and that was it.

01:18:05 SPEAKER_007: Sometimes we look at reserves, and in mining production, we look at resources, not mineral reserves.

01:18:09 SPEAKER_007: Yeah, it's it's it's we have this sort of half-assed way of doing stuff.

01:18:15 SPEAKER_007: We, until now, have not really looked at smelting and refining, and I think that's a mistake.

01:18:21 SPEAKER_007: There's three basic paradigms that are happening in this data.

01:18:26 SPEAKER_007: Paradigm one: Can we be self-sufficient in the value chain commodity of this chain value chain supply of this particular commodity?

01:18:34 SPEAKER_007: Can we be self-sufficient?

01:18:36 SPEAKER_007: Two: Is the market controlled by a single power block?

01:18:41 SPEAKER_007: And three: There's a couple of markets, energy in particular, where the market is split between two large groups that then control, and the market is being controlled by these two large groups, so it's bipolar.

01:18:55 SPEAKER_007: So within that, when I show something about who controls the market, like how much the market—if the largest operator controls anything less than twenty-five percent—you've got market forces.

01:19:07 SPEAKER_007: Basic market forces are in effect.

01:19:09 SPEAKER_007: That's great.

01:19:11 SPEAKER_007: If the global market is above fifty-three percent, the market price can be influenced.

01:19:18 SPEAKER_007: If it's above fifty percent, the physical supply can be influenced.

01:19:24 SPEAKER_007: If it's above seventy percent, that actor can dictate terms to the market.

01:19:32 SPEAKER_007: And then you got the Lehman there.

01:19:34 SPEAKER_007: You don't hurt me.

01:19:35 SPEAKER_007: Yeah.

01:19:37 SPEAKER_007: Okay.

01:19:40 SPEAKER_007: So purple is bad.

01:19:42 SPEAKER_007: Red is bad.

01:19:43 SPEAKER_007: Orange bad.

01:19:45 SPEAKER_007: Yellow not good.

01:19:46 SPEAKER_007: All right.

01:19:46 SPEAKER_007: So how is this going to break up?

01:19:48 SPEAKER_007: So let's look at first of all the critical raw materials.

01:19:53 SPEAKER_007: So this is things like you know cobalt, graphite, all the stuff for the green transition.

01:19:58 SPEAKER_007: Red that means they can dictate terms.

01:20:00 SPEAKER_007: Orange they can actually dictate supply.

01:20:03 SPEAKER_007: Yellow you can influence price.

01:20:06 SPEAKER_007: So you got these markers, for example, vanadium, where in terms of mineral reserves, the BRICS alliance controls fifty-three percent, but the West has got forty-six.

01:20:17 SPEAKER_007: Right.

01:20:17 SPEAKER_007: And so the market is stretched between two poles.

01:20:21 SPEAKER_007: Then you get mining production as another thing.

01:20:25 SPEAKER_007: Europe, for example, sees mining as something dirty and unclean, and we should phase it out.

01:20:32 SPEAKER_007: Now, all the stuff that we actually think we need, you know, like rare earth elements and everything, the BRICS nations control quite a lot.

01:20:42 SPEAKER_007: So this is mining, but when you get to refining, things turn downright ugly.

01:20:44 SPEAKER_007: Things turned downright ugly.

01:20:48 SPEAKER_007: Yeah, right.

01:20:49 SPEAKER_007: And so this is the problem.

01:20:51 SPEAKER_007: So it's not just China; it's all those countries summed together.

01:20:56 SPEAKER_007: It's an alliance.

01:20:58 SPEAKER_007: All right.

01:20:58 SPEAKER_007: So that's critical raw materials.

01:21:00 SPEAKER_007: Here's base metals.

01:21:01 SPEAKER_007: This is the other thing we've been asked to focus on: lithium, or cobalt, or rare earth elements.

01:21:10 SPEAKER_007: Hold the phone.

01:21:11 SPEAKER_007: What about base metals?

01:21:14 SPEAKER_007: Iron, for example, controls everything.

01:21:17 SPEAKER_007: You know, iron, cement, aluminium, copper, all that.

01:21:21 SPEAKER_007: So you got your reserves for one thing.

01:21:23 SPEAKER_007: Mining production's another, but it's really the refined metal.

01:21:29 SPEAKER_007: Right.

01:21:30 SPEAKER_007: So, so the base metals, the underpinning thing for the entire manufacturing sector right across the planet, is heavily influenced by the BRICS groups to the point where they can influence supply of most things,

01:21:43 SPEAKER_007: at least the price, and in some cases they can just dictate terms.

01:21:48 SPEAKER_007: What's going to happen when we get to a shooting war and they decide?

01:21:51 SPEAKER_007: Well, we're not going to do business with you anymore because you know, as Gail just pointed out, there may not be enough to go around much longer.

01:22:00 SPEAKER_007: What happens to democracy when there's not enough to go around?

01:22:04 SPEAKER_007: Right.

01:22:04 SPEAKER_007: That's base metals.

01:22:06 SPEAKER_007: Here's energy.

01:22:06 SPEAKER_007: Now, this is an interesting one.

01:22:09 SPEAKER_007: When you look at just China, they produce a lot of coal and they produce a lot of gas.

01:22:16 SPEAKER_007: They're consuming roughly the same amount of coal and gas that they're producing.

01:22:20 SPEAKER_007: They do import a little bit, but it's not much.

01:22:22 SPEAKER_007: Their Achilles' heel is oil.

01:22:26 SPEAKER_007: And what seems to be happening is the energy market in general is being split between two basic economic blocks, and they can influence the price.

01:22:40 SPEAKER_007: But we are seeing a full-on pitch battle for over the last fifty years on who controlled energy.

01:22:46 SPEAKER_007: Remember that chart.

01:22:46 SPEAKER_007: How often do we go to war over areas with oil and gas?

01:22:52 SPEAKER_007: Like, for example, the Syrian war was about the choice between two gas pipelines, one backed by Europe and the United States, and the other one backed by Russia and Iran.

01:23:02 SPEAKER_007: Thus, that's why the people there were fighting.

01:23:07 SPEAKER_007: Fertilizer.

01:23:07 SPEAKER_007: Now, this is something that has not come out yet, but I think it's coming.

01:23:14 SPEAKER_007: Food.

01:23:15 SPEAKER_007: When you know since the kinetic shooting in Iran has kicked off, one of the things that is being blocked is all the sulfur that's coming out of the region,

01:23:27 SPEAKER_007: and they need that to make fertilizer.

01:23:30 SPEAKER_007: And we've now missed one planting season, and we've got a wheat crop that's the lowest it's been in something like fifty-six years.

01:23:38 SPEAKER_007: what could possibly go right?

01:23:41 SPEAKER_007: So, so this is the long-term pattern.

01:23:43 SPEAKER_007: This is twenty-twenty-four data, right?

01:23:45 SPEAKER_007: So that's not what's happening now.

01:23:46 SPEAKER_007: This is a couple of years old.

01:23:49 SPEAKER_007: Since COVID, they've actually stopped reporting data as often.

01:23:53 SPEAKER_007: I suspect they would rather we didn't know.

01:23:56 SPEAKER_007: Anyway, but we are seeing a point coming where the BRICS nations could exert control over at least some fertiliser.

01:24:05 SPEAKER_007: Precious metals.

01:24:09 SPEAKER_007: This is another one.

01:24:10 SPEAKER_007: Did someone ask a question, Andrew?

01:24:13 SPEAKER_007: Yeah, I'll have to check the chat.

01:24:16 SPEAKER_007: Yeah, never mind.

01:24:17 SPEAKER_007: We can do it at the end if you like.

01:24:18 SPEAKER_007: Okay.

01:24:18 SPEAKER_007: Yeah.

01:24:19 SPEAKER_007: Okay.

01:24:19 SPEAKER_007: Anyway, precious metals.

01:24:22 SPEAKER_007: So this is also you know the currency thing.

01:24:24 SPEAKER_007: Platinum in particular is controlled by BRICS.

01:24:27 SPEAKER_007: Gold and silver is influenced by BRICS, not so much the West.

01:24:32 SPEAKER_007: Refining of gold and silver.

01:24:34 SPEAKER_007: The data is very spotty.

01:24:36 SPEAKER_007: It's not the point where you can actually sort of do it country by country, which I found very interesting.

01:24:40 SPEAKER_007: Right.

01:24:41 SPEAKER_007: So what's going on here?

01:24:44 SPEAKER_007: So I'm going to put some thoughts on the ground of what I think is going on here.

01:24:48 SPEAKER_007: So the West has the basic plan of doing battle over years of chess, take out the enemy king, like a decapitation strike.

01:24:56 SPEAKER_007: Yeah.

01:24:56 SPEAKER_007: The East is more like go, take over territory.

01:25:01 SPEAKER_007: Right.

01:25:01 SPEAKER_007: It's a very, very different and both are just as nasty.

01:25:04 SPEAKER_007: Go takes you lull them into a sense of false security for longer, and then suddenly you've lost.

01:25:11 SPEAKER_007: Yeah.

01:25:11 SPEAKER_007: Then there's the question: Is well, what are these other guys doing?

01:25:14 SPEAKER_007: And everyone on this board is doing something because everyone now understands the basic predicament that Gail just presented.

01:25:22 SPEAKER_007: What do they do?

01:25:23 SPEAKER_007: And it's all about stuff, resources.

01:25:25 SPEAKER_007: It always has been.

01:25:28 SPEAKER_007: So China controls the majority of the industrial system, as does the BRICS.

01:25:31 SPEAKER_007: What's their plan?

01:25:32 SPEAKER_007: Do they have one?

01:25:33 SPEAKER_007: Of course they do.

01:25:34 SPEAKER_007: Have we misunderstood what's happening?

01:25:36 SPEAKER_007: Are we looking at the wrong things?

01:25:37 SPEAKER_007: Yes, and yes, and I think that's not an accident.

01:25:41 SPEAKER_007: I actually have a thesis of how this has happened.

01:25:44 SPEAKER_007: So I saw a pattern between these books, and this is what I saw.

01:25:49 SPEAKER_007: China was doing that they have a hundred-year marathon from 1949, and by 2049, they want absolute control of everything industrial on planet Earth.

01:25:58 SPEAKER_007: Between heaven and earth, will be under the Han Dynasty control.

01:26:02 SPEAKER_007: If you want to do interact with anything industrial, like by a computer, a car, whatever, anything with metal in it, you will do business with them on their terms.

01:26:14 SPEAKER_007: Long-term, full spectrum, global domination through control of the industrial value chain by 2049.

01:26:20 SPEAKER_007: That's what they're doing.

01:26:22 SPEAKER_007: Whether they will be successful or not remains to be seen.

01:26:26 SPEAKER_007: It they're already pretty close in a lot of ways.

01:26:29 SPEAKER_007: Yes, yes.

01:26:31 SPEAKER_007: But my solution to that is to leapfrog the bastards by making a parallel system.

01:26:36 SPEAKER_007: Okay, you don't have to play the game.

01:26:39 SPEAKER_007: That's how you win.

01:26:41 SPEAKER_007: Yeah, you want to be king of the castle.

01:26:42 SPEAKER_007: All right, you can be the king of the castle.

01:26:45 SPEAKER_007: You're the best, and we'll be off to somewhere doing somewhere else.

01:26:49 SPEAKER_007: This is the paradigm we've been working with.

01:26:51 SPEAKER_007: We change the lexicon.

01:26:53 SPEAKER_007: So there's a couple of other books.

01:26:56 SPEAKER_007: In 1999, Unrestricted Warfare was published by a couple of Chinese colonels.

01:27:03 SPEAKER_007: What they did was they looked at the Gulf War, the first Gulf War, and they were absolutely appalled about what they saw.

01:27:11 SPEAKER_007: That, even though it's a footnote in history, that war changed military technology.

01:27:16 SPEAKER_007: It was all about systems and information and everything working together.

01:27:20 SPEAKER_007: And so, what those guys did was they then rewrote The Art of War by Sun Tzu into a more modern context, and this is what they came up with.

01:27:32 SPEAKER_007: And war without rules is like someone who understands the Chinese language and the culture, and they actually then wrote a book about it.

01:27:38 SPEAKER_007: So if you want to see about this, look at War Without Rules.

01:27:42 SPEAKER_007: Okay, and then you've got you know the science of military strategy in their own words.

01:27:46 SPEAKER_007: This one's a little bit opaque, and you really need to understand Chinese culture to get to it.

01:27:51 SPEAKER_007: Anyway, that was the pattern that I actually got to.

01:27:53 SPEAKER_007: It's an evolution of the art of war, and in fact, the art of war turns out to be a Boy Scout polite version of the Chinese history and the Japanese history in warfare.

01:28:06 SPEAKER_007: Ethics is a very Western thing, right?

01:28:10 SPEAKER_007: So China started having their resource, raw minerals policies.

01:28:16 SPEAKER_007: The first one appeared in two thousand and one.

01:28:18 SPEAKER_007: All the military stuff appeared before this.

01:28:21 SPEAKER_007: So the military plan was put on the ground first, and I think it was an economic war of a multi-dimensional or form.

01:28:30 SPEAKER_007: That by the time warplanes are launched, the missiles are launched, and everything, the war has already been won and lost.

01:28:37 SPEAKER_007: That's that.

01:28:38 SPEAKER_007: That was the approach.

01:28:39 SPEAKER_007: It's it's about money, economics, financial systems, but also the control of raw materials.

01:28:47 SPEAKER_007: Coming to a close here.

01:28:48 SPEAKER_007: This is the second half of the now.

01:28:50 SPEAKER_007: Of the analysis, I'm making the case that the BRICS economies not only control the majority of the value chain across all metals and minerals, but they also control the shipping routes.

01:29:02 SPEAKER_007: So here's the major shipping routes.

01:29:03 SPEAKER_007: Yeah, the primary ones and the secondary ones.

01:29:05 SPEAKER_007: The circles are choke points.

01:29:08 SPEAKER_007: Right now, let's look at what the BRICS nations actually are.

01:29:14 SPEAKER_007: So there is five tiers of shipping routes.

01:29:18 SPEAKER_007: So tier one, tier two, tier three.

01:29:21 SPEAKER_007: So tier one, this is the main shipping route.

01:29:24 SPEAKER_007: It goes from China through the Strait of Malacca, through the Suez Canal, through here to London.

01:29:34 SPEAKER_007: That's the primary shipping route.

01:29:37 SPEAKER_007: Now, who are the BRICS?

01:29:40 SPEAKER_007: China, Brazil, Russia, India, South Africa.

01:29:47 SPEAKER_007: They happen to control the maritime areas along where this is going.

01:29:53 SPEAKER_007: The other countries, you know, things like you got Indonesia, you got Malaysia, Vietnam, Thailand.

01:30:02 SPEAKER_007: So you've got Ethiopia.

01:30:04 SPEAKER_007: Why is Ethiopia in BRICS?

01:30:07 SPEAKER_007: This is when I first started.

01:30:08 SPEAKER_007: Why do they do that?

01:30:10 SPEAKER_007: Well, they happen to be right here, where you get this major shipping route going through.

01:30:15 SPEAKER_007: So the Suez Canal is owned and controlled by a couple of companies that are majority owned by the PRC government.

01:30:23 SPEAKER_007: That's the Suez Canal, as was the Panama Canal, until the Americans started breaking shit.

01:30:29 SPEAKER_007: Now, so the Chinese control that.

01:30:32 SPEAKER_007: Egypt is in the BRICS alliance.

01:30:35 SPEAKER_007: Saudi Arabia is thinking about joining.

01:30:37 SPEAKER_007: The largest military base for China happens to be right here in Ethiopia, right on the coast where all this shipping lane goes past.

01:30:48 SPEAKER_007: On the other side of that strait is the Houthi rebels, which happen to be aligned to Iran, who happen to be aligned with everyone else: China, Russia, what have you.

01:30:56 SPEAKER_007: Yeah.

01:30:57 SPEAKER_007: So they control this whole section here.

01:30:59 SPEAKER_007: India controls the ocean around here, and then you got you know Thailand and they control this whole circuit across here.

01:31:07 SPEAKER_007: Now here's Morocco.

01:31:09 SPEAKER_007: Morocco has fifty percent of the world's phosphate reserves.

01:31:13 SPEAKER_007: Used to be seventy-five.

01:31:15 SPEAKER_007: They also they're considering joining BRICS.

01:31:18 SPEAKER_007: Now you remember the recent monkey business with the Spanish territory Suta, yeah?

01:31:25 SPEAKER_007: Where right, the Moroccans encourage that, and the Chinese encourage that.

01:31:30 SPEAKER_007: If the Spanish lose control of that, and the Moroccans take it back, and the Moroccans happen to join BRICS, they will then control that choke point.

01:31:39 SPEAKER_007: Oh, okay.

01:31:40 SPEAKER_007: Right, so so it's all about the maritime shipping control of stuff where we go through.

01:31:48 SPEAKER_007: So that's Qatar and that's Iran.

01:31:50 SPEAKER_007: All right, let's look at tier two.

01:31:53 SPEAKER_007: So tier two is here.

01:31:58 SPEAKER_007: The United States control this one obviously, and that's not contested at all.

01:32:03 SPEAKER_007: Right, and so then you've got the same things, and here you've got the Strait of Hormuz, and you know the trouble that we've got at the moment is actually coming out of here.

01:32:13 SPEAKER_007: Tier three: South Africa controls what goes around the tip of Africa, and Brazil controls these two points here.

01:32:22 SPEAKER_007: So this entire shipping route, all the way along there, is controlled by BRICS navies, with the exception of patches of open ocean.

01:32:31 SPEAKER_007: And yeah, so there's Nigeria.

01:32:36 SPEAKER_007: That's also in the BRICS alliance.

01:32:37 SPEAKER_007: They've got their oil reserves, but they're also right next to Cuba.

01:32:40 SPEAKER_007: Not sorry, right next to the Congo.

01:32:42 SPEAKER_007: Sorry, as is Uganda.

01:32:44 SPEAKER_007: Congo's in there.

01:32:46 SPEAKER_007: What's in Congo?

01:32:47 SPEAKER_007: Cobalt.

01:32:50 SPEAKER_007: And so here is.

01:32:51 SPEAKER_007: I'm going to make a series of these maps.

01:32:53 SPEAKER_007: So this was in a report that I found, but I'm going to make a series of them.

01:32:58 SPEAKER_007: This is Russian activities in terms of resources in Africa.

01:33:04 SPEAKER_007: The Chinese are many times this, but look at what they're going for.

01:33:08 SPEAKER_007: It's oil, it's gas, it's uranium.

01:33:13 SPEAKER_007: You know, it's all there.

01:33:15 SPEAKER_007: It's all the good stuff.

01:33:17 SPEAKER_007: Now they've got military assets on the ground, and when they've got military assets, they're using the Wagner.

01:33:22 SPEAKER_007: What do you call mercenaries?

01:33:27 SPEAKER_007: Yeah.

01:33:27 SPEAKER_007: Which means they can say, "Oh, we're not doing the military stuff at all."

01:33:31 SPEAKER_007: Oh no, no, no!

01:33:32 SPEAKER_007: It's private military contractors.

01:33:34 SPEAKER_007: Right, right.

01:33:35 SPEAKER_007: You know, United States does exactly this.

01:33:38 SPEAKER_007: That's what I'm saying: all parties around the table use the same methods, but it's about resources and control.

01:33:46 SPEAKER_007: And to close, the submarine data cables show a similar pattern.

01:33:52 SPEAKER_007: Right.

01:33:52 SPEAKER_007: So the maritime shipping control of these areas happens to be controlled most of the time, but not always by BRICS.

01:34:00 SPEAKER_007: The United States and Canada will control this one and this one.

01:34:04 SPEAKER_007: Now, going back to here.

01:34:11 SPEAKER_007: Okay, so when we get to where was it?

01:34:17 SPEAKER_007: Yeah, this one here.

01:34:17 SPEAKER_007: So this was go to Tier Three.

01:34:19 SPEAKER_007: Was Tier Three?

01:34:20 SPEAKER_007: This is Tier Three.

01:34:22 SPEAKER_007: The Panama Canal was owned by two companies.

01:34:25 SPEAKER_007: Owned by the Chinese government at both ends.

01:34:29 SPEAKER_007: And so the Americans have put their strategy forward, which is the New Tech Strategy.

01:34:31 SPEAKER_007: Ford, which is the new technite, and they want to control North and South America.

01:34:36 SPEAKER_007: The technite they wanted Greenland, so they can control the shipping lanes around the Arctic.

01:34:41 SPEAKER_007: Well, they can at least challenge the Russians for that.

01:34:44 SPEAKER_007: Canada is on the books.

01:34:47 SPEAKER_007: Mexico, all the military actions against the Mexican drug lords, the Panama Canal, and Venezuela.

01:34:55 SPEAKER_007: And people I know in South America tell me that control of South America—they're encouraged to be controlled.

01:35:00 SPEAKER_007: They're encouraged to be dependent on Venezuela, all their logistics, and it's the Americans telling them to do this.

01:35:07 SPEAKER_007: So whatever they did in Venezuela, it was successful, and they're quietly getting control of both continents.

01:35:14 SPEAKER_007: So they're withdrawing from all over here, and they're going to go for this.

01:35:18 SPEAKER_007: It looks like a grand bargain where the Americans will control North and South America, the Chinese will have the Asia-Pacific region, and perhaps control of all flows.

01:35:28 SPEAKER_007: Controllable flows, and I suppose Russia is going to do whatever it's going to do with Europe, if they want to.

01:35:36 SPEAKER_007: The reason I've got this up here, Cuba is right there, right where that shipping lane passes.

01:35:42 SPEAKER_007: Why is Cuba and BRICS doesn't make sense?

01:35:45 SPEAKER_007: But hang on, when you actually go, when the same thing as Ethiopia, it's right next to, and actually can control these shipping lanes associated with a major arterial, and that's what I think is going.

01:35:58 SPEAKER_007: So, so, so you've got first of all, you've got this pattern, this sort of thing happening, where control of sale, refined metal sale of is is control, absolutely controlled, right?

01:36:15 SPEAKER_007: But they've also got control of the flow of stuff.

01:36:17 SPEAKER_007: When things turn kinetic, international contract law breaks down, and it's going to be about who's got the ships and who can exert influence.

01:36:27 SPEAKER_007: And the finance sector is going to not be as effective, right?

01:36:34 SPEAKER_007: So then, that I put into AI.

01:36:39 SPEAKER_007: What's the historical precedent for now?

01:36:43 SPEAKER_007: And I was going to say it's Germany 1935 is what people say.

01:36:47 SPEAKER_007: It's actually not what came back.

01:36:48 SPEAKER_007: It came back with the fall of Constantinople in 1453.

01:36:54 SPEAKER_007: Wow.

01:36:55 SPEAKER_007: Right, so at a big siege, there was 1,100 years as the capital of Nice and Roman Empire.

01:37:03 SPEAKER_007: The Ottoman Empire turned up.

01:37:05 SPEAKER_007: There was a big fight, and the world didn't end.

01:37:08 SPEAKER_007: It was fundamentally reordered in context of economics and politics.

01:37:12 SPEAKER_007: A fundamental maritime shipping route bottleneck was handed from one power bloc to another.

01:37:20 SPEAKER_007: This was a black spot that scared the hell out of everyone.

01:37:24 SPEAKER_007: So the Ottoman control of the Bosporus Straits gave strategic dominance of the Black Sea and the Mediterranean, and they became very rich.

01:37:32 SPEAKER_007: And that's the foundation of the Ottoman Empire, or at least that was their heyday.

01:37:38 SPEAKER_007: Constantinople became Istanbul, and the Ottoman expansion into South Eastern Europe accelerated, threatening Christian kingdoms.

01:37:46 SPEAKER_007: The fall psychologically devastated Christian Europe and deepened the East-West divide.

01:37:54 SPEAKER_007: Greek scholars fleeing to Italy brought about the classical knowledge and fueled the Italian Renaissance.

01:38:01 SPEAKER_007: And one of the things that actually came out of this was Europe said, "Well, we just lost a major trade route.

01:38:06 SPEAKER_007: We need new territories."

01:38:07 SPEAKER_007: So they kicked off the exploration era to go and look for the New World.

01:38:12 SPEAKER_007: Ah, okay.

01:38:13 SPEAKER_007: Give or chance.

01:38:15 SPEAKER_007: Economically, traditional overland trade routes between Europe and Asia came under the Ottoman control.

01:38:21 SPEAKER_007: Europe faced higher tariffs, restricted access, etc. Disrupted trade patterns motivated Western European powers to seek alternative routes to Asia.

01:38:32 SPEAKER_007: So this was the age of exploration.

01:38:33 SPEAKER_007: Does any of this sound familiar?

01:38:35 SPEAKER_001: Yeah, and the timeline is really aligned because 1492 is when they did the exploration, and that's just 30 years after the fall of Constantinople.

01:38:47 SPEAKER_007: Yep, this is we need a plan, right?

01:38:53 SPEAKER_007: So to finish, where are we at?

01:38:56 SPEAKER_007: And so I put in a couple of means to make you know in meetings to you know give people a laugh and everything.

01:39:01 SPEAKER_007: But what the West has been preparing for all this time is proving is going to be proved to be inadequate for what's happening.

01:39:09 SPEAKER_007: It's absolute bullshit.

01:39:12 SPEAKER_007: There is very clearly an elephant in the room.

01:39:16 SPEAKER_007: Has our leadership lost their mind?

01:39:18 SPEAKER_007: Are they stupid, or are they doing something so unethical that they don't actually want us to know?

01:39:23 SPEAKER_007: Therefore, they're appearing to be stupid, and we are about to receive a smack to the face with the dead fish.

01:39:33 SPEAKER_007: And we can all see it coming.

01:39:35 SPEAKER_007: Groups like this—it's not that we notice we're smarter than everyone else.

01:39:38 SPEAKER_007: It's the fact that we're taking the time to look.

01:39:40 SPEAKER_007: I believe our leaders know this.

01:39:44 SPEAKER_007: What we need to do is find a way out of this where we don't need our leaders' help anymore.

01:39:50 SPEAKER_007: They're not working in our best interests, and that's what I had prepared.

01:39:57 SPEAKER_007: Wow!

01:39:59 SPEAKER_001: Well, thank you.

01:40:00 SPEAKER_001: That was great.

01:40:01 SPEAKER_001: Questions from the panel?

01:40:05 SPEAKER_001: There is a few.

01:40:06 SPEAKER_001: As it turns out, stop sharing.

01:40:07 SPEAKER_001: All right.

01:40:10 SPEAKER_001: Um.

01:40:13 SPEAKER_001: So.

01:40:15 SPEAKER_001: I'm seeing on YouTube.

01:40:21 SPEAKER_001: There's several.

01:40:23 SPEAKER_001: Someone said they didn't believe the Chinese involvement in Panama was in the form of ownership.

01:40:32 SPEAKER_007: Not anymore.

01:40:34 SPEAKER_007: Not anymore.

01:40:35 SPEAKER_007: There were two countries, the two private sector corporations, one at each end of the canal, and they were Chinese owned.

01:40:41 SPEAKER_007: Now, and they were trying to encroach more.

01:40:46 SPEAKER_007: They were trying to buy more through capital, and the Americans decided: look, we spend a lot of money digging the Panama Canal, and we don't want our geopolitical adversaries to control it.

01:40:57 SPEAKER_007: And so they kicked off a series of actions that look deeply unethical, deeply sort of you know you've got to be kidding me.

01:41:05 SPEAKER_007: Are you nuts?

01:41:05 SPEAKER_007: Have you lost your mind?

01:41:08 SPEAKER_007: You know, this is not how we do things as civilized people.

01:41:12 SPEAKER_007: To me, it's panic, right?

01:41:14 SPEAKER_007: And it's been fake.

01:41:16 SPEAKER_007: And I think they are in the process of resolving this strategic problem.

01:41:24 SPEAKER_007: You have to remember, it's not the first time we've got involved in Panama.

01:41:28 SPEAKER_007: Remember back in the '80s, Manuel Noriega, and he was a drug king, and I was involved in some of those operations.

01:41:35 SPEAKER_007: So it's not the first time the United States military hasn't just dropped in on Panama and just taken over.

01:41:39 SPEAKER_007: In Panama, just take them over for a while, and we reserve the right to do so, because it's a strategic, important place in the world.

01:41:48 SPEAKER_007: So, it's not pleasant.

01:41:49 SPEAKER_007: Is just as what it is.

01:41:51 SPEAKER_007: Yeah, that's what I'm saying.

01:41:52 SPEAKER_007: It's we are seeing a series of moves.

01:41:55 SPEAKER_007: This is the way the world has always been.

01:41:57 SPEAKER_007: It's not anything new.

01:41:59 SPEAKER_007: Normally, they do things in a cloak and dagger or behind the scenes fashion.

01:42:04 SPEAKER_007: I believe the American infrastructure collectively woke up in 2016 when there was a changing of the guard, and it's not that they panicked; they had a very small amount of time to do stuff,

01:42:15 SPEAKER_007: and they put a plan on the ground that was so, you know, civilized people would have absolute whiplash trying to sort of keep up with that.

01:42:26 SPEAKER_007: And you know how the world actually works behind you know below the layers and everything like that.

01:42:31 SPEAKER_007: You know, most people have a very naive view of the world of how things are.

01:42:35 SPEAKER_007: We've got this thing called the law, and well, the law is actually for us, not for everyone else.

01:42:43 SPEAKER_007: And yeah, and so to me, what the American strategy is doing looks like panic, and it may be panic, but to me, it's an attempt to resolve an untenable situation where they almost got checkmated.

01:43:02 SPEAKER_007: I have, yeah.

01:43:04 SPEAKER_007: Sorry, go on.

01:43:05 SPEAKER_007: Yeah.

01:43:05 SPEAKER_001: Question from the YouTube user Jochen van Wing says: Simon, your thoughts on the observation that Saudis, Iranians, Italians, Indians, etc., are quickly reinvesting into proprietary shipping,

01:43:17 SPEAKER_001: moving from leasing and subcontracting towards investing in owning shipping ships again?

01:43:24 SPEAKER_007: Money, yes.

01:43:25 SPEAKER_007: Well, follow the money.

01:43:28 SPEAKER_007: I know Jockum is a good man.

01:43:30 SPEAKER_007: Oh, yeah.

01:43:32 SPEAKER_007: Um.

01:43:33 SPEAKER_007: Yeah.

01:43:36 SPEAKER_001: All right, Dan, did you have any questions?

01:43:39 SPEAKER_001: No, no. I know Simon's work quite well, and I've been following it.

01:43:45 SPEAKER_001: I'm not an innocent bystander in any of this.

01:43:49 SPEAKER_001: Fair enough.

01:43:51 SPEAKER_001: I've written some papers going back to 2019 talking about the Belt Road Initiative, more specifically, the freeway that China built that goes from China past K2,

01:44:03 SPEAKER_001: down through Pakistan all the way down to Gwadar City.

01:44:07 SPEAKER_011: And when I first was involved in it, to be truthful, I got dragged into a video with a couple people in my company with the Situation Room there at the Pentagon,

01:44:18 SPEAKER_011: and I had to defend myself.

01:44:19 SPEAKER_011: And what I came up with was a video of this Pakistani kid who had a little scooter and he was doing a bunch of stuff.

01:44:27 SPEAKER_011: And they said, "Well, Dan, do you understand Pak?"

01:44:29 SPEAKER_011: I said, "No, I don't.

01:44:30 SPEAKER_011: I just care about what he's going to do," so I turned the volume off and watched this YouTube video.

01:44:35 SPEAKER_011: This kid driving this little scooter with lunch or something on it, past these big piles of gravel under this freeway of fresh cement, drove all the way down to the Indus River.

01:44:47 SPEAKER_011: And his uncle had a big machine putting in place a one-hundred-ton beam because they were building a freeway over the Indus River, right?

01:44:55 SPEAKER_011: And then I was told about two weeks after that that about 26 analysts for the CA were fired because of that video,

01:45:04 SPEAKER_011: and I pointed out the fact that the Chinese had built all these oil and gas pipelines between Kazakhstan and China, and looking at the infrastructure, they got to be three million barrels a day.

01:45:14 SPEAKER_011: And understand, Kazakhstan was moving a million barrels a day through a Russian pipeline down to the Black Sea, and I said sooner or later they're going to.

01:45:22 SPEAKER_011: The Russians are going to shut that down, which basically happened already this year, and everybody's wondering why.

01:45:28 SPEAKER_011: China, you know, they're not importing four million barrels a day.

01:45:31 SPEAKER_011: And I pointed out, like, and it already happened.

01:45:34 SPEAKER_011: The Chinese have already shifted three million barrels of oil consumption a day over to electric cars, and they're getting a lot more oil and gas from somewhere else.

01:45:43 SPEAKER_011: And that somewhere else is either a combination of Kazakhstan and Russia.

01:45:46 SPEAKER_011: And it goes back to they've been very busy building all this infrastructure.

01:45:50 SPEAKER_011: So the point is, the Chinese.

01:45:52 SPEAKER_011: This is a fight they've been preparing for a very long time.

01:45:55 SPEAKER_011: That's what's going on.

01:45:55 SPEAKER_011: Yep, and it's not just.

01:45:56 SPEAKER_011: And a smoke detector.

01:45:58 SPEAKER_005: And I'm noticing that in the U.S., we have absolutely lost our capacity to do any infrastructure.

01:46:07 SPEAKER_005: Our investments are all going into the metaverse, right, virtual world.

01:46:13 SPEAKER_005: Nothing physically on the ground.

01:46:15 SPEAKER_005: And then we see here China building international freeways across Asia.

01:46:25 SPEAKER_005: Well, it seems as if they've got the need for physical infrastructure to keep this stuff moving, and we've lost the will and the capacity to do that.

01:46:39 SPEAKER_005: They'd rather fight us instead of each other.

01:46:41 SPEAKER_005: Yeah, some of the problems we're having here in the states—we have a severe shortage of machinists, which is basically affecting our industrial capacity.

01:46:51 SPEAKER_011: The other thing that's going on is going to become a lot more apparent.

01:46:54 SPEAKER_011: The financial markets have already figured this out.

01:46:56 SPEAKER_011: But on the AI projects that the Fortune 500 have been implementing, we don't really have that much return on investment.

01:47:05 SPEAKER_011: We had a case with Air Canada was sued because an AI agent misquoted, made a misquote to a bunch of passengers about brevity or something to that effect, and it wasn't according to company policy,

01:47:22 SPEAKER_011: but a court up in Canada ruled that the corporation was liable for the hallucinations that the AI agents were coming up with.

01:47:30 SPEAKER_011: And then the other is that we're seeing a number of financial processes where you have to have second-person verification of code,

01:47:40 SPEAKER_011: and a lot of the AI agents basically just hallucinate about thirty percent of the time.

01:47:44 SPEAKER_011: Hallucinate.

01:47:45 SPEAKER_011: So what's happening on the investment front is the bankers are backing away from the AI mainly because we don't have any actual proof that it is more efficient, which is what I'm getting.

01:47:59 SPEAKER_011: A lot of the guys doing the development spend most of their time debugging what the AI wrote, right,

01:48:05 SPEAKER_011: and I guess it goes back to a misunderstanding that most of our time isn't expended writing code.

01:48:12 SPEAKER_011: It's actually thinking about the logic of the things, the objects we build, the functions we build, not writing massive amounts of code.

01:48:20 SPEAKER_011: And there's a lot of other issues with it.

01:48:22 SPEAKER_011: I'll send some videos to you, Andrew.

01:48:25 SPEAKER_011: Some of the things are coming out by Gartner and some of the other folks on AI.

01:48:29 SPEAKER_011: So we've recently seen that AI has picked up the human ability to lie, cheat, and steal.

01:48:36 SPEAKER_005: And well, we're doing the training wrong.

01:48:39 SPEAKER_005: No, you let them on the internet, and they see the value of lying, cheating, and stealing in the real world.

01:48:47 SPEAKER_005: It's no way to prevent it.

01:48:48 SPEAKER_011: Barbara, they're not picking up the value of lying, cheating, and stealing.

01:48:52 SPEAKER_011: The problem is what they're doing is they're picking up the most common thing.

01:48:55 SPEAKER_011: For example, one of the things I deal with code is we have a lot of repositories.

01:49:01 SPEAKER_011: Engineers, we have a lot of repositories out on the internet, and what the AI would choose will choose the most common function or procedure or algorithm, even though that's the wrong one,

01:49:10 SPEAKER_011: and that's old software that's got known bugs in it, and that's what it chooses when it writes down software.

01:49:15 SPEAKER_011: But it does the same thing with lying, cheating, and stealing because there's more of that on the internet than there is of good behaviour, and that's what it picks up.

01:49:22 SPEAKER_005: And it's a good strategy, you know.

01:49:24 SPEAKER_005: The AI is told to get the quickest, most efficient strategy, and if lying, cheating, and stealing is more efficient, it's not the most efficient strategy.

01:49:35 SPEAKER_005: It's just the one that's most common that's picking up on the internet.

01:49:39 SPEAKER_005: It's not the most.

01:49:39 SPEAKER_005: Yeah, yeah, and it depends on the scenarios and things like that.

01:49:43 SPEAKER_005: But I do have another question from the audience for Simon.

01:49:48 SPEAKER_001: What are your thoughts on Icelanders voting no to joining the EU?

01:49:54 SPEAKER_001: Twenty-seven.

01:49:57 SPEAKER_001: Yes, Europe is going down hard.

01:50:02 SPEAKER_007: Finland, in particular, is going down very hard.

01:50:06 SPEAKER_007: Choices made over the last seven or eight years have been flamboyantly stupid and have not been in European interests.

01:50:15 SPEAKER_007: Now, as early as Brexit, for example, when Brexit happened in the British Cup ties, there were structural imbalances in the European banking system, which were mathematically inevitable.

01:50:29 SPEAKER_007: There's going to come a point when the Central Europe infrastructure is going to asset-strip its provinces to survive.

01:50:38 SPEAKER_007: Yeah.

01:50:39 SPEAKER_007: Now we're seeing that now.

01:50:41 SPEAKER_011: So I make if I can jump in a second and try to explain this in a simple way.

01:50:46 SPEAKER_011: When they formed the EU, one of the critical things they did not do was merge the debt, and those debt imbalances between the two countries are really stark, and that's what's causing the imbalances.

01:50:57 SPEAKER_011: If they had merged the debt all into the ECB or some central thing, they wouldn't be having this problem.

01:51:03 SPEAKER_011: Years ago, back in 2013, they had that Portugal, Italy, Greece, Spain—that financial crisis that was never solved.

01:51:12 SPEAKER_011: All they did was pay it over, and eventually, want to know how empires fall?

01:51:18 SPEAKER_011: It's debt, debt, debt is what kills them.

01:51:21 SPEAKER_011: That's what's killing the EU.

01:51:23 SPEAKER_011: They're guessing it'll happen within the next four years.

01:51:26 SPEAKER_011: Well, really?

01:51:29 SPEAKER_013: Well, that's pretty fast.

01:51:31 SPEAKER_013: No, no, no, no. Well, no, I think it's not fast enough.

01:51:35 SPEAKER_013: Like, it's something I saw happen that came out from the EU President Ursula von der Leyen, where she was talking about through pretty political language engaging in a bail-in right across Europe.

01:51:56 SPEAKER_007: Citizen savings at ten trillion euros.

01:51:59 SPEAKER_007: Oh, right.

01:52:00 SPEAKER_007: And we need to mobilise that to deal with some of the financial instabilities and imbalances, and they did it.

01:52:10 SPEAKER_007: Is we're here to help you.

01:52:13 SPEAKER_007: This is for your own good.

01:52:15 SPEAKER_007: Now, the people setting outside of Europe, watching all this stuff, there's a whole series of things that are very apparent.

01:52:22 SPEAKER_007: Like like the moment the Nord Stream pipeline was blown up, Europe lost its energy source.

01:52:32 SPEAKER_007: Diplomacy, especially associated with the Ukraine war, they were not able to get the gains they wanted or needed out of the Ukraine war to keep going.

01:52:44 SPEAKER_007: The West has fairly sort of soundly lost.

01:52:50 SPEAKER_007: I'm going to a defence conference in a few weeks' time.

01:53:02 SPEAKER_007: It's by invitation only.

01:53:03 SPEAKER_007: It's government.

01:53:04 SPEAKER_007: It's run by NATO.

01:53:05 SPEAKER_007: I'm going to be sitting in the audience.

01:53:08 SPEAKER_007: It's my understanding there's two factions in the room.

01:53:12 SPEAKER_007: One is the magical thinking faction.

01:53:15 SPEAKER_007: We're going to thrash the Russians.

01:53:18 SPEAKER_007: The Russians have been absolutely thrashed by the Ukrainians.

01:53:23 SPEAKER_007: We are going to make them rue the day that they ever heard of Europe.

01:53:28 SPEAKER_007: And the other faction is the groups that understand that we've got no logistics left, all our consumables are done.

01:53:38 SPEAKER_007: You know, we don't have the money, we don't have the capability to have a kinetic shooting war Europe-wide.

01:53:45 SPEAKER_007: Yeah, Simon, if you don't know this, Europe, you guys only have half the gas you need for winter, so you don't have the resources.

01:53:52 SPEAKER_007: Oh, I know this very well.

01:53:55 SPEAKER_007: I would like to be not in Finland for the next winter.

01:53:59 SPEAKER_007: In fact, I've been trying to actually get a job in the thorium industry in Australia—that's been my actual plan to actually sort of, you know, move forward on this.

01:54:09 SPEAKER_007: I'm routinely seeing some flamboyantly stupid thinking, magical thinking, circular reasoning.

01:54:20 SPEAKER_007: It's not just the case of people understand that there is a problem and they're just papering it over; they genuinely believe what they say.

01:54:28 SPEAKER_007: Hey.

01:54:30 SPEAKER_007: Hmm.

01:54:31 SPEAKER_007: I just anyway.

01:54:33 SPEAKER_007: So Europe is going down hard.

01:54:36 SPEAKER_007: It's going to be abandoned by the United States.

01:54:39 SPEAKER_007: It's going to be punished by China, and it's going to be really punished by Russia, all at the same time.

01:54:46 SPEAKER_007: They've got the prospects of a dog that's been hit by a twenty-two wheeler.

01:54:50 SPEAKER_007: Anyone outside of Europe can see this.

01:54:54 SPEAKER_007: Yeah.

01:54:54 SPEAKER_007: So the people in Iceland who actually have a history of not being stupid, and then coming together, and yeah, absolutely is the right answer not to go anywhere near Europe.

01:55:09 SPEAKER_007: So I think Europe will break apart, and in its place, there'll be probably a number of alliances.

01:55:13 SPEAKER_007: I actually think it will be a smart move if the Nordic regions banded together: Finland, Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Iceland.

01:55:22 SPEAKER_007: They're cultures that understand each other.

01:55:24 SPEAKER_007: They do things properly; they've got things in hand.

01:55:29 SPEAKER_007: They're probably less likely to want to do business with, say, Mediterranean countries in Italy and, say, Greece and Spain.

01:55:36 SPEAKER_007: They'll probably band together, and then you've got the former Soviet Union bloc.

01:55:42 SPEAKER_007: You know, they'll band together, but they understand each other.

01:55:46 SPEAKER_007: But we've got to work out the single currency first, right?

01:55:55 SPEAKER_001: Oh, and also, I see a bunch of people said happy birthday, Simon.

01:56:01 SPEAKER_001: That's actually my internet birthday.

01:56:02 SPEAKER_001: It's not my actual birthday.

01:56:04 SPEAKER_001: Oh, okay.

01:56:04 SPEAKER_001: So, what do I do is I have a false profile.

01:56:09 SPEAKER_007: Okay.

01:56:09 SPEAKER_007: On the internet, so if someone does internet identity theft, and they just use the wrong birthday, okay, yeah, right on guys.

01:56:16 SPEAKER_007: Okay.

01:56:17 SPEAKER_007: Okay, cool, cool.

01:56:18 SPEAKER_007: You might notice my place where I'm living happens to be Antarctica.

01:56:22 SPEAKER_007: Oh, okay.

01:56:23 SPEAKER_007: Okay.

01:56:24 SPEAKER_007: Nice.

01:56:24 SPEAKER_007: Right.

01:56:26 SPEAKER_007: That's good.

01:56:27 SPEAKER_007: That's good planning.

01:56:28 SPEAKER_007: Yeah.

01:56:30 SPEAKER_007: Great idea.

01:56:33 SPEAKER_007: So, so when I go to conferences now, I go as an individual, private individual.

01:56:39 SPEAKER_007: So my hands are free.

01:56:41 SPEAKER_007: I describe myself as a whiskey disposal expert, and my affiliation is the Third Rock from the Sun.

01:56:48 SPEAKER_007: Okay.

01:56:48 SPEAKER_007: Good.

01:56:51 SPEAKER_001: So I think Barbara and Dan may want to talk more about AI, or because you guys are putting it in the comments.

01:57:01 SPEAKER_011: I just wanted to add come up with some good reports talking about like I said we don't have any good return on investment for AI and probably the most discouraging part has to do with

01:57:13 SPEAKER_011: the thirty percent hallucination of the models and there's a couple other things that are going on about four different things.

01:57:19 SPEAKER_011: One has to do with a number of artists, I guess, have gotten tired of being ripped off intellectual property wise.

01:57:25 SPEAKER_011: There's never lawsuits going on.

01:57:28 SPEAKER_011: So the guys at the University of Chicago came up with a pool, and I've got I need to get a capture a picture of what they did.

01:57:34 SPEAKER_011: But what they do is they take a picture of the pool, you know, put really subtle flaws in the graphic, right?

01:57:40 SPEAKER_011: You the human eye can't see it because of what's we what's called persistence of vision.

01:57:45 SPEAKER_011: But what happens when you feed it into an LLM and you tell the model let's say, draw me a middle-aged Labrador Retriever frolicking in a pasture.

01:57:55 SPEAKER_011: What it prints out is a dog with five legs and three eyes, right?

01:57:59 SPEAKER_011: So that's gone with that.

01:58:02 SPEAKER_011: The second thing has to do with the thing we talked about as far as epigenetically developing code and choosing the most chosen algorithm rather than the correct one.

01:58:13 SPEAKER_011: And then there are two other different forms of espionage.

01:58:16 SPEAKER_011: Of espionage, there is industrial espionage, where entities basically put backdoors in language models, and then we have many examples of national intelligence agencies putting backdoors in language models and systems.

01:58:30 SPEAKER_011: So, those are the things that are hitting the AI space.

01:58:39 SPEAKER_011: I do have a model for what's happening.

01:58:40 SPEAKER_011: All that.

01:58:42 SPEAKER_011: What was that, Simon?

01:58:44 SPEAKER_007: I do have a model for myself of what is happening with all that.

01:58:48 SPEAKER_007: AI is in the process of eating its own tail, I think.

01:58:53 SPEAKER_007: AI is a strategic thing; it will not be available for all of us.

01:58:58 SPEAKER_007: I think it's been game-theoretically solved.

01:59:00 SPEAKER_007: There will come a point where it's cooked and it's just not useful anymore.

01:59:04 SPEAKER_007: But it will be used for surveillance and running a cryptocurrency-based currency that's going to be programmable, which is why they need all the data centres.

01:59:14 SPEAKER_007: But they also want a surveillance grid to surveil and control everyone.

01:59:20 SPEAKER_007: And so, what I think is going to happen is AI is going to get to a certain point; it's going to be too expensive to be accessible for the average person.

01:59:28 SPEAKER_007: What it's producing is bullshit anyway, and that whole function of AI will be shut down.

01:59:34 SPEAKER_007: But then, the infrastructure that's left will be retasked to something else.

01:59:37 SPEAKER_007: One I prepared earlier.

01:59:40 SPEAKER_005: I just saw an article that China is trying to sell datasets at a very reasonable price, and of course they are Chinese propagandized datasets, right?

01:59:58 SPEAKER_011: So well, well, Barbel, a lot of the data, well, the datasets they're putting out are actually very useful, but the problem is,

02:00:05 SPEAKER_011: we've been able to prove that almost every one of them's a Trojan horse.

02:00:09 SPEAKER_011: They've got backdoors in it, so when you use it, they use it as a way of compromising your system.

02:00:14 SPEAKER_011: So well, compromising your system, but also certain responses.

02:00:22 SPEAKER_005: And the U.S. has the same problem with our social media.

02:00:27 SPEAKER_005: You know, if you ever ask for an article that you know existed that violates the current talking points, right?

02:00:38 SPEAKER_005: Trying to get AI to tell you it exists.

02:00:41 SPEAKER_005: It is a fascinating exercise in tearing your hair out.

02:00:46 SPEAKER_005: Right, eventually you may get it.

02:00:49 SPEAKER_005: But so you're right about either the most common or the most generally accepted, which may not be the most common response,

02:00:58 SPEAKER_005: but the one which social media and government and media have decided is the correct response.

02:01:06 SPEAKER_005: Both the U.S. and China do a real good job of doing that.

02:01:11 SPEAKER_005: So, in addition to surveillance, I think it's also going to be a good method of mind control.

02:01:19 SPEAKER_005: Yep, agreed.

02:01:21 SPEAKER_011: Yeah, considering the settlement that Facebook had just admitted.

02:01:29 SPEAKER_011: That's very much true.