The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters - PREVIEW： Brokenomics ｜ Dark Triad Economics with Richard Grannon

00:00:00.000 Hello and welcome to Brokonomics. Now, as you know, my main thesis on Brokonomics is that the

00:00:05.340 system is broken and the system is made up of people. So possibly some of the people are broken

00:00:10.840 leading to a system which is also broken. So I thought, who do I know who can talk about

00:00:16.360 that sort of stuff? And that's when I turned to my favourite YouTube psychologist, Richard Grannon.

00:00:22.500 Hello. Thank you very much for having me on.

00:00:25.100 Thank you very much for coming in. Wanted to have you in for a long time.

00:00:27.580 So tell us a little bit about yourself. Why are you the man to speak to about the dark 1.00

00:00:33.960 triad behaviour that is manifesting from our political and economic system?

00:00:40.360 Well, my background is in psychology. I am a psychology graduate, but it was a behavioural

00:00:46.800 psychology degree. So we did nothing to do with personality disorders. And then I spent

00:00:51.380 a while teaching...

00:00:52.540 How is behavioural psychology different to basic psychology?

00:00:57.580 So if you wanted to... Well, behavioural psychology, they're only really interested

00:01:01.960 in that which can be seen or measured. It's behaviour only. So you'd put lots of rats in T-shaped

00:01:08.280 mazes and try and incentivise them to go left or right.

00:01:11.160 Oh, I see.

00:01:11.620 There's an awful lot of that. So it's the... I suppose you could say it's the hard...

00:01:15.960 It's the side of psychology that tries to be a hard science.

00:01:19.660 Okay.

00:01:20.120 So it's very scientific, if I'd say it that way.

00:01:23.720 Yeah, measurable. Now my thing, my interest is really Freud, Jung, Adler, psychoanalytic

00:01:29.580 theory. And it's from that place that largely speaking, the notion of personality disorders

00:01:34.740 comes from. It's a largely Freudian concept, the idea of narcissism. And so over the years,

00:01:41.820 when I was teaching self-defence, people started to ask me to teach about emotional self-defence.

00:01:48.240 So I was already blending psychology with self-defence because I had a psychology background

00:01:52.060 to teach people to be prepared for real world violence. And then the instructors that I was

00:01:57.880 speaking to, they would ask me questions. They would say, oh, can I ask you about my wife?

00:02:02.040 What can I ask you about my kids? And then that grew into a project that was more focused

00:02:07.820 on childhood trauma, PTSD, and then it's manifestations in psychopathy and narcissistic

00:02:13.520 personality disorder.

00:02:14.580 What forms did you focus on in your martial arts?

00:02:18.920 Oh, gosh. Started out with Shito Rukarati, moved to spirit combat jiu-jitsu, did Tagakari

00:02:30.260 rune ninjitsu for a few years, Aikido, Judo, shifted over to Muay Thai. Then when MMA got

00:02:38.680 big, we called it valetudo or shoot fighting before the term MMA was born. So this is back

00:02:46.080 in the 90s. Boxing, wrestling, Silat, I've done some Wing Chun, some Tai Chi, some Qigong,

00:02:54.200 lots, lots. Are you into martial arts?

00:02:56.440 I've done about two thirds of those.

00:02:58.700 Okay.

00:02:59.080 If you had to pick one, I would go with boxing because even though it is the least sophisticated

00:03:08.100 of all the ones you mentioned, it is so immediate.

00:03:11.760 Do you mean pick one for a brawl in the pub kind of a thing?

00:03:14.240 Well, I mean, if you lived in a rough area and you had a 13-year-old son who you were worried

00:03:22.500 who had to look after himself, I think I'd go with boxing because it's just right there

00:03:27.680 straight away. Whereas the other ones, you can get to a higher level, but the curve is

00:03:33.260 a lot longer.

00:03:35.040 One of my, as I've aged, one of my favourite disciplines is now boxing. Because when I was

00:03:42.280 younger, I didn't really think, I did it because I had to do it. It's part of combat

00:03:46.580 sports. And if you couldn't box, people would think you're an idiot. But then the puzzle 1.00

00:03:52.240 of boxing, because it's quite an interesting puzzle to try and solve, has become more fascinating

00:03:56.440 to me. I actually have a TBI from boxing, so I can't hard spar anymore. I can only tap

00:04:01.460 spar.

00:04:01.720 Yeah. I split the bag around my brain, sparring. But boxing, I love. If I had a 13-year-old

00:04:09.020 son, probably Muay Thai, just because of the clinching. So he'd have his hands and then

00:04:15.460 he'd be able to clinch a knee. And sometimes, I used to do nightclub security. If you kick

00:04:20.780 someone in the leg, it doesn't look that bad on CCTV. The police don't mind. But it could

00:04:26.680 stop them. They could be like, because it's a shock.

00:04:28.880 I suppose that's Boxing Plus, isn't it?

00:04:31.720 Yeah, it's Boxing Plus. So my favourite would be, there's actually a style in Brazil, it's

00:04:39.660 called Shoot Box. Vandele Silva came from it. So they sort of had the boxing format, and

00:04:46.340 then they put on the elbows, the clinching, the knees, and the kicks for an MMA environment. 0.92

00:04:51.000 Did you ever do Krav Magaar?

00:04:53.040 I've done a couple of classes. I've taught in Krav schools. So my main thing, I said self

00:04:58.860 defence, but you would know this, it was combatives. So they were our cousins. The Krav guys would 0.94

00:05:05.160 do drills like this, we would take from them, they would take from us.

00:05:08.380 So yeah.

00:05:09.640 Krav did kind of change my psychology, because I got quite into that. I mean, I was even going

00:05:14.420 to go, this was before COVID, I was going to go over to Israel, because it's from Israel,

00:05:17.880 and spend a couple of weeks out there with those guys. But COVID, it never happened in

00:05:22.660 the end. But I mean, Krav is just so brutal. I mean, it's just, you can't spar it. It's

00:05:28.440 immediately eyes and throats and knees and stuff like that.

00:05:31.060 Yes. And as I started to learn it, I would find, if it ever looked like I might be in

00:05:37.900 a situation, I would be defusing it. Because, I mean, more than I normally would, just because

00:05:44.040 I didn't want to have to do that stuff, if it came to it.

00:05:46.680 Yes. I mean, you could find yourself in a lot of legal trouble. So the perfect thing for

00:05:51.360 me now would be people who were athletic enough to survive combat sports. So they're

00:05:57.140 scratch boxers, grapplers, they can wrestle, they can do the takedowns, nothing fancy, but

00:06:02.340 you can cope. And then that would be 20% of the training and 80% of the training, if

00:06:07.520 it's for the street, would be combatives. So Krav style. But yes, when I was teaching 0.96

00:06:13.980 it, eventually we split it. We said, here's what we do. If somebody's broken into your

00:06:17.440 house at four o'clock in the morning, you're going to kill them or try to as quickly as 0.99

00:06:21.080 you can. And then here's the control and restraint for if you just, I don't know, somebody's 0.96

00:06:25.940 drunk at a party and you just need to put them on the floor. And then we would drill

00:06:28.840 that.

00:06:29.840 Yeah. I remember once one of my instructors, he was teaching us all these forms. I think

00:06:36.020 it was taekwondo. And he pulled a few of us aside at one time and he said, look, all

00:06:41.620 this stuff is great. If somebody's really trying to kill you, don't worry about any of

00:06:45.800 this. Just get your thumb and drive it as far into the top of the eye socket as you can. 0.59

00:06:50.200 Basically, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. If you're really, really struggling. I have unfortunately

00:06:55.060 used that a couple of times. I mean, hopefully you should never get to that point.

00:06:58.780 You should never. You've really messed up at multiple levels of redundancy to get to that

00:07:05.240 point. But I put myself there. I was doing nightclub security in Tenerife. So I could find

00:07:10.080 myself in situations of extreme pressure where you can end up being kicked to death. And that

00:07:15.140 was where in the combative style of thing, you would be looking at what causes the maximum

00:07:19.740 amount of injury with the least amount of calories burnt on your behalf. You're right.

00:07:23.720 You can't spar it. So we'd have to find drills where you could ingrain it into your physiology

00:07:29.380 without hurting your training partners. I mean, because it's just a stamp on somebody's knee

00:07:35.540 and then hit them in the throat. You just can't do it. These are permanent injuries. So 0.92

00:07:41.380 yeah. Yeah. That was the style. Right. We went slightly sideways. We slightly did. But if

00:07:46.480 boys are watching this, they'll love it. They'll be like, that's great. That's all awesome. But

00:07:50.380 I do like this stuff. So I had to deviate onto that. So yes, the confluence of psychology

00:07:59.140 and markets, it's not talked about that much, is it?

00:08:03.380 It's not. But I've had this suspicion for years and I've always thought, God, I'd love

00:08:08.220 to bring. So I do get a chance to speak to professors of psychology and philosophy. Some

00:08:13.000 of them are mates, Professor Ed Dutton and Dr. Paul Taylor. So if I have something, I can

00:08:17.900 reach out to them and I think, God, I really need an economist. That is not something you

00:08:22.520 hear a lot. No, it's not. God, I need an economist. Someone

00:08:27.040 please give me an economist. I mean, when society collapses, I don't think the economists

00:08:31.860 are going to have a particularly good time. And the reason why is because obviously I love

00:08:37.720 psychology, but I can see the limitations. It individualized. It puts the problem in the

00:08:44.140 individual. And it's very, very rare that if I'm depressed, that it's just purely my individual

00:08:53.140 trauma, purely my individual genetics. It's a group.

00:08:57.280 Well, I mean, you must have seen those charts that show sort of societal level happiness.

00:09:01.180 I mean, the women's one is the most extreme one. I mean, they've gone from basically being 1.00

00:09:06.200 happy pre-war to incredibly unhappy, but I mean, it's happened to everybody.

00:09:11.200 So women are experiencing far higher levels of unhappiness than men.

00:09:18.200 Yes, self-reported happiness. I mean, it's declined for everybody in the West, but women 0.54

00:09:23.200 most especially.

00:09:24.200 That's very interesting because I think they're more susceptible to the men as a generalization,

00:09:29.200 as a generalization, more susceptible than men to what's happening in the collective.

00:09:34.200 So if the collective is unhappy.

00:09:37.200 Well, I suppose that also, and the fact that, I mean, we must be a similar age, but the messaging

00:09:44.200 that I remember being put out to women when we were young was very much, if you are, you

00:09:50.200 know, if you are a stay at home mum, that means you're a failure. 0.99

00:09:53.200 Yes.

00:09:54.200 And you must get out there into the workforce and strap yourself into an office chair.

00:09:58.200 Yes.

00:09:59.200 And spend the next 30 years there.

00:10:00.200 Otherwise you're a waste there.

00:10:01.200 Yeah. 0.98

00:10:02.200 And you failed the sisterhood.

00:10:03.200 Exactly.

00:10:04.200 And I kind of just internalized this because it was the universal messaging and we didn't

00:10:08.200 have YouTube back in those days.

00:10:10.200 We just had, you know, the message that came through media and schools and all the rest

00:10:14.200 of it.

00:10:15.200 And what I, and so I believed it myself.

00:10:17.200 And then I noticed as I went through my career, the women just started dropping off. 1.00

00:10:20.200 Yeah.

00:10:21.200 And I'd be kind of surprised and say, why are you doing this?

00:10:23.200 Mm-hmm.

00:10:24.200 You know, you've got a great job.

00:10:25.200 Mm-hmm.

00:10:26.200 And it was like, yeah, but I don't want to do this.

00:10:27.200 It doesn't make me happy.

00:10:28.200 Yeah.

00:10:29.200 The moment they have a kid, they're just off.

00:10:30.200 Yes.

00:10:31.200 They don't want to come back.

00:10:32.200 Yes.

00:10:33.200 It's interesting.

00:10:34.200 As far back as 2015, I was in Malaysia, which is a majority, well, it's a Muslim country,

00:10:41.200 Muslim government.

00:10:43.200 And one of my friends, we met in a shopping mall and she was very upset and she was crying.

00:10:50.200 We'd had a long conversation and she started crying.

00:10:53.200 I said, what is it?

00:10:54.200 And she said, all I want is to be a mother and have children.

00:10:59.200 I said, you're a 28 year old Muslim girl in a Muslim country.

00:11:02.200 Of course you can do that.

00:11:04.200 She said, I can't.

00:11:05.200 My mother's a lecturer in feminism. 0.99

00:11:07.200 And I was like, this poison, this poison, it's everywhere.

00:11:14.200 It's everywhere.

00:11:16.200 And yeah.

00:11:17.200 I mean, from my point of view, Islam has a limited number of appeal points, but its total 1.00

00:11:24.200 repudiation of feminism is definitely one of them.

00:11:26.200 Well, and, and, and if they can't, if they can't hold it back, I would just say, who's,

00:11:33.200 who's got the strongest ideology?

00:11:35.200 Yeah.

00:11:36.200 Because what I would say, so I, I lived in the East, uh, for maybe a total of four, four

00:11:41.200 years, Thailand, mainly in Malaysia.

00:11:44.200 And I would come back and people would say things like, Oh, in the West, it's like this.

00:11:47.200 And in the East it's like that.

00:11:48.200 And I would say, no, the East is the West. 0.86

00:11:51.200 If they have wifi Instagram and they know who the Kardashians are, they're in the West.

00:11:55.200 They're in the West.

00:11:56.200 And they go, well, it's a Muslim country. 0.86

00:11:58.200 And I'm like, what do you think is happening in Muslim countries in the Middle East to the

00:12:03.200 Far East?

00:12:04.200 It's all going this way.

00:12:06.200 The, the predominant ideology, and it's back to economics again, is really downstream of

00:12:12.200 capitalism.

00:12:13.200 It's, it's consumer capitalism.

00:12:14.200 I think it is.

00:12:15.200 Well, if you hold on your point there, I think what's happened is, so I talked about

00:12:19.200 the happiness levels.

00:12:20.200 Yeah.

00:12:21.200 If you go back pre-war and there were surveys done at the time, um, that asked people, you

00:12:26.200 know, what is your highest ideals in life and making money was very low down the list.

00:12:31.200 So I think, I think the, the surveys I've seen, they, they gave you the top 10 and making

00:12:36.200 money was on the list, but it was like ninth or 10th, right down the bottom.

00:12:39.200 And at the top, it was things like, um, basically live a rewarding life.

00:12:44.200 Um, garner respect in my community.

00:12:47.200 It was, it was all, it was all community orientated goals right at the top and money was at the

00:12:53.200 bottom.

00:12:54.200 And if you look at it, those same surveys today, it's flipped the other way around.

00:12:58.200 Now it's, you know, being a upstanding member of your community.

00:13:01.200 Um, I don't think it even makes the top 10 anymore.

00:13:03.200 It is.

00:13:04.200 It is.

00:13:05.200 It's right at the bottom and making money has gone right to the top.

00:13:08.200 That's really interesting and really depressing.

00:13:11.200 And, um, I, uh, if, if you could send me some of these to look at afterwards, I'd be really

00:13:16.200 grateful.

00:13:17.200 So this is where I would, this, I really need an economist phrase kicks in.

00:13:22.200 I, I've got a grasp of psychology.

00:13:25.200 I can bluff my way in philosophy, but then I just have this strong sense.

00:13:30.200 Um, that what's happening psychologically, philosophically, meaning people's worldview,

00:13:36.200 just the world, the way they see the world philosophy at that level, like a moral code

00:13:41.200 is influenced by factors that we're not talking about.

00:13:45.200 So, so what's on stage is childhood trauma and microaggressions and, um, issues around

00:13:53.200 identity politics that's on stage right now.

00:13:55.200 Okay, fine.

00:13:56.200 And then I look and I go, but the microaggressions, the woke, the, the, the, the identity politics.

00:14:03.200 I'm like, isn't that fundamentally economic?

00:14:07.200 Because you have to be quite wealthy.

00:14:10.200 You have to have quite a lot of disposable wealth to be wringing your hands.

00:14:14.200 The whole luxury belief things.

00:14:15.200 It's a luxury belief thing, isn't it?

00:14:17.200 Well, let, let me, let me build out that point about, um, the change in economics behavior

00:14:22.200 sort of pre-war and post-war.

00:14:24.200 Yeah.

00:14:25.200 I think I can explain that.

00:14:26.200 A lot of, a lot of the economic stuff drives essentially from, um, demographic change is

00:14:32.200 a huge one.

00:14:33.200 Mm-hmm.

00:14:34.200 And, and by that, um, I don't just mean, um, people, the, the, the demographic change

00:14:39.200 that came from immigration is a, is a later effect, but basically the size of populations

00:14:43.200 is a huge factor in this.

00:14:44.200 Yes.

00:14:45.200 I'll explain what I mean by that.

00:14:46.200 The, the, and the other one, um, is the introduction of the fiat money system post-war, which, which turned

00:14:52.200 money from being something scarce to money being something which is abundant.

00:14:56.200 And when money becomes abundant, everything else becomes scarce.

00:15:00.200 We were, we were, I thought we were fiat before the second mole war. 0.99

00:15:03.200 Well, yeah.

00:15:04.200 So I think in 1913, 15, something like that, the UK came off a gold standard.

00:15:11.200 Okay.

00:15:12.200 Um, I mean, it'd done this a couple of times.

00:15:13.200 It came off and then went back on again.

00:15:15.200 Mm-hmm.

00:15:16.200 Um, but in the early days, it was a fairly muted effect and the dollar was still on the

00:15:21.200 gold standard.

00:15:22.200 Mm-hmm.

00:15:23.200 And since the dollar was the dominant currency, that kind of set the tone of things.

00:15:26.200 Mm-hmm.

00:15:27.200 Post-war, I mean, what, basically what happened in the war is, is all the gold ended up going

00:15:30.200 to America.

00:15:31.200 Okay.

00:15:32.200 Partly as a function of the fact that everybody else was fighting a massive war and they were

00:15:36.200 still producing stuff that we needed.

00:15:38.200 So they earned it, but also people just sent it there for safekeeping.

00:15:42.200 Because if you're France and you think things might get a bit dicey, the first thing you

00:15:46.200 do is you send all your gold over to America, where it's comfortably out of the way.

00:15:50.200 We got to the end of the war and somebody, probably an American, thought, eh, maybe we

00:15:57.200 should hang on to this.

00:15:58.200 Mm-hmm.

00:15:59.200 And so they needed to come up for justification why they needed to hang on to all of the gold.

00:16:02.200 Right.

00:16:03.200 And the explanation given was, okay, well, we've got a large, powerful navy now.

00:16:07.200 Mm-hmm.

00:16:08.200 What we will do is we will hold on to the gold.

00:16:12.200 We will protect international shipping.

00:16:14.200 So the whole rationale for all of this is protecting international shipping and trade

00:16:18.200 and stuff.

00:16:19.200 The dollar can be the global currency and the dollar will be pegged to gold.

00:16:26.200 So is this the beginning of the Team America World Police scenario?

00:16:30.200 Yes.

00:16:31.200 Because I found out when I was living in Asia that Asian security and the prevention of 0.99

00:16:37.200 war is an American mission. 0.80

00:16:39.200 Oh, yeah.

00:16:40.200 There's naval bases all over Asia.

00:16:42.200 And if we pulled them out, it was like, yeah, China would just take everything. 0.99

00:16:45.200 I was like, I had no idea.

00:16:46.200 Yeah.

00:16:47.200 I had literally no idea at all.

00:16:48.200 So that comes from the opportunity they saw post-World War to move people to a fair currency.

00:16:54.200 Well, if you've got a whole bunch of gold, you've got most of the world's gold.

00:16:57.200 You don't want to give it back.

00:16:58.200 Sure.

00:16:59.200 And they didn't.

00:17:00.200 Sure.

00:17:01.200 So we then went on this, the dollar became the global currency system, pegged to gold.

00:17:07.200 And that works perfectly fine, pegging to gold, as long as you behave like you're pegged 0.88

00:17:12.200 to gold.

00:17:13.200 Okay.

00:17:14.200 Which basically means you don't spend more than you earn.

00:17:16.200 Right.

00:17:17.200 Because there's only so much in the vault.

00:17:19.200 Yes.

00:17:20.200 First thing they did, started spending more than they earned.

00:17:23.200 So that was a problem.

00:17:25.200 And so they kept on creating new dollars because they were spending more than they earned

00:17:31.200 and they needed to make up the difference.

00:17:33.200 Sorry, just for fiat currency.

00:17:37.200 Some people might not know what it is.

00:17:39.200 Paper money.

00:17:40.200 It's promissory, isn't it?

00:17:41.200 Money which is backed by the promises of politicians.

00:17:44.200 Sounds like a great idea.

00:17:46.200 What could go wrong?

00:17:47.200 Exactly.

00:17:48.200 What could possibly go wrong?

00:17:49.200 So they started spending more.

00:17:50.200 And so they created more dollars in order to finance the spending.

00:17:53.200 And then people started to get tiny bit suspicious that the dollar was not in fact backed

00:18:00.200 by gold in the way that they said it was.

00:18:02.200 And it was the French who went first. 1.00

00:18:03.200 The French said, yeah, I think you guys, I think you guys are flagging it.

00:18:07.200 We take our gold back.

00:18:09.200 So they started their gold back.

00:18:11.200 And of course, once one country does it, everybody's like, okay, there's an issue here.

00:18:15.200 And Nixon in 70, was it 72 or 73?

00:18:20.200 I think it was 73.

00:18:21.200 He basically realized that he had no choice apart from unpegging it and making the dollar

00:18:27.200 a purely paper fiat system.

00:18:32.200 Right.

00:18:33.200 The morning after he did that, surprise announcement, markets absolutely shot up.

00:18:38.200 Okay.

00:18:39.200 Which might seem counterintuitive.

00:18:40.200 But the reason they did that is because stocks are things divided by pieces of paper.

00:18:46.200 And the president has just said, I'm removing the only cap on the amount of pieces of paper

00:18:51.200 that I can generate.

00:18:52.200 Right.

00:18:53.200 So therefore, everything which is a thing now needs to get re-denominated by a larger number.

00:18:59.200 Therefore, the unit denomination of these things has to go up.

00:19:03.200 Right.

00:19:04.200 And that created a system where, well, basically the amount of money would expand.

00:19:11.200 And the mechanism.

00:19:12.200 Yeah.

00:19:13.200 I'll just finish this.

00:19:14.200 Yes.

00:19:15.200 The mechanism of that is you take on debt.

00:19:19.200 So you take on debt, which creates more money.

00:19:22.200 But if you start creating debt in order to create more money, well, you've got a problem then.

00:19:28.200 Because debt comes with interest.

00:19:32.200 So even if you pay off the loan, well, where does the interest come from?

00:19:37.200 That money does not exist in the world.

00:19:40.200 So therefore, how do you pay off interest?

00:19:42.200 Well, you create more debt.

00:19:44.200 So the amount of debt must always expand.

00:19:47.200 The amount of money must always expand.

00:19:50.200 Yes.

00:19:51.200 And you get in a situation where you get this continual growing bubble.

00:19:54.200 Yes.

00:19:55.200 What that basically means is you put that on a compound.

00:19:58.200 Right.

00:19:59.200 And what you find is that money becomes increasingly abundant.

00:20:04.200 Whereas pre-war, money was relatively scarce, but things were abundant.

00:20:10.200 Mm.

00:20:11.200 And things were competing to get the money.

00:20:13.200 Mm.

00:20:14.200 But in that system, it's a lot easier.

00:20:16.200 I mean, well, you know what it was like speaking to your grandparents.

00:20:19.200 You know, they would go out at 14, get an electrical apprenticeship.

00:20:22.200 And on the way back from securing that, they would go and buy a house and get married and all the rest of it.

00:20:28.200 Whereas these days, you can be a 37-year-old lawyer and really struggling to get your first house.

00:20:35.200 Yes.

00:20:36.200 Because money has become so abundant that it doesn't really have that much value anymore.

00:20:40.200 Mm.

00:20:41.200 Whereas things do.

00:20:42.200 Mm.

00:20:43.200 So people have had to shift into basically a scarcity mindset, which means they desperately need to accumulate more and more of this melting ice cube.

00:20:51.200 Right.

00:20:52.200 Which is fiat money.

00:20:53.200 So that, I think, is driving the phenomenon that you talked about just before I got into all of this, which people have to do this.

00:21:01.200 Okay.

00:21:02.200 Scarcity mindset.

00:21:04.200 I definitely need to ask you more about that.

00:21:08.200 Was there ever a chance, say we go back to 1972 and Nixon is having a conversation with, I don't know, eight people who are advising him.

00:21:16.200 Was there ever a chance that this wouldn't completely ruin the system?

00:21:20.200 Was there any way that it wouldn't, that he wasn't signing?

00:21:23.200 It's a death certificate, right?

00:21:25.200 There's no way out of that.

00:21:26.200 Yeah.

00:21:27.200 Well, as long as you keep the game going, it works.

00:21:31.200 So, okay.

00:21:32.200 So if you were to say to me, what do the policies look like of the UK, of USA, of the modern Western liberal democratic countries, so-called, as far as the long-term plan goes?

00:21:44.200 And I've always thought, I don't think there is a long-term plan.

00:21:47.200 I think they're kicking a can down the road and just praying that the next person who comes into power deals with it.

00:21:53.200 Oh, it's very much that.

00:21:54.200 Yeah.

00:21:55.200 So, I mean, in answer to the point, was it obvious immediately that this was going to lead to ruin?

00:22:00.200 Mm-hmm.

00:22:01.200 Yes, it was.

00:22:02.200 And a whole-

00:22:03.200 They knew straight away.

00:22:04.200 There was no surprise.

00:22:05.200 Yeah.

00:22:06.200 And there was a whole bunch of people who understood it and immediately packed up for the hills.

00:22:11.200 Right.

00:22:12.200 They loaded up their, what the Americans call it, station wagons or whatever it is.

00:22:16.200 Yeah.

00:22:17.200 They loaded up their station wagon with tins of beans, shotguns.

00:22:20.200 Right.

00:22:21.200 And drove off into the woods.

00:22:22.200 Waiting for the collapse.

00:22:23.200 Waiting for the collapse.

00:22:24.200 Yeah.

00:22:25.200 Now, that was in the mid-70s.

00:22:28.200 Yeah.

00:22:29.200 And they're still waiting.

00:22:30.200 Yeah.

00:22:31.200 So, in fact, I also had this the other day.

00:22:34.200 I mean, James Stellingpole got in touch with me because he was a bit worried.

00:22:39.200 Because his son's going to university and he's apparently sharing a dorm with some guy

00:22:45.200 who's doing finance and is very, very good on the math stuff.

00:22:48.200 And he started crunching the numbers.

00:22:50.200 And he was like, this system is going to collapse.

00:22:53.200 There's mathematically no other solution than this thing going to collapse.

00:22:58.200 And James was asking me about it.

00:22:59.200 And I was like, yeah, that is the case.

00:23:01.200 But it's been the case since the mid-1970s.

00:23:04.200 So, we are in a collapse.

00:23:07.200 It's a mathematical certainty that it will collapse.

00:23:09.200 But we're just doing it in slow motion.

00:23:10.200 But as long as you can keep the plates spinning and you can keep adding more plates.

00:23:15.200 So, if you ever go to Cirque du Soleil or something and they do the plate spinning,

00:23:20.200 they're incredibly good at it.

00:23:23.200 And you sit there as the audience member thinking, oh, they're definitely going to drop one in a minute.

00:23:26.200 And they just get another plate.

00:23:27.200 And they get another plate and they keep doing it.

00:23:30.200 But it is a mathematical certainty that if they didn't at some point stop that and move on to the next act of, you know,

00:23:37.200 Trampesians or whatever the hell it was, that one person would not be able to grow forever with the amount of plates that they could spin. 0.99

00:23:44.200 And at some point there would just be hundreds of them and they couldn't possibly do it.

00:23:47.200 Yes.

00:23:48.200 That's the financial system that we're in.

00:23:49.200 And it's, well, I suppose at some level it's physics, isn't it?

00:23:52.200 It has to have a limitation.

00:23:53.200 It has to have a point at which it just bursts.

00:23:56.200 So then, I don't want to digress too far, but it just occurred to me, if you're running a system politically and you can see you're at the, I don't know, you're voted into power tomorrow and they take you into a room.

00:24:12.200 Let's imagine where it's like the room out here that controls what's happening here.

00:24:16.200 You can see in real time, the numbers moving and you have your hands physically on levers of power that don't exist.

00:24:22.200 But in this metaphor, they do.

00:24:25.200 I wonder what that does to people's, their commitment to the job.

00:24:30.200 Is this why we have so much political degeneracy?

00:24:33.200 Because they know we ain't going anywhere.

00:24:36.200 It can't last.

00:24:37.200 I wonder if that creates this sort of nihilism.

00:24:41.200 Well, I mean, you can pick up a lot of this from interviews with politicians post being in office.

00:24:48.200 Because we've all noticed that politicians talk a good game before they're elected.

00:24:52.200 The moment they become elected, all of a sudden, they just do exactly what the last guy did.

00:24:56.200 Right.

00:24:57.200 And, I mean, a whole bunch of them talked about this, but I'm thinking of George Osborne, in this respect.

00:25:03.200 He came in and he was like, he wanted to cut government because he ideologically believed in cutting government and all the right things and all that kind of stuff.

00:25:10.200 And he's talked about how he was basically, exactly what you said, which was taken aside and said, yeah, but if you do that, this will happen.

00:25:17.200 Right.

00:25:18.200 And if we were to reset the system long term, it would be enormously beneficial.

00:25:26.200 Yes.

00:25:27.200 Short term, it would be a bloody disaster.

00:25:29.200 Politicians are elected for the short term and not the long term.

00:25:33.200 Yes.

00:25:34.200 Then don't we need a violent revolution and 10 years of dictatorship for the transition?

00:25:43.200 Well.

00:25:44.200 But we need to be global, wouldn't it?

00:25:46.200 Yes.

00:25:47.200 That could work.

00:25:48.200 I mean, this is part of the reason why I've come around so much on Bitcoin.

00:25:53.200 Because regardless of whether it's Bitcoin or whether it's something else, it could be gold for this purpose.

00:25:59.200 If you're going to replace one financial system, you're going to need to have another one waiting in the wings.

00:26:03.200 Sure.

00:26:04.200 Because if you were to go back to 2008, gold had been demonetized effectively.

00:26:10.200 It was a store of value, but it wasn't money.

00:26:15.200 And gold is really difficult to use as money in a modern world because you've got to put it on a boat and ship it.

00:26:21.200 Or you do what they used to do, which is you have it in a vault under the Bank of England.

00:26:29.200 Okay.

00:26:30.200 And what happens is when China trades with India, you know, messages go back and then every so often somebody wheels out a pallet of gold from the Chinese vault and puts it in the Indian vault.

00:26:40.200 Okay.

00:26:42.200 The logic of gold is you have to centralize.

00:26:44.200 Right.

00:26:45.200 In order to have a global system to make it all work.

00:26:48.200 Yes.

00:26:49.200 The problem with that is in this modern world, is China, India, Russia, et cetera, going to be perfectly happy for all their gold to be sat in a vault below the Bank of England so that they can do their international trade?

00:27:02.200 I would suspect not.

00:27:03.200 No.

00:27:04.200 So are you going to let every single central bank hold their own gold, which they will insist on doing?

00:27:08.200 Mm.

00:27:09.200 Okay, fine.

00:27:10.200 What's the problem then?

00:27:11.200 Do you trust them?

00:27:12.200 Yeah.

00:27:13.200 Do you say, I would like to order, you know, whatever it is, a quadrillion tons of steel.

00:27:18.200 Mm.

00:27:19.200 I'm good for it.

00:27:20.200 I've got the gold.

00:27:21.200 Are you going to go, okay, well, I guess they say they've got it.

00:27:24.200 Sounds good.

00:27:25.200 No reason to disbelieve them.

00:27:27.200 So that's why I've come around so much on Bitcoin.

00:27:31.200 But one of the notions with that is, is that everybody who's using fiat currency, more and more people are using Bitcoin.

00:27:40.200 At some point they will cross and you can step off from one elevator to the other and then one can plunge into the sea and the other one can go up.

00:27:47.200 What that will mean is that all the people who refuse to get off one system are just going to lose everything.

00:27:54.200 Right.

00:27:55.200 But at least you have an alternative so you can save perhaps half or the majority or whatever number it is at that point.

00:28:02.200 What I said before about the country going into dictatorship for the transition, in a global economy, obviously that wouldn't do much.

00:28:11.200 You really need the globe to commit.

00:28:14.200 Every country across the globe needs to commit to it, right?

00:28:17.200 Potentially.

00:28:18.200 I mean, we kind of see an example of this with BRICS at the moment.

00:28:21.200 Yeah.

00:28:22.200 When you measure it as being de-dollarized.

00:28:23.200 Yeah.

00:28:24.200 And the traditional, most other economists would look at that and say, well, look, it's a disaster for Russia because their GDP is declining, all that kind of stuff.

00:28:34.200 Yeah.

00:28:35.200 When you measure it in dollars, it is.

00:28:36.200 Mm.

00:28:37.200 When you measure it in industrial output, energy produced, agricultural output, if you measure it in the way that we used to measure economies.

00:28:43.200 Mm.

00:28:44.200 Actually, BRICS is doing, in fact, if you look at BRICS, I mean, they've got the majority of the world's commodities, energy, agricultural output and population.

00:28:53.200 Mm.

00:28:54.200 The only thing they don't have at the moment is the majority of the innovation that's still taking place in America.

00:28:58.200 Sure.

00:28:59.200 If they were to ever get, and it would be harder for them because of their, culturally, it's harder for them to innovate.

00:29:04.200 Mm.

00:29:05.200 They tend to be a lot more hierarchical and this stuff.

00:29:07.200 If they could ever get that, you know, sanctioning them would be, well, I mean, it's already absurd because they've got the majority of all of these things that I mentioned, which is very difficult.

00:29:15.200 Mm.

00:29:16.200 And actually, the other thing I'll make up the point on with growth of the system is that it's worse for countries like the US and the UK.

00:29:27.200 I'll explain why.

00:29:28.200 Mm.

00:29:29.200 Because if you think about it, then America has a global system.

00:29:33.200 And what is their main export now?

00:29:35.200 Their main export is actually their debt.

00:29:37.200 Mm.

00:29:38.200 And how it...

00:29:40.200 How is debt exported?

00:29:41.200 Right.

00:29:42.200 Well, because everybody needs...

00:29:43.200 Because if we want a dollar-based system...

00:29:45.200 Oh, I see.

00:29:46.200 Okay.

00:29:47.200 Everybody needs dollars.

00:29:48.200 If you're Sri Lanka and you want to buy diesel, you need dollars to trade internationally to buy diesel.

00:29:56.200 And that is exactly why Sri Lanka collapsed what it was two and a half years ago, three years ago.

00:30:01.200 Mm.

00:30:02.200 The reason they collapsed is because they ran out of dollars.

00:30:04.200 Okay.

00:30:05.200 Which meant they couldn't buy diesel.

00:30:06.200 Mm.

00:30:07.200 Which meant that their...

00:30:09.200 Well, their farmers couldn't put diesel in the tractors.

00:30:11.200 It meant that their delivery drivers couldn't put diesel in their delivery vans.

00:30:15.200 Mm.

00:30:16.200 And so the economy collapsed and the government collapsed.

00:30:18.200 And you saw those scenes of the president's limo collection getting tossed into the river by furious locals who were basically watching their kids go hungry.

00:30:26.200 Yeah.

00:30:27.200 Because of that.

00:30:28.200 So the US has found that there was this insatiable demand for dollars, which it supplies via debt.

00:30:37.200 So what does that do to them?

00:30:39.200 Well, what it means is that they've got to create debt and then send it abroad.

00:30:46.200 And in exchange, people will send them stuff.

00:30:50.200 So it's, I'm trading a concept.

00:30:54.200 Yeah.

00:30:55.200 Which is this debt notion.

00:30:57.200 Yeah.

00:30:58.200 Backed by the promises of politicians for actual things.

00:31:02.200 People are sending them actual stuff in exchange for this notion.

00:31:06.200 Yes.

00:31:07.200 It's a bit like a branding sort of a thing, isn't it?

00:31:09.200 Yeah.

00:31:10.200 You'll spend an awful lot of money on Versace, but it's still a handbag that you could get from Zara.

00:31:15.200 Yes.

00:31:16.200 It's purely psychological.

00:31:17.200 But what that means is that they kind of have to send all their manufacturing abroad.

00:31:21.200 Yeah.

00:31:22.200 Because if you're getting stuff from abroad and you're sending things out.

00:31:25.200 Yes.

00:31:26.200 Well, you want to get all the things want to be outside.

00:31:28.200 Yes.

00:31:29.200 And all the debt wants to be inside going outwards so that things, finished goods and raw materials

00:31:34.200 then sort of flow back inwards.

00:31:36.200 So once you're on that system, you know, you're kind of very locked into it.

00:31:41.200 Because if you're going to change it, I mean, you've already spent the last 30 years de-industrializing

00:31:45.200 your own country and sending all of that abroad.

00:31:48.200 If you just stop it like that, well, why is anyone going to send you anything?

00:31:53.200 They're not.

00:31:54.200 They're not.

00:31:55.200 There's no incentive.

00:31:56.200 You've completely de-industrialized yourself.

00:31:58.200 So in order to build back up again.

00:31:59.200 Now, long term, America will be fine because America has.

00:32:03.200 It's got the best starting.

00:32:05.200 Obviously, it's got the best starting position in the game of civilizations.

00:32:09.200 It's got, you know, abundant, good agricultural land.

00:32:13.200 It's got a decent amount of commodities.

00:32:15.200 It's got lots of energy.

00:32:16.200 It's got a bright, motivated population.

00:32:19.200 So long term, it will be fine.

00:32:21.200 But can you imagine that sort of 20, 30 year transition from we don't need to do anything.

00:32:27.200 People will just send us stuff to, oh, look, we turned it off.

00:32:30.200 Nobody is sending us anything.

00:32:31.200 And we can't produce anything.

00:32:33.200 I think you would need you would need a dictatorship to survive.

00:32:36.200 Because how else are people going to eat?

00:32:37.200 Yeah.

00:32:38.200 We have to send out texts to people and go, you're on the farm today.

00:32:41.200 And so are your children.

00:32:43.200 Yeah.

00:32:44.200 Please, please, please attend the local center and sign in.

00:32:46.200 And the UK is in a similar position to that because we can do a bit of that in producing

00:32:52.200 debt and sending it to other people because UK debt is still worth something.

00:32:55.200 But it's not the dollar.

00:32:56.200 So the way that we got around it was, OK, well, we're going to have a massive financial

00:33:00.200 services sector.

00:33:01.200 So we're going to plug into this dollar system and we're going to be.

00:33:05.200 So it's I've heard this before, and that's what makes London, London or did make London,

00:33:11.200 London. 0.91

00:33:12.200 It's so fucking devious, but you have to respect that. 0.99

00:33:15.200 They got a piece of the action. 0.98

00:33:16.200 Yeah.

00:33:17.200 And they're basically middlemen.

00:33:18.200 They're the bag man.

00:33:19.200 They're the bag man.

00:33:20.200 Yeah.

00:33:21.200 That's brilliant.

00:33:22.200 Yes.

00:33:23.200 They're producing nothing.

00:33:24.200 Nice hotels for you to chat to each other in whilst you do these things.

00:33:27.200 Yeah.

00:33:28.200 If you want to trade in the European time zone, well, Europe, Africa, Middle East or come

00:33:34.200 to London because we're in the right time zone.

00:33:36.200 We speak English.

00:33:37.200 We can we can culturally relate to you.

00:33:40.200 So you can send your American bankers over or you don't even need to do that.

00:33:44.200 We train our own people.

00:33:45.200 You just you just let us filter the dollar system through us.

00:33:48.200 And that's how we survive.

00:33:50.200 So if that system were to ever go away, well, Britain would be screwed as well.

00:33:54.200 Especially since we are aggressively shutting down our own agricultural energy and manufacturing

00:34:00.200 capabilities.

00:34:01.200 Why are we doing that?

00:34:03.200 Yes, that's a good question.

00:34:05.200 If you would like to see the full version of this premium video, please head over to

00:34:11.200 lotuseaters.com and subscribe to gain full access to all of our premium content.

00:34:15.200 Thank you.

00:34:16.200 Bye.

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00:34:18.200 Bye.

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The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters - December 10, 2024

PREVIEW： Brokenomics ｜ Dark Triad Economics with Richard Grannon

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