The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters - The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters #1154

00:00:00.000 good afternoon ladies and gentlemen welcome to the podcast of the load seaters for wednesday

00:00:12.920 the 30th of april 2025 i am joined by dan and geopolitical strategist commentator firas modad

00:00:19.440 welcome to the show thank you very much for having me pleasure and today we're going to

00:00:23.760 be talking about the great spanish blackout because that caught everyone on the hop although

00:00:28.560 i understand that it was probably predictable right a few people did uh we're going to examine

00:00:33.800 trump's first hundred days and how he's got surprisingly good reviews from his enemies on

00:00:39.280 this and what to expect in the upcoming india versus pakistan war quote unquote we're legally

00:00:45.060 looking forward to that one uh yes that's that's definitely going to be wonderful here um right so

00:00:50.040 uh without further ado let's get on with it yeah so nobody expects the spanish blackout uh but it

00:00:56.540 happened so uh ap is reporting this uh well everybody's reporting this massive power outage

00:01:02.100 in spain and portugal leaves thousands stranded and millions without lights and i'm sure you've

00:01:06.360 all seen the images now um people having to walk off trains um without power some people being stuck

00:01:12.500 on trains overnight stadiums being shut down hospitals having to go to their emergency backup

00:01:17.700 and so it was complete power loss in spain um which is um surprising just a quick thing i didn't

00:01:24.900 actually look into this deeply because i knew you were going to cover it today so was this all of

00:01:28.300 spain uh yes i think it was there might have been a few splatterings of areas but it was all of spain

00:01:34.420 bits of portugal bits of france i heard not gibraltar though no no because they uh they have sensibly

00:01:40.820 kept their independence now you might think it's surprising because um only uh what about a week

00:01:51.260 ago they managed to achieve a hundred percent renewable power that's incredible and then what

00:02:00.380 three days later so you know everything is fixed and then and then shocker um yes how did how did they

00:02:08.100 get how did they get to 100 renewable power well a lot of it was you know building out solar which

00:02:12.980 you know works in spain yeah spain so you know bit of bit of wind as well um and of course we play

00:02:18.820 this without sound um getting terribly excited at the prospect of um blowing up power do you want to

00:02:25.060 do you want to play that samson stick it on without sound um yeah power stations being demolished

00:02:29.680 look a look this is just like the germans yeah the nuclear power plants the soy face for thumbs up

00:02:35.060 yay why is that good the power stations are coming down because you know we don't need those anymore

00:02:40.500 oh um yeah so he's very happy the degrowth cult and then this happened uh

00:02:51.140 what happened when we destroyed our power stations yeah i've ever got i've got longer there we go so uh

00:02:58.420 basically uh it's about um just after 12 midday uh massive drop off in power um and i've been

00:03:06.340 speaking to my insiders in the power industry and they they basically told me it must have been a

00:03:10.340 frantic race against time because you've got certain battery reserves that you can use to restart the grid

00:03:16.580 um and so they and luckily because because eventually it went on for so long you hit the

00:03:20.900 night time and the night time demand falls off so heavily right they're able to basically get back up

00:03:26.180 there if they hadn't been able to get it as restarted as quickly as they had you would have to manually

00:03:32.580 reset every substation that's a good 12 hours without power well i mean they weren't using any

00:03:39.060 because it wasn't anybody supplied but you need you need a base level in order to be able to start

00:03:42.660 i mean like that's you know 12 straight hours with yes the entire country zero power yes that's crazy

00:03:48.580 yes um so um i mean i suppose good for them that they managed to avoid a complete

00:03:53.300 power loss and complete restart of the system which could have taken days if not weeks

00:03:59.220 um so it could have been a lot worse and obviously surprising since they're 100 renewable you would

00:04:03.620 have thought this sort of thing's behind us you you should probably i mean i if i was spain i'd be

00:04:08.340 looking at this as a shot across the bow right well you say spain not just spain yeah all of us

00:04:13.940 we've all got a net zero policy um which of course then triggered uh samson do you want to play this

00:04:18.820 without sound as well um so you know obviously panic buying ensues uh because you know if the

00:04:26.180 power goes out for 12 hours you might run out of toilet paper which wouldn't is not the situation

00:04:29.700 you want to be in so people rushed into the shops and they bought absolutely everything they could

00:04:34.260 um realize how closely connected to toilet paper my electricity in my home was

00:04:38.740 well covid as well i guess basically any sort of upset irrational fear of losing toilet what you do

00:04:45.220 is you immediately rush for the toilet paper i don't know why that's apparently how it works

00:04:50.500 yeah um spanish prime minister pedro sanchez uh yesterday said um what happened yesterday cannot

00:04:57.940 ever happen again and he vows to hold private operators to account so just to be clear it's not the

00:05:07.220 politicians fault for dictating that we must have a hundred percent renewable power it's the fault of

00:05:12.580 the power companies for doing what they were told by the politician that's the big problem here yes

00:05:18.420 i mean there's a couple of points here to think about um first renewables by their very nature

00:05:25.060 are variable and not reliable whereas because the wind can blow too much the clouds can shift too

00:05:31.540 quickly etc etc so that leads to shifts in power the grid insists on stability for it to keep on

00:05:37.700 functioning yes so there's that consideration i'm definitely coming to that part yes yeah the

00:05:42.740 the second consideration is that um everything we have in the west is based on a just-in-time system

00:05:51.300 as in once the system freezes

00:05:54.420 everything falls apart well not just just in time but also regularization of demand that's the toilet

00:06:01.140 paper example yes exactly so uh the demand has to be very stable and predictable and the supply has to

00:06:07.860 be very stable and predictable and that makes the system ridiculously fragile and these are the same

00:06:14.900 people who are thinking about going to war with russia yes in a system this fragile that's very bold

00:06:21.780 um and then the third factor is if there are two or three nights without power the kind of

00:06:30.020 looting that you will get and the kind of crime that you will get in a society that's been recently

00:06:35.940 diversified especially in a society that's become low trust is going to be incredible so the risks that

00:06:43.460 these guys are taking are only now becoming evident but they're too much bought into the woke cult

00:06:51.540 including the net zero aspect of note cult the woke cult which is just eschatology for secularists

00:06:57.940 to actually see that there is a potential problem and if anyone doubts the point you're making about

00:07:03.300 three days without power um i was living in london during the 2012 london riots right and 2011 2011 2011

00:07:10.900 2011 and i mean the the looting was off the charts by the second night let alone the third yeah and just

00:07:18.100 i mean all correct obviously just out of interest uh what was france's power generation like during

00:07:23.140 that time well france was fine of course they've got lots of nuclear power stations southern france

00:07:28.420 had problems initially well because it's linked and actually that's that's what i wanted to come on to

00:07:33.140 next because this is the bit that the the mainstream media does not want to talk about um and therefore

00:07:38.180 you're not going to get this anywhere else um i found a great explainer on grid frequency which is

00:07:43.460 something we don't talk about often so i'm just going to have to quote bits of this to bring us up

00:07:47.460 to speed so we can move on to the to the rest of the banter um so everything uh points to the cause

00:07:53.220 being a chain reaction from so-called frequency collapse the danger of frequency collapse has been

00:07:58.180 warned about for years but politicians poisoned by the green brain virus simply refused to listen

00:08:03.060 the cost of preventing frequency collapse has already has also skyrocketed across europe the somewhat

00:08:08.820 comical aspect of this event is the authorities release information claiming the power collapse

00:08:12.820 was due to external temperature variations to make everybody believe that climate change was

00:08:17.940 the cause now we don't know uh the precise trigger um but there really is no other explanation than

00:08:24.340 chain reaction through frequently collapse because there is not the resistance in the system and i'll

00:08:28.180 be coming to that in a minute electricity is consumed the moment it's produced therefore the power

00:08:32.980 supply is a pull phenomenon not a push consumers draw power from power plants by turning on switches

00:08:38.260 and there's always been exact balance the second most important factor is the power supply is

00:08:42.660 based on alternating current like most other countries spain has a supply of 220 volts 50 hertz

00:08:49.220 50 hertz means that the current uh switches polarity to plus and minus 50 times a second and i'll explain

00:08:54.980 how that's done in a moment and this um this hertz rate this frequency must be exact because basically

00:09:03.060 all the power stations need to line up with each other and produce the same frequency and it's basically a

00:09:08.820 sine wave they're all pumping the same energy at the same frequency into the same grid yes if you've

00:09:13.860 got one power if you've got one power point at the peak of the sine wave and the other one at the bottom

00:09:18.180 cancel each other out well it's it's worse than cancel each other out or do they amplify each other

00:09:22.340 no it's it's well they kind of do cancel each other out but they do it in a very destructive way so

00:09:26.820 imagine imagine two bicycle wheels that have been two different bicycles and the two bicycle wheels have been tied

00:09:32.500 together with a rope and if they're both going around at the same speed and same rotation works

00:09:37.300 beautifully yeah if if they start going the opposite way from each other or they get out of sync both

00:09:42.740 bicycles break apart and that's what happened with um france in that france hadn't probably had enough

00:09:49.780 power to supply them to get them over the hump but when it started losing frequency they had to

00:09:54.820 disconnect right so there would have been a french homer simpson somewhere sat watching this is like uh-oh

00:10:00.980 mon dieu press the kill switch yeah and cut them off yeah um because if you get this this you know

00:10:06.660 this out of sync thing so and then it basically goes on to say that green politicians don't realize

00:10:11.220 this and they've embarked on the world's you know largest energy experiment where every city becomes a

00:10:16.180 small solar power plant every mountain top becomes a power plant uh through wind and so on now with this

00:10:22.740 situation they'll describe you've got to keep this frequency in a line across different power plants

00:10:26.660 that's actually bloody impressive yes if it's just a big power plant next to each city

00:10:33.460 doing that on a national scale and then you've got to remember that the

00:10:38.500 european nations they all link up so not only do you need your power plants in two spanish cities to be on

00:10:44.980 the same frequency you need the one in germany and france and scandinavia they all need to be at this precise

00:10:51.160 frequency because it's all linked up so you can see if there's a frequency drop they've got no choice

00:10:57.240 but to immediately start islanding everything and cutting them off that's the issue here so with that

00:11:03.560 and i'll try and get through the rest of this explainer as quick as i can uh let's just watch

00:11:07.160 the first minute of his video samson and just refresh us on our on our gcse science it's been a long time

00:11:13.000 what you're looking at is a very simple alternating current or ac generator a device that converts

00:11:19.080 mechanical energy into electrical energy this part is called the armature it's made from metal and

00:11:26.600 electricity is generated by its rotation between two magnets to show clearly how the generator works

00:11:33.880 one half has been colored yellow the armature can be rotated in various ways for example using pressurized

00:11:42.440 steam as in a power plant a flow of water from a dam or a flow of air from a wind turbine

00:11:49.080 these parts are called slip rings they're also made of metal and are connected to the armature

00:11:57.880 the slip rings and the armature rotate together

00:12:03.880 the rings are connected to brushes made from carbon the brushes make contact with the rings as the rings

00:12:10.120 rotate so they provide an electron flow within the system in order to determine the magnitude and

00:12:17.480 direction of current a galvanometer is attached you can see the frequency when the armature starts to

00:12:24.120 rotate an electric current is formed this is because the magnetic flux changes over time magnet right so

00:12:32.440 we leave that there yeah so magic right got it yeah so i mean the the only difference i understand between

00:12:37.400 that and and modern um power stations is that rather than using permanent magnets as indicated here you use

00:12:44.040 superconducting magnets so you use you get the spin going to build up your voltage and then you feed

00:12:50.520 power into the superconducting magnets and then that gives you the amperage and you can taper that

00:12:55.320 amperage up and down so the bit about how all these power stations need to supply the right amount of

00:13:00.200 power you can feed power in and out of those magnets once you've got your voltage up and once you've

00:13:04.360 got your frequency and as you can see the the whole thing with this is that the frequency is a natural

00:13:10.280 byproduct of how the energy is generated because the the hertz frequency is basically just a function

00:13:17.000 of how that how that spins so that spins 50 times a second well there you go you've got your you've got

00:13:22.280 you you've got your spin and it is a basic byproduct of energy generation and as long as you get them all

00:13:28.600 going at that sort of spin rate and actually i mean it sounds difficult but these things are huge they're

00:13:34.920 very heavy and they've got a lot of momentum they've got a lot of grid inertia going to them so once

00:13:40.520 you've got a whole bunch of these spinning actually it's it's it's fairly well i wouldn't say

00:13:45.320 straightforward but it's manageable to keep them all spinning at the precise rate so that all makes

00:13:50.360 sense right um that's alternating current green energy doesn't use that it's direct current uses well

00:14:00.040 solar is direct current i didn't know that yes i mean i don't know anything about this so why would

00:14:05.720 i yeah um wind is direct current far less powerful i think it's less efficient i i don't have the

00:14:13.080 physics to to explain why i remember in i remember in gcse physics apparently direct current's just

00:14:19.320 far weaker than alternating which is why they chose alternate okay it goes less of a distance and things

00:14:23.640 like this over the lines um my understanding is that direct current is good for long transmission

00:14:29.960 at very high voltage or something so i don't know yeah so don't ask me yeah i i i can't explain that

00:14:35.560 either unless unless unless you're also a physicist i mean that's his camera no i'm not all right well

00:14:40.200 we we we we we skip on that but yeah obviously solar power produces um direct current so if you've got

00:14:47.000 solar panels on your roof you need an inverter and the inverter turns it into alternating current but it

00:14:52.360 doesn't really turn it into alternating current what it does is it is it sees what the grid is producing

00:14:57.800 the the frequency and it kind of mimics it but it doesn't produce its own it can only mimic it and

00:15:03.320 feed it into the system so now you start to see the issue that they had in spain is that because they

00:15:08.920 were so heavily reliant on um renewables and wind does produce an alternating current but

00:15:18.040 the alternating current alternates with wind yeah so so they end up it's not a stable alternating current

00:15:24.120 unlike the stable alternate current that generates from convention so they often end up converting it

00:15:29.000 into direct current and then inverting it back into a mimic right of the frequency rate that we need

00:15:35.000 here so now you've got your problem so whatever happened happened in spain and it might have been

00:15:41.240 you know some weather phenomenon it might have been a surge in demand maybe you know the maybe the

00:15:45.960 spanish discovered because it was about the same time as our podcast went out so maybe the spanish

00:15:50.200 discovered lotus eaters and they all turned on the switch at the same time no doubt maybe it was

00:15:54.120 a weather phenomenon whatever the point is is that system did not have the resilience to whenever there

00:15:59.400 was a fluctuation which normally would have been observed by massive steam turbines with the grid

00:16:04.680 inertia that they have and the frequency composition that they have when it's um renewables it's just

00:16:10.520 inherently unstable it's very very brittle because they'd be generating a frequency somewhere

00:16:15.720 in spain and then everything else is mimicking it but there's just no inertia there in order to do it

00:16:22.440 which which basically um gave us up on so if you've got a hundred percent renewable system

00:16:29.560 but you need frequency you need the spin well what do you do how do you generate that okay the answer is

00:16:38.360 is that having got rid of all the massive flywheels you then add them back in again

00:16:41.800 so so this is this is island solution to the problem they're basically just going to make

00:16:47.720 massive flywheels and spin them using spinning wheels using solar power and wind power so using

00:16:53.960 direct current to spin a flywheel to create the alternative which the direct current then mimics

00:17:00.280 in order to feed back into the system right so if look so spinning a flywheel from coal or nuclear is bad

00:17:09.960 so we got to get rid of this we got rid of got to get rid of the spinny thing but then we got to add

00:17:15.480 back the spinny thing except this time it's not generating any power it's being pushed along by solar power

00:17:23.240 this is the thing about the whole uh yeah ed milliband lie that green energy is going to be cheap

00:17:29.720 you're destroying existing infrastructure that you have

00:17:32.360 which comes with a massive price you then need to replace all of its functions in a dozen different

00:17:40.840 ways yes and then you need to invent completely new maintenance systems that you have no experience

00:17:47.160 with using a labor force that's less skilled in order to achieve the same result naturally this is

00:17:54.840 going to be a lot more expensive but try telling that to mr ed milliband and also you've just created a

00:18:00.200 little spaghetti solution to what was otherwise a straightforward well frequency was a natural

00:18:05.720 bribe product of the old way it works yeah like now it's artificially imposed this this is what i

00:18:11.560 mean by how was france because obviously nuclear power is just so much superior to all of this system

00:18:17.160 there's just no question you know with you know carbon byproducts and actual energy output like nuclear

00:18:24.520 power plants right i looked this up they're they're 95 efficient whereas solar and wind are like

00:18:29.720 35 yeah something like that yeah and it's just it's just not even worth talking the argument from

00:18:34.280 safety about nuclear is so hollow because if you can make a submarine and an aircraft carrier run on

00:18:41.560 nuclear that is about as safe as it gets well um as well it's as safe as solar power yeah so they they

00:18:49.960 keep on lying about these things and i think corruption has a lot to do with it i think one thing that

00:18:56.920 we should be looking at is the extent to which politicians and parties associated with net zero

00:19:03.480 zealotry are actually receiving money like from people like nice mr dale fans who are involved in

00:19:11.480 the this industry and who stand to benefit from it see i i view a lot of it as being ideology uh i

00:19:17.640 view a lot of it yeah i mean you described it as zealotry i i think they have this really weird

00:19:23.240 commitment to the idea that essentially uh man has to be dependent on this kind of power generation

00:19:30.600 or else something immoral is happening in their minds which is why they look at nuclear power and

00:19:35.160 that is going to just destroy the entire renewables industry completely because there's just no logical

00:19:41.160 reason why you would choose one over the other i mean it's just and so they all they can do is fear

00:19:45.400 monger so what what about you know fukushima fukushima i do have to pull you up on that point

00:19:50.920 about nuclear being as safe as solar power is actually safer oh more more people die of solar

00:19:57.160 power and i checked in real time and the reason more people die of solar power because they fall off

00:20:03.080 roofs yes yeah that's a point yeah yeah nuclear power probably kills fewer birds as well yes yes

00:20:09.560 now the other thing you've got to bear in mind is because the nuclear power stations in spain

00:20:15.240 they've got a couple and they did go offline as well and the reason they went offline is because

00:20:19.080 of this frequency they had to disconnect in order to protect protect the um protect the systems and

00:20:24.600 basically every eu country because we're all trying to get to 100 renewable although france have

00:20:29.960 decided that renewable includes nuclear it does well it does yes i agree but every everybody else has

00:20:36.760 decided no that's not the way to go i hate being having to praise the french yes i just have to

00:20:41.000 praise the french on this well the thing to remember is that renewables aren't renewable

00:20:45.160 in the sense that the materials that oh yeah oh yeah the batteries yeah and the batteries have

00:20:49.800 an expiry date and they might explode um in lebanon we have a lot of issues with sort of

00:20:54.520 batteries not being stored properly and possibly exploding um so you have the issue with the safety of

00:20:59.720 the batteries you have the issue with the uh resources used for solar panels and for wind

00:21:06.280 and for batteries not being renewable in any way and requiring enormous mining operations

00:21:13.400 that are mostly done on the backs of slaves in the congo yes of slave labor in the congo and so

00:21:21.080 the whole narrative that this is renewable it's it's they aren't uh the sun is a renewable resource

00:21:28.120 but the solar panel is not and the wind turbine again exactly and the wind turbine dies in 20 25 years

00:21:35.240 and then has to be buried underground somewhere some anthropologist in the future is going to find

00:21:40.840 fields full of buried wind turbines um and ask themselves was this a religious cult there's

00:21:49.480 another and the answer is yes it was yes it was yes some god yeah if you're watching this in a

00:21:56.280 a thousand years time no it's genuinely a cult um and there's another geopolitical angle to this in

00:22:01.800 that every european country basically has the same energy emergency um plan yes which is we get it from

00:22:09.080 our neighbors yeah yeah now that works when russia is the last country in that chain yes it doesn't

00:22:15.240 work when russia is no longer in that they might think that okay france is going to be the last thing in

00:22:20.120 the chain but france obviously had to disconnect to protect its power plants from the mismatch in

00:22:25.880 the frequency yeah or over why are we giving the french that kind of power over europe yes the

00:22:30.600 french literally the one saying you're going to have to do exactly as we said we cut your power

00:22:33.480 well that they they become the new russia don't they exactly which has the whip hand exactly why do

00:22:37.240 we want that why wouldn't we just build our own well and and ed milliband is pushing us towards

00:22:41.240 this so i spoke so i did a a brokonomics uh where is it okay oh yes also i should mention that the

00:22:47.800 basically the spanish electric company warned in february that this is going to happen sooner or

00:22:52.360 later oh really by the way guys the entire country is going to go black soon sorry yeah because they

00:22:57.800 could if to industry insiders this is actually fairly obvious i spoke to an industry insider not so long

00:23:02.920 ago i did a brokonomics on nuclear power and i got in touch with that chap and um his basic message

00:23:08.280 was by the way everything that spain is doing we're doing here of course we are ed milliband is pushing

00:23:12.920 us towards this and the other thing that he said that was quite interesting that i thought was um

00:23:18.040 basically he was emphasizing how extremely lucky that we got because this was a when when you get

00:23:24.680 into this sort of cascade canaps um it so obviously rip it out all over spain it started to go into

00:23:31.080 portugal and uh france and then it got killed because it got disconnected there's no particular

00:23:36.200 reason why that wouldn't have necessarily so somebody was sharp on the button somewhere there's no reason

00:23:41.000 why that wouldn't rippled out all over europe and then if we could have all of us could have been in

00:23:46.200 the situation where we're having to spend weeks restarting manually each substation so we could

00:23:50.760 have had weeks without power now why is this so important because this is a live view of the uk grid

00:23:57.160 at the moment um right so let's have a look so 18.1 percent we aren't generating ourself 18 18 so

00:24:07.240 interconnectors there and we're getting 7.6 from france we're giving a bit to ireland for whatever

00:24:12.760 reason we're taking some in from netherlands norway belgium denmark and so on we're only we're only

00:24:18.040 generating 18 of room no no we we are generating the rest of it it's 18 is what we're oh 18 from

00:24:23.560 other people right right right yeah we we get a lot from wind for whatever reason look at that only

00:24:28.200 nine percent from nuclear yeah and it was 22 from gas and biomass is that coal or is that um

00:24:39.000 no that should be um big pots of of rain sort of stuff food products yeah

00:24:47.400 it's like again for anyone who doesn't know britain has something like 185 billion tons of coal on it

00:24:53.400 yes and and fracking resources and we got the north sea yeah yeah so we we are actually a very

00:24:58.840 energy rich country but we choose to be almost 20 percent dependent on other people 9.6 percent

00:25:04.600 nuclear i mean that we why not just do what france does just entire country nuclear it's not like we

00:25:09.000 don't have safe sources of nuclear as well canada and australia have loads of uranium take this just

00:25:13.320 take a look at that nuclear power plants oh yeah so spain actually has seven um of course which had to

00:25:18.920 come offline because of the frequency collapse france has 56 ones being renewed or something like

00:25:24.120 that we've got nine and we're building two germany recently decommissioned their last ones yeah they're

00:25:28.920 down to three now i know i think russia has 37 no i think i think germany turned them off a few months

00:25:33.480 ago uh yeah i don't have a date on this so that's possible yeah that might be good because i was just

00:25:38.600 like what are you doing and the germans like ah we will go back to coal yeah it's like

00:25:42.440 what are you doing idiots what you what you have to remember is that there can't be prosperity

00:25:47.160 without cheap food and cheap energy exactly there's there's no prosperity for anyone there's

00:25:52.920 no industry there's no manufacturing there's no economic success of any sort without cheap food

00:25:59.000 and cheap energy and this country can very easily feed itself and others and provide power for itself

00:26:06.360 and others but there are political choices that are being made that go completely against that

00:26:13.400 because of strange ideological reasons that are best explained as a form of cult having taken over

00:26:21.800 uh the decision makers minds completely true can we get back to that map sorry just a second

00:26:26.360 i just it blows my mind how france is the one country in europe that basically escaped the cult on this

00:26:32.760 and i think it comes back to sort of like the the sort of futurist mindset of the french revolution

00:26:37.640 they're like we're going to build like the you know the the beautiful futuristic uh you know high

00:26:42.920 tech country of the of tomorrow and the french took it seriously i mean don't go wrong they've done

00:26:47.240 a lot of things wrong but like on this they're so obviously correct and it's driving me crazy

00:26:53.160 that we're we're genuinely worried about our power supplies but we it was it was also a geopolitical

00:26:57.800 choice for the french yeah they wanted to make sure that they weren't reliant on anybody

00:27:01.880 be it the gulf and the possibility of an energy embargo from the gulf be it uh the russians be

00:27:08.680 it the americans this is why the french have a fully independent military supply chain they make

00:27:14.600 sure that their food production um is fully self-sufficient and they have energy self-sufficiency

00:27:21.400 this is what allows you to actually be a serious geopolitical player yes it is um in many respects

00:27:26.520 france is is is is already at the position that trump is trying to take the us to yes the us has

00:27:33.240 all of the ingredients to be there just chosen it's chosen not to but in many ways it's chosen not to

00:27:37.880 so we could do exactly the same thing we could just build like i i looked it up the other day something

00:27:43.640 it's only something like a dozen power plants to power every house in britain you know it's like okay

00:27:48.440 so let's build like you know 15 or something make sure we've got a lot of excess a lot of slack in

00:27:52.600 the system whatever it is and it costs them like 130 billion okay that's a lot of money you only need

00:27:57.880 to spend that once and then you've got whatever the maintenance as opposed to destroying the

00:28:01.560 infrastructure that you already have to replace it with less reliable infrastructure which you're

00:28:05.560 going to have to replace anyway and we're yeah we're spending all that money on the renewable

00:28:09.080 boondoggle so so that was the one thing that i didn't come to that i think i should throw in there

00:28:13.240 if you were going to design this system from scratch for renewables you would design the system

00:28:17.480 to be dc rather than ac right so what does that involve every fridge freezer every oven every

00:28:25.800 washing machine every tv every computer every air can all of it you need to throw it all out and buy new

00:28:31.560 appliances so either green new deal dan yep we carry on with this green revolution and we have to

00:28:40.360 either massively increase the cost if you if you're going to do renewables you need 100 redundancy

00:28:45.880 you're going to need massive amounts of batteries and batteries don't need to be

00:28:49.320 like physical batteries they can be they can be pulleys and mine shafts you winch them up when you've

00:28:53.480 got excess power and you let them go down or you can have a two-stage lake and gravity pump there's a

00:28:58.040 whole but you need massive redundancy if you're going to do the renewable thing and you don't have

00:29:03.320 the grid inertia so you've got a fragile grid that can collapse at any time or you need to build huge

00:29:09.480 spinning flywheels in order to give you back the inertia that you've just taken away so you need

00:29:14.920 to have a massively over-engineered system or you need to throw away every appliance in your

00:29:19.320 country and start again i'd rather build nuclear maybe a giant treadmill around london and all run

00:29:24.840 on and sort of try to make that actually have something like that they've they've got roads

00:29:29.240 where there's a little indent uh rating so when you step on it generates a very tiny amount of power

00:29:34.120 right and uh okay like they've we ought to put those in our immigration centers i guess we're gonna

00:29:38.520 power the country i guess we've got no choice i'll just mention that um you you've covered this in your

00:29:43.160 blog as well um um not as not in as much detail as as we have now but yes yes uh but but that is

00:29:49.480 there and available i don't think we've got time to get into that now because uh we've got to hear

00:29:52.600 about um trump yeah uh so that was um that was very interesting i didn't know any of that yeah it's

00:29:59.160 good isn't it yeah definitely um matt says uh how will mainland europe handle war mobilization under net

00:30:05.000 zero policies well that's the question actually yes uh do you know what's really interesting you

00:30:11.080 can have a flintstone stack yes i think they're gonna have to because the thing is though if you

00:30:15.160 if you look at what europe is actually doing they they are acting as if we're living in the star trek

00:30:20.600 future already yes so right we've got one world government we've got the united federation of

00:30:24.120 planets and so everything there's the you know it's there's no possibility of war on earth and

00:30:28.440 therefore we'll plan for all of this sort of stuff it's like yeah but that's not the world we're living

00:30:31.640 in no what is wrong with you and he says that how much coal will have to buy from japan well a lot

00:30:36.680 apparently because for some reason we're refusing to sell anyone any coal i don't know what's wrong

00:30:40.920 with us um but but anyway yeah it's preposterous absolutely preposterous anyway so we have just

00:30:48.360 passed donald trump's first hundred days and there have been lots of write-ups about this and i could

00:30:53.720 have chosen one of many but politico had a surprisingly positive write-up um now you can see from the the

00:31:01.400 title there like well he's failed to immediately end the war in ukraine or bring down food prices

00:31:05.320 or conduct mass deportations that's a bit of a sort of maybe um but overall when they posted

00:31:11.320 this on twitter they were like he's done he's done most of what he said he was going to do actually

00:31:15.560 and it's only been 100 days uh and so i i have my criticisms of what trump has done which we'll come

00:31:20.920 to at the end but generally it's been pretty good so uh they say i'll just read read a bit of this uh

00:31:26.920 just going in uh during his comeback campaign trump made sweeping promises centered on america

00:31:31.960 first policy a crackdown on immigration over all of the federal government a drop in grocery prices

00:31:36.040 global tariffs the end of wars and the elimination of dei programs among others in many cases trump has

00:31:41.240 kept the promises he ran on but to do so he has tested the balance of power pushing up against

00:31:45.320 congress the courts and other guardrails doing so could hamper his ability to make the changes

00:31:49.640 permanent or meaningfully enact them at all so that's interesting they have to concede

00:31:54.680 yeah he's actually doing what you voted for and so a lot of people who support maga are like yeah

00:31:59.000 i vote for this whenever something happens and the liberal media is outraged like yeah but this

00:32:03.160 is what i wanted and so yes i get to enviously look over america and say i'm glad you're getting

00:32:08.200 what you wanted uh i just ran the numbers 100 days is seven percent of his term yeah it's meaningful

00:32:14.440 but yeah yeah i mean he's well it's it indicates what the rest of his term is going to be like

00:32:20.520 yes if he if he has a family that's good yeah i know he's had quite productive so they this is a

00:32:25.160 very long answer i'm just going to pull out the so you've got um some that are broken you've got

00:32:29.560 some that are to be determined uh because they are long-term things but i'll just read out the

00:32:34.680 ones that he's kept according to them it's quite a lot um blanket tariff uh of up to 20 on imported

00:32:40.520 goods at least 60 tariff on chinese goods yes he has done that uh whether it's a good idea or not

00:32:45.160 there's a different question uh ban transgender athletes from participating in women and girls

00:32:49.400 sports and the federal government's crackdown on cryptocurrency firms and investors pardon people

00:32:54.200 convicted for their participation in the january 6th riot interesting how they describe it as a riot

00:32:59.720 all of a sudden yes and and actually if he came in nothing more than just pardon the jan sixes i

00:33:05.720 probably would have been fairly happy with that but no it's just a riot now it's not an insurrection

00:33:10.760 according to again politico um yeah instruct federal federal agencies to cease the promotion

00:33:16.440 of sex or gender transition at any age uh which he's done however two federal judges have blocked

00:33:21.560 the order and uh there's currently a legal battle going on another two in jail so

00:33:28.040 just as a quick aside i saw so many people they're locking up judges now and i managed to you know

00:33:32.840 ratio some guy by saying today you learned that judges can commit crimes uh yes judges can go to jail

00:33:38.920 if they do something wrong i mean this is crazy they've spent the last four years trying to put

00:33:43.080 trump in jail so yeah exactly yeah absolutely i mean they put bannon in jail they put was a stone in

00:33:47.720 jail yeah like sorry if your judges make break laws they go to jail too but anyway moving on so

00:33:53.800 rehire service members who are discharged due to their refusal to take the code vaccine again these

00:33:57.640 are things that trump has actually done uh eliminate di from the military and launch a task force to remove

00:34:04.440 woke generals which is great you know again if you're an american this is all stuff that it's so

00:34:11.080 easy for them to sort of knock down you know sorry you go and do that you go and do that you go and do

00:34:14.760 that and politico's saying well yeah he's done a bunch of all this uh restore the name of fort bragg

00:34:19.800 which i didn't know had been renamed but uh probably less important uh sign the executive order to end

00:34:24.920 birthright citizenship for children of undocumented immigrants born in the us now he did that did he yeah

00:34:30.120 yeah this is a particularly fascinating thing for people from the old world right because in the

00:34:34.680 old world it's almost all blood blood you get your citizenship by your parents so even if i was born

00:34:39.960 in like china or something i'd be a british citizen because my parents british citizens uh and vice versa

00:34:44.920 so like the new world's obsession with birthright citizenship is a weird thing it is it's very much

00:34:51.640 an americanization and an example of how uh the entire world is a province of the american empire at least

00:34:59.240 intellectually yes completely america the american ideology is essentially one world war uh the cold

00:35:05.160 war yes after the collapse of soviet ideology and that's all we've had left to stew in unfortunately

00:35:10.920 um so anyway they they agree that he has sealed the border and stopped the invasion and the border

00:35:16.200 crossing encounters bear that out uh he's declared a national emergency and used the military for mass

00:35:21.080 deportations and he has deported something like 140 000 now a lot of people like well that's not nearly

00:35:25.720 enough uh but the biden administration was claiming that they were deporting twice as many but they

00:35:30.840 were counting border turnaways yeah in in those numbers uh which doubled the numbers if you count it

00:35:36.680 like that his numbers are through the roof then exactly because it literally millions came in under

00:35:42.200 biden so uh trump has he has secured the border so yeah and even politico concede this um he's

00:35:49.160 declared a national emergency to approve new drilling pipelines refineries power plants and reactors

00:35:53.960 because of course biden uh shut all this down by executive order uh so he has done that and they

00:35:59.080 concede uh he has terminate they've got a little quote from him here quote to terminate these green

00:36:04.120 new deal atrocities on day one which he's done so they're not going to have the kind of power out

00:36:08.920 which spain had i imagine uh again just except in california well that's their problem uh he's upended

00:36:16.600 the federal civil service which is great uh he's repealed biden's artificial intelligence

00:36:22.040 executive order on day one which he did which shifts the executive branch's focus from protecting

00:36:27.560 safety and civil rights to ensuring american market dominance in air which in such an emergent

00:36:33.720 field is probably not the time to be conservative about it no yes you've got to get ahead especially

00:36:39.160 since the chinese are demonstrating with deep seek what they can do exactly uh they can't talk about

00:36:44.120 tianamon square in deep sleep so there is yes it's like uh yeah but uh yeah and so uh the majority

00:36:51.320 of things they've got on the list are to be determined um so i'm just going to leave them

00:36:56.760 out so these in this first hundred days what he has done and he's got the three that he has broken

00:37:02.840 so he hasn't ended the war in ukraine in 24 hours to be fair that was a bit of an over

00:37:06.680 over promise anyway yep um but it's not like he's not trying to end the war in ukraine

00:37:10.760 yeah of course it's bits the way i look at it is it's spiritually over yeah everybody knows that

00:37:16.280 zelinski um doesn't have you know the u.s does not have his back anymore no and he's not retaking

00:37:21.800 the territory that he's lost to russia no it's not uh implement mass deportations of undocumented

00:37:27.000 immigrants on day one i i don't know i think he looks like he's doing that i mean 140 000 would

00:37:33.560 average to maybe 50k a month or something like that that's quite a lot under 50k a month that's a

00:37:38.120 significant number but given the numbers of people that have entered it's it's a problem

00:37:43.000 um but it sort of confirms the point that the border needed to be closed to sort of stop these

00:37:48.520 numbers rising and until complete um overwhelming of the of the native population um it's there's

00:37:58.600 the what you find what i find with the media is that they're completely

00:38:01.720 firm in their belief that they're absolutely neutral and anybody who looks at them can say

00:38:09.080 guys please you're not uh and if you say that to them you are attacking the fourth estate and

00:38:16.520 undermining democracy so there's it's impressive that politico was able to put together something

00:38:23.000 somewhat coherent and somewhat fair um and it shows that actually what's been delivered is

00:38:30.600 probably more than what they're willing to admit yeah and no no that that was the reason that i used

00:38:35.400 that yeah you know this is quite comprehensive and surprisingly charitable yeah so it was very

00:38:42.840 interesting but so and the the final one is that he said he was going to immediately bring prices down

00:38:47.720 starting on day one and of course that's actually not really in the president's control

00:38:50.840 uh all he can do is liberal to be fair he's brought down energy prices yes and the he was referring to

00:38:57.560 grocery prices but but one follows from the other and there's a lag um and there's a lag and the other

00:39:03.880 part is that if he does make a deal with the russians and with the iranians a lot of the geopolitical

00:39:08.920 premium on the price of oil goes down and so you end up with a more stable lower oil price there's

00:39:16.040 a discussion over whether or not this is good for american shale or not that's a separate conversation

00:39:19.800 but it does mean that you know cheap energy key to prosperity and and we just recorded a brokonomics

00:39:27.000 going out next tuesday where we discussed the iranian and russian strategy yeah so viewers can

00:39:31.720 look forward to that next week but no you're absolutely correct i mean it's slightly unfair to

00:39:35.800 say that he'd say bring prices down on day one i mean he's begun the process of bringing prices yes

00:39:40.840 but again it's not even in direct control it's it's you know three or four steps down the line um

00:39:45.560 so anyway that so these i i'm genuinely quite impressed with what trump has done so far and

00:39:50.600 the issue is that a lot of these things are real tangible goods yes uh and they are being overshadowed

00:39:56.840 by trump's bluster and the things that he has said uh so i wanted to make sure that we we had a fair

00:40:03.720 analysis of what he did yeah um the the washington uh times uh has got a really really comprehensive

00:40:10.520 um article about uh trump and how he shut the border and tom homan uh they oh i love that guy

00:40:18.120 i love him yeah he's so good he's just absolutely merciless he can be deported together yeah exactly

00:40:25.080 but he he makes a good point never again does this country have to have a debate about this

00:40:29.240 it was simple because they didn't use any they didn't need new legislation they didn't need to

00:40:34.920 change anything structurally about the system it was just willpower it was just enforcing the laws that

00:40:39.320 that were already it's all political will all the way down it's all political well and so if if ever

00:40:43.800 the border is left open like that in future this has been a concrete proof that it's the will of the

00:40:49.560 administration and not anything to do with uh you know something extraneous and and here in britain

00:40:55.400 it's the will of keir starmer to keep the boats coming in this is this is not a subject of debate it

00:41:00.280 can be shut down it can be stopped uh we still have a navy it's self-evident we could absolutely do this

00:41:06.440 yeah um but uh anyway so the the tariffs so the tariffs this has been uh one thing that's got

00:41:11.960 everyone spooked uh and trump honestly i think went about this in the the wrong way and did all of this

00:41:19.400 back to front uh because he began by saying in fact he he began by and in my opinion uh delivering

00:41:26.200 canada to the globalists with his talk of making the 50 he was a little bit uncautious on his rhetoric

00:41:31.480 towards canada i'll give you that on the tariff thing i would push back for 20 30 years now they've

00:41:37.560 been trying to use a scalpel on on on the trade policy and it has failed consistently so you have

00:41:44.840 you had he had to bring a hammer to this discussion i i understand but the the thing i think he should

00:41:50.280 have done is spent the first month or two buttering up his allies uh to be fair yeah he could have done

00:41:57.880 that he should have been promising them you know we're going to help together you know america is

00:42:02.600 going to work with pierre polivert or you know marina penn or whoever to make canada france germany

00:42:08.280 wherever great again uh we're going to have brilliant networks of communications and trade and

00:42:14.520 technological exchanges whatever it is he's going to promise whatever they want get them all on the

00:42:19.400 hook and make sure they're all like sign a bunch of deals and then after they've signed all the

00:42:24.760 deals you say right china guess how high your tariffs going because then everyone's kind of

00:42:30.840 already bought into what you're doing and they have possibly i'm a little bit cautious because

00:42:35.640 administrations like i say 20 30 years have been trying an approach of some variation of that

00:42:42.120 and they've never got anywhere they've generally given away the goodies and then find that nothing

00:42:46.680 comes back so a lot of the reason we're having a problem with china because they were brought into the

00:42:51.080 world uh world trade organization the wto um and it was assumed that you know you you you start with

00:42:57.720 your sort of bridge building efforts and then you kind of get everything else that comes with it and

00:43:01.480 a particular exacerbating factor with the chinese relationship is they were brought in as a developing

00:43:06.120 nation status which basically allows them to do a whole bunch of things which we now think of as

00:43:11.720 unfair trade practices so they can do tariffs but you know the us hadn't been able and i'm not saying

00:43:16.680 don't do the tariffs what i'm saying is essentially um message it better yeah carrot first then stick

00:43:23.720 rather than stick first then carrot so even though i do admire his use of the hammer i don't want to

00:43:29.480 make everything hammers no and but also you you need to show some love before you bring out the hammer let

00:43:35.720 me let me let me suggest a counterfactual just for consideration um if trump had said nice things

00:43:43.960 things the entirety of european media the bbc etc etc would have spun it in a particular way

00:43:52.680 to say he's selling us chlorinated chicken and he's trying to destroy our trade and this isn't

00:43:58.920 this isn't going to be to work so there's there's an element of the europeans have not shown any good

00:44:06.840 will towards their own people first and towards the americans that would have justified a nicer

00:44:13.160 approach so perhaps there's a something to think about in the next six months where essentially

00:44:20.200 the backing of ukraine stops completely the russians improve their position significantly

00:44:27.080 the baltics are under threat and then the europeans have to come back running with their

00:44:31.480 tails between their legs absolutely i'm not saying there can't be a 4d chess move yes but i and i'm not

00:44:37.000 sure if it is 4d chess or if it is just a sort of uh you know uh this is how this train is going to go

00:44:43.080 regardless but i'm also i accept what you're saying and it's a fair point i'm just not convinced that the

00:44:52.840 ideologues uh in charge of europe would have done it better anything but you are right to say

00:44:58.760 that messaging it better to the to european people and working on softening up the european

00:45:07.480 publics would have been a smarter 4d chess move rather than hammers all the way down i mean i don't

00:45:15.160 think that jd vance meant to make european politicians literally cry i don't think that to be

00:45:21.000 fair european politicians should not be such bloody wuss i agree i don't know i totally agree yeah right

00:45:26.920 but that's you not taking them as they are and taking them as they ought to be yeah and the thing

00:45:31.800 is i think that the the trump administration is kind of they've put a bit of a step wrong in that

00:45:37.240 thinking that they're going to share american moral priors when in fact they don't they're

00:45:41.960 a bunch of blubbing girls yeah and this is why i like conan the barbarian over mark rubio for

00:45:48.760 well i i agree but the problem is trump has had to step down uh his tariffs right so trump has uh

00:45:56.280 had to release the grip on a bunch of components that u.s car makers use for example yeah so this

00:46:02.840 but then this instead of looking like strength it looks like weakness yes and much of diplomacy is

00:46:09.320 i'm sure you're gonna be perception yeah it's perception absolutely 100 and so power is what

00:46:14.760 people perceive you to have 90 of it and then the other 10 is what you can actually do it's a tricky

00:46:20.520 one because what he's got to do is he's got to send the message to he's basically got to explain to

00:46:24.520 people you don't want to be basing your supply chain on china so he needs to send a very clear

00:46:29.400 message out for that but at the same time if you just bring it in in one fell swoop then you are

00:46:34.600 going to disrupt supply chain so we need to send the message but also then have a whole bunch of

00:46:38.920 exemptions and tear them down here and stuff like that and at the same time he's also got to respond

00:46:43.720 to the chinese who increased things on him so he's got to he's got to play the strong man routine

00:46:48.680 and then they've got to dial it back between each other to something that's sensible yes and

00:46:52.680 not getting their backs up by telling them you're going to annex their countries or making them cry

00:46:57.560 in public is probably a good start to that because if i see a german politician crying i just want to

00:47:02.920 bully him more yeah i like it i'm not saying i don't enjoy it that when the ukraine war started

00:47:08.920 the head of the german army posts on his own social media saying that i never expected to ever see a

00:47:16.040 war in europe again and i thought hold on a second if you're the chief of staff of the freaking army

00:47:23.240 what are you doing yeah what does he spend his days doing do you think this is the peace corps do you

00:47:27.320 think this is some kind of ngo do you not understand what your job is so there's a there's a degree to

00:47:32.920 which european leaders are so far gone that we have no idea how to reason with them other than punch them

00:47:39.960 in the face and i agree and there's a there's a separate point that i would want to introduce

00:47:46.040 perhaps for your consideration put yourself in the in the shoes of the ceo of a car company

00:47:53.720 if you know that this tariff war is happening and there is going to be this madness and if you know that

00:48:00.760 trump has the upper hand over europe and japan and korea in terms of defense

00:48:05.320 you are wiser investing in the united states because you think that over a long enough time

00:48:12.680 period the americans will win the trade war and impose their will and this is the biggest

00:48:18.200 and richest market so you might as well base yourself there so the uncertainty benefits trump

00:48:25.800 not necessarily out of 40 chess but out of the sheer size of the gorilla that is the american economy

00:48:32.280 yes the the the only thing that springs to mind on that is that during the brexit negotiations

00:48:38.440 i remember i think it was merkel went to the leaders of the german car manufacturers and said

00:48:42.520 look you're just going to have to take this on the chin yeah because this is going to massively

00:48:46.440 impact your business and they said okay for it's our patriotic duty take it on the chin which was

00:48:51.080 surprising frankly yes you think cynical multinational corporations but actually they all fell into line

00:48:57.080 and did exactly as they were told and didn't give britain an inch in these negotiations which they

00:49:01.960 could have done we you know they could have and and the fact that they're not screaming bloody

00:49:06.360 murder about russian energy and about green energy shows you that the entire establishment has been

00:49:15.080 intellectually captured spiritually captured by this woke dogma yes and when you're dealing with cultists

00:49:24.120 it's difficult to understand what the reasonable approach is

00:49:28.600 as in there's a reason why religion why organized religion doesn't tolerate cultists

00:49:35.080 and doesn't tolerate heretics because when they go down that route their capacity to reason gets eroded

00:49:41.720 so just a point on that i think that the issue was that uh trump and vance are kind of coming from a

00:49:48.680 very sort of classically liberal american perspective yes uh they could have framed things differently or at least

00:49:55.000 uh have vance do it after all of this had been kind of embedded into the consciousnesses

00:50:01.640 of people rather than go over and basically tell because i mean you you saw lots of posts lots of

00:50:06.200 articles written by them going oh the international order's over the sky has fallen it's all come to an

00:50:10.600 end and it's like well yes but really the trump administration kind of didn't want them to think that

00:50:16.920 they did need to send a clear message that there has been a regime change i mean i don't know if you'd agree with

00:50:21.400 this but i i think the days of soft power have ended in the in the days of hard power are resuming

00:50:26.760 yes i agree and there needs to be such a clear message to the world no the order has changed

00:50:31.960 and actually um the one of the few things i can say to keir starmer's credit is he he understood that

00:50:36.920 the mood music had changed immediately yes and he got it it's the european leaders it's the eu

00:50:42.680 leaders who are struggling with the fact that the mood music is now different i won't i won't belabor the

00:50:46.840 point but uh but the thing is even trump's tariffs are having an effect so apparently uh china's uh

00:50:52.920 factory activity is slipping according to reuters um again i won't go into any great detail but uh

00:50:58.920 but so again with things like tariffs it's easy to look at the the stock markets and go oh god look

00:51:05.320 at the panic uh but it happens it has a long-term effect there's an effect of time and this he probably

00:51:11.800 will start getting something of the result he's looking for well this is your point about the

00:51:15.320 uncertainty the uncertainty is a feature not a bug of this policy because if there is uncertainty it's

00:51:19.880 like okay i need certainty what's the most certain thing based in america yeah yeah beyond the gorilla's

00:51:27.560 good side exactly but uh but yeah so overall uh trump hasn't done terribly uh he does seem to have

00:51:34.360 tried to do what people voted for him to do and it's an auspicious 100 days but uh as uh i'm very

00:51:41.400 happy with it first yeah yeah me too i'm quite i'm quite happy with it with as nori in the chat

00:51:45.320 points out though uh the first 100 days only reflects the rest of his term if they don't

00:51:49.080 lose the mib terms yeah but that's november 2026 i mean yeah i mean yeah but that sort of brings us up

00:51:54.520 to to the argument about tariffs and the need of a blunt instrument the problem that the american

00:51:59.160 political system has is that it must vote every two years and your ability to execute changes

00:52:04.760 fundamentally every two years therefore there is an argument to be made that you should maximize the

00:52:11.560 pain economically of whatever it is that you're going to do in the earliest period possible so that

00:52:18.440 by the time you hit that midterm timeline you have made some gains and you've recovered to some extent

00:52:26.440 so that you can continue with the rest of your agenda this system

00:52:30.680 have being at risk of shifting strategies completely every two years messes up the ability

00:52:38.600 to plan and execute properly and it destroys the capacity for finesse and it leaves a strategic

00:52:45.640 disadvantage to china and russia who can plan decades exactly so if you're engaged in this kind of great

00:52:52.680 power competition you can't have these constant shifts in direction but it's a feature of the system

00:52:59.080 no i agree uh matt makes some good points as well trump uh approaching allies and addressing trade

00:53:05.240 policies in the first administration uh made that the carrot which is actually a good point

00:53:10.520 uh and he says during the biden administration china was laundering goods through third countries

00:53:15.080 to bypass u.s tariffs that's true and i wasn't in any way against him putting tariffs on vietnam or

00:53:19.640 wherever else he put them because uh yeah of course you've got to do that um but anyway right let's uh

00:53:24.840 let's move on so the upcoming india pakistan war um what do we make of this samson if you want to

00:53:32.760 bring up the links um we oh there we go we've got we've got the links here right excellent so uh we we

00:53:37.560 have with us today a geopolitical analyst so um what i've got here is i've got your blog um looking at the

00:53:45.960 war risks um i've also got a map because actually a lot of this can be basically started from from just

00:53:53.160 understanding the terrain especially the water issue um and we've also thrown in a video of indians

00:53:58.360 and pakistanis dancing at each other um along the borderline um if we if we run out of things to talk

00:54:04.280 about so um yeah where do you want to start what's the issue which we dig into the map yeah just the

00:54:11.240 water issue let's start with the water let's start with the water because this is what defines everything

00:54:14.760 else yeah um you had the partition of india pakistan along religious lines um and there was a fight

00:54:24.520 over who controls kashmir because most of the water that flows into both countries starts in kashmir

00:54:33.160 so so let me let me get this right so basically we've got this is the uh tibet uh plateau very high

00:54:39.000 region four or five thousand feet up lots of glacial uh water there water evaporates from the

00:54:45.160 indian ocean and the indian land basically travels north hits the hits the high terrain yes comes down

00:54:51.240 and then it basically flows back and the situation got is pakistan here uh 92 of their water is going to

00:54:59.080 come through um indian territory on its way to pakistan exactly exactly as i understand it there was uh

00:55:06.520 the six tributaries in kashmir yes uh three were annexed to pakistan three to india in a treaty

00:55:13.800 in like 1960 or something there's a water sharing treaty the industry the indus river water treaty

00:55:19.640 which divides the water between the two sides and one of the reactions of india to the terrorist

00:55:25.560 attack that happened on 22 april was that they suspended uh that treaty they can't instantly shut

00:55:33.640 down the water it requires building big chunks of infrastructure from canals to dam to power stations

00:55:39.320 to what have you um but they're saying that this is something that they're willing to consider

00:55:44.360 now for pakistan that's the indus valley the the bit in green that you see in pakistan

00:55:50.360 and 40 percent of pakistani labor and 20 percent of pakistani gdp comes from this agricultural output

00:55:59.960 that mainly comes from the indus river and indus is is the reason india is named india so it's a bit

00:56:06.200 unfair that the indus river is actually in the hands of india's mortal enemy pakistan i think it's worth

00:56:12.760 pointing out that the indus river is an ancient and famous river uh it's kind of like the nile exactly

00:56:19.800 um i mean you can see in fact the desert on either side yeah uh and it's very much the same sort of

00:56:25.720 situation is in egypt uh egypt i guess is lucky to have its uh sources thousands of miles away

00:56:32.680 they're having a problem with it with ethiopia over there over their water sources but that's

00:56:36.360 uh but this is an existential risk to pakistan if that is shut off yes if if that water begins to be

00:56:42.200 diverted it becomes quickly an existential issue um my understanding with that treaty is that it's

00:56:48.120 something like a third of the water goes to india and two-thirds goes to pakistan a lot of

00:56:53.400 that water naturally wants to flow into that valley anyway yep and my understanding is that india is

00:56:59.320 currently only using about 90 of its share because in order to get up to 100 of its third it basically

00:57:06.280 needs to build out dams but as you can imagine this region is quite mountainous and they haven't

00:57:12.200 it's complicated engineering it's very complicated engineering it's not clear that the indians themselves

00:57:17.160 can do it and build this kind of infrastructure um they are saying that they that they can do it but

00:57:24.760 this is pretty much where the front line is and if you look at cities like islamabad and lahore they are

00:57:30.760 right next to the border so the capital of pakistan is very close to kashmir and lahore is in punjab or

00:57:40.920 next to the indian side of punjab which means that two of pakistan's three most important cities the

00:57:46.760 third being karachi are ridiculously vulnerable from a military perspective so there is this what is the

00:57:54.360 terrain like to cross that border so for kashmir this is a ridiculously mountainous terrain the three

00:58:01.560 wars that they fought in um uh 48 65 and 71 led to this border and the 65 and 71 war really didn't lead

00:58:13.320 to major changes on the border because of the nature of the terrain it's very difficult to advance and move

00:58:19.560 in mountains so does the border look like that because that's where the front line was when they

00:58:25.000 stopped fighting or has in in ramo and kashmir it looks like that because that's where the ceasefire

00:58:31.480 that's where they were when the ceasefire happened okay and so they sort of froze that into the line

00:58:36.520 of control and that line of control is the de facto border with both of them saying that this is the

00:58:44.040 border but we don't relinquish our claims in any way and we're going to try to arbitrate this in another

00:58:49.160 way so but you just you can see why kashmir is such a disputed region the water comes in the mountains

00:58:56.120 it flows through there yes it's existential so the control of kashmir absolutely is crucial for both

00:59:01.880 sides yes even more so for pakistan and they're not the ones who are in control of it so is this a

00:59:08.680 natural border of some sort no no no this is the result of ethnic cleansing and this is where it sort

00:59:14.280 of ended up yeah but what i mean is is is there any kind of um like like between ukraine and russia

00:59:21.720 there's no natural frontier right yeah so is there a natural frontier at all here there are rivers

00:59:25.960 but it's not exactly a natural frontier so it's relatively easy to it's well it's on this flatland

00:59:31.800 for lahore specifically the pakistanis are extremely vulnerable right and you have to remember india

00:59:37.320 has 250 million muslims pakistan hardly has any hindus they allow sheikhs to enter why why do they

00:59:44.280 have hardly any hindus uh because islam tends to be a lot less tolerant yes than any of the others um

00:59:54.280 so the indians have their their muslim population don't get me wrong they both ethnically cleansed

00:59:58.920 each other or religiously cleansed each other um there was absolutely no mercy there from either side

01:00:04.520 but the indians did still end up with a massive muslim population the pakistanis did not

01:00:09.080 um and you know how they treat the christians in pakistan and so on islam tends to be militant and

01:00:16.680 severe when it has the upper hand uh pakistan is in the ultimate caliph it wasn't exactly like that

01:00:22.840 they were they had big christian communities big jewish communities i think it's worth pointing out

01:00:27.880 that pakistan is basically an islamist state as well yes it's like people think that the all the arabs are

01:00:35.000 muslims and therefore they must have a very overtly muslim consciousness when they're governing but

01:00:40.520 actually the arabs seem to be a lot more moderate with their application of islam whereas the pakistanis

01:00:46.360 whenever you see the the any state organ talking about islam they talk about it as if they're just

01:00:51.720 fresh converts it's kind of crazy yeah i mean even in the gulf the which is the place where islamic

01:00:59.960 law is most overtly applied uh at least in theory with the exception of places like the uae um the

01:01:07.080 pakistanis are seen as ridiculous extremists yes and for pakistan imagine the saudis being like yeah

01:01:14.280 those pakistanis are crazy so there are funny stories there when pakistanis from the united kingdom

01:01:19.640 go on pilgrimage to saudi arabia sometimes they'll try to do things like pray in a public space that

01:01:25.800 isn't a mosque and they'll suddenly find the saudi police beating them

01:01:31.800 whereas we've got so much to learn whereas here if it happens in say france or in britain

01:01:39.160 sort of everybody backs a show force yeah yeah so the saudis don't tolerate the kind of disruptiveness

01:01:47.000 that comes with european islam and european islam as the uae has been warning has become much more

01:01:54.440 extreme than um islam in the middle east in in a lot of places now mind you when pew surveys did a

01:02:02.520 survey on what do muslims believe in the middle east and so on and they only did it once because

01:02:07.960 the results of that survey in 2013 were pretty catastrophic uh 67 of palestinians 60 something

01:02:15.800 percent of egyptians and in pakistan and afghanistan 90 percent and 90 something percent supporting

01:02:23.720 sharia law it was 99 it was really high 90 it was evident that we were incompatible yeah yes there's

01:02:30.280 there's a conflict but to your point about the borders i'm not seeing anything on here that suggests

01:02:34.200 that these borders could not change no and this is the biggest fear of the pakistani state yeah this is

01:02:40.440 this is the biggest fear of the pakistani state that basically india because it has a much bigger

01:02:46.680 population and a bigger economy and spends a lot more on its military could one day come and invade

01:02:53.080 and so the pakistani doctrine is if the indians capture enough territory in pakistan we the pakistanis

01:03:02.520 will nuke our own territory with tactical weapons to destroy the indian army can i recommend that they

01:03:09.560 make an immediate push to lahore i wouldn't cheer nuclear war no well i suppose um and the and the

01:03:17.640 indian position is that if you use tactical nukes against indian forces even in pakistani territory

01:03:23.960 we will use strategic nukes against your cities okay and the pakistanis also have strategic nukes so i i

01:03:30.920 want to raise the point on that sorry because i the last i i looked this up the other day so when it

01:03:36.440 first all flared up i was like okay what's going on and uh i realized i found out that the pakistanis

01:03:41.080 haven't had a missile test or a nuclear test since 1998 right so i'm i'm mildly skeptical of their

01:03:48.360 technical ability in this regard yeah i mean they have chinese support for their uh for their military

01:03:55.480 the nukes we've heard back in the day that they're under american control and american supervision

01:04:01.800 uh and that's the only way that sort of it's it's tolerable but um once you've figured out the

01:04:09.800 process for building a strategic weapon building a tactical weapon is not that hard sure but my my

01:04:15.400 question is if they haven't in over a generation even tested these things yes i mean like didn't the

01:04:21.640 the last trident test fail yes and so and that's britain first world country best universities in the

01:04:27.560 world pakistan not first world country but possibly not the best universities in the world institution

01:04:34.600 in the pakistani state is the pakistani military uh the judiciary to a lesser extent and then there's

01:04:40.600 chaos so if anybody's going to do things well in pakistan is going to be the pakistani military

01:04:47.320 is there any indication that um things could happen imminently yes so pakistan this morning the

01:04:55.080 information minister of pakistan this morning said that their intelligence is that the indians are

01:05:01.160 going to conduct some kind of strike against pakistan in the next 24 to 36 hours this was around eight

01:05:08.440 hours ago now um so so that that 24 hours is quick ticking down it's sticking down quite quickly yeah

01:05:16.040 and so and in 2019 when there was a terrorist incident targeting the the indians also backed by pakistan or

01:05:24.360 allegedly backed by pakistan pick your side um the indians did conduct an airstrike they say it was

01:05:32.120 against the training cap the pakistanis and some um a satellite imagery analysis says it was against a

01:05:39.080 hill this resulted in a pakistani airstrike and then a dogfight and the indians lost one of their jets

01:05:45.000 and one of the pilots okay so this this is a lively border yes i understand over the last year there's been

01:05:51.080 1 500 um ceasefire breakdowns um there are always incidents but there's a difference between

01:06:00.680 shooting randomly across the border and nobody gets hurt and between using jets to bomb camps yes

01:06:07.880 that that's a big one so the pakistani defense minister said he thinks the indians are going to do

01:06:12.680 something the information for 48 hours um have the indians said anything no no they haven't confirmed

01:06:18.760 it or judious silence they've been making pretty blood-curdling threats about what they will do

01:06:27.160 and to the people who who are responsible and how they will chase them to the ends of the earth and blah

01:06:32.440 blah blah blah um a lot of it the the way that politics works in these two

01:06:39.480 somewhat democratic countries is that you have to keep the population riled up

01:06:46.840 because you're not delivering enough on a lot of domestic things

01:06:50.120 and so when a foreign opportunity comes up you have to do it so they have excess manpower

01:06:56.840 and um they both think that they have the upper hand militarily uh

01:07:03.080 i guess don't think that it's me they've been buying a lot of uh modern equipment and getting

01:07:11.000 a lot of stuff from the chinese yeah and again the pakistani military with a lot of these countries

01:07:17.000 especially with these uh muslim countries like egypt and pakistan and turkey before um before erdogan

01:07:23.400 the military is the only point of national pride and so you must convince the public that the military

01:07:29.720 is unassailable and that it is competent and capable and therefore entitled to play

01:07:35.480 the role that it does play in politics and economics so my my only i mean i i no doubt they

01:07:42.040 think that but the militaries are terrible both of them yes yes i mean muslim militaries generally right

01:07:50.680 the jihadi movements tend to perform better than the muslim militaries

01:07:54.120 yes and now turkey is changing that yeah and now turkey is changing that to sort of

01:08:00.520 make its army more ideological and therefore more committed oh brilliant uh

01:08:06.440 what a great tone of affairs people fight for god and country i agree this is why when the europeans

01:08:11.480 say they're going to fight russia and they discard nationalism and discard religion you have

01:08:16.280 to sort of laugh at them a little bit sure you're not going to fight for the abstract doctrine of

01:08:19.000 human rights yeah exactly uh but well this i think is an interesting but just a quick thing like

01:08:23.720 because the many of the the the countries in the middle east are essentially fictional right yes

01:08:29.640 lines drawn on maps by colonial powers and so like you know iraq like syria so the border

01:08:36.600 is fictional yeah but something like basra being a political community sure yeah i'm not yeah i'm not

01:08:43.160 what would have been more sensible i think would be the european powers uh creating a series of small

01:08:47.960 ethnic states uh that would actually have functioned as sort of national that would have required

01:08:52.680 a level of bloodletting comparable to the 1923 turkey greece but the but the point is if your

01:08:58.520 country is essentially kind of fictional yes uh then you only have you you can't really fight for

01:09:03.400 nationalism it feels a bit artificial yes saddam's nationalism always felt very forced yeah forced

01:09:09.800 yeah which is why when he was in trouble he turned islamist yes uh but the the religion is authentic

01:09:14.680 yes you can see yes yes uh so yeah i can i mean you i would have thought in the case of turkey

01:09:19.640 actually they would have had a fairly authentic nationalism they do and the turkish military is

01:09:25.960 quite good but it's completely untested in battle since the first world war uh the turks haven't

01:09:33.480 fought anybody except cyprus which wasn't much of a challenge yeah yeah so interesting yeah let me

01:09:39.480 just double click on the motives because my macro view of this is look populations in both countries

01:09:45.240 are growing their water demands are growing in both countries there was a terrorist attack in

01:09:51.320 the cashmere region yes and india immediately responded by going to water i can't help but

01:09:57.640 think that india was like okay the first opportunity we get we're going to bring this water issue up i

01:10:02.200 think so terrorism attack happened and it's like right that's it that's our moment to pursue they

01:10:07.640 threatened to do it in 2019 but they didn't do it now they've said that they've abrogated the treaty and

01:10:12.920 and they're ignoring it and the pakistanis said that they're going to abrogate the treaty

01:10:18.520 that governs the line of control meaning that there is not a real ceasefire it's it's a it's a

01:10:24.760 ceasefire in practice but there's no legal reason for them to be in a ceasefire so they're edging

01:10:32.760 closer to this and the problem is that the level of national pride that they have

01:10:37.400 both countries is completely out of whack with their actual capabilities it's proportionate to

01:10:42.680 what they deserve to have as well that's a very true point as we get to the series but i should i

01:10:48.440 should samson do you want to play the video um with no sound in the background so we just we just got we

01:10:53.160 can see these guys in action so just while these chaps are dancing off against each other um so do we

01:10:59.240 think they're actually likely to go to a hot war i think that there is that the indians are honor bound to do

01:11:05.640 something and that it will last for a couple of days up to a week and that it will calm down

01:11:13.000 i think so what is something as in an airstrike in pakistan and then the pakistanis retaliate

01:11:18.920 some limited exchange that remains managed something to save face something to save face

01:11:24.280 because i think that they both know that if they got into a hot war an extended war it would immediately

01:11:29.880 become a china u.s proxy conflict with the west backing india and china backing pakistan solidifying

01:11:38.280 huntington's idea of an islamic chinese alliance against the west which is what we're seeing in a lot

01:11:44.840 of ways um and they don't necessarily want this kind of conflict but the problem is that for the indians

01:11:54.040 they don't have i mean this is a border region unless they get massively humiliated they're willing

01:11:59.720 to take risks uh in 2019 the loss of the jet really embarrassed them and made the pakistanis very

01:12:07.000 pleased with themselves if they had an airstrike from india into pakistan pakistan doing an airstrike

01:12:15.720 in india there was a dogfight between their jets and the indians lost a mig-21 and they just lost

01:12:22.680 one jet so it's a very acceptable loss etc but the pakistanis felt that they saved face and that

01:12:28.200 they came out on top in that exchange they got the bragging rights the problem is that so much of this

01:12:33.480 is based on back bragging rights and that islam's view of hinduism and i would argue a negative view

01:12:41.960 of hinduism is quite warranted um is so negative that it does warrant escalation exactly and the hindu's

01:12:52.520 view of islam and of the risks associated with pakistan is very extreme as well i mean you get

01:13:03.000 mobs that are led by members of the ruling party burning mosques and attacking muslims randomly you

01:13:08.840 get people killed because they are suspected of having slaughtered a cow and then in pakistan you

01:13:14.280 get something very similar and in pakistan you get allegedly similar somebody supposedly blasphemed

01:13:20.520 yes created a quran or something and and it goes completely insane so there's to making such

01:13:27.320 countries into democracies is itself quite dangerous because it leads to the kind of pandering and pride

01:13:33.880 that allows things to get out of control it would have been better to have a sultan yes it genuinely

01:13:41.640 would no no absolutely like some sort of rajasthani king we don't respect how culturally contingent

01:13:47.640 democracy is exactly and how necessary it is to sort of think carefully about who you want to have a

01:13:56.680 say but your base case is a limited border skirmish that's the most probable outcome what's the next

01:14:05.160 most probable outcome if they don't know how to manage it over two or three months we're in very

01:14:13.080 dangerous territory if it goes into two or three months and then ends with both sides being bloodied

01:14:18.440 but having some bragging rights that would be the next most likely outcome is there is there a

01:14:23.560 possibility of like a prolonged three-year um russia ukraine style ongoing conflict or maybe it's

01:14:30.200 sort of around iraq wars yes but i would suggest that that's the i hope that that's the least likely

01:14:36.040 outcome because i'm basing this on the two sets of political leaders thinking that they have too

01:14:41.480 much to lose from that the point that i make sometimes to my clients is that betting on

01:14:49.160 political leaders being rational in the way that we think is not always a safe bet especially when you're

01:14:56.440 in this region of the world especially when they are in this region of the world that is a fundamentally

01:15:00.520 irrational region yes so what is the rational thing for the pakistanis to do is it to make a show

01:15:07.800 and so it would be for the indians to do their strike and then the pakistanis do their strike and

01:15:12.520 then we listen to china and the united states and they both told us to de-escalate but what if china

01:15:18.040 says go for it we're going to support you all the way would they have a motivation to do that chinese

01:15:23.480 well they might if someone's just slapped gargantuan tariffs on them they they have

01:15:30.680 the two great powers other than the united states have an interest in escalating conflicts that draw

01:15:37.800 american resources because it means that they are less involved in their own near abroad so russia has

01:15:44.520 an interest in escalation in yemen or in iran up to a point because it means that the americans have to

01:15:50.600 focus there china has an interest in escalation in iran or in india pakistan because it means that

01:15:57.320 the americans have less resources to direct towards them but always up to a point as in mature players

01:16:04.760 in geopolitics understand that there are no geopolitical solutions that the geopolitics game is constantly

01:16:10.840 being played and it never ends but the us also has the defense industry that just likes continuous war

01:16:16.040 that's also true that's also true but i think that they have their hands full with china

01:16:22.440 and with ukraine and with the middle east i think there's got to be a a sense underpinning all of

01:16:29.880 this that i mean it could very quickly turn into millions dead right yes uh very very quickly and

01:16:36.520 probably quite easily yes so and does that actually benefit anyone um is the status quo better than that

01:16:43.720 eventuality is the question framing it in terms of better implies that the most rational course of

01:16:52.840 action will be pursued that's true yes it does and i know why i did it and i just don't agree with

01:16:58.120 that assumption i agree that's one of the reasons i became religious because you are correct on that

01:17:02.760 that's just not a correct assumption but they've got to have a kind of fear in the back of their minds

01:17:06.360 like oh we could lose a lot here yeah is it worth us just not doing it yeah i'm sure a lot of generals

01:17:12.120 are saying that but then you end up with these systems that are that are captured where doubt

01:17:16.760 is seen as disloyalty where caution is seen as cowardice and so when the mob mentality takes over

01:17:25.240 you have this risk of escalation so i'm not saying this is the most probable outcome i'm saying the

01:17:29.960 most probable outcome is that they'll keep it localized but i'm just very but it is definitely

01:17:35.400 the potential yes exactly exactly exactly i did look into the nuclear thing and while at first

01:17:42.600 hand it might seem slightly tempting um it's actually quite a bad thing um even a limited

01:17:47.960 nuclear exchange apparently could um blot out something like 10 to 15 percent of the sun's

01:17:53.880 you know rays filtering through to the earth does that mean that we end at zero

01:17:57.800 well does that mean the labor government doesn't need it means that crop yields significantly

01:18:01.800 no it's it's a disaster it's yeah this kind of nuclear war with we're not dealing with the

01:18:07.720 hiroshima nagasaki bombs yeah we're dealing well a limited strategic weapons limited exchange assumes

01:18:14.600 that it's only the low yield stuff that gets used and even that is enough to block out 15 of the sun

01:18:19.640 yeah limited exchange nuclear warfare not good yes yeah um right so um for time's sake i'm afraid we're

01:18:26.680 gonna have to wrap this up but on a on a scale of sort of one to ten what do you think the likelihood of

01:18:31.640 this going any further is uh to a limited exchange just a very small source a very managed exchange

01:18:39.880 i'd say seven or eight out of ten uh full out i would say one out of ten right okay well that's

01:18:45.640 that's put my mind at ease um right uh do we have a video comment samson and uh by the way lots of uh

01:18:52.360 comments are saying a big fan of uh you you coming on the show a big fan oh you're doing brokonomics

01:18:57.320 um thank you and uh really enjoying what you're doing which is great thank you let's go

01:19:07.000 good morning lettuce eaters unfortunately i missed the last zoom call again but i took my

01:19:11.800 monthly trip down to yakima to see my hiking friend going over the pass you've got to swing

01:19:16.520 by owens meats and clay ellum for some pepperoni and jerky my friend and i decided we were going to

01:19:21.720 do two hikes down in the columbia river gorge a little hazy but otherwise perfect weather and

01:19:26.760 the wildflowers were in full bloom both hikes had amazing views of the gorge mount hood on the

01:19:31.800 oregon side of the river and mount adams with the rural countryside i'll send part two of this trip

01:19:36.360 tomorrow our subscribers live in much nicer places than we do they do let's go to the next one

01:19:46.520 yay this morning on facebook a friend asked me to sign a petition outlawing catapults and their

01:19:53.960 ammunition bold presumably that also would include um sticks shaped like a y pieces of rubber and ball

01:20:03.480 bearings which would send us back into the stone age well not quite you know we'd be in horses and

01:20:09.960 carts wouldn't we um of course i signed this is oh this is i i just hate the government's approach to

01:20:20.360 any problem it's like right okay if we can just disarm them yeah it will stop killing each other it's

01:20:25.400 like dude we can do that with fists you know like we do rocks and sticks i mean come on it's people not

01:20:31.560 tools exactly exactly so obviously the problem anyway let's move on interestingly i have already

01:20:37.080 thought a lot about the gorilla murder question because this is actually a question was asked on

01:20:41.320 the super best friends podcast way back in the 2010 and it was funny the discussion they had because like

01:20:47.800 one of the ways they went about it was okay half of us are gonna have to feed the meat and the other

01:20:53.160 half will forge weapons from the bodies of our fallen comrades to stab him with another simple method

01:20:58.680 would be just to use our weight of numbers to hold the gorilla down and just throw the bodies of

01:21:04.520 our dead comrades on his face and just smother him to death with them yes that's my argument basically

01:21:11.800 you've got to wear the gorilla out first right so you just form a massive human ring around the

01:21:15.480 gorilla so if this doesn't make any any any sense we're debating can a hundred men beat one gorilla

01:21:21.240 no absolutely absolutely can i think we we i'm not gonna go let's go to the next one we're gonna

01:21:28.360 do a lads hour on it soon all sorts of belligerent anti-canadian things in there we're gonna make you

01:21:32.920 the 51st state of course it's just bluster wrong trump is a ceo not a politician and the media and

01:21:40.120 analysts are not intelligent enough to understand what that means ceos measure their value entirely by

01:21:46.120 their ability to deliver what they say they will if they do not then they're open to allegations of

01:21:50.920 lying and the worst insult you can give a ceo is to call him a liar when trump says he wants something

01:21:56.600 then he'll make it happen maybe not an invasion but other pressures will be brought to bear

01:22:02.520 do you think trump's gonna get canada i believe in the league of temporarily independent countries

01:22:09.000 places like belgium kuwait lebanon lots of ukraine and canada um these are countries that sort of

01:22:19.720 are at the border of big empires and will eventually be swallowed by them so i don't know if trump will

01:22:25.320 get it but i know that eventually the americans will get somehow or another eventually the americans will

01:22:31.080 get canada because like why um or more like why not yes okay makes sense uh right so uh our societies

01:22:41.480 and civilization as a whole are complex are as complex as they are fragile a ship blocking a canal

01:22:45.960 canal in egypt or a bridge collapsing in boston can impact the entire world's trade we could very

01:22:51.240 well have our own bronze age collapse if we do not conserve the means of our way of life and the power

01:22:55.960 outages in spain and portugal show this yeah this is this is one of the things i kind of really hate

01:23:01.800 our leaders about yes how cavalier they are yes such complex systems they are willing to do things based

01:23:09.320 on ideology and the very nature of an ideology is really to teach someone who doesn't know what

01:23:15.560 they're doing is to instruct them on what to do yes so it's it's all um uh deontologically based that

01:23:23.160 you should do this for moral reasons and now try and make that interface with the real world well

01:23:28.360 you the you'll notice that the least ideological people are those with the most expertise yeah

01:23:33.800 those people and and this is uh conquest's first or second law i can't remember which one it is

01:23:39.880 he is most conservative about the thing he knows most yes the thing is no best because you know how

01:23:44.280 complex the system is you know the things you can impact as you go yeah and that's the problem with

01:23:48.760 ideology so you've got someone like ed milliband who doesn't know anything yes uh but being

01:23:52.760 highly ideological to give him the confidence to make decisions that are going to have severe knock

01:23:58.360 on effects and my industry insiders say that they're trying to tell him that exactly the thing

01:24:03.160 like the spanish thing will start happening here but he just want to hear it no of course not and

01:24:07.960 it's completely outside of his realm of expertise but he has the the bravery that comes with ideology

01:24:12.520 and that's the problem with ideology frankly yeah uh and yeah and like i said it's the cavalier nature

01:24:17.480 of it just really bothers me because they don't know that they're dogmatic yeah if if if you know

01:24:23.400 that you're dogmatic and what you're dogmatic about and why you're dogmatic about it you're actually a

01:24:29.160 lot more intellectually free than someone who believes he has no dogma because the human mind

01:24:35.800 is a dogmatic machine you have to have a lot of presuppositions to be able to interact with a very

01:24:41.640 uncertain extreme world and so if you're aware of the fact that you're dogmatic you're fine because

01:24:49.240 you know why and what it is that you're dogmatic about you can be free about everything else but if

01:24:55.080 you're being dogmatic and you don't even know it that's when you're extremely dangerous and after

01:24:59.960 often the the dogmatism itself is a cover for a lack of knowledge about the subject yeah so you can't

01:25:05.000 even admit that you don't know because there'd be a massive public humiliation if ed milliband the

01:25:09.640 energy secretary came out and said yeah i don't have no idea how energy generation works i mean

01:25:13.080 i'll bet you anything that he doesn't know anything about the video that you showed about how alternating

01:25:17.400 current works and how you shift from a spinning system into alternating current and the difference

01:25:22.760 between ac and dc i'll i'll make a bet with you now that he doesn't know anything about that oh yeah

01:25:27.480 i wouldn't take it because i'm absolutely certain you're right but yeah so this is the thing that

01:25:31.960 terrifies me about the way things are going yeah absolutely uh arizona desert rat confirms what i was

01:25:37.400 saying it's difficult to send direct current over a long distance basically it has to go twice the

01:25:41.480 distance and alternating current has to go to complete a cycle i've definitely read something

01:25:45.000 about it but don't hold me to i i'm sure i'm sure i'm running on gcse physics yeah exactly yeah i'm

01:25:50.040 sure it was like i just remember from gcse physics that alternating current was more dangerous

01:25:55.720 but obviously more effective yeah and probably direct current less dangerous but obviously crap

01:26:00.440 um alistair says ac in the vast majority of cases would be more efficient for long

01:26:04.840 distance power transmission there we go one exception would be the new mega project power

01:26:08.680 bringing power from france to britain one reason they're using hvdc oh that's what i heard about

01:26:13.560 yeah due to it being able to sync to each current country's grid independently well i i have no idea

01:26:19.240 oh that was yeah maybe that's getting around the hertz thing yeah um uh and rgh says 10 out of 10

01:26:24.440 spanish title choice so well well done people did appreciate it um uh grant says i think you

01:26:30.920 underestimate how toxic trump is in canada yeah no i don't i don't underestimate it i i know that

01:26:36.600 they do i don't get it i don't get why canadian the boomer mind is what's toxic and the interaction

01:26:42.840 between the boomer mind and trump is the most toxic but even our canadian friends in our sphere

01:26:48.920 are a hundred percent against canada being swallowed up and it's like why because why would you want to

01:26:54.440 you don't want to lose the independence of your country yeah you never want yeah but you're being

01:26:59.400 ruled by libs and frenchmen yeah but better to be ruled by our libs and frenchmen than they're

01:27:05.880 foreigners who don't take our interest in enoch powell on even if this country had a communist

01:27:11.560 government i'd still fight for it exactly yeah well i don't know i don't know if i'd be that upset if

01:27:16.120 we became a 51st state i mean we we don't worry about it you are anyway so yeah but no i'm i'm with him

01:27:22.760 even if jeremy corbyn took over i'd still have to support my own country so you know to me but

01:27:28.520 the but grant carries on he says uh anyone whom would speak in favor becomes untouchable so starting

01:27:33.960 by saying i'll work with polyev uh would have been just as bad fair enough liberals were able to paint

01:27:39.160 polyev with the brush trump even though he hadn't said anything about working with him

01:27:42.120 ferris's point about the elites of europe applies equally to canada uh it wouldn't have mattered what

01:27:46.600 he said 80 of canada are tds affected the rate is 100 amongst the intelligentsia and public service

01:27:51.320 and that is the important reason yeah to remember it's the same in britain like the brits are

01:27:55.960 overwhelmingly against trump even though most of them don't know anything about trump and it's because

01:28:00.040 we have exclusively liberal media yeah so all they're doing is pumping out one-sided we hate

01:28:04.840 trump all day every day and if you're not invested in the subject you're just like wow that's a guy

01:28:08.600 sounds bad uh and so brilliant uh baron von warhawk says carl do you honestly believe anything trump

01:28:16.520 says could ever sway leaders like macron um mers or starmer uh well starmer starmer came over pretty

01:28:23.160 pretty quickly and pretty pragmatically um yeah i think there is i think i think in fact there is a

01:28:28.840 way of getting around these people um the thing is the the europeans are no less

01:28:36.840 thymatically driven than the indians and the pakistanis they're just driven by the need for

01:28:41.880 recognition over different things uh essentially if trump came over and essentially conceded that

01:28:48.360 morally they were superior to the americans even if it was just in a private conversation it wouldn't

01:28:52.040 have to do this publicly uh i think that would be the first step to them kind of puffing themselves

01:28:57.160 up and being willing to work uh but it's a long conversation i'm not going to get to i will say

01:29:02.680 but uh but yeah no i i think um i think it is possible i think you just have to know how to

01:29:07.720 deal with the people themselves in the sort of hannibal way that we were talking about before

01:29:11.240 the podcast yeah uh than dealing with their public personas right yes uh actually jimbo g's comment

01:29:18.120 there that kind of gets to the heart of it uh jimbo says honestly trump seems to have alienated some

01:29:22.760 of the people i know who are at least starting to understand why he's necessary yes my mum went

01:29:27.160 from low-key sporting to being stuck in the boom of truth bbc cycle again no one likes this sort of

01:29:31.960 conservative it is very easy to knock boomers back into the cycle it is but it was because of trump's

01:29:37.560 um aggressiveness uh trump so trump trump came in like he was genghis khan conquering a city right

01:29:46.440 whereas in fact what he should have done is portrayed himself as like an ascendant king

01:29:50.840 like the return of aragon right he should have portrayed it's like no i'm the legitimate king of

01:29:55.560 all of this and so actually your interests are also my interests even though up until yesterday

01:30:01.080 we were enemies and so if trump had come across with a more regal persona rather than an aggressive

01:30:07.400 warlord persona i think it would have done a lot of good and it actually would have made them

01:30:12.120 essentially like he's gonna be all right and if he had that persona he would have won the american

01:30:16.680 elections no no i don't know if that's true i think uh i think a lot of it was assuming i think a

01:30:22.520 lot of his appeal was actually assuming that he is kind of got that he's got that potential in him

01:30:27.560 right and i think i think a lot of it was assumed that you know he's a fighter and when he wins he is

01:30:33.240 actually going to be a fairly fair governor right and to be fair he's not a terribly unfair governor

01:30:37.720 yeah but the this is something that nigel farage is stuck in like he nigel farage is stuck in the

01:30:42.600 boxing position where he's like i've got to punch every everyone around me but it's like nigel at

01:30:48.280 this point you could just claim to be the king of the right wing in britain like no one can challenge

01:30:52.600 nigel farage you know and and for some reason he's not stepping into the authority of the role and

01:30:57.480 saying no i am the king maker i'm not i'm the power broker everyone's going to do i say as i

01:31:02.280 say it because i'm nigel farage and i spent 30 years doing this trump needed to move into that role

01:31:06.600 as well and he's kind of failed which i hate to say we're out of time but i won't so i can't really

01:31:10.680 give you well i mean one very quick comment that i'll throw in because it's something that we didn't

01:31:13.560 touch on we probably should have done unpick collins says from a broader perspective if a war between

01:31:17.480 india and pakistan begins in earnest what is the likelihood of widespread violence erupting in

01:31:21.960 the uk and europe will that risk lead to a european diplomatic intervention i mean the

01:31:26.520 the risk is 100 as well yeah it's it's guaranteed to happen uh there'll be no european diplomatic

01:31:32.040 intervention because why would india and makistan care what europe says no yeah we're bradford and

01:31:37.480 leicester i mean just up in smoke yeah it's gonna be terrible but uh we are out of time and we have

01:31:42.360 after this a round table coming up where we're going to be discussing in fact the consequences of

01:31:47.160 our immigration policy and what could be done differently to make things better uh so thank you

01:31:51.400 for joining us folks join us on lucis.com for the round table and we will see you tomorrow for the podcast

01:31:56.520 thank you

The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters - April 30, 2025

The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters #1154

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