In this week's episode of Trigonometry, Francis and Constantine are joined by Mike Driver, a serial entrepreneur, entrepreneur, and all-around good guy who has a lot of counterintuitive ideas. They talk about the Black Friday Black Friday sales, the impending Black Friday blackouts, and why you should always be open for me.
00:00:30.000I never trust people in power to give the keys back.
00:00:47.040They really don't like giving it back.
00:00:49.480My biggest fear is the civil liberties implication of what will come after this.
00:01:00.000Down the road, when I say down the road, I mean a year, two years from now, there is a risk of very serious inflation.
00:01:08.600And I think we will look back on this if we ever have a chance to do so with an impartial inquiry and say, how on earth did we go mad to this extent?
00:01:16.980It simply wasn't justified. And I think there will be, when this is examined, a fair number of excess deaths.
00:01:24.420This is political belief and ideology over rational, scientific argument.
00:01:38.860I still don't think people understand what's about to happen.
00:01:42.460I really don't think they understand that we leave ourselves vulnerable
00:01:45.780at some point of a not-too-distant future to blackouts.
00:01:49.340It's about to blow up this year. It's about to blow up.
00:01:53.740Hey Francis, do you like Scottish wildlife?
00:02:05.260Yeah, I love Glasgow on a Friday night.
00:02:08.180No, you idiot, I mean Scottish birds and...
00:02:52.200They plant a tree with every order and work with global charities One Tree Planted and Trees for the Future to support global reforestation efforts.
00:03:00.380You could officially include the title Lord or Lady on your credit card, plane tickets, dating profiles, etc.
00:03:07.180It makes a great last-minute gift unless you're a socialist and you want the aristocracy abolished.
00:03:12.220Established Titles is actually running a massive early Black Friday sale right now.
00:03:17.520Plus, if you use the code trigonometry, you get an additional 10% off.
00:03:23.660Go to establishedtitles.com slash trigonometry to get your gifts now.
00:03:29.060Go to establishedtitles.com slash trigonometry and get 10% off this wonderful gift.
00:03:38.260Hello? Stavros? This is Lord Foster of Croydon, mate.
00:03:41.960Yes, what I want, kebab, salt and pepper, extra, chilli sauce, salt and vinegar on the chips.
00:03:49.080What do you mean you're shut? I'm a lord. You should always be open for me.
00:04:00.080Hello and welcome to Trigonometry. I'm Francis Foster.
00:04:06.020And this is a show for you if you want honest conversations with fascinating people.
00:04:11.460We have a collection of guests for you today.
00:04:13.800But before that, we should explain why we're sitting in front of a black curtain again.
00:04:17.380And the reason is our new studio is being built literally as we speak.
00:04:21.980So this is what we're doing with it at the moment.
00:04:25.460But rest assured, it will be back very, very shortly.
00:04:29.040And as those of you who are on Locals know, it's going to be absolutely awesome.
00:04:32.360We've posted a bunch of backstage footage of it so you can see what is going on.
00:04:37.220But in the meantime, one of the things we've always focused on the show is attempting to give you information about some of the economic trends that are coming and some of the other things that are going on in the world that are likely to happen in the future.
00:04:49.760So what we've done for you today is we've collected a bunch of times when our former guests have predicted what was about to happen in a way that we think was going to be very useful to you.
00:14:59.080Pippa, before Francis jumps in, let me ask you this, because you're a former advisor to two
00:15:03.660U.S. presidents. If you're sitting in the Oval Office right now, and you're looking at the fact
00:15:07.840And this I come back to the issue of globalization here. You're looking at the fact that 97% of your antibiotics are made in China. You know, a huge quantity and percentage of your essential supplies are made in China. A lot of particularly right leaning commentators have been banging away at this point.
00:15:24.800You know, we've become reliant on China for essential supplies in a world where, you know, I mean, we don't know exactly what's happened with this virus, but there's some evidence to suggest that, you know, it's not without China's at best incompetence that this has spread the way that it has.
00:15:42.640So if you can't trust them, and when the proverbial hits the fan, countries tend to lock down and go, I need this, and you're not having that.
00:15:53.540Are we, as a president of the United States or the prime minister of Britain, are you going to go, we need to onshore not just manufacturing of widgets and iPhones, we need to onshore manufacturing of medical supplies, syringes, vent, everything?
00:16:08.500Yes. And it's not only because, you know, China didn't handle it well.
00:16:13.280I think probably most countries wouldn't have handled it well.
00:16:17.180I'm not sure that the British did so much better and they were loaded with a lot more information and they were still slow.
00:16:23.580But the main thing is what you're talking about is a tradeoff between efficiency and resilience.
00:16:29.960and for many years we have gone after efficiency and cheaper prices ever cheaper prices that that
00:16:37.640was our driver now we're faced with this reality that resilience is is interfered with by that and
00:16:44.760i'll come i'd like to use the example in formula one racing it's a constant race between resilience
00:16:51.840and efficiency and what you're doing is you rip that car apart every single day and you try to
00:16:57.300shave one gram of weight off of the thing so that you improve its chances of winning. But that one
00:17:04.440gram may be the thing that breaks the piece you're working on. So it's either correct or
00:17:10.420catastrophe, right? You're on the borderline all the time. Well, this is where we are with the
00:17:15.240economy. We chose efficiency, efficiency, efficiency, and we shaved off that extra gram of cost by
00:17:21.480outsourcing it to China. And now we see a break. And therefore, now we're going to have an emphasis
00:17:26.500on resilience. Now, what does that mean? That means inflation. That means higher prices. It
00:17:31.860means you say, I'm willing to pay more for a British sourced product or an American sourced
00:17:37.820product so that I'm sure to get it. Then I care about its reduced costs. And that's another
00:17:44.000channel through which higher prices begin to worm their way forward. Now, this in the light of the
00:17:50.060current president, let's just keep in mind who the current president is. The current president
00:17:54.240the United States is a property guy. Property guys make all their money on inflation. They love
00:18:01.460inflation. And so what is his inclination going to be? He's always going to be, we should just
00:18:09.860have more debt. And the way you deal with the debt is you basically inflate and that's okay.
00:18:16.980And by the way, inflations, they do tend to make asset markets go up, which means stock markets.
00:18:22.640And I would argue we've had that inflation has shown up in recent years as higher asset prices, and everybody loved that part about it.
00:18:31.200And they ignored the fact that a consumer had to go from 1% inflation at the time of the financial crisis to, say, 2.5% at the time of the COVID crisis.
00:19:17.700what's the speed and magnitude of that thing and and i agree with jim usually great inflations are
00:19:24.040preceded by a puff of deflation and whether that lasts a year 18 months two years i don't know
00:19:31.520but we have seemingly set the stage for prices to begin creeping up and for people to say again
00:19:38.980it's a psychological phenomenon to say you know like in my world i have people companies are
00:19:44.000saying, you know, the Chinese drones may be cheaper, but I'd rather buy British. Or the
00:19:49.640Chinese drones, you know, maybe I can buy them, the supply chain's there, but I'd rather work
00:19:55.040with someone who's closer and speaks English and can work with me to produce what I really require
00:20:00.520for my business. That means they're telling me they're willing to pay more for this. And I think
00:20:06.180they'll pay more for these things now that they go, I need to be digital, and I need to not travel,
00:20:11.200I need to be more localized, not globalized. So in this sense, it all comes together to form
00:20:17.560a full circle that what Jim and I have written about inflation, which everybody says is a dead
00:20:26.220duck and never coming back to life is distinctly quacking in the background.
00:20:35.200Hello, and welcome to Trigonometry. I'm Francis Foster. I'm Constantine Kissin.
00:20:41.200And this is Peter Hitchens. Peter has ruined our introduction. But this is the show for you if you want honest conversations with fascinating people. And our brilliant returning guest is Peter Hitchens, the author and journalist. Peter, welcome back to the show.
00:20:57.360Well, so far, it's okay. Yeah, I have to say, we've never had a guest interrupt us mid intro, but you've managed. So let's get straight into it.
00:21:06.100one of the reasons that we were really keen to have you back on the show is that you have done
00:21:11.560a lot of alternative coverage, shall we say, of the lockdown and the coronavirus situation. So for
00:21:17.620anyone who has not been following your writing and opinions on this issue, just give us a brief
00:21:23.500overview of what is your opinion of what's happened and the lockdown measures that have
00:21:27.700been implemented. Okay, right from the start, I said that the response to the government was
00:21:32.260completely out of proportion to the size of the menace. I didn't say there was no disease. I didn't
00:21:37.060say nobody would die and say it wasn't horrible for a lot of people if they got it. But I said
00:21:42.400that as an event, it simply didn't justify the measures being taken either to suppress liberty
00:21:47.980or to suppress the economy. I think that the damage to both human liberty and to the economy
00:21:54.280have been huge and probably permanent. And I think we will look back on this if we ever have
00:21:59.360the chance to do so with an impartial inquiry and say, how on earth did we go mad to this
00:22:05.120extent? It simply wasn't justified. How many people have died or otherwise suffered or
00:22:11.820will die or otherwise suffer as a result of these methods? The healthy old have suffered
00:22:18.200hugely in terms of being deprived of normal life. And as a brilliant man, Professor Sutrid
00:22:24.520Bakhti of the University of Mainz in Germany, warned at the beginning of this, and I did
00:22:28.440what I could to publicize this morning. It is precisely those people, the healthy, old, and
00:22:33.520active in society, who've suffered very, very greatly from this by being cut off from social
00:22:38.000contact. And the amount of misery, which of course brings on death. That of course is the effect which
00:22:42.700I think everybody acknowledges on the rest of the health service. While the health service is
00:22:46.540concentrating entirely on COVID, all kinds of other things, particularly the detection and
00:22:52.260treatment of the major cancers, is put to one side. And I think there will be, when this is
00:22:57.740examined a fair number of excess deaths which have resulted from this this this policy which
00:23:06.200have not been covid deaths or not even been remotely related to covid which are among people
00:23:10.400who who were deprived of treatments and checks they otherwise would have got because of the panic
00:23:15.180so sure we're all concerned i i completely concede that my opponents in this argument are concerned
00:23:22.020with saving human life and their motives are good well actually so am i but i think not really are
00:23:26.980my motive is good, but I think my assessment of the situation is better than theirs. And I think
00:23:31.260if my policy is much more closely aligned to what Sweden has done and had been followed,
00:23:36.900fewer people would have died. Do you think the health consequences of
00:23:40.940the way we've reacted are going to run for years and years?
00:23:45.200Well, you can't tell exactly how bad the damage is. The enormous load in which Maynard Keynes
00:23:52.760negotiated for this country from the United States at the end of the Second World War when
00:23:56.380Lend-Lease stopped, was negotiated in, I think, July of 1945 and wasn't paid off until December
00:24:04.5602006. My entire childhood was spent in a country which was constantly weighed down by the paying
00:24:12.800off of and the paying of interest on that enormous level. Our lives were greyer and more pinched and
00:24:18.400our public services worse. You look at things like council house building in the early 50s,
00:24:23.920look at the low standards of the architecture and the building. The country was poor, and it was
00:24:29.280poor because it was in debt, but that was a debt honorably contracted as a result of war.
00:24:36.180On this occasion, it's going to be poor because of a debt contracted because of a government mistake.
00:24:42.780Rishi Sunak has no choice. It is really a question of how soon he has to announce the
00:24:49.600emergency budget the first I think of many emergency budgets which you will have to introduce
00:24:54.480which I will be one of the few people who will not be shocked by and the these budgets will be
00:25:01.100very serious and people who think that it can all be loaded on the well-off very much mistaken
00:25:06.900the things VAT the duties on all kinds of things due to particularly on travel I wonder how many
00:25:15.180people who long to go back on holiday are going to feel about how much more expensive it's going
00:25:19.320to beat it. Quite possibly, there's going to be something called the capital levy, a raid on the
00:25:24.860savings. That means, amongst other things, quite possibly on the value of houses which people have
00:25:30.020bought. It's unprecedented in a free country such as this, which people will find, particularly since
00:25:36.140it's levied on the savings they've made from already taxed money, they'll find very oppressive.
00:25:40.540But the government will probably call it something like an NHS surcharge. It'll be very hard to
00:25:45.320resist politically. And I doubt very much whether the Labour opposition will resist it, because
00:25:49.040they will know, their own economists know, that there is no choice. The government is going to
00:25:54.340have to increase tax. The other thing that's going to happen is, as a country, we are going to be so
00:25:58.560much in debt that the levels of interest which we are going to be willing to pay to the pension
00:26:09.240funds and the insurance companies, which loan so much of the money to the government, are going to
00:26:13.100be fantastically low. That means a raid on the pensions and savings of millions of people whose
00:26:19.820old ages will be under threat. That also happens. And the other thing is the world will look at us
00:26:24.480and see an economy much weaker than most. And it may be less and less willing to lend us money
00:26:30.020on the terms which we've been willing to do so. And one of the results of this will certainly
00:26:34.560be a decline in the international value of the pound sterling. So again, that has many,
00:26:39.940many effects, particularly on the cost of imported goods, and on our ability to travel
00:26:44.500abroad, which people will feel there's going to be a lot of things going on. And all of
00:26:50.120them are going to hurt. Part of the problem is that people are living in this kind of
00:26:53.640dream time at the moment, the beautiful weather, the furloughing, which means people get paid
00:26:58.760for not working, the huge numbers of professionals in the southeast who are spared from the daily
00:27:03.300ground of commuting and so far have continued to be able to work from home. There will come
00:35:05.620And what she felt, there should be a thorough psychological investigation,
00:35:09.700as was the Tavistock's tradition, into family dynamics, individual psychology.
00:35:16.340and she felt that there was too much of a willingness to sort of go along with the kid
00:35:22.180in terms of the kid's idea they've got there's one problem with one solution and they basically
00:35:29.020want to get through past the gate gatekeepers onto ucl that's a generalized picture but it was
00:35:36.820it was a sort of predominant um picture that was being presented so i'd say i was a part of the
00:35:44.460senior management I said well what we would usually do it's very multidisciplinary it's not
00:35:49.480like a traditionally medically hierarchical service you've got lots of different disciplines
00:35:56.740and you're used to sort of discussing and debating approaches and I said well you've got to go back
00:36:03.020and challenge the culture and she felt and she was quite a senior person by the time she'd arrived
00:36:09.300in this service this was was not welcome it was a sort of shutting down of any dissent or wish to
00:36:17.380examine what was going on beneath the surface for the kid etc etc and she felt she got nowhere
00:36:23.980it rapidly became apparent there was a politicization of this whole area so again
00:36:29.840unusually there was a very close relationship with mermaids and with gender intelligence the
00:36:38.780the uh the trap charities and they had an unusual sort of influence over the sort of culture
00:36:46.060um now i when i was in charge of the adult and adolescent department i would have
00:36:51.400relationships with mind and some of the charities but they but they wouldn't sort of insist on
00:36:57.960the culture or look ask me to run them by the protocols for treatment etc etc there's been a
00:37:05.860sort of enormous policy capture into this area where you've got the affirmation model which was
00:37:12.000adopted with virtually no evidence and jettison in what used to be in place was what's called
00:37:20.260watchful waiting which is that gender dysphoric kids you know most of them would desist if
00:37:28.540supported and left to their own devices um there's a sort of huge capture of of the clinical
00:37:37.220environment i think that once you're sort of um your decision making is based on a sort of belief
00:37:44.860pre-existing belief structure may be embedded within the clinicians may be met by the parents
00:37:51.640and some of the parents and some of the kids you you're not in a clinical environment you see
00:37:57.700Lots of people, you know, will come into psychiatry and they, when people are in a sort of chaotic state of mind and they feel that their minds are falling apart, they often focus down narrowly on there's one problem with one solution.
00:38:13.460now psychological health is usually based on the opposite it's based on sort of opening things out
00:38:20.760thinking that we're complicated we've got many different moving parts as a personality and that
00:38:27.060usually our problems are made up of all sorts of things coming together so we're trying to sort of
00:38:32.860open things out for in for the kids for example you're saying okay that's what you believe let's
00:38:39.920have a look at what's who you are what's going on beneath the surface what might be troubling you
00:38:45.760let's open this dialogue out so we think about things in the round um and you you're you're not
00:38:53.820going along with um fixed beliefs there's one problem and one solution so just one more thing
00:39:02.960So one thing that's often talked about is that the kid's completely certain.
00:44:36.080You know, as a mental health practitioner,
00:44:38.900someone who's proud to be in the business that I'm in,
00:44:41.320I'm really quite ashamed by, you know, the lack of...
00:44:45.240This is political belief and ideology over rational, scientific argument.
00:44:55.060our brilliant and returning guest needs very little introduction nigel farage welcome back
00:45:06.720to trigonometry it's good to be here and not doing it via blooming zoom i couldn't agree
00:45:11.200with you more it's a real pleasure on the fuel bill side of things which is just i still don't
00:45:18.920think people understand what's about to happen i really don't think they understand the first
00:45:23.480week of April when those bills hit the mat for their Q1 gas and electricity bills. There's going
00:45:30.700to be absolute shock and outrage. Number one, massive mistake, the Conservatives adopted price
00:45:36.180caps. Can you believe it? Can you believe that a Conservative government, I mean, why not set a
00:45:43.020price for a loaf of bread? I miss what the Marxists did. Nuts policy. It never works. It's nearly
00:45:50.840always counterproductive. But it leads to a much bigger question. Net zero is, in economic
00:45:59.880terms, I think the most self-destructive policy that has ever been put forward by a British
00:46:06.120government in the history of the nation. That doesn't mean that I'm against finding ways
00:46:12.740of producing energy that emit less CO2 and cause less environmental damage, but I'm a
00:46:19.580pragmatist you know we still burn four and a half million tons of coal a year in this country we have
00:46:24.880to to make steel you know what we import it all we're importing 50 percent of our natural gas
00:46:31.500when we've got vast reserves possibly as much as a trillion pounds worth of natural gas in
00:46:39.060lancashire and cumbria alone hey that's half the national debt it's quite interesting when you look
00:46:44.180and a lot of jobs too tens of thousands of well-paid jobs and if you're going to if you're
00:46:49.680going to use the blooming stuff anyway you might as well make it here the americans
00:46:54.260rethought their energy policy you know five six years ago and the price of natural gas in america
00:47:02.580is half the price that it is here we then have whopped onto people's bills
00:47:08.420incredibly 25 percent of your electricity bill is green subsidies money that goes to rich land
00:47:17.060owners money that goes to large foreign companies building wind farms we've put so much faith in
00:47:23.620wind energy or if truth be told so much money has been made out of wind energy by those in the
00:47:30.000elites that we leave ourselves vulnerable at some point of a not too distant future to blackouts
00:47:35.540So, yes, commodity prices globally have gone up, but we've left ourselves absolutely exposed, not just to world markets, but left ourselves exposed.
00:47:46.980You know, 9% of our electricity comes from France through an interconnector.
00:47:53.000So I think we should be self-sufficient in energy.
00:47:55.760We should be aiming with areas like gas to get people's bills down.
00:48:00.300I don't think a penny piece should go to massive global industries in the form of green subsidy.
00:48:08.840So I think this, I've got a feeling actually that the energy debate and the net zero debate is going to be huge.
00:48:17.180And Boris stands up and says, isn't it marvellous?
00:48:19.680We've cut our CO2 output by 44% since 1990.
00:48:23.040Well, if you close down nearly all of your chemical plants, your aluminium smelters, your refiners, and you move steel plants from Redcar to India, and then import the products back, you yourself may be producing less CO2, but globally, the net game is even more CO2 is being produced.
00:48:45.400So I think we've got this hopelessly, catastrophically wrong. And I think it's a function of, and by the way, Labour are just as bad on this, if not worse. And I think it's a function of career politicians, a function of people living inside metropolitan bubbles in London,