 You know when you go on holiday, you might go on holiday for two weeks, same. And during that time, you will typically get done much more than you would on a typical day of your normal life, working week, if you will. And the reason I guess, or you feel like you've got a lot more done, because you're doing many, many multiple things, unless you're one of those people to go and sit and lie at a poolside at a hotel for two weeks, is not that guy, but unless you're that sort of person, if you're going to a new place, you're typically going to get up in the morning and you're going to do something in that morning, and then you're going to do something in the afternoon, then you're probably going to go and do something in the evening, and you're going to repeat that day after day, and you might take one day off to sort of just chill a bit. But essentially over a 14-day timeframe, you're going to be doing way more than you would on a typical day. And so what happens is you come back from your holiday and you feel like you've had more than two weeks. You've compressed so many things into a two-week timeframe. You know, if you've gone, like I guess you're in Canada, let's say you've gone on a, it's getting a bit chilly for you, so you decide to head down to Mexico or something. And in two weeks' time, you're going to like trip all around, and you're going to do all these things, and you're going to come back and you're going to feel like, wow, that two-week timeframe, you had so many things that had done. And in the last six months, we've basically had that kind of an environment where the types of things that would have ordinarily accounted for a significant event or accounted as a significant event in any other year have just been compressed. So we could pick almost anything that happened within a month or even a week timeframe. And if that had happened at any previous year, within a decade, prior to 2020, it would have been of significance. And it would be something that markets and participants would have looked at and said, wow, do you remember that? And that might not have been massive, but it was fairly significant. But we've had them those sorts of events almost daily. Yeah, so you have this sort of overwhelming stimuli to your brain and you're saying, well, what is it that I need to pay attention to? It's a little bit like if you and I went into the ring and we were going to have a bit of a sparring contest. Great. We need to focus on each other. We're going to watch each other's hands. That's it. Now, if I was to bring in two more people and we're all going to attack you, you're suddenly like, whoa, like this is just morphed. I don't need to just watch Chris's hands anymore. I need to watch that guy over there and that guy over there and I need to watch their feet. And it's like you're in an environment where suddenly you've got a massive amount of stimulus and you're going, what is the most important for me to pay attention to? I kind of think I need to pay attention to all of them. But in any one split second, I need to be focused on one of them because that's mostly the one that's going to be of most significance to me. And it feels like that's where we're at in the markets. We've had almost six months of multiple stimuli hitting us from all angles, from COVID to the subsequent lockdowns and how that has impacted markets to government stimulus, to government interventions, not just in terms of stimulus, but buying corporate debt, for example, to rising unemployment claims. And we are now in the US at about 20 million at present. Of course, there's actually more outside of that because there's a lot of government loan programs that are in place, that are ending at the end of June. And so those are helping a lot of businesses stay afloat, which consequently allows more people to stay employed as those expire. That is likely to see a surge in the unemployment side of things. So there's multiple different things. As we could then look at the rise of Marxism, which I think is there has been an opportunity for the, shall we call them cultural Marxists, to take advantage of a period of chaos. And this is it. And so that has sent much of the Western world into a spiral of insanity, really. And so we have many, many different things to contend with. And part of the difficulty is determining which of those is most important. All of them are important, but which is most important. And how do you quantify what they mean and figure out what you need to be doing with your capital and quite frankly, what you need to be doing with your physical person, which is a related but different question. I have a bunch of friends right now that have actually left the United States completely. They left maybe a month and a half ago. They saw the writing on the wall. Well, they're in very blue states to begin with. And they just left. They're like, there's too much right here. It's interesting. You know, there's... I'm one of the very few finance guys that has paid attention to or spoken about this neo-Marxist sort of ideology. And I've been writing about it for about five years. And part of that reason is it's a hot political topic. And when you call out something as being dangerous and it's politicised, then it is quite easy to be labelled something racist or a bigot or pick your terminology. And that's really one of the tools that will be used by the neo-Marxists. If it's very binary, if you do not agree with us, then you must be a racist. In other words, if you don't choose our racism, then you must be a racist. And it's actually as absurd and moronic as it is. It is actually quite powerful. And we're seeing that now manifesting itself often in society. So this is something that I've written about extensively. And when I did, I can't tell you how many comments and emails back from people were on along the lines of calm down, buddy. This is akin to young kids that are just blowing off steam and it's a fad. They will grow up and get over it. You're just a grumpy old man on the porch yelling at clouds. Don't worry about it. And I'm an ardent student of history and I've spent an extraordinary amount of time also reading up on psychology and trying to understand why people do what they do. Because if you think about markets, markets are really just an extrapolation of billions of people on the planet making a decision what to do with their time at any given point. And so understanding psychology often is, I think it's always somewhat important and there are periods of time when it's almost like the only thing that matters. And if you think about some of the most transformative events that mankind has been through, that is absolutely true. And if you think so, to provide you some examples, the rise of the Nazi Party and what allowed that to take place both financially, which was essentially a very, very weak economic environment for Germany coming out of World War I whereby they had to pay war reparations and a subsequent drag on the economy. The way they tried to, quote-unquote, solve that was with the Weimar Republic which then decimated wealth even more. And that environment allowed for a psychology amongst the citizenry that was open to ideas that would have previously been shelved and not considered viable, thoughtful, possible or certainly moral. But under times of economic stress, people look for somebody that's going to provide a solution, someone strong. So that's the Nazis when we know what happened there. But you have similar things with respect to the USSR post World War II and how the Bolsheviks, you think about the Bolshevik Revolution beforehand, that was, again, similar sort of circumstances, Mao's great leap forward. There's big polpots, genocidal activities in Cambodia and when you study those, you realise that there's a very close inter-connection between economics and markets and it doesn't mean that those things will happen if you have, for example, an economic stagnation or recessions or depressions or anything of that nature. What it does mean though is that the probability for something to come out of those environments is much, much greater than it is at any time prior. And so that's really where we find ourselves today at the same time that we see this ideology that has been lurking and has been growing in popularity and growing in power for well over a decade now. And again, it's something that I've written about extensively and everybody was like, no, no, you just calm down. It's no big problem. The people that tell you, no, no, is usually the people that don't have first-hand experience. I always find it funny when people tell me about communism that they escaped a communist country. I'm not theoretically making stuff up. I'm telling you from the fucking horse's mouth. But yet they stand there like, oh, no, no, no, your experience, we don't accept your experience. It's different this time. It's different this time. I mean, we get the same with respect to, you know, this claim that again, like I said before, the binary concept where if you don't side with us on this particular viewpoint, whatever the viewpoint is, then by default you're racist. You can throw out any ad hominems like racist, Nazi, bigots. Any of those particular things are thrown at you and you see the absurdity of this because you have these absolute morons calling Jewish people Nazis. And, you know, you try and... But that's how an ideology works. The facts don't matter. And they work really in this critical, what's called critical theory, which is a... It came out of the Frankfurt School and it's sort of this Marxist economic... It's more than just an economic theory. But it talks about emancipation from slavery and all these wonderful words like liberating human beings and so on and so forth. Much of the work is really just lifted out of Karl Marx's papers. And so it sounds all sort of fluffy and wonderful, but at its heart it divides people into two separate groups. You have the oppressors and you have the oppressed. And there is no in-between. And within the oppressors, even the oppressors themselves, as they see them, are often oppressed themselves. And what it does is you basically have this massively fractured society. You create a society that is completely divisive. So to give you an example, today the oppressors are straight white, preferably Christian males. So if you are a straight white Christian male and you came from poverty and you worked your way up and you now have some wealth, it doesn't matter. You're a privileged oppressor because of your skin colour, because of your sexual orientation, potentially because of your political opinions and religious beliefs. And so these people are the oppressors because of those lists of categories that they fall into. That of course itself is highly racist, but they don't see it that way. Now it fractures in that, for example, if you're black but you're straight, you're still an oppressor to gay, trans, disabled women. If you're a black woman, you're still probably an oppressor to gay, trans, disabled black people. And it kind of keeps going on and on. It's highly divisive, but really what it is is a divide and conquer system. It's a system of revolution. It's a system of chaos and violence. And it is the same system that has been utilised throughout history time and again. And when it has been implemented at any level of scale, it has... I can't find an instance when it hasn't resulted, basically in genocide. And that's a pretty frightening thing. So here we sit today and I'm a finance guy running asset management company and investment research company. And I can't... It's difficult to find peers that are prepared in public to talk about this. They'll talk about it in private, but they weren't in public. And there are times, I think, when... They'll say to me... And these are friends, and I understand where they're coming from. They'll say to me, just leave it out. Just focus on the finance. Now, there are times when the finance almost doesn't matter because it's driven by more powerful things taking place. And so, for example, was the coming to power of the Bolsheviks important as an economic event? Fuck yeah. More important than anything any central bank ever did. More important than unemployment, like it didn't matter. The most overwhelmingly powerful determinant of what was to take place and what was taking place for the next 70 years. So I think this is an important thing for people to pay attention to. And not paying attention to it is actually somewhat binary or has the potential to be somewhat binary. Are you thinking we're at the tipping point for... Well, I'm not American, I'm Canadian, and Canada's more... It's a weird country as in it's more or less all immigrants that escaped majority of these countries, of Marxist countries. Like you look at our immigrants, it's post-USSR, China, former Yugoslavia, Ukraine. So a lot of them had first-hand experience in a Marxist communist country. And even though we're fairly left leaning on socialist policies in the country, the zeitgeist of the people more or less isn't quite as crazy as what we're seeing in the United States. Like we're not having riots, we're not having crazy protests, etc. Maybe it will happen, I don't know, it's just not happening at the moment. Now, what I'm interested in the United States, if we look at the examples that you mentioned, we look at the Bolsheviks, we look at Mao Tsing Tung, even we look at Tito and Yugoslavia. We look at all these countries that had this quote-unquote Marxist revolution of a press versus a presser. One thing that they had all in common, the people that they're going after had no means of protection. They weren't really armed whatsoever. That's that one X-factor in the United States. You have small towns in the United States that have more or less a militia. They have, you name it, it's like literally a mini-army. And people forget, the United States technically isn't a nation, it's technically a republic. It's a federation of states that agreed upon a certain charter in the constitution and the states have superseding power over the Fed, at least for now as it is. And so I'm kind of interested because that's kind of the X-factor. There's also mentality. You have down south, crazy red states and they're more on the, I guess you can call it conservative side of things, whatever that means these days. And so I'm fascinated to see how that plays out. I don't know, what do you think, what's your take on that? Yeah, if we stick with the United States, I think that the probability right now for civil war is actually higher than the probability for not having civil war. I fully realise that that may sound like a sort of hyperbolic statement. And I'm not here to make those, but simply consider the evidence. So we have a partisan structure within the country that is to the extent that we've never seen it before. And there is no dialogue to be had. We can see that with the news media which has helped feed this on the right side of things. You've got sort of Fox News and then you've got CNN on the left. And there is no desire to sort of bridge that gap at all. It is purely there to... It's a little bit like when you go to a football game or a hockey game. You're in Canada, so it's a hockey game, right? And it's like there is possibly a small percentage of actual supporters in the crowd. Or maybe it's not so much even supporters. People just there for a game and they want to watch a cool game. And they don't really mind who wins. They just want to have a good time. But then you have the ardent supporters, right? And they've got all the regalia, they've got the caps and they're like that's their team. And they follow them and they support them. And for those participants in the crowd, they only want to win. And they're only interested in... So if one of their guys commits a foul, it's easy to just sort of, ah, that's kind of part of the game or they just they'll gloss it over. But when the other side commits a foul, oh my dear Lord. Come on, Ref, what is going... So you have... That is essentially what it looks like today across the United States. Extraordinary binary. And then I think it's been fuelled by social media as well. In that you have echo chambers where you can follow... And I did a test thing on this because... I don't know how the algorithms work on something like Twitter. But if you... So I try and get viewpoints from different people and most of the people that I follow are purely finance guys. But outside of that I do follow other people just to try and get news flow from both sides. And you can follow someone and still not get their feeds. And I found that extraordinary. And so what I did was I set up another account. And I made its look completely left leaning. Right? And then it started feeding me all this information. And some of the people that I was following in that account were the same people I follow in another account. And yet they're not getting their feeds. You know why though, right? Well... It's the centre model of media. So they assume that you are leftist ideology, psychology. Therefore the ads that they put in front of you, you click them. So let's say you're using your regular account and certain ads that are more left leaning popped up on your feed. You want to click them. That's the double-edged sword of social media. People think it's like nefarious. I'm like no. Literally, where can they get the most click for the most people to fucking suck up as much money as possible from the users on the platform? Right. And they have no loyalty. It doesn't matter. It doesn't matter if it's left. It doesn't matter. Obviously they pick and choose when it comes to banning people. That's a whole different thing. But when it comes to the algo, it's bottom-line capitals. Like how do I make the most money from these users on this platform per day? The problem with that then is that the byproduct of that is that it further channels people down into a particular eco chamber and it further fuels their own biases rather than having an ability to keep your mind open and consider what the facts might be. If you go back and you think about what western civilisation was built on, it was built on free speech, and you cannot have freedom of thought. And you cannot have freedom of thought without freedom of speech. Because in order for us to consolidate and form thought, typically we go through a process where we'll discuss it and that will mould and shape our thoughts. You might have a certain view on gays. You might have a certain view on a dollar. You might have a certain view on the tech sector, whatever. And then you go about a process of trying to discover the ultimate truth. And we're never going to get to the ultimate truth. But if we can get as close to that truth as possible, we're likely to be more profitable. If I can determine what the greatest probability is for the dollar moving forward and I position myself accordingly our profit, so I'm not interested or I shouldn't be interested in having a bias because the market doesn't care what I think. It doesn't care what my bias is. It's going to do what it's going to do. And so it's important for me to try and identify what the actual facts are. So it's like a scientific experiment where you go into the laboratory and you put in some mercury and you put in some whatever and you think, oh, this is what's going to happen. And then boom, it doesn't happen. You go, well, that didn't work and you try something else. And then you have this evolutionary process in terms of determining what the facts are. But you ultimately have this ability to go, aha, that is the truth, right? Because the evidence proves that it is. And so we've actually largely moved away from that experience where today, ideology is more important than the facts. You can't state the facts. Or if you do state the facts, you are labeled something. You see it in the market, though, too. You look at what's going on, where it hurts. You look at the Fed buying out everybody. You look at, for example, the rise of David. I think that's the same. He runs a Barstool sports. And he got it right away. He's like the whole stock market's rigged at the end of the day. And so you have a zeitgeist narrative of raw fundamentals, at least for now, fundamental investing or value investing, looking at the data, looking at statistics, looking at the fact. Forget about it. Burn it, throw it out. It's non-existent anymore. And so it's interesting. I want to pull out of that and look at it from a macro view. It's like when you can't find real, natural price discovery, you have chaos happening all around the world, not just the United States. Exact same time, you have elections going on. And magically, when the election season's here, well, we can have protests and people can go out and they can vote. You'll see after the elections are over, it's going to be tightening again for COVID because they don't need the use of us anymore. Yeah, absolutely. Again, this is a factual thing, so I'm going to say something which would almost certainly get me banned on certain channels and it's this. And this is factual. Anybody could look it up. Black Lives Matter is a funding arm for the Democratic Party. So if you go to the donation site for Black Lives Matter, it is processed by a company called, I think it's Act Blue. You go to Act Blue and you scroll down and you look into that company and it clearly states that this is a company which is a funding arm for the Democratic Party. So this has actually been one of the most extraordinarily, I'm going to say well put together in a like a fox situation, well put together fundraising mechanisms of all time. Of all time. Why? Because not only have you duped a lot of people into fundraising for the Democratic Party. You've done it on the basis of dividing society. You've divided society and then you've put up this facade to say this is how you can help. This is how you can correct this inequality if indeed it exists and that's questionable in itself. But this is how you correct it. You pay money here. And they've managed to do this where most people don't do any amount of due diligence on anything. And they'll take in information from from websites, from whoever and I always say this like just look at the facts. Look at the numbers. It doesn't matter if you're looking at copper supply. Any of these things. Just look at the facts. They are widely available. And they're not that much more difficult than listening to an opinion but they will give you real numbers to work with and then you can look at an opinion and go how does that fit into this? Does that make sense? So when you think about the Democratic Party for example you now have people all across the world pretty much every country, well pretty much every western country is donating to the Democratic Party in the United States. That's a serious, serious feat. I mean well done. So you're right. As long as the chaos continues this is absolutely awesome for them to fund. Why would you stop it? Why would you stop it? You'd only stop it if you can win at the elections in which case then you're like okay we're done. But here's the problem. And this is why I think civil war has a higher probability than any other outcome. And look, I don't care one way or the other. I'm not political. I don't invite, I'm not even an American. I simply look at the world through a lens which is one of understanding a lot of history. If the left do not win we're going to have other chaos. It doesn't matter actually who wins. It's a lose-lose situation whoever wins. Neither side is going to accept the outcome. We'll have all sorts of calls about the Russians was the one before. It doesn't matter. And so if that happens, well firstly if the left get in there is an increasing ideology there that is really dystopian. And I'm not sure people fully understand what that can look like. At the far end of the spectrum it is your extreme left who are calling for reparations and by reparations it's basically just theft. They're going to go and steal from whoever has money. It doesn't matter and it won't matter if you were black and disabled and a black disabled woman it won't matter because they will manage to channel that into some sort of privilege or siding with the enemy if you will. Again, all people need to go and read some history. That's exactly how Miles China came about. I'll tell you a story in Yugoslavia. We were originally sided with Stalin and publicly you had to make your legion. Stalin, Russia, blah, blah, blah. And overnight Tito wants to break away from Stalin. So all the people who are public decided with Stalin overnight the zeitgeist switches. They're gone. Disappeared. People don't get this man. All these people out there who think they don't understand they don't understand it but what's the saying Yuri says? Useful idiots. They are pawns in a greater scheme for people who are controlling them for their means. Nasi mtaleb. We're seeing this taking place. The first call to action if you will is to join our cause. And at the moment the siren call for that is Black Lives Matter. Now, just to be clear, I don't know any single person who thinks what happened to George Floyd was right. Not a single person. Everybody knows that that was murder or believes it to be murder. It seemed self-evident from the videos. And I don't know anybody that thinks that there shouldn't be anything other than justice served. Okay? Now, that's not what this is about. That's not at all what this is about. And it's taken on, like I said, the left has used this as a tool to drive their own dogmatic views further. Now, to your point, which you talked about deciding with Stalin and then Tito coming in, if you go and you look at what, Miles China for example, what they did, they started off with the Red Guard, which was the young student activists. And they picked on particular people that they deemed to be the bourgeoisie, the elitists, and they made them join the cause. They said, you know, are you with the cause? Until they corrected their views, if you will. Okay? And that was the first step. The other thing that they did was they took any symbols and they destroyed those symbols. So they went through people's homes. And if they had anything like, it was the textbooks and there was the intellectual, anything that could be related to the intellectual was torn down. There was the Four Olds, I think they called it. So there was religion, there was what was the other? There were artefacts which were deemed to be old and they were creating a new China. Anyway, so they went through destroying all of those things. And then one of the, and then the next technique or the next step in that process was they got the, those who say if it was a university professor or something of that nature, they got them to out somebody else within that organisation. You needed to go and guilt somebody and find somebody that was guilty of this. And I could almost use the word privilege. It's the same thing. And that's exactly what's happening today. So there are people being called out. They're saying, I'm with Black Lives Matter. Not really understanding that they're actually just siding with the Democratic Party. Maybe they do, that's fine. But then it should be better to say I am siding with the Democratic Party. But they used this facade. Again, many of them unwittingly probably brought into it. And so then the next step and we've already moved into this is you do not, so if you do not say anything, you are now racist. What's the hashtag? Silence is violence. Right? So by keeping silence, you are deemed to be racist. I had a phone call with a very good friend of mine over in the US. And I won't use his name because it's not really important and I don't want to bring attention to him. But his wife works, which is a hotshot lawyer basically, about 200 employees. One of the employees, been with him for 25 years, happens to be Black. Text her and says, your silence on this matter is incredibly disturbing. What are you going to do about it? So imagine this. Now, for starters, it's an employee, right? He's trying to guilt her into championing this cause. And it's like, what do you want me to say? I'm not racist? No, that's not what they want you to say. They want you to champion. I'm so sorry for being white and privileged. That's what they want you to say. Whether it's true or not, they want you to say it. And if you don't, I'll shame you into it. And so that's exactly the same methodology that was utilised in the Great Leap Forward. Today it's just simply the terminology is white privilege, silence is violence. These are the popular terms that they're using, but it's the exact same thing. You're getting this now on social media. You've got basically Twitter, Robespiers. And they just move from discipline to discipline, torching people's reputation and jobs. We've seen the multiple situations with CEOs of companies where if they've dared to say anything that could be deemed to be controversial, they're outed, they're kicked out of their jobs. If you're a professor, that is at any of these universities, you're kicked out of the job. And this is an important article that was written by a professor that was confirmed the validity of this, written as an anonymous letter because he feared for losing his job, who happened to be a person of colour. Not that that should matter. And stating that the entire, that this is incredibly dangerous and not representative of what many people think. But if you stand up and say, no, I don't agree with that, you will lose your job. And it comes back to Nassim Talib's excellent works. He wrote an article, part of one of his books, talks about the dictatorship of the intolerant minority. And so it's not about the majority of people thinking anything. It's just that those who do are so intolerant to any other views that they rule. It's a little bit like if you and I walked into a bar and there's 20 people in the bar and there's one guy in there and he could be skinny and on any ordinary day we wouldn't fear him. We'd be able to, if he became violent with us, we'd probably deal with him adequately. But he's absolutely wild. Maybe he's on drugs, but he's just not right and he's acting extremely dangerously. What do we do? We just give him a wide berth. We're like, whoa, because we don't know what he's capable of. We don't know if he actually cares about his own body and his own safety. That's normally what happens, right? You don't want to get hurt, so that stops us from fighting largely. Now, if I really don't care, then I'm much more dangerous to you. That's the intolerant minority. They can have that one guy in the bar who will dominate that space. Why? Because nobody's prepared to take him on because his reaction is going to be asymmetric. They might say something that just fucking triggers him and he's off and his reaction is extraordinary and that's essentially what you have today. It's this trigger warned. You say something that violence is now simply offending somebody. Again, I've written about this for years saying that this is extraordinarily dangerous. This is where it leads to. At the beginning of this podcast, you said, is this the tipping point? I think we've passed the tipping point. I think we've crossed the rubicon. There is no going back from this. In order to stop something like this in history, it takes extraordinary blunt force. Now, I don't see that. I don't see that coming. I don't see people standing up to this. On the contrary, I just see largely in the Western world people are queasing to it. We just had, for instance, so we've seen the toppling of monuments. Again, that's exactly what we saw in Mao's China, right? Mao's China recently in Afghanistan with Mojadine, the Taliban. It's the same cycle. People seem to be myopically looking at it and going, no, this is something else. It's like, no, if it walks like a duck and it cracks like a duck, it's probably a duck. I don't see anybody standing up to it. For instance, we just... The next step is quote-unquote reparations. Then if you refuse that, the following step after that, if we look at history, is actually a purge. That seems far off, but history also shows us that this can happen blindingly quickly. That's how it happens. The intellectual class in Pol Pot's Cambodia or in Mao's China, they could see these things were disturbing. They didn't like them. They maybe just got shamed and then a colleague got shamed and it was all worrying and whatever. I want to pause. I think people really don't understand how easy human beings are, especially when it comes to mimetics or mimesis as where neighbours are. In Pol Pot's and Cambodia, not too many people know. I think more people need to understand the story. If you were wearing fucking glasses, they thought you were above them. Cambodia was so bad. They destroyed a generation. Everybody was illiterate. All the people that had any intelligence either were killed or they left the country, and they had a 60-70-year span of anything productive to move a nation forward, obsolete, gone. It's really fucked up what happened over there. I've spent quite a bit of time in Cambodia and there's nobody basically over the age of 40 in the country. It's incredible. What you get is this massive dearth of expertise as well. You think about it. As you're growing up, even in your 20s, you will look to your... Not to your peers necessarily, but you'll look to those older than you for advice, running a business, playing sport, dealing with relationships. All the things that make life... You often look... It might not be your father or your mother or your uncle, but it's somebody that fits into that space. It might just be somebody that you become friend with, whatever. But there's this depth of expertise and knowledge and experience that generations tap into. That just got wiped out. It was gone. It's been devastating for the country. But to your point, people don't understand the extremities that this will go to. At the moment, they're saying, well, it's just about racism. And it's not. It's really not. So, Lloyds of London just broke down on this and have said that they are going to pay reparations for slavery. Do you know why? One of the founders of Lloyds was a slave owner. Back in the 1800s. Who cares? Look, if we're going to move back to a... If we wanted to go that far back, then it's not about Black Lives Matter. Why? Because Slav, which is slave, actually has come from Slavic. And that was white people that were enslaved for about 500 fucking years. We were enslaved by the Ottoman Empire for like 500 years, yeah. Exactly. That's right. And that's where the word slave actually comes from. So, this entire thing is absurd. And if we're ever going to move into a situation where you and I or any person must pay reparations for the deeds done by our ancestors, then we basically go back into the Dark Ages. Because that's what you had. How do these reparations work? For who? Everybody? Where do you end? What about reparations for the original aborigines of the land? What about them? What about reparations beyond that? For me, I look at semantics and optics. Lloyds of London, from a virtual singling point of view, makes this statement. We shall be doing reparation. They want us to believe that they're on the side of the virtuous of the good. But then for me, I looked at it as more kind of a judo move. That is what they want us to see, like a pokerhand card. Like, what is the real motives? Like, are they positioning themselves to benefit from this? Like, how are they capitalising on this situation? It's not simple black and white where it's like, ah, we're just going to give some random people money. Well, again, if we look at what happened in history, it was the idea that it's largely self-preservation. It's trying to front-run self-preservation. So, what you'll do is you'll say, before they come at me, I'm going to stand up and go, it's okay. We agree with you guys. We're going to give you some money in the hope that they will go away. And it doesn't work like that. If you feed a dog, it's going to keep coming back for more. And if that dog's successful in getting food, keep coming back. So, what we have now is this collective snowball where everybody's feeding this animal to think that they're going to stop is absurd. They won't. If you're successful in something, why would you ever stop? It doesn't work like that. But that is often why people are doing this is because there is a belief that by siding with that ideology, they will leave you alone to some extent. And so, that's what you do, hoping that that's going to actually help things, but it's not. But the whole shaming thing is extraordinary because it's literally what has happened time and time again. So, that's coming back to what we were talking about before with respect to the markets. This, I think, is equally as important as any time in the past when you had the Bolsheviks coming to power, when you had Tito, when you had Miles greatly forward. So, if you look at these examples, and we're going to wrap up a little bit soon, we're coming up for an hour over here, and you look at the macro, not the macro perspective, and you see a couple of theories that Brett Johnson talks about, the milkshake theory, liquidity crunch, US dollars sucks up a liquidity around the world. We see gold is not really breaking out yet, but you see pressure building up for people looking for gold. You see the stock market, which is not really price discovery per se. Fed just said, hey, we're just going to keep on printing. We're going to buy equities. There's as much money as you need. We'll just keep on printing. It seems like we're entering MMT right now. So, from a historical perspective, even it can be from the Great Depression, so I'm in that too long ago. Is this still the classical golden standard? No pun intended. It's like from a macro perspective, it's just hedge your bet on gold while all chaos happens. Like for me, I kind of find to see it very difficult from maybe hedge fund or quant trading, but I find it difficult for any price discovery right now in the market. No, that's the issue. Price discovery has gone. The ability to actually, because what are the tools you're going to use? Unless you're short-term trading on momentum, you're fresh out of luck. Because, look, we've shut down the world literally. Parts of it are opening now. There are globally over 300 million people unemployed due to the government lockdowns. That's before they started torching half the cities in the US. And we're about just under 15% off the highs. As Howard Marks recently painted in one of his letters, it seems like we're a bit more screwed up than 15%. And so what is the disconnect there? The disconnect there is central bank intervention in order to prop this up. So in Europe, they're buying up. Europe, they're in about 40% of all corporate debt, junk bonds essentially. They're buying it up. They're doing the same thing in the US. So now you prop up all of the corporate debt side of things, buying. What's the flip side to that? Or even just before we get into it, if you stop doing that or if you continue to do that, but things still go south, will you stop buying equities? Fine. What's the flip side to that? The flip side to that on the balance sheet is that all of this just goes onto the sovereign balance sheet. So we simply have more and more debts that are increasing. How do you service that debt? What do you service it with tax revenue? Where does tax revenue come from? It's a percentage of GDP. What's GDP look like? Oh, fuck, it's going through the floor. So you have this incredible asymmetry that's taking place where everybody is looking to the governments and the central banks to solve this massive problem and they're saying, yes, we are and we can. The problem is that you can only normally solve these issues if you've got savings in your piggy bank and there are no savings in the piggy bank. This is borrowing the money, borrowing the money. Everybody can keep believing that until it becomes inevitable that it is impossible to do. So it comes back to what we're talking about at the start. Western civilization was built on a scientific model. It was built on the ability to say, okay, we think this is possible, let's test it and it either proves itself or it invalidates itself. And we've moved far away from that to the point now where they're wanting to defund mathematics in the universities and they're wanting to defund science. I saw that. What the fuck? It's racist. Mathematics is racist. I never knew nature's racist. Wow. Yeah. And this ridiculous idea that sex is a spectrum, for example, again, fine, sex is a spectrum. Let's test it. Let's validate it or invalidate it and you very quickly invalidate it. Okay. There are not 52 fucking genders or whatever they want to come up with and you can't choose your sex. So you have this whole ideology and again, I wrote about this thing. This is a danger, but it's moved through into science and into mathematics and everything else. And they're saying, well, that doesn't conform with what we want. So if you have the tools that are used to actually prove something and it's going to prove something that you don't like, then it makes sense that you get rid of the tools so they're getting rid of the tools. The problem is those very tools of the Foundation for Western Civilisation. You tell me how you build a bridge when maths doesn't work. You tell me how you build a 100-story skyscraper without mathematics. It's going to come crashing down. So we've got the same thing in the finance space. There's this idea where this can be done. Now it cannot. There has never been an instance in the world's history where you can continue to do this. So the next iteration in this and I wrote a long report about it, which has been gathering momentum for some years now is MMT, Modern Monetary Theory, which is neither modern nor is it a theory. This is just a neo-Marxist type of ideology around how something shorter shouldn't work and it will not work for many, many reasons I've pointed out. But that's where we're heading towards. So we either take it to its conclusion and it just collapses where gravity shows that yes, science matters in which event. And by the way, this is not global. That's the important thing. And so I'm spending a lot of time looking at what different countries around the world are doing. That's my segue question I want to ask you. Very, very important question. So you look through history. For the most part, everything is a zero sum game. Capital flight goes, money goes to where it's best appreciated. Intelligence, if possible, goes to the best places it's appreciated. And so we've seen through history, migrations of people, migrations of money that shapes and forms nations and economies. And so for the longest period of time, it was the American dream. It's not like, oh, I wake up, man. I can't fucking wait till I go to China. That's a Chinese dream. No, no. China, America, Russia, America, Europe, America, America, America, America, America. American dream, okay. Now we're seeing this American dream kind of fizzle away, right? You don't have that American dream anymore. But as you just said, for every yin there's a yang, is there other places around the world that have this environment that is more conducive and nurturing for people that have intellectual capital and financial capital? I think it's a matter not so much of, look, what we had with Western civilization was a wonderful thing. But it's going away. And we're going to have to choose an alternative that is less good, less good than that which existed, but better than where we're going. Yeah? So to give you some examples, you think about Eastern Europe where you came from. Eastern Europe today is vastly better than Eastern Europe 20 years ago, 40 years ago, okay? Part of the reason behind that is that they learned some of the lessons of how fucking despicable and terrible that existence was. And so there's a Zid guys there that's determined not to go back there. It doesn't mean that they've suddenly gone down the complete democracy, freedom of everything path, but they've gotten better. On a relative basis, they've gotten better. Yeah. That's true whether you go to Ukraine, Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, it's true across Eastern Europe, okay? It's pretty brawley libertarian with a base layer of bribery. So it's open bribery. It's part of the game. It's part of the process. At least it's open. Everyone can participate. It doesn't matter who you are. You can fucking participate. It's a pretty libertarian. Not so much taxes per se. And you can do pretty much what you want if you bribe the right people. It is a more free society which we're heading into. And I wrote an article about this about two years ago where I discussed Western Europe versus Eastern Europe in particular with reference to migration policies. Okay? And it is universal. Across Western Europe, they opened their borders and said, okay, we'll take in North Africans and Muslims and everything else at scale. Right? Very left-leaning in that respect. Eastern Europe, every single country said no. And it didn't matter whether they were left-leaning or right-leaning. Okay? And part of the reason behind that very quickly is that those who experienced the last... In the West, the last hardship that was experienced was World War II. Everybody's dead. In Eastern Europe, it was a fall of Berlin Wall. That's not that long ago. Yeah. Okay? And many other small... You remember it. You remember it. It is fresh in your memory. 1995, you're just live in a war, Chechnya war not too long ago, even the Ukraine war with Russia. Like there's a lot of micro wars that's been going on. Yeah. Yep. And so there's a desire to keep what you fought for. Hmm. You're not going to give it away. The West is just giving it away. With this belief that the socialist system that they've constructed actually is far bigger and more powerful than it is because they don't understand economics. It's just a percentage of the tax revenues they've come in to try and hold that edifice in place. But there is one caveat to that though. Like in Eastern Europeans, like whether it's the Baltics or the Balkans or any former Soviet satellite place, there's no welfare. No. Well, that's a good thing. Fucking non-existent, man. So here's the thing, Amir. In those countries, there is not a belief by the populace that the government can or should come in and solve any of these problems. We've had this virus issues and lockdowns. It's damaged economies. It's hurt businesses. And this is an East vs West issue. I'm talking about Eastern Europe, but the same is true in Asia. Yeah. There isn't a belief that the government's going to solve these problems for you. So what are people doing? In most Asian countries, they've gone back to the villages. They've left the cities and they're just going to hunker down and they're just going to get on with things and they're going to figure it out. So they don't believe that the government's going to solve the problem and they don't and the government subsequently does not take on more debt. Aha. In the West, it's completely the opposite. The government's are just racking up trillions and trillions of dollars of debt and they're being championed by the people to do so. What the people don't understand is that they're just sealing their own fate by asking for that. So there's there's the East and West type structure with it. You could literally look at Eastern and look at all the balance sheets and look at the trade balances. I've done a lot of work on this with respect to various countries around the world. East and West, East and West and it is extraordinary. And so that's what we're going to see and we're already seeing it is a shift of political, social and intellectual, increasingly intellectual capital is going to shift to where it's treated better. If you're a professor in a university in the U.S. today and science is considered racist and you're a scientist or a mathematician and you're going to be labelled as racist purely because you're following logic and reason and mathematics, proven principles you're either going to just shrink away and do something else or you're going to go where you're treated better. And so this ideology does not exist in East. You'd know it does not exist in Yugoslavia. It does not exist in Hungary. So there's a fascinating chart that I saw which shows and this is just as an example Black Lives Matter protests globally and it was just Eastern Europe and it had highlights of the countries that had no protests and then those that had one and those that had more than ten and so on and so forth. And you'd literally see this map of Europe and it's just red. Western Europe is just red because it's like they've had tonnes of protests. Eastern Europe, nothing or one. And they've been like a few kids in the street and they just got bored at the same time basically. And so it's what it is is you have literally the DNA of the society and this is discussed by Neil Howe and Strauss in the fourth turning. A great book. Which listeners should definitely... If there's any books to read right now and I mentioned this in the inside out the other day, it is to read Alexander Solzhenitsyn's the Gulag Archipelago which is a bit of a tough read and it is incredibly distressing but it is so important. And the other one is the fourth turning and then I would suggest also Animal Farm and 1984. Because they are so prevalent in terms of understanding where we are right now and this is the most important I think time not just in our lifetimes but probably in the last 100 odd years. It's cycles. What I like about the fourth turning they go into deep into Young Ian and Joseph Campbell psychology and mythology. And we are entering a phase of in modern psychology they would call it the Peter Pan syndrome Young would call it the man-child syndrome. And what we see right now is majority of people you can substitute man-child for woman-child doesn't matter it's an adult body with a psychology of a child and they need a mother the devouring mother the helicopter parent to take care of all their needs every aspect of their life wipe their butt give them money allowance protect them make sure nothing happens to them and give them this little bubble world of rules the mother will protect you and they never become the maverick so the ways to counteract they don't take risk they don't understand risk they never grew up psychologically they never grew up Amir this started with the schools for example where children aren't allowed to climb trees because it's too dangerous but that exists across the western world today and so we've we've we've generated an entire generations of man-children as you talk about or as you talks about and so now we're just we're reaping their harvest and the issue and this is I was talking with a buddy of mine the other day and I was remembering years back this has been almost 20 years ago I bumped into a guy I was climbing um Table Mountain in Cape Town and I bumped into this German chap we became friendly long story short he was a money manager who managed index funds and one of the major things that he looked at and it always resonated with me and has just come back to me now is he said if you want to know what a country is going to look like in 10 years time go and study the universities because whatever the Zittgeist in the university is those people are going to be holding the positions of power CEOs, politicians legislators, judges you name it that's where they're going to be and whatever they if there's a powerful Zittgeist there you need to pay attention to that and at the time he was talking about South African and he was saying if you look at what's beginning to gain traction there it was this Marxist sort of ideology and I fast forward to about 10 years ago actually no it would be less than that and I wrote a long article about it and we had within the South African universities it was you know on surveys done it was something like 70% of the class or not the classes the sort of student bodies etc that have been set up were all Marxist in ideology today in the US not only is that prevalent within the student bodies but in the professors with the professors one in five identifies as a Marxist not sympathizes with Marxism identifies as a Marxist and so you can't undo that you cannot undo that so we're we're facing this onslaught of an ideology of an entire generation probably at least two generations that have been brought up with this sort of ideology and they're going to bring it to fruition determined to do so and we're in the first innings maybe nearing the end of the first innings of that and it could be a soft revolution which just turns the west into basically a fairly fucked up place that loses I wouldn't categorize United States as a group because like I said before what I think and goes to your point of possibility of civil war or something in those or something that resembles that is like you look down south whether it's Texas whether it's Florida, whether it's Arkansas you know deep deep down south is heavy heavy red states not so much Marxist ideology and they're fucking armed armed to the fucking gill I hear what you're saying and that's why I think that the probability of civil war is is decent what has been interesting to watch though when you think about an invading force you either you're either on the defense or you're on the offense and the counter to this is very much on the offense very much on the offense even within those I mean I'm seeing things on a daily basis out of places like Texas where you go whoa I didn't think that was going to happen here's what it's like so when I grew up in Africa and I talked you could see what was coming there I was fortunate enough at about age 16 to start reading a lot of the history the countries north of the border which had thrown off the cloak of colonialism beforehand so Africa went down the apartheid route and held on to a different structure for longer but then when that went away I was like okay what comes next and I looked at all these other countries and they all followed pretty much the same route it all went down some sort of Marxist policy and it took about 30 years so I looked at those like okay South Africa is basically just 30 years behind all these other countries and that's kind of where we're at today so it was very easy to see the probability of what was going to transpire and I remember talking to people about it and it was always the same it's the same thing I'm hearing now from Americans in the red states it's this idea of if they do this then it's like finished we'll stop there and it's like that line just keeps moving if you had gone back and said if you had cities on fire we would have stopped it before then and here we are there are red state cities that have been looted and burnt very akin to when Hitler took Poland Russia and the United States it's like yeah no problem you can have those other Eastern European countries but when you got a little bit too greedy but if you come this way to the West then we're going to have problems and if you let so again you're dead right if you let that happen you're fueling it because when you have success you keep doing it like if you're running your business and it makes you a whole lot of money you go bloody hell that was good what did I do there oh that worked I'm going to do that again you're not going to look and go oh no I'm not going to do that again so I think that's important for both sides because at the moment there's this there's a success that is being gained so to think that they're going to stop unless there's something stopping them and so the countenance to this is on the retreat it's on the retreat and so yes I do believe we'll have bloodshed and there's going to be there's going to be a clash coming but I'm not the Zipgeist is not it's not a powerful we're not letting this happen it's more like we're not letting them come this close which is a retreating thing it's a you know here's the line oh no no no oh it's actually here to the point now where it's like I mean I'm seeing this with people you just mentioned Florida, Texas these places people I'm talking to they're like oh well there's stuff happening in the cities I'm not going to worry about that I'm out in the suburbs already that's your state environment oh I don't go into the city yet often but they've taken your city so the line is moving it's like well we're not worried about the people in the city if they go and they torch a few buildings there and there's riots we're in the suburbs we're just going to protect our suburbs so everything is moving the other way so again if you go back to North Turning it's like the actual DNA of society is very very different and that doesn't bode well for how this works out so yeah I mean I think that the US can splinter I think it's going to have to and that's just going to be chaos so yeah so bottom line for people is study history load up on physical gold if you can buy bitcoin that's the digital gold and be ready to be mobile if you have to move somewhere well I think it's more than just gold I mean it's when you go through these periods it's going to be a stagflation environment which you're already moving into yeah and when you have that sort of thing all the supply spend a lot of time on supply chains supply chains are massively under pressure you got trade wars taking place you have geopolitical tensions and so some of the most asymmetric types of sectors are not gold gold one of them because things like agriculture energy they're going to be huge now you and I were talking about agriculture I'm bullish very bullish in agriculture so those are all in that interim and then as we come out of this and I think the in terms of locality where you're going to be wanting to have your capital and potentially even your person is going to be largely be in the east that's where the on a relative basis you're going to be treated better intellectual capital is going to move there human care and sciences you name it that's where it's going to be look you're going to land up having this this weird where you would you will choose a place that is even a somewhat of a dictatorship or an authoritarian country because they allow other freedoms that make your life better I hate to say it I don't wish that but that's what I see as being relatively inevitable where you'll literally say you know what I'd rather live in Shanghai than I would in Berlin or in you know because I have more freedoms we're in interesting times all cycles and everything cycles out and I just wish the best for people Chris I want you to tell my audience about insider I mentioned before but I think it's a phenomenal resource for people if you want to shed a light on exactly what it is so insider was actually designed after the fact we run Glenorchee Capital which is a managed asset management firm for Pinetworth clients and the work that we do in order for those clients because we were doing all the work we said hang on a second there's like many people who aren't Pinetworth individuals that can still utilise this as as a service and it's not just coming from you know some crappy publication type business well look I mean we manage it's an asset management firm and in the research that we do on that is what we publish and so then and there's all sorts of clients that use that it's everything from Joe Sixpack trying to understand markets through to asset management firms that buy it so that's what it is and it's it comes with a writer weekly report on that basically you know covering many of the sectors that we're invested in and then any special report if we're doing anything within the portfolio buying something selling something special reports on that and in the community as well which our clients it's a slack community where they discuss all sorts of the sectors that we're invested in you name it and then I do a monthly Q&A so everybody can ask me any questions around what we're doing why we're doing it what I think about this the other thing and we run through that it's a live Q&A once a month and yeah so that's it Chris I just want to thank you so much guys if you are interested in checking out Chris's insider it's in the show notes as well you can just go to www.amirrosic.com it will take you there directly we have a special offer for anybody who's part of a mirror approved audience Chris brother always a pleasure really appreciate you taking your time out and talking about this and definitely we'll do another session in a month or two and thanks once again not a problem always good to check to you man likewise brother