Speaker 1This is the Commodity Culture Podcast, where we interview prominent investors, fund managers, analysts, and company CEOs to give you an edge when it comes to investing in the commodity space. Simon Michaud, it is great to have you on Commodity Culture. Now, we have to kick things off with the growing civil unrest in France that now also appears to be flaring up in Belgium and Italy. We're seeing a lot on social media, which is, of course, a medium that rewards sensationalism to draw clicks. I wonder how you've been observing it, if you could help us separate the signal from the noise, because obviously there's all sorts of theories out there. This is an Islamic takeover is one theory. They allowed too much unchecked immigration. It's a cost of living crisis. Of course, the official narrative being that it began through student protests, though as many have pointed out, a lot of these people in the streets. Certainly don't look like they're of the age to be students. What are your thoughts on this and why it's all playing out and the reasons behind it?
Speaker 2So this is an opinion, but it's considered opinion. I call bullshit. Not that it's not happening and that it's not real. It's just that why is it happening now? To me, this is not a synthetic situation. You know, when the remember the yellow vests when that when they came out. That was an organic thing. Pressure builds up over time and then there's some trigger events. And from memory, it was the French police or the French government demanding that you had to have a yellow vest in the boot of your car as a rule. And everyone sort of turned out. It wasn't that everyone was upset at the thought of having to carry a yellow vest in their car. It was more a case of we have had enough of your or your authoritarian approach to life. And so everyone turned out and they were everywhere and they stayed. They stayed in place for a long time, like a really long time. Vive la France. But but the current mob that are out, there doesn't seem to be a trigger event. And what's also another flag viewers check this out ahead of time with those riots pallets of projectiles. Happen to be put into place. Right. And they just happen to be there. And then when when when you often see these rights, you often see a lot of placards and signs and they all seem to come from the same place. Who pays for that? So it's premeditated. So to me, what's happened is someone is playing silly buggers with social engineering and fifth generation warfare where there are real pressures in place, real people who are upset. Yes, there's a lot of illegal immigrants that have been brought in. Yes, society is not very happy about that. So there's a lot of anger. So there's fault lines to direct that. But someone has directed that anger to this end and it's manifested in multiple countries and multiple places. Right. So so to me, watch this space. It is to put like is it as simple as the people in charge, you know, the conventional people in charge have lost. The. Initiative. So now they're just going to burn it all down. Or. Is this an action to just put people and put our leadership under pressure to make them jump through hoops, putting out fires everywhere? Meanwhile, something rather serious is happening in the background while they're distracted. Right. And I think it's the latter. So so it's an opinion. But I think this is the precursor to something else. Right. And it's whether that's something else actually manifests this time. So we've been through this before. It almost happens. And then it doesn't. There is a full on conflict happening behind the scenes of an unconventional nature.
Speaker 1Could you unpack that unconventional conflict that you're seeing going on right now behind
Speaker 2the scenes? I split warfare into 10 paradigms, 10 generations, 10 spheres, if you will. And what we're seeing in things like economic warfare. Is one law fair is another, but the fifth generation warfare is a war of ideas. Where. People are get to believe something and then they'll sort of turn out like psychological warfare is the fourth generation for me and what we saw in Vietnam, that they're all slightly different, but. There is there are interest groups that are less like an arm wrestling, but they're using all the. There is a hybrid warfare that sits below Article 5 between the West and Russia. Both sides are heavily engaged in that both sides are very aware of. We need to keep things below the threshold of Article 5. They openly said this. And so like Europe has a role in the hybrid war below Article 5 against Russia. What does that mean? Then. Please explain, sir, right? So it's the sorts of things we are seeing is economic warfare, like the buying of shares and companies, government treasuries, dumping of treasuries, cyber attacks. Also, the decisions made by civil officials, they're often pressured from various different directions that they're often not left alone to do their jobs. It's coming from lots of directions and some of. It is some of us quite asinine. You look at these guys, really, guys, come on, you know, it could be something. Things like, OK, a group of migrants have hit the shore. They're not violent, but those migrants will now consume resources and they'll they'll consume a minister of time to process those migrants while that part of the government is doing that. It's not doing something else. You did that sort of thing. And so there's a lot of pressure on our civil sector at the moment that is unconventional. It's always been difficult. But if you actually get someone in the civil sector, like in the civil sector government and ask them how things were 30 years ago and they said, look, we've got all sorts of problems now that didn't exist back then, it's not an accident. Yes, technology is developed. Yes, society has developed, but it's been weaponized. And so, yeah. So that's that's what I believe we are seeing. And with these riots, you know, like a riot in prison, if there's a prison riot, it takes months and months and months to build pressure, build anger, pressure up. And then the riots like a release function. And then after that, no one wants to fight anymore for a while. And these these these these these riots are the same while the anger is in play, you know, stuff's going to get burnt and broken and smashed and all that. But there comes a point when the rage burns out and it's a relatively short term thing, unless it's synthetic and someone's organizing this. So the question is, what is the true point of anger behind these riots? And if you think about it, it's not as clear as it should be with the scale of the riots that are happening this time in multiple countries at once. There is no clear flashpoint. There is no clear point of aggression. And and then the flag for me is, you know, like pallets of of stones and bottles, empty bottles put in certain places along along the routes, just just ready for the normal security barriers that normally protect certain buildings are taken away. Another flag is. One of the buildings that burnt down happened to be the French resistance headquarters. Now, if these people were real rioters, that's a symbol. That burned down a bank with a burn down a church, no, no, you know, because these things are symbols, but the French resistance headquarters, really, that's a message, guys, a message for who? That sort of diagnoses who and what is behind these riots, really.
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Speaker 2The issue of the Spanish territory, Souda, in the north of Africa, that ties directly into some analysis I've been doing in terms of. Who controls the trade routes for stuff? Who controls the movement of materials? Now, that Spanish territory means the Spanish have territory on either side of the Strait of Gibraltar. Gibraltar? I'm not pronouncing that right. Gibraltar. Morocco has been invited in to become a BRICS member. Now, I believe the BRICS member. Now, I believe the BRICS member is. The BRICS alliance serves a purpose that we can talk about shortly. It's the real purpose of this war is control, physical control of the material world. Now, Morocco happens to have 70% of the world's phosphate rock reserves, which is what we need to make fertilizer for industrial agriculture. The trouble in Souda has been encouraged by Morocco. Who's encouraging Morocco? Well, you can speculate. But what it means, if the Spanish are kicked out of that territory or the Souda is just all too hard, the Spanish lose control of that important maritime strait. So, you see things like, who controls the Suez Canal? This is on your list of questions that we can talk about shortly. And the migrant force is used as a weapon, a blunt weapon, to complicate the lives of the people who are trying to administer that. To the point where it's just not worth it. Look, we're just going to seek control of this territory. Yeah. So, as for the weaponization of the migrating population, there's a book. Fiction has a way of exploring ideas in a useful context. Read a book published in 1973 called Camp of the Saints. The premise of the book. It was on the banned list for a long time. The premise of the book is. Something like one million refugees invade France. They just flood in. And the civil services and society at large was overwhelmed. And the nation state of France came apart at the seams and it eventually fell as a nation. Right. But back in 2015, or was it 2014 or something, that Muppet, George Soros, was openly quoted, openly, that he was. I'm just saying the refugees from the Syrian war were going to flood into Europe. And at the same time, Turkey was playing the game where they had a lot of migrants were coming from Syria. They were holding them. They were processing them. Turkey was holding back anyone who was valuable, anyone who's educated, doctors, engineers, what have you. Anyone who had a criminal record, no education, especially people who were involved in criminal. Activities like the drug trade. They were sent forward into Europe. And what they would do is they'd hold them for 48 hours. And they'd get people they know were junkies, druggies. They know that. And they would hold them. And then they'd drop them over the border. What do junkies do when they're looking for a fix? And we're not talking one and two here. We're talking thousands. And Erdogan, the President Erdogan of Turkey at the time, said, Turkey. He would like European passports for its citizens. You will give that to us or we're going to flood Europe with these refugees. Followed by, you will give us six billion euro to manage these refugees. Otherwise, we're not going to do it. What did Greece do? They put up a great big fence and they said, yeah, not us. Go away. Right. So, and back to Soros, he was saying, I will flood Europe with refugees and this could be the end of Europe. The end of Europe. The end of Europe. So, it is known. These refugees are being moved around like pawns on a chessboard. The human tragedy, the human misery that's being weaponized here is right up there with the other war crimes against humanity. It's just, how could you do this? But they absolutely are doing that. Now, I was in Belgium from 2015 to 2018. And I think it was. I think it was 2017 that the police in Amsterdam. You often hear about there is a right-wing swing right across Europe. Why is that? Right. Now, a lot of the social engineering policies have come through left-wing style governments for about 40, 50 years. There are a lot of conversations that are not allowed to be had. And so, people are rejecting those dialogues. And so, what are they rejecting? It's left-wing. Therefore, we're going to go to the right. So, 2017, it was either the year before or that year. I don't remember the details exactly. But in Amsterdam, the police started. They had a lot of. The area was being flooded with refugees from Morocco. Economic refugees. They're not running away from a war. They just want a better life. And they've come into Europe. Usually, apparently, it was to access the medical system. You know, my kid needs a dentist. Right. We're here. But they brought all their problems with them. The police started tracking people based on their skin color as it appeared on their identity. Right. And the reason for this is the number of women raped between Christmas and New Year's for that year was reduced by something like 30%. Right. They were then pulled up. And they said, that's racist. You can't do that. The following year, the rate of women being raped in the same time frame went back to what it was to that baseline. Now, the people in Amsterdam who had a structured society that they had taken centuries to build was being overrun. The average person walking down the street in Amsterdam thought in terms of, how can I make our society a better place? Whereas, look, the average person coming in from Morocco. was thinking in terms of, how can I gain the system for my own personal gain? A very different paradigm. The people in Amsterdam were told by the European Union, you must take these refugees because you're part of Europe. Shut your mouth. It's just the way it is. Oh, by the way, you've got to pay for all this. So all the systems in Amsterdam were overwhelmed, medical systems in particular. But then we actually sort of had this sort of thing, well, hang on, because of an accusation of. racism, 30%, there was a 30% increase or decrease of our women being raped. We can't even protect our own people because of an ideology. And the people who were giving them a hard time on the internet were from the social media. They were the woke warriors from California. And so there was a deadly, deadly serious tectonic shift that started back then. And it says. What the hell is happening? We don't want to be part of Europe anymore. And there's now, in areas, they've actually sort of started changing the law, and they've changed certain zones. They now want to break up certain ghettos. Society has quietly responded, we don't care what you think of us, we're just going to do it. But because we can't have that conversation out in the open, people just quietly act. And that's what's happening. right across Europe. That's the basic story behind what's happening in Germany. In France, Marine Le Pen, she was a right-wing political leader, but her political opponents tried to have her committed for mental illness. Dodgy, guys, dodgy. And so what happens to her supporters? Are they going to just accept that? So you've got a combination of these riots in Europe are happening. There is real anger there. Some of them are synthetically put together, but society's had enough. It's well had enough, and there are large groups of people becoming red-pilled. We finally understand. We're not going to play along with this. I think we're seeing a version of that. Someone's lit the fuse, though. And what that concerns me is other fuses are being lit elsewhere. So this is a distraction. Look over here. Look over here. Don't look over there. No, no, over here.
Speaker 1Now, before we move on to the conflicts and the very interesting conference which you attended in Warsaw on defense in Europe, which you've got a lot of great insights from that, I know, is the left versus right playing out, for instance, the AfD in Germany, Le Pen in France? Is this controlled opposition? Is this all a PSYOP? Because it seems too convenient. It's almost like the people controlling both parties or that there's somebody controlling both parties behind the scenes. It's almost like you create the problem and then you offer the candidate or the party that's going to present the solution. Maybe I'm just being cynical. I think I'm more black-pilled than red-pilled these days. Do you think there's any merit to that theory?
Speaker 2That's what they're trying to do is what you could say, but there's a large number of people now who have been watching this happen over the last 10, excuse me, 10, 15 years, and it's not left-right. That's now an illusion. I think it's up-down, right? And it's becoming very apparent to the people on the ground where things that used to be like center, can we have a discussion? That's weaponized. What used to be called left-wing has been hijacked and weaponized by groups that don't care about their left-wing ideologies, thus the term fifth-generation warfare, right? Anyone who opposes them is automatically right-wing to label. You're a Nazi. We will punch you in the face. But the people on the ground are looking at each other, and let's call them the center of left. They're now looking at the center of right, and then it says, hang on, we're not extremists, you're not extremists, can we have a discussion? And so what's now starting to happen is whole chunks of society are backing away from the left-wing riots, right-wing riots, and that's good because people are finally waking up to what this means. So is it too convenient? Yes, if it works. Like I said, the people on the ground are now educated, and they're not as stupid as the architects of this situation would like to think. And so people are starting to remember. And as they remember, we're seeing a fully-fledged awakening happening all over the planet.
Speaker 1I want to talk about the Warsaw Security Forum you were just at at the end of last month. I want to read a quote from the chair of the Security Forum, Professor Pisarska, who said, quote, the Ukrainian struggle for freedom reminds us that peace is never guaranteed and resilience demands an all-society and cross-industry approach. We remain resolute in our purpose, guided by the enduring Polish motto, for your freedom and ours. I'm throwing mottos out there. Okay, great. Wow. Anyways, it continues. We will continue to prepare to defend and to deter because peace is best preserved through strength. Now, it's interesting how it's always those who never get their hands bloody in the actual war who like to opine on peace. Peace through strength. Give us your take on the events, any insights you glean from that, and how European leaders and indeed leaders in the West around the world are currently viewing the situation between Ukraine and Russia and indeed the entire security architecture of the European Union.
Speaker 2Look, some of my thoughts and opinions might upset people who have drunk the Kool-Aid, but we're going into a very serious situation. And so we need some frank discussions. I saw some flamboyant bullshit at that forum. Now, how do I unpack that? So the people there were all very polished and had prepared. It was a script. You had about 2,500 people in the room, and they're all generals, admirals, military people, but they're also defense ministers, senior civil servants. I was very much a stranger in a strange land. I shouldn't have been there because there was no one else there. I'm an analyst that's working in the civilian industrial system. And the analysis I put together is what this conflict is all really all about is in my world. And it was not referenced anywhere by these people. They are completely unaware and they had no clue and they had no plans to get one. When I was trying to talk to some of these people, it was the concept of energy. You know, why is energy important? Oh, well, we will take. I'll take out the energy infrastructure and they'll try and take out ours. Yes, but the underlying systems behind that energy over a 20, 30 year time frame. Where do we get it from and how do we use it? It was like trying to explain the concept of being horny to an eight year old. They just didn't get it. And so I stopped trying to talk to them about it after a while. And what I've come to the conclusion is our military leadership, if that's this is how they really think, have misdiagnosed. The nature of the conflict they're in. They have misunderstood the true nature of that conflict. They've also misunderstood who their adversary really is. Now, the whole thing was Russia, Russia, Russia. The Russians are evil. The Russians are coming to get us. Okay. Why are the Russians doing this then, sir? Well, Putin, who is evil, the next Stalin, he wants to establish the next Soviet Union empire. And he wants his plan. His plan is to establish the next Soviet Union empire. And his plan is for him personally to become the next Peter the Great. Okay. Cool story, bro. Let's unpack that. Can we have some information to support that, please? Because nothing in that, like China wasn't mentioned at all in the whole conference. The information I'm putting together, it's actually the BRICS alliance that's actually put together a cartel. Brazil, Russia, India, China. And now you've got a whole spectrum of. New partners that have come on board. Russia and China are the only visible actors at the moment, but they're all there, right? And so Russia is serving a purpose in that alliance. And it's all about forcing an outcome of which financial system is allowed to survive or who has control of our money. So we can go through that shortly, but that's your next question, I think. But these people had. No clue about any of that, which means their view of the Russians was very simplistic. What do the Russians actually want? Well, they've misdiagnosed it. They have completely misdiagnosed. It's very clear to me there's an A team and a B team. The A team is all about economic sanctions, legal lawfare. Kick the Russians out of SWIFT. Seize the Russian assets. Take those Russian assets and use it to fund the Ukraine war. Use their own money. Again. None of this is legal. A lot of it is actually, by definition, an act of war. It's also offensive in nature, as in military offensive. Team B is defensive in nature. Team B is your conventional military. NATO is a defensive alliance. We will not attack anyone. If anyone tries to attack them, we're going to kick their ass. Right, right, right. But, right. What was very apparent in the war? In this. A team, I believe, is based in London, as in the finance group in London. They don't care if Europe gets destroyed. The people on B team have been handed a very difficult situation, which I don't think they're going to be able to perform in. Now, it was very, very clear that the Americans are withdrawing from Europe. They are withdrawing all critical assets from Europe and redeploying to the Indo-Pacific. The Americans openly said, our strategic priorities are the homeland, the United States, the Western Hemisphere, North and South American continents, the Pacific, let's meet the Chinese coming in, and fourth was Europe. Europe's not a priority anymore. For the last 40, 50 years, the Americans have had control of NATO. Oh, well, that's fair. They paid for everything. They wanted control, and they wanted to meet the Russians, and that was their objective. The Russians aren't their concern anymore. The Chinese are. Right. So as the Americans are withdrawing, they're taking a lot of critical. stuff with them. What's left in Europe is seriously fragmented. And a lot of the military left behind is obsolete. And it was the American contractors that were supplying a lot of their military toys. A lot of the European groups were just overlooked. Now, before all this monkey business started, the NATO alliance with the Americans had enough air and missile defense capability to cover about 5% of the frontier with Russia. 5%. Then anything that wasn't welded down, as in terms of a Patriot missile system, was redeployed to Israel to deal with the Iranian problem. So that 5% is now substantially less. Russia is firing more missiles and is able to make many times more missiles than Europe or the United States. The manufacturing capacity. What's clear is the military doctrine has changed. All the conventional stuff of conventional tanks and aircraft and all the stuff. The thinking's still in the 1980s, when the Soviet Union was still here. They think they're going to fight war as it was back then. They think the Russians are going to come in through some agreed corridors and they're going to meet them. And NATO is going to deploy along freeways that have been built and supply depots that were built for that purpose decades ago. And they're going to deploy along freeways that were built for that purpose decades ago. And, right, none of that's going to work. The reason is the Ukraine war is showing the military doctrine has changed. Drone warfare is kicking everyone's ass. Electronic warfare with drones. AI agents running swarms of drones is the future. AI agents deciding which targets, which people are going to get killed, according to what AIs decide. And because. One side's doing that, the other side's going to have to have AI agents running defensive shooting down drones. And that's going to be what's required to survive. So humans are being cut out of warfare in terms of the decisive edge. That won't make the existing unit obsolete. What it means is it's just not very important. So you've got to. I heard a combination of. I think it was in Saudi Arabia. Advanced Russian radar were able to detect and see an F-35 flying in Saudi Arabia. They then tell the Houthis. The Houthis then get a lot of really low-tech drones, launch them to exhaust the defensive capability of their target. And then one high-quality munition that came from Iran was fired to take out that F-35. That combination is now the new. warfare. And what's interesting, it's all low-cost stuff. What the magic is, is the software system that talks. how the drones talk to each other and how command and control talk to it. So military doctrine has very much changed. A lot of the military that is in place in Europe is obsolete. Someone at this meeting, when the script. fell over and the mask flipped a bit, mentioned that if a nation-state starting with G had to deploy to war tomorrow, half of their military capability would be grounded through the maintenance issues that could not be resolved quickly. And so the Europeans don't have the capability to manufacture stuff in Europe because the Americans have the license. The Americans have left. They're not going to give the license. The European plan is things like, to make the F-35 in Europe at a massive scale. But the F-35, the most expensive weapons platform in the world, the Russians can see it on radar. So the people there were all very confident that they will perform just fine. We'll be able to deal with the Russian threat just fine. But then they'll admit certain things that, oh, well, the Americans are leaving and we can't replace their capability. We need 49 brigades. of deployable combat troops somewhere quick to make up that shortfall to meet the Russians. Their plan, their big plan, is to develop a European space force to punish and intimidate the Russian assets on the ground to perform well in a conflict with Russia. That's their big plan. The Americans, the Chinese, the Russians, maybe even the Indians are already up in space weaponizing it, and the Europeans have limited launch capability, and they don't have any money. Right, so we're talking about delusional thinking. I heard about 20 or 30 times that European member states had to actually increase military spending, take responsibility. And if they did that, maybe the Americans wouldn't leave NATO. And the Americans were suggesting, well, it's money that's got to be sent to our defense industries. Right, and so they're talking. They're talking about the agreement was 2% of GDP for each member state, and most member states haven't been doing that, et cetera, et cetera. Every European country is facing budget cuts. How the hell are they going to do that? They're talking about 5%. They're just not going to do it. The thing where I fell off my chair laughing, I think it was Keith Kellogg, David Petraeus, that's right, it was David Petraeus in one of the sessions. He said, the American president, they didn't say Trump, the American president has made NATO stronger by threatening to pull out that European countries have been forced to spend more money on defense, therefore it's stronger. The American president has been helping you. And the audience, which was so sort of on script and everything, didn't say, yes, sir. Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. Like when someone suggested, I think it was Vladimir, no, no, it was one of the addresses we're talking about when the Russians hit some data centers in Ukraine. So Ukraine hit some data centers in Russia, and when they did, they happened to take out a bot farm, and all of a sudden, everything's on social media got easier. And so everyone said, well, we just need to get Zelensky to hit some more data centers then. And the audience clapped, right? And so everyone, it's like everyone's drinking the Kool-Aid from the trough. You know, everyone, let's go along with it. But it's full-on delusion. They're all talking like it's a business opportunity or someone else's problem. None of them are actually, like, there were a few Ukrainians that I spoke to, and it says the people here in Europe, they have got no clue of the concept of reality of war like this. Right? And so the Ukrainians are the only ones that have a snowball's chance in hell of meeting the Russians in terms of drone warfare and missile defense because they've been fighting, their military has been forced to evolve. Right? The rest of Europe, absolutely not. Absolutely not. And, yeah, they were talking about getting Starlink capability over Russia, being given to the Ukrainians and to NATO. That's what they wanted. But, of course, if they did that, this conflict would escalate and we may as well not bother. Yeah. I was a fly on the wall. I was not there to say challenging questions at all. There were lots of questions I could have challenged. But if I did, any questions I'd put out there would be a turd in the punch bowl, and I'd be escorted from the building very quickly. So I was not there to ask questions. I was there to write notes and, yes, sir, no, sir. Of course, sir. Yes, tell me more, sir. I was there to learn.
Speaker 1I hope you've been enjoying this interview. And if you're the type of person who likes to dive deep and become a better investor in the commodities sector, I have now created an online classroom, the Commodity Investing Academy. We've got lessons on all sorts of topics from investing in silver to uranium to gold and silver stacking and much more, along with being able to take a live look at my own portfolio, which has handily outperformed the S&P since inception in 2020. Find out what I'm buying. What I'm selling and what I'm holding, as well as being part of a vibrant community of commodity investors and sound money advocates. Go to joincia.com to join up today. The link is in the description. Yeah, that's some great information. According to your assessment and just what you've been watching overall, because we recently saw yet another article in the UK media about what would happen if you were conscripted to go to war and you refused. Just crazy stuff. We're seeing coming. We're seeing coming out of the media in Germany, Denmark, the UK. How much of this push towards the citizens of, okay, there could be war up ahead and you might have to fight. How much of that is more of a distraction, a psychological operation to create fear among the populace so that they perhaps don't question other areas? You talked about distraction. Is that just a distraction or do you think we're entering a phase where there's a real chance we could see the EU more directly enter the war? And even worse, citizens be conscripted to fight on the front lines?
Speaker 2Column A, column B. Now, to me, what's really happening is, uh here is we are seeing a tectonic shift or changing of the guard of who controls our industrial system and who controls the money right and so they're trying to bring in a new system that if we were to see it coming we would never accept in a million years so the riots in europe and france for example but also the idea of you know we will now conscript stuff and another one was when um was it denmark due to a feminist equal rights we're now going to conscript women as well um everyone's foaming at the mouth on this stuff while they're doing that in the background with things like the digital id is just being implemented programmable cryptocurrency is just being implemented um we're not being asked about it we're not even being told about it but they're doing it and our bandwidth to actually understand issues and is taken up with these other issues on the other hand they're trying to coerce the russians into into doing stuff if this strategy genuinely is bricks you know brazil russia india china in particular china russia and india helping each other where they'd rather fight us instead of each other right but all we hear in europe is how terrible the russians are and how they're they're we're going to crush the russian economy and that's our plan we're going to make vladimir putin wish he'd never been born right at some point um i believe the russian strategy to keep everything below article 5 uh threshold uh the strategy of the ukraine war has drained nato's consumable base of munitions tanks ammunition troops anything they could put in a shipping container they sent to ukraine the russians set up a defensive line and didn't move and the ukrainians run with nato can you know very very obligingly threw themselves against this defensive line and it was a meat grinder what it means is every country in europe now doesn't have any money to replace those consumables uh you know uh was it one group sent in 12 tanks 12 tanks are blown up we want our tanks back they're blown up sir you need to buy some more we don't have any money oh well no more tanks for you then you know so by the time it actually gets to a real shooting war nato will have been substantially weakened europe will have been substantially weakened i believe there's a grand deal on the table where the americans the chinese and the russians have come to an arrangement of sorts there's going to be a defensive line across the indo-pacific between the chinese and the russians and the americans um the americans are going to withdraw from europe not our problem anymore whatever the russians actually want in europe is actually going to play out i believe but it's not clear what they want i don't believe it's territory because if you take territory you've got to administer that territory which costs you resources and in a low energy world where no one's got any money that's a real problem any territory they take will have to be for a very good reason the only territory that makes sense to me is if they took a territory corridor that links california to europe and they took a territory corridor that links california to europe and they Kaliningrad with the rest of Russia. That makes sense. Right? Mind you, the Lithuanians are now openly saying 2050, we will 2050 Kaliningrad. By 2050, we will own and control Kaliningrad. What do you think the Russians are going to think about that, guys? Yeah, anyway. I heard a lot of delusional talking. But it did diagnose for me what was really happening.
Speaker 1So talk about the economic side of this, because you mentioned digital currencies, the digital euro. I believe it's set to start its pilot program next year. Official launch is predicted to be somewhere around 2029. Obviously, the eurozone is in a lot of trouble when it comes to debt. So are governments around the world. Many people are calling this an emerging sovereign debt crisis as we see yields on government bonds rise. In many cases to levels not seen since pre-global financial crisis days. How much of what's going on here is tied to economics? And what do you think the end result and the end goal of that side of this conflict is going to be?
Speaker 2Well, let's start with the Americans. Let's say the Americans. Let's call him Donald. Let's say Donald, who runs at least part of the American infrastructure, has put a plan on the ground. What is that plan? I'm going to cause as much chaos as possible. The Ukraine war has caused trouble in Europe, but not so much for America. The American war between Israel and Iran has absolutely ripped to shreds the ability for revenue to flow. It's putting pressure on the rest of the system. What if the American goal was that they've got inflationary structures in their economy already, and they know it's coming, and it's mathematically certain they're going to go into a hyperinflation spiral? What if they wanted to control that? We will make an event that will make that worse and keep it worse. Hyperinflation. While hyperinflation is going, but the system is still functioning like that window, they then pay off their $40 trillion debt on an inflated currency. You know, when Zimbabwe went down in 2008, its final currency was $100 trillion. It was worth about 30 euros when it was wound up. If you want to pay off $40 trillion of debt, but you want to generate a bottle of milk, now it costs $20 billion. It's a way of them paying off their debt in a hyperinflationary spiral they know is coming. Everything crashes, and then they implement their system, which I believe is the programmed currency, all the surveillance state, the data centers, that plan. But if they can do it in a way where they've paid off their debt, they didn't default, then their ability to interact with the business world after that is substantially different if they defaulted on their debt, which is what Europe will have to do, Japan will have to do, the UK will have to do. But their plan is going to really cause a lot of trouble. It's going to really cause a lot of problems for the rest of the world. But our mate Donald, well, he's American first. He's in it to win it for America. And that to me is what I think I'm seeing. The purpose of the Iran war is not to punish the Iranians, it's to hurt the Chinese and create hyperinflation during which they can then control the payoff of the US debt system and then bring in a new currency system. So the BRICS economies are trying to get out from under the control of the Anglo-Petrodollar system that's been in place for the last 50 odd years. And they're trying to sort of get out from under that. They're trying to actually put an economics based on the ground of commodities, real physical stuff. And to do it, they're building their parallel systems. They're getting control. They've gotten control of, like I did a study where I looked into who controls mining, smelting and refining, manufacture value chains for 57 minerals and metals. All most conventional European critical minerals lists only list about 30. And I think we've been convinced to look at not the wrong things, but not worry about certain things. Meanwhile, the smelting of, say, zinc or tin or the refining of rare earth elements is controlled mostly by China. But in the mining, okay, China is often the top tier. The next producer or the third producer is Russia, a lot of the time. Right? Then you actually look at they've gotten control of something like about 60, 70 percent. So let's talk control. If you've got a single actor in the market that has, say, 25 percent of the market share, anything less than 25 percent, and you've still got free market actions. By the time you cross 30 percent, that actor can influence price. If they get to 50 percent of supply, they can influence physical supply of that commodity. If they pass 70 percent, they can dictate terms to the market. But quite a few of the commodities are actually over 90. And over 90, it's shut up and take my money, don't hurt. Right? The Chinese, in particular, but, you know, the BRICS together, have got control above 90 percent for quite a few metals and minerals. And it's above 70 percent for a large, and it's above 50 percent for a lot of them. What else is there? They've gotten control of the physical stuff. They've also gotten control of all the trade routes. The maritime shipping lanes happen to be in territorial waters of countries that happen to be in the BRICS alliance. Who controls the Suez Canal? A Chinese company. The Panama Canal, Chinese company at each end. Right? The Americans are in the process of trying to remove them. You know, who controls the shipping lanes that go around India or go through Southeast Asia? All BRICS countries. The Houthis have closed the Red Sea section. There happens to be a big Chinese military base right there in Ethiopia, right there. Have they done anything? No, because the Houthis happen to be their allies. You know, the data cables that go under the sea happen to follow the shipping lanes, right? So you can see it. They've got control of the physical world. The West has got control of the money, money insurance. Their big plan, you know, data centers are a thing. You know, I did split the world up into the BRICS alliance, the West, which is United States, Canada, Australia, what have you, Europe. You know, countries like Norway. Put all that together, that's the West, and then you've got the rest of the world. 85% of data centers that are either built or in the pipeline are in the West. So the data center structure is a specifically Western strategy. Yes, other countries are using data centers. Yes, the Russians and the Chinese have their data centers, yada, yada, yada, right? But it's the idea of the programmable currency, the idea of the digital passport. The surveillance state. All this data has to be collected and done something with. It's a Western strategy. This is their plan. And it was the plan all along. The American administration prior to 2016 developed this plan. But the American administration after 2016 goes, that's a good plan. That can be our plan too. Thanks. And, yeah, so after the Nord 2 pipeline, Nord Stream pipeline was blown up, one of my favorite questions, who blew up that pipeline? Asking for a friend. Yeah, well, after that happened, Europe lost its supply of its primary energy for industry. And ever since then, they've fragmented. They were a major player on the board, geopolitical, but they've been softened up and fragmented. And they're not really a player anymore. It used to be United States, China, Russia, and Europe. And you had the ascending countries of India and Brazil. But they weren't on the board yet. Now Europe's been taken out. The dark horse in all this is India. They've said nothing and done nothing. But, my goodness, they're positioning themselves quietly. I think when it's the most inopportune moment for everyone else, the Indians are going to make their play. That's the dark horse, I bet, for me.
Speaker 1Very interesting. Now. All of this going on, obviously, leads to a potential great upheaval in societies, in countries around the world. It sounds like you believe the West is going to get even more authoritarian with the entire surveillance state. Many have speculated that's a big reason for the AI data centers being built out. Now, what's the solution for all the people watching this show right now? Is it to get out of the countries that are pushing for war? Is it to get out of the West, head to the countryside, start a community? Grow your own food? Should people be stacking physical gold and silver? Is there a political solution to any of this? It doesn't appear that way to me, but I'd love to get your thoughts on actions people can take to protect themselves in these times.
Speaker 2Look, my answer to that might sound a little abstract. And people look at me like a goldfish when I actually, hmm, what? When I say it. But I like the phrase, what if they started a war and no one took part in it? What if they started a war and no one took part in it? What if they turned up to fight it? The architects of this situation, let's call them them, are all psychopaths. They're bloody psychopaths. What's a psychopath? They don't have any empathy. Empathy happens to be the primary human attribute. So the architects of this transitionary situation have misunderstood what human beings are. Their plans, they're putting on the ground. They've been researching us for a long time. We'll work, but only for a short time. I believe what's called human group consciousness, like there's you and me individually, but then us as a species like to do things in groups and communities, and there is a group consciousness. And you can sort of see that in terms of five years ago, it was politically incorrect to have certain conversations. Like this conversation would not be allowed, and now it is. You can meet someone in the supermarket and strike up a conversation about really strange stuff. Because the human consciousness is evolving in sophistication. I would like to think, we'll see how it all goes, but the programming to put us in a difficult situation and expect us to behave like people at war will fail. It's things like if you don't have any money, there's poverty, there is no food, do as you're told, take this gun, run over that hill, do as you're told. Might work for a short time. I don't think it will work very long. Everywhere in the world, there is no perfect place to go to. There's no silver bullet. Any place that happens to be very good to ride out the crisis, well, you won't be the only person to think that, and that place will be under substantial competition to control. So everywhere you have, you've got a list of pros and cons. It comes down to what you personally do. Now, if you can not panic, not react emotionally, and if you can also see the person next to you as your solution, not your actual enemy, then that's the long-term goal to get out of this. In the short term, our life at the moment is very complicated, but a lot of it's not necessary. If we can get to the point where, well, what do we actually need to live, can we scale back our expectations, and can we source those things more locally? Like, have everyone turned out all at once and started growing vegetables? Okay, that's great. Parts of the world, that's going to be a problem. Here in Finland, for example, you have a strong winter that goes for months. You're not going to grow anything through winter. But people used to live here, and they used to grow things, and they used to grow things in the summer and store it over winter, and life was a lot harder and a lot simpler. Right? So what I'm sort of getting at is a lot of what we call wealth at the moment may not be wealth on the other side of this transition. Money, anything electronic, even silver and gold. If I've got a gold bar, a big gold bar, like, great. What do I do? What do I do with that gold bar? Like, can I just exchange it for a box of carrots? Well, okay, a box of carrots, and the gold's gone now. Now what? Having skills that are useful, you know, for example, a midwife or a nurse will never, ever, ever be worried about being fed or finding a place to live, you know, because the society around them will very much value them when they're not skilled. Who do we turn to when things get difficult? Pharmaceutical medicine. What happens if the pharmaceutical stuff stops coming? What do we do? Right, and so there was a whole lot of herbal medicines. All right, well, how do you grow that stuff? Where do you get it from? What I'm getting at is you're looking at a parallel skill set, but the primary thing is if people can step away from the fear, the porn that we're seeing on the internet, you will be afraid. If we can step around that, then the whole idea of a conflict which destroys us all won't be as easy to deploy. I would like to say things like when they force us into a situation of the CBDIC and the digital ID, you know, people say, oh, don't engage in that. Easy to say, but if you've got kids, and that's the only way you're going to get food for your kids, what are you going to do? So I guess what I'm saying, if people become informed, have the ability to understand what they're looking at and talk to each other, talk to each other, form communities, even if things go rough for a couple of years, and even if you end up complying with the system, if people are talking to each other instead of believing what they're told, then we'll get through this. That's a little abstract, I know, but all the conventional stuff like digging a bunker, having a gun, having a stockpile of beans and butter, that is short-term thinking, and what we saw in Argentina in 2001, none of that worked. Eventually, all of those bunkers were targeted.
Speaker 1Yeah, I love that. Where can people go to follow your work online?
Speaker 2SimonMachaud.com is where I like to put my information. works, I've got to update it. And this podcast will probably go up there when I get around to updating it. Sorry, guys. I've also put together an idea of what I call PrometheanNexus.com. If we were to learn everything we needed to learn, and if we were to build a city or a settlement, let's say 10,000 people, and we would use the best science had to offer, what would that city look like if we were to optimize it to the quality of life of the people in that city? Now, these are the evolutions. It's an evolution of the ideas from Jacque Fresco of the Venus Project. That's Promethean Nexus. And it all comes back to what energy system do we use? How do we use it? Where do we get our resources from? Followed by how do we grow our food? And so on and so forth. Circular economy. Steadiest state economy. They're great ideas, but they've got to evolve into something else. I call this the resource-balanced economy. Anyway, that's all on that website.
Speaker 1Great. I'm going to put links below to both those websites you mentioned. Simon, fantastic conversation. Thank you so much for coming on and sharing your insights. You're welcome. Thank you for joining us today on Commodity Culture. Earn up to a 4% annual yield on your physical gold, paid in gold ounces through monetary metals. Go to monetary-metals.com. slash commodity to find out how to put your gold to work for you. Link is in the show notes below.
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