WBD598 Audio Transcription

Debt, Deficit, Spending & Tax with Dominic Frisby

Release date: Wednesday 28th December

Note: the following is a transcription of my interview with Dominic Frisby. I have reviewed the transcription but if you find any mistakes, please feel free to email me. You can listen to the original recording here.

Dominic Frisby is a British author, comedian, voice actor and musical curator. He also produces one of the top 20 financial substacks. In this interview, we discuss a range of issues highlighting how dire our current economic situation is, and if sound money and libertarianism are the solutions, the responsibilities this imposes on us as free citizens.

“In a libertarian society where the government doesn’t do anything the responsibility falls on citizens to do stuff, at the moment, that responsibility is the state’s; so, with freedom comes responsibility.”

— Dominic Frisby

Interview Transcription

Peter McCormack: Good afternoon, Dominic.  How are you?

Dominic Frisby: I'm very well, thank you, Peter.  How's it going?

Peter McCormack: Yeah, it's good.  Good to see you.  That film we made, by the way, I'm going to publish it on Tuesday.

Dominic Frisby: I meant to ask you about that; I thought it had just sort of got lost as things do.

Peter McCormack: No, the editing process just took a long time, but it's ready, it's all done, it's all finished, so that's going on Tuesday.

Dominic Frisby: How long?

Peter McCormack: It's about 25 minutes long.

Dominic Frisby: Oh good.

Peter McCormack: It's about the right length.  So, we've got one more to go; we're going to make one in January about mining and then it's kind of like, "Okay, can we now get properly financed for the films?" but thank you for that.

Dominic Frisby: And the ecological stuff related to mining?

Peter McCormack: We've got so many angles; we're trying to think, "What is the throughline we want for it?"  We haven't fully decided yet.  I'm most interested in the areas of mining that nobody expected would have happened.

Dominic Frisby: Okay.

Peter McCormack: Which is the ecological, it is the flaring gas and the methane it dumps at landfills, but also there's some stuff that's coming out that's happened in Africa to develop low-cost energy.

Dominic Frisby: Have you got Putin?

Peter McCormack: Not yet.

Dominic Frisby: They're going to use some of their oil and gas for mining.

Peter McCormack: Well, we'll come back to Putin.

Dominic Frisby: Okay.

Peter McCormack: Anyway, how have you been, man?

Dominic Frisby: Yeah, very good.

Peter McCormack: What's new?

Dominic Frisby: Well, my sort of big ongoing project at the moment is nothing to do with Bitcoin or mining or anything to do with that, or even investments; it's a musical that I've been working on.  I don't know what colours are left; I'm going to try and brown pill you!  I'm going to try and Kisses on a Postcard pill you.

Peter McCormack: Oh right, okay.

Dominic Frisby: Because this musical's called Kisses on a Postcard.

Peter McCormack: We've got to go to one of his evenings; we've never actually been to one of your stand-ups.

Danny Knowles: Yeah, absolutely.

Dominic Frisby: 16 December, this Friday, Camden, if you fancy it.

Peter McCormack: That might be possible.  I might have to bring my dad.

Dominic Frisby: Even better.

Peter McCormack: Can you just stick that in my diaries?

Dominic Frisby: Does he have unacceptable views?

Peter McCormack: After my mum died, my dad was like, well obviously in a pretty miserable place, so I took him to see the Book of Mormon.

Dominic Frisby: Isn't that the best?

Peter McCormack: Yeah, and it was just perfect, he just pissed himself for two hours and I think it was just the right thing at the right time.  So, yeah, he's not as dark as I am, but yeah, he is; you'd like him.

Dominic Frisby: Good.  I sort of meant unacceptable political views rather than…

Peter McCormack: I think it's more just doesn't give a fuck anymore.

Dominic Frisby: Okay.

Peter McCormack: He just thinks they're all morons.

Dominic Frisby: I think that happens as you get older.

Peter McCormack: Yeah.

Dominic Frisby: Book of Mormon, by the way, is just a fantastic musical.

Peter McCormack: Yeah.

Dominic Frisby: This is something that my dad was a writer, quite successful, now no longer with us, that my dad wrote in the 1980s and it was broadcast on Radio 4 and it was all about his experiences as a vacky in World War II.  Are you familiar, gentlemen, with the story of the vackies?

Peter McCormack: I don't know what a vacky is.

Dominic Frisby: Okay, I'm going to tell you in a second.  And then it got option to be a film, and then the film didn't happen, and then his friend had been urging him to turn it into a musical.  Ken Loach optioned it to be a film but then the film never happened.

Peter McCormack: Ken Loach is great.

Dominic Frisby: Oh yeah, the best.  But it got stuck in sort of development hell and all the rest of it.  Then, in the 2000s, they turned it into a musical, a chance encounter, and it ended up being put on as a community theatre project in Barnstable, which is a little-known town in North Devon.  I went to see it, and it was the best thing I'd ever seen in theatre and I fell in love with it.  I was like, "We have to make this happen, we have to get this into the West End somehow", and Dad was like, "I know", and I said, "Nobody's ever done that to a room before". 

So, one of the reasons I started writing about finance, almost the main reason, was I was trying to figure out how to raise £3 million to £5 million, how to make the money to turn my own little bit of money into £3 million to £5 million in order to raise money to bring this thing to the West End.  That got me writing about gold, and then it was writing about gold that got me into libertarianism and sound money, and I started a podcast, etc, and that got me writing; I wrote a film called Four Horsemen, which was very popular, co-wrote it, and then I wrote my first book.  Then, when I was writing my first book, the argument of the first book is we need to fix money if we're going to fix the world.  Then Bitcoin came along while I was writing the book, so there was a little chapter on Bitcoin, and then I wrote the Bitcoin book in 2013, 2014 and so on, so this musical's kind of what got me started in the whole thing.

Then my dad died a couple of years ago, April 2020, and I was clearing through his stuff and there was the script and the CD, and I took it home and it was just sat on my shelf, and for some reason I put it in a place in my desk accidentally but where it would just catch my eye just over the top to the left of my computer screen, to the top left of my computer screen.  And every day in the lockdown I'd be sat there during whatever on my computer and the thing would catch my eye, Kisses on a Postcard, and a bit like you with Bedford, I was like, "I have to do this".

Peter McCormack: Funny you should say that, so my whole thing, I wanted to make £3 million to £5 million because I wanted to buy a football club.  So, in 2017, when I first got into crypto, I traded this original £32,000 up to £1.5 million; I remember it was Christmas -- was it £1.5 million, I can't remember, the number's ridiculous, but my dad was like, "You need to sell some of this".  He was like, "Sell half of it, buy three houses, you're protected".  I was like, "No, Dad, give me six more months, I'm going to turn this into £5 million and buy the football club"; obviously, that all went to shit!

Dominic Frisby: Yeah, but it happens.

Peter McCormack: Chasing dreams.

Dominic Frisby: I've done it, and I've nearly got to the amount of money; I did once with goldmining shares and then again and never quite did it.

Peter McCormack: Yeah.

Dominic Frisby: Anyway, so during the lockdown, this thing was looking at me and I was like, "I don't have the means to turn it into a film.  This thing should be a film or a series on Netflix or something, but I would need tens of millions".  But not only that, you need powerful allies, to make a film work, you need powerful allies.  Similarly, to get something on in the West End, you need to know the guys who run the theatres, the PR, you just need powerful allies on your side otherwise it's very hard.

I didn't have the means to turn it into a film, I didn't have the means to turn it into a live show in the West End, and the problem with a live show in the West End is that once the curtain goes down on the last night, it's dead, that's it, it's gone, it's history.  I've worked all my life in voiceovers and I know all about audio and I write songs and all the rest of it, so I was like, "I'm going to turn this into a podcast, an audio podcast", and there are all sorts of different versions of the story, and in the end, I made this huge audio podcast that lasts four-and-a-half hours and it's like a musical podcast experience.

We got lots of big names from musical theatre in it because it was the lockdown and nobody was doing anything.  So, we had a 14-piece orchestra and a cast of 50, including 25 kids, and we had this studio booked in to record it, and they were really breaking my balls about COVID, "Oh, everyone has got to be two metres apart, mask, COVID test", and I was like, "I don't have the resources to do this", and they were breaking my balls so much; this was like on the Thursday and we we're going into the studio on the Monday to record it.  So, at the last minute, I phoned round all the other studios, and the first one I phoned up was Abbey Road.

Peter McCormack: As you do!

Dominic Frisby: As you do; aim high.

Peter McCormack: For the youngsters, that's a very famous studio for the Beatles.

Dominic Frisby: Yeah, Abbey Road is the most famous studio in the world I'd say.

Peter McCormack: Yeah.

Dominic Frisby: And it's where the Beatles recorded all their stuff, but you see whoever, Stormzy's there now, whoever.  It's the best studio in the world.  Anyway, they were like, "Oh, this conductor's just come over from France and he has to do two weeks in quarantine, so the studio's free, we'll give it to you at cost".

Peter McCormack: Sweet.

Dominic Frisby: I was like, "Well, yeah!"  So, 60% of it was recorded live at Abbey Road.  So, it's just been blessed with all this good fortune.  Anyway, now it exists and it's Kisses on a Postcard and it's at kissesonapostcard.com, and it is free, I put it out for free because I just want as many people to listen to it as possible; I'm going to lose so much money on it but I just don't care.  And it's permanent; that's the beauty of the internet, once something's up, it's just there forever.  But there are also CDs that you can buy which make nice Christmas presents for people who still have CD players.

Peter McCormack: I was going to say, who still has a CD player?

Dominic Frisby: Quite a few people.

Peter McCormack: Really?

Dominic Frisby: You'd be surprised, in their car.

Peter McCormack: I have got about 1,500 CDs at home in boxes; I don't know what to do with them.

Dominic Frisby: I know the feeling; I'm the same with records.  I'm from the record era and I used to collect records and I've got probably, from this wall to over there, records.

Peter McCormack: You've got a record player, right?

Dominic Frisby: I do, but I never play them.

Peter McCormack: I've got a record player; Danny set it up for me.

Danny Knowles: Have you ever played it?

Peter McCormack: I actually have, yeah.

Danny Knowles: Have you? 

Peter McCormack: Yeah.

Danny Knowles: I'm impressed.

Peter McCormack: I've played some records, occasionally go in, it's the no-TV room.

Danny Knowles: Have you been able to change the speed on it yet?

Peter McCormack: No, so some records I can't play, so some records work and then some, it's like the Chipmunks, and I don't know how to change the speed.

Danny Knowles: It's really strange, like it's a very ornamental record player, so you actually have to lift the platter up and move the belt to make it play.

Peter McCormack: Is that how you do it?

Danny Knowles: Yeah.

Peter McCormack: Okay, so now I know. 

Dominic Frisby: Yeah, so, now I'm going to tell you the story.

Peter McCormack: Okay.

Dominic Frisby: The show is called Kisses on a Postcard.  Have you ever cried in your podcast before?

Peter McCormack: Have I cried in my podcast before?

Danny Knowles: Only when I was editing it!

Peter McCormack: Do you know what, the one we didn't actually release I kind of welled up; do you remember we lost the video for the lady…?

Danny Knowles: Oh yeah.

Peter McCormack: What was her name?

Danny Knowles: I can't remember her name.

Peter McCormack: I got upset in that one, but I do cry a lot.

Dominic Frisby: Okay.

Peter McCormack: I'd cry in a good film.

Dominic Frisby: I've struggled to tell this story without crying, and there's a small chance, if you've any sort of heart, Peter, you'll cry.

Peter McCormack: God, don't put the pressure on me!

Dominic Frisby: So, the show's called Kisses on a Postcard and it's about my dad when he was 7, my dad was called Terry, and his brother, Jack, was 11, and it's World War II, 1940, he's living in South East London, Deptford, and the last soldiers have just come back from Dunkerque and Britain is about to be bombed, the Battle of Britain is about to begin, and every single kid in the cities in the UK is being evacuated to the countryside.  I can't remember if it's 4 million or 8 million, kids were evacuated in 1939/40, and they got the name "vackies".

They were sent from their parents, separated from the them; if the kid was under five, the parents could go, otherwise the kids were separated from their parents.  They were put on a train into the countryside and nobody knew where they were going, who would be taking them in or how long they would be going for, and it's an extraordinary situation that happened to our country.  You can imagine being separated from your kids when they're 7 and 8, 9, 10 years old; imagine how it was for the parents.

So, my grandmother, to turn it into an adventure for them, she came up with this plan to sort of cover up what was going on, and she gave them a postcard, and it was a stamped addressed postcard, and it said, "Dear Mum and Dad, arrived safe and well, love Jack and Terry".  So, Terry, my dad, was 7, and Jack was 11, and they were to write the address of where they ended up on the postcard and send it home.  And the kids are like, "Yeah, but what's the code?" and she said, "You know how to write a kiss with a cross, you put one kiss if it's horrible and I'll come straight down and get you, you put two kisses if it's okay, and you put three kisses if it's nice, and then I'll know".

So, she gives them the card, she writes their name on a little nametag, they each have a nametag around their neck, a little bag with their gas mask, sandwiches, pyjamas, change of clothes, and they walk down to the station along with every other kid in their school.  You can imagine saying goodbye to your kids, you put them on a train with their nametags and you just wave goodbye and you don't know if you're ever going to see them again; imagine, this happened to the whole country.

So, Dad gets on the train and they go on the train all the way through London, across London, and then they go all the way across the whole country, six hours, and they end up in Cornwall, in Liskeard.  Cornwall, for American guys listening, or anyone anywhere, it's probably the most remote part of the country, it's sort of the south west corner of England.

They get off the train in Liskeard and they're put on buses and they're all sent to little villages out in the area, and Dad and 50 other kids from his school end up in this little village called Dobwalls, middle of nowhere, and they're herded into the village hall and the kids are all made to stand there in the middle of the village hall.  All the locals come into the village and they stand around and they go, "I'll take that one there", and they're all chosen like cattle in a cattle market; can you believe it?  That was how they did it; no mobile phones or any of that stuff, no checks, and the strange accents, the strange, Cornish accents, all that going on, these strangely dressed farmers, all farming folk.

The other thing that my nan had said to Dad and his brother was, "You stay together, whatever happens, you stay together"; my dad is 7, his brother's 11.  They get chosen, this Welsh woman, Auntie Rose, chooses them along with her husband, Uncle Jack, and they were Auntie Rose and Uncle Jack and they were a Welsh couple who'd moved down to Cornwall after World War I. 

They didn't know this at the time, they were just picked out by this strange Welsh couple, but he'd been a soldier in World War I, he was only five-foot tall and he'd been in a regiment called the Welsh Bantams, which were all under five foot, little Welshmen; after the tall guys had been shot, they went for the little because initially you had to be above a certain height to join the army.  He'd been in this massacre called the Mametz Wood Massacre against the Prussian Guard who were all six foot four, all over six foot, beautiful blonde-haired German guys, the Welsh Bantams against the Prussian Guard.  When he told them the story about what happened, only 17 of them survived this huge massacre.  Uncle Jack, this man, would say, "Everyone's the same height when a bullet hits him, he's horizontal"; that was the line he would say, but that's later in the show.

Anyway, they get chosen by this couple, and the reason this couple have come down to Wales is that, when he went back to the village in Wales, he was the only man from the village who returned from the war and all the other women in the village -- this is World War I now -- all the other women in the village would just look at him and think, you know, "Where's my husband; what happened to my man?" and it got too much and they eventually left the village and they came down to Cornwall.  He worked on the railways; he'd started out as a coalminer and now he worked on the railways. 

So, Dad and his brother, Jack, Terry and Jack, they're picked by this couple, Auntie Rose and Uncle Jack, and they walk back to their house and it's 7 Railway Cottages.  There's a row of railway cottages next to the railway; he worked on the railway.  They've got the railway at the end of the cottages, which was the London to Penzance line; Dad and his brother loved railways.  My grandad worked on the railways; you know that generation who just loved steam trains? 

They'd go into this house and there's no electricity, only oil lamps, there's a cat asleep by the fire, a canary in a cage, two shells from World War I on the mantle shelf, in the garden there's a pig and some chickens.  They look outside and there's woods and valleys and rivers to dam and adventures to be had, and no toilet, outside privy.  Uncle Jack and Auntie Rose had got this son called Gwyn who's a soldier himself; he was a bit weird.  This scene that I'm going to play you now takes place on the very first night, and the two boys are deciding how many kisses to put on their postcard.

[Excerpt from Kisses on a Postcard musical plays]

Peter McCormack: I'm going to cry!

Dominic Frisby: And that's true, they covered the card in kisses and sent it home.

Peter McCormack: Did you write the music?

Dominic Frisby: That song was written by a man called Gordon Clyde, who was a mate of my dad's, who died in 2008.  The music was sort of half-finished when Gordon died, and Dad got other people involved and tried to finish it off, but what we did, when I adapted it, is I took all the songs that Gordon hadn't written and we basically got rid of them then me and the guy who I write my songs with, we wrote all the rest of it.  It turned out that my mate's dad had also been evacuated to Cornwall; it was one of those happy little coincidences.  So, about half the music is by me and my buddy and the other half is by Gordon Clyde.

Peter McCormack: Send me the full link, we'll have to listen to that.  We usually do this at the end; how do people listen to that?

Dominic Frisby: kissesonapostcard.com and you can buy a CD and you can get links.  It's on Apple Podcasts or whatever; you can get links to all the podcasts.

Peter McCormack: I'm not sure how we segue to Vladimir Putin from there!

Dominic Frisby: Well, we'll just do it, make it awkward.

Peter McCormack: War?

Dominic Frisby: It's kind of cool though; did you like it?

Peter McCormack: Yeah, it is.

Dominic Frisby: And that's just the first 20 minutes.  You get the whole of the story of World War II through the eyes of this little village.

Peter McCormack: Do you know what, I didn't know the story of the evacuation. 

Dominic Frisby: We're not taught it.

Peter McCormack: No.  So, I knew about the underground being used as bunkers to hide out during bombings, I knew about that, and I'd seen, was it World War II in Colour?

Dominic Frisby: Oh yeah.

Peter McCormack: There was something I've watched on Netflix or something, I watched all about the D-Day and the landings and I watched all about the Spitfires.

Dominic Frisby: Yeah, I know what you're talking about, yeah.

Peter McCormack: It was incredible to watch; if you haven't seen this, by the way, it is incredible, but I didn't know about the evacuation.

Dominic Frisby: Biggest movement of people in our country's history.

Peter McCormack: Wow. 

Dominic Frisby: This is why I think this'll be popular in America, prior to D-Day, all the American soldiers come over and they're all billeted in villages around the country, and by whatever quirk of destiny, one of the regiments that was billeted in this village in Cornwall was a village from Louisiana, one of those all-black regiments, so there's a load of black guys came to Cornwall. 

Actually, Cornwall had a long history of naval trade and war and all the rest of it with North Africa because of just where it is on the sea, but that bit of Cornwall, no one had ever seen a black man before.  And we exploit the New Orleans music and everything like mad, we've got loads, and so there are some great numbers.  Then one of the local girls gets pregnant and there's a big scandal because she's had a mixed-race kid and all the rest of it.  It's all a big part of the show.

Peter McCormack: Well, I will definitely listen to it.  Do you know what it does make me think though, looking at a time of World War II where the countries work together and say, "Let's evacuate and let's protect these kids", and families coming and taking them and looked after them, it's like the country really came together at a time that's needed.

Then you look around right now and we've a fragmented society, we've got people who cannot heat their homes in freezing fucking temperatures; I mean, this week was cold, and people cannot afford to heat their homes.  We've got politics that aren't working, it's everything feels broken, it feels like we've rebuilt a country after a war and we've taken it to a point of complete fragmentation.  I'm really pessimistic about the next, I don't know how many years, Dominic, ten years?

Dominic Frisby: I don't know, but I agree, we are a mess and there's no coherence, we can't even agree what it is to be English anymore.  We can't define ourselves, and until we can define ourselves and what our laws are, how can anything hope to work?  And it's not just us, it is the whole of western Europe and probably the United States as well, and it's all because of Russian propaganda.

Peter McCormack: For me, look, there's a distinct lack of credible, believable leaders who you can look at and go, "I can get behind you".  Rishi Sunak?  No.  Keir Starmer?  No.

Dominic Frisby: They're both guys who would, if you stuck them in a major institution, Goldman Sachs or the BBC or whatever, they would both end up being CEO.  They know how to get to the top of an institution but we need some charisma.

Peter McCormack: You can occasionally have someone and go, "Oh, I don't mind so and so", and there's going to be somebody listening going, "Oh, I can't believe that", but do you know, I don't mind Angela Rayner, I don't mind her.  I think she's kind of interesting; I think she cares about people.

Dominic Frisby: I went to a drinks last night and Penny Mordaunt was speaking, and I've always secretly had a bit of a crush on Penny Mordaunt, and she was terrible.

Peter McCormack: Really?

Dominic Frisby: She's so bland and just so nothing.  I was like, "You were nearly Prime Minister", and she couldn't even read the speech and all she was doing was attacking the Labour Party, and it was like, "Oh, come on!"

Peter McCormack: Well, I worry if it's any kind of uniqueness is beaten out of them in the process of becoming somebody who has power.

Dominic Frisby: And she was really scared before she went on.

Peter McCormack: Well, do you know what, it's interesting, I interviewed Ted Cruz out in America recently --

Dominic Frisby: He's great; is he?  I only heard his stuff on Bitcoin mining, so…

Peter McCormack: No, he's good on Bitcoin.  People have mixed feelings about him; I'm not going to pass judgement.  What I will say is that it was interview in a conference in front of a few hundred people and all he did was attack the Democrats over and over and over.  And I put a question to him, and I said to him, "I'm not from round here; it just seems like the red team and the blue team really hate each other, but on this issue of Bitcoin, we need you not to fight, we need it not to be a partisan issue because Bitcoin benefits everyone.  Better money means a better life for everyone, and you're meant to represent your constituents, the ones who vote for you and the ones who don't.  How do we stop it becoming a partisan issue?" and he rambled some stuff off.

I turned around to him and said, "Can you name me one thing you like about the Democrats, one thing they do well?" and he gave a really soft answer to do with they're very good at almost like politicking.  I was like, "No, give me one policy thing they're better than you at", and he said, "I can't", and that's where we got; it's now so polarised and divided, and it's happening here now.

Dominic Frisby: Yeah, the same thing's happening here.

Peter McCormack: It's just like how do we break this?

Dominic Frisby: Yeah.  If all the Conservative Party is worried about is Labour, that's not the way to take a country forward and lead a country forward.  I was in Korea about four or five years ago and I was looking around Korea, even Japan, and I was like, "These countries are ten years ahead of us, particularly technologically".  Western Europe, we set the trend for the whole world and we are falling behind.

Peter McCormack: Well, this interview we did with Dan Tubb, @Kingbingo_ on Twitter, fascinating interview, his summary is that we are breaking and we're past the point of no return, this cannot be fixed, the amount of debt we're having to serve is too high.  Have you got those charts?

Danny Knowles: Yeah.

Peter McCormack: Dig these out; I'll show you these because I think this will lead nicely --

Dominic Frisby: I know the thread you mean.  I know him and I think he's great and I think he's on it.

Peter McCormack: So, let me show you these charts though because I think what's interesting about these, this will actually lead to the Putin thing very well, which I wasn't aware he said, which -- right, so anyway, this is the presentation.  So, this is what he showed us; it's really interesting. 

Dominic Frisby: Yeah.

Peter McCormack: So, revenue and spending, so 2016, £56 billion and you can see the national debt growing.

Dominic Frisby: Yeah.

Peter McCormack: But then, when I looked at 2018, I was like, "Surely we can save £32 billion of spending; we can cut £32 billion out somewhere, right?"

Dominic Frisby: Yeah.

Peter McCormack: Anyway, it carries on, then we obviously have a big jump in 2021 because of COVID.

Dominic Frisby: Great chart.

Peter McCormack: Yeah.

Dominic Frisby: That's presented really well.

Peter McCormack: So, then he does it in terms of people, so we're basically taking around £25,000 in revenue and spending's about £32,000 per person.

Dominic Frisby: Per worker.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, per worker, and that's the deficit; our national debt is about £67,000 a person.

Dominic Frisby: Per person, per worker.

Peter McCormack: Carry on, Danny.  But this was us back in 2000; revenue and spending was about the same, and the national debt was £14,000.  He said, "Think of it as a credit card, you've got a £14,000 credit card, you can kind of get rid of that; if you had the £70,000 one, you're kind of fucked".  Then he starts going on about, "So, this is the public spending, so of our £1.1 trillion, £211 billion's the NHS, £178 billion is" --

Dominic Frisby: The big problem is the one at the bottom because that's going up.

Peter McCormack: I think the debt interest is a problem because it is going up and that's caused this death spiral, but I also think the NHS, I want to talk to you about that as well --

Dominic Frisby: I love the fact that the interest on the national debt is now more than the education budget.

Peter McCormack: Yeah.  What a scandal though as well.

Dominic Frisby: Yeah, it's terrible.

Peter McCormack: Yeah.  So, in my head, I don't know, I'm not going to have the answers, I'm not going to change society.  So, these are the different ways he said, "Default, cut spending, tax the rich, raise growth, none of them are going to work".

Dominic Frisby: The growth thing was possible with Truss, but that's gone now, and lower taxes have gone for a generation.

Peter McCormack: Yeah.

Dominic Frisby: Well, not for a generation, 15 years.

Peter McCormack: And you can't tax the rich enough to cover the -- so, in my mind, it has to be a cut; it can be done.  If you were over budget, you would have to cut spending, and if you have move house or sell, as painful as it is, we all have to manage a budget.

Dominic Frisby: What's the nickname of your football team?

Peter McCormack: The Printers; actually, we've changed it.

Dominic Frisby: Oh, have you?

Peter McCormack: That was the original name, but everyone keeps calling us The Pirates, so we're going with it.

Dominic Frisby: That's kind of cool, but go on, carry on.

Peter McCormack: If you keep printing that causes other issues.  So, he's basically saying we're fucked either way.  At some point, we're going to hit hyperinflation because they won't be able to print enough to keep up.  For me, look, the cancer of this is the political cycle doesn't incentivise anyone to stand up and say, "We're going to be the government of austerity, we're going to cut spending".

Dominic Frisby: That's toxic.

Peter McCormack: But they've got to find a way of basically -- he said they've got to reduce spending by £120 billion a year to not increase the deficit but to pay it off over, what was it, 20 years?

Danny Knowles: It's something like that.

Peter McCormack: We have to cut another £200 billion, so we've got to take £250 billion out, where can you take it?  Now firstly, you could just rid of the NHS, that would do it nearly, but I think it's multiple areas you've got to cut.

Dominic Frisby: Then the healthcare would improve.

Peter McCormack: Well, so I wanted to know your thoughts on the NHS because I am a fan of the NHS.  I've been to America, and I've had to go to hospital and it's scary, and I like the fact that anyone here can get seen, but the NHS is a fucking mess; we're spending more money and getting a worse service.  I don't know what the answer is. 

Dominic Frisby: Well, there's a lot to unpick there.  The first thing I would say is that I've heard these arguments that hyperinflation is around the corner.

Peter McCormack: He's not saying hyperinflation, he's just saying eventually the currency will collapse.

Danny Knowles: He's saying the system can't save itself.

Dominic Frisby: I've got a lot of time for Dan, he's a clever guy and we message each other all the time, but I've heard these arguments that collapse is around the corner, that spending is unsustainable, the only solution is to hyperinflate; these are all Austrian arguments, Austrian economic arguments.  In 2008, it was happening, it looked like the whole thing was going to go under, and then quantitative easing came along and it didn't collapse, the system didn't collapse, and so all the Austrians said, "Oh, they've just kicked the can down the road". 

Now, we really do seem to be under extraordinary pressure, and even between 2008 and now, if you just look how much the pound and the dollar have devalued by, not relative necessarily to each other but how much less house can you buy now compared to what you could buy?  House prices have probably doubled since 2008 give or take; they're down a bit now.

So, I've heard these arguments before, and my portfolio is positioned so that if everything does go up the swanny and there's a mad rush into gold and Bitcoin, I will be okay, I will do very well.  But I've also heard these arguments a lot and they just always seem to find some way of just extend and pretend, or whatever you want to call it, they always find some way of dragging it out.

Peter McCormack: But that's what Dan thinks, he thinks that the way they're doing to do that is --

Dominic Frisby: They're going to invent some new way of creating money that's got something just as incomprehensible as quantitative easing --

Peter McCormack: CBDCs --

Dominic Frisby: CBDCs, they're coming.

Peter McCormack: -- and control, he thinks it's going to be CBDCs and control.

Dominic Frisby: Yes, I would agree with that.

Peter McCormack: He thinks it's no coincidence, and it sounds a bit conspiracy theorist, but he says, "There's no coincidence at the moment that we've got these Just Stop Oil protestors doing outrageous things because that's going to give the government an argument to have more control over protests".  He thinks civil disobedience is coming, and to the point where they're going to need to have more control.

Dominic Frisby: Got all these strikes coming as well.

Peter McCormack: Exactly.  So, I think his view, and I kind of see it, is that it's not like we're going to go like Venezuela and Zimbabwe and have complete currency collapse and complete anarchy, it's going to be a continual slow decline, and I'm seeing things like that. 

The film that you were in, I went to that Terminus House in Harlow, and I keep bringing this up on the show, because for me, it was a ghetto in the UK; they've turned an office block into social housing and there are like hundreds of people put in it together and it's a centre of deprivation, crime, and it's awful, it's terrible.  And what I think we're seeing is we're seeing a country whose GDP is going up, the wealth gap increasing, and we've got real massive amounts of absolute poverty in this country.  People are choosing between food and heating, and sometimes, don't have either. 

We should be a wealthy country, and we're going to fucking shit, and I think that's what's going to happen.  Crime's going to go up, the wealth gap's going get higher and there's going to more poverty and they're just going to control the decline, and I think they'll do it in a way that makes sure certain people stay rich.

Dominic Frisby: I see the South Africanisation of the UK.

Peter McCormack: Okay.

Dominic Frisby: I think we're following a similar path.

Peter McCormack: Explain.

Dominic Frisby: Corruption of our institutions, massive corruption, rise in crime, rise in gated communities, different groups of people treated differently.  When I was in South Africa in 2010 it would have been, or was it 2012?  It was when the World Cup was on; 2010.  I was working out there and we were staying in Johannesburg and we were supposed to stay in this hotel in Johannesburg, and when we got there, this is a whole team of people working in broadcasting, the hotel just hadn't been built!

So, we were put up in this sort of emergency accommodation, and we had this big presentation by this enormous Afrikaans security guard who's got one of those, you know, really frightening accents like this, and he's got these huge hands, and he's pointing at the board, the slides; he doesn't bother with the clicker, he's just pointing at the slides.  He's got this, "This is Johannesburg.  You must not walk in Johannesburg by night, you may walk in Johannesburg by day.  This area here, this is Hillbrow, you don't go to Hillbrow day or night; am I clear?"  Then somebody goes, "Where's our hotel then?" and he looks through his things and he goes, "Hillbrow!"

So, we ended up -- you couldn't walk outside the hotel, you had to be escorted in a security car any time you went anywhere.  All the South Africans, white or black, were complaining like mad about immigration to South Africa from the rest of Africa.  They had a massive immigration problem because relative to the rest of Africa, South Africa was perceived as rich, and they had massive immigration from Nigeria. 

For whatever reason, the South Africans all hated the Nigerians, "They're fucking coming over here taking our jobs", all that kind of stuff.  But all the Nigerians, or a large portion of Nigerians ended up working in the security industry in Johannesburg, I don't know why, but you know how different people from different countries end up in different sectors of the economy for whatever reason.  Anyway, I became very friendly with this security guard who was the guy who used to drive me around in the car.

It was really, really cold in Johannesburg, freezing cold, and we'd been given all these like fleeces, these warm clothes to wear.  I remember going to watch to Brazil against North Korea in -4°C, it was -4°C and you imagine all of those beautiful Samba dancers trying to do their thing that they do freezing their nuts off, and it was just an extraordinarily mad experience.

Then I remember we were in the bus coming back from the game and the bus driver just hit somebody walking, somebody walked out into the street, like a tourist who didn't know the road, straight out into the street, the bus driver just hit him and ran him over and he was just knocked flying, this bloke, and the bus driver tried to drive off.  His first instinct was to just flee the scene of the crime.  We were all like, "You've got to stop!" and everyone was videoing and stuff and so eventually, he stopped.

Anyway, I had all these warm clothes for me and the team, so I said to my security guy, "Look, let's go into Hillbrow and we'll find some people who could do with these warm clothes because I'm not going to wear them again when I go home".  So, I had this big black bag full of clothes, and I remember the security guard's got a gun, right, as security guards do, and we go into the town centre and there was just all these people asleep in the street.  So, I said, "Look, there's a load of people in the street there, go and give them the bag", and the security guard goes to me, "No, you go; I will watch", and I'll never forget that.

So, I said, "All right", and I got out the car, and it was like I've never seen poverty like it, I've just never seen anything like it.  It was like going back to another age, the clothes that people were wearing, the rags.  Except for the fact that India's hot, it was like something set in Calcutta in the 19th century or something like that.  And people just, as soon as they saw me get out of the car, a white man get out the car, you know, I was just in normal clothes but I must have looked like some kind of rich God to them or something, they just literally swarmed all over me and they were just grabbing everything on me, and there was literally nothing I could do.

So, the only thing I could do, I just took my bag and I just threw it in the air so that all the clothes went in a sort of shower everywhere, and everyone went for the clothes, and that just gave me like a microsecond to jump back in the car again.

Peter McCormack: Wow!

Dominic Frisby: But it was like wow kind of experience.  But that sort of chaotic -- already now in London you're seeing private security vans round Notting Hill and Belgravia, places like that; you never used to see those in the 1970s or 1980s when I was a kid.  This sort of siloing, all this identity politics and everyone -- I just see this real tension, racial tension between communities. 

There's a lot of anger about immigration, and they don't know what to do with all the people coming over on the boats, so they just round them all up and they stick them in a hotel in Skegness or somewhere, and everyone in Skegness is like, "Wait, why are you sticking them all in Skegness?  We've just suddenly got 3,000 young men dumped in our town.  What about our town; what about our community?" and this is happening all over the country.

A friend of mine who lives in Malvern, he said that the most expensive hotel, all the homeless people in Malvern live sort of in the shadow of the most expensive hotel in Malvern, and the most expensive hotel in Malvern's now full of all these guys who are just having their visas being processed; they don't know what to do with them.  So, they're all being put up in this expensive hotel in Malvern overlooking the local homeless people who have been ignored by the system for years and years. 

So, people are going to look at that and go, "Hang on a minute, these guys who may or may not be refugees, they might be illegal immigrants, they might be just economic minors, whatever they are, but they've never paid tax and they've never done anything, they're being put in a five-star hotel and the local guy is sleeping homeless in a tent underneath him".  A lot of people are going see a lot in that situation and that message, and it's a very dangerous place that we're doing to.

Then, as soon as you start going, "These are our values, these are British values, these are British laws", everyone goes, "Well, no".  People are going to try and go, "Well, we're a Judeo-Christian country", and everyone goes, "Well, I'm not a Christian"; well, maybe, but it still a Christian thing.  So, then everything just ends up in an argument, and then Democrat and Republican, and Conservative and Labour end up -- and nothing happens.  The fundamental thing that government should do, before it does healthcare and all this other stuff, it's got to police the nation, keep order and defend the borders, and it's not doing any of that.  So, if government can't even do those basic things, let alone healthcare and education, we're in a bad place.

Peter McCormack: I want to know how we get the message across to a wider group of people of why there is such a problem with the deficit, why growing deficit makes it even worse and why something needs to be done about it.  I think there's too much acceptance that, whenever there's a problem, the government should just pay to fix that.

Dominic Frisby: Tax the rich.

Peter McCormack: Tax the rich, yeah.  In the US, I think is it 70% of the tax comes from the top 1% or 5% or something ridiculous; there are stats like that as well.  People just need to need to know the truth, that you can't just tax the rich because if you tax too high they'll just leave the country or find ways to hide it, so there is a limit to how much you can tax people; there still isn't enough revenue that comes from that.  The truth is that government just has to spend less.

Dominic Frisby: Yeah.

Peter McCormack: They just have to, it just has to be that way.  We all have to work harder and they have to spend less.

Dominic Frisby: Even under Thatcher and Reagan, who were both great champions of balanced books and reduced fiscal spending and they took on the unions and they changed the narrative, etc, government still grew under Thatcher and Reagan.

Peter McCormack: But there were periods of surplus.

Dominic Frisby: It just didn't grow by the same rate.  I think the last person to run a surplus was Clinton in the late 1990s.

Peter McCormack: In the UK, can you have a look?

Danny Knowles: It was 2000/2001 in the UK was the last time we had a --

Peter McCormack: So, is that Blair?

Dominic Frisby: Blair and Brown.  One of the problems with the tax code is just the sheer complexity of it, and Nigel Lawson, when he was Chancellor, made a thing, with each budget, he was going to remove a tax, and I think he was Chancellor for six years, so he removed six different taxes.

Peter McCormack: Nice.

Dominic Frisby: He was the last guy to not only reduce taxes but reduce the tax code, and since then, the thing has just got more and more bloated and they'll do this tax but then there's this exception for this person and this subsidy for this person and all that, and it just makes the whole thing -- the tax code is now something like 15 times the length of the Bible; I promise you nobody's read it, but the longer it is and the bigger it is, all you do is create more loopholes, and then it's only people with deep pockets, rich corporations or rich individuals, who can find the loopholes. 

In any case, the idea of a national system with national borders is kind of irrelevant in this new globalised world that is the internet because where is Google located?  Exactly.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, but do you know what, I just think better government would find a way of taxing these people.

Dominic Frisby: Well, land value tax is the answer to all of that, but then what they'll do is they'll introduce land value tax on top of all the other taxes.  The system is designed as it is, the democratic system, "Vote for us, we're going to give you this, that and the other", is set up so that the state will inevitably grow because it's literally, "Vote for us, we are going to do more to fix this, that and the other problem".  Nobody gets elected going, "Vote for me, we're going to give you less"; it doesn't work.

Peter McCormack: So, essentially, we need revolution.

Dominic Frisby: Yeah.

Peter McCormack: Bitcoin, a peaceful revolution.

Dominic Frisby: Yeah, try and make it illegal!

Peter McCormack: Yeah, how do I try and communicate to these people without sounding like a conspiracy nutter, because I think they do think I'm a nutter when I'm trying to explain to my friends, like, "I'm not making this up, you can go on the government's website, here are the facts.  This is the national debt, this is the increasing payments on that debt, this is the increasing spend, these are the implications; this is all true.  This is what we have to do to be able to pay it back.  If we don't pay it back, these are the implications". 

I actually think it's a time where the country came together, during World War II, to protect the children; it's essentially the same now because it's our children we're fucking.  Like, I look at my children and I'm like --

Dominic Frisby: I'm just, "Leave", I just tell them to go.

Peter McCormack: So, they're not going to be able to afford a house, just zero chance of being able to afford a house unless I help them, so that they're going to be in a situation where there's --

Dominic Frisby: Going to be starting a family later in life, they can't afford to have as many kids, and then there's a shortage of labour, so they import more labour from abroad, and then the national identity gets eroded and destroyed and we're in a vortex.

Peter McCormack: It is all fucked, but there is a way out, and the way out is to stop spending so much.  Everyone has to, as a nation, we have to work harder and the government has to spend less to the point where I was even thinking --

Dominic Frisby: They tried it, austerity; they called it austerity, but it wasn't even austerity because spending still rose but they still called it austerity, and it got absolutely pilloried as being heartless and horrible and all the rest of it, and now nobody's going to mention the word "austerity" again.

Peter McCormack: I have a very simple rule that would solve this; what happens if you stop paying your mortgage?

Dominic Frisby: I'm guessing you lose your home.

Peter McCormack: You lose your home.  So, you run a budget, right?

Dominic Frisby: Yes.

Peter McCormack: Sometimes you go into deficit and maybe borrow some, probably have to speak to your wife, and most times you probably run a surplus, but every single person in this room has to run a budget and we can't have infinite debt because we end up bankrupt.  I think any government that runs a deficit is immediately put up for re-election at the point they run a deficit, you have to be put up for re-election, so you have to run balanced books.

Dominic Frisby: Maybe. 

Peter McCormack: Crazy idea.

Dominic Frisby: Well, it's a nice idea, Peter, and if somebody proposed it, I'd vote for it, 100%, and probably a lot of people would vote for it, but the problem is, if you don't pay our mortgage, you'd lose your house; the rules for government are not the same.

Peter McCormack: But they should be.

Dominic Frisby: If we could all run up endless deficits, then many of us would.

Peter McCormack: Of course we would.

Dominic Frisby: Of course they should, but they don't and they never have.

Peter McCormack: But people don't know what they're sleepwalking into and I'm like, "How do I get this message to as many people as possible?" 

Dominic Frisby: I've spent my life trying to get this message out to people, and I've written books about it, I do endless blogs and vlogs and things, and you're seeing a jaded man who's just -- you can rail against it, you can suggest ideas, you can nudge, you can hope some of your ideas will catch on.  I wrote my Daylight Robbery; the IEA gave it to every politician in the cabinet last Christmas.  I've written a Bitcoin book, I've endlessly gone on, but what it all comes down to, Peter, is there are two zero patients in all of this, and in fact there's one zero patient, and fix the money -- do you know what I mean by a zero patient?

Peter McCormack: Yes.

Dominic Frisby: Okay, I'll just explain it in case anyone doesn't know.  So, in a zombie film, when they're trying to eradicate the virus, they have to get to the zero patient, which is where the virus started, and either the zero patient, or patient zero, either it's got the anecdote, of if they kill the patient zero, then they rid themselves of the virus; it's like a trope of some zombie films and other kinds of films.

Patient zero is the system of tax and the system of money; when government has the power to print money, when one body in a society has the power to create money at no cost to itself when everyone else has to earn it, it is inevitable that that body will grow disproportionately large.  And while money is the issuance of government, that is the system we run under; once upon a time, when gold was money, it wasn't so easy.

You need an independent money system; that's one thing.  The other thing is you design a society by the way that you tax it; it really is that simple.  You determine a society's destiny and at the moment, we tax labour very, very heavily.  Now, if you're a young guy starting out in the world, all you have is your labour, that's literally all you have, but because we tax it so heavily, it's very hard for that guy to catch up with the guy who's got money because he's constantly having 45% or 50% or whatever percentage of his labour taken from him of his earnings, so it's very hard to progress.

Then simultaneously, the money he's paid in is losing its purchasing power all the time, so he faces the double-whammy of income tax and inflation, so you have to do away with all of that, and tax something else and not labour.  But while 50% of government revenue worldwide derives from income tax in one form or another, it's just not going to happen because it's the government's biggest source of revenue.

So, I'm of the view that you just need to protect yourself, look after number one, vote with your feet if necessary, and try and do what you can and put your own little house in order, but you cannot fix the system; the system just has to implode.  The law of history is that all fiat systems die sooner or later, and ours just seems to be dying this slow 100-year death, whether you measure it from 1914 when we came off the gold standard, or 1971 when the States did, but you just see this incremental…

The way that Osborne tried to deal with it when he was Chancellor was, simultaneously they were going to inflate away some of the debt, they were going to have a little bit of growth, and they were going to rely on increased tax revenue; that was sort of the three-pronged way they were going to do it, and it sort of half worked for a bit, but now, since COVID, the whole thing's just gone bananas.

We were going to talk about Putin.

Peter McCormack: Well, we can segue into that because actually, the one thing Dan said, well the two things he said at the end, he's a believer in Bitcoin as the solution to this.

Dominic Frisby: Yeah.

Peter McCormack: You need a money independent of government, but he also said the BRIC nations might not be affected by this, Brazil, Russia, India, China, because they're not so anchored to the dollar system.  I think he's almost alluding to what everyone else has been alluding to, we can talk about Putin attacking Ukraine, a sovereign nation and it being some evil invasion, but also at the same time, he has been talking about separating himself, or separating Russia from the constrains of the dollar system.  They've been trying to trade oil with China outside of the dollar; I didn't hear Putin say this.

Dominic Frisby: This is a big theme of mine.  Okay, let's just backtrack a little bit; Pippa Malmgren, a fairly well-known economist, she talks about World War III has already started.  She says, "We're in a hot war in cold places", and by cold places she means cyberspace, deep sea, space, the Arctic.  Then she says, "We're in a cold war in hot places", Africa, Taiwan, so on; quite a nice way of looking at things, but in her eyes, World War III has already started.

Peter McCormack: Is she English?

Dominic Frisby: American.  She was a big cheese; she was on one of President Bush's advisory committees; she's got a good Substack.  Anyway, we have this situation where in currency terms, World War III has already started, and the way that the US weaponised the dollar against Russia was extraordinary, confiscated its assets, and Russia's finding it very difficult to trade.  So, Putin retaliated by saying, "You have to pay roubles for our oil", and it resulted with the rouble being the best form of currency last year!

Peter McCormack: I know.

Dominic Frisby: Russia is desperately seeking alternatives to the dollar system, and they've got this guy who's designing a new monetary system and his name's Sergey Glazyev, and he's a former Kremlin advisor, and he's designing this new money system for the Eurasian Economic Union.  Now, have you heard of the Russian Davos?

Peter McCormack: No.

Dominic Frisby: This would be in St Petersburg every year, it's in June every year, and I spoke to people who were there, and the overwhelming recurring theme of the Russian Davos last year in June is, "What are we going to use instead of the US dollar; what system of money can we use?"  So, Glazyev is designing this new digital currency that's going to be backed by a basket of foreign currencies and natural resources, but when you back a currency with natural resources, it's very problematic; grains go off after a year so you start dealing with grain futures, and then grains are problematic, and oil, and you end up just using gold and silver because it's just easier, they become the things.

The problem with it, a currency -- and it would be for the nations, it would be China, India, Russia, Kurdistan, all those stans, Afghanistan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Turkey wants to join it.  So, China's got this thing called the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation which is basically, west of Japan and east of Ukraine, all those countries, and it's huge, it's 40% of the world's population and something like 30% of its GDP, and it's the world's largest regional organisation, and they want their own currency.  But the problem with all those countries is they're not that trustworthy and none of them trust each other, so how are they going to design a system of money where they all corporate? 

The beauty of the US dollar, and to an extent the euro, is that, relatively speaking, everyone trusts in America, so the US dollar kind of worked; everyone knew that, for all its problems, America, it's pretty sound.  It's partly American military might imposed the dollar, but a lot of countries just took it on voluntarily, because do you know what, America's more reliable than we are.

Similarly, the euro, on a relative basis, all those countries, France, Germany, Holland, whatever, they all trusted each other, and so the euro kind of works.  But those countries, Tajikistan, whoever it is, they don't trust each other, so my argument has been that they're going to end up using gold, but there's a problem with gold. 

The other thing about gold is, I've spent ages studying China's gold holdings, and I'm just going to give you some numbers now.  The beauty of gold is everyone can trust it.  Gold has its problems, which your listeners and you are well aware of, but America has -- let me just find the right figure here because I've got it written down -- about 8,000 tons of gold in Fort Knox.

Peter McCormack: So they say.

Dominic Frisby: Exactly, but let's just assume, for the sake of this, that they have 8,000 tons of gold.  China, on the other hand, has about -- sorry, I just can't find my numbers -- yeah, 1,948 tons of China's stated gold, so a bit less than a quarter of America's, but China has long since been the world's biggest gold producer, it's also long since been the world's biggest gold importer.  You can work out how much gold it's produced since 2000, and it's produced about 7,000 tons of gold, so already you're going, "But you said your reserves are 1,948 and you've produced 7,000 tons of gold, and over half of your goldmining companies are state-owned", already you're starting to go, "That 1,948 tons figure is not right".

Then, you look at Chinese imports, and you can't measure all imports; you can measure imports from Hong Kong, but Dubai and Switzerland, the imports, it's not all stated, but you can see how much gold has left the Shanghai Gold Exchange, which is where most of the gold that goes into China leaves via.  22,000 tons of gold, since 2008, have been purchased by and delivered to physical gold buyers in China, so that's 22,000 tons plus the 7,000 tons that it's mined, so 29,000 tons.  Actually, the number's going to be bigger than that because the Chinese central bank likes 12.5 kilo bars but they don't go through the Shanghai Gold Exchange, so it's probably more.

By the time you put all these numbers together, I arrive at a figure, and I've done the sums on my Substack and if somebody wants to read it, just frisby.substack.com, but 33,000 tons of gold has made its way to China since 2000, 33,000 tons, just log that figure.  Let's assume that half of that gold is state-owned, it's probably higher but let's assume, so 16,000 tons, 17,000 tons, about that figure.  That is twice as much gold as America has, and that's assuming America has its gold. 

We all know that China wants its own currency and it wants reserve currency status, etc.  If China wanted to get involved in the currency wars, at the moment it's just stayed out of it, all it has to do is go, "Oh actually, this is how much gold we've got".  If it suddenly has twice as much gold as America, then the whole global financial landscape changes with one announcement, and I don't think China's quite ready for that.  We also know, by the way, that Russia's accumulated loads of gold.

There's an analyst called Zoltan Pozsar who's arguing that -- so, all these shenanigans going on with Russian oil at the minute where the EU and the United States are trying to impose a cap on Russian oil of $60 a barrel, and what's happening now is that India's importing Russian oil and re-exporting it as diesel and America's buying the diesel to replenish its strategic reserves that it's been selling off in order to cap the oil price, with the result the Russian oil is kind of making its way to America; it's more complicated than that, but it's not going to last. 

So, a lot of a people are saying, "Well, Putin's going to start demanding gold for oil if they're going to cap it at $60".  I don't know if that happens, but there's a strong argument for it, and it's a natural progression of all the currency wars that have been going on.  But then we have this wonderful quote that comes from Vladimir Putin last week.  The problem with gold is still I have to send you gold by post or by courier; I can't send it over the internet.

Peter McCormack: And that's risky.

Dominic Frisby: I'll say!  And how do we know that the gold is pure?  We have to rely on third-party banks and exchanges to process the gold; we've still got the trust issue.  So, if only there was a system of money that you could send from A to B --

Peter McCormack: That wasn't gold.

Dominic Frisby: -- without the trusted third parties, that preserved its value, etc.

Peter McCormack: Like a digital gold.

Dominic Frisby: That kind of thing.  It doesn't have to look shiny though.  So, Putin came up with this quote last week, and it just sounds like it could have been Satoshi Nakamoto who said this, but he said, "The technology of digital currencies and blockchains can be used to create a new system of international settlements that will be much more convenient, absolutely safe for its users, and most importantly, will not depend on banks or interference by third countries.  I am confident that something like this will certainly be created and will develop because nobody likes the dictate of monopolists, which is harming all parties, including the monopolists themselves".  Well, it already exists, Vladimir, and if you've self-googled and you're listening to this podcast, go to bitcoin.org because you'll find all the information you need.

Peter McCormack: He will know, it's whether they want it to be that or something they feel like they have a bit more control over.

Dominic Frisby: Sure, that's the problem, but as soon as they invent something themselves, they're creating trusted third parties and they're in that vortex.

Peter McCormack: I know.

Dominic Frisby: So, it might just be that they just go, "Well, okay, just for this trade, we'll use Bitcoin for this trade.  Oh actually, that worked quite well".

Peter McCormack: Yeah.

Dominic Frisby: "Let's just do it for this one", and trojan horse job.

Peter McCormack: Well, you can only hope; this is why we're here, right?

Dominic Frisby: Yeah.

Peter McCormack: It's to try and communicate and educate people that there is a better way and there are consequences to having this form of money, but ultimately, this is a better way.  It's strange to hear someone like Vladimir Putin be the one to put it out and saying that, and I just want to know the game theory behind it for him.

Dominic Frisby: Well, I just take people at value, and he's a game theory player.  The other big problem is, do we want to be facilitating trade for Putin?  That's the problem with a censorship-free money, anyone can use it, even bad people.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, I think Putin will always find a way to trade one way or another for one asset or another, so I don't think you stop him, but Bitcoin is money for enemies, so…

Dominic Frisby: Yeah, it is the global money, it is the global reserve currency of the internet.

Peter McCormack: Yes.

Dominic Frisby: How about that?  Something like that.

Peter McCormack: The other thing I did just want to ask you about because I don't know your opinion on this, but what are your thoughts on the NHS, just because that was all part of something? 

Dominic Frisby: Sure.

Peter McCormack: I respect a lot of your thoughts, I really appreciate your thoughts, especially on taxes, you're not a no-tax person but you're a fair-tax person; I think we discussed that the first interview we ever did.  I'm a fan of the NHS, my mum worked for it, I don't like the US system, but it is costing £211 billion in that chart and it is so fragmented and broken; I don't know where the money's going and being spent.

Dominic Frisby: Admin.

Peter McCormack: Well, yeah, apparently about a third of that number's depreciation as well.  But I don't know the answer but I'm sure you have ideas.

Dominic Frisby: Well, I don't believe that state-funded healthcare is the best way to deliver the best possible healthcare at the lowest possible price, but even if you say state-funded healthcare is the best model, well, the French system, the Swiss system, the German system, the Dutch system, the Kiwi system, they all function better than the NHS.  So, there are much, much better state systems than ours.

Peter McCormack: Do we know why; what are they doing differently, or is it just because we're fucking useless at everything now?

Dominic Frisby: A bit of that.  The American Government spends more per capita on healthcare than we do, and the American citizens don't even get healthcare that's free at the point of use.  I would rather just self-google, every time I get ill, I just self-google and self-diagnose rather than have the hassle of going to the doctor, and I just know loads of people who are like me.

Peter McCormack: How many things have you diagnosed?

Dominic Frisby: When I probably get into my 70s or something, there will be certain point where -- I just hate going to the doctors.

Peter McCormack: We've got a private doctor near us that opened up recently, and it's £50 a visit, they'll see you the same day sometimes, at least the next day, and they are brilliant.

Dominic Frisby: Well, the problem with private healthcare is, because government healthcare is in the market, it pushes up the price of private healthcare, and so if it was just purely a market-driven -- the friendly societies of the 19th century provided healthcare and it worked very well at the standards of the time.  But at the moment, the problem with the NHS is that it's geared in favour of the supplier, not the user, and the doctor is not answerable to the patient.  That customer dynamic needs to be in place where the doctor is answerable to the patient, and if the doctor delivers a bad service, then the patient can sack him.  But the customer, in the NHS, does not have that power; the customer in the NHS has no power.

Peter McCormack: Well, you're exactly right because I'm using this service because the NHS is so bad; you phone up for an appointment, it's three weeks for a doctor's appointment.

Dominic Frisby: Yeah.

Peter McCormack: You go to any A&E, it's four to five hours.

Dominic Frisby: I broke my ankle playing football, so I had to have all this ankle treatment, they want to do an MRI of my ankle, and I went to see, I call them the paedophile, but I went to see the podiatrist!  So, I went to see the paedophile and he does all these things, and he said, "Look, it's going to cost you £5,000 to have an MRI, and if you want both your MRIs done, it's £10,000, but I can refer you to the NHS.  It's not like an immediate thing that needs doing, so there'll be about a two- or three-month wait and just do it through the NHS", so I said, "Great"; this was last July. 

I still haven't got an appointment for the MRI, and I was on the phone to them yesterday, it took me an hour to get them on the phone, and they were like, "Oh, you're on a waiting list, and you'll come off the waiting list in five months' time and then we'll book you an appointment which will probably be a few months after that", for an MRI on my ankles.  I'm like, "I wish I'd just paid the £10,000".

Peter McCormack: I have private healthcare because we got it at my old company a few years ago.  For me and the two kids, it's £150 a month, and this is not like a flex, it's just that's the cost.  I would get rid of Sky Sports and Netflix and Spotify before I get rid of that because I've had to use it for my back and I've had to use it for my son's shin splints.  When my son had shin splints, straight down to London within a couple of days, MRI scan, all done, all paid for.  My back, when my back went, three days within a phone call, I was in and had the operation.  It's the last thing I would get rid of, and I think the value for money --

Dominic Frisby: But we're lucky because we can afford it, we're lucky.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, but I think there are a lot more people who could afford that who don't do it.

Dominic Frisby: Maybe, but the NHS has become a political tool.

Peter McCormack: Of course.

Dominic Frisby: It's just supposed to be about healthcare, and that's the problem when things like -- education has become a political tool.  This is why I'm a libertarian, I just think education should be about teaching, healthcare should be about healthcare, no more than that, and if everything was just market driven and there was no state involvement, the actual cost would end up being a lot lower.  Then you say, "What about the poor and needy; what about the people who can't afford it?"  Well, charity is a basic human characteristic; we are all charitable. 

If we are empowered by having more money in our pockets because we are taxed less, then we will become even more charitable because there will not be that attitude, "Well, I've paid my taxes, it's somebody else's problem".  In a libertarian society where the government doesn't do anything, the responsibility falls on citizens to do stuff; at the moment, that responsibility is the state's.  So, with freedom comes responsibility.

My belief is that competition improves productivity, and just as competition in food or clothing or something has driven down so that we can all wear amazing clothes at very little cost, unless we're Richard Heart, those same dynamics could exist in education and in healthcare, and if there was no state involvement, they would be a lot better and a lot cheaper.

Peter McCormack: I feel like I should become a libertarian, Danny.

Dominic Frisby: I can't believe you're not; I can't believe you're not a rabid libertarian having worked in Bitcoin as long as you have.

Peter McCormack: Do you know what it is, is that I always find myself just a bit of a centrist, but I find myself a centrist now in between left/right and libertarianism.  I struggle with the idea of a libertarian society working unless everyone agrees they're a libertarian.  If everyone doesn't agree they're a libertarian, you will just have new powers, new structures, new abuses.  But what I do think I wish would happen, I wish there was a libertarian party, just like the same size maybe as the Lib Dems, who could have a bit of power and their goal is just make the government smaller, let's reduce tax.

Dominic Frisby: That's supposed to be the Thatcherite arm of the Conservative Party, but nothing ever happens.

Peter McCormack: Well, bloody Boris Johnson came out saying he was a libertarian.

Dominic Frisby: Well, exactly.

Peter McCormack: What a fucking liar! 

Dominic Frisby: Yeah.

Peter McCormack: But if you had a libertarian party with power, and their mandate was less tax, smaller government, because we have a pull from left to right, but we don't have a pull from big to small.

Dominic Frisby: Yeah.

Peter McCormack: If we had the pull from big to small, because that left to right balances.

Dominic Frisby: I just think probably half the country are conservative with a small C; generally speaking, they believe in more individual responsibility, not no tax and no government, but less government and less tax and more individual responsibility, and that's the kind of silent majority that struggles to articulate itself, it struggles to be represented in politics.  The way of government getting elected, promising this, that and the other, it just is not articulated and not represented.

Peter McCormack: They need a better less is more mandate to run on, but look, fuck, maybe it just all needs to implode.

Dominic Frisby: I think it does.

Peter McCormack: Yeah.

Dominic Frisby: The only way to solve all of this is bankruptcy.  We were talking about how fragmented and divided and everything else, I strongly believe that money is the blood of a society, it courses through everything, and if a body is to be healthy, its blood must be healthy, and if blood is poisoned, the rest of society is poisoned, and fiat money is poisonous and it courses through our society.

I said patient zero; I honestly believe, if we can clean up the blood, we clean up the money system, then everything else, like your deficits and everything else; because once you have independent money, governments can't run up deficits, they just can't because the markets won't allow them; they'll run it up a little bit and then they'll go bust.  But when they've got the power to print, that doesn't happen.  So, if we fix money, we get that blood pure again and healthy, then we'll be all right, but we might have to go through a lot of pain before we get there.

Peter McCormack: All right, with football coming up, I think that's a good place to close out.

Dominic Frisby: Yeah, I can see Dan's constantly nudging you, looking at his watch, going, "The game's starting".

Peter McCormack: Poor Sean, here, for the last two days, I think we've orange pilled him over four interviews.  He's going to be going round the streets going, "Fucking Bitcoin, have you heard about Bitcoin?  And the money system's fucked!"

Dominic, listen, always a pleasure, love chatting to you, really appreciate you.  Thanks for coming on.  I will go and listen to the full performance.

Dominic Frisby: Listen when you're driving your car.

Peter McCormack: Okay, I'll do it when I drive, and I will share it out on the show notes, and prediction for England/France tomorrow?

Dominic Frisby: Okay, kissesonapostcard.com for the podcast.  If you want to read my Substack, my Substack's now one of the top 20 Substacks, financial Substacks in the world, pretty good for an English bloke because I haven't got all the Americans, but anyway, frisby.substack.com. 

England/France, well, you never bet with your heart, do you, you should never bet with your heart, and I just think France are better than we are and there are going to win 2-1.

Peter McCormack: Danny, score prediction tomorrow?

Danny Knowles: I would probably go 2-1 England.

Peter McCormack: I think 1-1 penalties.

Danny Knowles: All right, this is going to come out after the World Cup is over.

Peter McCormack: Is it?

Dominic Frisby: Can I revise my prediction?  I think we're all going to look like fools.

Danny Knowles: So, who wins the World Cup?

Dominic Frisby: France or Brazil.

Peter McCormack: England.

Danny Knowles: You know only one person can win.  Come on, you're not sitting on the fence here.

Dominic Frisby: France/Brazil final, Brazil edge it.

Danny Knowles: Okay.

Peter McCormack: Come on, Sean.

Sean: 4-1.

Peter McCormack: What?!

Dominic Frisby: Those are wise words.

Peter McCormack: I'll tell you a funny thing, right --

Dominic Frisby: They've got good players in every position.

Peter McCormack: -- before this World Cup started, I was like, "Fuck this World Cup, fuck Qatar and their human rights", and then I came a little bit round actually thinking, when the tournament started, I realised actually the whole world is looking at you and what if this tournament does change the country; what if they open up a bit more; what if they realise, actually, it's better to treat their workers better and to be a little bit more liberal; what if, and actually maybe it can do that?  I was going to boycott watching the games, and I just had to watch the football, and I think it's the best World Cup, certainly since Italia 90, and in terms of football, it might be the best I've seen.

Dominic Frisby: It's a really good World Cup; there haven't been that many upsets so far, well, Germany.

Peter McCormack: Morocco/Spain.

Dominic Frisby: Yeah.

Peter McCormack: Saudi Arabia/Argentina; there have been a few.

Dominic Frisby: Yeah, but in terms of, if you look at the make-up of the last eight, you would maybe expect Spain and Germany to be there, maybe Croatia's a bit of a surprise, and Morocco obviously, but yeah, it's been a really good World Cup, I've really enjoyed it.  I'm ashamed of the fact that I've enjoyed it.

Peter McCormack: I'm ashamed.

Dominic Frisby: But you know what, I really resent the Gary Nevilles and the Gary Linekers of this world who are always pontificating about politics on Twitter and telling everyone else they're bad and evil, and when the crunch came for them, they put their careers and their wallets ahead of their principles, and then they went there and then they tried to virtue signal once they were there.  So, I resent that and I find that hypocritical.  There's something I really like about the fact that all the fans have got these, like they've adapted the sort of Arab robes to the colours of their thing; I find that really funny.

Peter McCormack: Is it called a tobe? 

Dominic Frisby: I don't know what the word is.

Peter McCormack: They were talking about it on the radio at one point, but yeah, I love that too because the guy was asking, "Is that insulting?" he's like, "No, it's not; we love it".

Dominic Frisby: It's funny.

Peter McCormack: Yeah.

Dominic Frisby: It's what happens when two cultures merge.  It's like when two countries merge and you get, for example, Indian food and English food merge with all Indian immigration to England, then you end up with this Tikka Masala dish that's the national favourite dish and nobody in India's ever eaten it in their life.

Peter McCormack: Or curry sauce and chips.

Dominic Frisby: Yeah, whatever, and it's where two cultures merge, and this is just another example of that.

Peter McCormack: Well, listen, look, the last thing I'll finish on, I was in Paris at the start of this week, Monday, Tuesday, and I was asking every Frenchman, "What do you think of England?" because I don't think you can see your own country objectively. 

Dominic Frisby: You can't.  That's another thing we forget, is how well the English are perceived abroad, we are; people love us.

Peter McCormack: So, I was asking that because I know every England player who's good and bad; I only know the good French players, I don't know the ones they think are shit, and everyone was saying the same, everyone said, "We think you're a threat, you can beat us, but we have Mbappé", that's what they said.  They're putting all their hopes on Mbappé.

Dominic Frisby: Yeah.  They've got two or three big players who aren't there, Pogba and a couple of others, but they've got so much depth, the French.

Peter McCormack: So have we.

Dominic Frisby: Yeah.  I still think Grealish should be in the team, but…

Peter McCormack: Yeah, where do you make them work?  I would like Grealish to be playing the old free-floating Gazza role.

Dominic Frisby: Yeah, he should be the number ten.

Peter McCormack: Yeah.

Danny Knowles: Then who do you drop?

Dominic Frisby: I'd have a front three of -- Dan, let's stop!

Peter McCormack: Are you dropping Kane?

Dominic Frisby: No.

Peter McCormack: So, you're playing Kane, Grealish, Foden?

Dominic Frisby: Yeah, Kane, Grealish, Foden probably.  I wouldn't have Sterling or Rashford, except, no, Rashford had a good game.

Peter McCormack: Rashford's a great guy to have on the bench.

Dominic Frisby: Yeah.

Sean: What about Saka?

Peter McCormack: Yeah, Saka. 

Dominic Frisby: I would consider playing three at the back and having Saka as left wingback, but then Luke Shaw's been brilliant.

Peter McCormack: See, we've got depth.

Dominic Frisby: Yeah, we've got depth, and Saka plays well and he's an old soul, Saka, he's an old head on young shoulders.

Peter McCormack: Yeah.

Dominic Frisby: There's a wisdom to him, but I prefer Grealish, and I prefer Foden.

Peter McCormack: Right, okay.  Well, listen, let's go and watch some football.  Big shoutout to Sean, thanks to Sean for these four shows he's done for us; appreciate you, man.  Thanks, Dominic.  I will see if I can get down on 16 December.  My dad arrives on 14 December; if he wants to go, I'll be there.

Dominic Frisby: Okay.  It's Comic Songs in Camden.

Peter McCormack: All right, I'll see what I can do.  Right, let's go, thank you.