WBD638 Audio Transcription
Why Mainstream Media is Failing Us with Izabella Kaminska
Release date: Wednesday 29th March
Note: the following is a transcription of my interview with Izabella Kaminska. 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.
Izabella Kaminska is a journalist and founder and editor of The Blind Spot. In this interview, we discuss the failure of current mainstream journalism to cover subjects properly, why the destruction of the middle class is dangerous for democracy, the endemic problem of corruption in politics, and the need for an honest economic orthodoxy.
“The system is better off with a neutral asset that can price everything because, without a neutral asset, you have no pricing of anything…money must be neutral. And there is no neutral money outside of Bitcoin at the moment.”
— Izabella Kaminska
Interview Transcription
Izabella Kaminska: I promote what I use because I actually use it; this sounds so staged!
Peter McCormack: Here we go, here's the advert!
Izabella Kaminska: This is like value-aligned advertising in the sense that I really believe in his app. Why shouldn't a whistleblower app sponsor an independent journalistic operation; it's the perfect alignment, isn't it? It is better than being sponsored by, I don't know, Facebook or whoever. So it seemed really a no-brainer, so yeah, we have a barter deal.
Peter McCormack: If it's a whistleblowing app, how do you know what is genuine and what is…?
Izabella Kaminska: Well, this is his genius thing.
Peter McCormack: Okay.
Izabella Kaminska: So, one of the problems journalists have is that you often get reached out to by -- look, I'm very keen to not upset anybody, but sometimes people get a little bit overzealous in terms of what they're seeing. People have personal vendettas or axes to grind, so not all whistleblowers are good whistleblowers and you have to filter it out. So, journalists get a lot of timewasters basically, is the quick way of saying it, reaching out to them and we need a way to easily protect the identity of the person who's speaking to you but without having to go and have a coffee with them, meet face to face.
What Frank was pointing was that, when Snowden tried to reach out to journalists, it took him a year to make the first reach because nobody would take him seriously, and that first point of contact is always really difficult, but also you need a to-and-fro to be able to determine if there is any validity to what people are saying. With his app, it's an instant messenger chat which means that any institution can basically have his system, it creates a kind of burner code, it's very easy; it's not for you Bitcoin people because you know how to use to PGP signatures.
Peter McCormack: No I don't! Have you ever tried to use PGP signatures?
Izabella Kaminska: No, because it's beyond my capacity but everyone just listening will be like, "Oh God, she's an idiot!" It's just that it is really hard and I think the average person, who works in like a bank or an institution, it is a point of friction. So, if you can just take a QR code, take a photo of it, go to an app which allows you to despatch an anonymous message to the journalist or the institution and they've got a kind of Dropbox where it comes in, but rather than read it and then do an email or how do you connect, you have an instant little message chat. So, you can to and fro, send images, figure it out, whether there's any substance to the claims, and then only afterwards go and have the first meeting. So, it just helps you determine the validity of your source.
It's also potentially very good for the Catholic Church if you want to do confessions in an anonymous setting but online in say a lockdown; there are all sorts of use cases!
Peter McCormack: How do people find it? It definitely sounds like a shill now, but I love Frank so I don't care.
Izabella Kaminska: It's hayaorg.com, so that's the institutional one, that's the one for your institution, but there's also HaYa Chat, so if you look at those two or go on my website, the-blindspot.com, it's all over there and it's on my Twitter page; now we've definitely gone in the ranks of total product placement, so sorry.
Peter McCormack: Well, I don't mind. Firstly, I love Frank, I've known Frank for 20 years and also I love what you're doing with The Blind Spot; I am a subscriber, as you know.
Izabella Kaminska: That's very kind.
Peter McCormack: I like what you do, and journalism is one of the things I want to talk to you about today, even though this is a Bitcoin show. I started this podcast six years ago as somebody who, maybe naïvely, was a massive defender of both democracy and mainstream media. I thought it was very easy to attack the mainstream media and journalists when I thought they did a difficult and tough job.
Now, not all journalists are the same, I understand that, but over the five, six years I've been doing this, I've regularly come up against journalists who do a very poor job of reporting on what I do, very poor job, and I'm not asking them to be pro Bitcoin, I'm asking them to be fair Bitcoin, and too often getting just very basic facts wrong. I've even attempted to reach out to them and say, "Here, listen, I can help with this, let's correct this"; the only one who was any good was The Spectator, they actually replied and said, "Okay, fair enough, you can even write a reply", which I did, and they published it, but often they're almost arrogantly dismissing us.
Then also I found democracy a very hard thing to defend, especially since COVID and over the last couple of years, especially with what's happened with Matt Hancock. So, I'm in this position now where I'm not --
Izabella Kaminska: You don't know who you are!
Peter McCormack: No, I don't. Look, I don't know where I stand because the other side is, I'm not an anarchist, and also I've seen some of these successful independent journalists suffer from the same problems as mainstream media where they have the same audience capture.
Izabella Kaminska: Yes, exactly.
Peter McCormack: Izabella, what the hell; what do I do? I wanted to talk to you, actually Danny most of all was the one, he's really disappointed he's not here, he was really looking forward to this one because he's such a fan of yours. He said, "Izabella is the person we should talk to about this, (1) she's British so her accent is more credible; (2) she has a credible background; and (3) I know you so I get on with you. But he said you're the one I should talk to about this. So, for people who don't know you, some people might not have been in Amsterdam, just give your career background, let's talk about The Blind Spot and then let's dig into all this bollocks.
Izabella Kaminska: So, I am a journalist. How far back do you want to go? I did ancient history at college, just to really make it historical, and I didn't really know what I wanted to do in life and I thought, "You know what, I've always been fascinated with geopolitics, what are the factors that influence society", and I thought, "Well, as a historian, I should be in a role that catalogues tomorrow's history". So, I ended up doing a journalism course, and throughout my career, I've been at CNBC; I've been at Reuters; I've been at a funny English language newspaper in Warsaw, Poland; I've worked in Azerbaijan; I've been on freelancing ops to Kabul. Then, around actually 2008, I went from CNBC to the FT where I stayed for 13 years on Alphaville, and I was the editor of Alphaville by the time I left.
I never really wanted to do anything else; I did do columns there as well, but it was one of my favourite jobs because I considered it the best job at the FT because it was so anarchic in a really weird way because we were like an internal, I don't want to say fifth column, but we were like a sub-cell.
Peter McCormack: You're like the FT's wild little brother.
Izabella Kaminska: Yeah, like a hedge; we were the internal contrarians always trying to figure out where the groupthink was and pushing back against it, and in a crisis, we went full wonk, we could get really into the weeds. I think, when you work in journalism, you are always conscious of the broader audience, which makes you editable, and it's a good policy. I'm not dismissing the policy because I think it is important, you don't really understand your topic if you can't explain it very simply, but it does tend towards sort of dumbing things down and getting things wrong. And with Alphaville, because we were like in the heyday of blogging, and you could write these insanely long pieces and go really wonk on contango trades and whatever and no one was doing that at the time, and there was a very niche but important and very influential audience.
So, we had this amazing opportunity to do things differently, and it was such a collegiate environment back in 2008 because the blogosphere was challenging normal mainstream media, and when we started, no one in core media really even knew what Twitter was, they didn't understand blogging, and the blogosphere was always ahead of the curve versus everything else. There was this weird loop where you'd written something and then, a month later, a reporter would come down to you from the main news desk and say, "Oh, there's this really interesting thing happening, I've read it in a bank analyst's --", and you'd be, "Yeah, yeah, well, we did that like a month ago and I think they probably read it on our thing".
So, it was really cool, and so I loved it, I really loved that time, and like you say, I think there are many virtues to the mainstream media, and what was really important, which I miss, is the sense of working in a group where people think in different ways because I think, for a contrarian mindset, if everyone thinks the same way, you end up having your own blind spot. I've always been a contrarian and I always second-guess myself and I try to not get too married to my position. So, if somebody comes along, says X is X, I will try to critically analyse why it isn't, like a scientist. If however it withstands my scrutiny, I will have to change my mind, because if you don't, you're an idiot, then you become so ideological.
I think, in 2020, it was interesting you referenced that, everyone went a bit mad and no one was using that basic sort of line of logic, and that really frustrated me and I found it very hard to operate in an environment where you couldn't question. My overarching point on what happened in 2020 is not that I necessarily was right that lockdown was a bad idea, I just wanted there to be a debate without resorting to people who are saying, "Maybe this is the wrong policy", without resorting to saying, "You're a granny-killer", or, "You are some sort of an immoral agent". Why shouldn't you, in a democracy, question whether the government policy is the correct one? That, to me, I couldn't handle it, because as a journalist I had always questioned everything. So to demonise questioning was for me very hard.
Peter McCormack: Well, I've noticed that recently, also with Russell Brand, they're starting to demonise him now just for asking questions.
Izabella Kaminska: Yeah.
Peter McCormack: Someone who was a darling of the left who now is no longer a darling of the left because some of his thoughts appear to be contrary to what the left believe on certain issues, not everything. I was trying to figure this out with Danny, I was trying to explain it in certain ways, because COVID for me was a whole experience of realising I just trusted people too much, I just believed what I was told.
Izabella Kaminska: Me too.
Peter McCormack: I believed, "Okay, there's a virus coming in and lots of people are dying, yeah, so lockdown's great", and then you had to realise, "Oh shit, that was wrong". "Oh, there's a vaccine here, yeah, I should take that", and maybe I shouldn't have taken that; I think they were almost like the final straws. Do you remember that game; what is the game with the donkey where you put the bits of plastic on it, the bucking bronco thing? Buckaroo.
Izabella Kaminska: I've never played Buckaroo.
Peter McCormack: You've never played Buckaroo?
Izabella Kaminska: No.
Peter McCormack: So, it was like a donkey and you had to put different bits of like satchels and things on it, and when the weight got too much, you didn't know, and it would buck.
Izabella Kaminska: We're the same year, aren't we?
Peter McCormack: 1978.
Izabella Kaminska: Yes, it's the best year.
Peter McCormack: What month?
Izabella Kaminska: July.
Peter McCormack: No, you're a bit older than me, I'm October.
Izabella Kaminska: Just a little bit.
Peter McCormack: That older school year.
Izabella Kaminska: I'm sorry, that is the best generation; we basically were brainwashed in the 1980s, which was the best time to be brainwashed by TV.
Peter McCormack: We were brainwashed when you had no outlet to find out you were being brainwashed, so we just accepted it.
Izabella Kaminska: Yeah.
Peter McCormack: Whereas kids now, they find out they're being brainwashed and they challenge it and they become TikTok journalists at 15! We also had Spokey Dokeys, no mobile phones, cassettes.
Izabella Kaminska: Yeah.
Peter McCormack: I was explaining cassettes to my daughter the other day, I was like --
Izabella Kaminska: "Back in the 1980s!"
Peter McCormack: Yeah, we used to have music, we used to have to put it in this machine, and if we wanted to get to a song, we had to press "forward", and then sometimes it would unwind and you had to wind it with a pencil; fucking hell! Anyway, where was I going with this; where was I?
Izabella Kaminska: We're becoming old-timers!
Peter McCormack: We're becoming very old! What the hell was I saying before then?
Izabella Kaminska: Now I've forgotten as well.
Peter McCormack: That's how old we are! We're forgetting things we're talking about because we're so old. Oh my God, that is so funny. We can't look to him; what were we talking about?
Izabella Kaminska: He wasn't listening!
Peter McCormack: No, I remember what we were talking about. No, I was too trusting, I grew up trusting things and I've had to, like Buckaroo, too much weight, and it's all belted off me now, and I'm like, "Screw this shit". I'm now embarrassingly having to walk back some opinions I've held but also not knowing what to trust anymore. And actually, I'm not ideologically driven, I just want to find the truth.
But I was trying to explain to Danny and I was trying to say, "I wonder if we're all falling into a trap here". There is, say, a left and a right, and there's like a Venn diagram of things, of topics, and some they overlap and they may agree on, and some they disagree on and fight over, but if you're a Conservative, you can hold a contrarian opinion to the Labour Party as long as it's within the field of things you're allowed to argue about, and vice versa.
If you want to ask or question things that sit outside both parties, you're suddenly a conspiracy theorist, there's almost like this group of questions you can't ask, and I fear it with my job, I even say it to my friends, I say, "Look, I'm not a conspiracy theorist but these CBDCs are a bad thing, because they will come from either party, these are a bad thing", or, "The banking system's collapsing".
Izabella Kaminska: It's actually very worrying when both parties agree on something.
Peter McCormack: Yes.
Izabella Kaminska: Because then there's no opposition, and in the UK, and I'm sure lots of your listeners are from America, but in the UK, the whole point of a shadow government is that it's like Devil's advocate; you're supposed to stress test and hold the government to account. So, when there's like total unanimity on anything, it's actually either 100% correct or it's 100% wrong; our system depends on that dialogue.
Peter McCormack: Well, this is where it gets me to what my challenge is now.
Izabella Kaminska: Democracy.
Peter McCormack: Well, two things, democracy and truth; I'm struggling on both. The BBC is a great example, and we should talk about Gary Lineker and explain that to people, which by the way I think was a great win for democracy, even if it isn't a great win for the BBC. But I'm struggling with democracy because I'm not an anarchist; the alternative to democracy to me is tyranny or it's anarchy, which has never existed and will never work.
Izabella Kaminska: Or communism.
Peter McCormack: Or communism, it's all these other shit things.
Izabella Kaminska: Yeah.
Peter McCormack: So, democracy, to me, is just like the best shit version, to paraphrase, with curse language, Churchill, it was the best shit version that we have, but it's so broken, I'm not voting.
Izabella Kaminska: Well I think, as an ancient historian, and this is another collaborator on The Blind Spot is Tim Ferguson who runs the Anacyclosis Institute, so I'm going to shoutout to him. So I try to be quite neutral in my politics really, even though lots of people on the left think I agree with them on lots of things and people on the right think I agree, but actually I'm fairly distributed; that's because my mindset about politics is from the anacyclosis perspective.
The anacyclosis perspective is a Polybian theory about cyclical political systems and that actually it's very rare what we've had the last 100 years or more. Democracy is actually, well, specifically in the last 100 years, the kind of wealth effect that we've had as a result of democracy in the post-war environment; but democracy itself, institutionally, over thousands of years that we've had it, is frankly, well actually Poland was one of the first democracies in Europe, just to bring out all my biases, we had a noble democracy, so slightly different, but that's why I say thousands of years; but the problem with it is that it is a solution based on cyclical principles.
Anacyclosis is the theory that everything gets corrupted eventually, so you start off with let's say the proto, original model is the benign monarch or the philosopher king, so that's great until there's a succession because you don't know who the child's going to be. So, in that case, what happens if it's a tyrant? Even if you have a good run of 13 generations of a nice king, at some point you're going to get a tyrant. So monarchy is not brilliant, it's definitely not protected from corruption and having a tyrant. But once a tyrant emerges, usually it swings to the next phase which is a benign oligarchy, so there's a coup against the mad king, à la Game of Thrones, and then they kind of secretly manage things.
But they too get corrupted, at which point there's a revolution, so the example of that is France and the aristocratic system and the concord between the head of state and the aristocracy; we've also had that in the UK. And then there's a revolution and you have mass democracy, and that's great as well, or a good form of mass rule, but then that gets corrupted and you end up in mob rule or you end up with a situation that can swing the other way where there's a coup and there's a return to autocracy.
But sometimes a benign autocrat emerges as well, in which case this is where we are and this I think it speaks to your dilemma: is a bad democracy better or worse than a benign and good dictator, at least on a temporary basis? So, I had a massive argument with David Gerard, who I'm sure you know who he is.
Peter McCormack: Attack of the 50-Foot Blockchain.
Izabella Kaminska: I'm a big fan of David's and I think he's exceptionally well researched and he is generally a good egg, even if I disagreed with him on this one issue, but we were discussing El Salvador. I'm not an expert in El Salvador and I will definitely put my hands up and say I'm not an expert, but I've read a little bit about it and I know there's history there amd they've had a very tumultuous recent past. The way I know it, went into El Salvador's history, or the way I was exposed to it, was through a book by a Polish author called Ryszard Kapuscinski who wrote about the Soccer War, which you would love.
Peter McCormack: I've got that book; that's between Honduras and El Salvador, isn't it?
Izabella Kaminska: Yes, and there wasn't a civil war, it was like a very brief, maybe two-week war, that emerged because of some penalty -- no, they didn't get into the finals I don't think.
Peter McCormack: I can't remember the details.
Izabella Kaminska: They were playing each other off and what happened is there were a lot of politics before that, I think there was land migration and El Salvadorans had moved to Honduras; it was all very complicated. But they were playing each other and the Honduras team came to play, or vice versa, anyway they the El Salvadorans went to play in Honduras and the Hondurans were very loud outside their window so the team couldn't sleep, and as a footballer, I'm sure you'd appreciate that.
Peter McCormack: It's a great tactic. Who did they do that to; was it like Man City or somebody they did it to, a hotel, they set the alarms off before a cup final? It's an old tactic.
Izabella Kaminska: Well, it's goes back to the 1960s, the Soccer War, and of course El Salvador lost and there was a massive outcry because they thought it was unfair and some girl committed suicide and it became very, very emotional. And then Honduras had to play their match and the El Salvadorans did exactly the same thing to them, and then the Honduras team lost, and on their way back to Honduras, they were like, "Something's going to go down, it's just going to go down".
Within days, or even a night, I'm sorry if I'm getting my history wrong as a historian, there was an attack and the El Salvadorans attacked Honduras and there was like a seven-day or ten-day war; it was really awful and very bloody and lots of people died and it was a precedent to the madness that has ensued in El Salvador ever since, which has always been in the grips of some sort of tyrannical coup or military junta or whatever, being bankrolled by one western state or the other.
There was a proxy war between the USSR I think and the Americans, basically trying to edge power into the politics there. Then finally, the final, it was not good, there was a horrible kind of dictatorship and there were death gangs; what are they called?
Peter McCormack: Death squads?
Izabella Kaminska: Death squads going around, horrific stuff; from that emerged the gangland of MS-13. So, all I said to David Gerard, who was very quick to criticise Bukele, is that I appreciate that he might be going a bit dictatorial, but we don't know the sensibilities of the El Salvadorans, and frankly, in some cases, if you're surrounded by chaos I can see a situation where a little bit of certainty under a benign leader that you think is on your side makes a hell of a lot more sense than standing up for democracy, which is never going to get rid of the MS-13 problem, or whatever; I just think we need to be a bit more openminded.
Peter McCormack: Has David been to El Salvador?
Izabella Kaminska: I don't know, have you?
Peter McCormack: Yes.
Izabella Kaminska: Well, you can tell me more.
Peter McCormack: Five times; I've interviewed the President twice.
Izabella Kaminska: Oh yes, you did, so you can tell me more than anybody.
Peter McCormack: So, it was a funny coincidence, it reminds me, like last night, I ended up watching -- have you seen the film Gone Baby Gone?
Izabella Kaminska: No.
Peter McCormack: Gone Baby Gone, to explain this I'm going to have to ruin the plot for you, but essentially a young girl gets kidnapped and goes missing, she's about four or five years old. The film was meant to be released about the time Madeleine McCann went missing, so it got delayed for a while actually. Eventually got released, and it was a huge conspiracy and she ended up being kidnapped by a policeman, Morgan Freeman, who I think his own daughter had died, and they were really well-to-do, raised her well. The mum who she was kidnapped from, it was her brother who knew the mum was a crack addict and just a piece-of-shit mum, and he helped her get kidnapped by the police because he knew this girl would get a proper upbringing.
They end up finding her and cracking it and realising it was the policeman who kidnapped her, and so then the policeman who'd figured it all out went with his wife to visit Morgan Freeman, they see the little girl there and his wife says, "Leave her here, do not return her to her mother. She's going to have a good upbringing, she's going to have a good life", and he's like, "But I have to because it wasn't his right to steal her".
So, it was this real kind of moral dilemma of, the rules say that she should be with her mother because it's kidnap, but morally people are questioning, it was like, "Yeah, but her mum's a crackhead, doesn't care about her, she's a drug dealer, she's just a piece of shit. This little girl's going to have an amazing life". So, they go through that moral dilemma, and it makes me think a little bit about the moral dilemma of El Salvador, which I've seen debated because Alex Gladstein, a very good advocate of human rights, works for the Human Rights Foundation, has been very critical of President Bukele and the human rights situation with the mass arrests of people who've basically got tattoos, and I totally see his point. But I also see that the murder rate has dropped from something like 110 per 100,000 to 7.8, which is a huge drop.
I've been there myself; I've been to a red zone, I've got a tattoo here I got there, and I met somebody there, this was pre all these mass arrests, they said, "The difference under Bukele is I can use my phone on the street; previously I couldn't because it would be snatched from me". The country has undoubtedly got safer, undoubtedly become more of a tourist hotpot, undoubtedly there's an increase in the GDP, the country is improving but it's taken someone who's got kind of dictator tendences to do this.
Now, do I think of him like a Putin or like an evil dictator? No. Do I think of him more a benevolent dictator? Perhaps. But the population are behind him at the moment, he's going to win a second election, which is against the Constitution; what happens after that; does he do a third or fourth; what happens? I don't know, and I question all these things.
Izabella Kaminska: Well, this is the thing. In some ways, this is a very long-standing argument in ancient history and philosophical circles, what is the best form of government? We've just assumed democracy's the right answer, and I think by and large democracy is the right answer, but the reason democracy works is because it synthesises all three of those government models. There is a bit of monarchy because we have a prime minister or a president of a head of state; we have a parliament, which is the oligarchy; and then we have the voting part of it, which is the democracy.
So, in an ideal system, those three complement each other and it's all checks and balances on power and it rotates, and actually the usual process is that this, according to Polybius, this cycle continuously evolves, and when it goes from one point, from the monarchy to the oligarchy to the democracy/mob rule, it's always very destabilising for economies or for civilisations. But in democracy, we essentially synthesise that transition because we do controlled rotation of that system, and because it's controlled, you should allow for the bad stuff to get shaken out but without the destabilising effects.
That's why, when you can't have transition of power very smoothly, and it's interesting that we are talking on the day that Trump is about to be arrested, alleged, sorry if it dates the programme, but if you can't have that transfer of power in a smooth way, then you end up with a destabilisation, and democracy itself is probably beyond saving. What I've noticed these days is that, in our democratic systems, you're either in power or you're in prison, and that is usually the characteristic of say the developing world or Latin America. The idea is you're in power and the former president then goes to prison because you're so polarised, you hate each other so much, there is no peaceful transition.
So, the real question is how do we get back to a system which allows for that peaceful resolution and for democracy to flow again? I think the reason, and this is my last point because I'm talking a lot --
Peter McCormack: No, you're meant to talk a lot. People prefer interviews than discussions because they don't want me to talk as much.
Izabella Kaminska: I want to know about your Bukele experience, it sounds fascinating. But the point is, when you can't transfer power easily, you end up with -- now I've lost my train of thought!
Peter McCormack: It's the transfer of power.
Izabella Kaminska: I was going to make a really impressive point and I've forgotten; I hate it when that happens. Something probably to do with anacyclosis.
Peter McCormack: Yeah, you were saying, if there isn't a smooth transfer of power…
Izabella Kaminska: Yes, that's it. So, why is there no longer a smooth transfer of power? Because the process has, in my opinion, been corrupted because we don't have a fair -- and I don't know mean this in the Trump sense but I mean it in the sense of lobby groups, in terms of who really has influence over the politicians, like who really has influence?
The one thing about Trump that I had to agree with is when he stood up there and said, "Well, you know, I know they're corrupt because I paid them!" Well, I can't argue with that, that's a point that is essential, and I think this is very true, and I think that is fundamentally the issue, is that when politicians come into office just so that they can later make their money out of what they've done in office, that is a not a good model.
Peter McCormack: Well, that's the entire US model, which the UK model feels like it's slipping into.
Izabella Kaminska: Exactly.
Peter McCormack: I think Matt Hancock really exposed that by saying, "I'm going to go on I'm a Celebrity, and then I'm going to release a book", which how naïve was he to have -- I can't remember, you'll know her name, the ghost writer.
Izabella Kaminska: Isabel Oakeshott.
Peter McCormack: That's it. I'm not a huge fan of hers, but to have her as a ghost writer and give her all your text messages was unbelievably naïve.
Izabella Kaminska: But the madness of that is, what was he thinking?
Peter McCormack: Well, I have no idea, but the key point is he went to monetise his position as a --
Izabella Kaminska: But he could have got any ghost writer. She was a known lockdown critic who was married to Richard Tice, the head of the Reform Party, who's competition; what was he thinking?!
Peter McCormack: I know. She must have said, "I've got all his fucking text messages!"
Izabella Kaminska: Well, either that or he was doing a Columbo.
Peter McCormack: I don't think he's particularly intelligent, Matt Hancock, personally.
Izabella Kaminska: He went to Oxford, didn't he?
Peter McCormack: Yeah, but there's university intelligence, there's graded -- I don't have grade intelligence, but there is almost common sense intelligence. I just don't think he particularly is, I think during the whole COVID -- do you remember that video of him stood next to that lady looking all weird from the hospital? I would think you would argue he was halfway through his political tenure and decided to monetise it.
Izabella Kaminska: Yeah.
Peter McCormack: The incentives were so strong for him to make money, he went and did it, after a very unsuccessful tenure during lockdown where he was highly criticised, and that's the point, it's too easy to monetise it, by the way, which I think there's a solution for; I think we should pay politicians much more money.
Izabella Kaminska: Yeah.
Peter McCormack: I think they're vastly underpaid for the role they do. People complain about politicians, I think we should pay them a fortune so they don't go and monetise it elsewhere and so people want to do the job.
Izabella Kaminska: No, I agree, and also who wants to even be a politician these days? There is no upside to being a politician; your personal life is on full display to everybody. The idea of it is just appalling to me, I really don't know why you'd why you'd want to do it; it's actually a sacrifice nowadays to be a politician, so there's an adverse selection because the wrong people become politicians.
Peter McCormack: Well, it's narcissists, it's a breeding ground for a narcissism.
Izabella Kaminska: Yeah.
Peter McCormack: And psychos!
Izabella Kaminska: Yeah. To be fair, there are a few good politicians who I think do do it for the right reasons, but they're very rare.
Peter McCormack: So, where are we within this cycle then?
Izabella Kaminska: Do you want the pessimistic view or the optimistic view?
Peter McCormack: I'd like both actually.
Izabella Kaminska: So, I think you can definitely read it as collapse of democracy because of corruption, in my opinion, and that democracy needs to be rescued; and I am very pro-democracy in the right format and I want to rescue democracy and that's why we've come up with this idea of what I call Vitruvian capitalism. The idea really is that you can't have a healthy democracy unless you have a thriving middle class; when the middle class is doing well, they get on with adding value to society and being non disruptive and generally towing the line and everyone's happy and income is distributed in a really…
This idea of communism where everyone is equal, that's just not ever going to work, and as a Pole, I am very much against communism. So, the nearest thing you can get to an egalitarian society is a society that does have a small but dynamic and meritocratic billionaire class, as small as possible an underclass, obviously, but with a lot of mobility between so that there's at least opportunity to go up and down, but the middle class is the bulk of the whole system.
Unfortunately, at the moment, we're hollowing out the middle class, so every single thing that's happening in terms of economic policy, politics, whatever, it's always the middle classes that are suffering, and that is what instability is made of; one of the reasons for that, I think, is the tax system doesn't incentivise productive investment.
Peter McCormack: It's a bit more than that, it's not just the tax system, it's the red tape as well.
Izabella Kaminska: Yes, 100%.
Peter McCormack: As a business owner, I have multiple businesses now, I'm just buying a bar at the moment, which I'll own in ten days --
Izabella Kaminska: Cool.
Peter McCormack: You would say so, but --
Izabella Kaminska: Completely agree.
Peter McCormack: But all the different licences and things I have to do to run this bar, I was like, "Jesus!"; this is a bar that has 200 people go to it.
Izabella Kaminska: Well, this is what happened in communism, everything was a bureaucracy because every layer of bureaucracy is an opportunity for a take.
Peter McCormack: Sorry to interrupt, so I made a film on inflation and I think it was Dominic Frisby said to me, I think he said that Lenin said, "To destroy a society, you have to hollow out the middle class".
Izabella Kaminska: That sounds plausible.
Peter McCormack: Yeah, I think it was that, it was either Lenin or Stalin, I can't remember.
Izabella Kaminska: But it sounds like the sort of thing they'd say.
Peter McCormack: Yeah, but I'm with you, you are seeing this but the tax system is awful but it is the red tape, but we have gone to that point now where I know plenty of families, it's both parents are working, both have what you would consider good jobs, and both are finding it quite hard or seeing them pushed to the limits. I used to grow up thinking when they talked about the middle class, like, "Why is everyone focused on the middle class; shouldn't we be focused on the working class?" I didn't realise the importance of a middle class to a well-functioning society.
Izabella Kaminska: Yeah, and I think that's exactly right. We've forgotten about the working classes entirely, in my opinion, as well, so it's this collateral damage across the spectrum. So, we've got this sort of Versailles situation where there's a small global elite who are imposing all sorts of -- the system, for me, it's USSR 2.0, so that's my worst case scenario is that we're on the verge of USSR 2.0, which stems from the same problems in the sense there's too much centralisation, there's too much bureaucracy, there are too many people on the take, everything's a bezzle, everyone is working in a de facto nationalised company.
A lot of your listeners are not going to like this, but I think there are a hell of a lot of tech startups that are just bullshit who, if they are successful and get loans from Silicon Valley Bank or whatever, how many of them, especially in the UK, are doing it because they get government contracts? I mean, the PPE scandal was a great example of this. The government isn't really nationalising stuff or owning things, but they give out these contracts which basically can make or break little companies. So, if you get a government contract, you're quids in; but if you don't get a government contract, you can't compete with those people who have. Then you've got the bank, obviously gives the money to the startup with the government contract, but how do you get that contract? Through your connections. So, it's all kind of nefarious.
Peter McCormack: And how do the banks now get their money?!
Izabella Kaminska: Well, exactly, and by the way, who's the bank owned by now, like HSBC?
Peter McCormack: Yeah.
Izabella Kaminska: Ultimately, that's now a Chinese bank.
Peter McCormack: And if they backstop all bank money, banks can take as much risk as they like lending as much out as they want; none of it makes any fucking sense!
Izabella Kaminska: Essentially, so this is the column I'm actually writing at this minute, is this has just made something that is implicit explicit, which is that the banking system has been nationalised since 2008, and we've just been pretending it isn't. And because it's nationalised, like with any socialist system, like in USSR, the state is not capable of making productive investments because it always ends up profiteering on it, allocating wealth to people who are in the little ruling elite.
So, that ends up misallocating capital and taking it away from productive investments that can actually make a difference to this world and things that everyday middle class people really want and allocating them to whatever the elites want. In this case, it's all ESG stuff, which ultimately are value destructive for everybody because they're a mechanism by which, okay, it's for the sake of the planet, but some of these things are completely ridiculous and have nothing to do with the planet.
Peter McCormack: Well, look, I completely agree. In the latest budget, there was nothing in there for me at all, and that's not me as a selfish person saying, "What's in it for me?" there was just nothing in there for me. As a business owner, corporation tax is going up soon, so that means I'm going to have less money to invest. I've got increasing red tape, increasing licences; my ability to do business is getting harder.
The minimum wage is going up, which by the way, it's not that I oppose to paying higher wages, it's another cost. In buying this bar, I know there's a big increase in the heating and electric that's coming to this business because it was previously on a fixed price deal. It's getting harder and harder to do business, but nothing in the budget was --
I did an interview with this guy called Dan Tubb and he told me about how the government's going £100 billion over budget every year. There was nothing in this budget that said, "Well, we're going to cut back as government here". Government continues to grow, it continues to grow, and we've been continually pouring money into every different --
Izabella Kaminska: Under a Conservative government to top of that!
Peter McCormack: Yes, interestingly enough, but they're not a Conservative government.
Izabella Kaminska: No, I agree.
Peter McCormack: They're a blue Blair Labour basically.
Izabella Kaminska: It's like that Bill Hicks sketch, "Do you prefer the psycho on the left or the psycho on the right?" They're the same thing.
Peter McCormack: Dan Tubb referred to it as the governments are now insurance brokers, they basically provide insurance for any mistake that anyone can make in society, whether it's health insurance or it's pension insurance or it's welfare insurance, and we cannot afford to do this. The point being is that, look, I think I'm a good allocator of capital, I've created multiple businesses, take the handcuffs off and let me do it.
Izabella Kaminska: Exactly. If you had a government contract, you'd also have to pass an EQI score; do you know about this?
Peter McCormack: No. Equality?
Izabella Kaminska: Yeah, so there's now this push for any government contracts have to be given to companies that meet a certain score on EQI, and I don't know exactly this criteria but it's like a diversity whatever, green, I don't know, whatever policies the government wants to pursue.
Peter McCormack: That's very progressive of a Conservative government.
Izabella Kaminska: Except the funny thing is, the only people who can score you are a handful of a little agencies that exist, there are only like a handful of them, and they all have to be with the -- you know like when we all had to get our vaccine tests and there was like a list of approved suppliers?
Peter McCormack: Yeah.
Izabella Kaminska: So the same thing. So, they've approved people who do the score, and there are not enough of them, there are councils everywhere who need these scores, and because there aren't enough of these approved suppliers, to get a score, if you're a little startup, it's like £100,000 for a score, which is an insane amount of money to waste on a score to evaluate something that common sense can evaluate. As far as I understand, there's no logic to how they do these assessments.
So, I know a startup, they did get a government contract and they had to do this score to get the actual money and what ended up happening is they couldn't believe they'd been quoted £100,000; they're just a little startup, and they go, "We can't afford this", and the government department was like, "Well, it's okay, we'll pay it for you then, don't worry". They were like, "No, no one should be paying it, it's ridiculous". He was like, "How come it's this much anyway?" He goes, "Because all these councils have to do it and they've just driven the price up because there are not enough suppliers".
This, to me, is just like rampant obvious bezzle, it's the same thing as in communism, you have these corrupt apparatchiks who are sitting in the system and just taking money for creating stupid positions that don't do anything.
Peter McCormack: This is the pessimistic view, right, this is not the optimistic view?
Izabella Kaminska: No, this is the pessimistic view.
Peter McCormack: So, what is the optimistic view?
Izabella Kaminska: The optimistic view, I hope, is that we recognise these problems, and frankly, and this is where I got a lot of heat on Twitter, this is going to sound mad but Liz Truss, I was not a fan of Liz Truss, really not a fan. To be honest, I didn't know that much about her, I'd not read her book, but we have to do something and that was a better option than -- we have to try and do something to revive our productivity, and at this moment, I don't know, it's like some sort of sci-fi drama where you're being pulled into a black hole and you can either stay on that course or you can do something. Then suddenly Tom Cruise comes in and is like, "Yeah, I know, but I have this crazy plan and it involves actually leaning into the black hole but to use the energy to propel ourselves outwards. Yes, we could die, but at least we've got a 1% chance of surviving". That's what I think, and I think Liz Truss was that kind of slingshot manoeuvre, and we just killed it.
Peter McCormack: I don't know enough about why the policy failed, why the bond market crashed afterwards. I've heard rumours that was a coordinated --
Izabella Kaminska: By the way, the pound is one of the strongest-performing currencies in the last quarter.
Peter McCormack: In the last quarter, yes, but it hasn't been in the last year and a half compared to the dollar. So, I'm always aware compared to the dollar because all my sponsors pay in dollars, so when the pound crashed, I essentially made more money, and as it rises, I make less, but there were suspicions that there was a coordinated crashing of the gilt market because people didn't like her policies, but when they were announced, they were very traditional Conservative policies: lower tax, stimulate growth.
Izabella Kaminska: We're going back to media. One of the problems is media people, and this is where I criticise myself, I do it, I'm guilty because we're all guilty of it and I think you have to acknowledge your own role in it to be able to fix the problem, and it's a psychological problem which means that we all want to be first to a big take. It's like any mind hack, you see something and you're like, "Yeah, yeah, the headline proves my point", and then you don't reach the bottom, and you share it and you haven't actually done the research but it's confirmation bias on steroids.
I don't think people do it on purpose, I just think it's a psychological disposition of everyone. And in the Truss situation, everyone was like immediately, "Oh well, OBR says it's bad therefore it must be bad", but actually, if you read Truss's interview post that event, nobody told her about the LDIs, okay fine, maybe that was problem and there should be better communication, but fundamentally was that really that big a sin? Like, under COVID, we passed unfunded budgets.
It's quite clear we're going to monetise the debt at this point, so all this was about monetising of the debt; this is going to happen, anyone who can read the markets can see we are going to monetise the debt. In fact, Silicon Valley Bank, the whole debacle of this week and last week shows you we are going to monetise the debt. The Fed is taking loans at par which means they're trying to pretend -- it's an impossible situation; just by raising rates they are killing the value of their own bonds and then pretending they're not.
Peter McCormack: Don't you sometimes think perhaps having this centralised interference is the problem?
Izabella Kaminska: I think in this case, demonstrably yes. So, what happened with Truss is that she just made something implicit potentially explicit, which is that we were going to monetise the debt, but if you monetise the debt, it's like during a war; in emergency scenarios it's okay, providing you invest it properly and actually get your productivity up; if you can create growth, it's that slingshot manoeuvre. But the usual voices on Twitter were like, "Oh no, how dare she lay tax cuts for the rich", but when you actually deconstruct what she was doing, the tax cuts were for PAYE; how many rich people do you know pay themselves through PAYE; like billionaires, do you think they pay through PAYE?
Peter McCormack: No, they all pay themselves £1 usually.
Izabella Kaminska: Exactly, so it wasn't for the billionaires, the PAYE tax cut was actually for the very people who talked themselves into the idea that she was doing them a bad service; it was the lawyers, the professional classes that take a salary. The people who work at Deloitte, at McKinsey, people who draw salaries, who live in the commuter belt of London, are the people who would have benefited from that tax cut. And they're the ones with the biggest mortgages, which interest rates will hurt them the most, and so this was basically throwing them a bone which they then threw back at her. So, I think that was a really big blunder for us in the UK, and now I suspect, in the long run, we will realise that everyone's going to do what Truss was proposing anyway.
Peter McCormack: Well, somehow we have to stop spending more than we earn, as a country. The growing deficit, I think, is a concern, but one of my bigger concerns, Izabella -- I see all of this, I just do this day-to-day. The people I talk to on my podcast or the people I talk to on Twitter are all talking about this. I try and reach out to the circles of friends and explain it to them.
I don't know if you saw the letter about the coordination between the ECB, the Fed, the Bank of England, the BoJ, how they were all coordinating with the swap lines, which I'm not going to pretend I understand what the hell they are, but they're all coordinating; this letter itself, you could read it and even an idiot like me could read that and go, "This doesn't sound good". So, I was like, "Right, I'm going to put this up on Facebook and say, 'Look, just read this, it'll take you about two minutes, just read this. This'll give you an understanding that something crazy is going on'"; nobody read it, nobody cares.
Izabella Kaminska: Really? Your viewers, readers would care about that.
Peter McCormack: So Twitter and Facebook are different people, Twitter is work --
Izabella Kaminska: So you, like me, have two lives?
Peter McCormack: Yes, I have my Twitter world, which is my professional world, and I have my Facebook which is baby pictures and dogs and football updates.
Izabella Kaminska: And most of your friends and family just probably roll their eyes when you say stuff because that's like it for me.
Peter McCormack: So, my Twitter people roll their eyes and think I'm some crazy woke liberal, my Facebook friends think I'm Alex Jones. It's my tweet, it's my pinned tweet, I've got two angry faces, and I try and tread that path really carefully to say, "Listen, I'm seeing this all here, you should know about this. You know those high interest rates? Well this is why it happened. You know that high inflation? This is why it happens", but they see it and they complain about it but they don't want to go to the point of understanding why it's happening, I can't get them to that.
Izabella Kaminska: Yeah, I have the same. Most people have busy lives, they have their day jobs and they just don't have the capacity and bandwidth to pay attention to this stuff.
Peter McCormack: Well, we can go back to journalism though because I watch the news and interest rates are reported on. I watch Silicon Valley Bank and the banking crisis being reported on the news, but nobody on the mainstream media is talking about the reason Silicon Valley Bank or these banks have got themselves into difficulty, is that they were buying yields and the massive rise in interest rates put those yields under -- nobody's talking about the detail and the stupidity that's happening.
I heard it on the radio yesterday, some lady explaining about the liquidity crisis; she didn't explain why there was. So, it's almost like we're holding back from giving people the truth of what's happening in these situations. I don't know, you've worked in these journalistic circles, why don't we get this form of reporting?
Izabella Kaminska: So, if you are a reporter and you get asked to go on the BBC to talk about finance and you use any technical term, they will never invite you back because you have to reduce everything to the most simple explanation you can think of. You can't say the word "mark to market", it's too complex, and there is a general perception in editorial newsrooms that the vast majority of your readers are not going to get X and Y and you have to put it in very simple terms.
Usually that would be okay because actually, like George Orwell said, "Simple writing, keep it simple, stupid", actually is really important. But the problem is that, well, let me go back a little bit. If you really understand your topic, really understand it, you can explain it simply. People who don't understand it can't explain it simply and they can't explain it in a non-simple way either because they just don't understand it.
However, the simplicity allows them to just not bother learning any of it, and so you end up just fudging things because there's never a need to delve to the next layer because nobody ever does complex stuff on TV or in print. So everyone's bluffing, is what I'm basically getting to. A real analyst, it's going to take two or three days just for them to understand what really went wrong, but in this case, I just find it surprising. This was obvious, since 2009, 2010, when as soon as they did QE, there were hundreds of papers written about how the exit's going to complicate things and how are we going to manage the exit because really, once you expand the balance sheet, to go back is really difficult and you have this problem.
It makes sense, think about it, usually you raise interest rates and they are a lever that can regulate credit supply in the system. But if you have this huge bond portfolio that's out there because you've expanded the balance sheet, if you raise interest rates, you're also debasing your bonds. That's why you don't go QE, because the problem with the monetisation isn't whilst interest rates are down, it's when you have to contract your liquidity. And frankly, if you didn't have a QE-expanded balance sheet, then you could raise rates whilst inflation is going and it would be all right because there wouldn't be thousands of underwater bonds.
Peter McCormack: Yeah, but this goes back to the problem of the political cycle in that the decisions they make have a lag. So, you can make a decision in 2008 under, God, who --
Izabella Kaminska: Gordon Brown?
Peter McCormack: No, I'm thinking in the US, it was essentially a crossover from Bush to Obama, wasn't it?
Izabella Kaminska: Yes, Tim Geithner.
Peter McCormack: Yeah. So, essentially, the decisions they made then rescued the economy for those people --
Izabella Kaminska: It wasn't their problem what happened next.
Peter McCormack: No, and it pushed the problem on to Trump and now Biden. People will want to attack Biden and blame Biden or even blame Trump, but these are successive governments that have made critical errors across the entire spectrum of politics, and so these are institutional issues not policy issues that you can tie to one specific political ideology.
Izabella Kaminska: Yeah, exactly, and I think you make a good point about long termism because if you're not accountable for your decisions in 10, 15 years' time and they've ruined the economy, what's that about, like, "Oh, it wasn't me". It is a funny situation; that's the downside of democracy and continuous rotation of your leaders. Like the Queen, the Queen, God bless her soul, was a real rock of stability for the UK, and I do think people underappreciate the role she played in global stability, and I do wonder if people have overlooked how destabilising her death will be, because she was the ultimate neutrality political force in the world.
Peter McCormack: And an almost unimpeachable -- how long was she Head of State?
Izabella Kaminska: 80 years?
Peter McCormack: Yeah, almost unimpeachable.
Izabella Kaminska: Yes.
Peter McCormack: I say "almost" because I think she should have thrown her son under the bus; a chat for another day. But who else could have 80 years without real scandal?
Izabella Kaminska: Yeah.
Peter McCormack: But in my circles, it's not going to be very popular to --
Izabella Kaminska: To defend the Queen.
Peter McCormack: To defend a monarchy of any kind, an elitist monarchy. Look, I think the Queen was a fantastic monarch, but I'm not a fan of the monarchy.
Izabella Kaminska: I think, in the UK system, the UK obviously has a very underpowered monarch because ultimately parliament passes all the laws, but she has that capacity to influence, soft power is what they call it. We roll out the red carpet when we want to attract foreign investment or whatever, and it does play a part. If Charles isn't as neutral as the Queen, that's a problem because my general thesis, just to bring it back to money, is that the problem we've created as a result of not just Ukraine, the de-neutralisation of money started a long time ago, but it's become more acute now because of Ukraine. So, there is no neutral asset to price the market, and so we are living increasingly in our own bubble valuations, pretending like…
That's fine for as long as you don't need commodities of anything from outside of your little zone and you can pay for things with your own currency, but in a multipolar order, which might be the next phase, that means a massive sort of depreciation of our overall wealth as a western system, because it will be kind of USSR 2.0. And if that's the case, the only optimistic pathway out is through innovation and productivity, and that means entrepreneurs have to really rally together, forge networks, distributed, and I agree with you on that, and find resilience in network-based productive ventures.
Peter McCormack: Well, look, this show promotes a neutral asset, an uncorruptible asset that hopefully, at some point, maybe a decade, decades down the line, could be that measuring stick, that could be that neutral measuring stick, like I hope for. I'm not going to spend any time when we've got seven minutes to go getting into the -- well, where are you with Bitcoin?
Izabella Kaminska: I am in a situation where I think Bitcoin plays a role in the new multipolar order. I think most of crypto's crap but --
Peter McCormack: I mean, it's all crap!
Izabella Kaminska: You can't really replace Bitcoin because it was the first one, and so just from a pure energy endowment perspective, it is the first one; nothing can replace it. It's got the biggest blockchain, and I don't see it as a settlement for retail payments necessarily in the future. I think it can co-exist in a landscape of competing natural currencies but be the ultimate settlement token between those different zones.
Peter McCormack: I think you've just put it better than I ever would. Why do you think the FT still don't take it seriously, and I know you might have to be careful with your words here, or not even want to answer?
Izabella Kaminska: Well, I think to some degree, the FT speaks for the establishment.
Peter McCormack: Okay.
Izabella Kaminska: And I think, whether wittingly or unwittingly, I would say that there are people who are pro-Bitcoin and crypto in the FT and who are openminded to it, and I think the whole collapse of FTX and stuff, they've been all over that.
Funnily enough, it's become a huge story for them even though, for years, people were rolling their eyes about me and Jemima being really obsessed with crypto, they're like, "Oh God, it's just not a story, it's not as important as traditional finance", but I always approached it from the point of view of you have to scrutinise this stuff, it's making very bold claims, I have to criticise. I think a lot of my criticisms were fair and hopefully led to corrective action, but that was my perspective. But I do think that lockdown changed my view on everything, as you know, and that's when I realised that it makes sense.
The system is better off with a neutral asset that can price everything, because without a neutral asset, you have no pricing of anything; money must be neutral and there is no neutral money outside of Bitcoin at the moment.
Peter McCormack: Yeah, not even gold these days.
Izabella Kaminska: Gold's reaching a new high as we speak, I think.
Peter McCormack: Is it? Peter Schiff will be happy.
Izabella Kaminska: I think so, yeah. But yeah, I think gold is fine, whatever, but in a digital age, you need a digital gold because you can't compete, like you wouldn't be able to compete with anyone if you have to settle in gold, you just can't.
Peter McCormack: Yeah, my friend, John Pfeffer said to me a long time ago, he said, "When we're all flying around in our Millennium Falcons, we're not going to be settling in yellow rocks, we're going to need a digital gold, and Bitcoin is the one", and that always stuck with me, and so I'm 100% agreeing with him.
I'm conscious we're coming to an end. God, there was so much more I wanted to talk to you about, but that means we can at least save it. We haven't even talked about Gary Lineker; I wanted to talk about that.
Izabella Kaminska: Oh man!
Peter McCormack: Can we very quickly talk about that? I saw it as a win for democracy.
Izabella Kaminska: To be honest, what is the latest with Gary; did he get his job back?
Peter McCormack: He did.
Izabella Kaminska: Okay.
Peter McCormack: He also completely destroyed Penny Mordaunt on Twitter.
Izabella Kaminska: See, I'm not informed enough about this. First of all, I don't really care, I'm sorry, Peter, I'm not really into football either.
Peter McCormack: It's not about football.
Izabella Kaminska: I think he should be allowed to say what he wants to say, but does he get overpaid? Probably. I don't really understand what the controversy was about.
Peter McCormack: Well, he spoke against the government policy on migrants.
Izabella Kaminska: And he called them Nazis?
Peter McCormack: No, he didn't call them Nazis, that was how it was misrepresented. He said, "The language they're using is familiar to 1930s Germany", which it kind of was, and the argument is should he be able to express a non-neutral political opinion as someone paid by the BBC?
Izabella Kaminska: I think it's more difficult for news reporters, but he works in sport, right?
Peter McCormack: Yeah.
Izabella Kaminska: Does it matter? My own point is the difference is that Hitler was being oppressive to his own citizens, so that was the difference, whereas the Tories are having policies for non-citizens, so that's the difference. Throwing people out of your own country, it's very different; it's not nice either way, but it's just --
Peter McCormack: Yeah, we've moved to a point where --
Izabella Kaminska: But he's got a right to say it, he's got a point.
Peter McCormack: Yeah, an absolute right to say it, and the fact that the BBC tried to shut him down or tried to cancel him and then everybody refused to work on Match of the Day, everyone from commentators to his co-pundits to maybe it was the camera operators, it poisoned the show that nobody could now work on it because nobody wanted to step across the Gary Lineker picket line as such. So, I thought it was a win for free speech, which we don't have enough of in this country.
Izabella Kaminska: Yeah, but then I was just thinking today, would I draw the line on free speech if it's going to cause a banking panic or something like that? I don't know. I tend to agree with you, I'm a free-speech maximiser, which means I want to push free speech as much as it goes, but I do think there are a few limitations that are fair; I'm not like American free speech about everything.
Peter McCormack: But there are limitations in the US, incitement of violence and certain things.
Izabella Kaminska: Yeah, so that's where I'm kind of.
Peter McCormack: You can't shout, "Fire!" in a cinema.
Izabella Kaminska: Yeah, exactly, and now with Gary Lineker, we're out of --
Peter McCormack: We're out of time! Oh my God, they went so quick, I knew this would. Right, listen, you should finish by shilling The Blind Spot because I think it's wonderful; tell everyone about The Blind Spot and how they sign up and where they should send their money.
Izabella Kaminska: The-blindspot.com, annoying dash because the actual Blind Spot is owned by a company that makes blinds, which one day maybe I will own but not yet, maybe I'm going to be able to make them an offer they can't refuse. Yeah, so check me out if you like all my stuff, yeah; what else can I say? I write about finance but I also write about media because I think you can't get finance right if you don't approach things from two perspectives and at least try to push back against some of the propaganda. It doesn't necessarily mean I agree with certain ideological positions when I'm trying to explain what's going on with the propaganda, but I just think if you're going to try to make money in the current environment, you can't afford to be swept up in the propaganda.
Peter McCormack: Well, listen, I love it, I love your work and I wish Danny had booked us three hours, not an hour and a half, and we were both a few minutes late as well, but we'll just have to do this again with Danny.
Izabella Kaminska: That sounds great.
Peter McCormack: He's over soon.
Izabella Kaminska: We'll come back and hopefully figure out what's going on with the world of banks, but maybe by the time we come back we will be living in a new paradigm of financial multipolarity.
Peter McCormack: Where we have to show our IDs to get anywhere. Are you coming to the conference in Miami?
Izabella Kaminska: When is it?
Peter McCormack: May.
Izabella Kaminska: Not at the moment, but maybe, I don't know. No, not at the moment.
Peter McCormack: We need to get you another conference because that was good.
Izabella Kaminska: I'll come to a conference.
Peter McCormack: Anyway, listen, thank you, thank you, thank you, Izabella; I will talk to you again soon.
Izabella Kaminska: Thank you, Peter.
