WBD642 Audio Transcription

The Failure of Government Economic Policy with Dan Tubb

Release date: Friday 7th April

Note: the following is a transcription of my interview with Dan Tubb. 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.

Dan Tubb is a podcaster and former venture capitalist. In this interview, we discuss the problems with fixing the sovereign debt problem in the context of broken media, broken politics and broken international institutions. We talk about the general ignorance of the problems facing society, and how this compounds the difficulty of resolving the situation.

“For every £1 the government collects in taxes, it spends £1.30. And the debt element of that is going up all the time, and you’re not getting anything for that. And effectively we’re in a spiral, a debt spiral.”

— Dan Tubb

Interview Transcription

Peter McCormack: Good to see you, man.

Dan Tubb: Good to be here.

Peter McCormack: The last show we did was very popular.

Dan Tubb: Good.

Peter McCormack: And, Danny would probably say it's the show I've referred to most.  Would you say that since that?

Danny Knowles: I think I said that to you.

Dan Tubb: Yeah, you did.  On the way over, yeah, you mentioned that.

Peter McCormack: You've got to keep with the mic, that's why we've given you headphones!

Dan Tubb: Oh, okay.

Peter McCormack: That's where you notice it.  Yes.

Dan Tubb: And I should thank you actually, because I think until that point, my Bitcoin journey had been a rather lonely one, because I really got into Bitcoin at the start of the pandemic, and I had a lot of time on my hands, so I really went deep on it.  But what I probably didn't appreciate, until I did your show the first time, was that had been a very insular thing.  Then after I did the show, a whole bunch of people started reaching out to me, so I guess it resonated with a number of people.  And some people just wanted to say hi, and that's great, but I met a couple of really interesting characters off the back of that, a couple of them that are worth mentioning, because I'm going to come to your live thing next week.

Peter McCormack: Oh, you're coming?  Great.

Dan Tubb: Yeah, I'll come along to that.  And I want to introduce you to a chap called David Parkinson, who is building out a payment system in the UK.  So, that's a business which is just getting off the ground now and I'm going to be involved in that and helping in whatever way I can.  And the other one is a chap called Jeremy Casey.

Peter McCormack: I feel like I know that name.

Dan Tubb: You might well do.  He's quite the evangelist.

Peter McCormack: Oh, okay.

Dan Tubb: He's the sort of guy that can't walk past a restaurant without going in and converting them to Bitcoin and getting them to start accepting it.

Peter McCormack: I think sometimes though, those people turn people off, they're a bit annoying, "Oh, it's one of those fucking bitcoiners".

Dan Tubb: He does it quite well actually, and he's started this regular Bitcoin meetup in London now.  So, every couple of months we all get together and I've gone along to those and spoken at them, and it seems to be taking off.  So, I think he's going to tie up with Jordan from the Bitcoin Collective.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, I spoke to Jordan today.

Dan Tubb: Oh, okay.  So, they're probably going to put their heads together and come up with something bigger in London which will be fantastic, because it will be a forum where every two or three months, something like that, the plebs can get together and have a beer and talk Bitcoin, but also it will be a forum where you can get policymakers, chief execs, that sort of crowd to come along, and it's an environment for them to start talking and engaging with this stuff and saying, "What can it do for me; what can it do for my business; how can I think about it?"  So, there's a lot of value in something like that.

I think what being involved with these chaps has shown me is that the thing where people say, "You've just got to hodl, you've just got to hold and that's the only thing you've got to do", it's making me realise, no actually.

Peter McCormack: They're completely wrong.

Dan Tubb: You've got to build.  You've got to build out the infrastructure, like David is, and you've got to grow the network like Jeremy is, and if you're doing those things, the Bitcoin will only be worth $1 million when it's genuinely worth $1 million to people, because it has that value because it has that network.  So, as it becomes easier to use and as we get 2 billion people on it across the world, that's when it will really take off.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, I love what Jordan's doing, I think he's a great guy.  The event they put on in Edinburgh actually, my son and daughter came along, they ran the merch stand for me while I was wandering around.

Dan Tubb: How did that do?

Peter McCormack: It did very well, yeah, it did very well.  I think we sold about -- it's Real Bedford merch, the football team stuff, it always does very well.  I think we did about £3,000; yeah, £3,000 we did.  I've done another event where we did about £6,000, which is great because the money just goes all into the football club.  But when I heard about this event that they were doing, I didn't know them, didn't know anything of them, and part of me was a little bit apprehensive, nervous for them.  In my head, I just pictured something that wouldn't be that great, and that's probably really unfair.

Dan Tubb: Were you picturing something a bit cringy then, a bit nerdish?

Peter McCormack: A little bit The Office.

Dan Tubb: Right, okay.

Peter McCormack: But I have to hold my hands up to them.  Look, they crushed it.  They had great speakers, they had great talks, they had really good people there, it was just a really good event, really well-organised.  And the reason I've spoken to Jordan is we're doing this live event next week, but a year later we're going to do our own event, we're going to a full one-, possibly two-day conference here in Bedford, which I used to think about like, "That's difficult, how do you get that many people to Bedford", then I realise people will go to the places where Bitcoin exists.  And Bedford is a centre for Bitcoin because of the club, because of me and what we've been doing here.  And so, yeah, we're going to go for it and I want Jordan's help, I want him to support what we're doing.

But that's really cool that you're in with the nerds, man!

Dan Tubb: Yeah, the plebs, yeah!

Peter McCormack: You're in with the plebs!

Dan Tubb: Yeah, it was valuable.  So, when you start to build these networks, you start to see a depth behind this movement, and real, good-quality people as well, people who've done some serious thinking about stuff.  So, getting involved in person, being able to have a beer with somebody, there's a lot of value with that, because it is so easy to have your Bitcoin experience as being a purely online thing, because there are so many podcasts and ways you can get involved over the net.  But actually, there's no substitute for just standing there and having a chat with somebody with a beer in your hand.

Peter McCormack: Well, we have the exact same feeling about why we do the interviews in-person.  I mean, it's a bit easier with you because you're British, but you can very easily do a remote show and most people do, almost everyone does.  I mean, Jordan Peterson's is remote, Russell Brand's is remote, most of them do remote stuff, some in-person.  But you get a few people, like Rogan, who'll stick to in-person, Rich Roll sticks to in-person, and we try the best we can.  We can't do it always, because we have to react to news, but the conversations in-person, they're just infinitely better, it's a higher quality and you get that relationship.

Dan Tubb: Another thing I've started doing is I'm spending a couple of days a week now with the Lotus Eaters team, so lotuseaters.com.

Peter McCormack: They're the ones you were writing for before, was it, or something?

Dan Tubb: No, I was just having conversations with them, I was just sorting something out with them, but now I've joined them two days a week and I've got a show there, called Brokenomics, where I'm looking at why the financial system's gone wrong, trying to explain the components of it, and I've found exactly the same thing.  So, I have had guests along for that, and I did one guy who lives in Barcelona, so I did that one remotely, but the rest of them I got the guys to come in and you're right, it is a far superior experience when you can look somebody in the eye and you get that more natural rhythm of getting into the conversation with them.

Peter McCormack: Well, there's no latency.  Latency kills the online conversation.

Dan Tubb: Well, we're getting some latency here!

Peter McCormack: Yeah, well, Danny, don't take that!

Danny Knowles: I'm trying very hard here!

Peter McCormack: Yeah, don't take that!  So anyway, back to what I was saying, it's been the show I've referenced people back to during the show, but even outside the show, the most.  I don't know if you remember, I said one of the difficulties I have is trying to explain the problems with the financial system without sounding like a conspiracy theorist.

Dan Tubb: Yes.

Peter McCormack: And I've really struggled.  CBDCs are a great example.  When I try and explain to people what is wrong with CBDCs and say, "Well, look, it's giving the government too much information.  We could end up with a Chinese-style surveillance state whereby if you go to buy things, you're told you can't and you have a social credit score", and they're like, "You're a fucking nutter, what are you on about?"  I know I'm right, I know the threat of what I'm talking about, yet when you try and explain this to a normal person, they're like, "What are you on about?"

So, what I've been doing, and I thought the best data point within, and we're going to have to go back through it, but the best data point for me was £120 billion is spent on servicing debt, the interest.

Dan Tubb: And you get nothing for that.

Peter McCormack: Nothing, nothing's paid off.  So, what I've been saying to people is, "Hey, just so you know how fucked the UK financial system is and the economy is, do you know how much money the government brings in tax receipts?" and they're usually, "No".  "It's about £1 trillion to £1.1 trillion".  And I'm like, "Do you know what the biggest expense is?" and a lot of people get that right.  Not everyone, but most people are like, "Is it the NHS?" and I'm like, "Yeah, it's about £200 billion". 

I'm like, "What do you think it is next?" and all kinds of things, pensions, whatever, and I'm like, "No.  It is servicing the interest of the debt that they've accumulated".  And I say, "Do you want to know why that's crazy?  Because it's £120 billion, yet they only spend £76 billion on education.  So, they're spending almost double on servicing interest on the debt than they're spending on education.  Imagine they had that £120 billion a year to put into education?"

Dan Tubb: Well, and as I pointed out, a lot of that spend is not actually departmental spend, it is non-cash items.  So, once you strip that out, that's why the debt interest goes directly after the NHS.  And it wouldn't take too much in growth of debt interest to go beyond the operational budget of the NHS, even though the total spend, including the depreciation and other items they've got in there, is a little bit higher.

Peter McCormack: But let me just get to my point.

Dan Tubb: Yes, sorry.

Peter McCormack: The point I was getting to, so I've explained this to them and I'm thinking, "I'm going to get you here, you're going to finally realise this is all fucked", and then they're like, "Oh, okay, anyway did you see Man U lost yesterday?"  "Yeah, I mean I'm literally telling you about the collapse of the financial system, how you're being robbed by the government", and I know what's going to happen.  We're going to come to another election and they're going to be like, "I don't think I can vote for Rishi, so I might have to vote for Keir", and it's just like, "No, it's all fucked".

Dan Tubb: Changing from the red team to the blue team is not going to do a damn thing.

Peter McCormack: Well, it is if you're a Man U fan, because you might actually win the league, but not in regards to politics.

Danny Knowles: This feels very pointed!

Peter McCormack: Why?!

Dan Tubb: I don't follow football at all, so that reference went over my head.

Peter McCormack: That's a wild accusation, Daniel Knowles!  Yeah, Danny's a Man U fan, I'm just giving him some shit.

Dan Tubb: Oh, okay.

Peter McCormack: But no, you're right.  So anyway, the point I've been trying to get to is, I felt like you gave me the ammo, and I went out with the ammo, and I was just shooting blanks everywhere.  Nothing was sticking, nobody was going --

Dan Tubb: Yes.  So, what you've just said and the comments that you made in the first interview, I did hear you, and that's kind of where I want to come at it today, I kind of want to address those points, because people have a set of ingrained assumptions in their thinking that is not letting them get past a certain point.  And frankly, you're not going to be able to persuade everybody, but I think we need to understand -- last episode, what I did is I explained that we are in trouble, there is effectively no way out of that, I systematically went through each of the options.  So, what was it now?

Peter McCormack: Well, let's do a TL;DR, let's remind everyone what it was.  But the interesting thing is, since we've done that, everything's got worse; I mean, the banks are starting to collapse!  But anyway, do you want to remind people what the issue is?

Dan Tubb: Yes, so let's go through it.  So, the summary is that for every pound the government collects in taxes, it spends £1.30, and the debt element of that is going up all of the time and you're not getting anything for that, and effectively we're in a debt spiral.  The reason being is because, let me see, so the total amount of debt that we have here in the UK is about 100% of GDP, so the coupon on the debt is about 4%, going on for 5%.

Peter McCormack: Explain the coupon on the debt.

Dan Tubb: The interest payments, yeah.  So, if you want to rectify that situation because it's 100% of GDP versus 100% of debt, this is pretty much a one-to-one relationship, so the growth of the economy has to exceed the growth of the debt; but we're not going to get growth of greater than 4%, we're getting typically in the 1.5% range, historically it's been about 3%.

Peter McCormack: So, would you say historically, if the government was accumulating debt below the growth rate, that's okay?

Dan Tubb: Yes.  So, debt accumulation below the -- well, I wouldn't necessarily say it's okay because you should be living within your means, but it's manageable.  But because we've got a series of bad assumptions in our economic thinking, in our societal thinking, our political thinking, we have got to the point where this has become -- actually, you spoke to a US economics professor a couple of episodes after I was on, and he was able to explain the whole thing in about a sentence.  I thought it was brilliant.

Danny Knowles: Josh Hendrickson, maybe?

Dan Tubb: Possibly, I forget his name.

Peter McCormack: Yes, it was Josh Hendrickson, yeah, he is the professor. 

Dan Tubb: So, he explained it brilliantly and I wish I had thought of this.  And the way he summed it up was --

Peter McCormack: Was this the insurance, or was that you?

Dan Tubb: The insurance?

Peter McCormack: So, he said, "Since World War II, governments have become insurance providers".

Danny Knowles: No, that was Dan.

Peter McCormack: That was you.

Dan Tubb: Well, so let me paraphrase the way that he did it, because I thought it was quite neat.  So, he said that effectively, we are fighting a total war at this point in terms of our level of spending, but that total war is directed at -- I mean, the thing with wars is they end.  But the total we're fighting is against old age, sickness, people who don't work, so it's basically insurance schemes, so it's a war that cannot end.  So, this spending's going on, the growth of the spending exceeds the growth of the economy, therefore debt spiral.  And what I did, the TL;DR with the first episode, although it would probably help if people just went and watched that, because that will give the full explanation, but the TL;DR of that is you can't get out of it, and I set out the reasons why.

So, growth.  We can't exceed 4% and we're struggling to get 1.5% at the moment.  Historically, growth rates have been about 3%, but we've got a lot of government, a lot of regulation, a lot of taxes, and that is sitting on the creative output of the economy, so growth rates are low.  The second one was tax the rich, and I didn't mess around there, I said, "Okay, let's just take all of the wealth from the Times Rich List 250, just take the whole lot", and it came to whatever it came to, maybe £600 billion or something, and that pays for seven months of government spending.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, and also if you do that, they're all going to leave the UK.

Dan Tubb: Yeah, and you wouldn't get it in the first place, because people like Roman Abramovich, they are not keeping their money in the Lloyds current account!

Peter McCormack: Well, I mean all his money's in the government account right now, isn't it?

Dan Tubb: Okay, well maybe he's a bad example.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, I know what you mean.

Dan Tubb: 220 on the Times Rich List is Rishi Sunak.  I mean, even he is probably not keeping all his money in a Lloyds current account.  That money will fly the moment there's any suggestion of wealth seizures.

Peter McCormack: He's 220?  Is that his money, or his wife's money?

Dan Tubb: Oh, probably the wife, I'd imagine.  A PM salary's good, but I don't think it's that good.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, I can't imagine him putting in place a policy whereby he would give away 100% of his money!

Dan Tubb: Yeah, well you can't see Keir Starmer doing it either, so nobody's going to do this and it's not like you can just take the next 250 and the next 250, because the 250 richest people in the country, the 250 under them own a tiny fraction of what the top 250 own.  So, if you wanted to try and address the debt problem by seizing wealth, I mean you would be seizing wealth right down to your Great Auntie Edna, who's got a second cottage somewhere.  I mean, it would have to go all the way down.

Another one was cut spending, that we talked about, and that was probably the main focus.  It was helpful to have three Brits around the table when we were talking about that, because we were talking about things like cutting the spending of the NHS in half effectively, and that's just not going to happen.  The NHS is basically a religion in this country.  So, that doesn't work and you would have to cut the operational budget of basically everything in government by half at this point to get the spending under control.

Peter McCormack: Remind me, the target was £250 billion so that we could have balanced books, and then pay £120 billion off a year and therefore clear the debt in 20 years.

Dan Tubb: That sounds right, yeah.

Peter McCormack: That was about the maths, because we were increasing the national debt by about £120 billion a year.

Dan Tubb: Yeah, so flip that the other way.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, so if you cut by £120 billion, you tread water; and if you cut by £250 billion, you can pay it off over 20 years.  At the moment they're doing the opposite, they're increasing it.

Dan Tubb: Yeah.

Peter McCormack: And so, just remind people, why should they care about them increasing the national debt every year by £120 billion?

Dan Tubb: Well, because eventually it's going to squeeze out everything else.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, exactly.

Dan Tubb: I'll tell you, the last one is going to be to print.  So basically, the error term in all of this is print the money.  Then you will get a pension, but you won't be able to buy anything with it, and it will screw everybody else as well, everybody who's working.  So, financial assets will do somewhat better, because they'll just be redenominated by the new, larger money supply.  But certainly if you're earning, you're going to get squeezed out by that.

Peter McCormack: I thought about it a lot afterwards and I thought, "How would you save £250 billion?" and my starting point was halving the budget of the NHS. 

Dan Tubb: Yeah, try getting elected with that.

Peter McCormack: But I think it would need cross-party consensus.  And I think we're at a stage whereby cross-party consensus is needed for the constituents and the country, and that's becoming a more important point than the career goals or the power gains of politicians.  And the political hot potato of the NHS should not be used as a voting tool, but it is, with people who really do not understand the situation we're in. 

That said, we're heading towards it.  It used to be four hours used to be the generally accepted wait time in the NHS.  It's now six, seven, eight hours, everyone's striking.  I don't think we should be getting away from people having access to free healthcare, I think we should be getting away from everyone having access to free healthcare, and I think we should be doing things like in Ireland, where my father lives, where everybody has to pay for a doctor's appointment, lots of things like that.

Interesting anecdote for you.  I bumped into an ambulance worker in a local shop and I was like, "I've got some questions for you".  Anyway, we were talking about the problems.  You know when the strikes happened, Bedford wasn't striking, they weren't part of the union that was striking.  They said the intake within their Accident and Emergency department fell off a cliff and, I can't remember what she told me; the wait times were like one to two hours, because everybody thought there were people striking, so they weren't phoning up ambulances, they weren't going into -- they basically got rid of all the people who were going with anxiety, panic attacks and nothing issues.

So, I think the thing is, if you have a health service with no friction, people are going to overuse it.  So, my personal point is that maybe you only support, and this is highly controversial, but you only support people who absolutely need free healthcare and most people should have an insurance.  Then I think you go department by department, slashing and burning all this fucking wasteful shit they do.  I think you can save it within government.

Dan Tubb: Possibly, but you just can't get elected.

Peter McCormack: No, of course.  That's why cross-party consensus is needed.

Dan Tubb: Yeah, but it doesn't feel like we're anywhere close to that, because when you play that game out, let's say you go to the opposition and you say, "We both need to go forward and we both need to say that we need to bring in these radical cuts", the opportunity for the other team to renege on that and take the opposite view and win power and then say, "Okay, I'll just kick the can down the road ten years, I'll have my time in office, and then it will be the problem of the next guy", and that's what they all think.  They're all trying to kick the can down the road.

Peter McCormack: Of course.

Dan Tubb: Now, take France at the moment.  They have kicked the can down the road on the pension thing for so long that it has now got to the point where the incumbents are the politicians who are realising that this is going to break on their watch and therefore they need to do something, and that sort of explains why Macron is pushing through something incredibly unpopular at this point, because he knows the alternative is worse.

Peter McCormack: But it's a strange one really, because those pension reforms, I mean there's such a lag for that to come into place that it really won't affect him right now.

Dan Tubb: It might affect his ability to borrow, to keep things on track right now, so that's one thing.

Peter McCormack: Oh, okay.

Dan Tubb: All of that said, I have come to possibly see a growth route out of this.

Peter McCormack: Okay, you're not going to crash the economy like Liz Truss?

Dan Tubb: No!  Are you using ChapGPT?

Peter McCormack: A little bit.

Dan Tubb: Yeah, it's kind of remarkable, isn't it?

Peter McCormack: It is.  Me and Danny have tried some things, right.  For example, we could have said to ChatGPT, "Today, I'm interviewing Dan Tubb.  Here are some details on him.  Give us 20 questions to ask him today", and you'd get through it and you'd probably maybe use half, about half of them maybe, and the others you'd reword them.

Danny Knowles: Probably not even half without seriously editing them.

Peter McCormack: But it gives you a starting point.  Or recently when I've been writing articles, I've got it to just build my structure.

Dan Tubb: Well, it solves the blank page problem, it gets you off zero really fast.

Peter McCormack: That's it, it gets you off zero.  So, I've had two articles I've written recently, I've said, "Do this for me".  I've almost written the entire thing again afterwards, but it gave me the structure, which was so useful.  What were the things that you've done where you found it useful?

Danny Knowles: It's semi-useful for writing show descriptions.  To be honest, I'm not using it that much at the moment, but I think we will try and implement it more in the workflow.  But I just asked it how the UK gets rid of its debt issue.

Peter McCormack: Okay.

Dan Tubb: Oh, right.

Danny Knowles: Fiscal discipline, economic growth, inflation and structural reforms; they were its four.

Peter McCormack: What's it saying on structural reforms?

Danny Knowles: "The UK can implement structural reforms to reduce long-term cost of public services such as healthcare and pensions.  These reforms can include changes to the retirement age, the introduction of private sector competition in public services, and the use of technology to increase efficiency".

Peter McCormack: And mean, that's like what I just said, what you're about to say.

Dan Tubb: Yeah.  I've actually been using it for a lot more frivolous stuff than that.  I mean, I find it's brilliant for, what did I ask it last night?  I asked it, "Ask me seven questions and then recommend seven movies", and it did that.

Danny Knowles: That's a good one.  You want to do it, don't you?

Peter McCormack: Yeah!

Dan Tubb: And I know that it did well, because all of the movies that it recommended, I had seen and I really liked.  So I said, "Okay, that's great, but give me more obscure ones", and I had to do that a couple of times, and I ended up watching some Spanish time-traveller movie, or something.  I mean, it's a really powerful tool.  Then I thought, "Okay, I can use this now to recommend book series", or you can use it for a whole bunch of other things.  But I think we're only scratching the surface for potentially what this AI technology can do.  And actually what I'm going to reference here is, you've interviewed Cathie Wood, haven't you?

Peter McCormack: Yeah.

Dan Tubb: So, Cathie Wood, every year she puts out a Big Ideas report, and that's really interesting because what it looks at is the convergence of new technologies that are coming forward and how they can reinforce each other.  Now, we have had a period like that before, so the early part of the 1900s, we got things like electricity, steam trains, automobiles, so these technologies that could reinforce each other.  And what they did was they increased the growth rate of the West.  So, the growth rate before that had been sub-1%.  And then after that, in the 1900s, we got a growth rate of 3%.

You might think, "Okay, what's the significance of a growth rate of 3% as opposed to say 1.5%; does it really make that much difference?"  It makes a huge difference.  So, if you were to rerun the 1900s, take the US, and give it a growth rate so it actually had, between 1900 and 2000, a growth rate of 3%.  Rerun that again with a growth rate of 1.5% and the US today would have an economy which is smaller than Brazil's.

Peter McCormack: So, it's compound growth?

Dan Tubb: Yeah.  And actually, it's worse than that, because the US has a higher population than Brazil, so GDP per head would be lower than Botswana today.  So, a fairly small change to the growth rate can have a significant effect down the line.  Now, as I mentioned earlier, the western growth rate has been 3% for a while.  It starts to get more difficult to draw something meaningful from that post about 2000, because of the magic money tree effects that came along.  But as I talked about in the first podcast, we're struggling around 1.5% now with a debt growing at 4%, 5%.

Now, what Cathie's Big Ideas report looked at was the convergence of, this time it isn't trains and electricity and automobiles, it is 3D printing, it's AI, it's self-driving cars, it's the energy revolution stuff that's going on.  There's a whole bunch of different trends which if you combine them together, they think that you can get growth up to about 6% by 2030, and you can get growth up to, I think they said 10.5% by 2040.

Peter McCormack: Okay.

Dan Tubb: Now, that is absolutely huge.

Peter McCormack: And that compounded means you can start paying off the debt?

Dan Tubb: Oh, yeah.  So again, let's go back to that experiment between 1900 and 2000.  If you were to give the US a growth of not 3% during the 1900s, but 6%, the US would be 20 times wealthier than it currently is.  You would have an economy bigger than the rest of the world put together.

Peter McCormack: Okay, so the only spanner in the works for this great idea you have is AI's going to kill us all in three years' time!

Dan Tubb: Yes.

Peter McCormack: Tell him about the podcast you listened to.

Danny Knowles: Well, it was a Bankless podcast, which is our arch rivals.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, it's basically What Shitcoin Did.

Dan Tubb: Okay, I don't watch that one.

Danny Knowles: Good!  But they had this guy on who was basically an AI expert, who was saying that he thinks it's going to end the world in the next few years, that it's out the box, there's no putting it back and it's game over, effectively.

Dan Tubb: So, I'm certainly not an AI expert, but I'm listening to what people are saying on this, and it's not obvious to me why that necessarily needs to be the case.

Danny Knowles: Well, to be fair, I wouldn't be the right person to answer that, but we have got a guy coming on this week who's going to get into the AI stuff with us.

Dan Tubb: Was it the guy I mentioned to you?

Danny Knowles: Yes, it was; Andrew Phillips, yeah.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, so this guy that Danny's talking about, I haven't listened to it.  And by the way, I'm only kidding with the Bankless guys, they're all right.  But he is an expert on this and he has kind of flipped negative, because he's realised where this can go, the speed of change, the speed at which it's learning.  And the thing is, regulating AI is super-difficult, because it can exist in the grey market, it can exist rogue.

Danny Knowles: And that's his issue.  I think he thinks we're just playing too fast and loose with this thing that we don't really know what it can be.

Peter McCormack: And even Elon said that recently, and signed the letter with Steve Wozniak, or whatever his name is, and 1,000 other people.  And when you start to get it explained to you, if AI decides, "Actually, we need these humans dead, they're fucking annoying, let's get rid of them", if it makes that decision --

Dan Tubb: There's very little we can do about it, yeah.

Peter McCormack: But it only has to be a slight error rate for it to do that, it only has to be one bug, one thing that's wrong.  I mean, this is me talking about connecting AI with CRISPR.  Do you know about CRISPR?

Dan Tubb: Yes.

Peter McCormack: Connect it up with CRISPR and they're like, "Let's get a bit of the virality of COVID, but let's get the death rate of Ebola, and then let's just sprinkle it around".

Dan Tubb: If the AI gets smart enough and it decides we have to go, then we're gone and there's not much we can do about it.  But if it goes the other way and it decides to help us, then there could be a very bright future ahead.  I kind of look at it, it's like having a kid, it's like giving birth to a new consciousness.  I mean, you don't know how your son is going to grow up to think of you 20 or 30 years later.  He might think you're a great guy, or he might decide that you've got to go.

Peter McCormack: Well, that's one way of saying it.  Also, it might think of us as an ants' nest outside.  And when I get an ants' nest, I'm like, "Kill those fuckers, let's drown them, let's get rid of them, they're annoying", rather than going, "How could those ants help me?  Well, they could carry the leaves away"!  So, they might just exterminate us, we might all be dead.

Dan Tubb: Yeah, they might do.

Peter McCormack: Maybe that's it.

Dan Tubb: But it also offers the possibility to get us out of the debt hole that we're in.  So, there are possible upsides, even though we might all die!

Peter McCormack: Well, if we're all dead…!

Dan Tubb: Yeah, I suppose that's another way of solving the problem!

Peter McCormack: Yeah, there's no debt hole!

Danny Knowles: Maybe that's his solution!

Peter McCormack: Yeah, fuck!  All right, come on, hit me with it.

Dan Tubb: Yeah, so that growth is a potential revision of what I put forward in the first podcast, that potentially we could get enough growth.  Now, I kind of have mixed feelings about that.  I mean, it would be fantastic if we could get the sort of growth that Cathie's talking about, with the convergence of these different ideas.  On the other hand, it does bail our current elites out of the hole that they've dug for us.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, but that's the way it works.  It's a bit like, have you just seen the new IMF loan that went to Sri Lanka, that was announced today; a $3 billion loan?

Dan Tubb: I haven't seen that.

Peter McCormack: See if you can find it, Danny.  It's a new $3 billion loan to Sri Lanka, which requires ongoing austerity for the peasants.  But it's a bailout for the elites and it's austerity for the peasants.

Dan Tubb: Yeah.  And it's interesting, the US are always like this, aren't they?  They're like, "You can't just print money.  No, you have to have austerity, you need to cut", and then they go and print another $1 trillion.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, "And by the way, give us your resources".

Dan Tubb: Yeah.

Peter McCormack: Did you ever listen to the show I made with Alex Gladstein about economic imperialism?

Dan Tubb: I might have done.

Peter McCormack: It was a fascinating show, and I think Sri Lanka -- no, Bangladesh was the example, but he just talked about this.  Essentially, the IMF and the World Bank, they just really enforce economic imperialism across the rest of the world just to steal their resources.

Dan Tubb: And one of the things that I notice they've been talking about lately is copying the China model.  So, the China model is, "We're going to give you loans which you probably can't pay off, and then those are going to be secured against land and natural resources".

Peter McCormack: Ports.

Dan Tubb: Yeah, and effectively just acquiring all of these assets when the debt defaults.  I have seen some papers, I can't remember which one now, but the West has been looking at that model and thinking, "That's quite clever, we should do that".  So, I'm wondering if the Sri Lankan's loan that you're talking about that came out today, that's probably got some of those provisions in it.  It's, "We're going to give you this money, but when you do default on it, we're going to end up owning --"

Peter McCormack: Well, who's "we" though, because the IMF is a US-controlled institution?  It probably says it's independent, but I can imagine its head offices are in --

Danny Knowles: It's based in DC, I'm pretty sure.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, but like the UN being in New York.  Whereas, China is a nation state, they literally can just take ownership.  But anyway, okay.

Dan Tubb: I mean, I don't know the details of this particular loan, I haven't seen it, but I'm wondering if elements of that are going to be brought in.  So, we know we're in a mess, we know it's very difficult to climb out of it; potentially one of the only ways that we could grow our way out of it is the AI, which might kill us. 

So, on more conventional grounds, I think it's probably worth talking about, how did we get into this problem?  The last episode was all about, we're in it and how we're not going to get out of it, but how did we get into it in the first place?  For that, I kind of need to call out the group that is behind this, that led us into that situation in the first place.

Peter McCormack: Okay.

Dan Tubb: I'm referring to the boomers.

Peter McCormack: Hold on, have we got one in the room?  Is he a boomer?

Danny Knowles: Might be before a boomer.

Dan Tubb: I think it's born between something like 1950, about then, maybe the late 1940s, and --

Peter McCormack: Can you check it?  We might have a boomer in the room with us.

Danny Knowles: Yeah, 1946 to 1964.

Peter McCormack: He's in; we've got a boomer here!

Danny Knowles: It's all your fault.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, thanks, Jerry!  All right, so tell me about the boomers.

Dan Tubb: So, I'm not saying that there is anything wrong with the boomers as people.  I'm not saying that Jupiter was in alignment with Saturn in their birth years and it happened to produce a particularly malevolent class of people; it's nothing like that.  It's just that they were a very large generation going into a very small world.  And what that did is it gave them a mindset which was true for most of their life, which is continuing to be implemented, which is at the root of a lot of these problems.  So, what do I mean by that?

The boomers, what they saw is they saw constant workforce expansion over their life, and that was initially driven by themselves, because they were a very large generation.  So, as they came into the workforce, they grew it.  They all went out, bought a suit, a car, a house, they expanded the economy as they went; and then even when that began to crap out, then you got the effects of globalisation.  China was brought into the workforce and India was brought into the global workforce.  So, throughout their working lives, they have seen this constant expansion.  And when you get that constant expansion, it becomes very easy to implement pay-as-you-go government policies, so things like healthcare, pensions, welfare state, all that kind of stuff.

Peter McCormack: They also got the digital revolution.

Dan Tubb: Yeah, that's slightly different.  So, I think this is where it started to unravel.  So, this is probably the argument that Jeff Booth would make; he makes it very well.  So, before I address the unravelling of that, the other thing is that they operated under an economic model, which if I was to oversimplify it, I would just describe it as "more"; there was always more.  So, it was another factory, another worker, another product line, it was all about that expansion; it was more, more, all the time.

The way that Jeff Booth describes that transition was looking at the case study of Blockbuster Video.  So, it was always one more store, one more video title, one more employee, that constant expansion.  And then Netflix came along, and they reduced the marginal cost of video distribution down to zero, and all of a sudden that capital expansive model no longer worked.  We had changed from more to more for less, so efficiency.  So, entering the digital age, it sort of flipped that around.

So, the boomers, they experienced that constant workforce expansion, they operated under a capital expansion model of the economy, and that is very supportive of fiat money, expanding fiat money.  So, one of the problems you'll have criticising fiat money is you can say, "Well, this all changed in 1971", and they can push back and say, "Well, yeah, but it's worked.  The last 50 years, it's worked.  I mean, it's worked for me.  I've got a house, I've got a car, everything seems to be fine.  Why is it you're telling me that fiat money can no longer work for the next 50 years?"

Peter McCormack: Well, because if you actually look at it, it's worked while we've slowly eroded the middle class.

Dan Tubb: Yeah, but you can see why a lot of people are going to feel superficially that it's worked.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, because they think they have more.  So, I made a film about inflation with Dominic Frisby and he talked about this and he said, "What one salary used to provide, two salaries now can't provide".  So, we've gone to a stage where both parents tend to be working and they're still living to the limit of their budget, trying to have a house, have a car and have their holidays, and people are getting squeezed.  And he said, "This is essentially a squeezing of the middle class".  And he said, "The best way to destroy a society is to destroy the middle class"; I think he said it was a Stalin or a Lenin thing, but he talked me through that and he talked about the inflationary increase in prices of things, the day-to-day things like cars, houses, whatever.

Dan Tubb: And it's very obvious when you look back several decades, but you can understand why the people who are in it, they think, "My house is now worth a lot more than I paid for it", it's very easy to get caught up in, "This has been a good thing for me", and you don't tend to notice what you've lost until you compare it to perhaps the next generation, who husband and wife do both need to work, they both need to put the child into childcare and turn up at the office, or whatever it is.

So, the other thing that I think is more relevant here is the government response to this.  So, the boomers wanted to be compassionate to their elderly, so they introduced a generous pension system; they introduced -- well, they didn't quite introduce it themselves, but they expanded the rollout of the NHS, and all these other insurance provisions.  Now, when you are a very large generation supporting a small generation before you, that's very easy to do.  So, you can see why the government insurance programmes have expanded to the point that they have.

Now of course, while they're doing that, they have normal levels of self-interest.  They've got half an eye on, "Yes, we're being generous to the elderly today", but they've also got half an eye on, "This will be nice for us when we retire as well".  So, I'm not completely letting them off the hook, but it is primarily a demographic change that has led them into this situation.

Peter McCormack: And when you say boomers, is it unfair to pick on the people who've benefited from it, and this is really the fault of those who've set policy?  Because, we all want more, we all work hard for more.  Danny works hard, I work hard, you work hard, we all work hard for more.  We all want a bigger house, you know, we all want that.  So, is it not really the fault of the bankers, the central bankers and the policymakers who have led us into this desire for constant growth, ever-expanding fiat money to support growth at all cost, elimination of the bust part of the boom-and-bust cycle; is it that who we should be blaming?

Dan Tubb: Yeah, I think that's perfectly fair.  I mean, the mess we're in, there's a lot of blame to go around.  I'm just making the point that we have ended up with this enormously expensive social insurance level of spending, which has been facilitated by all those things that you mentioned, the central banking, the fiat money.

Peter McCormack: And this is why there's so much fear about population decline, which is evidently happening.  I mean, what did I read; Japan, they're looking at a 25% fall in the size of the population over a certain period.  We're not going to have enough workers to pay for everything for the retirees.

Dan Tubb: You can see why all governments, including the ones who claim to be against it are, in practice, so in favour of immigration, because they know that they need to get more workers into the system, because the system has been designed to only function when there is more.

Peter McCormack: Well, driving growth requires a growing population of workers as well, or AI bots!

Dan Tubb: Yes, possibly!  So, this has led to an extraordinary level of boomer wealth.  They saw significant real-time, real-level housing increase, so this is beyond the rate of inflation, real house prices have increased significantly; they saw their wages rise every year, and that went up until, I believe, the people born in about 1975.  When those guys came into the workforce, it started to turn the other way.  And so, we've now had about 30 years or so of real-time wages decline.  But nevertheless, this is baked into the assumptions.

Pensions is a big element of this as well.  So, a lot of the boomers had defined benefit pension schemes.

Peter McCormack: Final salary pension schemes.

Dan Tubb: Yeah, and again, they brought this stuff in wanting to be generous to the people above them by bringing in this pension stuff, but with half an eye on when they would want it themselves.  And they started to make those through policy more and more attractive.  So, they did things like protect the benefits of widows, if the main character on the pension were to die early, protecting the right of early leavers.  And what it's done, it's made those pension contributions quite excessive really.

So today, a lot of companies who have had in the past a defined benefit pension scheme, the vast majority of their contributions is going to that class of pensions, even though they don't offer it, and they haven't offered it for many years now, to new entrants, who are getting a defined contribution scheme.  So, a lot of wealth comes from that as well.

Then there's benefit of things like the NHS as well.  If you wanted to hit the demographic jackpot in life, you wanted to be born in 1956, because you sort of crested the wave of putting the least into the system while getting the most out of it as well, in terms of the NHS and other benefits that you got off the back of that.  Now, what it's led to is that the people who are in their 70s today are, in average, 40% wealthier than people who were in their 70s just ten years ago.  So, boomers have got a --

Peter McCormack: Compound growth!

Dan Tubb: Because you expect to get wealthier as you get older, but it's well in excess of other cohorts from other decades.  So, you've got that big concentration of expansion, and what it's given them is it's given them a whole set of faulty assumptions, which when you apply those today, are effectively breaking the whole system for us.  So, it's that constant workforce expansion, it's the expansion in money works for them, I think they have got away with fairly weak family units in the West that you don't see in perhaps Asian countries, so that's worth coming back to.  Other assumptions: they've often assumed that old is the same thing as being poor.

So, if you looked at policymakers in say the 1980s and 1990s, if they wanted to do something for poor people, they basically just did something for pensioners, because they were effectively one and the same thing.  You didn't really even need to means-test it.  So, everything from free bus passes to free entry to events and stuff like that.  It is no longer the case that being old equals being poor.  In fact, if anything, the retirees' disposable income now matches the average of working people.

Peter McCormack: Wow.

Dan Tubb: And if you go lower down the income band, so say the poorest 20% of pensioners versus the poorest 20% of working, they're significantly above.  So, that's been a part of it as well.  So, that has then got me thinking about the whole range of assumptions that our society is working under.  Now, if you got the wrong set of assumptions, when you try and solve a problem, you're going to end up making it worse, because you've got the wrong assumptions going into this.

So far, I've been very generous towards and boomers, and yes, they have led us to this point through policy preferences and voting preferences, and everything else that's gone along with it; and I certainly do take your point that there are other influences as well, the central banking influence behind that as well.  So, it's a combination of things, of voting for politicians who've done this, but also the toleration of that kind of thing has had a big effect.  So, I'm not blaming them as people, it is primarily a demographic effect.

However, there is one thing that does rankle me, and that is for the overwhelming majority of boomers, the TV is a primary sense organ.  So, try telling a boomer that something that they're told on TV is not the case.  You can't make a boomer believe in something if he hasn't seen it on TV first.  Now, #notall, there are exceptions to this, but it is a remarkable hold that it has over a large segment of the voting population that, I mean I think you've described it yourself, I think you talked about you put something on your Facebook page, and --

Peter McCormack: Yes, that was about CBDCs, and someone blocked me.

Dan Tubb: Yes, because you were saying something that was different from effectively what they'd seen on TV, and that's just that refusal to accept anything of it.  So, you've got all of these mechanisms that are reinforcing this set of bad assumptions.

Peter McCormack: Well, it was quite interesting the other day, I went to get a cup of coffee in the morning at the local Co-op, and there was somebody in front of me.  He must have been about 75, and he did something that I've not seen somebody do for a while; he bought three newspapers.  He had I think it was a Times, a Mail, and I think it was the Mirror or the Star.  But that was something, when I was a kid, every adult, I remember I'd go and get my grandad's. 

Dan Tubb: Oh, I used to do that years ago, yeah.

Peter McCormack: My grandad used to send me out to get the papers, and I remember then you would read the paper.  I don't know anyone who reads a newspaper any more, but he had gone, by habit, to get his newspapers.  And I don't read the papers because they're full of shit.

Dan Tubb: Well, they've all got the same ideas, they've all got the same assumptions, they're all operating on the same model.

Peter McCormack: But it's all propaganda, and that's not conspiracy; it's just fucking bullshit.  So, I don't read that stuff any more, but I was like, "He's still got that, he's reading --" in my head I was thinking, "You're reading that and believing what you're reading.  That's setting the tone for your opinions.

Dan Tubb: Yeah, well TV and the newspapers.

Peter McCormack: But they're one and the same.

Dan Tubb: Oh, yeah, it's the same ruling elite, the Westminster Bubble we call it here, or whatever the equivalent in the US is.  So, yeah, we are locked into this and because the system is obviously not working and they are trying to fix it with a set of assumptions that no longer line up with the underlying reality, you've moved from a point where politicians are trying to solve problems on behalf of the public, to now politicians are trying to solve the problem of the public, and you see this all the time now.  They're always thinking about, "How can we --" it's like they're thinking, "We've got these bloody proles and they're doing the wrong things.  How can we make them do the right thing?"  It is all geared at changing our behaviour and trying to bring it in line, because the system that we are now living in, the economic shift has just moved, if we can describe it, to a more digital age.

Peter McCormack: Goddam it, Dan, you're sounding like a conspiracy theorist here!

Dan Tubb: It doesn't line up.  So anyway, that got me thinking about, okay, what are --

Peter McCormack: Well, give me some examples on that, or list some examples of where they're trying to control the public; give me some examples.  I mean, I've got my own.

Dan Tubb: Well, for example, just the last thing that I noticed was things like the electric car thing, where they're going to ban them.  Now, I don't think that's necessary.

Peter McCormack: What do you mean, ban?

Dan Tubb: Well, they're going to ban internal combustion cars by --

Peter McCormack: 2040, was it?

Dan Tubb: 2035, I think it was.

Peter McCormack: Was it diesels first?

Dan Tubb: I can't remember.  But it was only a couple of years ago, they were trying to push people into diesel.  Now, I actually quite like electric cars.  I think they are on parity at the moment and they're probably going to be better within a couple of years.  And because they're on their own Wright's curve -- so, with manufacturing techniques, you tend to get a consistent rate of improvement, or a consistent reduction in cost of these items as you produce more of them.  So, Wright's Law, I believe, for cars was something like every time you have a cumulative doubling of the amount of cars that you produce, you get a 15% cost reduction. 

That can't happen in internal combustion engines any more, because there are so many cars out there.  Let's say there's about 4 billion internal combustion engines have been produced, or maybe it's 6 billion, I don't know what the number is, you're not going to get a cumulative doubling at this point that gets you the extra 15% cost reduction.  Whereas, you are getting that with electric cars, it is a different technology.  And we are seeing a fairly consistent price decrease.  So, within a few years, you're going to get to electric cars which are going to be cheaper than internal combustion engine cars to buy and to run.

But nevertheless, it is an example of where they can't help themselves but be a bit heavy-handed about the way they're doing it, and they're just bringing down the banhammer, which is just going to antagonise an awful lot of people, which probably isn't necessary to do, because people would make that switch on their own.

Peter McCormack: I think there are examples that are more --

Dan Tubb: Yeah, that was the first one that popped into my head, but what are you thinking?

Peter McCormack: Well, so you're talking about the problem of the public, okay, so let's talk about Extinction Rebellion, who I find particularly annoying.  I think their strategy is particularly annoying, to glue themselves to roads, and I think a lot of their thoughts or ideas with regards to a policy with regards to fuel and oil is naïve and not well-thought-out.  At the same time, I support their right to protest, and I think at times you need civil disobedience.  You need that option, you need that ability.

It's the expansion of the laws regarding protesting, where I can't remember the detail.  Priti Patel started it during COVID the first time, which were I think particularly, how would I put it?

Dan Tubb: Evil?

Peter McCormack: Let's say oppressive.

Dan Tubb: Right, yes.

Peter McCormack: To the point where the democracy -- a pillar of democracy is the ability to protest.  You take away the ability to protest, you're matching the ability to protest in Red Square.

Dan Tubb: The interesting thing for me is that all of the stuff that Extinction Rebellion is doing is already illegal and they can already be arrested for it, and they generally are, after they've held up the traffic for about six hours.  And you see the police turn up and effectively protect them, because you get the white van drivers, they get out their car and it's like, "Well, just bloody move them then".

Peter McCormack: Yeah, and they drag them off the road.

Dan Tubb: Yeah, and the policy are basically protecting the protesters and they let them sit there for several hours.  And then once the point has been made, then the police arrest them and take them away.

Peter McCormack: Have you heard the full conspiracy with regards to Extinction Rebellion?

Dan Tubb: Go on, then.

Peter McCormack: So, the full conspiracy I was referred to, this might have been you anyway, that if you look at their talking points and their arguments --

Dan Tubb: Oh, I did say to you, yeah.

Peter McCormack: -- they very much match the government's.

Dan Tubb: "Their website is full of quotes from government scientists", was the way I put it. 

Peter McCormack: Yeah, so they're inspiring them to protest and them expand the laws.  I don't buy that link, I think the government's being more reactionary.

Dan Tubb: Yeah, but I guess the point I'm making is you don't need new laws to deal with what they're doing.  But they are being used in order to bring in the Public Order Bill, which can then go after the people who have protested in the past in ways that has been entirely legal.  So, take for example the anti-lockdown protest that occurred.  Now, those guys didn't block roads, they did it in Central London, they gave notice of their plans, they walked down Whitehall, and I suppose by sheer volume, they blocked the traffic on Whitehall, but it's not a major through-route, or anything, walking past Downing Street.  They're giving themselves the power to go after those guys, who are doing something which at the moment is entirely legal.  So, they're using them as an excuse in order to expand power. 

But you see that more broadly, in that governments all over the West now are equipping themselves with tools in order to go after the masses.

Peter McCormack: CBDCs.

Dan Tubb: Yeah.

Peter McCormack: Well, here's another example.  Let's go straight with Bitcoin.  The opposition to Bitcoin that's coming from, whether it's, I don't know, within DC particularly someone like Elizabeth Warren, or whether it's coming from the ECB, or whether it's coming from UK Government, that is a problem of the public, because these are people who are so fed up with the fiat financial system screwing them, they said, "This is a lifeboat here, and that's something I want to use because you're fucking with my money", and then that's a problem with the public.

Dan Tubb: I should have gone to the financial system first actually, because there are much better examples there.  Yeah, in the US, they're bringing in that any transaction over $600 gets the IRS's attention.  The financial system is being used as a surveillance tool.  Well, it's being used as the police now effectively.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, the Pentagon can lose billions, the government can waste trillions, but you spend over $600?

Dan Tubb: I'll give you an interesting example actually.  So, I looked at the World Economic Forum Risks Report that came out at the last conference.  Now, they list out top risks over I think the medium and the long term, and a lot of those things on those two lists were stuff that they can have absolutely no effect on.  It's basically climate change stuff.  There's nothing the World Economic Forum can do, so I think that's flimflam.  You get rid of those, what's on those lists?

Top item on both medium and long term is basically the public pushing back against the WEF policies.  Now, I'm one of those guys who actually sits and watches some of the talks coming out of the WEF and have done for years.  For years now, they've been talking about increased civil unrest.  I mean, they paint it in flowery language and I can't remember the way they describe it now but basically, "People are going to push back against what we're doing", is overwhelmingly what they're saying.  So, we know that their top concern is pushback from the public, and we know that what they're doing is they're equipping themselves with tools that makes that pushback much harder.

So, I think the 2018 Davos event was headlined on digital IDs.  And coming out of that was a policy paper that was basically homework for national governments around the world.  And you can do it here in the UK, but you can do it in any western country, you type in a title similar to the WEF plan and you'll find a .gov paper, which is implementation of digital IDs.  And then there's other policies which are perhaps WEF-adjacent, such as the 15-minute city thing, where cities are being divided up into zones, and the selling point is you can have everything close to you.  So, you can have all of your leisure and work and whatever else within 15 minutes of your home, and that's great. 

But they're not actually delivering those things.  What they're actually delivering is cameras and barriers.  And then you've talked about the central bank digital currency as well.  So, you start to combine these things together and what have you got?  You've got governments which now have tools like more cameras and barriers to stop people moving around.  You know, you try doing something like a truckers' protest when there are barriers that they can raise at any time.  Now at the moment, I know in places like Oxford, they're basically just big planters, but in ten years' time, that will be a proper metal barricade and all the rest of it.

Peter McCormack: You think?

Dan Tubb: Yeah.  What, it's going to just be little plant pots for next ten years?  This is to get us used to it.

Peter McCormack: Okay, yeah.  I would take the other side of the bet.  I don't think we're there yet, but I can see a scenario, yeah.

Dan Tubb: It's a process, yeah.  Well again, for that one, go and look what, I think the organisation behind that is C40, I think I'm getting that right, which is a collaboration of the 40 biggest cities, although it is a lot more than that, it is over 100 cities now; and just look at the policy documents that they put out.  They are very clear at what they are looking to achieve, which is basically a future where people don't drive, where people consume considerably less.  I mean, they even talk about the items of clothing that people might buy in the future.  None of this is a conspiracy, you can just go and look at the policy documents.  They put it out there, the WEF does the same thing, they put out what they want the future to look like.  Of course, none of this applies to the people who actually turn up to the WEF, they're not going to live like that, but the rest of us are going to live like that.

So, you start giving governments the tools of cameras and barriers and 15-minute cities and the way that that's rolled out, the digital IDs, and if it comes, a central bank digital currency.  I mean, you won't need police after that point, because try protesting when your money doesn't work when you're more than 15 minutes from where you live.

Peter McCormack: Oh, you will still need police if that's true.  I think we're still a long way from this.  I know it exists within China and I know there is a trajectory of heading in that direction, but I think the freedoms that we have here in the West allow for us to protest.  You won't get away with that in France and they're not getting away with it in France.

Dan Tubb: It doesn't mean they're not going to try.

Peter McCormack: Oh, no, of course they're going to try, but I think that's the great thing about a democracy is you have the ability to push back.  You can't push back in China.  They tried in Tiananmen Square and they murdered thousands of people.  You can't in Russia, you can't protest.  Your options are being poisoned, being jailed or being tortured.  But here, we don't do those, we haven't gone that far, we don't do that, so therefore you can push back, and you're seeing that in France; they will not get away with it.  Macron's approval rating is at the lowest ever.

If you tried the same here, people will push back, they will protest.  You've seen it in Amsterdam, you've seen it in Holland where people have pushed back, with the farmers.  I mean, isn't the party that just one the last vote in Holland, weren't they the farmers' party?

Dan Tubb: Yes.

Peter McCormack: So, you've got those pushbacks.  Like I say, I think they will try and I don't think they will win, but they might have small wins.  So, the endgame you're painting I don't see happening.

Dan Tubb: I'm describing a process rather than an endgame, I think.  So, when you're saying they're going to have small wins, but that's who it works, isn't it?  They take an inch, then they take another inch, and you basically keep doing that until you're a couple of miles down the road, and people suddenly wake up to it and they start getting a bit riotous, and then they come back a few inches, and then they carry on again.

Peter McCormack: Or, the history will tell you, you end up in full revolution.

Dan Tubb: Yeah.  I mean, people in the West are fairly comfortable, so possibly we could get to something like that.  I'm more describing that they are trying to score these incremental gains, they are trying to equip themselves with tools and laws that enable them to solve the problem with the public, because they are increasingly recognising that there isn't enough pie to be divided by everybody.

Peter McCormack: And, not whether this is evil or not, but is this organically the way this just happens because of the way the debt is spiralling and it's the way of managing it, and these are naïve people who think they're doing the right thing, rather than evil people thinking, "Ha-ha, I've got control over you!"?

Dan Tubb: Yeah, I don't think it's nefarious evil or anything like that.  So, I described how it came about with the boomers through basically compassionate reasons.  It was a large generation in a small world and they wanted to be compassionate to their elders and therefore they brought in these insurance policies.  But once you then get to the point where that large mass of people are no longer paying, but are the beneficiary, those insurance policies don't work.  That was born of nothing more than compassion for elders and a misappreciation of what the demographics would do to that.

When it comes to the politicians, again I don't think there is anything nefarious behind this.  I think the majority of politicians think in their own mind that they're doing the right thing, and it's increasingly getting to the point where they realise that they're going to need to push back against the public, but they think they're doing it for the public's own good, because they are trying to protect this existing system at all costs.  And in their own mind, they're thinking that, "This system gives us stability and order, it gives us a justice system, it gives us healthcare, it gives us all of these things and therefore I must protect this system at all cost".  I think very few of them are looking at the system as a whole and including the money system in that.

When it comes to nefarious actors above government level, because I certainly don't think that governments are the key decision-makers, the key decision-makers are well above them, who I'm talking about.  So, it is going to be international bodies.

Peter McCormack: WHO, UN, World Bank.

Dan Tubb: To a certain extent.  I mean, I can evidence it.  So, if we go back to say the pandemic response, which as you know I'm highly, highly critical of, but if you look at the House of Commons Select Committee reports that got in: Dominic Cummings and Matt Hancock, and you look at what they actually said on the record as to how they were making their decision-making process, well Bill Gates' name was mentioned every five minutes.  There was hours and hours of testimony and he was being brought up all the time.  Why was he being brought up all the time?  He was being brought up because his foundation, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, had done a lot of thinking about how to respond to this.

Peter McCormack: By the way, is that just the Bill Foundation now?

Dan Tubb: I think her name's still on it, I would imagine, but they were referring to them all the time.  Now the reason is, is because we have got ourselves to a point where government doesn't do their own thinking, they refer to external groups who have put together policy proposals and policy packages.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, and we know this because of the influence the WEF has had on the Trudeau Government.

Dan Tubb: Oh, that's very obvious on that particular case.

Peter McCormack: But weren't the WEF even planting people to work within government; I'm almost certain of this?  See if you can find that, Danny.

Dan Tubb: The reason I bring up the pandemic response is because it's all on record in those Select Committee reports that you can watch on YouTube.  The fact is that they were not driving policy themselves, they were basically getting it fed to them from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and you can go and watch this on YouTube, those Select Committee reports; they were being told what to do.  Now, my point is, that doesn't just happen in pandemic response, that happens in basically every level of government.  Politicians, their job is to look good, respond to news flow on the day and be hopefully charismatic enough to get elected.  They don't have the capacity to start thinking through policy. 

So the way this works is not that you're in opposition and you spend all your time in a dark room writing out an ideology or a policy plan, or anything like that.  All you do is focus on trying to get yourself elected.  Then once you're in, you then turn to the people who give you policy solutions and policy packages that you can then implement.

Peter McCormack: What did you find on that, by the way?

Danny Knowles: Not a lot.  From a quick look, I can't see anything conclusive.

Peter McCormack: Okay, maybe I heard that in an interview or something.

Dan Tubb: I mean, I think you're right.

Danny Knowles: Yeah, it wouldn't surprise me, but I can't find anything at the moment.

Dan Tubb: So, it's very obvious in say the US where, I don't know how long ago it was that congressmen and senators actually sat down and wrote legislation themselves; that probably happened at one point.

Peter McCormack: Well, we know it isn't because they work with staffers.  So we know the way you want to interview a politician, you've got to influence the staffers, and the staffers --

Dan Tubb: I think that has passed as well, so then it would have been the staffers who were putting the policy together, and I'm pretty sure it is the case because I've heard this.  I can't remember where I heard it, but I've heard it from multiple sources now.  The way it's done now is the lobbyists write the legislation.

Peter McCormack: But I think it goes through the staffers.  I think the lobbyists target the staffers.

Dan Tubb: Yeah, it goes through the staffers.  Yeah, they probably read it and make the odd change here and there, but effectively the policy has all been outsourced to lobbying groups.

Peter McCormack: We know this on the Bitcoin front, because Alex de Vries, who is a compulsive liar, who misrepresents Bitcoin and the mining industry relentlessly, he has been cited in papers that come out of government departments.  We know that, don't we; we had that with Nic Carter, didn't we, that report from the Science --

Danny Knowles: From the White House, it was the Department of Science at the White House, or something.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, the Department of Science at the White House, they were quoting de Vries, who is a compulsive liar.  So, we know that, so we know you can influence at that level.

Dan Tubb: And I don't think it's nefarious particularly.

Peter McCormack: Go on to the Elizabeth Warren website.  So, we were looking at this the other day.  Oh, no, I wrote to Elizabeth Warren the other day, that was it, and if you go to contact her, then there's a big list of things that she's --

Danny Knowles: That you can contact her for?

Peter McCormack: Yeah, or maybe it was the bit where she was fundraising for.  This list was like, "Contact me about everything", from gun laws to cryptocurrencies to banking.  I'm telling you, there may have been 100 things on this list.  Now, there is zero chance that Elizabeth Warren is an expert on these subjects.  She has to have the talking points on them all.  So, it's only natural that she needs a team behind her.

Dan Tubb: I think her job is twofold: it is to raise money to get elected; and to get elected.  And the staffers will be filtering a lot of this stuff through but again, they don't have the capacity to be putting legislation together; it is going to be coming from lobbyists ultimately.

Peter McCormack: And they'll be testing it as well, what works.  Have you found that list?

Danny Knowles: I don't know exactly what you mean, but there's this all over the website.  But when you say, "Share your opinion", it just gives you a form.

Peter McCormack: I found it the other day when I wrote to her.

Danny Knowles: Yeah, I'm not sure exactly the bit you mean.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, anyway, the point being is I looked through it and I thought, "How can you be an expert on all of these things?  You have to have staffers and you have to have people feeding stuff to you.  And staffers are maybe, "Well, I've got too much to do, so I need somebody to feed this to me".

Dan Tubb: Now, when I say I don't think it's nefarious, I don't think in their mind it's nefarious.  I think the outcome of it is because again, let's go back to the awful pandemic response, and we know how cynical and bad it was now because we've seen the WhatsApp messages that have come out.  So, even when they knew they were wrong, they didn't want to row back on any of this stuff, because they thought it might cost them electorally. 

Peter McCormack: Exactly.

Dan Tubb: It was all about saving face after a certain point.  But to go back to the point about how the policy came in in the first place, and that referring to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation constantly, that Matt Hancock and Dominic Cummings did, in their minds they are following best advice, so they are doing the right thing.

Peter McCormack: And do you know what, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has a good track record in supporting the eradication of certain diseases.  I mean, didn't they eliminate polio around the world?

Danny Knowles: And they've helped massively with malaria and things like that.

Peter McCormack: Okay, I know a lot of people are quick to jump to, "Bill is evil, etc, and he went to Epstein Island", but they have done good things.

Danny Knowles: And they could objectively be true as well.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, they can both be true.  They've objectively done good things and perhaps even Bill thinks he's doing the right thing.

Dan Tubb: Yes, I think that in his mind, he thinks that he is doing the right thing.  But the point is, the solutions to the problems are getting moved further and further away from the public who vote from them, and to the supranational organisations.  I am simply making the point that most policy is decided beyond the level of national government.  So, the role of the national government in all of this is to be a policy implementor, not a policy decider.  And the real policy level is done at those supranational organisations, or those large lobbying groups.  So, power's moved as far away as it can effectively get from the individual.

Peter McCormack: So, I'm following everything you're saying, and some people think it's evil, some people just think it's organically just the way it works.  I think for me, it's a lot of the way that politics works, and the fact they've now got technology that can accelerate the things they want to do makes things a bit of a problem.  One step to make this situation better, looking at the incentives, for me is maybe some form of separation of money and state would help.

Dan Tubb: Yes.  And I think it can be both things.  It could be a collection of people that think that they are doing the right thing, that produces a result that is evil for us, because --

Peter McCormack: The road to hell is paved with good intentions.

Dan Tubb: Well, not just that.  As we talked about, national governments are the implementing layer, and it's the layer above that who are basically forming policy now, it's the lobbyists, it's the international groups, and they all think that they're doing the right thing.  However, they are all the people who have benefited the most from the fiat Ponzi scheme.  They are basically what's bobbed to the top of this particular swamp, and from their position, what they perceive to be good is of course going to be a continuation of this system, it's going to be a continuation of the fiat Ponzi scheme, and it's going to be all of those other things.

So, when you layer that back to a set of assumptions which no longer apply, which channel money to the top, it can be both simultaneously a bad outcome, effectively an evil outcome for the masses; at the same time, everybody's who involved in it thinks that they're doing the right thing by supporting the system.

Peter McCormack: Yes.  So, how do we fix it?  And this needs fixing, because I think it gets fixed through revolution, as I said, but I think revolution is messy and maybe we go two steps backward through government and one forward through revolution, but it's still a slow decline into hell.

Dan Tubb: So, I mean I think we're alluding to two problems there: one is the economic set of problems; and one is the political set of problems.

Peter McCormack: Well, the political cycle to me is the biggest problem.  The political cycle, without any form of --

Dan Tubb: Well, it doesn't match with the economic cycle.

Peter McCormack: No, it doesn't match with the economic cycle; but also, there's no disincentive for politicians, there's no punishment for politicians for screwing things up badly.  There's very little social cost, there's very little career cost.

Dan Tubb: Well, there's no incentive not to kick the can down the road, but there are disincentives to not do that, because you won't get elected if you don't do it.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, but also poor performance.  Every one of these fuckers leaves government and they end up on a board or an advisor to a company because they have influence and they can peddle influence and their mates are still working within government.  That whole part is completely and utterly broken.

Dan Tubb: I mean, we talked about Macron earlier about, he's pushing through these reforms and you think he's not going to be successful.  I think he's going to be successful in a large element of it, I think he will see them done, but he won't be able to get elected again after having done it.  But that is not necessarily a failure for him, because we know what happens with these characters, is once they fail at the ballot box, there is always some international organisation which is willing to pay them an absolute fortune to head up some other thing.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, I mean Tony Blair, rather than sitting in a jail at The Hague --

Dan Tubb: Oh, his levels have only increased.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, and he should have faced trial for war crimes.

Dan Tubb: Yeah, and instead now, I mean have you seen him now?  I mean, I watched a lot of his stuff at the WEF recently, but he's effectively put himself in charge of Africa.  And Tony Blair's Foundation is out there giving them advice, but effectively doing the same thing that I've just described, which is being that layer above government, where he is designing the policy that then gets implemented by African Governments.  And what I found so interesting, as he was sat there on that WEF stage, was how he referred to "My Presidents".  So, African Presidents, he sees as being feeding into him, they're his subordinates.  But that's the whole thing with this international group of policy setters.

Peter McCormack: Now, with him, I would go as far as saying he is evil, and the reason I go and say he is evil is because he took us into an illegal war in Iraq based on fabricated evidence, against the largest protest this country has ever seen.  And, I can't remember who; Clare Short resigned, there were a few people resigning from his government at the time, and he still took us into it, he didn't listen to the electorate.  Nobody wanted that war, everyone knew what it was about and he did it anyway.  And the consequence of that was regional destabilisation, the deaths of hundreds and thousands of people, including children.  I don't find there's a particular significant difference between what happened there and what's now happening in Ukraine; both unnecessary, illegal wars.

Dan Tubb: Yeah.  So, to my shame, I did support the Iraq War at the time, and I realise it was a mistake now.

Peter McCormack: I supported COVID lockdowns and I realise it was a mistake.

Dan Tubb: And the reason I supported it is because I got wrapped up in the propaganda that was coming out at the time.  Now, of course, I recognise that the West has propaganda every bit as bad as any other tinpot, authoritarian nation, not even the tinpot ones.

Peter McCormack: That's why you probably approached COVID with a little bit more scepticism than maybe I did.  It happens, we're allowed to make these mistakes.

Dan Tubb: Yeah.  I mean, Ukraine, I know you're a bit more mainstream than I am on that one.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, I reject the idea it's mainstream.  I mean, Putin is a dictator and he has assassinated people in foreign countries, he has poisoned people, he's shot and murdered journalists, he has stolen from the Russian people, he has amassed a huge amount of wealth and power.  Look, I'm not going to pretend I know --

Dan Tubb: So, I'm not going to make the argument that he's a good guy, because I do not believe that he is a good guy, but everything on the list that you just gave me, okay, we don't shoot our journalists, Julian Assange, we just keep him in prison forever.

Peter McCormack: That's one, and I'm a supporter of Julian Assange, I've interviewed his entire family, but that's one.  You still have journalists in this country who can criticise the government; yes, at risk, but they still do and they will do.  I mean, the Spectator does it, Private Eye does it.  You don't have journalists criticising Putin and Russia, because they will be shot, poisoned or…

Dan Tubb: Okay, but the West is much more artful in the way that they do it.  Here, we just fund them.  So, if you look at who's actually funding the newspapers, certainly since COVID, the biggest advertisers going into these papers are now government.

Peter McCormack: But I would reject that what's happening in Russia is analogous to what's happening in the UK.  I think we have much more freedoms here, much more ability to criticise, and Putin is a dictator, you don't have free and fair elections.  If you attempt to become an opposition party which gains any ground, you face arrest, coercion.  I mean, Navalny was poisoned.

Dan Tubb: Yeah, so I'm certainly not going to take the opposite side.

Peter McCormack: I don't see Rishi Sunak poisoning the tea of Keir Starmer if he starts to gain ground; he will just lose an election.  So to me, they are entirely different scenarios.

Dan Tubb: Okay, so I'm perfectly happy with saying all of that, but that's not point of difference.  My point of difference is, for example, we could have had a peace deal in Ukraine in March, and it was Zelenskyy who unilaterally pulled out of that.

Peter McCormack: Why, what were the details, I'd have to know the details?  What was the peace deal on offer?  Did he have to give up more land.  They've already had Crimea stolen from them.

Dan Tubb: We don't know the full details, but we do know that basically they were several drafts in and they were basically the 11th hour and it was the signing stage.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, you see I can't judge it without knowing the details, presenting the evidence, but they were attacked once, had Crimea stolen from them; they've been attacked again.  What's stopping it happening again and again?  Maybe this is the final resistance.

Dan Tubb: Yeah, I think this is closer to our point of difference, is that if you frame that conflict through the way that the media has described it, it would be completely immoral to take any other view than the view that you're taking right now.

Peter McCormack: I don't need the media to frame that to me, because I rejected the Iraq War and the media supported it.  I can independently make decisions, I can independently see what's happening in Ukraine, I can independently see what's happening in Belarus, I can see the history of Russia attacking previous Soviet states, I can see people being poisoned and murdered abroad, I can see the destabilisation efforts, by the way which usually brings people into their world of whataboutism.  And I can completely agree that also, we've been a destabilising force in the Middle East and completely criticise our politicians.

Dan Tubb: So, all of that granted.  But I think the way that I'm approaching this is perhaps a little bit differently, which is to look at, it's more the Civil War that's been ranging since 2014.  I don't see it as a unified country which has been invaded by a foreign force; I see it more as the people in Donbas have been at war with the Kyiv regime since 2014.

Peter McCormack: That's fair, border region.  It's not just Donbas, it's other border regions.

Dan Tubb: Yeah, well Donbas principally and I forget the name of the other one. 

Peter McCormack: But they are Russian-speaking people who have chosen to live on the Ukrainian side of the border, and how much do we know that --

Dan Tubb: Well, found themselves living there, they were born there, or whatever.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, but how much do we know that's being stoked locally.  I mean, look, we'll never know the details.  People who listen to this will take one position, they'll be like, "Oh, you believe Russian propaganda [or] you believe western propaganda", or they'll say, "I've got no fucking idea".  I think the ones who say, "I've got no fucking idea", are probably the most honest.

Dan Tubb: I won't show it to you now, but I did dig out an interesting CNN clip from maybe ten years ago, which basically talks about the people in Donbas getting shelled by the Ukrainian Government.  And I actually know somebody, well not directly, I mean through internet magic I know somebody through an online game I play --

Peter McCormack: Yeah, and I saw a video of Russians shooting down a Malaysian Airlines jet over Ukraine.

Dan Tubb: Yeah, I'm not saying it's great or anything, but I knew somebody who looked in the Donbas who was getting shelled all the time and got fed up with it and ended up moving over into Russia.  So, I see it more as that sort of conflict.

Peter McCormack: You're right, it's probably a border civil war.

Dan Tubb: Yeah, it's a civil war which sides have been brought into.  Now, has the US done everything it could to avoid that war, or did it escalate wherever it could in order to get another forever war?

Peter McCormack: That, I don't know.  The problem with all these situations, I can build both arguments, which I don't know if that's a strength of mine or a weakness.  I can build the argument, "Yeah, that's another forever war, it funds the military industrial complex", or I can say, "No, this is Russian aggression.  At some point, you've got to stand up to it".

Dan Tubb: I guess how we got onto this topic in the first place is more that the media narrative has been very good at painting this as, "Ukraine is all one people, one happy family who all agree", and then Russian tanks came rolling over the hill.

Peter McCormack: I disagree.  Maybe in America.  I mean, I saw specific coverage, I can't remember, of the BBC or Sky News, or whoever, that covered what was happening in the Donbas region, the political escalation, what was happening at the local police departments, how there were tit-for-tat battles between the Russian natives living in Ukraine and the Ukrainian locals; I've seen all of this, I've dug into it.

Dan Tubb: Yeah, but I mean you're not typical of the people who are consuming --

Peter McCormack: No, but you're saying mainstream; I saw this in mainstream coverage.

Dan Tubb: Okay.

Peter McCormack: And sometimes, the mainstream may be right.  Even if you are anti-mainstream media, sometimes it may be right.  I don't think I'm falling for propaganda to make the claim that Russia is an aggressive nation who've entered another country and they are looting, raping, and killing people.

Dan Tubb: And again, I'm not taking the opposite side of that view, I am saying that western powers are all too happy to have a war; it is serving their purposes.

Peter McCormack: Historically, yeah, but they didn't start this war.

Dan Tubb: That depends if you see it as a civil war.

Peter McCormack: Look, I would find it very difficult to blame the West for extending a war they didn't start!  I mean, this is Russian aggression; Russia invaded Ukraine; Russia positioned their troops across the border for months; Russia has bombed cities; Russia has conscripted people to sign up.

Dan Tubb: And Kyiv was bombing the Donbas for many years before that.

Peter McCormack: Was that following the previous invasion where they annexed Crimea?

Dan Tubb: I don't think you can draw a cut-off line at any point and say history starts here.  This is a whole series of events that go back many, many decades.

Peter McCormack: But if you're making the claim that they were bombing them, I would just say, was that pre- or post-Crimea annexation, because if that was post, that's war that's already started again from Russian aggression.  So, I don't know without all the details; I don't know the full details.  But I think the point I'm making, so that people focus, is that I'm not going to just reject something because it was reported by the BBC or Sky News.

Dan Tubb: Yeah, and I'm not necessarily at this point trying to -- I am certainly not trying to say that there is a good guy and a bad guy here, I'm saying there are two sets of bad guys and it has suited the West to advance another forever war.

Peter McCormack: Perhaps.

Dan Tubb: I think the more interesting aspect of this conflict over the last couple of years is what it's done to the euro, because there is a framing of this which is we know that the US dollar is in danger at the moment, we know that they have been coming down hard on crypto as a potential escape route.  I saw the great interview you did with Doomberg recently, where he was describing Operation Choke Point 2.0 effectively.  Bitcoin is a threat to the system, but actually what is the biggest threat to the dollar today?

Peter McCormack: The Fed!

Dan Tubb: Okay!  I meant it as external.  It's actually the euro.  So, something like 60% of international trade is done in the dollar at the moment; second place is the euro, which is accounting for something like 20% of international settlements.  Now, what has one of the interesting effects of the last year, this conflict, been; what's underpinning the US dollar?  It's basically the US economy and the US Military.  What's underpinning the euro?  Well, it's Germany really, isn't it?  I mean, I know there are 26 members of the eurozone, but it's Germany.

Peter McCormack: It's Germany.

Dan Tubb: And it's not the German Military, it's the German economy.  What is the German economy?  Well, that's a €5 trillion economy, which is all based on €50 billion of cheap, Russian energy, and that has effectively been kicked out from under them.

Peter McCormack: Now you're giving an excuse for bombing the Nord Stream pipeline.

Dan Tubb: Well, I mean come on, what's going on there?  That is the US effectively crippling the economy of Germany.

Peter McCormack: Danny, can you look this up.  Prior to the Iraq War, I'm under the belief that Saddam Hussein wanted to move away from pricing oil in dollars to the euro, and he wanted to -- yeah, is that true?

Danny Knowles: Well, that's what Alex Gladstein said on the show, yeah.

Peter McCormack: Yeah.  And so in that scenario, that's a threat to the dollar being the global reserve currency, in that one of the largest producers of oil is moving away from pricing oil in dollars to the euro.  So, that was a threat.

Dan Tubb: Yeah.  Isn't it interesting?  Every time a viable threat to the dollar comes along, they find America tanks rolling down their driveway before long.

Peter McCormack: Yeah.  Gladstein told us that, but I never actually fully researched that.

Danny Knowles: Yeah, me neither.

Peter McCormack: You can have a look.

Dan Tubb: But the taking out of the Nord Stream pipeline, it has a hugely damaging effect on the German economy, which has knocked the legs out from under the euro, which has significantly reduced the potential of the euro to offer a threat to the status of the dollar at the time when the dollar is at the weakest.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, well they'll just move to the yuan.

Dan Tubb: Yeah, that's harder to take out at that point, but they are a very small part, and there are a lot of challenges for China becoming -- I don't think China wants to become the reserve currency.

Peter McCormack: Anything?

Danny Knowles: Yeah.  In November 2000, he tried to price his oil exports in the euro. 

Peter McCormack: Is there any additional context or interesting things in that?  What date was that?

Danny Knowles: November 2000.

Peter McCormack: When did the Iraq War start?

Danny Knowles: March 2003.

Peter McCormack: And you would need that much time to build up a case.  It's not like he could do it in November, and invade it in December.  He'd be like, "Yeah, now we know what the fuck you're up to".

Dan Tubb: There are conflicts all over the world and we don't hear about most of them.  I think in 2020, I remember looking up, there were 14 live conflicts around the world.

Peter McCormack: I would have thought there would have been more.

Dan Tubb: Yeah, and we only heard about one of them, which was the Ukraine one.

Peter McCormack: That's not true, that's just not true.  So, we've continually heard about what's happening in Yemen, which is a humanitarian crisis.

Dan Tubb: Yeah, okay, you're right, it's not the case that it's invisible, but what are most people aware of.  You've got to remember that you're not typical when it comes to the level of attention to world events you apply.

Peter McCormack: No, but the BBC covers the Yemen War.

Danny Knowles: Not to the same degree, to be fair.

Peter McCormack: No, not to the same degree.  But there is a different scenario when it's -- I mean, how long has that Saudi/Yemen War been going on for; a couple of decades perhaps, I don't know?  But this is brand-new war and it's happening on the border of Europe.  Of course we're going to see more of it.  And also, it's Russia, the second world power in war.  It's a nuclear-armed nation starting war on the edge of Europe.  That is more newsworthy than something that's happening between Saudi and Yemen.  But we do hear about other wars.  If you name me the other wars, I mean I'm trying to remember them.

Dan Tubb: I mean, I'd have to look them up at this point now.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, of course, but it's more newsworthy.

Dan Tubb: Yeah, and again, I'm not going to take the opposite side on some of this stuff, I'm not going to try and tell you that Putin's a good guy.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, who's the worst bad guy; I get it.

Dan Tubb: And for me like I say, the more interesting aspect is that attacking of rivals of the dollar.  That for me seems a very neat way to attack the euro, and it was successful.  Although, that said, I mean what you're talking about more broadly, it does feel like we're very much at the end of an era, because the petrodollar has been effectively America's greatest superpower over the last 50 years, and how did it get the petrodollar?  Basically, in combination with it's own energy resources and going to the House of Saud and saying, "We will give you military guarantees as long as you price the oil", and then going to everyone else and saying, "You will price your oil in dollars or you're going to get invaded", and several of them did get invaded, has led to this era of everybody needing dollars in order to get energy, which meant that the US could then --

Peter McCormack: Print oil.

Dan Tubb: Well, print debt, and use that to get effectively free money.  So, they have effectively had free energy for the last 50 years.  And it feels like that is unravelling on a daily basis at the moment.

Peter McCormack: And, hasn't Saudi announced that they're going to --

Danny Knowles: Pause oil production.

Peter McCormack: No, OPEC said they're going to reduce it by a million barrels a day.  That's because the price of oil was dropping and they wanted to increase it.  I thought that Saudi had joined in the BRICS group and they will be -- who was it who also just said they're going to be buying Russian -- oh, Japan.  Didn't Japan just announce they're going to be buying Russian oil?

Dan Tubb: I think you might be right, yeah.  I mean, there are so many announcements at the moment of people moving away from US hegemony, it does feel like that is slipping quite fast at this point.

Peter McCormack: It is. 

Dan Tubb: I mean, we're certainly at the end of the unipolar era.  And we're in a potentially dangerous spot, because the US establishment is still very strong, and they know that they've been held below the waterline at this point and they're lashing out, and that's what I think was driving the behaviour with the Nord Stream takedown, and also with what they're doing at the moment with Bitcoin, the attacks that they're making on that.

Peter McCormack: So, how do we fix all this, Dan; how do you and I fix this, mate; what shall we do?!

Dan Tubb: I mean, we know how to fix the economic side of it, don't we?  We fix the money, we fix Bitcoin.  So, I don't think I necessarily want to --

Peter McCormack: Fix Bitcoin?  Bitcoin works.

Dan Tubb: Yeah, fix it with Bitcoin.

Peter McCormack: Yes.

Dan Tubb: So, I don't think we necessarily need to rehash that here, because these arguments have been going --

Peter McCormack: Yeah, everyone knows it and agrees with it.  Well, not everyone agrees with it, but anyway.

Dan Tubb: I turn my mind to what's wrong with democracy.

Peter McCormack: Yes.

Dan Tubb: Now, I think about what I would do differently.  It's effectively painting castles in the sky, because none of this is going to change.  But for me, it's a useful thought exercise as to how it could be different, because it's not necessarily obvious how bad our current system is until you line it up against something that could potentially be better.  I'm interested in your thoughts on this actually.  Where do you think blockchains can come into this?

Peter McCormack: I don't.

Dan Tubb: Why not?

Peter McCormack: I only think Bitcoin, because a blockchain does one thing.  It was designed to solve the double-spend problem, and it works as a self-contained system where the token exists within the system.

Dan Tubb: So, do you think Bitcoin is money but doesn't necessarily have use cases beyond that?

Peter McCormack: No, not entirely.  It is a timestamping machine, which can be useful.  But primarily, I care about Bitcoin as money, and the blockchain was designed as a way to solve the double-spending problem, and that's what I think a blockchain is for, and I think a blockchain is being used by marketing people to sell other kinds of ideas and things.

Dan Tubb: I wonder if it's potentially bigger than that.  Look, electricity was a digitisation of energy, which allowed the use of energy to expand significantly; the internet was the digitisation of information, which has allowed the amount of human knowledge to expand dramatically.  Are blockchains not the digitisation of value beyond just money?

Peter McCormack: No.  Bitcoin is the digitisation of value.

Dan Tubb: Okay.  Where I'm coming from is, if you frame it as the digitisation of value, then a huge part of that is going to be money.  But there are still things that are valuable over and above money.  So, I'll give you a small example and a big example.  A small example might be something like hotel reservations or airline tickets, or something like that, or even coupon vouchers for your local supermarket.  All of those things have value, which would benefit, I think, going on some sort of blockchain that makes them more easily tradable. 

So, if you can't make your hotel booking, at the moment you just don't turn up.  And it's not great for you because you're out of pocket for this; and it's not great for the hotel either, because they can't sell all the ancillary services that go with it.  If that was on some sort of blockchain, then that would allow you to very easily resell that through the blockchain to somebody else which benefits everybody.

Peter McCormack: You're going down a rabbit hole that is a necessary one to go on.  I think it's important to go on it, and then you realise why it doesn't work.  A blockchain is just a database, that's all it is.

Danny Knowles: And it's a really slow, inefficient, expensive database.

Peter McCormack: Its only thing that it's really good at is that it stops the double-spend problem.

Danny Knowles: And it's censorship resistant.

Peter McCormack: This is subjective, but I'm going to paraphrase something that Parker Lewis says.  He's a guy who's written a lot of stuff about Bitcoin, really smart guy.  But do you know what he thinks is the number one factor that gives Bitcoin value?

Dan Tubb: Security perhaps?

Peter McCormack: No, that there's 21 million, the fact there is a hard cap.  The hard cap is what we don't have in the fiat system; we have it in the Bitcoin system, that's what gives it value.  He's therefore saying the number one thing we need to do is ensure we enforce the hard cap.  So, that's what Bitcoin does, it has to enforce the hard cap.  I'll send you some of his articles, they're on a series called Gradually, Then Suddenly.

So, if you enforce the hard cap, you still have to have the ability to be able to spend it, you have to have the ability to be able to send it to each other, so you need the blockchain to do that.  That's how, along with the rules of consensus, that's how you batch up transactions and you allow people to send value to each other; that's what it does.  But what it stops you doing is lying, because in each block you have to follow the rules of consensus and check that hasn't been spent before.  And so, that's what a blockchain does.  But it's slow and it's inefficient.  It takes ten minutes to get all the transactions together.  We need layers above it to make it work.

What do you think a blockchain actually solves?  What do you think a blockchain does that another database doesn't?

Dan Tubb: For me, it is the digitisation of value, and I know you say it's slow, but it's still potentially a lot faster than a lot of the other systems that we have.  I guess where I'm essentially going with this is I'm asking the question, and I'm not wedded to the solution here on this, I'm just thinking that if blockchains are the digitisation of value, well a vote has value.  Is that something that could be better expressed through a blockchain, perhaps even on the Bitcoin Network?

Peter McCormack: Yeah, but what is it you're trying to fix that's wrong with the ballot box?

Dan Tubb: Maybe it's worth coming back to this then, because I'm thinking this is a potential tool that gets us to -- assists with a solution, but it's not the solution in itself.

Peter McCormack: If you said to me, "I think we need to move to liquid democracy, whereby your vote can float".  The idea of liquid democracy is super-interesting.  It's like rather than voting every four years, you have a floating vote.  And if the government is piss-poor and your vote floats over and then suddenly they lose their majority, they're out of power.  I like that idea of liquid democracy, because rather than kicking the can down the road, it's live, it's happening right now, and it's upon them to retain their leadership constantly.  And as they fuck up and fuck up more, they can see they're losing power, and then they have to try and retain it.

If you said to me that we need some way of digitising our vote so we can have liquid democracy, so I can literally on my phone go, "Do you know what?  Fuck you, I'm changing my vote", I get that and that's great.  But you still don't need a blockchain.

Dan Tubb: Yeah, okay.  So, maybe the blockchain is a red herring on that, but I think that's tangential to my point, so it doesn't particularly matter.  I think everything that you're saying there is absolutely right.  What are the proper principles of democracy, because at the moment we have this democratic system, but I don't think we genuinely have a democratic system; I think that we have something that we call democracy, which is effectively wearing the skin suit of it.

I mean, you think, we've got 650 MPs.  I know not all of them turn up, not all of them take their seats.  But what you've effectively got is 650 people who are all elected by the largest minority within their constituency.  Now, because we've got a fairly uniform culture, a fairly uniform media, and I know we've talked about the influence of the mainstream media and the amount of information you can get out of it, but you've got to admit that the vast majority of people are consuming that media and they're consuming the simple messages within that media.

So, if you look at any particular constituency, maybe I should have looked up Bedford before I came here, but you'll find that most MPs are elected with the minority of the vote.  So, it's simply the largest minority within each constituency, okay.  So, you get this very uniform set of opinions that are spread across this and effectively, what you end up with is 650 people who all believe broadly the same thing.  They've got some variations, but not any significant variations.

Where this was particularly marked was over the lockdown period.  Really, out of 650 people, there wasn't one who was against it; they all voted for it?  What about Bitcoin?  Out of the 650, how many of them think that Bitcoin is a crucial issue?  If you were to take 650 random people from the population, I bet you'd find at least one of them who thinks that Bitcoin is the crucial issue of our times.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, but isn't that down to the gaming of politics, whereby you have to follow the whip?

Dan Tubb: Yeah.  I mean, that's exactly what happens, but entering politics these days is not decided by somebody thinking, "I've got a better set of ideas and I'm going to run and I'm going to try and win people to my point"; it is, "We have been sort of gooned into this situation where there's a red team and blue team, little bit of a yellow team", and to get selected to go on the list, to go on the candidates' list is the selection criteria.  And the parties are looking for a very uniform set of characteristics within those people.

So, what you end up with is 650 people who all think pretty much the same thing, they've all got the same set of solutions to stuff.  And anybody with an alternate view outside of that, which is particularly marked when you look at any particular issue such as Bitcoin or lockdowns, or whatever it is, you see that those views are simply not represented.

Peter McCormack: It's kind of that thing that I was talking to you about; do you remember?

Danny Knowles: No, what's that?

Peter McCormack: Do you remember where I said there's that Venn diagram of things?

Danny Knowles: Oh, yeah.

Peter McCormack: So I was saying to Danny, the way I see it at the moment, there's a Venn diagram of topics, whereby you've got say Labour on the left, Conservatives on the right, and within that Venn diagram, the topics they will debate.  In the left circle is the Labour opinion, and the right circle's the Conservative opinion, and there's ones that overlap where they probably share opinions.  So for example, on tax, in the right it would be Conservatives, which are lower tax; in the left it would be Labour with higher tax; and the agreement bit in the middle is, "Tax should exist".

Dan Tubb: I think that's the view that they try and pretend exists.

Peter McCormack: Hold on, bear with me.  So, where they overlap is they agree tax should exist.  What I'm saying is, if you come out with a thought that doesn't fit into either circle, you're a conspiracy theorist.  So, if you come out and you say, "Well, I think Bitcoin should exist", that's not acceptable, because that's not a subject where one's saying yes or no or they agree on, it's outside of the remit that they're willing to discuss, so you're a conspiracy theorist.  But if it's within those sides, it's acceptable discussion.

So, climate change is an acceptable debate, whether you agree it's an issue or not, because that's something they debate over.

Dan Tubb: So, the way the political system works is they want to have very vigorous debate within a very narrow range of topics, to give the impression that, like you say, your two Venn diagrams that hardly overlap; I think actually, those circles are almost entirely overlapping with just a little bit of slither round the outside that they don't overlap on.  And you can see, say with Liz Truss.  I mean, she didn't have to go very far out of the mainstream view.  It was just, "Okay, let's cut taxes a little bit", and for that, she was out in 40 days.  You don't have to stray far at this point.

Peter McCormack: So my brother listening right now is going to be banging his fists on the table and say, "It was more than that with Liz Truss".

Dan Tubb: Yes, to an extent, but what argument would he make there?

Peter McCormack: I'm not going to make his argument for him, but when I previously raised the fact there may be a little bit of conspiracy around her ideas or policies with regards to driving growth that were rejected, and the markets reacted in a way to get rid of her because her policies were a threat to the status quo, that kind of thing.  I've brought it up before and my brother was like, "Hold on a second, these were unfunded policies, these were massive tax cuts, these were unfunded policies.  That's the market reacting to the ideas".

Dan Tubb: So, two things on that.  One, yes, she brought forward the tax-cutting element of it and then said, "And a month later, I'm going to give you the corresponding cuts elsewhere that balances this", so yes, she did split them out and then she should have bought those both together, but she was in a bit of a hurry to try and get this bit through.  But as I mentioned on the last show, the market knew about all of that in advance.  The only thing they didn't know about was the £2 billion cost of the top-rate tax cuts.  And actually, the issues in the Bank of England had been brewing before. 

There was quite a good unheard article, which I'll have to send you, which lays out the timeline of how the pension crisis in those bonds had been brewing, and analysts were talking about that was going to be an issue, regardless of what Liz Truss did.

Peter McCormack: Fair.

Dan Tubb: So, I won't get too much into that, but my point is more that there is a very narrow set of consensus opinions within Westminster at the moment.  So, I would ask the question differently: what would be the principles of good governance?  One is, I think that the governing should be as close as possible to the governed.  This is something that we've talked about a number of times over this discussion, that power is actually moving further and further away.  National governments are just implementors of policy, they're not formulators of policy, because they're too busy doing the day job, which is funding reaction, getting elected.  All the policy idea comes down from above.  So, governing should be close to the governed.

Peter McCormack: So, you're talking about localism?

Dan Tubb: A more advanced form of that, yeah, effectively.

Peter McCormack: Okay, I'm not opposed to that.

Dan Tubb: So, with my local councillors, one of them lives at the end of the road, so I can go and knock on the door if there's anything I'm particularly upset about.  I wouldn't do that because they have absolutely no power, and therefore there's no point.  If I've got a problem with a policy that's coming out of the WEF, I mean what the hell do I do about it?  I mean, you can't even vote your way out of it, because both parties are signed up to the same agenda.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, and devolution I think has certainly benefited Wales in some ways, Northern Ireland in some ways, Scotland in other ways.  They can at least set local policy on certain things.

Dan Tubb: I like that a lot.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, but we're talking about expanding that into -- and do you know what, the idea of expanding that into counties I think is a great idea, because it makes counties compete with each other.

Dan Tubb: I love that.  I would do it slightly differently in the UK, because we've got a lot of history here.  I'd actually return to the ancient kingdoms.

Peter McCormack: Okay!

Dan Tubb: Now, I'm not necessarily saying, bring back the kings along with it, it's just that sort of size of unit.

Peter McCormack: I'm just thinking of Game of Thrones!

Dan Tubb: Yeah, don't get caught up on the kingdom element, I'm just talking about the historical roots of this.  I mean, I'd probably describe myself as a bit of a Wessex nationalist.  I'd like to see Wessex return as a sort of autonomous political unit; the reason being is that's about the same sort of size and scale as a Wales or a Scotland.  And then, you could do the same with Mercia or Northumbria.

Peter McCormack: Well, I just look at the US.  I mean, I have friends who have moved from California to red states, because there are tax benefits, or they like the differences in the laws, and there's a big push for States' rights.  I like that.  You get no legal or tax code benefit for moving in this country, so there's no competition between counties or regions.

Dan Tubb: So, what that removes is innovation.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, of course.

Dan Tubb: And in fact, not only are we anti-that in this country, we actually even have a term for it; we call it the postcode lottery.  So, if anybody tries to innovate in any particular area of the country and it produces a different result, we call it the postcode lottery and we attack it immediately, so you get this uniformity of approach. 

Now, I've spent a little bit of time doing consulting in local government, and I've found the biggest problem was the risk-averse nature of the people that work in that organisation, because there is zero upside in delivering anything which is better for people.  I mean, if you're the politician, there might be some benefit in it.  But if you're the civil servant, the implementors, the people who actually were the permanent staff, there's no benefit in delivering something that's better.

Peter McCormack: And there's very little individual benefit, because you're put into wage bands, and career progression is particularly difficult.  That's why I tend to, I personally think, and I'm sorry if you work in the civil service, but I think the standard of people in the civil service, I'm not talking about the police, the firemen, the nurses, who I think are superstars, I'm talking about the people who work in the local council, generally I think are a lower standard than the people you get in the private sector.

Dan Tubb: Yeah, so I do have a take on that, but let me just finish the thought.  There is no benefit to the upside, but there is career risk if you screw things up.

Peter McCormack: Hell, yeah.  Is there?

Dan Tubb: Yes.  Yes, because you will be passed over for promotion.  If you go out on a limb and you say, "I want to do this thing", and it delivers great upside, fantastic.  If it screws up and it costs the council money, then you are less likely to get that next promotion to director level or Head of Council, or whatever.

Peter McCormack: But that's life, that's the same in the private sector.  If you fuck things up, you're not --

Dan Tubb: Yeah, but in the private sector, there's also that commensurate reward if you do well.  So, what happens if you take away the reward, but you keep the career risk?  What you end up with is a whole group of people --

Peter McCormack: Are you on about economic reward?

Dan Tubb: Yeah, effectively.  Let's say you're in a medium-sized business and you come up with a zinger of an idea and it doubles that company's revenue, you're getting a hell of a bonus and you might be made a director.  There's lots of upside from it, you'll do very well out of it.  And I think the private sector understands the opportunity costs and risks associated with projects as well.  But if you're in the public sector, if you attach yourself to something which might have upside to it and you fail in that, you get all the career risk, but none of the upside to it.  So, what I found when I was working with local government is that there is an extreme career risk aversion to trying anything new, so that's why you get that really static response.

Let me just come back to your point you made about the quality of the people.  I actually found that at the lowest levels, there was either no difference, or actually the public sector people were probably a little bit better.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, because they haven't had it beat out of them, they haven't gone through the monotony of working year after year with no recognition or no ability to progress, no ability to compete against the others.  There's no benefit to turning up early and doing a great job.

Dan Tubb: Yeah, but I think at least halfway up the organisation structure, the quality of the people in the public sector is no different, or possibly even as good, or possibly even better.  It's after you go halfway up, it's once you get into middle management and you start going beyond that to the senior levels, that's where the quality of the people really degrades, because these are not people who've taken risks, they're people who have avoided career risk their whole time.

So, these principles of good democracy that I'm talking about, it's close to the governed, it's good innovation, which we simply don't have at the moment.  I like what you're talking about there, about regions that can experiment, so I think the Americans are closer to this, because they already have that state system.  All they need to do is overthrow the yoke of federal government and get powers returned to the states, and I think that gives them the innovation and the opportunity to try.  So, the route for political reengagement for them is a lot simpler and it is a lot clearer; it is return of those federal powers to state level, and I think that is something they are very much aware on.  I want to achieve that here if we can.

Peter McCormack: It would be amazing.  By the way, it's never going to happen.  What's going to happen is everything's going to descend into chaos and we'll have a revolution.

Dan Tubb: None of this is going to happen but if I could, I would go back to those ancient kingdoms, which is the Wessex and the East Anglia and the Mercia and so on, and basically just groups of roughly the same size as we've got with Scotland and Wales now.

Peter McCormack: I would do the same.  I would actually bring back the kings and chop their heads off if they fuck up!  Why not?

Dan Tubb: Yeah, why not go all in, yeah!  What that gives you is it returns power close to the level, but within that I would have direct democracy.  I think you called it liquid democracy, did you?

Peter McCormack: Yeah, well liquid democracy is the idea that you don't have a term.  You're in and as soon as you lose a certain percentage of the vote, there's a trigger in force, you're out of power.

Danny Knowles: So, real-time voting.

Peter McCormack: Real-time voting, I love that, I fucking love that.  I think that's great.

Dan Tubb: Yes, exactly.  Now, there are arguments for a representative democracy but you can have both in this day and age with the speed of information.  So, if you are somebody who is really politically engaged, you can follow a lot of this stuff and you can vote directly on the bills themselves that are coming forward.  For a lot of people, that's not going to be the case.  So, you should be able to delegate your vote to somebody else.  Now, that person could be, I don't know if you've got a brother, but say you and your brother, you're really political engaged, your brother isn't, but your brother trusts you, he could just lend his vote to you and then you're voting two votes.

Peter McCormack: Gosh, I need to think that one through.

Dan Tubb: Well, it follows on from here that what will happen, what will emerge is a certain number of people within each area, region, state, ancient kingdom, whatever you call it, would accumulate a large number of votes.  So, let's say you wanted to have the benefit of a representative democracy.  What you would simply do is you'd say, okay, within each region, the 50 people who have accumulated the most delegated votes, you give them an office, you give them a salary, you bring them into some central chamber, and those are the guys who hold the executive to account.

Danny Knowles: That sounds like a scary centralisation of power to me.

Dan Tubb: Why does it?

Danny Knowles: Imagine how many Elon Musk sycophants are just given the vote and the control that that can then wield.

Peter McCormack: You've just given a load more jobs to people, you've just expanded government, Dan; we're trying to reduce government.  Look at our national debt!

Dan Tubb: No, because it's giving you direct control of your vote by recognising the law, people would not necessarily want to exercise that themselves and would want to delegate it to somebody else.

Peter McCormack: I also like the idea that governments have a budget and if they go over budget, it triggers an election.

Dan Tubb: Well, let me finish the thought on this.  The reason why I like it is a lot of the NPCs, a lot of the normies will just go for a single charismatic figure, a very mainstream figure, and a lot of votes will accumulate with that.  That is exactly what we have now.  What we have is 650 people who all think the same way.  So, under this system, what you'd end up with is, you'd end up with a small number of people who've got an awful lot of delegated votes, who are completely mainstream, who are completely within the central bubble.

But beyond that, what you would end up with is people who are representing views that don't get any traction, don't get any representation at the moment.  Almost certainly, you'd then start getting delegates whose primary focus was Bitcoin, for example.  Over the lockdown period, you get people who their primary focus was being anti-lockdown.

Peter McCormack: It's almost that single-issue voting stuff.  Yeah, that's interesting.

Dan Tubb: But with the proviso that you could always take back your vote on any particular issue that you wanted to, and this would be a fairly fluid thing, because the reason people like the represented democracy is because you want a group of people holding the executive to count.  That's the other thing you've got to do, you've got to split out the legislative from the executive.  So, the legislative would be your delegated vote, and it would be those are the people who define the job of the executive.

Now, that's the other thing that you've got to split out, is those executives.  At the moment, we have a very simplistic system how this works, which is we vote for a party and they do the entire executive job.  Why can't you do it by function?  So, you have your regionalised system, and then each of those is going to want to operate say the NHS or the health service that you have, or operate the response services, the police.  You can have a different executive directly elected for each of those functions, you don't need a single executive.

Peter McCormack: But it's never going to happen!

Dan Tubb: Yeah, again, it's not. 

Peter McCormack: It's so frustrating.

Dan Tubb: I also like your idea, or the one that we talked about before, is that those executives would then be elected with a certain amount of budget.

Peter McCormack: I just think budget should be -- I have to operate with a budget for my business, my house and everything, and I work hard to make sure I spend less than I earn.  There is zero incentive for governments to operate within the budget because they're not spending their own money.  I love the idea that if they were over budget, or if they needed to go over budget, that triggers an election and they have to tell the country why they're going over budget.  And then the opposition can say, "We don't need to go over budget, because we're going to do X", so there's competition to become more efficient, rather than the opposite, what we have now.

Dan Tubb: And that's why I like the regionalised system, because what you would then end up with is people in different regions trying different responses to problems, and some of them would be more successful than others.  And you're seeing this in the US now.  Texas is doing very well on the Bitcoin front, whereas was it New York has made it effectively illegal, or something, or mining?

Peter McCormack: Well, not as such, but yeah, but it tends to go down political lines.  But I just like tax wars.  We're in this country without that competition between regions.  Essentially, they can constantly increase tax.  Today, I've heard about the tourism tax that's coming in in Wales.  There's just constantly new taxes that are constantly hitting us, because there is no competition on the tax front.  But the idea that you would have a budget and then when the government's going to go over budget, that they have to tax us, or print money which causes inflation, the opposite, there's competition to reduce.  That's what I like.

Dan Tubb: It's that innovation layer.  That's what so important here is, you need people to try and find different solutions to all of this.

Peter McCormack: Dan, none of this shit's going to happen.

Dan Tubb: No, it's not!

Peter McCormack: It's a bit like the legal system.  There's no incentive for lawyers to make the system more efficient because they get paid less.  That's why it's stupidly complicated with appeal after appeal, and appeal's courts and Supreme Courts and this fucking rule and that rule.  There's no incentive, so nothing's going to change, but it's good to talk about.

Dan Tubb: Yeah, it is.  I think it's sometimes worth touching on these topics, the reason being is you've got to highlight how basically flawed the system is now.  But then again, it wasn't so long ago when people were saying, "Bitcoin can never replace fiat currency", and that is looking increasingly less likely all the time. 

Peter McCormack: More likely.

Dan Tubb: Sorry, yeah, more likely over time.  And my thinking is more, as these political systems start to unravel as well, it is worth having an eye on the future as to what we could do from it.

Peter McCormack: Unravel, revolution, that's what I think's going to happen, man.  Dan, great as ever.  We disagreed with a few things on here, but that's okay, we went back and forth a bit. 

Dan Tubb: That's all right.

Peter McCormack: I'm going to send some bits to you.  There's some bits in there I can't explain as well as other people.  I really want you to read some of Parker Lewis's work, Gradually, Then Suddenly.

Danny Knowles: I've got a podcast for you to listen to as well, with Junseth and Perianne Boring.

Dan Tubb: Perfect.

Peter McCormack: Yes, about voting.  Let's send you those things.  Those people do a better job of explaining these topics than I.  Where shall we send people to find you?

Dan Tubb: So, I do a couple of days a week now at Lotus Eaters, so I've got a series there, Brokenomics, where I talk about the economics more than the politics actually.  I just thought the politics would be interesting to discuss today, so check out lotuseaters.com.  And I've got a Twitter account, which is @Kingbingo_.  It's a silly name, but I picked it 12 years ago when I thought that Twitter was only going to be a thing for a few months.

Peter McCormack: Well, we will stick that in the show notes, and I'm sure on the next sprint, Danny will be in touch and say, "Let's go round 3".

Danny Knowles: For sure.

Dan Tubb: Good chat.

Peter McCormack: Thank you, brother.