End of American Dominance: What History Says Comes Next | David Murrin on CFK UK

Summary

• Macro Cycles: The guest frames markets through long-wave cycles, arguing the Kondratiev C-wave into 2025–27 drives a powerful commodity upcycle and accelerates the drumbeat of conflict.
• Commodity Supercycle: He expects relentless gains across commodities, with oil prices potentially surging and producers advantaged over consumers, shaping returns and geopolitics.
• Energy and Shale: U.S. shale output could partially cushion the U.S. downturn, but energy security pressures and rising input costs favor the broader Energy sector, especially E&P.
• Defense Spending: A new age of war and rearmament underpins a constructive outlook for Aerospace & Defense as Western nations are compelled to rebuild capabilities.
• FX and Rates: He sees debt stress and continued bond weakness; expects dollar volatility, favors a long-sterling stance, notes yen vulnerability, and foresees RMB appreciation over time.
• United Kingdom: Bullish on post-Brexit UK dynamism and sterling, citing policy flexibility and national energy, with potential upside if pro-growth and defense investments accelerate.
• Deglobalization: Anticipates manufacturing reshoring from China and severe supply gridlock, adding to inflation and benefiting select domestic producers and supply-chain rebuilds.
• Risks: Highlights hyperinflation risk, geopolitical escalation, and debt crises; no specific tickers were pitched, with emphasis on sectors and macro positioning.

Transcript

[music] >> And we are live. So, thank you everybody for dialing in tonight or signing on tonight. Just kicking off, may I introduce David Murrin? So, David and I dealt with each other over the years and argued over many, many different things. But, David's here tonight to talk to us about basically a lot of the research he did in his book, Breaking the Code of History, which I have to also I hope you can catch it is an extremely large, complex series of interlocking theories about how things work, how basically the economy works, how we go from patterns in history. I know I'm simplifying it, but David himself just give you some kind of background. You've done as the preamble says for this show, but 30 years of experience. You started off in geophysics and mining, I believe, before moving on to JP Morgan Prop, which your legend preceded you when I I was there. And before moving into basically setting up your own hedge fund back in the day in the 1990s. You obviously were chief investment officer there for many years. And now you're a full-time author, consultant, and public speaker, I believe, amongst other things and television presence as well. So, thank you very much for joining us and thank you for making time and let's without further ado, let's kick off with a few questions. Now, you and I have talked in the past and you know where I'm going to kick off with this one. But, why do you think history is so deterministic? Do you honestly think that you can kind of recognize these patterns over time? As you know, I'm a big believer in history is unknowable, it's slightly more chaotic. There's much more random events in there. So, if you could kind of perhaps kick off about how you got to that theory and then we can kind of back engineer from that point about how you move from basically geophysics into kind of doing history pattern recognition and various other aspects. I've got to remember all your questions at once, Ben. You know, I'm a simple soul. So, so in answering your question, I am a physicist by training and then I specialized in geophysics. So, I see the world as a quantum world of infinite probabilities, the physical universe anyway. What really surprised me from my early experiences looking for oil in Papua New Guinea was my workforce was really cannibalistic tribal people who on my first day work decided to riot on me and I watched this transmission of unconscious energy from Augustus, the son of the chief who decided he didn't want to work for me, to 60 other cannibals who also simultaneously decided the same thing. And it was like a pebble had been thrown into a pond and I saw ripples spreading from that person to all of the others. Sadly, they emulated the same anger towards me and it was palpable at the end of it. And then [snorts] after surviving this onslaught by walking through them and fronting down this act this violence and anger, I walked away and and had a second experience where they came after me again. But, 3 hours later I was alive and they were sitting around like vacant children after the worst temper tantrum and 4 hours later they're back to work and they just forgot every single aspect of their anger towards me. Now, that was a seminal moment because I'd seen what I thought was humanity in the past. I postulated it was a tribal behavioral pattern with a low threshold of individuality because of interdependence and one person's emotion could be spread to another. So, it was a collective emotion and it would discharge like a capacitor over time and then have no memory of it. That was my takeaway from numerous similar experiences. >> [snorts] >> And after 3 years of living in the swamp, which I can tell you is an interesting experience in itself, somehow I made this weird transition and jump to the floor of JP Morgan. >> [snorts] >> And of course, being a good scientist, I sat there and I looked and thought, well, I know nothing about finance. So, let's look at the guys who meant to matter the most, the economists. And I realized very quickly that economists were like some form of old modern version of druids. They spouted all sorts of rubbish. The predictability was really in reality very low in terms of predicting what came next, yet it was a consensus opinion. Yet, some of the guys from the East End actually without an education or similar knowledge were very good at calling the markets. And suddenly I realized that we were no different from Papua New Guineans. There on this trading floor was this collective emotion swirling around between people turning Cray computers as they were hired on their CV into pocket calculators following a group with no memory of their actions. That fascinated me cuz then I realized actually that's who we were in our human form. And that was a shock because I had a completely different idea of who we were. We were individuals, well-educated, that shared our collective experiences rather were our collective experiences. >> [snorts] >> So, that's the fundamental mechanism that I observed and being a good scientist, I thought, how do you actually look at that? Well, price seemed to be the biggest stimulant of emotional behavioral patterns. So, why didn't I start quantifying price to see if price represented a behavioral pattern? And after about 4 months of developing my model, someone tapped me on the shoulder and said, "Hey, mate, do you realize there's a lot more stuff out there?" I said, "There is." So, then I exposed myself to other stuff having made that basic observation myself and started to build my own models. And I when I sifted through just about everything that was available at the time. What's really interesting is that those unconscious patterns are basically why we have cyclical behavior. And we do it on an individual basis, but we do it on a collective basis. And since I wrote Breaking the Code of History, I have a a number of other additional theories which explain who we really are. And my first theory is a human human anti-entropy. It's a concept of essentially our survival mechanism as the human race. And quite simply, it is social agglomeration. And what we do individually, we multiply when we do it collectively, which is control and shape the environment around us. So, we're less susceptible to the entropy of the universe, which is as we all know, decay. So, entropy events are things like storms, gales, tsunamis, droughts because of weather changes. And we found as a race that the more we built social organizations, the more we became immune to those events around us. And take for example, the Roman Empire. The Roman Empire had many gods when it started because you needed a god for everything from grain to wind to water to whether or not, you know, you'd have a girl or a boy in your first child. Everything was dictated by divine intervention. And of course, towards the end of the Roman Empire when grain came from Egypt and it came from Spain, if there was a drought in one country and then you lost your grain, there was still enough for the empire. And it's no coincidence we moved from polytheism to monotheism as the empire learned to control its environment. And in time, each of our empire peaks has increased in terms of the entropy control of the world around us. Our modern society is looking at anti-aging technology, which is the ultimate survival trait to have to get your DNA to survive longer. But, what we've also done at the peaks of those cycles as as empires and systems decline, they start basically fighting each other. And the weak is taken on by the rising strong hegemon and we see this conflict in transference, which is a process which has got us to where we are, which is why war is an essential component of human societies. Even though we hate it, we deny it. Every time a system becomes weak, a rising system challenges it and tries to knock it off its perch. And from that process, we keep repeating our cycles at the highest level. We keep repeating our cycles within the structure of empires, which are our biggest social systems. And it's because they really are unconscious and collective. And that separates them from this probabilistic world that we understand through quantum mechanics into a very, very predictable set of cycles if you can decode how they operate and that's the basis of my work. Okay, and thank you for that. So, kind of coming back to that >> say thank you for that, what you're really saying is I'll get you with this question. Come on now. >> [laughter] >> Uh you know me. The How do you reconcile that then against a lot of the kind of random short-term events that we have to deal with in life? I mean, as you know, there is a lot of theories about, you know, longer-term cycles in the economy. You've kind of got capital cycles, you've got obviously inventory cycles, we've got potentially Kondratiev cycles. But, actually nailing that down to a precise kind of model, to a kind of almost sort of schedule, has proved next to impossible. So, they do seem to be the kind of classic to use Fed terminology, long and variable lags. So, Please don't associate me with the Fed. >> [laughter] >> So, I think that one of the things that's most interesting is bigger bigger systems are more predictable than smaller systems because the variability of individuality within those systems has less impact. Uh [snorts] duration, for example, but when it comes down to saying on this date, this will happen, there none of the cycles are accurate to that. 56-year cycle will happen on Tuesday. These are These are patterns which template our behavior and require shorter-term cycle systems and price models, which I also use in my work, to actually work out what's happening. So, one of the things I think the most geopolitical, you know, commentators in the outside world that consider themselves top of the tree list is actually markets are the regulator of collective behaviors. And those collective behaviors feed back into those other cycles. So, the integration of long-term geopolitical cycles and their effectiveness with market cycles, which can be shorter, is really fascinating and I think was one of the reasons why I was able to predict the invasion of Ukraine because the commodity cycle within the contractive cycle was triggering overconfidence in Putin and also the process of accelerating the drumbeat of war into what I would call a new age of war. So, it integration of market cycles coupled with bigger cycles is the solution. There is very little information in detail that goes back 500 years. So, therefore, we're piecing together 100 years of data in markets and superimposing it on something that happened over 400 years, which I was able to construct using a different algorithm by taking apart price models and describing collective behavior to those price models, I was able to create a new five stages of empire model, which has turned out to be frighteningly accurate, even though it doesn't have data to do it. It has mosaic behavioral patterns that construct in it where you are on the cycle. So, I wanted to go through those sort of first of all the elements of empire and the sort of five stages and I should point out for the listeners, I remember you telling me in 2018 maybe early 2019 high probability of a pandemic breaking out and also you were talking telling me then about how you thought Ukraine was going to be invaded by Russia and talking it through. So, I should kind of point out that um yeah, I was I was very much surprised and very much wrong on all of these things so far. So, just wanted if you could kind of talk through what do you see as elements of empire cuz I know you slightly different models and definitions of it and then if you can kind of talk through the sort of five stages and perhaps we'll move on from there. Well, you know, what's very interesting and in breaking the code of history, there's a sort of pre-section and it's basically you know, around the evolution of mankind. So, I think there's a couple of things that are important and we'll talk about them later if you raise the topic of lateral and linear. But mankind as hunter-gatherers were essentially a lateral species of thought because hunter-gathering requires although you learn lessons, you have to adapt every day to trap your prey to do those processes. And mankind's population expanded about 10,000 years ago with the advent of agrarianism. And agrarianism can be a completely different pursuit because it created linearity and predictability to seasons and behaviors. And [snorts] so, society started to create a linear-lateral split in human evolved mindsets. And that lateral-linear process, as we'll see, has been very instrumental in how we rise and fall as empire systems. So, the five traits that I identified in the system that I used was essentially and it's called the five stages of empire. So, the first is regionalization. Imagine, you know, a system starts from disorder at the bottom of regionalization and the population expands. It has a hierarchical leadership and by the time it reaches the end of regionalization, you have a few people at the top that are hierarchical and you have many people at the bottom who really have very little power and they have a civil war. And the civil war is about maximizing the lateral thinking process within society because war is the ultimate entropic determinant of lateral thinking because you win because you don't do predictable things. You do things that are surprising. You challenge your enemy at night rather than day. So, that first civil war, a regional civil war, is about putting the right leadership into the system and at the same time it militarizes the system through civil war. The whole system becomes militarized by definition. And at the end of that regional civil war and by the way, Brexit fits exactly into that category but without the bloodshed, which is why I was able to model it and predict it so effectively. But it is a regional civil war, the first in history where systems didn't kill each other to get there, which is a major tick and I'd say a point of hope. But at the same time we didn't complete the social evolution because we don't have fully lateral people in in charge. We've got a lateral leadership in number 10 in the cabinet and you've got a linear leadership still left in the government agencies, which are actually constantly thwarting each other. So, although we didn't we haven't really completed that process yet, but the increase of entropic events through war are going to do that naturally. I just hope we do it in time. Once regionalization finishes, the system is energized, it's got expansive demographic energy and it starts to run down its resource chains and it fights anyone in the way. So, Britain went out, for example, of the civil war within years it was fighting the Dutch in a series of wars, knocked the Dutch aside, then it went on to the French and the system algorithmically expands faster than any linear predictions. So, any system that isn't natural itself does really surprise at the rate of growth and the obvious example is our predictions over China, which started in 2002 when we said that by this peak China would be hegemonically challenging America. People used to fall off their chairs in 2003 and 2004 when I suggested the great American empire could actually ever be paralleled or equaled. But lo and behold, we're here because of that asymmetric exponential expansion process. And one of the things that's very interesting is it's full of lateral thinking. Whether it's an autocracy or a democracy, the system is full of creativity. So, as it expands by out-creating its competition. And it does it especially in the field of military capability where it finds weapon systems and tactics, which are specifically designed to overcome the advantages the hegemon has produced and the systems which made it a hegemon in the first place, which of course that hegemon's clinging to like life because it defines it. At the top of an expansion process, which is pretty non-linear, there is always a limit to an empire's control space. It can't go beyond certain topographical features or just can't communicate to the periphery and frontiers to make a bigger system work and it stops expanding or the rate starts to really slow down and it enters maturity. Maturity is quite a fascinating period because it doesn't matter what system there is, social integration and tolerance are the hallmarks of maturity >> [snorts] >> and it's the idea that you take that wealth and you build institutions and buildings and structures which are commensurate with the power of the empire. So, all of these great structures that we're used to, the great buildings in London were built in that period. And then something happens at the top, it's usually very quiet. It isn't an external civil war, it's an internal civil war. But the lateral system and the people that led it, because the empire is now a unipolar, controls everything around it, the variability of the inputs it faces are fewer because it controls everything. So, actually, the need for maverick lateral thinking that's adaptive really starts to disappear and it's displaced by linear thinking increasingly because of course the world is predictable because we control it. And so, you start to see this ingress of the lateral side losing influence and the linear side building influence and there's a subtle civil war at the top and a power shift. For example, if you look at Queen Victoria's reign in about 1860, there was a constitutional revolution and the devolution of power from the crown into parliament once and for all. And but essentially that was the revolution for the British empire. And then you start to move into overextension. Now, of course, the empire never looks more powerful and established because time, the linear constructs, means it's stronger, it's it's more of itself. But what's key here is it starts spending more than it earns. And there are two fundamental debt piles which empires build. The first is in regionalization and and the move to empire because you borrow money to fund your armies which are in a mode of expansion. So, you build a massive amount of debt which you borrow from yourself. And once you become that empire, you start to pay it back because by definition you are a monopoly and literally your coffers just fill up again. >> [snorts] >> And then as you move into overextension, what's really happening is you've removed that lateral creativity, replaced it with linearity and the system is slowly losing adaptability and productivity. And so, you start to borrow money against course the certainty of empire, which compensates for natural growth and that's the beginning in overextension of the leveraging process. And then you end up with an event. In America, it was 9/11. Some catastrophic physical event which shifts the mindset and starts to remove the veil off overextension into some very obvious qualities. In the case of America, it was the loss of the moral imperative, which was basically the neoconservative drive through Rumsfeld and Cheney and torture and rendition and the concepts that you just are going to keep expanding stumping democra- democracy on people who weren't. That was the beginning of the process. Obama then came next and Obama basically is was quite typical of a of a leader of a system in decline because essentially what he did was basically he came from the underclass and capable or not, that's another discussion, when someone from the underclasses is in position, it's because the demographics of the underclass have outgrown the overclass who built the empire and priorities change. And the core priority is social integration and social equality and there is total neglect of the boundaries of the empire at the same time. So, it's not a coincidence that Obama presided over the greatest loss of American power up until that point. And then there's always this corrective moment. It's a a make me great moment which Trump so beautifully etched into, which was we've lost so much power, get me back to where I was. That was Trump's promise. He sat in that slot and he completely failed. He made it worse. And then of course, [clears throat] the next process is everyone's poorer. So, what do you need? You need wealth distribution politics and lo and behold, you end up with a with a Biden on the wealth distribution packet who happens to be even more ineffective and the slide of the empire accelerates into a horrible military reversal of some kind which ends the system or in the translation of being at the end like the British empire, you give up the last energy of empire to stop a hegemon which has completely different values. So, the [snorts] British empire spent the last vestiges of its energy ablating the challenge of Germany twice, which was you know, I would say autocratic in both cases. And I think America's destiny is exactly that. To with its last energy ablate the Chinese challenge with what energy it still has left and we hope it's got enough to actually prevent a conflict where for conflict arises to win that conflict, but after it it will be a spent force and a new system will rise into the vacuum. What does a spent force look like in to your mind around the United States and then we move on to Well, well, I think actually it depends on two things. So, let's look at Britain the British Empire as a spent force. I mean, we basically passed or had our power ripped from us by the American Empire. And by 1970 we're in all kinds of nightmare we're into a peak of a contractive inflation process. We'd lost our Empire. We had no national pride and we look like a third world country for a time. >> [snorts] >> Now, if we hadn't have sat under the American umbrella of protection both nuclear and conventional, we would have been subsumed at that moment by the USSR. But we didn't and we were able to re-establish ourselves and I believe that Britain restarted with Thatcher a whole new cycle starting in 1979. And in fact, we have been through a second stage of regionalization matching the one up into the English Civil War and post-Brexit we're in an expansionary phase which has got all sorts of hallmarks which are around us but we choose not to recognize. And we have left one crucial piece out which we've left our military capability on the verge of absolutely incapable when we most needed another byproduct of a of an a civil war without bloodshed. We didn't militarize and we're particularly vulnerable for that reason. Okay. >> [clears throat] >> Um So, to your mind then the US is this and we'll get back to the economic beat. You would see them as going into basically a multi-decade kind of downturn in terms of >> They've been in it since 2001, Ben. And you're into the terminal phases. There are some pieces which might hopefully keep them in the game as this this commodity cycle moves upwards and one of them is the production of oil gas and oil shale. Essentially, that as oil prices go through the roof, that could be the one thing that keeps it in play longer. But it's fundamentally has to go into the hole to come out in a reformed state because it's in a it's old ways, it's non-productive ways are so deeply constructed within society that seems the only way I've ever seen. You can never get to circumvent these processes. There's no examples in history of it. Okay. So, [clears throat] obviously moving on to China because it's the kind of competitor. But as you know, I sort of struggle with that because it is already highly indebted. It's got poor demographics. It's resource poor. So, I've no doubt it's kind of reasserted something more in line with where it should be in terms of size of country, but I really sort of had difficulty [clears throat] seeing it being a sort of, you know, the new global leader. Um how would you counter that? Okay. So, the the new the new cycle of this Chinese Empire I argue started with the Boxer Revolution in 1902. It was the resurgence of Chinese identity and the rejection of Western influence through the Boxer Revolution. And then their stage of regionalization moved all the way into their civil war in effect. And their civil war as we know is between communism and nationalism. Honestly, I'm not sure we could tell the difference. They were both pretty autocratic, but they had different words and slightly different levels of mobilization. And as we know, the communist won. Now, by then China was fully militarized and people forget that it basically reached out and grabbed every piece of land from any country next to it for as long as they could, went to war with everyone around it. So, when people tell you, "Don't worry, the Chinese are peaceful." you can say, "No, they weren't." Right? They carried on doing it wherever they could and most of the the expansion modern China we see on the map involved incidents like Tibet which was a free country before they grabbed it. And so, that was their expansion, but they had a problem. And their problem was that the regulation of expansion of any hegemonic challenger is the vacuum created by the rate of decline of the hegemon at the time. And America was actually very vibrant as they came out of that cycle. And so, they went through a pause of containment where they could only go so far. >> [snorts] >> And their realization happened that so far was so far was the third Taiwan Straits Crisis in 1996. And the American response after the first Gulf War and the realization they were the preeminent military power by a quanta was to send through two carriers and a mere group to say, "That doesn't happen on our watch." And the Chinese realized that there was no way they could overtly challenge America. So, they channeled their their energies into a covert program. And that covert program was basically to use Western hopes, arrogance, and hubris against us. And by simply feeding the construct that if they became a capitalist state, they would become a democratic state. Now, there wasn't a snowflake in hell's chance the CCP were ever going to do that, but that was the carrot and the trick and the trap they created for the West. And of course, we fell for it hook, line, and sinker. Of course, everyone wants to be like us. We did it in Iraq, we did it in Russia. Everywhere America went, we you want to be like us. So, [snorts] we ended up investing in their country, building the biggest manufacturing base in the world, and sending our IP to be made and what we didn't send them, they stole from us. They inveigled every institution that was the foundation of our international community against us. And they borrowed money because they were in the phase of expansion to Empire. So, their debt mound is an internally borrowed debt mound. And yes, it seems as big as America, but trust me, it is a completely different nature that it's an internal mound not an external mound of an Empire in decline. Two different things. Now, [snorts] you're exactly right about demographics. Demographics confer certain advantages. In in China they're quite unique because you're talking about 55% males. Which is 55 million more males than they'd normally have at 51. Which is a staggering number of testosterone. And I've long for 20 years made a prediction that everything you see China do will be more aggressive than any aggressive Empire in the past with their extra pounds of testosterone making decisions. It sounds trite, it sounds simplistic, but we've seen it that essentially it's an extremely aggressive expansionist system. Now, for Xi with his ambitions and the 50-year plan was triggered in '96 to work in come to fruition in '46. Essentially, they wanted to dominate the world in '46. But since Xi came to power, he's realized a number of things. Number one is the demographic peak means they've got to get to that power slot before they start to drop off the top. Which means this decade. And number two is essentially with the Indians 15 years behind them, they might fill the gap as America wanes. And essentially they're double problem. So, they've got to get there quickly before India becomes a more dominant blocking force against their aspirations. And the third thing is he's highly ambitious for his own desires and China. And I would say that everything the West has done has weakened its position way beyond any 50-year year CCP plan could have anticipated. So, what we're really seeing is we're seeing China making its move now. It's created all sorts of military paradigms which have overturned um the American power. So, one of the um the um examples in the Ukraine crisis. Sorry, that is my cat and I do apologize. Um Uh in the Ukraine crisis, you saw that Kiev was hit by a hypersonic weapon. Right? Hypersonic weapons are truly game-changing if you are America with carriers. Because what it means is those hypersonic weapons travel fast enough to to get through your missile defense capability and they make carriers a dead duck. Both Russia and China have been developing in different forms with a single goal overturn the power construct of America. And right now the Chinese have enough of them and the American and the and the Russians that there is only one missile that can intercept those incoming missiles maybe and it's not American, it's actually British. So, the power shift, the basis of American power has been dismantled. And we've also seen the dismantling of American power in in Putin's nuclear threats. And those threats basically say, "Yes, we'll destroy ourselves if we have a full-out exchange, but before that I'll thump you with a nuclear weapon or somewhere near and you'll be too So, we're seeing the breakdown of our security context right in front of our eyes. Okay. So, um turning a couple of those arguments on the head. Obviously, you could make a lot of the same claims about the USSR as did many US economists that they were going to overtake the US. And you had >> When when when when they made that? All right, into the '80s. So, um I'm desperately trying to remember the name the guy who used to write all the textbooks for the US kind of post-grad programs, won the Nobel Prize. But it was in his book right up to about 1986-87 that the USSR was going to overtake the United States. What what That's because he didn't understand the contractive cycle. Okay. The USSR had that civil war. It kind of had the huge expansion, a lot of the debt, militarization of the economy, but it failed to overtake the United States. >> Well, there's a reason why. Okay? So, essentially, if you model the post um Soviet era from 1950 to 19 to 2000 on 156-year contractive cycle because Russia is a commodity producer. And that's the thing that no one understood. It's not a consumer society like us. And there's a human frailty where we always project our qualities onto our opposition or someone else. Quite simply, their system works by producing commodities and it was an anathema at the peak of the commodity cycle that they were doing well and they could expand more and produce more weapons and project more power and we were gripped in the West by 15% CPI inflation, 15% 10-year rates and we were barely alive even though America was actually at the strongest of its Empire cycle using my five stages of Empire model. So, So that point no one ever thought that we would win the Cold War because there was something magical over there in the USSR and we didn't understand it. And it was quite simply, they were producers of commodities in a peak commodity cycle. And if you're a consumer versus a producer, they're different dynamics. What happened after that, which broke them, was essentially the prices started to roll downhill as the Kondratiev cycle started to deflate. And essentially, along came Reagan and executed the right strategies, the stimulation of the American economy. You had an anti-inflationary policy with the Fed, which you know, really started to clamp down on that process so the consumers and society could start to move up. Money would be spent on defense. The Saudis would help go and roll the oil price down. And by the middle of the '80s, essentially, that was looking really bad for the Soviet Union. There are two things about weapons programs and two types of empires. The first is a maritime hegemonic power. It obviously has a very big navy, but that navy actively controls the sea lanes and builds trade routes and trade relationships which produce revenue back into the system. So [snorts] it's a very profitable return on assets, I would argue, when you invest in your maritime capability. But the USSR had the other version, which was a standing army. And a standing army just stands until you need it. It doesn't increase your economic growth, doesn't stimulate your system, it just is a massive great cost. So they had a massive great cost and decreased revenues. And of course, they slid downhill. And they were always thinking about using it as life got worse for them until something happened. And that's the pilot war called the Falkland Islands War. And it's one of the most significant little wars that people don't realize because up until that moment, the Kremlin had decided that every leader in the West was weak. When they rolled their armies into Europe, we would never have the courage to use tactical nuclear weapons on our own territories we retreated and they would win de facto. And they witnessed the Iron Lady send a fleet 8,000 miles like hit or miss, like hanging on by a hair, win a war and come back. And they completely revamped their perception of Western capital leadership as being weak. They had to. The Iron Lady's actions with the support of Reagan can change the process whereby the Russians saw us as weak. They were never able to use their army to invade despite the economic duress they found themselves on and they withered on the vine. And that's such a perfect example of a pilot war that was positive that actually defeated conflict. Whereas if you look at Afghanistan, Iraq, they're all signals to the hegemonic challengers that the West is weak and now is the time to move. Okay. So can I ask you where we are now? So I know you when we talked in the past, you talked about sort of commodity cycles which you've referenced a few times, but obviously military cycles where I think you feel we are now. And again, just the role of disease which was one of the things that was obviously very surprising when we spoke all those years ago. So if I could ask where you think we are now, where Russia and Ukraine is cuz obviously that's dominating the headlines. Clearly you think the US is on the way out. China's on the way out. I would also say, why don't you think India's going to be more of a challenger? You mentioned it to China, but it strikes me that they've got many of the kind of other than the fact they don't quite fit your model about starting in a civil war per se, but they they have a lot of the qualities that I would say look more likely to kind of drive them forward as a much bigger power over the next 100 years or so. So I've got to say, you've asked more questions in three sentences I had to answer. So I'm just going to remember them. All right. So Why not India? Let's kick off. >> [laughter] >> Okay. So so where are we right now? Because there is one adjoining drumbeat to this cycle that really explains what's happening to us. And that is of the Kondratiev cycle that started in 2000 that is expected to peak in 25 to 27. There are normally three phases. The A phase which was from 2000 to 2011. The B phase which was the long deflationary phase which happened between 11 roughly and the bottom of March 2020. And the C wave which is like a nightmare rocket shop which is basically where we are in now. This sort of massive trending commodity prices relentless and consistent over 5 years. So we're in that cycle. Now, in my book, I talk about the price of commodities being the drumbeat of war. Because the only thing humans ever fight about is resources. We mobilize and polarize our societies with the constructs that create bonding memes to then justify we're going to fight with you because you don't believe what we believe. But the truth is I really want your resources. And that's 99% of all combat is derived from that process. So as this demand cycle for commodities increases, the drumbeat quickens its tempo. So we've got the Chinese out there who've been planning this for since '96. And that includes the military arms race and challenge. We've got the Russians which have been planning it since 2007 when Putin rejected the construct of the Western world after feeling as if he'd been shortchanged by our promises being broken, understandably in many ways. >> [snorts] >> But we kept moving east and essentially, we also disarmed ourselves in the process. So we moved ourselves into the belly of the bear and we did so with not like multitudes of swords, but we've got one small fork. And that's essentially the essence of Ukraine. It's too far with one fork, unable to protect it, overexposed, overextended. And Putin's plans came to fruition in such a way. This is rearmament program and his strategy strategy over this process of nuclear um disablement which he formulated in 2017 has given him the bubble to actually do the conventional damage to Ukraine and we're left like Pavlov's dogs terrified of nuclear war. And he judged us correctly as if you threaten weak Western leadership, essentially we'd back off. Imagine threatening Margaret Thatcher with four times with a nuclear weapon. She would have picked up the phone and said, "Hello Mr. Putin, I've been watching you on television and I just need you to confirm that you made a nuclear threat to us." And of course, he would have had to say yes. And she would have said, "Well Mr. Putin, I need you to understand that when you use your weapon to try and threaten us, my weapon is going to land on your head. Our signals intelligence knows where you are every day, every minute of the day. And we promise you, you will be first." That's exactly how you'd face down a bully. Of course, everyone's been running away from the threat of any kind of nuclear exchange, of escalation of a third world war in exactly the way that Putin wanted them to. And they're salivating at the idea of if I give you this tank, that's an offensive weapon and you might start the process. We are gripped with a fear. Whether Ukraine resolves itself today, tomorrow, or in a year, the legacy is our security architecture has been dismantled right in front of our eyes, playing playing right into the process of weak leadership. And yet most people don't understand what we've lost and how vulnerable we've become. So Ukraine is our war, it's all of our war. And I would argue it's the beginning of the age of war as this commodity cycle moves into its peak. But this seems to be very much the opposite of how events have unfolded because you seem to have had NATO finally getting rejuvenated. You've had an increase in defense budgets and you seem to have a reasonable amount of sort of unity around the Western powers. Okay. So let me just say that. The only country that increased defense budget was Germany and that was because it was totally naked. So it's taken itself from totally naked to hoping to have some clothes. The country that is number one on the hit list with Russia, which is Britain, which quite rightly and I would got to give Boris and and Ben Wallace the credit to provide 4,000 N laws. And in my study on my marinations, you'll see the analysis is that if those N laws hadn't been there, I believe that Putin would have been successful because the only thing that stopped his armor thrust were the numerous number of weapons available that did such damage and then created another series of events. But that's a temporary process. In so doing, Britain has made itself completely exposed. And I wrote a I wrote a number of reviews defense reviews. One's 2015 which was just completely ignored. And I finally did one called now or never which I got out into the 2020 world. And it got into number 10 and Boris Johnson used it as the basis of his speech to say that the Conservatives basically cared about defense at the end of 2020. I thought, "Man, that's fantastic. You create a completely new agenda. You get it into the Prime Minister's office. Someone picks it up and claims it's theirs and he says the words." But the defense review itself was the biggest disablement we've ever had. When Sunak says you know, $24 billion, it's $4 billion a year. It's nothing in the scheme of an armed force which has been neglected and at a time when we're seeing massive revolutions in military affairs. Our ability to defend ourselves is almost negligent right now. And there's a reason why Putin acted in Ukraine. And this is so important. Hegemonic challengers and and and Putin is not a classic one. He's a commodity cycle wealth freak that's trying to whip his demographically declining Russia into action. And so therefore, he's a singular bully of an autocracy that stimulates his population with his own energy and control. But he's been looking for weaknesses. Let's look at the signals we sent. Well, the first signal we sent was you know, his early invasions after 2007. We didn't really do much about that. >> [snorts] >> Um Obama was incensed at the chemical red line and the New York Times. And so essentially, we created the revolution in Ukraine which flipped a pro-Russian to a Western government. Partly because of the gas reserves one always thinks and the ability of Ukraine to provide energy instead of Russia to Europe was attractive to the Europe and it was attractive to the legacy of American expansionism. But we didn't create the force capability to then protect it. And so the result was a war, the capture of Crimea. Again, we just sort of let that happen. We let the war tinker on. And then finally, you know, we have Novichok on our doorstep, no response. And we have a a route from Afghanistan that was an elective route on Biden's decision that left chaos behind and humiliated us. So, right at just before the you battle of Ukraine, I could imagine a conversation with Putin and Xi saying, "Man, we have got to make our move now cuz we'll never have a weaker leader in charge of America and he might die in office. He's so frail." So, I think the sort of rush to the door and the aggressive door came about because we encouraged weakness. Now, if we after the Ukraine, the best thing Britain ever could have done is the day or the day before we should have said, "We're raising our defense expenditure to 5%." Cuz the only thing Putin cares about is kinetic force. Doesn't care about words, threats, money, force. And the only thing that force equates to is the size and capability of defense forces. So, we are really missing a significant trick and we've exposed ourselves in a terribly terribly big way going forwards. So, we're talking about the UK, but we haven't really talked about the European Union, which of course is the enormous elephant So, so what is the European Union? Can you explain that to me? What exactly does it do? Well, the people that we decided to leave. But they are huge in terms of economic power. They are always as they say the economic giant and the political dwarf. Don't you see this as potentially their moment where they get much more unity of purpose? Well, the the the Okay, for a moment we had unity. And you know, so let's just look at how did that unity manifested? Well, it manifested in collective fear of nuclear third world war. We don't want to go there. So, let's go straight sanction program which you know, we've got to do it, right? As I've argued, taking a sanction program to Russia in the peak of a commodity cycle that it's a commodity producer and we're a consumer is like taking a knife to a gunfight. We have no chance. Because those commodities that we don't buy, China will buy all of. The strategic relationship between Russia and China is interlocked right now. China cannot afford to see Putin fall for three reasons. One is he currently has an alliance structure that would sit under the ICBM or the nuclear strategic umbrella of Russia and they don't have enough of those missiles right now to create that balance at the higher perspective. The next reason is if Russia became Western, they'd have to defend their northern border and would be a lot closer to their mainland. Not a good look. But most importantly, Russia can provide all the resources and commodities China needs over land away from maritime interdiction. And for those three reasons, there is no way that Xi will see Putin fail. At the moment, he may be nodding his head pretending that he doesn't want sanctions, but trust me, under the carpet they'll be doing everything they can to support Russia right now. And economically, as a commodity producer, as a cycle increases, just as the USSR got stronger from '70 to '75, that's Russia right now. And we're going to get weaker because the cost of living crisis is an inflationary crisis to do with where the contractive cycle is. And that is a simple input cycle. So, what really alarms me about our inflationary expectations is if you look at inflation at the peak of the last contractive cycle just in inputs, that cycle was two hegemonic systems, one a producer, one a consumer. If you go back to the First World War peak of 1914, the peak was much much higher because it was two great consuming empires, Germany and Britain, basically competing with each other. This cycle peak is two consumer societies between America, the West, and China competing. So, the peak will be bigger than any other peak we've seen. So, that's input prices. So, let's assume the 15% CPI in the States peaks at 30% cuz it's double the size of peak, which would be commensurate with the World War '14 1914 peak. But there are two other forms of inflation that the West has basically not talking about. One is we exported all our manufacturing to China at the beginning of the 2000 cycle and the process was to suppress our inflation with cheap manufacturing. And as the wall comes down around China as it has done economically around Russia because they fall in line with Russia and they support their ally, essentially every bit of manufacturing that was in China won't be anymore. And we'll have the biggest supply gridlock we've ever seen as we try and find alternative production sources and a massive spike inflation. And the third piece is the amount of money America has printed. And you look at M2 and you look at its growth versus GDP and it's the most terrifying chart I've ever seen. And now, what I think is like a dam breaking and the input price inflation dynamics has broken the perception that there's no inflation and the other two are going to come through. So, we're in a hyper inflationary environment for the next 5 years. A terrifying environment and America is less productive than it was in the '75 peak. So, there's just about everything pointing in the wrong direction and some very stormy markets ahead. Okay. So, [clears throat] putting that in there that you continue to see this big sell-off in US Treasuries to turn it into real world thing for the benefit of our audience. So, you'd see continued weakness in US Treasuries, weakness in the dollar, but against what? As we both know as former FX type trading, it has to collapse against something. What is that? So, so so so okay, what collapses where? So, a debt crisis in the States and the West I think is absolutely on the cards here. And I think if I was a chancellor in the UK, I would be looking ahead at the most enormous borrowing requirement and I'd be issuing an akin to a 50-year war loan and I'd give a 1% premium over whatever the curve suggested and I'd look to fund the country now when it's still fundable at rates under 4% because quite simply in this hyperinflationary environment, that that debt will inflate away in no time. If you are you know, you and I understand that. If the Chancellor Treasury did, it's like a free option. I fund myself and it inflates away over the 5-year inflation cycle when inflation gets to 30% and at the same time I lower taxes because what I've really got to do is create a super growth full economy that's growth rate accelerates and matches the inflation rate. And that's one thing that Britain could do post-Brexit. It's not open to the Union, certainly not open to America. But it's something we could do adaptively. And I think something we really must do if we are not going to suffer the same moribund fate as as the EU and and the US in this circumstance. So, bonds down, debt crisis. The dollar's kind of interesting in that somewhere soon it's going to like reload itself for the next big decline and this correction's gone on, you know, to to back up to sort of a 100 on the dollar index. Partly, interestingly enough, >> [laughter] >> because the EU is pretty too. It's right next to a war zone. It's got no growth. It's the sort of competition of the crappiest currency in that pair. I think sterling is really exciting. So, if there's one long-term currency in the Western block I would favor, it's a long sterling strategy. And I really think that'll pay off in droves over the next few years. Uh the yen is, you know, absolutely buggered and managed to call that really well from about 108 110. And this spurt is because it's a energy importer and it has very low growth rates and massive energy consumption needs. An absolute killer. And it just happens to be next to another violent expansive system called China, which is, you know, where everyone's worked out that what's happening in Ukraine is going to repeat in Asia. So, it's a very very unpopular destination. So, I mean, the yen is very weak. It's near a temporary respite somewhere up here between 22 and 25. So, I wouldn't be piling in right now. You'll get some kind of retracement. But currency-wise, that looks pretty interesting. I think in terms of currencies, don't be surprised if the Russians put themselves onto a gold standard producing 331 tons of gold every year without you know, an accelerated production process and a commitment of 3 years of gold into a gold standard that they just happened to grab from all the companies which, you know, pretty much defunct. Don't rule that out. And that would make it something that India and and China might want in their central bank. And that's certainly a finger up from Putin that, you know, the economic war is being lost by the West. So, that's something to bear in mind. And I think I don't want to trade it and we can't trade it, but what happens to the renminbi is over time it obviously appreciates compared to the dollar. >> [snorts] >> Uh even though its stock markets will are ahead of it in the collapse. And I think this is quite important to sort of describe to everyone is what's going on in China is really key. Because in 2020 after the pandemic slipped out and I use those words very carefully. Um China's shifted from a manufacturing export-driven economy into an internally fueled consumer society. And it took the risk that the gap between consumer demand and export demand would be a gap. And that they would fill that gap in time essentially through their arms process and their militarization in what is the biggest arms race since the last two wars. And that's been one of the main reasons and they started also hoard commodities. Now, the last country that did that is Germany. Germany 1936 March, the four-year plan. And it is singularly an intention of hostility that sort of times itself into the peak of the commodity cycle. It means in the case of Nazi Germany, they were either going to war or they were going to be bankrupt by 1940. If poor Chamberlain had understood that economic dynamic, he never would have bothered to say peace in our time. And similarly, the destruction inside the the Chinese economy is just so. It is the price that Xi is prepared to pay to insulate his economy as and especially now when you look at what we did to the Russian economy when we the West doesn't like an action by China that gives it protection and and guarantees its route towards conflict. So, that's a very real issue that we've got right now. And the sacrifice of the so-called free markets is just his his need or desire to remove the camouflage that he used to deceive us to invest in China in the first place. And it's so it's fundamentally not a good place to be at all. Okay. How can you be wrong? Uh every every which way. All right. So far so far, you know, when I look at this and I look at when I first started making the predictions over what we would face right now with the Kondratieff cycle. That was 15-20 years ago before the book was even written. I am absolutely horrified at how accurate those predictions have been in terms of the preparations for conflict by Russia and China, the way conflict is erupting in front of us, and I'm afraid that if I'm honest, this is almost something that's set in motion. If I was seeing a Western set of leaders that were Thatcher-esque in their determination to deter, I would be so much more optimistic. But I don't think of history or can't think of a group of nations less prepared to go to war than the West and facing two entities which are completely prepared to go to war. So the scale that this takes place on, the commodity competition, I'm afraid I think it's like watching railway lines and the number the number 930 coming into a station at the moment. Okay. You don't see these Western leaders coming out of the blue that now with How is it? Um weak times breed weak leaders and tough times breed tough leaders. >> They do, but the trouble is the time frame to the drumbeat of war accelerating is faster than electoral cycles can breed more aggressive leaders. Right. Okay. And obviously advancing towards war and having a confrontational stance is not necessarily a good thing. I mean that is incredibly >> No, the way you the way you advance towards war is you advance towards war with the concept that you prepare for the worst and you hope for the best and you create a policy of maximize full spectrum deterrence. That's not aggressive, that's defensive, but it has intention and it has commitment, and it's the only way to deter a predatory nation. Okay. So um you're obviously positive on the UK and Sterling over time, though it's going to be a wild ride. It's going to be a bumpy ride. We can certainly a contrarian view for most people. Well, well, I I'll give you a couple of things that are really interesting, right? That you know you you want me to give you signals rather than because I do use mosaic signals. So [snorts] the first thing that displayed to me that Britain had very high levels of national energy that were unrecognized was our Olympic standing in terms of the third and second place, and you only see that happen when a system has national energy and also money in combination and aspiration. So that was the first thing that made me realize Brexit wasn't a random motion of a few nutters, it was the the regional civil war of a new cycle. And then we've seen two adaptive things which I think are bold and separate us from our European compatriots. One is you know, a singular action of finding a vaccine solution, we showed the potential of our adaptability, our individuality, and our creativity. But I think the provision of NLAW's by by Wallace and and Boris to Ukraine is truly a powerful moment, and there's a piece that's coming out tomorrow in my Moral Nations which really explains that there were many things that have gone wrong for the Russians, but without those 2,000 NLAW's to actually break down the cycle of of advance by the Russian forces, I think they would have been successful and that invasion would have worked out. So the provision of those NLAW's, the support and training we gave to their army, those are all things that were quite bold and they're typical of a system finding its new feet in a more visionary expansive way, and certainly not a single country in Europe replicated it, and we were a long way ahead. So the assertion that Brexit wasn't just about our selfishness, but was actually about the optimization and reestablishment of democracy, and that would feed back into a weakening Western world where the rest of the systems were in decline, a bit like a young vibrant 20-year-old holding the Zimmer frame of his grandfather, essentially I think is a paradigm that has potentiality, but there's more that needs to be done for that to come to fruition with in Britain. Earth calling Ben. Well, I think Ben will be back in a minute. I've put him to sleep, I think. >> [laughter] >> Well, those are some quite uh scary predictions you're making. Well, we are not living in normal times, Gerald. We are living in a very, very tumultuous period. And I use an analogy that uh most humans really operate like sheep eating grass. And then you have sheepdogs, and the sheepdogs basically bark when the when the threat comes, and you have wolves. And right now we have wolves at the perimeter of the field, the sheepdogs are barking, and the sheep are saying, "Nah, just one more blade of grass, please." I see. Is is there is there anything our governments or the Western governments can do to change this this whole scenario? >> Yeah, and look, you know, the reason why I I decided to speak out about this using the constructive argument is that essentially things we can do, and I think Britain is the leader actually because Biden has really disabled America, which is another reason why she and Putin are acting, is that we need to increase our defense expenditure much like the Germans did with a very large one-off payment of 100 billion pounds and at least 100 billion pounds thereafter, and not just a normal spending program, but an emergency spending program as if we've gone into war. We also need to increase the resilience of our system because energy security is obviously a terrible situation and it will get worse, and food security is going to nail us, and you've got to think of like a wartime country where your supply lines are interdicted and how do you create resilience. >> [snorts] >> And that also I think will create efficiencies which create more productivity. And at the same time, I really think this is the time to create a flat tax with a five or four-year runway, and you basically attract all the capital from EU and from America which knows it's a bad place to be, it pours into us with investment criteria for all of the highly productive creative industries that give us a new technological advantage, whether it's biotech, whether it's weapons technology, whether it's energy technology, and we become that scientific superpower with overseas investment, and the result of that is that we can at least start to build uh like a really growthful economy that you know it has fewer pieces of red tape and constrictions, and we move ourselves beyond this paradigm of you know, timid growth. And the other thing, we borrow a shedload more money. And I know borrowings have got the EU and America into trouble, and they might get us, but I do believe that we're in that hump of debt where you invested in your system to be a USP that gives you dominance, not as the other systems are doing just to maintain their status quo which is failing. And as long as that money doesn't go to the programs you know Sunak has been following which is keep my system alive and goes into the future, then you get dividends and enhanced payouts. But the really important thing is we are years behind this curve. So you know, in terms of our enemies' aspirations, Putin's been planning this for 15 years. So when we think, "Yeah, who we're all together, didn't we do well?" trust me, we're still so behind the curve. And the same for the Chinese. So we've got to change our leadership to a fully lateralized leadership. That includes the people at the top of government to the heads of department of government and industry and investment because banks that have linear thought process will not survive the trauma ahead. So this is the time to embrace a maverick, embrace a cohort of mavericks, and stop looking at them like they're an irritant and actually realize they are the salvation of a process in recreating innovation and natural thinking, and not to do it gradually because we just don't have time. We're so behind. So this is an emergency dynamic program rather than an incremental let's try a bit here and a bit there cuz a bit isn't going to save the day. I just sorry for jumping out there, but um talking Embrace the maverick, Ben. Yes, and talking about the benefits of the UK in the future, and the infrastructure doesn't seem to work too well. So um where else do you see similar energy? Um well, in China, except it's advanced. Uh and that's it right now. I mean Britain, the reason the thing that Britain doesn't really realize, strangely enough, you see it in India, it's behind us to where we are in terms of its manifestation. But those are the three main countries. What what is very interesting is that um this energy is independent of the way a system is governed. It's definitely optimized. So if you look at autocracy versus democracy, the best way to think about it is uh and the and its origins is really important is that I argue that um lateral thinking was the hunter-gatherers' realm, and that linear thinking was the agrarians' role. So what you see in our societies is a mix of lateral and linear across the world. But you see topographical adaptation. So in a country like Britain back in 800 years ago, its ratio of coastline to internal volume meant that lateral people actually were in very high ratios because lateral people go to sea. And it's a very complex environment that begets lateral thinking. As a sailor watching a linear person afloat is a sight to behold. Whereas a lateral person can deal with multi-variables intuitively. So it's no surprise that Britain and Holland are seafaring nations were the first democratic democratic systems in the West. And the landlocked countries tend to be more hierarchical. So Russia is a typical case of landlocked, highly hierarchical, and just you know, never been able to change its construct. China is the same. >> [snorts] >> So you are looking to some degree of genetic allocation to a nation's population as to its propensity. Now how did India, for example, become democratic or how did Japan? Well, it had 50 years or India was hundreds of years of democratic rule that new systems and systems were talked to it that established it. But just going into Russia in the '90s and saying, "Have a bit of democracy" was doomed to failure like it was Iraq because it just wasn't fertile enough to accept it. So right now, this is not just the new age of war. This is essentially a fundamental battle between the autocracies of the world, the land locked structures, and the more western democratic maritime structures. And the problem is that if you just put it down simply, I think democracy takes the average individual and let's just say it gets 70% of its potential out of it on average if you're really lucky and you dream a lot. And when you go to an autocracy, you might get a human being operating at 50% of his maximum productivity. So there's a big difference individually. So if you want a small population to optimize, democracy is the route. But when you have very large numbers as in four times the population working only at 20% less, you still have more collective energy to overcome a democracy. So that's the battle we have right now and we do need to mobilize our individuals and I think there's watching the Ukrainians, I find incredible. That is the whole country fully mobilized to fight a war for survival. Now, you think about the French in 1940 when they're invaded, the whole system just collapsed. Just they went around the corner of the imaginary line, the army collapsed and 60 years later the whole country was under water. What a contrast between France and Ukraine. Now, I've long since argued that was because France suffered very high casualty ratios in the First World War. It's junior officers wore its leadership genes and they died the most. And so in effect, the First World War destroyed the leadership pool of France, left it rudderless when its next challenge came. But Germany, its population was in expansion and it replaced them. Not only did it replace them, it took people from the lower income bracket, pushed aside the Prussian officers and created a new leadership clan known as the Nazis. And Britain kind of held its own because its demographics were more expansive than France, but not enough to completely rejuvenate. So that process dictates leadership in conflict and the challenge of anti-entropy. The problem Putin has right now is he will adapt on the battlefield. The Ukrainians are at their most adaptable potential for this conflict with small incremental changes. They're battle-hardened, they had a plan, they have western, you know, eyes in the sky. There's very little fog of war because they're so well informed. The Russians are at the bottom of their learning form of combat adaptability. And I don't believe Russia's going to give up, Putin won't give up. And so this war will start to shift heavily against the Ukrainians as time goes on unless the west provides offensive weapons like switchblades to change the balance of power against artillery bombarding cities. But under the Pavlov's dogs construct, we're too scared to give those weapons in any numbers in case Putin tries one of his de-escalation strategies. So we've got to break that lock Putin has over our mindset that we don't want to offend him. Okay. Thank you for that, David. If people want to get hold of you or if they want to get hold of your book cuz I think you've got a new edition coming out, um what's the best way to do it? Yeah, so you can find So all these ideas are on my website, globalforecaster, um and you just look it up. Essentially, there are marinations which are the substance behind the things I've discussed and they're for general political understanding. They'll give you whatever you need to understand hopefully going forward what's happening and why. There's a global trader product for all the hedge funds and financial guys in terms of market predictions and operates like a hedge fund and you can access the trades in real time and returns. And there's also a thing called global advisor that essentially lets you or me interact to help navigate your companies through the difficult times ahead because it may not seem much, but there are a few things you can do that could save your company once you understand this terrain and then be adaptable to new information. So across the spectrum, global forecaster is there to to help people navigate through these times and optimize the outcomes. And there are a number of books you can access, they're all on the site. There's an awful lot of podcasts, for some reason people wanted to talk to me recently. So there's a lot of free information for you to to access too. And Ben, this has been completely different from the others, so I really appreciate the poking challenge you always give me. Well, thank you very much, um David. Since there's no more questions and we're at the limit of our time. Thanks everybody for dialing in and David gave you the details to get in contact him and he's obviously available. And thanks everybody else this evening. So have a good evening. Thank you. Thank you, Ben, and thank you everyone for listening.