The End of the Western Era | David Murrin on the Market Timing Report

Summary

Andrew Pancholi – founder of The Market Timing Report and leading cycles analyst – sits down with renowned global forecaster …

Transcript

Hey everybody, good day. It is October the 15th, kind of a a time of the year that we often see a lot of volatility in the markets, and we're seeing a lot of global volatility in geopolitics as well. And today, for the first time on this channel, I've got my dear friend David Murrin, a close neighbor and somebody who we have a lot of very interesting conversations with. We think similarly and we think differently. So, I thought this would be a great time to invite David. David, welcome to the Market Timing Report channel, and I'm really excited to ask you a whole bunch of questions, and I know this could go on for a while. So, I think we'll end up splitting this into several different little videos that you can the folks can digest. But welcome. Where do we start, David? I mean, there's so much to talk about. I think over the course of this session, perhaps we can look about and look at the economic situation, the market situation, the geopolitical situation with all the major theaters. There's so much going on. I mean, okay, David, let's start off with something that everybody's interested in, which is uh the equity markets. Friday last week saw a very sharp sell-off, and then we've seen a bit of a recovery so far. Those timing points were given in the latest Market Timing Report. The markets are at all-time highs, and yet there is so much geopolitical uncertainty. I think, you know, put that together for us. Where do you see all this? Well, I'm in agreement with you that we're at a major turning point right now. And Friday was could well have been the high of the whole process. But how we got to this level um is really interesting. So, let's just look at the geopolitical position of America. It is in late-stage decline, according to my empire analysis. And during that period, you print money for a good reason, cuz you've lost real productivity. So, you compensate for the loss of productivity by financial leverage. And that process means you get less and less real productivity, but you end up with greater financialization. And the money goes somewhere. It's like hot air. It goes into the marketplace and it's like these ping pong balls that are kept up by hot air. And what we've seen is a continual process of the hot air entering into the marketplace. Now, it hasn't done so in a healthy way because the assets that it's invested in got narrower and narrower and narrower. So you know, the magnificent seven became the magnificent four that moved up and two don't. Like Tesla dropped out. So that process of narrowing, we saw that in cryptocurrencies where essentially the only one making a new high was Bitcoin because of the liquidity depth, but the other ones were actually making corrective highs. So I think Bitcoin and the equity market are products of a liquidity bubble. But that bubble feels like it's blown. And once it blows, everything's going to implode. You're seeing a personal debt bubble. You're seeing you know, an AI bubble. It's like bubbles in all of these processes. They reflect the last row of money printing to compensate for lack of real productivity in the American system. And the real arbiter to to what's happened there is if an America is an internal system, they can keep playing that game until you get really like super leverage and fractional growth. But there is an external agent here and that's China. And China has just proven by its rare earth strategy that China holds the choke collar to America. And that is a really big process. On Friday, the day after they announced these rare earth like processes which prevent heavy REs from going into the defense industry of America, China has the choke collar on America. Trump is not the big dog. Trump doesn't have control over this. Not he had control over a lot of things, but he thought he did. And when a system is challenged from outside like this, that is the catalyst that actually they can't fuel the bubble in the same way. So I think what happened last week was very critical as a turning point. Okay, so with regards to China then and um with obviously the the latest thing is the rare earth issue. Where are we with China and Taiwan in your opinion? So, it goes back to the Taiwanese Straits crisis of '96 where they created a covert strategy to challenge and dominate the world. They suckered us into building an manufacturing base for them which the liberals did and the and the people from Wall Street did because they were greedy and they made lots of money, but actually it kept inflation low cuz manufacturing was cheap and that meant they could print more money to compensate for less growth. So, it was a really vicious circle which ate the West and it fed China. Then they moved with Xi from 2012 into a more overt strategy. Then they accelerated the arms race. They nailed us, I would argue, over the pandemic cuz we used our money to keep our poor pandemic strategy and our economies that were locked down and we used debt to keep them alive instead of using it to reintegrate and and expand our defense. And since then they've been involved in a massive arms race which has gone unanswered in the West. And they have basically become very overtly the center of the axis of autocracy. They are now providing full-on lethal aid to the Chinese. They support the Iranians, the North Koreans, the Pakistanis. They flipped Indonesia. Everywhere you look their footprint is massively and quickly expanding. And I think all of this expansion, again, that's been ignored in the West, not talked about, not seen consistently, comes to a head at the parade that was only 2 weeks ago when Xi's parade said, "We're here." And just before the SCO members were basically suborned to be a second-tier group of the axis of autocracy. And now they're overtly making their challenge. It was not a coincidence that Putin rushed home and said, "We're at war with NATO." because basically he was encouraged by Xi and given support. It's not a coincidence that we've got this rare earth like leverage point just afterwards. So, I see them really ratcheting up the pressure and at any stage that pressure manifesting a kinetic attack on Taiwan. And so, every exercise we see of fleets and airplanes around Taiwan has to be in a in what I would call an amber alert cuz we can't tell the difference anymore whether it's an exercise or the preparations for a real event. And I think once that happens, very quickly the Chinese have a plan to go everywhere all the way down to Australia because they assume the Japanese come to support the Taiwanese, therefore the Americans, they're involved in a regional struggle, and the only way you win a regional struggle is by emulating what the Japanese didn't achieve, which is pushing America out all the way of New Zealand, Australia, all the way to Hawaii where the tyranny of distance keeps them at bay. And how soon do you think this is likely to unfold? I think we're just in the imminent time. We're in it. You can't really tell. We we know that China's economy is in big trouble, but that's not because they're weak as many people say. That's because they've been militarizing their economy and they have a demand gap, and they've taken the price for militarization to be the demand gap by not relying on exports in the same way. That's very similar to the Nazi four-year plan where they were going to go bust in 1940, so they went to war in 1939. And I think that going bust point is anywhere from now to a year or really having trouble. So, I really think that they are on the edge of that point. And the only thing that's delayed their actions is that over the past few months you hear about Xi getting rid of 1,400 PLA and officers. They were all senior officers, so there's been some rebellion or some lack of control that he's not been able to exert over the Chinese military structure, which may have slowed down his his plans for expansion and kinetically. So, how will this spill over into Europe? Well, it is already because what you're seeing is Ukraine is a NATO war, whether we say or not, it is. And [snorts] Russia is propped up and supported by China economically through the sale of its oil and gas and through the supply of its war material now, which has now become really quite direct, intelligence sharing. It's the same basically with Iran crossing over in terms of the linkages. They're all interconnected They are facing an alliance like the axis in the first and second world war, exactly the same thing. It's just people haven't cottoned on to the fact it has lethal intent. So, in Europe, we would definitely be disabling the economy of Russia faster without China. And now you've got Russia coming back and saying we're at war with NATO and increasing the shadow conflict and pushing our boundaries. But unfortunately, we are not in a position where we will defend every inch because we don't have the intention to defend every inch. So, our response is lamentable and only encourage further aggression. So, we're we're really a taker of this aggression and we still haven't put them at risk. So, I think the pattern of escalation is going to increase until there is an accident where literally the Russians go too far and we respond and then it escalates. I don't think Russia can beat NATO. I think on the contrary, if NATO went to war with it, its air power would dominate Russia and destroy its capabilities very quickly. But we don't have certain capabilities if the Chinese join the Russians. And I think that should be our biggest nightmare right now because if you look at the second world war and its specific context, it was not man intensive, it was machine and ship intensive when when America took the Asian basin. And in reverse, the Chinese won't use a lot of their manpower, which frees it up to migrate and join the Russians on the border. So, NATO shouldn't be comfortable in thinking it's going to be 5 years, it should be planning for war now because that's the risk scenario. And if I look at the market set up, I can see this in many ways. I can see the stock market is asleep in the US and it definitely is at a turning point that we've talked about. That turning point is very important because markets are quite good at preceding or anticipating events and so the framework of a down market is the early stages is an interesting one. And the bond market is probably the biggest economic bomb waiting to go off. After falling for 3 years, they've been going sideways for a year and that sideways is just a consolidation before a downward push. And Britain is right at the weak stage of that process and France with it. Although German yields are going to increase, the Germans have low debt to GDP ratios so they're not going to have a debt crisis, they're just going to have increased price of their debt. Whereas Britain really could have a debt crisis and America could have a debt crisis which is one of my biggest concerns is how do we sustain conflict with even deterrence in a in a super cold war against China when we don't have the backing of the debt markets to actually borrow and rearm. And how do you rearm when your rears are choked off? So we're in a slight checkmate in the west, we really are and so that's why this idea that you can create multiplicity of weapon systems that are cheaper is so critical because we can't do it using exquisite expensive systems because we just don't have enough money. So couple of things there with regards to Britain, I mean do you think Britain has enough military capability to participate in anything and and also I just want to add this point that you mentioned about a debt crisis for Britain that that was the latest topic I've been writing about. The 200-year cycle is coming in. 1825 really saw financial calamity in the United Kingdom starting really late October then November and accelerating into December and of course we've got the budget coming in. But let's let's not digress from what we're talking about now. Maybe we'll talk about that in a minute, David. Do you think Britain has the suitable arms capability together with the rest of the NATO countries? I mean, is NATO under-armed right now, or do you think NATO can definitely take on such a a confrontation? Well, NATO with America and without America are two different things. Yeah. Um even without America, we have great air power, especially with the F-35s and the capability to destroy Russian air defenses and therefore put Russia at risk and its facilities. But, are we where we need to be? For example, in Britain, we're not. Our army isn't is in a tragic state. And our navy is truly in a state of disrepair. Not only do we have only a few ships available at any one time, maybe two if you're lucky out of the Type 45 destroyers of six, of seven, you know, Type 23s built with thin steel. London is not very healthy. You're lucky to get two or three. You're lucky to get a submarine. You know, lucky to It's really alarming how our navy has just degenerated. The RFA that support those ships, and the crews oscillate between different ships cuz they don't pay their crews enough to have enough crews for all the ships. That's never happened in the history of the RFA. So, the the the air force has a a reasonable number of airplanes, but the number of serviceable planes that are on point is really small. And the army is small, too. So, no, we're not prepared. The MOD is not fit for purpose. It's a peacetime structure and moribund. The weapon systems, the key people that operate them, we should be really proud of. They're doing the best they can with really appalling circumstances having run our defenses down. And yes, the Conservatives are guilty because they failed to do anything about it, but Labour are truly guilty because they've been in office for a year when it's clearly we're at war with Russia, and they have just put the whole thing down the road by saying, "We'll increase defense spending in 2 years' time." As if our enemies will just wait for us to do it. And even then, it's a slow burn. So, there is total negligence with respect to defense in Britain more than any other country I can think of. The French, you know, the Germans are rearming. The frontier countries in the east are rearming. The Spanish are probably not on the side. But basically, Britain, it is disgusting. And everyone should be up in arms at how vulnerable we are. If we come under missile attack, and one of the problems is the sheer drones which are now being launched in their, you know, thousands a night and against Ukraine have produced a multiplicity of large-scale factories. And those drones could be retargeted against Britain, and we would really, really struggle to stop it. On top of the exquisite weapons that we launch from Russian submarines from an Atlantic that we don't protect anymore effectively with our navy, we have real vulnerabilities in Britain. And yet, Russia views us as the backbone of NATO having supported Ukraine in the initial stages and kept it alive. So, it's a bizarre circumstance where our leadership has failed to recognize the threat, the direct threat from Russia, and actually just ignored. And And what's crazy about it is I could create an alternative scenario where we didn't give things to Ukraine. We created lend-lease as America did to us in the Second World War. We used that lend-lease to refuel and restart our defense industry. And then we had real economy and real productivity, which is what everyone really wants. But they missed the opportunity without the foresight because somehow war and weapons are dirty even when you need them to defend yourself. So, we've been totally let down by the Labour Party in in an epic way. Although I really like John Healey as a as a head of the MOD for a Labour minister, he has still failed as certainly Starmer has. And for example, the National Security Advisor, Jonathan Powell, who is now caught up in this Chinese spy crisis. And the idea of having a diplomat as a national security advisor who specializes in peace and appeasement at the time when you need to have strong and kinetic capabilities as the first to be strong and defend yourself is truly another really a big a big wrong by the Labour Party. So whilst we're on this subject of the UK at the moment, what's your economic view and then we'll we'll go on reverting back to the Russian situation. >> terms of my sort of impulse structuring models that we restarted our cycle in the late 70s with Margaret Thatcher and >> tell you what. Let's let's explain to our viewers what that model is in a kind of a nutshell because this is a fascinating model. It's really worth understanding because you'll really understand what's going on in the world in all the different theaters and all the different nations as well. So yeah, give us the background. Tell us where we are then with the UK. So it's basically a five-stage model where if you imagine a Gaussian curve that goes up and round, the first stage is regionalization. And regionalization is usually driven by population expansion of some kind. And that forces the human system to self-organize. And it reaches a point where its leadership is what I would describe linear versus lateral. It thinks along railway tracks. It doesn't think in strategy. It just thinks about the life is a series of railway tracks. But that's not how we expand. Expansive systems are lateral. They break the railway tracks and spill out and go around the sides. And so what happens is you have a regional civil war in effect like the English Civil War or the American Civil War. And in that process, the lateralizing agent, the one that wants a newer version, wins. You think about the Cromwellians and the Roundheads. They were far more adaptable as Protestants than the Catholic world which is quite fixed. You think about the North, it wasn't about slavery. It was actually about an industrialized society with a freer society compared to a southern society that was an aristoc- an aristocracy with, you know, the landowners owning most of it. So there was much more to this. And the reason why they could think about releasing slaves is because they were an industrial power, and industry had replaced the human battery because all systems need but human or energy to create the anti-entropy to make them work. So, that war takes place, the lateralizing agent comes out of it. It's now militarized. They've got rid of the linear people cuz they didn't survive combat cuz it's highly adaptive. So, the society is lateralized and it expands and it runs down its resource chains. It takes over its neighbors and it it it expands like algorithmically. Cuz I take you, then I add you to my resources, I take my neighbor in half the time, then I add him to my resources, and you literally accelerate. And that's why they constantly catch people with their pants down. And a good example is how many people in 2002 thought China would equal America 20 years later. Not one you'd meet in public could envisage that. How could this emerging market country match the great superpower of the world? Because of its algorithmic expansion in effect. And and then it they expand and expand using military USPs with lateral thought processes, great generalship, reaches a point where it can't expand anymore, and there's a point of maturity. Maturity is about integration. And at the top of that curve, where this maturity takes place, you see the big institutions of empire appear. So, all the great buildings, if you go around London, they're the institutions of empire that enshrine the greatness of the system in architecture. And in that process, suddenly there are bigger systems and linear people are very good politicians cuz they're people-orientated, whereas natural people tend to dis- be mission-driven and less sensitive to people's sensitivities if they disagree. And so, politics overtakes this creative aspect, and at the top there's also a sort of civil war of some kind where, basically, the lateral agencies lose to the linear agencies and it becomes a more linear system, but it's huge. It's a dominant system, so it's a big, like, monster traveling in a certain direction. And it From that point onwards, it's lessening its adaptation capabilities. As it throws more and more natural people out and more and more linear people take control, it becomes more rigid and less adaptive. And that's great cuz if it's the bigger system around, it can still survive. But as it starts to move to overextension, the cracks start to appear. And then there's a thing like 9/11, which is really fundamentally a change agent, and accelerating it into the decline. And decline is usually governed by superlinearity, especially if you get money printing. Cuz what money printing does is it perpetuates bad habits. If you're a CEO of a company and its growth goes from, you know, 6% a year to 4% and you go, "Well, I'm Well, I knew I had leverage." You can make it look like it's 6% and then it happens again and you add leverage from four real and you add and you've gone to two, but you add even more leverage and you still look like you're producing 6% because you've used leverage. So, the same poor business practices or leadership practice persist and the whole system becomes unbelievably rigid. And the people who are screaming, "We've got a problem, Houston." are ejected and they're left in the fields looking at their navels. And that really sums up our Western world. As the adapters on the whole have been ejected from the system. And as a result of that, we are non-adaptive facing a very adaptive China. So, with having you ex- you having just explained the model, uh let's put the United States, Britain, and China on the various points of that model, uh and uh so people understand where we're at. So, moving up the curve and where we are, Britain is actually struggling out of its war regional- its war regionalization. The Brexit debate was our civil war. And this new cycle, and what's interesting about it, think about how people friends fell out. It was really emotive. It was really strong. And what was different about it was that it was constrained by the legal system, that we tried to do it legally within the parliamentary system. And so it was quite unique within human history because at that stage normally get your pike out and start shooting each other until one side wins, but we didn't. We tried to do it in a constrained way and it resulted in that moment where Boris, a very lateral Prime Minister, I would say without linear discipline, which is critical in a combination to really work, came to power and was ready just before the pandemic arrived. At that stage you could say that our war had been won. The lateral change agents were about to do their business, remove the blob, adapt government, and be a more expansive global Britain. But we were hit by a pandemic and I argue that pandemic was not an accident, but it was particularly damaging to Britain because it prevented those lateralizing energies from manifesting. And Truss was the accumulation of that. And when Liz Truss came along, she had the right ideas I would argue, but they were so poorly executed and she did it just at the time the dollar was at the peak that her enemies called the dollar peak and sterling crisis. And then lo and behold, luckily, thanks to the Bank of England who failed to manage risk in the gilt market, we had an overblow of gilts, but that was Truss's fault, too. And in a beautiful way, everyone that didn't want adaptive lateral strategies of wealth creation and smaller government that Truss represented could turn around and say, "You're an idiot." But she wasn't. Well, she was because she didn't execute it properly, but her ideas were correct. And um and then we swung into this linear Sunak paradigm. So in effect, they they swung back. And unlike a war where you kill your linear your linear people and they don't get up, the problem with a nice peaceful version of it is actually they just pick themselves up after hiding in the bushes and come out and just club the change, not respecting how the electorate basically demanded change. So um and that's one of the reasons why they're morally bankrupt, the Conservative Party, because they ignored what was is Um so that's that's a really important part. And then if you go and look at the other side of it, that puts Britain just after regionalization. And China is well and truly into expansion. It's basically, so I'm looking out the window, some very big waves coming onto my beach. I've never seen anything like it. >> [laughter] >> Uh, cuz sometimes you get small earthquakes around here and they produce teeny little tsunamis. So it looks a bit >> Well, actually, it's funny you should mention that. I think um, well, we won't say where, but uh, David's just uh, off the Mediterranean at the moment and there has been a bit of seismic activity there just based on cycles. So uh, um, let us know you're okay there. Yeah, just 1 second. That's genuinely a strange wave pattern as someone that's into wave patterns. Yes. Yeah, yeah. Anyway, so so that's that's Britain. And Britain is now, not only did we go to the back to a linear Sunak, we then, as we tried to basically move to the right of politics, which every country is doing. And because the best way I can describe the the I think there's a pulse that runs through societies. And the Kondratiev wave was the first inkling for me that it existed. 54 to 56 years. And you saw inflation spikes and you saw conflict correlations. But I've now framed that as actually some form of entropic mechanism that pulses through society. And we build human societies because they're anti-entropic. We live in an entropic entropy governed universe. And for us to survive, we've got to like push the bubble out. So we create social coherence, self-organization, and that's the driver behind how we build empires. It's anti-entropic behavior. And that anti-entropic behavior is predominantly driven by lateral thought processes because they're adaptable and you constantly have to keep pushing. You can never rest, otherwise the bubble suffocates you. And that's the image which since I've developed this theory 3 or 4 years ago, it's just changed my life. For example, we have to keep working because then if we stop and we have a whole day, we know the bubble's going to come down and collapse us. So, we get little pauses, but the truth is the bubble's always there. And that's the same for super systems and empires, it's always under the compression of an entropic bubble. So, uh and now we have the Labour Party, and Labour Party came as we know because the right was split. Yeah. They are not, and this is so interesting, they are not the right party for this time. Because as the entri- entropy increases into the peak of 2030, which is this next cycle peak of what I would call a 112-year war cycle, everything should swing to the right. Everything should be far more adaptive, nationalistic, and less big government, the very opposite of a neo-Marxist Labour Party. And they're in by accident. Every policy that they basically conduct, and you know, they look like they're the accidental idiots, but I don't think they are. I think they have a consistently destructive mindset, which is consistent with neo-Marxism. The idea that you destroy and bring level society down. Look at public schools. Well, you know, that was a great idea. Suddenly, you know, you lose an educational base, and actually cost more because those people come to your schools the state schools, and you've got to pay them, and then you don't get any spare teachers as a result. We all knew it was rubbish, but they sold it that way because they want to level society in their own minds. It's a very destructive mindset. And if you add that destruction onto increased entropy cycles, you're going to double the destruction because you're not in a space where the system can survive. So, I think they're very incompetent, and their policies mismatch where we are, and they will not make the end term. And I think the spying crisis is a really big deal. There's a There's for me, there's clear evidence that there are parts of the government that have been infiltrated by the Chinese. The Treasury, for example, you've had this orthodoxy to be pro-Chinese, and they constantly push back against the security concerns of the intelligence services. And it's just incredible how consistently they've done that. And then even the the conservative government they were doing have incredible power, Andy, and it's just scary. And then if you go and look at having a national security advisor who's basically a peacenik and a pizza as at a time when you need kinetic defenses who's got some very strange relationships with MSM, the Chinese security services close links entities. I think we've been infiltrated and we really have to consider it most seriously that this government is not acting as an agency for the British people but has a completely different agenda and is being pulled from Beijing. And I think we need some really very very incisive public inquiries that go right to the top of the government right now. So, that leads us through to where China is. China is well and truly in the same >> Before we get into China, within the within your model, one of the things we're saying is that you know, there seems to be a loss of freedom of speech here at the moment to some extent. But also I see in America Heggswith Trump are trying to control who says what coming out of the Pentagon. And suddenly a lot of press agencies are moving away. So, there's an argument that that contradicts the first amendment. So, just let's just have a comment on this idea of suppression of information through the press or suppression of the press and that's something that also happened back in 1933 as as well. And then let's go on to America in the model as well. So, um it's a great call Andy because it is bizarre that you've got a party on the left in the UK and a party on the right in the US and both are suppressing free speech. And America has the audacity to say you guys over there you're suppressing free speech and Trump's leading the charge. And it's just it it's like the world's gone mad. The best way to frame it though is is the we are in this 108 112 year entropic pulse which is a double K wave cycle of a bigger magnitude which dates back to the 1914 peak entry point of war which peaked in 1920. So these wars are triggered before the peak because entropy builds in the system. Imagine the pulse is building and building and it triggers conflict before the pulse actually reaches its peak and once it's triggered the that's it. Like it's like the starting gun on some long-distance race. You can't tell how long it takes for the new hegemon to rise. It can be you know for example in the Napoleonic Wars it was 1792 all the way through the 1815 with a couple of small pauses. In the first and second world war it really was 1914 to 1945 with a pause in between. We are in that pulse. We are in the starting gun from 2022 the invasion of Ukraine. But what that pulse does is it moves everything to the right and so it destroys individual freedoms and it basically moves it to a point of suppression. And that's why we're seeing this movement much as it's framed by labor's left values or Trump's right values it's a fundamental shift away from freedoms as we move into this conflict dynamic and dictatorship or benevolent dictatorship or centralized control. So it's entirely consistent with that pattern. Well, so um What what other countries do we want to put on to your model before we move ahead and discuss >> so so let's go let's go to where China is. We talked a bit about it. You know China China is is really quite exceptional and and you look at history you see countries and you know dictators or leaders come forwards and they say okay let's go to war and they plan and they and they look at the Nazis 33 to 39 six years from arrival to off we go elbows out. And uh you look at I would say probably the second Reich as in Germany it would they planned for a lot longer. They planned probably from 1906 so they had 10 years to plan and run up. When the Entente Cordiale really formed against them with Britain and France, that was essentially when people realized what they represented, the expansion of Bismarck's blood and blood and iron vision. It didn't have to be brain of Britain because of all countries you've ever seen, the Prussian state was born in iron and conflict and melded together by new military science that took the Austrians in 19 in 1866 and then clubbed the French in the 1870s Franco-Prussian War. So, it was there was a pause between that and essentially the the First World War, but their nature was military expansive. That Prussian concept goes back to Frederick the Great when they, you know, basically had an army that needed the state because he made it so big. And it was No, it was a was a European joke. So, in the process, the Chinese have done something completely different. They've been planning this since 1996. 30 years of planning to overcome American hegemony. And they have done so many things meticulously. Look at the rare earth process. They didn't just suddenly announce it. They had like a year where they were making certain processes where they First of all, tracked down the supply chains and who used it where. And then they showed they could do it and took it off again. So, they've been playing with this tool, and we should have known it was there. And our mitigation strategies, I think, have been incredibly slow in the West considering the severity of what this represents as a choke point. So, the Chinese are ready to go, and they are now in a state and then all empires are like this when they're about to expand. Imagine someone who's running, but they're just tripping over. So, as you you start to trip, you sort of Imagine an athlete, and then you try and keep running further forward or you face plant. That's where China is, and it will only have one solution, and that is some final kinetic war, which it seeks to pursue because, whether people like it or not, all systems believe and like to expand to the limits of their parameters, and the Chinese want to dominate the world, and they built a system to dominate the world. After all, they control a population of 1.2 billion. They have social engineering to control that population. They suppressed the Uyghurs, suppressed the Hong Kong population. They know how to take hostile populations, take out the individuals, and everyone else becomes the wheat in the wind. So, they are a very serious threat to us. And now, if you go to other side of the world Before we do that, just let me for the viewers that follow my work, which is the mathematical patterns, we are also in the 100-year cycle from the long march. So, this is a clear tipping point or turning point for China. Yeah, but back to you there, David. And you And what you say is is very interesting cuz you know, the cycles The cycles are behind China in the In if you play this empire cycle, it started with the Boxer Revolution. And then, they moved to their civil war. And the civil war was interesting cuz the nationalists, the KMT, or basically the communists, to the outside world, they're both hierarchical. So, it wasn't as if one represented a different organizational structure for the other, but they were different. They fought, the communists won. And for that piece after '49 until 1975, they fought every neighbor they could. So, the idea that they're a peaceful agency, I'm sorry, you just need to read your history books. And the only reason they stopped in '75 is the Vietnamese gave them a bloody nose, and the American power in the region started to become stronger as they started to win the Cold War. And then, they had a glass ceiling above their heads. So, um I I I think you're exactly right in these cycles and how they repeat. And I love your work, by the way. I've got to say, I'm a huge admirer of your work. I think your timing Your timing tools are brilliant in terms of, you know, what where things go and the timing of them. I've followed them for years. I am a huge fan, and anyone who doesn't follow your work, I think is really missing a point. Well, thank you. So, I mean, I mean, certainly here we're putting two and two together, and I think we're getting some tremendous synergy here. But I just wanted to put that point. But let's revert back I think you were just about to discuss China and the the uh the model of yours. Yeah. So so well I mean China is at that point of is about to make its next leap and it's a kinetic leap. You know, it's make no mistake about it that war that they've you know material war, cyber war, you name it. Every version of it they've conducted upon us and now they've got proxy war with the Russians at us and of course that war is allowing them like the Spanish war to learn massive lessons, massive lessons essentially from war and adapt. And when they take those lessons and adapt, they go to the dark fifth generation factories and produce tens of thousands of the new weapon system. Whereas in the West, we sort of look and then have a cup of coffee at breakfast, think about it. Couple of years later someone has a plan and four years later maybe it's out. And that adaptive cycle and that adaptive loop is going to kill us because as the Ukrainians have found, they're more innovative than the Russians. They produce new innovations which give them like tactical advantages in spaces in the battlefield, but they cannot do it on scale enough to prosecute victory. The Russians then adopt that strategy. They then produce it at scale and throw it back at the Ukrainians with terrible consequences. And I think that little paradigm in the Ukrainian front lines is the paradigm we face in the West at the moment. We're going to have the same experience. Great idea, works for a while, not decisive, oh it's coming over our heads. We're all ducking. Right. Right. So is this a good time now to talk about Russia and Ukraine or do you want to >> Yeah, absolutely. Well, as we we're moving through the arc. I think >> Yeah. I think um it's worth framing where Russia was when it started its war. And Russia, if you look at its pure empire dynamics, is super fraught as the South Africans would say. And it's because it just didn't have a population that had the worst demographics. So what was it in terms of organizational energy that allowed Russia to go to war. It's The simple answer is Russia is like demographically at the bottom of its cycle, unable to rejuvenate its population. But its actual energy came through a contractive cycle of being a commodity producer. So you think about when the USSR was most powerful, it was 75 into the peak of the commodity cycle. It was producing commodities, inflation didn't touch it in terms of how its economy worked, and the consumer society of the West was just really gulping every single moment with, you know, 16% CPI and 16% 10-year rates and 23% Fed funds. We barely survived even though America was actually at the peak of its empire power, that phase of inflation. So that's exactly what Putin's regime represents. He came into power at the bottom of the new cycle in 2002. And at that time, he really thought the only way Russia could survive was integrating into the EU. And much as he tried to do it, he was never allowed to do it. But between '02 and '08, the first surges of commodities happened, and wealth flowed into Russia. And so he realized he didn't need the EU anymore, which is why his first speeches of belligerence came about in 2007 and then increasing in 2008. And then 2010 there was a huge oil price spike, and in 2011 he must have felt a bit sick when it dipped and thought, "Have I been prematurely aggressive?" But it recovered, and more importantly it went sideways above 120, and that was in revenues flowed into the Russian coffers. And as they flowed in, the new armaments programs for these special weapons he created, designed to give him strategic parity, where he could in the West and lose confidence. And so we only had one chance, and that was '18 and '19 and '20, when oil prices were in the counter-inflationary B wave of the contractive cycle. Could we have gone to him and said, "Mr. Putin, like we would like you to join us because you can join the Chinese, but really if you win the world war with the Chinese, how long would you remain independent? If you come with us, we will surround the Chinese." And he would have been vulnerable because of revenue flows. But if we didn't do it before the price dipped to negative oil, after that he was untouchable. And that was when we had to brace for conflict. And it was that understanding of the psychology of revenues, the contractive cycle, its impact on Russia, and Putin's own cycle that was, you know, we both predicted the invasion very accurately. But it was for me, that was the formative structure that created the groundwork that war was inevitable because he was in a particular mindset and feeling very lucid. Yeah, and just to follow on that note, just again for the cycles people, the 2010 oil high was a direct result of the 90-year cycle from the 1920 commodities boom and oil oil really spiked there. And the 2008 one was a direct relationship to the 144-year cycle going back to the Civil War and the commodity boom there. So, just just throwing that in again for for my people there. But coming back then, so do you think this war in Ukraine really it's in in NATO is interested to keep it going to keep Putin distracted, do you think? Or where do you see this ending up? You know, that's to stop him opening up further aggression, say towards the Scandinavian countries where we are seeing a lot of troops and strange drone activity and so on. So, let's let's look at Putin's mindset. Putin didn't go into Ukraine thinking I just want Ukraine. He wants the whole of the empire of the USSR back. I think we can accept that. We can see it because of his military strategy. He's now he has a wartime economy and there's no way you can get a wartime economy to be a peacetime economy because everyone's enfranchised in the weapons of war. So, the system is now orientated to long-term war, which is matching his goals. So, we face in NATO not just, you know, a threat over Ukraine. If Ukraine falls, he'll just come forwards and it'll just we're in trouble. Our responses have been slow in NATO, weak, if I might say so. And it only recently with this escalation, when he came back from the parade in Beijing and he said I'm at war with NATO, you know, we're at war and then these incursions started. The very lamentable response to these incursions and that's partly because the air defense network in the east of Europe is not coordinated. You'd think it's coordinated, each country has their own individual rules of engagement, their own crossovers instead of saying one NATO front, one engagement, you come near me, we'll shoot you down. And I actually think he provided an opportunity we missed. And we should have basically said we're going to put an air exclusion zone over half of Ukraine to the Dnieper River. That exclusion zone means nothing is going to get through. So, that's great for Ukraine cuz all their war industry will be safe, their people will be safe behind the line and then you say to Putin, every time you do something that's aggressive, we'll go 100 miles east and we'll only stop when we reach the original borders before 2022. At which stage the front lines will be under our umbrella and you will not be able to survive. And I would do that and it's within the technology of our western air power because fifth generation jets wipe out any air defense system as we've seen with the IDF cuz you can't see them before the anti-radiation missiles are launched and it's the greatest strength that NATO has, our air power. And that's what we have to do to force him back. I think the issue of Tomahawks where, you know, Trump is trying to pressurize him with Tomahawks is actually more dangerous than having an air exclusion zone. Cuz an air exclusion zone is passive. It sits there and says you can't come into it but we're not doing you harm. Tomahawks have a psychological impact on Russians which is really serious. If you've been Tomahawked and you're Russian, you are at war with America. So, the escalatory process is far greater and especially when you realize that all the targeting data is coming from America, too. I mean, we've been giving NATO targeting data into Ukraine since the the world war. The Chinese give their targeting data to the Russians. It is a proper world war in a microcosm. There is no proxy dynamic about it, apart from it's contained to a certain space. And even that containment is gray with the shadow war, which has gone after subsea cables, it set fire to the barrel furnace submarine factory, our power stations, it's thrown people off balconies. I mean, he's been enacting a war that in the Cold War we would have all said, "We're at war with you. You can't do that." And because the West is so weak, it just constantly finds excuses not to push back, scared of basically escalation. But in fact, escalation is inevitable unless you do push back, like a bully on a playground. Wow. So, um let's pivot the conversation with this is a tremendous background to this idea of BRICS. Um first of all, the economic uh synergies that may or may not exist with BRICS, the threat to the dollar, and um where you see this all heading. And you know, a lot of people have jumped Well, a lot of countries have joined BRICS in the last uh 2 3 years, you know, it's expanding rapidly. What's going on here in your opinion, David? Well, look, I think we think about BRICS as the emerging market world. Yeah. >> And China is no longer in the emerging market, it's emerged. And In- India is emerging. So, countries are coming out of the old emerging market paradigm. And what is interesting is that um first of all, we've got to look at what the empire of America was. Cuz I say was because it isn't the empire of America as it was, it's in terminal decline. It involved a massive envelope of defense. And it incorporated alliance structures in the Pacific and Europe to strengthen that envelope. And trust and belief between alliance members and towards America as the defender of last resort was integral to that process. Within that envelope, there is a dollarization envelope where the dollar was used within people within the envelope and outside it, but especially within it. And therefore, massive dollarization could be returned with all its advantages to the core of the empire America, which allowed them to have massive debt and do things with their economy no one else could do. Now, what has Trump done when he's come The first thing he did was destroy the fabric of that alliance. He destroyed that I'm going to be there for you moment, and he destroyed the fracturing the joints between the alliances. So, this whole alliance structure lurched inwards and effectively shrunk metaphorically, and with it the dollar footprint. Now, what's really clear about all like if you get a young business has big margins and it matures its margins slow down and it's bigger in scale, but when you get a really big old business has massive scale and piss poor margins. So, essentially the moment you lose a bit of margin, you're in the negative. And that's how you got to think of a mature empire when it's when it's dollarized footprint moves a fraction inwards and the dome decreases in volume, may look like a little bit, but on the margin it destroys any margin success. And that's what Trump did. Instead of making America great, his first points were to make it weaker because he never understood what the basic structure and fabric of the American American empire was or is. So, the dollar is definitely shrinking and no, because of the amount of debt, it's not a good asset to have. But where do you go? If you go to Japan, basically you're on the borders of the next war and Japan are very close to China, so that has some problems. If you go to Europe, up until now, Europe has been a very moribund area. But it is changing and I think that change has come by the fact it's bonded by a common enemy called Russia, and Germany at the middle of it has got a leader for the first time that's not under Russian control. Because if you go back to Schroder, Merkel, Olaf, and then you go to this current leader, he is definitely not under Putin's control as they drive towards rearmament and use the 64% debt to GDP ratio to not only drive Germany, but drive the whole of Europe. So, there's a reformation going on and it's about the energy of rearmament. So, all of those things coming together, the dollar's in decline, so what about BRICS? Well, one of the things that we've seen is the flows of capital to the emerging market world out of American dollars have gradually been drying up. And for a long time, China was far more in willing to fill that gap. It's not doing it now, and I could draw you a map. So, for example, its map now is stops because it thinks, "When I go to war, I will not control the seas outside the third island chain, so I cannot benefit from my investments, which is why investments in Africa have really tailed off with the Chinese." And what they're left with is all sorts of insurgent agencies, which I think are less are there to deny Africa to the West. So, you see there's an awful lot of armed elements that shouldn't be there. There's 4 million Chinese of military age. There's you know, like terrorist organizations being trained in the Cape Flats in Cape Town. All over the place Africa, see, I can see these denial cells. So, that the Chinese strategy, which is now changing again the BRICS dynamic, is one of what does my war look like in the early stages? If I'm successful, I eject America from the third island chain, but I don't have enough ships to go to the blue oceans. So, Africa's a non a non-accessible resource basin, and so is Latin America, which basically I'm just going to make so difficult to manage that I'll make it contested and therefore my enemies can't get the resources. But, basically, the other part of it is that when you're a small power, and if you just go and look at Indonesia is a really good example, Indonesia has switched to the shadow of the Chinese power base. It's strategic for them because they don't have to don't have to fight over it. It's highly populated populous so that would be troublesome which leaves just the Philippines, Papua New Guinea, and Japan and South Korea. So it there's less countries to flip and even recently China's been operating with Malaysia. So the the Malacca Straits are available. So as I started to talk about this you can see going around the place you can see what's happening. You can see that countries that are in their future economic zone of influence are flipping towards China and military aid follows or military neutrality is part of the condition. And areas further out may think for example in Latin America like Brazil, you know, they've got their elbows out. But the truth is they're in the American sphere of influence. So when the whole conflict happens it'll just snap and it'll split into proper global bifurcation. And I think the rare earth thing on Friday was an acceleration of the bifurcation cuz Trump will keep his trade tariffs up because it's all he can do. He's impotent. And that will only increase as this tension, you know, runs along its course. Well, I'll just come in there again from a cycles viewpoint. If we, you know, the 90-year cycle is dominant in many ways. Half of that is 45 years multiplied by that by three and that takes us back to the 1890s where America had substantial tariffs and in fact all it did was really create massive inflation and a lack of product availability. Prices went up sixfold and in fact that administration lost the midterms and also spawned the Populist Party cuz the the farmers had had enough of it all. So it was very much an own goal back then and I'm just wondering what your views are where where America's going to end up with all these tariffs. Well, I think you've described it really well and it's a good example of how all of us need to be respectful of the lessons of history. Is it it's very clear that tariffs are highly inflationary and the people that pay the price are the population. So, you know, when I don't understand how Trump can think it's beautiful apart from money flows into the US Treasury, which prevents the bond crisis because it looks like the revenues are increased. That's the only thing I can think of, you know, for America that's a good part of it. But the the substitution and adaptation through industry won't take place for 10 years. So, this inflation level will stay with us, and we're already in a phase when we can expect super commodity inflation coming up down the track, and acceleration of, you know, underlying inflation, and it will be a burden that just will not, you know, America can't tolerate. Which is why he's trying to get control of the National Guard and the military because he, you know, he wants to ensure he is King Trump. And he realizes there will be a lot of bumps along the way because anyone that studied history book understands inflation comes with tariffs, especially as extreme as these. So, he's not stupid in that respect, and I think his grab for the military is because he does want them to be loyal not to the Constitution but himself. He is seeking dictatorship. And it was one of the warnings I made 2 years ago when Trump was on the horizon and said this time around he will create a dictatorship. And I created a model which, you know, I know it sounds unpalatable at the time, but actually they I think Project 2025 is modeled off how the Nazi Party took over control of Germany. And you only have to look at the historical parallel parallels to really see each step of 2025's project in the states matches what the Nazi Party have done. Even the types of people that actually he had them brought towards him, you know, somewhat extreme characters who were failed in in other walks of life. They weren't great successes. Well, you can see that parallel in the many many of the MAGA members with the exception of Marco Rubio, who I think is really really great, actually. I think he's a super super member of the of the leadership. So, I mean, yeah, I mean, the 90-year overlay is something I look at continuously. Um so, it's interesting you point that out there. Where Where do you say this all heading then? I mean, do you think do you think the Trump is going to remain in power? I was talking to you another expert whom I was with a couple of weeks ago who is convinced that Trump is going to bring in military law effectively to override the Constitution and retain continuous power. But having said that, his age is also I would agree with him. I mean, it's very clear the project 2025 is the overturning of the American Republic. And you know, just a little fact that he wants to be on a dollar coin next year. If you look at the history of you know, of coins with leaders and the migration of in effect republics to dictatorships or empires, it's really very highly correlated. And now you're talking about Trump on a dollar coin, not a coincidence. I think that the battle in the courts between the states over the National Guard is really massive. And there's only two bastions that that preserve the Constitution at the moment. There's the Supreme Court, which is of questionable independence, and we'll see on November the 4th how they fare over the tariff judgment. And then there's the military. And interesting enough, when Hitler went to go and persuade the Prussian-dominated German military, he approached it in a very similar way, slowly eroding them, slowly moving through them. And what's most alarming is the way that anyone First of all, the Trump took the intelligence agencies, highly capable agencies, where individuals at the top of the tree were removed just because they might not have been loyal to Trump versus the Constitution. And at the same time, replacing with very incompetent people. So the intelligence that's coming out of the system is degraded. It's happening in the military, and you can see that constant process of hex of changing people. And the 800 strong meeting was was really part of that process. Its singular message was you come when I tell you. Like you should listen to me. And they met him and they stonewalled him. So, the implication is there is going to be a battle. There's going to be a battle between the military and Trump over the Constitution. Now, the only question is, is does that battle take place? And then as it's taking place, the Chinese take advantage of it? Or do the Chinese strike first and therefore there's unity in America to face a common enemy? Those are the only parameters that I think are variable. But, yes, conflict for America, whether internal, external, or combination is now inevitable in my opinion. Yeah, that's just fascinating. Um Wow. Uh so, we've talked to I'm just looking at my list of questions here. >> you What do you What do you think about this particular topic? >> What do I What do I think? In terms of cycles, this this is this is your show, David. We're we're interviewing you, but I >> no, this is this is this is this is us speaking. So, yeah. So, here's here's what I think then if you're asking. There's a 250-year cycle in empires. And um basically, if we take 1776, add 250 years, that takes us to 2026. It's death and rebirth or all change. So, um my first view was that America has been in the process of change. Now, if you've got a 250-year cycle, it you know, it plays out over 20 years, 10 years either side. And what did we see? You know, we saw this new presidency in 2016. And pretty much 10 years exactly, right? We saw the world change. It went from globalization to polarization. We saw Brexit. Uh we saw the arrival of a different type of presidency in the in the form of uh Donald Trump. And we saw this complete change. And that also tied in with the modern-day revolution cycles that I talk about. So, that time period there took us back to the rise of Hitler in 1932. That took us back to the previous revolution uh or the previous cycle took us back to 1848 with the uh arrival of Karl Marx, the Communist Manifesto, uh and um workers rise up, break free of your chains. And then the previous repetition there exactly to the Stamp Act. So, it's revolutions combining with mass change. And if you take this 250 years and double it up, that takes us to the Reformation where the Catholic Church is challenged as well. So, all this is coming into play. But if we're saying what exactly do we see happening next with America, well, it's in a a point of tremendous change. The American Revolution and everything that it stood for is about to be undone or changed in some sort of huge way. And the other side of this that got uh I was thinking more recently about was there were two parts. There's there have to be two parties to all these events. So, Great Britain or you know, the United Great Britain from 1707, United Kingdom from 1801 is also on the receiving end of this 250 year cycle with regards to America and America's dominance. So, it's all change and um uh you know, let's face it, you and I are of the generation where we we've had a pretty good 30, 40 years, generally speaking. But I I don't feel so uh optimistic for our kids. Uh really is is how I'd see this. And then what I would also say is that the 100 year cycle from the 1929 crash plays out in 2029. The 90 year cycle from the outbreak of 1939 and the the Second World War plays out in 1920 uh 2029. So, we're only four four years away from that point. Uh I really think that everything is destabilizing. I think the equity markets could head up higher if we're going to look at the 90 year pattern of uh sorry, the 100 year pattern there of what happened in the equity markets. Um but it's it's not very stable at the moment, that's all. And I I think that we could really see uh civil war in a different form that we've seen civil wars in previously. But you know, that it's it's civil war between belief systems. These civil war cycles for America I've been talking about for a while and and they they've already they're already coming in. They are going to peak. There's going to be a secondary peak in Q3, I think Q4 of 2027. So, that blue versus red, but there there's a lot of water to go under the bridge uh before that point in time. Um but yeah, let's get back to you. You know, that that I mean that's what I think. Um so >> then with then we are very similar minds about what we see. Very similar. >> Yeah. And the profoundness of this change and I think you touched on something that's really It's certainly driven me is that when I started to put all this together back in 2002, speak to people and um I my second and third child arrived, I felt a real drive that this knowledge I had uncovered and its conclusion into World War III, that's 20 years ago, had to be explained to people to avoid it. So, I thought that by standing up and speaking and writing Breaking the Code of History and other books that I've written about this onset of conflict, by the time we got to the point we would be in the state of deterrence that we saw in the Cold War. And that maybe we might head it off at the pass and we would see our enemy and we would be doing something about it. In my wildest dreams, I could not have imagined what I now describe as the extinction dissonance, this denial of our condition across our society. And I think there are three elements to extinction dissonance. There's one that you saw we saw in evidence in 1914, the collective denial that World War could ever happen because of economic entwinement with Germany, who was our closest ally in Europe up until that moment. And the royal families were entwined. So, there was a denial about the possibility that could happen. But we have two other elements and we have because we definitely have hegemonic denial in the process today. But the other elements are by basically putting all this money in and creating linearity, the warning dogs, the sheep dogs of our society have been ejected. So, there are no sheep dogs barking and saying, "Look what's happening." because they're all the sheep eating the grass and they're leading the show. And the other bit for everyone that's also in the flock is the dopamine that's related to higher stock markets means your cortisol responses don't exist and therefore you can't see the dangers. So, those three elements don't just add up. They're not additive. I think they multiply into what I call extinction dissonance because we are not prepared for what's coming. We are truly If I didn't live in this society and didn't, you know, love it, essentially I would look for all and say, "That is a soft society that's hubristic and blind and it deserves to be eradicated and wiped out because it just wasn't sharp enough." And, you know, in a Darwinistic world where the strong survive and the weak don't, we weren't strong enough. And my concern for all of our children has really driven me to make this public. And I think we as a generation and the generation below us have totally failed and left them with a nightmare. And we need to be really cognizant of our responsibility. And in that regard, I just don't blame the combatants or the aggressors in the world we see. I actually blame the people that didn't respond because they refused to respond, didn't have the courage to look, to certain they were sheep eating the grass with the wolves and the sheep dogs one or two barking, but they thought, "Just one more blade of grass, please." And I think that segment of our society which is more more numerous They've most people got are not most a lot of people have the attention span of a flea right now. You know, that's it. It's terrible, but in the macro world one of the things I've you know, observed and it ties in with these cycles is that and you know, I I study a lot of the work of W. D. Gann. He writes about this as well and he talks about after three generations, you know, basically you don't see big wars that close together. I mean, okay, you could argue that the the First World War and the second world war were fairly close together, but the whole idea is that as you leave a big war like the Second World War, there will be people and politicians and statesmen who will tell you, "We are not going to war. It is pretty horrible to be I mean, I even when I was at university, the mother of a friend of mine, she was always saying, "We had to go and hide under the kitchen table. I hope the bombs wouldn't fall on our house or nearby." Uh so, they had that memory, and it was those people that would make sure that you didn't go to another war. But, after three generations, the remaining people and we were up at I was up and a friend were up to visit the Chelsea pensioners, the the very last few people, you know, who lived through the Second World War. Nobody's listening to them. They've never Nobody alive has had to live through a war, and therefore it's very easy, you know, Gann calls the the character the young buck will take you to war uh but based on ego. So, look at you know, I'm just relaying ideas and thoughts here, but we are at that point where we are more than three generations on from the last big war that say that saw things hitting us in Britain, for example. Uh America historically has been lucky in as I say lucky in as much as it's never had to endure war on its own ground, and therefore it's with with two exceptions, uh Pearl Harbor, which was the 7th of December, 1941, and then 9/11, which was 60 years and 3 months. So, within the the 60-year cycle playing out perfectly, you know, with a tolerance of 3 months. Well, that's nothing. You know, 60 years there uh on the um on September the 11th, 2001. The only time America's been attacked on its own soil. So, we're seeing this. Uh if you've never been attacked on your own so soil, it's great to say, "Yeah, let's go and nuke them, you know, let's do this, let's do that." And And and that's the this this isolate this sort of splendid isolation of America, which is, you know, we are impervious with two oceans on either side. The thing they don't realize is with long-range rocketry, that's all changed and the Chinese are planning to build hypersonic weapons on DF-41s which will destroy American carriers on the West Coast naval ports before they even leave. So, the war is coming to them for the first time and those oceans are not able to protect them. So, I think you're really right and in fact, as you talk about that, I thought about a really good example of you know, the First World War, what happened was Germany didn't really appreciate it that it had lost. I know that sounds crazy, but you know, the generals blamed the politicians and when the first last shot was fired on the 11th of the 11th of the 11th, that was to the generals of the time a pause before they could start stop again. And you know, it's a little-known fact, the Royal Navy put a squeeze on on the German economy for 9 months and something like 450,000 No, it's a bigger number. 450,000 Germans starved in that period before they agreed to peace. But they never had a proper crushed surrendered moment where and then they had to accept an occupying force and then of course, like they rose up again in '32 under a different leadership. Now, here's an interesting question. Why did Germany behave like that? And my argument using the Empire cycles is it was the youngest empire basically or empire system or cycle system in Europe cuz it came into being you could argue after then it started with the Federation of the Prussian states and they consolidated in 1866 and then it came into life in in 1870. So, it was young and had massive demographics. I mean, it had more 8 million more people in '39 than it did at the at the end of 1918 and France still only replaced its population and Britain was at 1 or 2 million more. So, it had this demographic energy and then the energy had to be manifested. So, the old regime had failed to expand the system. So, the Nazi regime came in, which was a very lateral system from the lower ranks, challenged the old Prussian system, and off they went. So, the simple lesson is expanding systems find ways to expand. So, if you look at Hamas and you think, is it an expanding system or not? It is, because it's linked to the Islamic world, which also has its own expansion coefficients. So, that means it you really do have to deal them like ISIS a death before it disappears because it will research and it will minutely transmit everywhere and metastasize. So, that was the First World War. We wasn't properly wasn't completed in my The armistice prevented the the collapse of Germany. And if Germany had basically been invaded, they never would have remembered that. It would be like Japan. It would have been a completely different route afterwards. So, the trouble is with wars and when they start, you have to make sure the aggressor can never get up again. It sounds like a It's the same to you You can never let that person come back to you because they will. And you might not be in a state to protect yourself the second time around. Yeah. Um What what can we say? So, you know, see I've written down here coping with the Cassandra complex cuz >> [laughter] >> let's face it, it hasn't been the most cheery conversation, although it's a very uh reality sort of grounding one. How do you personally cope with all these sort of these uh dire warnings that are unfolding because the cycles are you know, we we have to look back and say, actually we've had some absolutely golden decades and glorious years in the West. So, you know, the worm is turning as they say. But how do you personally cope with all this stuff when you see it? Well, I know this may, you know, sound humorous to those that haven't heard me before, but I'm fundamentally a very optimistic person. Right. Um so, and I I am really I So, my part of optimism is understand the problem, solve the problem. So, the first part of this problem is everyone's asleep as conflict is coming towards us. And our chances of survival when we're asleep are zero. So, basically, my idea of this communication is, although it comes as a shock and people sometimes don't want to listen or say no, you're mad, but actually the evidence proves I'm not mad because we've been predicting it and the trailers worked incredibly precisely over 25 years. So, our track record is not one you want to easily refute or go against. But more importantly, my vision was mobilization, strength, and deterrence. And that was always my mission. And the first part was imparting a reality, and the second part of my work is my mitigating strategies, which are all over my work. And what do we do? How do we do it? How do we count with our opposition? You know, what do we do that can bring about the right outcome for us with the minimal casualties? All of those mindsets are actually part of Global Forecaster. So, I don't see it as just a communication of bad news and good luck. Over to you, buddy. We're all screwed. I see it as wake up and we can do something about it. Yeah. Um now, how does that feel personally? It's a very insightful comment. Um I'm very lucky because I have a fantastic partner who's actually full of life and she drags me into the present. And, you know, and says, "Hey, we'll have fun here. We have amazing fun." So, I have a personal discipline of being in the present, which is actually a real skill set when your when your role is to look at the future because you have to transport your consciousness to a different place to do that and level of awareness. And if you only live in that space as someone that has the ability to see forwards, you'll waste your life because the your life is in the present. So, understanding how to move, not just intellectually but experientially, between those phases has been a, you know, important part of my journey to make it sustainable. And And the other thing is I do truly believe in the individual spirit. I don't think that collective organization, the Communist parties of the world or dictators of the world are the are the best manifestation of humanity. I think individual expansion and potential are remarkable in our race. And that you know, it only might take one or two individuals who break out further than others to drag the whole of their democracy forwards. And it's that that we that we need to support and understand. And so, I see hope for the system. Now, the problem is when you look at democracy, we must remember that democracy is in its weakest form after a 500-year empire called the super Western Christian empire, which produced in a Catholic empires and then Protestant empires, then maritime hegemonies and democracy as a result of maritime hegemonies and and that process of the sea naturalizing through societies and self-responsibility. We are looking at democracy in its weakest form, but actually, it can be reborn. But to be reborn, it's going to have to go through the fire. And the question is how that fire plays out. Trump is one element of those flames as to whether America can find its voice democratically. But if you were to go and look at who wins the Third World War, I still favor individuality uh that comes from the West. But we do have to wake up to scale and the problems. And we all of us actually face the threat from AI because I think the Terminator scenario is a very very real threat that through this arms race over the Third World War, we essentially create an agency like an AI into robotic killing systems that can turn on us. And I think that that may be the destiny of many sentient races around the universe because they all get to the same stage at the same time. And strangely enough, it'll be arms races that empowers those Terminator systems because we give them the weapons with shorter kill chain cycles. So, I think we have a collective enemy that's not just human. I I it's our own aspiration to create another life form that may not and will not see life the way we do because we live through we we live through creative destruction. We destroy things and we create. And one of my most recent theories which explains everything, a bit like unified field theory, is you know, I kept thinking why do we organize? Why do we see these patterns? What exactly is the prime driver? And I touched on it earlier, it's this idea of entropy and anti-entropic behavior. Yet, what's really interesting is as if the world and universe wasn't entropic enough, humans have this thing that we do which is create super entropy through conflicts which creates the response of super adaptation and anti-entropy which then propels the productiveness of our social systems for the next 70 to 80 years before they become linear, sequestrant, and the cycle starts again. So, we are using wars to evolve. And the biggest message I have of all of my work is that until we understand how we use wars to evolve through naturalization and anti-entropy, much as we say we don't like them, much as we say we don't want them, we are basically going to keep having them in our society until we destroy ourselves. Wow. Okay. So, actually, a couple of things you mentioned there, AI. So, you think that could could all you know, be part of the end of it all or what do you think? >> I think it's a very it's a very real issue right now. When we we only see certain applications, but it's very clear that AIs have been used in both sides to gather targeting data and to control weapon systems. And you can say there's a man in the loop, but the person that takes the man out of the loop will have a faster kill chain cycle than the one that keeps it in. And as you're in a war and an arms race, one side will do it over the other. In which case, the machine has uninterrupted interruptions between its consciousness and the activation of weapons. And that that's exactly the story of Terminator. And Skynet. Wow, that's a very sobering thought. So, uh uh Um is there anything else you'd like to add? Um here. There is actually one thing. Sorry, I it's kind of that would be kind of a nice Well, I say not a nice but a point to to stop here. But, there are a couple of other things here. Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies. What's your view on those? So, um I don't think cryptocurrencies are a safe haven. I think that they are representation of the excess liquidity through money printing. So, we've seen in the US stock market the the narrowness or the the breadth of the market has become narrower and narrower and narrower and to a few stocks which epitomize the bull market. And strangely enough, if you just took the time to look at cryptos, you'd see exactly the same thing. And you know, the and the Fang in the US is actually paralleled by Bitcoin with greater liquidity and essentially that I think has peaked. And so, you know, we forget Ethereum. We forget like, you know, you you name them. Litecoin. If you look at them, they are just in massive declines and corrective cycles. And yet, people tell bull stories and you want to the one thing which is just just made a high at 125,000 and has dropped. And I think crypto is going to have There was an awful lot of press over dropping basically from 125 to 105 or whatever in a short period of time with some manipulation. Well, welcome to the crypto world. You're going to go from that number and you get cleaned out because it's too full of people and it's not a safe haven and it's not a new world. I think gold is a safe haven, but gold has surged. And gold has a quality and silver which is basically it preempts entropy. So, it is not in coincident with entropy. It's a warning of oncoming entropy. So, one of the things I did last quarter was warn people that gold and silver really going to super rally, but it would do so in the quiet summer. And essentially, it would do so and then afterwards, we would see a more entropic like leap forwards and we've seen that with escalation in Ukraine to all-out clear warfare. We've seen that with a the rare earth like trade competition. So, that's the entropy that matches the advanced movement of gold and silver. And funny enough, although you think the world is getting worse, you may be disappointed because in fact that is where you may get some profit taking and corrections and I think precious metals are actually quite linked to stock markets because when stock markets go down historically, gold and silver have not done very well. So, just watch out for the corrections with a coincidence or two. Okay, so let's wrap this up then. So, the question I get asked all the time is where do you put your assets? Where do you think the safest places are and what are the best opportunities? So, let me ask you that one. Well, it's been in precious metals for the past 3 years and especially the miners. Okay. Which have been huge and massive returns. Um I think moving from a peacetime economy to a wartime economy mindset is really the the the future for investors. And understanding exactly what that means and no handbags and no frilly skirt manufacturers, but things that make propellers for drones, you know, things that are part of a war machine will have value. So, I would encourage people to shift to that paradigm and start thinking about a different world. There are lots of studies on my work at different levels. I did this very extensive study on the first and second World War, how asset classes behaved, where you needed to be and I linked them into these contractive cycles and these war cycles because actually they create different outcomes. So, I have a very, very um intricate plan as to how to manage through this, but they they are two parts of it that I've shared. Fantastic. And then uh if people want to access your information, obviously Breaking the Code of History is a fantastic book. I'm a big fan of it. Uh what else do you have and where can they find you? So, come to globalforecaster, www.globalforecaster or to davidmurrin.co.uk. And on it you can do a number of things. You can sign up for Marinations, which are the geopolitical part. Uh they're a pittance. They're like 50 50 pounds a month. But essentially for that you're getting investment grade analysis of the geopolitical world. And you know, they it may not say to you buy something, which it doesn't do in that you can you can understand how the world works in a completely different way. And the things we've talked about today are covered in extensive detail and they're all accessible at that level. There there's a higher level where we do prediction strings, which are basically day-to-day updates with information there for a professional people and you don't need a newspaper or any other form of news cuz we'll tell you the ones that are the most important and things you don't see in the Western world which link to these scenarios moving forwards. And then we have a whole inside out hedge fund where people can come and be if you're a professional investor, you can get the CIO's view, which is essentially me as a CIO advising that investor group. And then we have a an action strategy with real-time buys and sells which are tracked. And then we have a consultancy level where we sit alongside people. So it's really for the top end of the of of the investment world. And those people that come as high net worth individuals need to go through a screening to work with me. But happy to do that if you fit into that category. And happy to basically share the ideas. I I really like you come from a place of wanting to share these ideas, you know, as much as being the person that holds the information and squeezes money out in return. I want transformation in my contact, which is why I built global forecaster rather than set up a second hedge fund. It's cuz I want to to explain what was happening cuz otherwise our children don't have a chance ultimately. Brilliant. Well, thank you very much. It's been an incredibly insightful and enlightening session. Uh um thank you I just can't thank you enough. I look forward to the next time. So thanks, David. Andy, and I can't thank you. I love your work and you know, proper on people understand Gann's work was really one of the most insightful investors in history are rare. And so, you know, I love our conversations cuz I didn't get to ask you as many questions as I should do. Perhaps we should do one where I'll interview you and then we'll do it the other way around. >> to. I'd love to. That'd be great. That'd be fantastic. >> deserve an equal airing, I think, cuz as a great friend of mine and a great practitioner. Uh thanks very much.