Financial Crash Expert: In 3 months We’ll Enter A Famine! If Iran Doesn’t Surrender It's The End!

Transcript from https://podmenti.com/t/cc296542f16cac6a

So there are five scenarios in which the war could end. Because Trump is stupid enough to take on what Israel wanted to do, which was destroy Iran, but they've bitten off far more than they can show. So scenario one is Iran destroys the Gulf Power infrastructure. I think that's highly likely. And if that happens, then Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Dubai they all become uninhabitable.
In scenario two, Iran disables Israel's nukes. I hope that happens, but there's this one. And it scares the shit out of me.
Professor Steve, I have so many questions. What is going on? So this war is threatening everybody on the planet. And what Trump is doing at the moment is a pump and dump scheme. He's trying to drive up the oil price and exporting it for his friends and for his own wealth in the process. So people are focusing upon the price of this. But the really important point is this. This is straight up on us. So oil, fertilizer, helium.
all have to pass through the Strait of Humbles. And Iran have blocked that gap. So they can say you do or do not pass depending on what your country's attitude towards our country. So that's quite terrifying. Because twenty to thirty percent of our fertilizer comes through this point. But if this is not available the globe has a famine. Do you think he will send ground sheep in? Yes I do.
But I'd hate to be one of those troops because it's a suicide mission. They've got underground military units of weapons and troops, but we have no idea of the scale. Trump keeps saying that the war has been won.
Yeah. What's going on there in your view? I think he's been fed propaganda to tell him that he's winning the war by his immediate advisors because you cannot tell a person like that that they've made a mistake. We'll talk about that as well, but you've developed a bit of a reputation because you're very good at predicting things. So which of these five outcomes do you think is most probable to happen?
Oh god.
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Professor Stephen, who who are you? If you had to sort of distill it down to three areas of specialism, what would those be?
History of economic thought.
financial instability, so the what causes volatility in the in the economy, and the dynamics of money.
And
Ironically, it makes me a minority.
in economics because most economists ignore money.
It's a strange thing to you. It's ridiculous, but it's true. We'll talk about that as well today. I really want to focus on what's going on in the world right now, because there are so many questions. It's it's all quite.
Confusing. Extremely. And understanding the lay of motivation that
You know, Trump has, Iran have, Israel have is um
It's a difficult j jigsaw puzzle to put together.
I guess the the the question
That I keep asking myself is like what is going on? You can't get away from the fact that we're basically elected a mafia Don.
to president of the United States. You got a guy who
M uh admires the mafia.
is running the country.
So
what we're getting in some ways is a shakedown rather than anything driven by
Any sense of political necessity.
Okay.
That's a crazy element to begin with.
And the
American
deep state, as it's called, has been anti Iran for forty or fifty years. Israel
has wanted to defeat Iran for that length of time.
Trump is stupid enough, but also cunning enough.
It's a combination of the two, to take on
what Israel wanted to do, which was
destroy Iran. They're now trying to do it and they're finding that they've

People's opinions of him.
And he must have known that this would be politically unpopular.
To target Iran at this moment in time.
I don't think so.
I had a relationship with somebody with narcissistic personality disorder. So that's something out over and above what I learned.
academically that I when I think about his behavior. And somebody like that, they want to be the center of attention at all times.
they can't stand it when the somebody else is being spoken about. It's ridiculous, but it's it's a pathology. So he's interested in people's opinions so long as they're positive and they're about him.
Are you saying that he
attacked around and started this war in part because he wanted attention.
That's always something with somebody who's got that disorder.
Yeah.
I mean what do you think about his rationale he's saying that
He attacked Iran because they had nuclear weapons and they were it was an imminent threat.
Okay. We know that Israel has
If you're gonna attack a country then you should attack Israel, not Iran.
But you can't attack Israel, can you?
politicians all over the planet are doing these days. There's a huge gap between what politicians are saying about
global politics more.
People in the street are saying about it. So people on the street have seen the Gaza genocide.
They've seen all the conflicts Israel has started there. And I think the general sentiment in most countries in the world today is anti-Israel.
Because of the way it's treating the Palestinians.
And that's what people are thinking about.
the top echelons like in this country, as you know, if I if I say free Palestine, I say that outside on the street
I can be arrested.
It's crazy.
What there's a huge divorce between what's the other one.
people are thinking and what the politicians are saying.
And I can't give any explanation for that divorce apart from believing that
Israel has something over our political leaders. What do you mean? You think they have something over our political leaders? I think there are we know about the whole Epstein.
on his belief that there's something where Epstein
has been working for for the Israeli
intelligence service and has blackmail working material on a huge range of politicians, and that's the only way that I can explain the
the sort of things that politicians are supporting when they're populous.
is angry about those same policies.
So you get demonstrations here, you know, free Palestine demonstrations, eighty year old female vicars being arrested.
for saying this sort of stuff. You go back forty years ago, there was a
A
a belief in the public and a belief amongst politicians that Israel had a right to exist and it was all pro Israel. And now after forty years
the type of abuses that have happened in Palestine have hit
individual ordinary people's attitudes to Israel. So ordinary people are saying Israel's the aggressor, Israel's making the mistakes. But the politicians are all saying it's a it's it's anti
um Semitic to criticize Israel.
A one sentence answered as to why
This war started.
'Cause we sort of hypothesised a few things there. What would that one sentence answer be?


Again, this is trying to make sense of the senseless. I just think er Israel wanted to destroy Iran. They thought they could do it, and they thought they had an American president who would help them do it.
And they I drastically underestimated how prepared Iran was for that conflict.
Why would Israel want to destroy Iran?
What's the bat context there?
This goes back to religious.
elements. The Zionist state had the right to that whole region.
And there's an expansionist element to Israel's behavior for the last forty years, and the major
rival they saw themselves as having in that sense was Iran.
They can invade Jordan, they can attack uh Lebanon, uh they could do all these things. Of course they
you know, the sixty seven war.
Uh they wiped out the Isra uh invading Arabian armies in six days. They have this
past history of being
militarily dominant in the area, and they they knew that Iran was too big for them to take on on their own. They thought they could get the Americans in there, and I think they drastically underestimated how prepared Iran was for this situation. When you say Iran were prepared for this situation, and it somewhat surprised Israel and the US
What is that preparedness you're speaking about?
Well it's for a start the the fact that Iran witnessed that there were
um decapitation attacks on other
countries in the region going way, way back, not just the last ten years, but the last forty or fifty years. And decapitation. You kill the leaders. And then well the leaders killed the army's in disarray and you can come in and invade and take over. So getting rid of Saddam Hussein, that sort of thing. You know, wipe out Saddam Hussein's power base and then
the whole system collapses. That was the Iraq story. But the Iranians observe that and they have
broken their military into thirty one divisions. There are thirty one provinces, like thirty one states in that sense inside Iran. Their military is broken into those thirty one units. They've got their own failsafe system running in the background. They've got their own resources, their own
missiles, production systems, all that sort of stuff. So you've got to take up the whole thirty one and then they'd have that
sub area. So the only way you can beat the country is by literally bombing it to back to the Stone Age.
Appears to be what they've been trying to do.
Trying to do, but the thing is it's a huge country. I mean looking at the scale of around the m the map's always distort how large, so that is larger. That's more than half the size of Western Europe.
It's got a population of ninety million, about one third or one quarter of the population of Europe, far more than Iraq. I mean it looks like it's double the size of the UK or more. Or more than double. I mean you know one thing about the Makeda projection. No, what's that? It's that it's it makes the the Northern hemispheres twice as large as the southern.
And around in the northern hemisphere, but not as far north as England. So the distortion gets amplified the further north you go. So it's bigger than France and Germany and Italy and Spain
And possibly Poland.
in terms of area. And then if you even see just looking on the map itself, you can see the corrugations there.
versus what you can see for corrugation. The the what representing mountains inside there. It's a hurr it's a horrendous terrain to fight a war on.
I think what Trump is doing at the moment is a pop and dump scheme.
He's trying to drive up the oil price.

Tell friends beforehand that he's about to make his announcement which will cause the price to fall.
And it's just oscillating this way up and down and exploiting it.
For his friends and for his own wealth in the process. Do you actually think that's the case? Yeah, because it makes sense of this stuff. This must be hurting his friends economically because the s the sh you know the stock market's gonna take a dip if he's not careful.
And his friends are all s shareholders in different big companies. So you know and also if you know like the one of Keynes' great lines was that there's no point in buying a stock which you think is going to increase in value over time, if you think it's gonna slump in the immediate future.
So he's making an announcement which causes oil markets to panic so the price goes up.
We've given him control of the most powerful country on the planet. He knows if you make an announcement at Moz Markets
He has no compunction whatsoever.
in exporting that to cause rises and falls in prices and try to export them himself and with his friends. I did I mean I did see that. I've got the data here on on the floor showing those graphs. I I generally looked at that and thought, yeah, y y you know, maybe
But it's also
Conceivable that Trump is quite predictable.
character and he tweets at the same time every day. And it's also I think me and you both know that before the market's open on a Monday morning, he's gonna want to say something really positive. He has a track record of doing that. So is it conceivable that they knew he was flying because it was tracked that he was going to be on this plane journey.
There's going to be a press gaggle. We know he's going to give an interview. I actually think that was quite predictable. If I was a betting man, I would have gone Sunday night, Monday morning, I would have put.
Uh a bat on
Oil prices coming down, the stock market going up.
Yeah, and like for example, the one of the things you said most recently, you talked about getting a present.
From Iran. And then he finally let's look what the present was and was leading eight ships through the Strait of Homaz. Oh, eight those eight ships.
were not American, they were only other allies. I think what he's thinking is these
Um that's gonna mean the oil market gets calmed down. That means the price is gonna fall.
Uh so I can then do another pump and dump. Let's explain the straight of hormose. Oh god. As if we had to explain it for sixteen year olds. Because there's been lots of coverage on it and I think some people have kind of skipped past the
importance of the region. What is the Strait of Hormos and why does it matter? Well it's the choke point in the Persian Gulf.
to get through you've got like twenty one kilometers, so that's an incredibly narrow gap for ships to pass through.
And that means that all the countries that pump not just oil but fertilizer
uh helium, all these critical elements for the production system all have to pass through this point. And obviously that's well within reach of any weapons from Iran. So they can say you do or do not pass, depending on whether we approve or don't approve of your political your country's attitude towards our country. You said fertilizer? Yeah.
Oil
And helium? Yeah, helium. Where are they coming from? They're mainly coming from I think from mainly from the Saudi Arabian side. Okay. Saudi Arabian like Iran would have the same things, but Iran will keep it
keep those for themselves. But Saudi Arabia is the the main source of gases and oils which are refined and as byproducts. We get sulfur dioxide and we get helium.
This is the helium? Yeah. Okay. That's you know
A couple of kilos of helium. But helium it's an element which there's no substitute.
So helium is inert.
What does that mean? It means it doesn't interact with other chemicals. You want to give it a try?
I've never done it. I don't think there's any in in here. Oh what a pity. Okay. You got any real helium?
Oh bloody hell. Helium balloon.
Does it change your voice?
I don't know, has my voice changed? It did. I'll give my voice a try. Okay. Um okay. I've never done this before, but I've heard it at parties.
Okay, now I think my voice has changed somewhat from uh
The fact you can do it. Oh my god.
That is a ride. Where is helium coming from the It's coming from a gas field. So about thirty percent of the world's helium comes from a gas field which spans both uh Sa Saudi Arabia and Iran. If you don't trap helium,
physically somehow, it'll goes to outer space.
That's the ultimate destination of the stuff. So it's trapped in the same things that trap oil. And then when you drill for oil, you also get helium coming out. And then helium is absolutely critical for the semiconductor industry. It didn't matter a hundred years ago. And semiconductors are important for what?
Everything. I mean you've you know you're you take the semiconductors out of that, you've got a brick.
Okay.
the the the the processors, the CPUs, the memory chips
They're all made. Helium is an essential element to make them. Everything, everything electronic. If you need semiconductors, you need helium.
So, if you cut off thirty percent of the world's helium supply, you cut off the capacity to produce thirty percent of the world's
Semiconductors. And Iran have blocked that gap.
And that means that we've suddenly lost thirty percent of the world's helium.
I've got a quote from March twenty twenty six from leading helium expert Phil Cornblutch.
He said we're looking at a minimum two to three month shutdown of helium production.
With up to six months before supply gets back to normal. And he explained you can't stockpile helium because it leaks through containers. Yep. So once supply is cut off, semiconductor production will stop entirely.
South Korea gets sixty five percent of its helium from Qatar in that region and makes two thirds of the world's memory chips.
Their government has launched an emergency investigation into the shortage.
Nobody's talking about this. I know. And this this is one reason that's quite terrifying about the scale of what we're going through.'Cause people are just thinking it's gonna be oil's gonna be more expensive. That's the sort of mindset we have. But in fact critical elements of the production system are being terminated by this conflict.
You can't produce chips anymore. And you can't Well you got hang on.
You can't produce these chips either, because the fertiliser's disappearing. So um you're holding a potato in your hand. Yeah.
How are are potato chips gonna be impacted by the wall? Because of fertiliser.
If we don't have the fertiliser we can't grow the potatoes and this is not just potatoes, it's a whole range of crops.
We eat food, okay, we eat this green stuff. It actually starts as brown stuff because the fertilizer is an essential part of growing all the food we eat, and the fertilizer is produced by a process called the Haber Bosch process, which takes petroleum and nitrogen
and fixes them in such a way that you can put this on the on the field and your plants will grow
Courtesy of the fertilizer. If we didn't have fertilizer at all
Guess how many of you?
billion people the planet could actually support. Between one and two.
And fertilizer comes from this region? Again, twenty to thirty percent of our fertilizer comes through that region. Through the straight of Hamas. Through the Strait of Hamas. Where is it coming from?
It's coming again from the the same gas field that's producing the helium produces a side effect of fertilizer when you need you need
You know, I'm not a chemist, okay, so I can get these things wrong. But you need sulfur di you need sulfuric acid as well as part of these production processes. Twenty percent of the world's fertilizer, helium
sulfuric acid all pass through that.
Strike.
And if you take them away, then you can't make micro chips.
which is what Korea is suffering from. You can't make fertilizer, which which everybody will suffer from. If we lost twenty percent of the world's fertilizer, we'd lose roughly twenty percent of the world's food. But it caused a global famine. We've never had this experience before. We've had localized famines. Countries like India have had famines and parts of Africa and so on.
But if this is not available, the globe has to famine. And what's the last uh tanker you've got down there? There's one more on the floor.
That's pretty good. It was accidental, but that's that's petroleum. Okay. Petroleum tank, obviously empty, twenty liters. So that's oil?
That's oil.
And so is that
That's what we're losing right now. And people are focusing upon the price of this. But the really important point, and I can bring up one of my own charts here.
is the role of energy in production.
Because
If we don't have energy, we can't produce goods and services. And the link is incredibly tight. This is looking at change in energy and change in gross world products over the last forty years. I'll throw this graph on the screen for people that are watching. So what what you've got here is the annual percentage change in gross world products.
and the annual percentage change in gross energy consumption. And they're virtually lockstep and they're the same magnitude.
So when energy goes up, GDP goes up. And when energy goes down, G D P goes down.
They were losing
twenty percent of the world's liquefied natural gas, a substantial proportion of its oil as well. We could see a five or ten percent fall in energy. We will certainly see a five or ten percent fall
in global world gross world product. So explain that to me. So where is the oil in this region? Oh it's everywhere. Okay. I mean this this is one of the accidents of history that the oil is
A large part is concentrated here, and a large part over here, and a bit in Russia.
For people that can't see you're pointing at Iran Saudi Arabia.
Iraq.
And then there's a lot in the
Unit States and the excess and you've got some in Russia as well, and there was a small amount, like the North Sea had a substantial amount of oil as well at one stage. And the type of oil in this region, I hear is quite important. It's very I mean oil, th there's no such thing as a homogenous product.
What does homogenous mean? You can if you don't get it here, you can substitute for something over here. That's a myth that economists actually, unfortunately, believe. They basically could persuade people to think that everything is homogenous. In fact, oil from Venezuela is almost like tar. Oil from here is
blows like water comparatively. You need different processing systems to to extract that oil than you need over here. Uh if we lose this, we can't replace it with something from over here.
So once that goes
then the production system of the planet is damaged.
Uh this has been the the shocking thing for me as a
Citizen.
has been the fact that
A war with one country.
Could
decapitate what twenty to thirty percent of global production. Global production of oil.
Yeah.
And food.
That's a vulnerability if I've ever heard one.
Like one reason I'm a critic of mainstream economics is they trivialise all this stuff. They don't teach their students how critical this is. So most people are like you, even people who've done a PhD in economics, even worse in that sense than other people.
They don't understand how critical and how fragile our production systems are. So people can talk about a war in Iraq and think oh that's a war in Iran and that's gonna cut off our oil supply. No, it's gonna cut off your food supply.
And for the average person listening now, what will they start to experience if this war doesn't immediately end?
Two or three months India's gonna run out of
Fertilizer.
And so there'll be a famine in India.
food production on the planet could fall
Ten, twenty five percent.
And therefore
There s there simply won't be enough food for everyone on the planet.
And then it's a question of who's gonna starve.
Now you'd think the wealthy countries
They're gonna be safe. They've looked for Australia, my old home country has about thirty days oil supply.
When it runs out it can't get food from the farm to the city anymore.
So Australia is incredibly vulnerable.
We're all far more vulnerable than we realise, and this war is threatening everybody on the planet.
I got an Ubie yesterday and I was with a
a a wonderful guy who was l actually weirdly, I sang to the Uber at two AM and I looked up on the screen and he was listening to the driver of CEO and then he l clocked he clock me in the back of the car. So we had a great chat. And he was saying to me, listen, uh this isn't actually my main job, it's my third job.
I do this because of the cost of living. And it really stayed with me. Three jobs. And he picked me up at two AM. He's got a family.
And he's working his butt off to keep the family alive. Yes. Yeah.
And you know, I'm gonna say something which I probably um
I don't say a lot, which uh
Wh which came to mind, which is um
In the position I'm in now, I think
It it it was a real reminder of my own personal privilege.
That I think is really important for someone like me that doesn't has an interview show because
You've got to be like intellectually honest with yourself, or just like honest with yourself generally, that like as a as someone in my position who's been fortunate enough to be able to make significant money.
I can understand from having that conversation.
How
Detached.
You are. I am. From the world around you. Yes.
Because you've I know I've read a bit of your history, of course. And you've had that terrible period where you were, you know
Unemployed and what the hell do I do.
U if you don't experience you don't know what it's like.
Yeah. But even if you have You can forget it. You can forget it. But you haven't, yeah.
Well, this is why it's so important for me to have those conversations because him saying I'm working three jobs and this is and picking me up at two AM in his Uber.
And him telling me he's doing that'cause of cost of living,'cause he needs to pay the bills, immediately made me think of ahead of this conversation today, like, Oh my God, if the prices go up twenty percent for people. He's out. He's he can't work twenty four hours a day. He can't work more hours in the day. And it was just one of those moments where you go, Fucking hell Steve, like, man, you need to stay close to
the plight of uh of people that are
On the breadline. Yeah. And so many people are those days. In in advanced countries, not just third world countries.
But certainly like in America and the UK, there are huge numbers of people who are
Basically living from hand to mouth.
So if we have a breakdown.
They can't afford it. And
In that situation you can no longer use money.
as your way of deciding whether you can eat food or not. I wonder if politicians know this.'Cause I say this is because you know
Trump is a very wealthy man, multi billionaire, reportedly.
And if the prices go up twenty percent at the pump.
He makes profit. I mean he actually when he said he said he said in favor of the rising oil price, we'll make a lot of money out of it.
The His Media Association rising price of something that I'm index correctly selling, that's good.
He doesn't say what about people buying it?
The people who buy it can no longer afford it.
Some food there on the table which shows how
Peace.
conflicts and the
pressure they put on some of these scarce resources can impact our ability to go and buy food. I think you've got two bowls of
Potatoes.
Well let's actually make it fairer right now. Let's get the actual distribution correct initially. So you are talking
About someone who in your situation
You've got that.
Lokan Uber's got this.
And now you're taken away.
The oil price. That's gonna make Trump better off. But he's down to the stage where, you know
He's not too far from that happening.
And that's what we've pushed ourselves into with this war.
Yeah, do the walls typically make
Inequality.
What
Very good question.
I think wars are created when inequality is bad.
If you go back to the Great Depression and see what caused World War Two, it was largely the collapse of the German economy.
Uh when
they repaid their debt their private debt to America, or government private and government debt to America. That led to the rise of Hitler. Everybody thinks Hitler rose because of the Weimar inflation. That's what people normally think. In fact the when when Hitler came to power in Germany, the rate of inflation was minus ten percent.
There's deflation prices were falling.
Unemployment rose from very low to twenty five percent of the population in that situation.
People supported Hitler. He revived the economy. Happy to talk about how he did that.
later, but inequality leads to people being willing to elect demagogues to say we can save you, and then you get war coming out of it. What happened after World War Two is
politicians realise that people who've been through the Great Depression
Which was horrific.
And that means for World War Two.
Which was horrific. And in that period
People in America were talking about either f a fascist
Well or a communist world.
So the Americans realized they had to m improve the living standards of the average American.
substantially to get away from that. And if you look at you know, in nineteen fifties and sixties
That's what is called the golden age of capitalism.'Cause at that stage it could be a single male
supporting a wife and four kids.
And have a comfortable lifestyle at the time.
That was where we started from. So the the war itself led to a focus upon equality, a focus upon fairness and getting as much as you can to the poorest in society.
And then we've forgotten that over the last eighty years.
And we've now got back to massive inequality once more. So I think inequality causes wars.
Wars in the aftermath make people focus on
equality not to allow that horror to happen once more, and then we forget
And do the whole damn thing again. One of the um surprising things w I learned the other day.
was that the country that is estimated to have the biggest reserve of oil.
Is Venezuela.
Yeah.
The third country
On this list that is estimated to have the biggest reserve of oil.
Is a wrong.
Yeah.
Yeah. Now it doesn't take a genius. The second country being America.
Well, it says Saudi Arabia.
So they were like well that's already an American vessel. Yeah, that's already basically they're basically partners with America already.
And funnily enough, the fourth one is Canada.
And if you if you're listening a lot to Trump's rhetoric, he said he was gonna take Canada and make it the fifty first state or something. So it's just it doesn't feel to me to be a coincidence that the countries that the US are invading and decapitating their leaders are the country that have the biggest oil supplies. And Trump has already said, you know, immediately, he said.
After taking out Maduro in Venezuela, pulling him out of his bed with his wife and flying it back to the US. She already said the the oil's on the way back to America.
Yeah.
One might assume that much of the motivation here with Iran is when they were in negotiations with them.
Maybe.
They weren't playing boy ball with the oil. Maybe they were threatening.
Something with the oil. And maybe it's such an economic worst.
Royal executives.
And they can see the benefit for them in controlling global oil. And the on one part they can't control is Iran. But I mean it would it's backfired pretty horrifically. I think one of the great sayings in humanity is it's looked like a good idea at the time.
Then you do it.
And you realise you underestimated your opponent, you have you don't realise how difficult it is. Like you mentioned um you know, talking about how being wealthy can make you
dissociate from the problems that ordinary people have. It can also make you dissociate from reality in general. You don't realize how difficult it is to something do something you want to have done. So all these oil executives and people who Trump socializes with could have thought take out Iran
America dominates the global oil thing, we're all gonna be rich.
Okay.
Iran's been aware of this possibility for forty years. And they're prepared. They're far better prepared than the Americans and the Israelis thought. So you've got five scenarios laid out on these cards in front of you here that you think could happen next. I'm gonna ask you to explain to me what the five scenarios are, and then tell me which one you think is most likely.
to a car.
So scenario one.
Which is the one that I think Trump is
I think Israel wants this one.
Iran is destroyed.
Okay.
If that happens, we're all gone.
Because to destroy Iran you're gonna have to use nuclear weapons.
Okay. You can't destroy it without
Obliterating it as nuclear weapons do.
And that's the scariest. I don't think it's gonna happen.
My main hope here is that Iran realises
Yeah.
possibility and they've got a way to neutralize
Not America's nuclear weapons, but Israel's You think it's a possibility. It's a possibility and it's what scares the shit out of me because if this happens, then we're all dead.
Obviously a nuclear bomb doesn't just
pull up an individual targeted everything within reach gets exploded into the atmosphere.
That's what led people to realize that you couldn't have a nuclear war back in the days when we had mutually assured destruction.
As the as the
policy. If you attack a country, then you will also die.
But can't they use narrow nuclear weapons? Is that not a thing?
Smaller nuclear weapons.
Well, again if the country is smaller, you're talking about destroying Europe.
The weapons you'd need to make sure you got every last potential
Element.
You're talking about bombing something which is
Yeah, but which virtually the size of Western Europe.
The amount of weapons you gotta drop to do that.
And you've got to if you if you don't get it right.
Then they're gonna come at you with what they've got left. The world has dropped nuclear weapons before and people survive. Other neighboring countries survived.
Only twice, and only small weapons.
The weapons we're talking about can in here here in Shimmer and Nagasaki, they're o about equivalent to twenty thousand tons

We're now talking weapons what are twenty million tons.
The biggest
nuclear weapons and if you wanted to hit a country the size of Iran and know you've neutralised it so you destroy the whole thing, you're talking hundreds of those weapons.
If you had to
give a percentage probability of that outcome occurring, would it be less than one percent?
If we didn't have a madman and
Washington, yes.

Um we didn't have
Madmen in Israel, less than one percent. I think probably five percent.
Five percent probability that's a possibility. I mean again, uh you know, th this is trying to make sense of the senseless. Okay. But I'd put it about them, less than ten percent, but still scary as a possibility.
If we end up there we're all gone.
I mean,
You know, I know very little about all these things, so that's the disclaimer.
Um
I'd say
That
I don't think Israel would intentionally wipe out
the rest of the world or cause a nuclear winter, because that would obviously impact them as well. But I I I am quite scared of
And what I mean by that is
If we establish it.
being okay to drop nuclear weapons on people you don't like.
the sort of domino effect of that for people in Ukraine and other parts of the world where there's conflict might then lead to
You know, mutually assured destruction. Yeah, uh it's the it's the last possibility you want to have it happen. The fact that it's even
possible to contemplate it is a terrifying prospect. Let us hope.
Yeah. So scenario two
is Iran destroys the Gulf Power infrastructure. I think that's highly likely.
Iran destroys Gulf power infrastructure. What does that mean? What it means is that Iran all the Gulf states have got their own power systems like main mainly based on burning oil for obvious reasons. Uh if you take out their power structure systems, then those s countries become uninhabitable.
Is that what's happening already? Because I know Iran have attacked a few sort of power facilities in the region. There have been a couple. Well, there was one attack on a Saudi Arabian power systems, and that took out two of the fourteen units that are critical for creating liquefied natural gas.
And apparently it'll take five years to rebuild them.
And there are only five companies on the planet can actually do that rebuilding. One quarter of the world's liquid notted natural gas comes through the Strait of Homels.
One.
tenth of that has been destroyed. It's like two and a half percent of the world's energy supply.
is gone for the next five years until those are rebuilt.
If Iran destroys the Gulf Power infrastructure then
Saudi Arabia, Qatar
Uh do why they all become uninhabitable.
And we're seeing that
happen in parts. I mean if it sounds like there's these attacks have slowed down a little bit, but it was interesting that Iran's strategy was to attack the neighboring sort of partners and specifically targeting a lot of their energy infrastructure. Is that in part to apply pressure? If I attack Dubai
The leaders of Dubai are gonna call Trump and say, Listen, cut this out. Oh yeah. I mean the pressure coming back from the Arabian states on America, I imagine, is quite immense right now, saying don't do it.
It's quite possible Israel could do it.
Like attack Iran and then Iran does a r retribution attack? Trump
If you would have seen his treat this morning, I think he's put it off to April the sixth before he says he starts attacking power infrastructure. If he attacks power infrastructure in Iran, Iran has said we will attack power infrastructure in the Gulf States.
So we've got to, you know, what eight days
I think he's bluffing. I hope he's bluffing. But if he does do the attack, then Iran will respond by destroying
Either an equivalent component.
Of the Gulf states or the whole infrastructure. I don't think people quite realise how costly it is.
for regions like Dubai when Iran attacked them. I was looking at some of the data. Yeah. And according to current estimates and historical risk assessments by Dubai officials,
They lose.
A million per minute.
Which is sixty million per hour.
Or one point four
billion a day.
When there's an unplanned emergency shutdown just of their airport.
Their airports, let alone their power systems.
Yeah.
As we probably saw on the news, Iran had flown a it seemed like a couple of drones into Dubai's airport, which meant that it had to shut down. Yeah. If they're losing a billion a day because that airport is closed, I think it's the biggest airport in the world.
It is
economic pressure.
for Dubai, which will then trickle down to Trump and
sort of force his hand. Yeah. So they've got a clear to cause chaos. Yeah.
And that's partly what Iran is saying. It's it's like a game of bluff. You don't want to do this bluff. If that bluff happens, then the Saudi Arabian peninsula becomes uninhabitable.
And therefore all the I mean that y if if people have are forced out of there, and most of the residents in those countries are not sorties. They're third world uh workers from India and P Pakistan and the Philippines and so on, they're
being paid lousy wages to to work on all these systems. If they leave because the power's not there to support them anymore, they try to leave, then we lose the entire energy contribution that r that region makes to
The global economy.
And the thing is.
And that figure I cited includes not just lost airport revenue, but then the immediate impact on airlines, cargo logistics, and the missed opportunity cost of thousands of high value business travelers attending the region. The Dubai's GDP is roughly thirty percent dependent
on the aviation and tourism sectors. So when the airport closes, it impacts tourism, hospitality, real estate investing, global supply chains and everything. So it's um it's quite remarkable, specifically with Dubai. Yeah because Dubai, I I think Dubai's a lovely place. I've been multiple times. I I I I love going there.
But it felt really safe.
And so a lot of key.
Yeah. It's not safe. Yeah.
Yeah, and a lot of people had chosen to uproot their lives and move there.
And you'd almost kind of forgotten you were in the Middle East to some degree. Yeah. Yeah.
But I think this is gonna be a pretty traumatic reminder for a lot of people there. How fragile.
And like that that's the lesson we're learning. It's the fragility of the society we take for granted.
So that was scenario number two. Okay. Scenario three.
That's the one that really
scares me because that is the Samson doctrine. You know the story of Samson. Okay. Samson is a enormously strong individual who's strong because of his hair.
And then he gets conned, this is an ancient story from the Bible, and he's the woman who's
Conned him, shaves his hair so he's weakened. And then they put him in a temple where he's standing between two pillars and his hair is gone, he's bald, he can't do a thing. They forget the fact that his hair is starting to grow.
His hair gets to the stage where he's now got his strength back, he pushes those pillars and the whole thing collapses and everybody dies.
That's the Samson doctrine, and that involves Israel's nuclear weapons.
If they realise that they are going to lose this war and it becomes
existential for them, then one of the things they have claimed
That they do is unleashed
Destruction on the rest of the world.
Like Samson pushing the towers and the whole thing comes collapsing down. This is I mean, going back to the situation with Iran and Israel. One of the things I was thinking a lot about from some commentary that I'd seen is
Із Ізраїл
Really
have a motive
To
get rid of Iran because Iran have repeatedly threatened Israel.
It's also because I mean Israel's trying to get rid of the Palestinians.
And in that sense
Iran has been probably the major bulkwood.
supporting the Palestinians say let the Palestinians survive.
Let the Palestinians
people continue existing, and the Israelis have been
Pushing and pushing and pushing the Palestinians out.
You know, it's a hornet's nest. We're provoked a hornet's nest.
Iran is responding right now, I think, in a very judicious way, but if the Israelis realise their
facing an existential defeat, that scenario is it would again mean uh civilization potentially gets destroyed. And just looking at some of the things that Iran have said about Israel, historically the supreme leader of Iran stated in twenty fifteen that Israel would not see the next twenty five years
Other officials said things like the end is near.
Um
And in March twenty twenty six, Iran's tone shifted from ideological to purely
Retaliatory
With the speaker of the Iranian parliament, Mohammed
Stating.
That
Iran has officially declared that it considers all Israel energy, water, and IT infrastructure legitimate targets for irreversible destruction.
With zero restraint.
If we think about this from a psychology perspective, you've got two neighbours.
They're both
Either implying implicitly or explicitly that they they want to wipe the other one out. Yeah. Trump is sort of this third party in in the arrangement who's not in the region, so he might be a little bit safer.
Those two parties that are against each other
One of them has nuclear weapons and the other appears
To be trying to make one.
The neighbor that is Israel.
Presumably.
Cannot let that happen.
Because if it gets to a point where they both have nuclear weapons
And they both want to wipe each other out.
Yeah.
I no, I I actually think that in the old days of mutually assured destruction.
We're a more stable time than what we're in now. Because if you realise that if you attack you also die, you don't attack. But what if you think of death as being a better thing than life?
You w you have to have a society continuing after you die.
If you're gonna be a martyr, there has to be people who are gonna mourn your death.
If you believe being a Mata means everybody else so so dies, and you don't do it. So do you think if Iran had nuclear weapons
It would be a safer world. Stop attacking your neighbours.
I sat with um
A few nuclear experts.
And one of the things that was shocking that I learned is
If
The United States wanted to launch a nuclear weapon today. Yeah.
It is one person's decision.
I heard that. And that's why Trump can actually just make that decision. He can make the decision on his own. He doesn't need to consult Congress or anybody else.
He has someone who walks around with a briefcase that has the nuclear codes in. And at any moment he can't. Yeah. Yeah. And when I think about the same in this region.
Actually, you don't need a whole state to decide that they don't like their neighbor. All you need is one supreme leader.
Ohne an Yahoo.
To say, do you know what?
I'm near the end of my life.
And these people have really pissed me off.
Yeah.
That's right. And that's I mean, I thought there was at least some control. I saw every I saw that segment. With Annie Jacobson, yeah. I thought there was at least some control. He had to consult someone.
But if and they had to have circumstances were justified not consulting someone.
If he's got that right, then we it comes down to what's the behavior of the person who carries the nuclear
Football.
Does he let Trump get hold of it?
And like there would there was another incident way way back, I think in this
Seventies or eighties.
the the Russian early warning system.
reported that there was a nuclear attack on the way to Russia and there was one submarine commander
or w one element of the submarine command system, and they had to have three people in the submarine who agreed
To to launch an attack and this particular person refused.
Now if that hadn't happened, if he'd agree with the other two, there would have been a nuclear war.
at that stage and there was it wasn't real, it was a false alarm from the system. So at le even the Russian submarine had three people who had to make that decision. So we didn't have a nuclear war. Now we've got one maniac in this White House who could do it.

I'll play Annie Jacobson's clip now where she talks about s the idea of soul authority, which I think is an important thing for people to understand because when we think about who we're electing to lead
Uh nuclear
capable countries, you have to think about who you want to give sole authority.
Two.
The United States president has sole presidential authority to launch a nuclear war. What does that mean?
It's exactly like it sounds. What's so interesting is a lot of this stuff, this nomenclature that gets thrown at you
If you just break it down, it's
So
Solo.
Presidential
He's the potus, and
Authority.
He doesn't have to ask anyone for permission.
Not the sectaf?
Not the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, not the congress. I love the worried look on your face in this moment because it is
Once you know that
You say, Well, first you might Google, is it really true? And you will get
For example, on Reddit, like that's not really true. You'll get like hundreds of thousands of people.
You know
coming in with their opinions but how that's not really true.
Well, it is really true.
It's absolutely true, and in fact, during the former president Trump administration.
Congress became so sort of
I I want to say motivated or alarmed by this issue, meaning they were being asked questions by the powers that be.
Із актри да ти реліст а репорт.
stating specifically, and I quote in the book, yes, it is true. As commander in chief,
The president has this sole authority, he doesn't need to ask anyone.
So what is scenario four in your envelopes there?
Iran disables Israel's nukes.
Nobody can know, but I do believe that Iran has not developed nuclear weapons. So you're hoping Iran disables Israel's nuclear weapons. I am. I hope that happens. Because that takes out the nuclear option.
Okay. We won't see nuclear war as a result of this if the only nuclear weapons that we know exist in the Middle East are destroyed. But if if Iran starts disabling Israel's nukes,
And attacking Israel.
Not effectively.
There's gonna be an even bigger problem.
Well not th not if we're talking conventional weapons.
If it's conventional weapons and ground troops, then you don't end up with a nuclear winter and the death of everybody on the planet.
Again, we don't know how capable their missiles are. The level of planning that Iran has done in this war, I I had no idea of of the fact they had those thirty one regions, for example, until the war began. My specialty is economics, not global.
military politics. But once I learned that I thought they have really thought this through.
They have war game.
What happens if they get an attack by America?
And they've wargamed it comp comprehensively. Now I hope they've also wargamed
if we sh start defeating Israel, and Israel realizes
they're going to be wiped out, then the possibility for the Samson doctrine comes in. We have to disable that before it happens. How could they possi they they don't have a
functioning military left in any sort of typical sense. They don't have ships left, they don't have planes left. They don't have ships they don't have planes, but they have got missiles.
And the we don't know how many missiles they've got. We don't know where the missiles are. Certainly the Americans would have some intelligence. I think the word's got to be used with inverted commas these days, but some intelligence over where they are located in Iran. But if you listen to the Iranians talking about it, they say they've got
Hundreds of these facilities buried hundreds of meters.
below the ground. If the if the weapons they've developed, the the the um advanced rocketry they've developed, they can evade
Israel's
Uh on maybe they can also
get into and destroy Israel's relaunch capabilities. And if that happens, I think that's that'd be the best possible outcome because
We have a a rug state.
in the Middle East, which has nuclear weapons, which will neither admit that it has or
won't won't sign it. They're not part of the nuclear nonprof proliferation treaty. They won't sign that treaty. We should never have allowed that to happen.
And if Iran gets rid of them, I think it's the world's a safer place. Israel are just gonna make more nuclear weapons.
They have the resources.
Uh you need a hell of a lot of technology and a hell of a lot of intelligent people to do that. How can Israel lose the war?
We've got ninety a population of ninety million in Iran.
And a population of less than ten million in Israel. But they've got it's a sort of technological
Golf.
It's not as big as we thought it was. We're only realizing now the level of technology that Iran has.
I mean the things which Iran are doing in this war so far I've surprised.
Everybody who's hasn't got the background of intelligence to tell them what's going on.
Uh it's an educated, sophisticated culture, far more so than the caricature we've got from the West has been about it in the past. So they don't have near nearly the same level of resources and technology
And uh
And I I would say maybe s sort of sophisticated, yeah, advanced systems from a war perspective that
Israel do
We think.
We don't know. We're assuming it's even the intelligence services, even they're like
Their planes and their missiles and their defence systems are like
Profoundly more advanced than Irans.
If that was the case, we wouldn't be having this conversation.
It's three weeks after the war began or four weeks, you know? The original belief that Trump has it would be over in one day. That's proved false. I think that's in part because of what you said, because they've prepared for
decapitation. If I was the supreme leader of Iran, yeah, that that's the sort of approach I would have taken, which is you take me out, and actually you've got a bigger problem because now you've got to negotiate with forty one or thirty one different
Sort of sub militaries.
And that's an impossible task. Yeah. Yeah. And that's the Iranians were aware of that.
And they've got a you know a huge army. They've got
They can conscript far more people than Israel has.
Um it's to me, if it gets down to a conventional military.
then it's possible that you know Israel could lose that as well.
On March twenty one.
Trump threatened to obliterate Iran's power plants if they did not fully reopen the Strait of Hormos.
within forty eight hours. He then came out and said that he was pausing that because Iran were negotiating.
Um and he says he he thinks he's negotiating with the right person.
As of yesterday.
Trump has announced a ten day pause.
Until April sixth on destroying energy plants.
claiming that indirect talks are going very well and that Iran is begging to make a deal, according to The Guardian. So
What's going on there, in your view? I think he's gaming the markets.
I really think he's using it to cause the all my price to go up and down.
And
Somebody in his circle.
people are making a fortune playing the options.
Because there's lots of ways to make money.
That don't involve
Crashing the global economy, losing the midterms. Yeah, you'd think of that. You've got you've got ethics, you've got empathy, you've got morals.
Trump has none of those things.
Do you not think it's just it's just again, if we look at Trump's pattern of behavior over time, even with the tariffs, the same pattern of behavior occurred there, where he would come out and say, every leader is calling me, they can't stop calling me, they all wanna make a deal, I'm gonna do a tariff on you ten percent. Wait, no, I'm not, pause, call me. Yeah.
Yeah. It's the same pattern of behavior. It's you address the system. Yeah.
You then
Blackmail the person to try and negotiate with you. Yeah. When they don't, you hit them with the thing hard. And eventually
in the end of the day, you don't really do any of the stuff you threaten to do. Because you've sort of
manipulated a person into getting your way. It's the same pattern of behavior. We're gonna smash you if you don't call me. Yeah.
They do or don't call. He announces to the world that they called. They're begging. Look, it says here. They're begging me for a deal. I'm gonna give them ten more days.
To me, it sounds like he's trying to build his golden bridge to get the fuck out of there.
What he's imagining is he's dealing with somebody like himself in Iran.
Okay. He's he's projecting what how he would react to these things. He's obviously projecting his own behavior onto the system.
And it's projection rather than understanding. So if you decapitate you know you took out Trump
You can look at his behavior and sort of
Understand what he wants. He wants to win this war.
And he he won you know he wants to win the war and that's and get out of there because that's what he's been saying. We've won, we've won we've won every day, we've won. More missiles go in. We've won. So that's clearly what he wants to happen. Yeah. The problem is winning here doesn't seem like a straightforward thing. No, it's not gonna happen. No pun intended with a straight up for Mozie, but it really doesn't seem like a straightforward thing. So I it's my opinion now
The
They are a little bit stuck. Because if you leave now
You lose. Yeah.
Iran start firing at Israel, Israel don't stop even though you tell them to. Yeah. They start firing at each other, the whole thing blows up. Or they keep the Strait of Hormos closed.
All prices go up, it looks terrible, terrible, terrible for Trump. We might get he might find himself in a Bush situation where his legacy and I think that's such an important word, a man that can't be elected for a third term.
His legacy
is tarnished in the same way that Bush's legacy was tarnished by going to war in the Middle East. I think his greatest fear, Trump's greatest fear, to think back through all of these moments over the last couple of years where he talked about the Nobel Prize.
I think he's trying to put himself on the Mount Rushmore of presidents. Yeah in history's mind.
And I think how this situation plays out now, the sole thing he's thinking about is his legacy.
And right now
Being stuck in a war.
And contemplating putting ground troops in.
It's arguably the worst thing for one's legacy.
Americans dead?
Yeah, and lots of Americans did. These wars are like you think about Vietnam, these wars are never really won.
No, well they did they America hasn't won a war since World War Two.
And even World War Two was won by the Russians more so than the Americans.
So we have this picture of America as being this you know invincible military power. But it lost in Vietnam, it lost in Iraq, it lost in Afghanistan. America's failed in all of those. This is another American failure, but on a scale far beyond what happened in Afghanistan and Vietnam. Do you think he will send ground troops in?
Yes, I do. Uh, and like I've seen people talking about where the troops might land, and the only part of they're gonna land is is right towards this edge here with Pakistan. Where they might land too between two and ten thousand troops.
I'd hate to be one of those troops'cause it's a suicide mission.
Again, with those thirty one provinces, the separated um military commands they've got.
the weapons they've got hidden underground, the troops themselves, who if if you know that there are Americans landing and you're a Iranian and a soldier,
you are going to attack them like nobody's
business and not be afraid of your own death because you do think if you get martyred it's the remaining people you're defending. There will be people who recognize you as a martyr. It's it's horrific.
If you had to give a sort of percentage probability of them putting ground troops in.
We're gonna find out in the next couple of weeks.
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What is the best case scenario?
The Americans have to realise they've lost.
they've not going to negotiate the terms of reparation. And what Iran has proposed, when you look at Iran's terms, they're extremely reasonable. They're saying America
leaves the whole region. America no longer comes back on this region. No military bases
no agreements. This becomes Iranian protectorate, that becomes an Arabian Empire. Or not Arabian Iranian Empire, because they're not R they're not Arabs. They're Persians. Uh so this becomes like a Muslim part of the world. That's
Yeah, you can actually take the whole region out to here. It's all Muslim. And what's been happening and this is part of the weird
religious elements here. You've got the Sunni sect and the Shiite sect, which is a bit like the Protestants versus the Catholics. Go back five hundred years and what we're seeing here is like the Hundred Years' War that occurred in Europe.
back in the days when it was Protestant birth Catholic was a serious thing. So we're seeing a religious war being fought here and the
The Sunni majority, about ninety percent of Muslims are Sunni, they have focused on their rivalry with the Shiites. And so what they've done is they've sided with this mob to enable the Sistes.
Uh to side so they've sided with the Christians to strengthen their own Muslim sect, which is the Sunni sect, against the Shiite sect, which is Iran is predominantly Shiite. Now what's happening here is as soon as the war started, America
The wish they
The Arabs agree to a bases here, military bases, as they thought it would protect them from Iran. As soon as the war starts, those spaces are obliterated, the Americans leave, and they realize that hasn't worked at all. So the deal the Sunnis may decide with the Christians
has proved to be an extremely bad deal.
You're gonna have to have change in who rules these countries to enable it to happen. But I think the persuasive case c coming out of this within the Muslim areas is
Muslims stick together, don't cooperate with the Christians.
Don't cooperate with the United States.
You think that's gonna happen? I hope so, because that at least gives us something which is relatively stable. This becomes a region that is Muslim. When you say this, you mean the Middle East.
Muslim.
dominated Shiad since when he start to I mean the the whole idea of cra of Catholics fighting Protestants that's completely dissipated. Um there's no level in in the West anymore of large scale military type animosity between Catholics and

That's what's happening over here.
the the conflicts the those religious conflicts within the cat within the Christians disappeared, largely speaking. They're still happening within the Muslim religion.
This could persuade them that that's gotta end.
So we've got one more scenario, scenario five.
Iran develops nuclear weapons.
I'd rather four happen than five. Which of these five outcomes do you think is most probable to happen?
I think the most likely outcome is Iran disables Israel's nuclear weapons because Iran has been so prepared for this conflict in a way that America has not, in a way that Israel has not. I hope they're also prepared for the eventuality of having to neutralize
Israel's nuclear weapons. You think the highest probability is Iran disabling Israel's nukes?
Yeah.
I have one right. I mean if Iran gets destroyed, then this leads not to Iran developing nuclear weapons, but every
potential rival for America on the planet developing nuclear weapons.
We go into a nuclear war dominated world.
Do you not think it's
more likely that Trump is gonna
Find
Himself a golden bridge to get out of this situation. He's gonna call Netanyahu in Israel and say, stand down, please.
I'm gonna announce that we've won this war. I'm gonna announce that we've done a deal.
It's all over.
Well w without doubt, whatever happens, Trump is gonna say he won.
Okay. That's again the narcissistic personality disorder thing. You simply couldn't
bring himself to stand on a stage and say, I lost.
I mean, think about the biggest insult that Trump ever made in his apprenticeship show, you're a loser.
Okay, being a loser is the absolute worst possible thing that anybody can be in his mind. If he has to say I'm a loser
Then his life is over.
In that sense, he's self he's self
Image is over.
So
Whatever deal comes out he's gonna say he won.
For the for the average person that's listening now, when they hear all this conflict going on on in the world, from an economic perspective,
Is there anything they can be doing to protect themselves against some of these downstream consequences? I think one thing is people we we've now got to the stage where you can buy your own
uh solar systems for your house.
You need something which means you are not dependent upon oil anymore.
I I think we've trivialized the dangers of climate change for the last half century. We've done very little about it to reverse it. This is telling people that if you rely upon oil
you've got a fragile existence, even if it costs you more to build solar.
You've got to build solar as your own alternative energy system.'Cause without energy there's no civilization.
And that's what we're learning the hard way from this conflict. So I think individual responses is going to be get some way to have your own
power source and for most people that means having solar. One man that has done a lot for both solar and sustainable energy.
Is Elon Musk.
He has and he's also helped get bloody plump relected, so I think you've got to score that against him as well. But yeah, his work on solo then and and and power and rocketry, I've absolutely admired that.
And I see that as a critical positive contribution. But getting Trump elected, he to play a major role in that. He should learn from that mistake and get the fuck out of politics.
He has backed off politics now, which is I think he's realised how poisonous it is.
Yeah. Yeah, it sounds like he's realised you can't really change the beast. No. He tried.
Yeah.
You should stick with the area who is mature, which is what he does with energy systems and what he does with rocketry. He's
Really, I mean in terms of legacy
Uh he's tainted his legacy by getting involved in politics. Go back to engineering.
So when you say that you think people should
Invest in solar for their home.
to get their own energy s sources so they're a little bit insulated from these sort of macroeconomics. Is there anything else they should be thinking about? You know, the average person, the cost of living crisis, what what happens next? What should they be doing now? The the thing that I'm most worried about, this is the impact upon food. I'm the the last person to talk about
Growing your own food.
I've never done it. I'm I I've got uh brown thumbs not green ones. But I think if you can have any way to produce your own food
you've got a bit of insulation against what's happening at the global level. The lesson that comes out of this is self sufficiency.
If we don't have self sufficiency, then these sorts of global chaotic things can destroy you completely, with you having no recompense. If you have some degree of self sufficiency, you can survive. And how does one create self sufficiency? Growing your own food is quite expensive and slow, isn't it? Yeah, extremely. So how does one develop self sufficiency in this these sort of economic climates? Is it
Saving money, or is it
Well, I think so having your own physics.
close to you that enable you to it money doesn't matter if you can't buy the product in the first instance.
the product doesn't exist anymore. So one thing that happened during World War Two is a large amount of food was grown in the UK by people turning their gardens into market gardens.
I I've heard you make a few predictions about the future of the economic markets. You know, you're famous for predicting two thousand and eight and the financial crash that occurred then. I've heard you saying that you think because of AI there's gonna be another financial crash around the corner within one or two years. Yeah.
What's happening with AI is a classic
Economic Burman bus cycle.
overlaid on the fact that AI can also eliminate
uh a huge amount of employment.
Where have never seen
That possibility.
in the past on on that scale. But a a common pattern in capitalism is that
some new technology will be developed, like railways, for example.
Some people see the po potential profitability of rail as everybody pours in
creating railways. You get too many railways built.
the p ninety percent of the companies that create the railways go bust, but then we all have these rail systems that we benefit from afterwards. So that's the classic
uh Joseph Schumpeter was the person who best described that, uh Austrian economist from the early uh early twentieth century. So he said you'll get the the banks will finance a new investment area.
that investment produces a new technology which causes a burn while you're building the technology, but when the technology comes online, it undercuts existing businesses and causes a slump. So that boom and slump cycle
And AI is a a natural example of that. And what you get is massive over investment in the first instance, because everybody who invests in AI
has the ambition of being the only AI provider on the planet.
Therefore you get too many companies investing, there's too much money going into it. That's what causes a boom. But then when the technology comes online, because it undercuts existing technologies, you have a slump.
And when you look at the investment taking place at the moment.
The big tech companies, Meta, Amazon, Microsoft, Alphabet, own Google, Oracle is on track to spend
Seven hundred and twenty billion.
on AI infrastructure in twenty twenty six alone, which is less than twenty percent.
of the revenue that they're making. We are seeing a five to one ratio of money being spent versus money coming in, which is historically unsustainable. Yeah, and I think that's true. I think there there has to be a slump coming out of this. And that in a in a sense, that's part of the natural cyclical behavior of capitalism.
'Cause if you want to make a profit, you've got to bring in technology that undercuts everybody you're currently rivals with. So that's the railways are a classic example there. You know, you had to get around by carriage instead. You undermine the carriage companies by bringing in the railways.
But the ultimate benefits society benefits because now you've got the railways for transportation. So that's the same sort of thing that AI is doing this time around. But companies ninety percent of those companies are going to fail.
I mean this kind of what we're seeing already. So the failure rate of AI specific startups has hit ninety percent in twenty twenty six. Wow. Sluck.
Yeah, you you predicted that one correctly. Significantly higher than the seventy percent average for general technology. Roughly ninety five percent of enterprise AI pilots fail to move into into production when they incur massive costs. The other thing I think a lot about is um
A lot of startups now are raising a lot of money at crazy, crazy valuations. I I can think of one particular startup I know. They're making like a couple of million dollars a year. They've raised at a billion dollar valuation. Wow. Yeah. And because they've got the word AI on them. And the thing is.
Because everyone's so such in a frenzy at the moment about AI, they're probably gonna raise it a two billion valuation six months from now. Yeah.
When you think about what's going on there, someone somewhere
is putting their money in. And they're gonna lose it all. And they're gonna lose it all.
And when when everybody starts losing all their money very, very quickly, you see this contraction. Yeah. Where everybody realizes that their paper gains, the gains they thought they had on paper because of valuation went up.
have just evaporated. And when you see that, you have to quickly
Count your pennies.
Yeah, and pull back in again. Pull back in again.
And so on and so forth. So
I I actually do personally believe that we're probably within twenty four months of a
pretty severe contraction. And that won't just impact
Please.
tech oligarchs that'll impact all of us.
in different ways. Yeah. It's a boom and bust cycle. I mean the only thing which we've experienced in our own lives which is similar would be the telecommunications bubble and then the internet bubble between nineteen ninety and two thousand
one two thousand and two. Um, we don't get bubbles on the internet anymore because that's now a stable technology in that sense. Uh but it wasn't a big one. This is much bigger.
What do we do?
as entrepreneurs, as team members and companies, what do we do at this moment if what you're saying is correct that there will be a
A moment. A boom and bust.
Which I think every smart person that I've spoken to agrees that there will be a bust soon. Yeah.
Their timelines vary.
Yeah.
Right now.
In March, April twenty twenty six to prepare
For this.
Well, you put money aside if you can, you buy other assets you think are gonna survive the the Berman bus cycle. Like what?
That's the trouble. I mean gold's been driven up, gold's now been driven down. Uh people are buying bitcoin, but bitcoin is collapsing as well. Uh in some ways you you really you can't
It's like saying, What do I do during an earthquake to not fall over?
In terms of insulating yourself, I really can't see a way of insulating yourself from the downturn. But I don't I'm not worried as worried about that as long term consequences.
of AI because
This is the first technology which implies you can actually virtually eliminate labor.
as necessary for reducing output.
Because you can use AI.
Rather than clerks, you can use
Yeah, I know this is a long way from being feasible, but robots could replace process workers.

Something which employs
Seventy percent of the global population.
Is no longer necessary.
And then
What do you do in that situation? What I've seen which I respect
Coming out of the
check boros in America is they're talking in terms of universal basic income.
You think a universal basic income is a good idea, and we should probably explain what that is.
provides everybody with enough money to stay alive.
That's the basic idea. Rather than having to work for a living.
at the minimum you get paid an amount of money that means you can buy the goods and services that are necessary to stay alive. You don't necessarily prosper, but you get enough to survive.
And so that's the idea of the UBI. Now, at the moment to survive, you've got to have a job.
And like that guy you mentioned is working at three three jobs right now. If he got a UBI, he wouldn't have to work at those
three jobs, he might work at one, or he might actually consider his own business possibilities in that situation. So I think universal basic income
is a necessity
Given what robotics and AI can do to employment.

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And you think up to fifty percent of working class jobs could be wiped out because of AI and robotics. Yeah. I mean that's um that's been a prediction from the leaders of some of the biggest companies
In AI. I heard the the leader of anthropic
uh recently say the same thing that he thinks fifty percent of jobs could be wiped out. I think the the shocking thing that we've talked a lot about in the show is just
You know, there's been other sort of economic or industrial revolutions in the past that have caused for job displacement. Yeah.
But none, I would argue, at this speed.
No, and none that can replace virtually everything. See, one of th there's a there's a classic story I read back when I was
uh talking about the global financial crisis, uh came out of the New York Times article where they went to interview workers in an air conditioning factory. And there was one woman they found there whose job it was to place a thermocouple inside the
air conditioning units as they went past. So there's three thousand of these going past her a day. She's just placing one of these thermocouples where it needs to go inside the circuitry of the
And she said,
You don't have to love your job so long as it pays you money.
It was a totally boring job. That's all she's doing. The thing is the reason she got that job was she couldn't make a machine to replace her because the air conditioning units don't necessarily end up precisely at the same point. To make a machine that would do that is really difficult. Now if you train a robot on it, the robot
perception can ultimately get to the point where the robot can place that piece inside there, that particular unskilled job disappears. So people who work in jobs like that no longer have a possibility of getting a job. I think uh even you know Anthropic released a report. Anthropic are the makers of Claude, they repeat released a report saying that entry level positions
They're seeing a thirteen percent decline already in people getting those entry level jobs. And actually, as an employer, someone that spends literally all last night, I was looking through our inbox our recruitment inboxes at
Candidates and talent.
I have noticed myself changing.
I've noticed that um
People that I would have
given roles to
Maybe six months ago. Yeah.
I now have to think long and hard about whether there's gonna be technology that can do those exact roles instead. And it's it was a really shocking thing. I was saying to the team last night at like one AM in the office, I was like, this is a a prime example of a candidate. I was looking at this particular candidate that six months ago
I would have bitten that hand off.
But now
I have to pause.
Because my innovation team in the corner of the office, they're they're able to do that now with
These AI agents instead. Yeah. And so I am you know, uh you hear a lot
About the theoretical impact of AI. But you're actually making the decision yourself.
And then y it's theory. It's theory. It's this thing on my Twitter feed, like blah blah blah, whatever. You hear on a podcast, you get blah, blah, blah, whatever.
And then you find yourself
Actually.
your behavior's changing and you're going, Oh, it's very
hard to know the types of people to hire into our company. And I've kind of almost segmented them into these two groups where you've got
People that have very deep expertise. Yeah. I'd say it's three groups. People that have very, very deep expertise in a particular thing.
You know, like my CFO.
Group number two, I'd say.
are people that are AI proficient.
Who can actually handle the stuff and be the people who manage the agents. Yes, and they can redesign our workflows across every department in the company to be agentic.
Um about AI agents, that's kinda like the word used so agenic workflows. And then the third group of people
Are people who have skills that are highly beneficial, human to human and in r in real life. So like human to human salespeople.
that deal with relationships. And are very good at it. Yeah. And are very good at it. Because there are still a t certain type of sale where uh people want to meet the person, shake their hand, and say, Okay, you're responsible for this deal. Yeah. We're still in a situation where people don't want agents to do that. There's like the three groups. What I didn't say
is young people who have
Just come out of university, maybe don't know anything about agents. They don't have the deep expertise yet. Yeah. And when you look at the data, we'll throw some of the data up on the screen.
It appears that these sort of
entry level white collar jobs.
Are the ones that are
Right now, yeah. Uh some of these investment companies would hire like three or four hundred
Analysts.
To look at
um companies and make decisions. That is one example of a of a role that's very at risk now. We've got an investment fund. We need one analyst, Molly.
Six months ago, we were interviewing more analysts. We now realize that we just need Molly and we need to give Molly AI.
Yeah. And she can set up I think Molly said to me yesterday when I left the office at midnight uh when she left the office at midnight, she's now set up three agents, these air agents.
As her team.
Those would have been three people. Like I've developed a software package called Ravel, uh which I've got one program for. And I I teach an online course as well, and I'd give Ravel as part of that online course. And one of the members of the course
said he's using an AI to build ravel models.
And he's also using an AR to write the code for Hind Ravel. He gave a demo this a couple of days ago. And
You know, I watched it happen on the screen as he built a model of simulation system and
he was messy on one stage, but it produced the correct mathematics. So he's showing you can actually he he's trying to tell me that we should uh get my main programmer to learn to drive agents
Now my main programmer

highly gift people. And he said it wouldn't be worth my while to have me telling an AI what to do because what I lose in terms of my own initiative I can't I just sort of balance out. It's really a okay. But he hires a junior programmer, then the junior programmer would be one who's trained to drive the AI.
I I do think programmers are fine. Actually, there were some stats that I saw the other day that showed there's been this huge demand and people trying to hire programmers. It's interesting because you hear stats from Spotify. Spotify saying we haven't written a human line of code since December. And I'm very good friends with the guys at Spotify. I was actually with the CEO the other day a couple of weeks ago in in Austin. And you you hear that, and I did check that with them, that's true.
So you assume that that means we don't need programmers anymore.
But if you think about Jevin's paradox, when something becomes
you know, German's paradox is the old analogy. Cheaper, you use more of it. Yeah. Yeah. So like when coal became cheaper, people were worried that maybe the coal industry was out of business or trains, whatever. But actually what ended up happening is people just drove more trains and they used them for other things like transport. Yeah and the same applies, I think, for AI. When
Creating technology becomes easier.
Every company starts using more technology. So media companies, lawyers
You name the company.
Executive assistants, they all become coders. And actually the demand for highly effort really anyone who knows
how to code or program. Yeah. It we're seeing it, it's exploding.
Yeah.
But
I just think the job disruption in the near some for most people is gonna be pretty Yeah. I mean I mean there's there's ways in which
AI and robotics should be welcomed.
Because
Yeah.
means the possibility exists, and it's only a possibility, that we can no longer have to
be exploited to get an income.
'Cause if you look at over the the Marxist attitude towards capitalism is that cap workers capitalists exploit the workers. Okay. Um the real world is we've been exploiting energy.
mutually, both labor and capital exploits energy.
We could have a future where we don't have to
work for a living and therefore you could do what you want to do for a living. That it's a Star Trek future. That's that's the possibility that it promises. But at the same time
Uh it could actually eliminate the jobs.
that people currently rely upon. And what I fear is we have two possibilities. We have a future where Star Trek's high future where you have replicators that make the goods and we consume and and we all live a energy abundant life. Uh or the
Hunger games.
where there's one little elite that gets has all the robots and lives extremely well, and we tolerate and oppress the vast majority, and they end up, you know, hunger game
Entertainment.
Those are the two possibilities we face.
I do think the cost of goods and services will come down, which is great. Yeah I think robotics, you know, if Elon is right.
And I often say with Elon, like his timelines are not always accurate, but he does tend to deliver magic. He ultimately delivers, but it you know, he always overpromises and delivers later than he plans.
And if he's right about when he says there's gonna be more humanoid robots, his Optimus robots than humans
And he says also in his predictions that
there's gonna be no need to study to be a surgeon because the robots are gonna be so much more
uh advanced and better than any h living surgeon. That would
imply that surgery and other sort of medical diagnoses and procedures are gonna be incredibly cheap, incredibly quick.
Great. How do you pay for them? That's the next question.
Yeah, so uh yeah, how do you pay for them and uh do people want to you know. The amount of copper inside a robot
You're talking you know several
kilos per robot. Um
Do we have enough to produce eight billion of them? And maybe, you know, surgeons do much more than just operate.
Yeah. There's a human element to the medical profession, which I think is sometimes unappreciated. Like I would I don't know if I'm quite ready to go talk to a robot about my health yet. Maybe I'll adjust. I wanted to come back to something you actually said earlier. You talked about Bitcoin briefly. I've heard you say that you think Bitcoin's going to zero.
Yeah.
Okay, this is worrying.
I think I have some Bitcoin.
You're an economist. You're saying that bitcoin is going to zero. Why?
Because ultimately, because of its reliance upon energy.
I mean I you know, you you Max you're Max Kaiser and Stacey Herbert, have you met them at all? No. They were sort of the original proselytizers for good bitcoin and and they're now uh living in I think El Salvador.
Um which has adopted Bitcoin as a form of currency.
When they told me about Bitcoin I could have bought it for a pound of
a bitcoin, which would have been I would have been bloody maybe wealthier than you if I'd done that. The reason I didn't is they explain that the way that the public ledger is kept safe
is that it takes too much energy to break it.
So each transaction requires ten minutes of
computer processing time globally, by the looks of it, to actually create an extra Bitcoin. And that means it's too expensive for somebody to try to break the ledger. That means it's got a huge requirement for energy use. And I
believe.
Knowing what I know from climate scientists that at some point we're going to realise we're using far too much energy on the planet. We've got to cut the energy consumption, and the two easiest things to cut out to reduce energy consumption are cryptocurrencies and international travel. But aren't you saying that, you know, nuclear energy is becoming
Vogue again.
And they're talking a lot, you know, about
It's the amount of time it takes to build that stuff.
I mean China's building nuclear power stations at a hell of a rate.
And much, much cheaper.
So let's become a big
Yeah, again, uh there's a guy called Simon Marchow, I might recommend you
get in touch with as well. And Simon is an engineer who claims that we simply don't have the physical minerals necessary to support a completely solar and wind based
uh energy system. He's got people who criticize his
Analysis definitely, but
we still are using far more physical resources than we're aware of at the moment on the planet, and the availability of of various
Critical elements.
that we need for the system we have right now. It's much less
Abundant.
than we would like it to be.
So a lot of these things about, you know, robotics taking over.
Do we have the minerals for it? Solar power, do we have the minerals? The answer is is not is not
Yes. Okay. Sometimes the answer is no. Other times it's it's dubious. But I think that energy requirement alone is a problem. You're saying that we're gonna have we' we we're gonna have to cut back on our energy consumption. But I mean the direction of travel has been we've been able to produce more and more and more and more energy.
And dumping it into the environment. The problem the problem about the the use of energy is it's happening on a planet.
Okay.
Can the biosphere
Cope with the waste that we jump into it.
as a result of using that energy, and that is something which economists are completely stupid on.
beyond stupid. They've trivialized the dangers of the amount of it resources we use and the amount of energy we use. So I don't think that energy future is possible on this biosphere at the moment.
It's possible in the future.
If we get off the biosphere.
So in that sense I'm even more of a space cadet than Elon Musk is. I think we have to plan to take production off planet. But while we're constrained on the biosphere, the biosphere's constraints will stop us using as much energy as as we used wish to use.
What are you what are your closing statements on this whole situation with the war and Iran and everything that's going on from a geopolitical
perspective. The basic thing is our system is far more fragile.
then we've convinced ourselves that it is.
And we can make uh observations about potential futures which presume a robustness we don't have.

is destroyed either by
military conflicts or by over extending what we
put into the biosphere, then we can fall off what's called the Seneca cliff.
We can go from an abundant future to a collapse.
The people at home should be doing
To course correct.
The path that you think we're on.
Stop electing fools.
Um electing Trump was an enormous mistake. We've got
Call politicians
We follow what's called neoliberal
Political philosophies they've what put us in this problem.
It hasn't worked. We need to reverse back to having a human oriented
And physically realistic.
view of how the economy managed should be managed and how the biosphere should be managed. We have to take care of our home.
And in an essential sense, we're destroying our home.
I'm thinking we can keep on doing that indefinitely.
We can't.
Our poem is Planet Earth.
Planet Earth has got physical
restraints. We haven't respected them. Planet Earth will tell us what it thinks of that this century.
And which leaders do you think we should be electing?
Do you think we should be elected to the other thing?
Because what
We
Yeah, then do it was end up getting uh we we we panned at a narcissists.
We pander to people who believe they can solve all our problems. We end up with megalomaniacs.
Making decisions.
If you look back at where Uth Athenian democracy came from, Athenian democracy didn't use elections, it used a process of like random number.
generators to select intelligent people to fulfill essential roles in those societies. And they they
weren't even people you got to know by name in that sense. We know Trump here, we know Starmer here, we have Albanese over here. We end up getting narcissists and Meglamaniacs.
directing us and they're the last people you need to make decisions.
When you're thinking about your own money, as an economist, what are you doing to protect your I'm not doing much. I mean I I've been a a I've been a a crusader for reforming economic theory for my whole life. I've sort of neglected
This side of things.
Чимай.
detriment.
I've got to say.
Um but I
really am focused on what's sustainable for everybody rather than what I can make as my own cut.
And I don't think we've got a sustainable economy at the moment. We have a philosophy of economics which leads to breakdowns.
I I I'm asking that'cause I've got so many friends and listeners that ask me often like, Should I be buying a house right now? Should you think I should be investing in gold? Do you think I should be saving my money? Should I be, I don't know, investing in technology companies? Yeah.
And I'm wondering if you had a perspective for them. Not on that. No, like I've I've really left that area alone. I'm I'm actually looking at the overall system and saying, how do we make the system sustainable so that people can live within it.
And what we've got is an unsustainable system. And you're asking me how do people s survive within an unsustainable system? Answer is they don't. We always think we can do something at the individual level to cope with what's happening in the system around us. That only works if the system around us is stable. What is a better system then?
Uh I think I think what China has done is a better in a b better direction. They have a they have a collective focus as well as an individual focus.
It's call communist.
So you think communism's better than capitalism?
I think a system which reflects
The need for a cohesive society as well as individual gain is needed. And the s system in China is closer to that than the system in America. In in China, I listen, I don't know a ton about this, but they have a leader who stays in power.
And suppresses the people's decision making, entrepreneurialism. Equally you've got a system to get into the communist party, you've got to have
uh hardly you've got to be educated to get in and you have to perform
to some extent in the region in which you begin your role. Trevor Burrus But you're not saying you think the West should adopt communism, No, I'm saying the West should adopt a system which
Reflects the need for a cohesive society. Is that socialism?
Socialism is closer to it. I mean I uh the words are all tainted.
Okay, the the if you go back do you eat Cadbury's chocolate?
I try not to. You have insure. Okay. Catweys was a socialist enterprise.
Okay. It was formed as a a belief we have to uh want to give the workers the best possible situation while also selling a profitable product. Mondragon in Spain is another cooperative started by a Catholic priest.
uh of all things. We tend to be very binary in the West. We say you either have competition or you have cooperation.
We need to be more like the East in the sense of the idea of Yin Yang. You have to have both
Okay. Cooperation and competition. And so that for you is the closest thing is socialism. The closest to socialism and what China China has done that better than Russia. So you go back to the USSR, uh that was
they they were disastrous in terms of product development. China's been extremely successful on that front. They've learned from the mistakes of being too centralized and too top down in Russia to have both the top down and the bottom up
dynamic going on.
And capitalism is what the UK and the US have adopted as their sort of economic. Now the real the s successful society combines both. You have cooperation, you also have competition.
And we've pushed it far too far in the competitive end and not enough in the cooperative. And what comes out of that as well is this co op qu competitive tends to be short term focused. What can I make a profit out of in the time that
the money that I've borrowed is I'm gonna be able to make more of a profit than the interest I'm paying on the money I've
I've created and if the interest if the longer it takes to get the the repayment, the less likely you are to make the investment. So what you get is a focus upon short term, with just a market system. Whereas with the long term you say what's going to last for a hundred years?
And like and what that means is you build the infrastructure for the long term while you allow competition to occur in the short term.
It's getting the balance right. We've got the balance extremely wrong.
Professor Steve.
Thank you. Um I highly recommend people go check out our YouTube channel where you make videos uh all the time about what's going on in the world. You give your opinion on economic issues, political issues, the Iran war. So if you people are listening and they want to learn more from Professor Steve, then look down below and you should see his YouTube channel linked um next to our name.
we're gonna try and collaborate on this post and I'll put you the dis the link to your channel in the description below for anyone that wants to check you out and subscribe.
It's so fascinating. I s especially the stuff about around the raw materials coming out the straight up, because I I really had no idea. I al it's just it's quite staggering to me that we're so dependent on one region of the world. And I think from watching your videos over the last couple of weeks,
It's really made me understand the unintended consequences of war generally. Yeah. But specifically this war in Iran.
Um so thank you for turning the lights on for me. I really, really appreciate this. And I hope we can meet again soon and have a conversation and hopefully
You know, this all resolves itself in a way that's good for everybody. I hope so. I'm I'm having my seventy third birthday tomorrow. I have my have on seventy fourth as well, but I think there's a question mark over that now.
Well, I did hear it was your
Birthday tomorrow.
I think the team have gotten you a little something. Oh my God.
Happy birthday.
Holy hell. On this blow the candles out? Yes, you should.
Okay, you get a wish. You blew them all out, so you get a wish. Well, I wish for peace in the Middle East. Okay, that's the main thing to say about right now.
That is a gorgeous cake, I have to say. That's a marvelous cake, yeah. That's my own homework, but it's not this better be eaten by the crew,'cause I'm not gonna eat all this myself, okay? Anybody get out of a knife and start slicing up? My God. Thank you so much, we don't.