The Sh*t Show: the spin room is at full throttle

We had a deep and meaningful discussion last week with Michael Haupt which left us all very reflective, but we didn’t have time to discuss the main news and the escalation continues, with spin rooms operating at full throttle. Immediately after our last show, the #NoKings protests in America overtook our newsfeeds, while the ‘big birthday bash’ was shocking in so many ways. Do we even remember that now?

Because since then, a much wider war with Iran is playing out before our eyes, and we still don’t know what the US will do, or if Trump will decide to get involved, bypassing Congress. Other leaders are stepping in to join the battle, but citizens of the US and its allies are not supportive of more war in the Middle East, in fact, it is creating a split within the MAGA faithful. The outcome is still up in the air and could change before we even go live with the show, and when you factor in the wider implications with China and Russia, the risks are very grave, not just for Iran, but for the whole world. 

Meanwhile, the world’s top scientists are warning that we have only three years left to limit warming to 1.5°C, with the reduction in fossil fuels needed to achieve this a staggering 80%. Meanwhile an intense heatwave is gathering pace across the Northern Hemisphere, with the UK now predicting the possibility of a 46.6°C (116F) day, a temperature the UK is not ready for. Tourism season is also changing, especially in Southern Europe, as even the perception it being too hot turning people away – which will have significant impacts economically for Europe.

Meanwhile, Mexico is bracing for Hurricane Erick – the first of the season, children born today will live in a world with 50% less food than is available today, seal numbers in Antarctica have dropped more than 50% since the 1970s, the G7 started off as a fiasco with more rumours of Trump’s physical health circulating, traditional media is in free fall, the “Nimbus” strain of Covid is growing rapidly with huge percentages of the population not maintaining vaccinations, and the rapid move in AI development brings risks and opportunities. 

It’s a big moment in time, and we’re going to pull it all together, to try and make sense of what’s going on, as well as what requires our attention. If you want a top-level view, that’s what the show is all about, so why not come and have a listen and get involved in the conversation? 

We’d love to have you. Join us Friday 20th June 2025, 8am UK, 9am EU, 2pm TH, 3pm SG, 5pm AEST. Streaming across various locations. 

The Sh*t Show is a Livestream happening every Friday, where Andrea T Edwards, Dr. David Ko, Richard Busellato and Joe Augustin, as well as special guests, discuss the world’s most pressing issues across all angles of the polycrisis, working to make sense of the extremely challenging and complex times we are all going through, plus what we can do about it. Help us move the needle so we can change the name of the show to something more genteel when (or if) it is no longer a sh*t show. 

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To get in touch with me, all of my contact details are here https://linktr.ee/andreatedwards

My book Uncommon Courage, an invitation, is here https://mybook.to/UncommonCourage

My book 18 Steps to an All-Star LinkedIn Profile, is here https://mybook.to/18stepstoanallstar

Transcript

Dr. David Ko: 0:00

You. Welcome to the shit show. My name is Andrea Edwards.

Unknown: 0:06

I'm David cope.

Richard Busellato: 0:09

Here I am Richard bucellotto bottom left,

Joe Augustin: 0:12

and my name is Joe Augustine, and together, we're the s team. We've come together to try and untangle the poly crisis, which to some people, is a bit of a mystery itself. It's all the different things that are happening simultaneously in the room, in the world. It's all kind of affecting us, and it's all a problem some people have. I've been hearing the word shit show actually being used quite liberally by quite a lot of people recently. So I'm, I'm going to take some credit for that. I think, I think our show maybe has had an influence. I think, I think our show maybe has had an influence. Maybe

Dr. David Ko: 0:48

Exactly, yeah, intersecting crisis all overlapping and happening at the same time. So, yeah, so David, I'm going to do

Joe Augustin: 0:59

some of the social media stuff as well, just at the beginning. Here, you know, right? So if you're watching this now just joining us, give us a like that kind of a, you know, preemptive like, if you like, the word preemptive may come up in the show again. Give us a preemptive subscribe as well. Because you never know you might like the show. You might like what it is. And so that when you when we come on next time, you'll get a an alert as well, and hopefully you join us live for the discussion. So yes, on to talking about our absentee member from last week.

Dr. David Ko: 1:30

Yeah. So, yeah, yeah, yeah, we missed you because it was quite a spiritual conversation. So we know you would have enjoyed it. It was fantastic, but we didn't get any time to talk about the news. And there's some, still some news items from last week that we put in for this week that we want to talk about. But I think maybe we can do that alternate between guests and just news focus every other week or something, if we have to, especially, especially right now, when people are talking to me, they're just so overwhelmed by everything that's going on, they can't see straight. So, you know, people are, people are struggling, and we like to help people where, I mean, I I've, I can't, I mean, the g7 is a topic for this week. I haven't had time to look at that at all, because there's so many other things that I'm paying attention to. My my browser tabs are just full of open articles. I haven't got time to read. How you guys coping with it all the maelstrom.

Richard Busellato: 2:22

Not, yeah, I think it's, it's been incredibly busy for news, a lot of potentially pivotal news that will influence us for quite some time to come. And then, you know, today is midsummer day in Sweden. So it's a very big day. It's probably our second biggest holiday of the year after Christmas. So yeah, it's been pretty busy overall. I have to say it's

Unknown: 2:51

that's when the Swedes, especially up from the north, get to be able to say, you know, we can stay up all night, all day, and from now on is months of sunshine.

Richard Busellato: 3:02

Yeah. I mean, it's since I haven't lived there for, you know, 30 odd years almost, but I've been up maybe once or twice this time of the year. You forget how incredibly bright it is when you get up there, you know. And having said that, Stockholm is not particularly far north, you know, you have two thirds of the country above there, but even there, it's like 90 minutes of and it's not complete darkness. It's like it gets sun goes down, but it doesn't get dark, and then the sun is up full throttle at three in the morning. Again, it's it's quite weird.

Unknown: 3:34

Yeah, I remember seeing this, watching this Swedish detective story, and in there's this scene where the detectives in this house, and there's like a little young, you know, youth disco going on there, kind of like, you know, sort of 18 year olds stuff. And it's all kind of, you know, the little cover plates and that kind of thing that you imagine, quite dark and stuff. And then she goes outside, and it's bright sunlight. It's middle of the night. Essentially, it's not bright sunlight. It's that sort of Cody sun light that you get in that way. It's just made me think, wow, you know what? Really, the sun doesn't go down where they are.

Richard Busellato: 4:12

No, it does not. It's weird. As

Dr. David Ko: 4:15

someone from the southern hemisphere, I could never get used to it. Winter was worse, where the sun sort of comes up and you can kind of see it for a minute, then it's gone and it's just dark again. I hated that. I definitely got the sads when I lived in the UK. Was very miserable for me

Unknown: 4:32

last mid summer. So, like you said, Absolutely, lots of things on the news. And you know, what the thing that does concern me, and again, to borrow Joe's word, preemptive, this sort of preemptive strike that we're seeing, especially in Iran, in that way, I think, I think, I think the piece that I get from it, that people don't mention is China from this. Yeah. Uh, 90% of Iranian oil goes to China so well that that's a lot in that way.

Dr. David Ko: 5:07

So before we dig into that, David, should we? Should we start off with our Not, not anything else in the agenda, just some, some news that's caught your attention that is maybe a bit weird or wonderful

Joe Augustin: 5:23

to state how difficult this particular section of the programme is supposed to do, is we're supposed to find some things that distracted us and caught our attention that's not going to be actually in the show, finding myself being very mundane about this. They're painting our flats

Dr. David Ko: 5:45

well. So you must be in the right electorate. You must have voted right in the elections, right?

Joe Augustin: 5:51

Well, you know, I think the one thing that does happen here is actually the constant progress of things, so every five years, and people don't realise this, but almost every five years, and it's not to do with the elections. It is actually to do with the rules that we have for buildings. They have to be maintained, they have to be refreshed, right? So we've literally had that. In fact, before the elections were announced, we actually had our own poll, which was on the colour of flats, what the colour of the building was going to be. And so, yeah, that that all happened, and now we were going outside. And if, if you, if you left last week for a holiday and you came back, you might be lost, because the building is not the same anymore. But yeah, we've had that so little excitement. I think the cats still know where they are, though, so they're okay

Richard Busellato: 6:38

with their food. Is Richard? Well, my quirky little left field story for for this particular week is that, you know, where I come from, ice hockey is obviously the national game, and it still attracts huge amount of attention, for very good reasons, because it is very beautiful, great game to watch for spectators. It's so intense and everything and the day before yesterday, we ended officially the season with the Stanley Cup final, which to me, I always knew it would run into mid June, but given the heat wave you have in the UK and you're in the evening trying to catch up on the highlights, it's like you're still playing ice hockey. And obviously the trophy this year was born by that famous winter town called Florida Panthers over Edmonton Oilers. It's just weird, and it's it's more weird when you live, where you live, I think in Sweden, you know that is going to carry on into sort of June. But one aspect that actually frightens me, and I think connects with what's happening in a lot of other areas of the world, and which cannot possibly be good, is these players play an incredibly physically intense game, and they see some for the top two teams, and with the final middle of the June when I was playing junior, You know, at much lower level, we went back training middle of August, and we went on ice in late August. I am sure these players will be called back for training camp in the middle of July, maybe, maybe third week of July, given the physical constraint, if not constraints, the physical exhaustion you have after playing in excess of 100 games during a season, to have two three weeks respite can not in any way be good for the body. And you know, for another show, maybe we can have a look at what sort of motor neurone disease cases have popped up in modern sport, particularly in the full contact sports, because I think it's a very, very frightening statistics. And at my lower level of understanding, I think this is completely linked to the extraordinary physicality of the game and the fact you have no respite.

Dr. David Ko: 8:56

Interesting. I wouldn't have picked you as a nice hockey man. I was too big. David, anything, anything grabbed your

Unknown: 9:07

attention? Yes. On that sports thing, Queens club, you know, Tennis Championship that's going on grass court, which is kind of uniquely British in that way. The thing about it that I didn't know about this until I went there, because Queen's club is actually down the road from me, is that it's a tiny little courtyard almost in between, sort of buildings in West Kensington. And when you go there, the people who live in the buildings next to it are kind of sitting at their windows looking out at the tournament. It must be a fantastic thing. And the area itself is not, you know, it's nowhere near as big a space as as Wimbledon. In that way is this kind of quite quaint. It's just basically one, one block between, you know, it's like the gap between the. Gap that doesn't exist. It's like in Harry Potter, when the buildings open up and you get this little gap in between this one, they're hidden in that kind of space, and they managed to hold this big tournament in there, which is actually quite exciting when you think about it. But you don't necessarily need all the other things and all the other stuff in that way. I think that's bad about it is that the Andy Murray arena, which is where they hold the centre court, is built so that people can't actually directly overlook it. I think it'd be really nice if people around the area could just watch into that as well.

Dr. David Ko: 10:34

Okay, well, hopefully that's not all your also your distraction at the end, because, you know, we've got to do that. So just, just, just a couple of things. So last week I mentioned the Tulsi Gabbard, you know, whatever she is, comment, her nuclear threat video that I found very strange. Well, apparently Donald Trump didn't like it either. So that's part of her being a bit dismissed. Apparently, the Trump family have released their gold mobile phones. And I was kind of like, okay, okay, all right, so I remember working for a company 745 a month, yeah, exactly right, yeah. I know 4745 Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, that's right. I was like, so in all ways, it's weird, and the fact it's going to be made in China, and all that sort of stuff, you know, like, it's all weird. But I remember years ago, when I worked for it, and it research company, and all of the analysts that covered the telecom space, I was like, How long until you guys don't really have any research to do anymore, because the telco industry was it didn't, it didn't know how to reinvent itself for the for the world that we have built since. But interestingly, launching your own telco company, there's a there's an acronym that that represents it is a very, very common thing and lucrative, if you get it right. But yeah, it's just basically you're like an OEM. So yeah, I thought that was kind of interesting. But the real story I wanted to bring attention to is which kind of feels ironic that it's happening right now. Extreme syphilis symptoms are showing up. Now this is a piece in the Atlantic. It's talking about the US. It's not just happening in the US. But what's extreme about it is, typically, there's all sorts of things that symptoms that they know what they are. But this one is involving the eyes, and people are getting blind because they don't know, like when they go in with these eye issues, the doctors don't know that it potentially could be syphilis. What I found fascinating is, since 2018 to, I think 2022 there's been an 80% increase in syphilis cases in the US. It just feels like a biblical, almost a biblical disease. But when I say it's ironic because, because, of course, Hitler was known to have had syphilis as well, right? So it sort of feels weird that it's now, it's emerging back in but anyway, I thought that was kind of an interesting piece of news in the mix. I

Joe Augustin: 13:18

mean, I think it's interesting that this is just the light hearted part of the show,

Richard Busellato: 13:24

exactly, but I find it, I mean, I was mesmerised when, when you showed me the article, right? You've always been aware of its existence, because it's very much a biblical disease. And you know, a lot of famous people throughout the sort of 18th, 19th and 20th centuries have had the decision was incurable for a long time, and for me, it was just one of those things that I would almost have equated with plague or smallpox. Surely, it's not around anymore. You never heard of anyone who's ever had it, and I just thought it was gone more or less maybe, you know, like plague, there are a few cases that we isolate in the world, and we can deal with them now because we have antibiotics that actually attack it, but the fact that you have hundreds of 1000s of cases in The US alone really, bowled me over?

Dr. David Ko: 14:22

Yeah, yeah, me too, yeah. The fact

Unknown: 14:27

that you know, the fact that is is it demonstrates itself in this way in your site, and those sort of things, which might have done in more time, is that just had a very because of variation in the virus itself, bacteria in is there some sort of, like the progression of the strain

Dr. David Ko: 14:51

that's bacterial, right? Yeah. So

Richard Busellato: 14:54

they mutate. Yeah, they mutate, right? Bacteria mutate too, and it must be just. Is evolving as it gets transmitted along the way and time passes. Well, is it the other way around that we're evolving exactly because we potentially, yeah, stuff that we're taking in that completely kills off our immune system and our ability to fight it up, including, right, how to deliberately destroy our immune system? Yeah, all

Dr. David Ko: 15:22

right. So let's get serious, even though that kind of is I'm sure I didn't say light hearted, just more of a wow. That definitely a wow factor for me. Okay, so I know a lot of people are really, really worried about what's going on in Israel and Iran. I'm concerned that the eyes off Gaza, because that has not stopped. Are we heading towards World war three? Will Cooler heads prevail? And when you look at the team in the White House, it's hard to believe that that's possible. Will Netanyahu just do whatever the hell he wants, and know that Trump's going to back him like because it kind of feels like he's doing that. I kind of feel like Israel is just saying, and has been for like, the last 12 months, we got an opportunity just to wipe out all our enemies and all our concerns. Let's just go. Let's just do it. We've got Trump in the White House. We can get away with it. So, David, do you want to kick us off and talk about some of those wider implants? Implications and why this really matters?

Unknown: 16:26

You know, you prompted me one thing which I've momentarily forgotten, but actually is very deep in my mind. Back in the First World War, there's this poet, Wilfred Owen, who wrote lots of war poetry, and one of the most one, most famous one, was in Patrice nobis, whatever, and so on, some Latin thing that I don't remember, but essentially is a is to to make a mockery of this idea that, you know, we dive our country, and it's a brave thing and the valiant thing to do in that way. And you think back about, you know, The Deer Hunter, you know the Vietnam War, the sort of films that came about, even mash, you know, the TV series about that is the the anti war concerns come from the people who fight the war, seize the horrors of it. And that was always the kind of case. And even if you read the Three Kingdoms, that kind of ancient Chinese chess text about the war and the description of that, it was nothing glorious and glamorous about it. In that way, today's fighting is done remotely. It is like in brief, in 1984 where the three major areas of the world from what they call have to have a decision that they are they have to remain in permanent state of war with each other. But they're going to do this by people actually naturally going off to their dying machines and just dying off in that way. So what you have here is you have completely separated this brutality and violence of fighting. What you have are the civilians being killed, but you don't have these soldiers. The soldiers are glorified in whatever video game form that they do, or the spy in going to the place and setting up the drone factory, whatever it is that they might have been. And that's a horrific thing, because it means that we are heading into a stage where war is just something that happens, and everyone is a bystander, and no one is actually involved in that fighting, and there are victims, and we're all victims, and there are victims in the hospitals, there are victims in the flats in the apartment blocks, but If you think of what's actually happened over this time, the fighting Ukraine has gotten a lot worse. And again, this is not a remote drone type thing, the disaster and the deaths and the murder of all the people in in Gaza by siege, the number of people killed waiting for aid in Gaza. All of those things have disappeared off for this kind of very theatrical conflict that's happened now. So that's, that's the first part to it. So to start it, what has happened with this Iran and Israel conflict has really embedded and crystallised this sense that conflict doesn't involve people soldiers fighting in that way. That's a horrific thing, because the brutality is of it is what holds us back, and we've lost that brutality of it. We just see victims.

Dr. David Ko: 19:44

So you'd have to you look at the war conventions you know that have been signed about you know who you can kill and who you can't all the wars at the moment, you know all crime indictments are because they're they are killing civilians or children or so. Uh, like it almost will make the new form of warfare will, will make all of that stuff obsolete too, right?

Unknown: 20:06

Yeah, yeah. And it will be, it will be horrible. So, here's a here's what's going on. It's a ballistic missile war. It's a missile, basically, rockets, drones and those sort of things, probably something like two decades back or more, I China formed the fourth, what you call it, section of its military. Conventionally, we're used to the Army, the Navy and the Air Force, and it created the missile force. And you first, you're beginning to hear about the hypersonic missiles in Iran, the Fatah two, I think, and these are the ballistic missiles, basically fall from the sky. You shoot them so far up into into the atmosphere, they effectively fall from the sky. And journey time is very short as a result. But you can see it because it goes all the way up in the atmosphere and falls from the sky. The hypersonic missiles are supposed to fly lower and at very fast speed so that you don't really see, you don't really have that signalling time and so on in that way. But all of these things work operate on the basis that you don't have soldiers actually having to go and fight in that way. They never die. They're just in their little kind of video game bunkers playing in that form. Nothing prevents these weapons from getting pretty horrific. The Chinese ones have nuclear warheads, for example, and the US wants to blow them out of the sky. So the Chinese are probably looking at this and says, fantastic. You know what? You cause an air you cause a nuclear explosion in the air somewhere in the Atlantic or the Pacific. We just got to time the wind direction to be right, and then your entire country is now going to lock itself down. We don't need to do anything else. You're the one. Else. You are the one who's creating the explosion, right? So warfare is becoming very, very different, and people are not aware of that, and they're allowing that to happen in that way and and the people still think of war in the way that it used to be fought, that somehow soldiers, and there are people in that way. But I

Dr. David Ko: 22:28

suppose when you look at the Ukraine, Russia war, and you sort of see the meat grinder, God, I hate that term of Russian forces, like a million forces, a million men killed. I suppose that's probably why people are still sitting in that thinking of, you know, because Richard, I think, was last week when you were talking about AI jets versus AI jets, you know, fighting in dog fights, right? And you kind of think, what, how does anyone, how does anyone win that?

Richard Busellato: 22:54

Yeah,

Unknown: 22:57

I think this is the point. If I, if I may, just finish off, yeah, in that way. You know what? What happens is that nobody wins it, it carries on, and civilians need to die. That's what war is becoming.

Dr. David Ko: 23:15

Yeah. So the profiteering is obviously made by the people who are building them, building the equipment. And I did say a long time ago, if you want to invest in in shares, go, go for the defence industry, right? But yeah, all the robotics, all the all the the planes, all the weaponry. It that's, yeah, it's, but yeah, so it's a Forever War future that we're moving towards 1984

Unknown: 23:42

with. Is that there is this Forever War, this three kind of blocks, the in there are in permanent Forever War, and it supports this very kind of messed up perception of the economy,

Dr. David Ko: 24:02

yeah. And then you've got Space Force in the mix as well, right? Yes. And China, China is definitely moving ahead in that direction too. So,

Unknown: 24:13

and going back to my comment earlier about Iran, and what this means in is that actually, you know, the US, undoubtedly, is trying to think, Okay, how, how do we increase the pressure on China in that way? And I just want to have a add a completely different, apparently different segue to this. Yesterday, I had a call. I had a series of calls in the morning, and conversations, really exciting conversations, one with a lady in Hong Kong, a gentleman in South Korea, followed by a call with a young man in Kenya, followed by conversation with a young man in the UK, and then someone in Amsterdam, in that way, and all these people in. Have a desire for a better world, a world where people is what matters along with that. So we live in a world today where it's possible for people, genuinely from all around the world, to get together and have conversations and get to like each other or not against this. What you have is a a have is a hegemony of power in a structure carried over from a long time past that is desperately trying to maintain its kind of old storytelling of the enemy. They are the enemy. Those are the enemy. And when you come down to it, really, what's the issue with people in different places making different things for other people to use? And you know, if they this, the aspect where they say, Well, they've taken our jobs by manufacturing those things there instead of here. That applied as much to the factory down Chocolate Factory down the road versus the one over the other side in the time. It honestly is no different in terms of what's going on. The question is, how do you find yourself and young identity? That's what our conversations are about. So you can find your place in the world. But these war that are going on, the driver to it is all false stories. All of those drivers to our full stories. This is a greater this word called Silent vanil, of the things that you do not tell

Richard Busellato: 26:49

Yeah, but it's, it's, it's very logical, because throughout history, what defines an empire is its ability To identify the enemy, because that's what gives the the structure and the cohesion of that existing empire. We have an enemy, hence we can justify our existence and the means we take to to combat that enemy. If you don't have an enemy, the reason for maintaining the status quo kind of vanishes, right? And there are strong forces who wants to maintain the status quo.

Unknown: 27:26

And that's what you've always said, is that you don't need to listen to that. You know, you we have individual, sovereign economic power as individuals on how we spend money and what we do, and I think that that is really a layer of governments, you know, we miss, we don't appreciate, and that's really, you know, the most simplest thing is, it's not we had conversations with people about, you know, how we can change political parties, how we need this political parties, and those sort of things, is actually every political party out, ultimately, is a local political party in terms of kind of and actually the ability to for people to form the governance and as Richard as said, Before you know that's, that's the message of Elinor Ostrom. How did you describe her as the economist, but she's, she's certainly one of the most then you're saying something

Richard Busellato: 28:35

like, I like her, but, but she has had the ability to identify at a human level, at an individual level, that our actions matter, and we find a way to actually forge the societies that we wish for, if we delegate that power to the communities. And she showed that it actually does work. We can set our own norms, and we can set our own economic rules for how this community will open and to give

Dr. David Ko: 29:13

So David, I think you're having some problems. Are you having some problems with your Wi Fi? Is that what's happening? Yeah, I think, yeah, yeah, just to make sure,

Unknown: 29:25

just to finish off with one comment, and the comment is that the I'm just going to try and lift my laptop up so that there's more airflow and then for it to cool. And that's the issue of oil price. Oil had fallen down to below $60 that's below the price where the US manufacturers can make a profit. Now it's gone back up because of what's going on the countries in the Middle East, Iran, as much as. Saudi Arabia and others need oil price higher, much higher, in order for their national budgets to balance. When you when you look at it in that way, the incentive to continue this in this way where it just kind of like lobs things at each other and keep it going so few civilians have to die. That's just the way it is. Is the collateral cost of being able to keep our regime, our status quo, going. And that's as much for the US as it is for the countries in the Middle East, and it's as much for people like China, which is kind of concerned about what's going to happen to our supply of energy that 90% of Iranian oil makes up 16% of Chinese oil, of the oil Chinese import, China imports, and China imports, a large amount from Russia is not going to try and import more from Russia. Things are really the other part that people don't realise is that production is very much at the capacity, certainly at the capacity of what the current economics can allow it to it's not that we are not producing as much as we can. We literally are producing as much as prices allowing to do. Yeah,

Dr. David Ko: 31:17

so they've got, they get oil from Russia and Iran, but they also get it from Saudi and obviously, the Saudi Iran history is a bit complicated. So what, what do you see from a, you know, how China gets pulled into this? What? What? What has to happen? Because they've been stocking up on oil, you know, for for this year, right? So they've, they've got a stockpile, but what? What's that implication? Well, the the

Unknown: 31:45

pessimist, the con, the conspiracy theorist in me, yeah. Says this is a battlefield opportunity to test hypersonic missiles against the missile system, right? So whether that's in part or otherwise, opportunity like this hasn't existed,

Dr. David Ko: 32:08

yeah, but China, China has got the coolest head of them all when it comes to responding, right? They've, they've, they've not sort of stepped up to the plate on that front, yet

Unknown: 32:21

they don't want to, because China, by itself, rather like to us having this conversation with a friend who was saying, Well, you know, you say all this thing, I think it's because China takes, for China a century is a moment, you know, it rather let them kind of work it out. You know, if it takes a century, the leaders don't necessarily feel that they have to be the one that is the ultimate legacy in that way. Yeah,

Richard Busellato: 32:50

they're playing the ultimate long game because they have a political structure that allows the leadership of China to actually play the long game. You're not going to elections to get replaced if the people are a bit pissed off with you. So that structure, in of itself, lends itself eminently to playing the long game and really strategic thinking. You don't need to react. But regime change is a real issue, because regime change basically means that all sources of this oil, except for Russia, is now under us control,

Unknown: 33:21

and it will not accept that.

Dr. David Ko: 33:25

So the Saudi is under us control. Saudi oil,

Richard Busellato: 33:29

yeah, yeah. I would say So absolutely, yeah, absolutely. I would say the Middle East ex Iran is under the US sphere of influence. Obviously, Canada and the US are very much so including Mexico. Then you have a few places here and there that are not totally under us control, but they're not actually that meaningful in total production. You have a few African states. You maybe can throw Norway into the mix. If you look at the 100 plus million barrels of oil being produced around the world. Iran is, by far outside of Russia, the most important producer that is not under us control. Everything else is kind of more piecemeal. And you have rigs everywhere now, and you have fracking everywhere, but meaningful chunks of oil coming to China, essentially comes from Russia and Iran, and then they buy what they can in the open market. But that leaves you very exposed.

Dr. David Ko: 34:25

So what percentage? What percentage would that be? Global oil under us control? What 90? 95% No,

Richard Busellato: 34:31

no less than that, Russia produces 12% of global oil. In Iran, another five, and you probably have another 10 to 15. So I would say 70% is a ballpark number that's on the US square of control. Yeah,

Dr. David Ko: 34:45

wow, that's, that's a fact. I've never, I've never been aware of very interesting,

Richard Busellato: 34:50

yeah, and China. You know, out of that, remaining 30% probably buys almost 50% of that. Yeah. Remaining 30% and then you have a few other major importers. And I think it's not totally clear where a huge consumer like India sits in that pyramid, but it's a really, really important aspect. If you factor in the security concerns that every country around the world will have, where do we get our future energy from if this really escalates, if, if the Iranians go down the really hardball route, I'm sure they can close the Strait of Hormuz, and then you starving the the world of like, 25, 30 million barrels per day. That's,

Unknown: 35:38

I think that's a really difficult step to go. What happens is, the consequence of that, the gamesmanship of that, that you're going to get as that happens, almost certainly, you're going to bring in a lot more direct military action. And even China would not want them to do that. No, absolutely, very little support in that way for for that as an actual action. But what happens is, if you think about what it means happening in China, you've got the top end that's being restricted at the moment. This is in terms of the AI and the chips and kind of all of that, all of those stuff that's going on. Oil is down at the other end. Oil is basically down to the villager and the ability to go along grow crops and actually feed themselves and others along. So it sees essentially this US sphere of influence, desperately trying to tighten in. And if I may go back and say, you know, think about the last Chinese person you met. Okay, I'm Chinese. So you know, it's easy for me to do that every morning, but again, in the conversation with people, people don't, don't really recognise the China in the same way as they see the Chinese people that are around. In that way there is this sort of mythical China, which is some great evil around. And there's this mythical Iran, which some great evil around in that sense, in some sense, in that way. But there are Iranians all over who work along. And we meet some Iranians who regularly go back to Tehran to meet with their family, come back. And they love it there. When they're there, they love it here and all that sort of things. And this goes back down to the people, the people in these countries are like people anywhere else, and this war is like this fictitious kind of construct that's that's been created. It has very beneficial purposes. It keeps the oil industry very happy. Raises the price of the oil, allows them to go on through it keeps all the regimes happy. And this is regimes as much as is, you know, Canada's happier now because of the price of oil than it was a few weeks ago. Yeah, even, even in country like that. But we never explicitly say the US oil companies were basically trying to figure out, what do we do? We can afford to drill to now. Say, fantastic. We can keep pumping out more

Dr. David Ko: 38:13

and almost another way war destroys the environment, right?

Unknown: 38:17

Yeah, and so it's feeding into those things. And when you don't have people actively, actually fighting, losing the arm, losing the leg, and doing those things in the fighting and coming back, you don't have their families feeling the horror of it. You don't have them living with all of those things, it becomes a case of actually, well, those are the evil ones. They bombed us, and now we don't have our home. So it reinforces that same story, as opposed to having that check, that Wilfred Owen kind of Whirlpool, the one that actually says all of the supposedly glory is just brutality and cruelty.

Dr. David Ko: 38:58

Yeah, do you know it's, I just want to sort of, maybe just sort of listening to you both. It's, it's a perspective that I think most people would be listening to and going, Oh my God. That's, you know, is this, is this the pathway really on, you know, this perpetual war where, you know life, life will just be miserable. And the environmental impacts, you said in your Ukraine of war, the destruction of water, water, forests, all that sort of stuff. I mean, it's we can't afford war at this point for humanity, like if we, if we really want to. You know, we talk about the environment later, but we've talked a lot about the tech bros, especially from the data AI. Now I think, you know, we should be thinking about the energy Bros and the Defence Force Bros. The three of them like

Joe Augustin: 39:48

energy uncles and war uncles. The bros are actually for the younger team.

Dr. David Ko: 39:55

I don't know if you think about where defence is going. It's very technology run, right? So you. Is probably the younger people who would define designing these new weapons, but the idea of being in perpetual war where there are no soldiers being maimed eventually, you know, we're going to wake up and go, we don't want this, but it might be too late by then, because then there'll be total control over information, over us, over our movements, where we live, how we live, you know? So it's, you know, when you when you look at the dystopian pathway that is being discussed openly, it just, you've just added a layer to that conversation that I haven't heard yet, but I actually think it really makes sense, even though I don't like to think about stuff like that, but it's not a pleasant thing to think about. But if you want to look this in the eye, I think it's important to think about these possibilities, because it just, it's just clicked into place for me that, you know, the Curtis yarvin, and then add this layer on top, and it's like, that's not going to be a lot of fun. Joe. Do you want to jump in with some thoughts? Well, I

Joe Augustin: 41:00

was thinking about how in the brutality that we are going to be missing out on, so to speak, I think it's being replaced with a different kind of brutality, which is the brutality of the results of your actions. Because you know, what is different now from then is all the all the visual capturing of the of the attacks, of the wars, of fighting, and the damage and stuff like that. So there is a different kind of brutality, I think, that we are having to face, which is the result of whatever action happens, right? So you, if you look at the strikes that happen, if you if you attack, it's like, it's like, what's happening for for Israel and Gaza right now, right? So Israel does what it does, and what we see is, is what happens in Gaza and what the rest of the world gets to see as well as that, and Israelis get to see that as well. So I am not as in despair as with David about the fact that there is no brutal there's no witnessing to the brutality of it. Because I think what what is, what is different now is we are seeing a lot more of the impact of the actions that we take, and if anything, I think we're having to face more the shame of it, the fear that I have, is that we get used to it, right? We don't, we don't think of it as, as a as a terrible, you know, monstrosity. Or we don't. We don't get struck by the enormity of everything. But I, I do feel that there's a change. There's a switch in the way that the equation goes. And you know, if you think about what was happening, like in in the US, while Vietnam was happening, it was also about the the impact on Vietnam that was upsetting Americans as well, how, how the war was being waged, and how, and how, how terrible some of the weapons were. So I, you know, I think that they're not, they're not immune, or they're not insulated from having to deal, to deal with the brutality. And the other thought about war is actually it is about putting putting your ideas, or putting your your values to a test, and it's about being willing to willing to defend it or willing to fight it. And it's a, it's a bizarre concept. It's a crazy concept. Is about you talking about my mother, and I thought, I have to, I have to, I have to fight you. That's what really war is about, right? It's about my beliefs. You're upsetting me, and I have to defend my beliefs because of the pride that I have on my situation. And I'm willing to go to XYZ extent to to prove this point, right, that really is all war is about. But, yeah, I mean, like, like, you're talking how, how in on a local sense, we all know the people from different places. Like, you know our helper is from Myanmar, and you hear all the things that happened in Myanmar and the military and all that, and she's going back for a holiday very soon to meet you know her partner, and they're going to be selling flowers for a for a feast. It sounds nothing like a country that is under military rule. It sounds something like the life that that we might see from the outside, right? So, yeah, you're right. There's layers and layers of it. And the thing is, we are, we're intertwined in the sense that there is, there is, there is, who has power, who has the big stick? You know, in that particular environment,

Dr. David Ko: 44:40

I just want to just just before we I think Richard wants to say something, but just before we do, I want to, I just want to point out a couple of things you might have missed, so it's what we see right now. We think we're getting a view of what's going on in Gaza, and we are seeing a lot of stuff that's going on in Gaza, but we're not seeing everything. You know, I. An 11 year old Palestinian girl who was a social media influencer was killed in one of the one of the bombs, right? So there's been a blackout. But what was really interesting to me, within like 24 or 48 hours of Iran bombing Israel, they did a social they basically went out and anyone who was posting any of the results on social media within Israel was basically hauled in and said, you do not do this anymore, and the whole country's gone. But so we're not actually seeing a lot of information of what's going on. A lot of media aren't in those regions because they're not allowed to. In Iran as well, that you know, the BBC can't get in there. All sorts of haven't been for a long time. But the other thing, of course, is trusting information. So that's just falling over like and it has been for the last 20 years, and AI's role is going to change that. So if you've got people who are in charge of the narrative that we're seeing, then we might not actually have access to the truth in the future unless we get a hand and all of this stuff that we're talking about. Well, it sounds so terrible, it's more about if we're aware of it, what can we do to stop it now? And there's enough people in leadership roles in government that don't want this to be our future, right? So I think that's, that's the kind of the point, but the trust in information, I think, is going to be massive in the in this, in this future that save it's talking about,

Richard Busellato: 46:31

I think it already is, actually, and it, it ties back a little bit to what we discussed last week, that I think it was last week. Yeah, I'm getting old. What can I say? Maybe it was two weeks ago. However, it's that to have high quality, unbiased, factual news cost money, and people today, particularly the younger generation, don't want to spend money on that, and they might have other priorities, but they but they do not want to not have news, so they are turning to people who either makes news into some form of entertainment commodity or in very biassed format, because they actually have other sources of revenue, if you want what I would call proper investigative journalism that unearths stories you know that we've seen films about and we love them. It costs money a journalist needs to eat too, right? So if, if news channels and newspapers are no longer being able to afford investigative journalism, the quality of the output will obviously suffer, and for me, it's it's really not a path you want to go down, because that's going to be a world effectively dominated by propaganda.

Dr. David Ko: 47:59

Yeah, I think we're already on the way. It's impossible now to figure out which information sources to trust, right? And that's why, you know, I'm always like in my weekend reads. I'm just sharing so many different sources, yeah, because, you know people, I enjoyed the guardian. But then if I only shared the Guardian, I'd be a tofu eating whatever, you know, whatever, whatever the label is today, but, but I

Unknown: 48:26

know with tofu,

Dr. David Ko: 48:29

yeah, I'm not a big fan, but, yeah, so that's it's really about using your critical thinking skills, right? Which we which, which are dropping off a cliff, and you digest lots of different sources from lots of different angles, so that you can sort of find the trends and the patterns in the information, and the truth is in there, but it takes a lot of effort, and people don't want to put the effort in, although they do spend our three hours watching a Joe Rogan podcast. So it's, it's not, it's not that people aren't willing to spend the time. It's that not everybody is willing to spend the time, and it's, I think that's a problem. I

Unknown: 49:05

think it's not, it's not so much that I knew we talked about the distinction between knowledge, understanding and wisdom. Yeah, and we've become a world that's dominated by knowledge, and knowledge is about knowing this fact or that fact. So a lot of things that we talk about earlier on is kind of like the knowledge of, you know, Richard was talking about, you know, when you place both these, these happens to athletes, that happens to whatever it is and so on, the understanding is when you connect that in some ways, with people. So that's what this show is about. You know, that's what we're doing here. We take these aspects that we think and we think that surely these are the things that connect most with people. And that's the understanding, I think, obvious, like, you know, you know, the sun is hot. That's the knowledge. The understanding is when you cook, cook with it. Yeah, that's when you connect with people, because different people cook different things. Some cook toffle, some cook

Richard Busellato: 50:07

and we love it different

Unknown: 50:11

way. And finally, the wisdom is when he connects with you about what actually helps you to progress your way through to actually go and find that purpose that allows you to become more motivated in what you do that actually makes a change from simply ignoring it all because you just swapped by it, to actually say, I accept that this full of imperfections is full of flaws and all of those things. And out of that, that means that I now don't have to worry about it being full of flaws and full of misinformation all those things, because I don't have to worry about it. I can now go and take a step. And that's the difference, and that's the part which I think you know, what do we want to do with the chit show, we want people to get past those points. And so the sources of truth and the silent venom, I'm going to keep using that word of all the things which are really poisonous and hidden along and it's kind of the lies that are never told in that way by not telling in that way you know they are. In that way is to get yourself to appreciate between the knowledge that's kept from you, even that you don't necessarily need to know, that what you need to know is about that wisdom of how you can accept the world is like that, so that you don't have to worry so much about it and actually take that step, find that courage to take that stop step.

Dr. David Ko: 51:49

Uncommon? Yeah, exactly. But okay, so let's just, let's just wrap up the around bit so people are feeling really overwhelmed. So is that? Is that your advice to people? David, maybe we can all just sort of give our thoughts on because people are really struggling with deep fear around this escalation. On top of everything else that's been happening for the last few years, it's like it's never ending. So to help people, you know what? What would you think? What would

Unknown: 52:16

you say this escalation is like the explanation for trying, for toppling Iraq, there's a seed of a fear of some weapon that they have, and therefore we must protect ourselves. A lot. Conveniently happens at a time to distract from what's going on in Gaza. Conveniently happens in times to create those other things, other parties come in and they affect it. For you and me, it matters because it normalises the brutality of war and is set up under a different path. I don't think this is something anyone should accept. What steps they need to take about it is to find how they engage with people themselves, with other people around, because that's the source of how they're going to find there's a place for them. If you simply engage as an activist against something all the time, or protesters against something all the time, if you somehow miraculously expect that your government is going to do the right thing and forget that any party in power the first priority stay in power, whatever that entails. And any party that's looking for power, their first priority is to get into power, whatever that entails, whoever they need to partner with in that way, then you're going to end up finding yourself more and more despondent about how things are. But it is in the engagement with people.

Dr. David Ko: 53:52

They go local,

Unknown: 53:54

and today, we can do that.

Dr. David Ko: 53:58

Yeah, Richard, do you have any thoughts?

Richard Busellato: 54:02

Yeah. I think if we rewind a little bit to you know that the vicious attack on Israel that set all these things in motion that would never, ever have happened without an Iranian go ahead to Hamas to do it, and at that point, bearing in mind, which is certainly my understanding of the Gulf, and what many people certainly agree with is that Iran's ultimate aim is to topple the House of Saud and ensure that Iran becomes the overall dominant power of the region, and they can only achieve that by basically kicking creating regime change in Saudi Arabia, and they saw this as an opportunity for them to seize the overall initiative in the region. Israel responded somewhat. Predictably. But here, I think, is where things happen on the quite predictable path, Israel's efficiency in particularly negating any Hezbollah threat with this mini device, explosions effectively proved to all the people. And I think there are a lot of people there who would have joined the Iranian cause, and in this sense, Israel is just a distraction, because what they really want is change. In Saudi Arabia saw that this was a dead end street, and they crawled away and remained quiet on the whole issue. Israel now sees this as their opportunity to actually, whatever we want to call it, ensure the safety of the State of Israel by whatever means they want to, because actually, Iran proved that they were an unreliable, inefficient ally for all the other guys in the region, and all of a sudden, US and China and even Russia becomes involved, because they all have very different objectives and interests in this region. And David elaborated, you know, brilliantly on on how China looks upon it. Us is US wants a band for oil, because it's both the consumer and the producer. US will not accept$100 a barrel oil because then the US is in recession, because it's a consumer led economy. US cannot accept $50 a barrel because actually, domestic production will cease in many places. So they want the band, the Saudis and the others just want a high price, and Russia wants a high price. And if you can constrain exports from the region, they would need to allow Russia back into the fold and probably extract a very heavy price in Ukraine for us, effectively becoming the rescuer and the provider of that oil. So now the situation is really, really complex, and I don't see any really good outcomes. And I think the whole idea that you want to create regime change by pumping the shit out of the people who will do the uprising just doesn't work. In my mind.

Unknown: 57:21

One One thing Richard reminded me, in that sense, is simply that, you know, think about the energy you use, yeah, that's what keeps that demand Absolutely you. You yourself become a pawn in the game, yeah, yeah. Alternatively, you can become the master over the game, yeah,

Dr. David Ko: 57:46

yeah. But then you look at China's massive escalation in, you know, alternative energy, right? Maybe this is all part of that story and the motivation. But I know, listening to what Richard was saying, I just feel like this is how this these are the pieces of the puzzle that needed to come together for me to say, Ah, so this is world war three, or potentially at the beginning of World War Three. Because, you know, you need all, you know, it's horrible. But Joe, do you want to,

Joe Augustin: 58:13

well, I was going to add a bit of, bit more gasoline to the fire as well. And I think it's, it's the Netanyahu Ponzi scheme that you had to think about too, right? Because it's, it's where he has tried to build up, build up this thing of goodwill he spent it now he needs to get more. And so what happens is he does something which has a as a story around that, that can you know, that has the potential to galvanise again and give him back some of the, some of that support that he had been losing desperately without this action. So, yeah, it's kind of a Ponzi scheme. And I was thinking about this in terms of politicians who are motivated very strongly by the threat of being arrested after they lose power, right? So you know you had Trump, who ran the ran the campaign of a lifetime, because it was the campaign of a lifetime. You know, at risk was his life as he knew it, right? And I think Netanyahu is in a similar situation as well. So he's he's not just making decisions that are based on some of the you know, ideas that are available and put on the table. They're convenient for that particular aspect of his his own existence as well. He's, on one hand, it's about, you know, keeping power, but on the other hand, it's also about not going to jail. So it's a very, very big motivator. So that's all, I think, all wound up together. I also heard this thing about how the war games simulations that have been done about this. And these are people who were in, you know, in the White House before his advisors, Trump is now sucked into a situation where the war games have always resulted with the US being involved in further bombing. There seems to be no i. Way for it to progress without that sort of thing happening. And I think that's the that's the very interesting thing that we're going to be I think I don't know whether we're getting into it now, but it's also how it's affecting the the support he's going to have with Maga. Because the strangest thing in the last week has been a lot of the left wing commentators, liberal commentators, have been agreeing with mega

Dr. David Ko: 1:00:24

Okay, all right. But just just before, I just want to finish off with a couple of points. So talking about getting back in the good graces. So uh, Elon Musk obviously made Starlink available to the Iranians so that they could be, they could still have access to the internet and be involved in the protests. But the other thing that I think a lot of people are missing is the temperatures in the Middle East in the last few weeks have been 50 to 53 degrees Celsius. So when I think of all of those people escaping to run because Trump said, get out of the city, there's a lot of people, like pregnant women, who can't they're like, eight months pregnant. They can't go because they could be stuck in a 20 hour traffic jam on the road and have to give birth. But I think there's a potential that we're also going to see a massive loss of life just because people are in the elements exposed to these extreme temperatures. And I think that's something to sort of keep in mind too. So, but yeah, so moving on to the I mean, there's, there's a lot to it. I suppose all I want to say to people is, keep the faith like I know that the time feels really, really dark, but if you unfortunately, people don't study history, and that's always been one of my passion areas. So I've always studied history. Studied at uni. I loved it at high school, but all my life, that's that's one of the things I've done. And the story, the story of humanity, is always a very long arc. It's not always obvious where we're going to go. You know what David was saying? Sounded, sounds really horrific, but it actually, really makes a lot of sense to me, based on all of these other pieces coming together. It doesn't mean it's inevitable. It means we need to wake up and make sure it doesn't happen, you know, and however that that looks like for you, whether it's getting involved in politics yourself, acting locally within your own communities, but keeping your eyes well and truly open. And you know, your your silent venom. So I find a lot of the venom is actually quite is very, very public. And I always, a friend of mine always used to say, if you don't want people gossiping about you put it all out there in the open. Because when it's all out there in the open, nobody notices but if you, if you do it behind closed doors, everyone notices it. So a lot of the a lot of the risks that we face are being discussed in open platforms. What we fail and we have, we've talked about this many times before. We have a failure of imagination, and that is our that is the biggest thing that's going against us. Every person who comes out of an authoritarian regime says we didn't expect this to happen, and I found that really, I find that a really insightful sort of perspective. So expect the worst plan for the best, right? But, and in the US, you know, the stuff that we're seeing at the moment, so there's been a lot of talk in the last week about Donald Trump's health. It's speculative, you know, so, and that's really hard, right? And people are like, oh, you know, people are celebrating his potential demise, but Vance is next, and I actually think he would be a lot worse. He's palantir's boy. He's Peter TEALS boy, right? So it's not like there's a better option if Trump goes out. You know, we started the week off like straight after the show, right? That that parade was as a former soldier and a mother of a soldier, I felt so embarrassed looking at that parade. I really did. I was cringing inside. So it had a big impact. And then, of course, you see that the big protests that are happening this week, I don't know who wants to sort of kick off, what's going on in the US. I mean, every single story. I mean, there was an assassination before any of this even happened, and it almost didn't make the news by comparison to all, because there were so many other things going on at the time. And that whole sort of angle

Richard Busellato: 1:04:21

is hugely troubling, but unfortunately, it is a typical expression of the times we live in and the polarisation that's occurred over the last decade in US politics and the fact that people are not more outraged by what happened is, I think, a clear symptom, because this is par for the course. Now in a very polarised society,

Unknown: 1:04:49

I'm kind of so this is going to sound terrible in some ways, right? So America has supported through. It's kind of covert actions, a lot of regime horrible things that have gone on in South America, in kind of Asia and other places. In many of these places, they have had to live through people being taken away by some form of police and disappearing away. They could be going to work one day and find that actually, you know what, they've been taken away somewhere, and that's happening in America. And over what's happening in America, you know, with, with what was the Marines going into Los Angeles National Guards, and then the the Trump co opting, coercing whatever it is the military to go and arrest civilians on in United States grounds ice, taking them along, taking them off somewhere that you may never see again in that way is actually the kind of things that have been happening around in different parts of the world. So if you then look at the US and you think about the political assassination of those things, it's just pointing out to say the US has now switched into a different sort of state, and that's the kind of state that we need to start thinking about. And you look at what you know, Carolyn Levitt, you know, the person, and the way she talks about what's happening and all the rest of it, they are just, you know, echoes of the same thing right here. In those other places and stuff. And she's good at her job.

Dr. David Ko: 1:06:48

She's excellent as a propaganda mouthpiece. I mean, she really is, you know, you see those the pictures of her dressed as a North Korean new TV anchor. It's perfect. That's exactly what she does? Yeah,

Richard Busellato: 1:07:03

no, it's, I wouldn't be surprised if she stumbled studied quite intensely Joseph Goebbels modus operandi and how that machinery was built up, because it has huge echoes of that, and the rhetoric has huge echoes of that. All we're missing is, you know, the Nuremberg rally, but maybe the birthday parade was kind of their attempt at that.

Dr. David Ko: 1:07:29

Yeah, I could. So one of the one of the things that I kind of feel really strongly is on the cards, is I've never seen a more so if every single person in a leadership position was was evil but brilliant, I think we'd have a real threat on our hands. But I've never seen a more incompetent group of people in leadership positions in my life, in every way. Right? So the incompetence is astounding. And while they might be being protected like like, if you think when that General was assassinated by the US, then Trump's last time in power, they threatened to take revenge on Mar a Lago, right? I if the Iranians have not set up something in the US to do something at some point, I would be very, very surprised. So I think that the incompetence in the US has opened the door to to risks that are going to, you know, basically, the country is going to fall over. So just their sheer incompetence will do that. But the other thing is, if you listen to the people who are experts in authoritarianism and fascism and stuff, nobody has ever tried to do what they're doing as quick as Trump is doing. And I think even the people like the project 2025 and the tech Bros and everybody behind him, and you hear it, you hear it sort of commented every now and again. It's like nobody expected him to move as quickly like even in Hungary, they've still got rights that he's trying to take away in the US. So authoritarianism usually is effective. It happens gradually over time. He's trying to take away everything all at once. It's been, what, four months, five months, and I think that's the potential that's going to make the US fall over. Just that's just one of my sort of interpretations of what I'm saying.

Richard Busellato: 1:09:30

Yeah, I think you if I look at it sort of in and it's very easy to do parallels, you know, fascist ideology and how that manifests itself, because there are strong traits in what's happening, but not only in the US. Let us be clear that the sort of populist authoritarianism is on the rise everywhere. In many ways, Victor orbans Hungary has been kind of torchbearer for that kind of philosophy. Across the western world for some time, I'm probably a little bit more optimistic on the US, for one reason only. You go back to sort of Marinetti is manifest of what is it? The modernist manifest. I think it's called right the pillars, you need to actually exert the perfect fascist states and remove the people, because clearly they don't know their best. Which sits at the heart of it is you need control of the judiciary, because you need to politicise the courts to ensure that your executive orders cannot be threatened by the judicial system, because that is obviously a huge hindrance in a state like the US. US courts, by and large, still have enormous independence, and even though the Supreme Court has been tilted in favour of people appointed under the sitting president. My sense is still that taking on the US judicial apparatus in a complete takeover into a authoritarian, quasi fascist state, is something that the regime in the US is not capable of doing, because it's even among people that would maybe sympathise with a lot of things that the President tries to do, would effectively back away from that, because it's very ingrained In US society that the courts are the courts, but we see the attack on the judicial system happening all over the western world, not least in the UK, where there's been masses of expressions from ministers saying that the courts shouldn't have this power, which is exactly down that route of saying we need to tackle courts ability to slow down our way of implementing laws, but I think that the judicial apparatus in the US is incredibly strong. That makes me a bit more hopeful than most, I guess. But my sense is

Dr. David Ko: 1:12:15

that there's Amy, Amy Barrett, Cohen, whatever name was the Trump appointed. There was a piece in The Atlantic talking about, she's not, um, she's been 5050, in the way she's voting. So she's not, she's not that guaranteed voice behind their their movement. So that's that, yeah, that's kind of interesting. And also, the what you're saying about, you know, kids learn in school about the judicial system and why it's important and why it's independent and but to me, that goes to the speed I was talking about. They're trying to they're trying to do it too fast. You need to pre programme people, and they haven't had time to reprogram and make those changes at the same time, right? So, yeah, well, they're trying

Unknown: 1:13:02

to make, they're trying to make. What they're doing is bringing in something that the broader audience hasn't really thought about before, right? So I keep thinking about this in terms of, I don't know whether you've had a friend at some point in your life who learned about network marketing, right? So before, before that point, they probably didn't consider too many things about life. They just had things happen to them and what have you, and then suddenly they've got all these issues and ideas that now become the truth for them, because they it comes into focus and it energises them, right so in in America right now, I think what's happened is a political awakening of what power is about, right? So there's been, there's been a great sense of American exceptionalism, but it was always just because we are America. There wasn't as much thinking about the values, the process and all the different things that went around that, because it was just about the identity of being a member of the team and what the Republican Party and what Trump has been able to do.

Joe Augustin: 1:14:09

Well, not so much, not so much Trump, actually. Trump, Trump is actually, I think, very successful in what he does because he has the gift of not knowing, and

Richard Busellato: 1:14:22

that's it's one of the scariest phrases I've ever

Joe Augustin: 1:14:26

heard, yeah, because you the wealth the well educated person who understands a little bit about history and understands about the way things have happened and why there's a process and how and how the judicial system is supposed to work, is able, in the in the moment of uttering an idea that should be challenged to know that that's not a good idea, that shouldn't be something that is going to be easy to put through right and I think that that sense that he doesn't know, i. Uh, really frees him up to make this, these, these choices, so he's able to do things one after the other, move very quickly through things, because without knowing, uh, what was supposed to happen and without seeing what the consequences immediately are going to be, he can move very freely, right? Uh, but on the other hand, I think, is the rest of the Republican Party that now is taking its time, taking its power. They're trying to move things along as well, so they can have things their way. And to be fair, look, both sides have been doing it a different way, right? I think the Democrats have been, have been trying to figure a way through legislations and rules and tying up of loopholes and whatever that, which is probably why they lost the election in the first place. They try to get their way by gaming the rules right now? What is happening on the other side is, well, let's figure a way so that we don't have to follow the rules. How can we change the entire thing? Because I don't like the way this rule book works. What if we just said new rule book, like in the bill that that that is going up to be passed and and that was such a terrible thing as well, right? Where? Where the people who voted for it did realise there were so many things in it that were just diametrically opposed to their own beliefs. That I think there's a there's a there's part of the bill there, which actually is trying to change the law so that the judiciary has less power. Yeah, and that was a bill that was being pushed through, right? So that, and then we'll see what happens with that, because it still is a bit of a process. Luckily, that process is not as quick as it is, but that's kind of what's happening as in, in a sense, America is waking up to the idea of real politics, right where it used to be, thinking just in terms of teams. It's still very much ingrained in them, the idea of we're thinking in terms of teams, and everybody's forming the teams and forming their allegiances, but they're only just understanding process. They're beginning to be they're beginning to be exposed to the idea of process. And unfortunately, the first source of information tends to be false. People are telling them how something works, when that's not really how it works, but because it's the first time you've heard how this works, you go, that kind of makes sense. And it becomes embedded. It becomes this thing where you go, like, yeah, that absolutely makes sense. So when I'm when I'm listening to my favourite source of news, Comedy Central, I hear exactly that when they do their interviews on the ground, right? They put some ideas out and the and the and I mean, I don't want to, I don't want to put it under that big umbrella, but machination supports all those ideas. They support cutting spending. They support things like being more efficient. They support all of that while they're waiting in the crowd for a $45 million parade to go by. Right? Yeah, it doesn't occur to them. It's not even, it's not even the same brain space, because they're not, they're not tuned to it. And so this stuff, it isn't, it isn't an issue. It's not something that is going to to really cause a problem for them in the next election, because it all fits into this idea of us getting our way. We like this, we don't like that, and all of that's fine,

Dr. David Ko: 1:18:51

yeah, all right, so I'm going to keep moving things along, but I do want to thank you for putting the theme tune to Team America in my head. Joe, right? So like the G, the g7 has come and gone, I'm going to suggest we bypass it, because last week there was a there was some research out of, can't remember who's I'm just trying. The World Bank warned, warned of, well, they, they didn't say a recession was imminent, but they did say that we're on track for the worst decade since the 1960s Richard, do you want to just, sort of just sort of give a quick overview of what that's all about and why it matters? Well,

Richard Busellato: 1:19:33

first of all, they are seen as an authority. Whether they actually are or not, can be debated, but at least it's a supranational organisation with some credibility, and we have grown accustomed through over the last couple of years, and certainly has intensified in what we can call the post COVID period. That growth becomes the overarching target variable for. For politicians and regimes across the world, because, and this is very important to bear in mind, the amount of debt being accumulated at the government, state level, at the regional level of regional governments, and most of all, at Corporate and Private levels, is staggering. We have never had a world with this amount of debt being accumulated, and we touched upon it last week with Michael how the debt Super Cycle rolls on. But when everyone is heavily indebted, it becomes paramount that things keep moving along, and we call that growth because if you interrupt the status quo, you get bankruptcy. People cannot states, regional governments, corporates and households cannot pay their debt if you get interruptions to growth. So now, instead of being an underlying desire and quasi target for governments around the world, it's now effectively the explicit, major target variable for how you drive politics. We live in the UK, David and I, we cannot switch on the news one single time without hearing our chancellor, Rachel Reeves talk about the need for growth and how they're going to achieve it, and the measures they're putting in place to ensure this high growth rate. Because effectively, when you look at it, you're in a debt trap. And I think that is the big message from the World Bank is that we have sucked the proverbial marrow out of the bones over such a long time there is nothing left on the table. So the only thing you can do is actually keep this Ponzi scheme going by not paying off your debts, but actually keep rolling them over. And to be able to roll them over, you need more growth, and they recognise that we're coming towards the end of the efficiency of this debt because, and I think this is universally true when you look at previous debt bubbles. And what it means is that when you start from a low level of debt, and you accumulate that, and you consume it, you get growth, at least the way we're measuring it. Every dollar you accumulate in further debt leads to a very high level of growth. But as the debt pile increases, it's very much like a junkie who needs a bigger fix every time, because the actual amount from the increased level of debt that gets translated into growth lowers all the time. And I would call that rational, because the people who you depend on to drive spending forward, because spending equals growth, realise that this is unsustainable, and they're trying to save more and more for a rainy day out of that increased level of debt that particularly is happening at state level. So World Bank is effectively saying we don't have those possibilities on the debt side. And when you overlay that in the developed world with actually significantly worsening demographics, and there are very, very few countries that have reasonable demographics, the US being one of them, and it has manifested itself over the last decade or two in much higher US growth than Europe, for example, or Japan, which obviously has the worst demographic situation. And now you're throwing in the third element, which is basically the final straw on the camel's back is we all to various degrees depending on our age. You know me, being at the older end of the spectra has benefited. For the last three, four decades of a world that became more and more open, trade barriers were torn down, the world started becoming much more interconnected, which is a great move towards further efficiency. Trade is great. It actually enhances living standards. It's a smart way of ensuring that everyone gets better. It's a win, win situation. And over the last five, six years, and particularly, you know, given Trump's first visit to the White House and more, so this time around, we are building up those barriers again. And World Bank is rightly pointing out that increased global friction through trade barriers and tariffs and taxes is really, really bad for growth. That's what it is. So they are lowering the outlook structurally depending on these factors. And it's very, very hard to argue with a conclusion. What it actually means on individual country level and individual households level has different implications, but we are going towards a slow. Low growth world for a lot of factors that we cannot influence, like demographics and factors that we could have influenced, like the build up of that and the things that we can influence, which is politics and what that means for in terms of trade barriers. All

Dr. David Ko: 1:25:19

right, so, David, you want to jump in before we move on? Or no, I'm gonna Alright. I'm gonna get Joe, so we'll just keep moving. Because, yeah, I'm looking at the time, all right, Joe, so RFK Junior sacked all of his 17 experts who decide the vaccination programme for the US. We don't, yep, we try, we try not to focus on domestic policies. But to me, this smacks of something that could have global implications if one country,

Joe Augustin: 1:25:49

yeah, yeah, this is, this is the advisory committee that this is a group that has been responsible for a lot of the good advice up to this point, right? So, and also some of the bad stuff that happened to be fair. So all that stuff during COVID, the policy, the moving out, the trying to get the the vaccinations, the healthcare, thinking about how to handle the crisis in terms of what their impact has been on America. The estimation is about half a million hospitalizations and deaths. So that number were prevented actually during the COVID situation because of their actions, and then in terms of what they've done, for protocols, for vaccinations and all this kind of stuff, it has a greater impact on the rest of the world because of the kind of information that they gain. We gain from that as well. And there is also, what we call it, the just the the cultural influence of it all. So America does something, and everybody else does kind of follow the trend as well. And it doesn't just come from anywhere. They actually try very hard to be they try to de conflict what they do by being quite transparent about what they say. So it's on, it's all out as much as they can. It's all out there on the on the website for review. Right? What this change is is not just about adjusting the balance, it is completely throwing out the old regime. And what's dangerous about that is it's not only been thrown out, but it's also been replaced by a regime that is shown already to have a bias in a different way. The excuse has been, we're bringing in all these people so that we have a way to re establish trust for the America with the American people for vaccinations and immunizations and stuff like that. And what is happening instead is the people who are being brought in the some people, not all of them, but some of them have been, have had been hyper sceptical about the process, and not in a scientific way, but in a in a way that's more about the opinion. So they're talking about the opinion without the data. So they have, they've expressed a lot of strong opinions without strong data to support what they're saying. And that's technically unscientific. So it's it's being very political with science, and that can be very dangerous, because people who can convince you with their words are not the people you should listen to when you're dealing with science. Ultimately, the science is about what actually happened. What does the data actually tell you about something? And so those choices that could come out of this that's very dangerous. It also is actually about putting in a group of people who already going to, in a sense, they agree with you, because you put the people you want in this particular place. And I think his big move recently, which was to first of all cancel all the vaccine contracts with, I think it was moderna to create something for the bird flu. This is, this could really bite them in a bum, that that was, that was crazy. And then what's happened is this idea that they're going to now put it all, they're putting all the chips on a kind of a universal vaccine in terms of, in terms of the so it's a universal Coronavirus, flu virus sort of idea, and it begs the question from a scientific perspective, right? Because what science actually thrives on is diversity of experiments and. With a broad series of results that give you an idea where different things or novel things come up, and then you can head towards the answer. And what they've done with that particular thing is they've taken funding away, essentially, and I'm kind of like conflating two things here. This committee is more about the it's more about the vaccinations area, but separately as well, what they've done is they have refocused the health authorities only in certain areas, and therefore taking the focus, or taking any kind of focus off other areas where they can learn stuff, and therefore defunding those as well. So I'm, I'm kind of straddling this every now and then I'll be, I'll be producing a webinar where, behind the scenes, they're talking about the movement of, or the non movement of some of the the graduates that are coming out, the PhDs, right, who were previously going to labs in the US, who are now just at the point where they go like, well, we're not going there anymore, because the labs are being closed, all these experiments that are being done on other leading edge areas of science, where maybe it's not the biggest, most prevalent problems that they're trying to solve, but it's relevant to humanity, those kinds of things are not being funded anymore. It's just simply because of that redirection so the political, the politicisation of the health department in the US, is what I think is really dangerous, in the sense that it's not the political. It's always been political, to be honest, but it's the polarisation of it that is scary.