All right, welcome to season four of Inside My New Head. I came and podcast about individual emergency preparedness, rocking an incredible life, and learning to do the things to make yourself more self-reliant in a chaotic world. Sit back, grab a beverage, and take charge to your life. All right, welcome back to the Ottawa Studios Inside My New Head.
Listen, and shout out, and thanks to everybody who can use to put in some great show ideas. I appreciate everything you send me, good, bad, indifferent, colorful, or otherwise. It all helps just making sure that the topics that I think are important to talk about in today's world in relation to preparedness and to help you on your preparedness journey doesn't necessarily mean that's what you actually are interested in hearing. And sometimes that gap can be profound, and sometimes the gap is small.
And I do appreciate those that continue to reach out, to say, hey, listen, that made no logical sense to me. Or I really appreciate Point Bravo that you had in there. I think that could be another podcast episode. So I appreciate that feedback and keep it coming.
Listen, the world's in a bit of fire, and it's on a bit of chaos, shall we say? So what we're going to do over the next couple of weeks is we're going to start some episodes on big picture, large muscle movements that are happening in the world, and what that means for preparedness. I had a great episode, a couple of last week, early last week, sorry, on the big stuff, the supply chain conflict, et cetera, and a lot of great feedback on that one. So I'm going to do a bit of deep dive into the problem set and how that then affects you, and then what mitigation steps you can do.
So the idea behind the project is, we're going to tie major issues like a conflict in Ukraine to you living in North Carolina and how that's going to impact your ability to become or remain a prepared individual. And so drawing that line I think is important because if we can draw that line, then it makes every logical sense in the world for you to pay attention to global issues. But if we can't draw that line, then it's just large nauseating environments on the news that just makes you feel really bad for your life, et cetera. So hopefully this will be of great use.
So today what I wanted to do is start off the series by talking about the global world order. And now I don't mean the new world order or the Illuminati taking over. I mean, how did we get to where we are now? By looking back in the past and taking the opinions and positions of, I think they're the two biggest, most prominent thinkers right now, one being Ray Dalio and the second being Peter Zion.
So we're going to take their looks at the world, how we got here and how the system developed and what position we're in now as a way of setting the stage for then discussing the issues that are present in the world. So sit back, grab yourself your favorite beverage, let's get to it. All right, we're going to start off with Ray Dalio. He's currently in charge of Bridgewater Investments.
Listen, as the largest hedge fund in the world, he's ranked in the top 100 wealthiest people on the face of this earth and he is a prolific author. And his basic two messages that he puts out through his books he's been called the gospel of radical transparency and the art of thoughtful disagreement. Ray Dalio is a huge believer in looking back at the past of historical events to predict the future. So he sees the world in a way of, we're not living anything innovative and new here in the 21st century that didn't already exist through the history of man.
So let's just, we're going to bring this conversation down into a couple of pieces. Up to 1945, how do we get to the end of the Second World War? What happened in the interregnum period between then and now and what are the big principles that steer and where do they think we're going? So about four points from each of the authors, I'll do Ray Dalio first, then move on to the next author.
So up to 1945, the world was a very chaotic place. There have been basically four major empires in the modern history, the America being the fourth and in Ray Dalio's work he's laid out each of what's happened and the stages all of these empires went through through several stage process and it is essentially a repetitive cycle. So the Dutch, the French, the British and now the American empires have all followed the same general process from rise to leading to falling and now the American process he argues is in the decline. But up to 1945, that's basically the world.
So at the end of the Second World War, the United States had 80% of the world's wealth as measured by gold, 50% of the world's GDP, a measurement of economic activity and it had a monopoly on military power. The Americans were the only ones at the Second World War that didn't shut down their military. All the other victorious countries shut down their military, disbanded a large portion of it and went into the economic rebuilding of their countries because most of the countries in Europe were flattened to some degree and needed a huge mass of infrastructure investments and so they set their militaries to the side believing we were done with that crap. And so our rebuilding Americans were literally other than the damage and Pearl Harbor had nothing to rebuild and so they just carried on.
Which is why you see with the American power within the Second World War, the International Monetary Fund in the World Bank are in DC and the United Nations is headquartered in New York. And if you wanna follow what he's talking about, go on YouTube and look for Ray Dalio, his video and empire decline is called Changing World Order. He also penned a book with the very same name and it just outlines individual media in exactly, so it depends where you like to consume your media or media or whatever. So Ray Dalio argues that right now there are several major things that point to the decline of the American empire.
And the first one is money creation and debt. Now this was the leading issue of why the other three empires came down is they're paying debt with printed money. Now if you raise up a lot of debt, you have two choices, you can pay it with hard money, which is actual raise taxes currency. That's really, really difficult to do and requires stark decisions by the government.
Nobody's making that. So everybody right now is printing money to pay down existing or to pay the interest on existing debt with new printed borrowed money, that basically leads to inflation, AKA where we are right now. He sees the America having a great internal conflict. So basically America and a lot of countries in the world are very similar, is that you have a large wealth and values cap, right?
So this is the reason why populism rises. Now populism is on the left and right. Populism is not a far right issue whatsoever. There's a great book from Sagar and Denny and Chris O'Ball, who currently have the show, the Breaking Points on populism 2020 and they lay down how populism is in fact, just as much as a left wing as it is a right wing phenomenon.
And populism is about fighting for the people. People are so strained in their positions in life that they no longer see a need for a compromise and they hard in their positions. So basically populism is the rise of a fight. You are so tired of the situation now.
You will vote for the individual who is fighting to unstuck your position. And then he sees the last part for consideration is there's a rise of a great power to challenge the existing power. And he looks at China as being this. You'll see that our next analyst doesn't believe China is going to be a future power.
But Ray Dalio sees China as the rising power that counters the existing world order as has happened. And he's very clear about this that these things have not happened in our lifetime, which is why a lot of the times these things seem new, but they've happened many times over to every other empire in history. And so wars are sequential. So two large powers don't go right to war in the traditional military conflict.
So Ray Dalio argues that the wars are sequential. They begin with a trade war. They then sift to a technological war. Then we move on to geopolitical influence and capital and economic war and sanctions.
That's what Ray Dalio believes we are right now. We're in the fourth stage of war in a conflict with China. So if you take the United States of America and China, the existing global power with the rising global power, according to Ray Dalio, they are in the fourth stage of war with the last one being the military fight. The military fight then determines who is the existing power.
And basically what has happened in every other historical context in the modern day is that if history repeats itself, then America will lose that military fight against China and will basically retreat back across the Pacific Ocean and allow China to own its dominance. And so when you think about Ray Dalio's look at preparedness, he is saying that the world is simply following a program sheet that it has for about a thousand years. And we're just repeating this every couple hundred of years with a new empire and the next empire will rise. He's arguing it's China and then we'll fight.
So what does that mean for preparedness for you? So if you think Ray Dalio and those that believe in him and the rise of China, you will believe that China and America have to fight. They have to fight militarily and that that fight will see China winning. Now when we talk about winning in a fight between two and each of the powers, we have to keep it to a position of conventional fight, right?
None of most of the vast majority of these powers that went down. They didn't have their territory conquered. What they had is they had their expansionary policy conquered. So basically Ray Dalio's argument is not that China's going to invade mainland United States and take it over.
What they're going to do is dominate the Pacific Rim, an area of American influence and push America out of there as an influential power. Now that means that America will return to basically what it was pre-1945 and that brings us right to a discussion of Peter Zion. Now, Peter Zion has wrote several books that is most recent at the end of the world, is just the beginning. It's mapping the collapse of globalization.
It was released on June 14th. I have that book, I haven't read it yet, but I have seen a lot of excerpts that have come out. So the way Peter Zion looks at the world, up to 1945, the United States of America was very isolationist, right? They believe in American exceptionalism.
They were very, very trade protective. They had barriers against almost everybody for economic goods, and they were basically leave us alone and allow us to be exceptional. They were basically a self-sustaining economy that was absolutely booming. And they really had no taste for war.
The Americans didn't enter the First World War until 1917, drag kicking and screaming, and the same thing in the Second World War. They did not get in. They had no interest in the European war whatsoever. Though Roosevelt knew eventually he would probably be dragged into it, but the Americans were dragged into both the World Wars.
And then when they went in, they went all in, and they won. As you can see, 1917 was the turning point, the arrival of the Americans and the Americans arriving in their first action in Europe in North Africa started to turn the tide with, along with the British against Nazi Germany, North Africa, and then the rest of the world played out. So the difference was at the end of the Second World War, as in, and this is where Peter Zion agrees with Ray Dalio, is America was the only military might, right? Russia was massive, it was huge, but it was literally a destroyed nation.
They lost near 20 million human beings during the Second World War. And so you had two powers that were, first of all, alliance has been end very quickly opposing each other. So on the Bretton with the agreement, near the end of the Second World War, the US presented a plan, and basically Peter Zion's argument, here's the Bretton was a very simplistic plan. The Americans would allow, because they're the only ones really with a large functioning navy that survived the Second World War.
Russia didn't have much of a navy. It was all of a ground campaign, an air campaign for them. So the American navy would protect economic shipping around the world, because you don't understand, even during the Second World War, and prior to the Second World War, piracy was a major thing. If the Dutch, or the English, or the French, or any other country wanted to send their ships around the world for commerce to trade, et cetera, they had to send their navy with them, or have their navy patrolling the seas to protect it, because piracy, by countries, not just pirates in the traditional sense, but piracy by countries, was rampant throughout the early 1900s.
And so the Americans and navy promise that we'll allow commerce to go everywhere between anybody, unfettered, unprotected, or actually fully protected, as long as you're on our side against the Russians, right? So it's a very simple context. You come on our side against Soviet Union, and we will protect the very seas that allow for commerce. Now we know it's one 20th of the cost to move goods by sea.
It is how globalism was born. Globalism was born through the Bretton Woods Conference in 1945 by the Americans to use their leverage and their military power to protect economic shipping. And now the problem is, is that since 1989, late 80s, early 90s, when the Berlin Wall fell, and the Soviet Union collapsed into Russia, you see an environment where all of these countries no longer need to follow the United States of America, a protection against the Soviet Union, or their allies in shipping and trade routes, and that threat's not there anymore. They don't need to follow and co-tail US international policies on agreements on trade, et cetera.
Now if you look at the America, every presidential candidate since 1991 has called for isolationism. Isolationism, which means the opposite and the end of globalization has really taken off in the United States of America, since the second half of the second term of Bill Clinton, really Bush and Obama just put the gas pedal down at 100 miles an hour. The America wants to go back to its isolationist past. Now it understands that throughout the world, there are trading partners that are available.
So while America has 14 trade agreements, then it compets 20 countries. There are five major plus one agreement, where America has laid down the unnecessary agreements, and that's an after two, or otherwise USMCA, they're agreement with Japan, South Korea, NAFTA, which is NAFTA DR, which is their Central American one, and their agreement with Australia. And you can add in Israel there just for 101 reasons. So basically what happened during the Trump administration, there's been a whole bunch of things that are 10 other podcasts.
His only cabinet minister to survive the entire time was Lighthouse or his trade representative. He went around the world and read it all of these agreements during Trump's time. And basically it said, we're not doing multilateral, they got out of the TTP, they did the Paris Accord, they didn't want anything to do with that crap. What they wanted was bilateral, where it would be the elephant in the most agreements with the key players around the world that had the technology or inputs that they needed to run their society.
So America did it, they signed those agreements, very one sided agreements, and they're done. America doesn't care what happens with the rest of the world. It could lie on fire, it really is inconsequential to America. They have their trade agreements, they have their booming economy, and they have the military to protect those trade agreements to keep going now.
The US shale oil and their natural gas, which is a byproduct of shale oil production, they are an energy independent, so they're not required to integrate into the world energy market. And that's the coming, when we talk about energy independence and supply chain in the future, podcast, but everybody else is on their own. NATO is at a very important check against Russia to keep Russia pinned in and to knock down their aspirations. But if you remember, NATO started in 1945 for three simplistic reasons by the European powers.
It was to keep Russia out and to keep the Germans down. That's why NATO was created, and other than keeping the Germans down, this is essentially the reason why it exists. Now, Peter's eyeing difference on China, and he does a lot of work on globalism, on geography, on resources, energy, and most importantly, demographics, so his position is that China will come apart at the seams within 10 years, based upon the demographics, and based upon China being exceptionally different from Russia. And this is a point a lot of people don't understand it.
If you look at why China doesn't invade Taiwan, they may do it next week and I'll look like a fool, but the problem with scared China about the Ukrainian invasion is not the prowess of the American, of the Taiwanese being like the Ukrainian, or all these major Western weapons systems, and how effective they are, it's the sanctions, because Russia is a net X-order of everything it needs. So when all these sanctions went on, Russia, what you're doing is you're hurting their economy, so they're gonna have to find other customers that don't follow those sanctions, but in the end, Russia is a self-sustaining. It is probably the largest agricultural exporter in the world of fertilizers and foodstuffs. It's one of the largest exporters of energy products.
It has all the resources it needs to be a functioning country in the world. So you can close off Russia, and it may be a little tough times, and they may be argumentative, but they're perfectly fine to survive on their own. They are an exporter. China is the inverse.
China is an importer of absolutely everything. They cannot in any way, shape, or form, survive without imports. If the same set of sanctions were put on China, that were put on Russia, they literally would collapse as a society within a year. They need the imports of energy, they need the imports of foodstuffs, they need the imports of raw materials.
So China is in a very difficult position. I'm not gonna argue whether they can win the fight against Taiwan. There's a bazillion of one people that want their 15 minutes of fame on TV, retired generals, and all these wingnuts. Fine, let them have their discussion on what I don't care.
If China wins or loses, it doesn't really matter. The sanctions that will be imposed by the world unilaterally and collectively on China will kill it as a going concern. The problem with that is, is I agree with both Ray Dalio and Peter Zion that there's a fight coming with China. I just don't know what that fight is, but China will largely not become a country of concern over the next 10 years.
Now, whether that happens rapidly in a demographic uprising and it, you know, because China really is a whole bunch of independent, culturally and tribal-based nation states that are city states that are held together by a large Communist Party and military. So if the people no longer want that happen, that may cause an uprising, which is why it's a police state and a pariah against human rights, not for the rest of the world, but to keep control of itself. And so all of this means for preparedness is, we see a world in disruption, that the world is going to have significant disruptions in the normal world order. I believe, and I will sell this point over the next coming weeks in episodes related to big things and tied into preparedness is, the world is not collapsing.
The world is going through, as Ray Dalio would say, the next stage of reorganization. We may now break with major empires and have a number of regional powers. We may have the emergence of a new empire or we may have the stomping down of the rise of China by the United States of America and the continued dominance of America. I don't know the outcome, but what I do know is in the 2020s, the world is reorganizing.
The world is reordering the way governance and things are done. And therefore, as a result, we're going to have significant effects on how our goods and services are delivered where we live. And so the end state of all of that for you is, is that how you have bought your goods and collected your services and run your life is now going through a change along with the rest of the world. That will affect your preparedness plans.
That will affect how you earn income potentially and it will affect the outward and inward look of the country you may live in. So if you're listening to me in Kenya, Kuwait, Ukraine, Germany, you're listening to me in Thailand. I have listeners in Tokyo and South Korea. A lot of what your world looks like is very much going to be morphing compared to what it may be for me living in the culturally protected area of North America.
It's just gonna be a bastion against pretty much everything else that happens. So very much your location matters. So a lot of what we're gonna talk about in the coming weeks is going to be about how to assess your world in relation to what's going on and then tie it to your preparedness. So the implications of China getting angry and throwing its way around are far different for me than some of my great listeners in Seoul or my great listeners in Tokyo or my great listeners in say India.
We've had a huge rise over the past couple of weeks of listeners in India. I greatly appreciate you taking the time to listen to us on this podcast. So we're going to include these regional focuses because everybody's lives are gonna be changing and they're gonna be changing differently. So it's hard to put that recipe for success.
So I hope this kind of product is valuable to you. Our regular two Monday and Tuesday episodes will be about this. We're still gonna do the fun preparedness related specific down deep chocolate waters, things like that on our Friday episodes. But we're gonna keep the Monday and Tuesday episodes in this series.
So if you think this is valuable, then we should carry on and do it, then please drop me a line. Tell me an area you'd like me to specialize in. Tell me a thinker that you'd like me to include. I'm more than happy to do any of that for you.
So thank you very much for joining us this week on Inside My Canoe Head. Stay safe, stay sane. Do your best to maintain a happy and joyful life. Remember, we only get one trip around this world.
And remember the key to what we're trying to do here inside My Canoe Head is to provide the preparedness information that allows you to rock an incredible life while wrapped in a blanket of preparedness. So take care, have fun, stay safe and keep that information coming. Go over, listen to us and drop a line at www.tripplewinsidemycanoehead.ca. Drop over all our channels to YouTube as soon as you can have some preparedness videos in person.
We're just getting there, take care, have a great time and trust me, investing the time in preparedness is worth it. And I think you're worth it. Take care of my friends.