#146 - Izabella Kaminska - The Soviet Collapse of Britain

Summary

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The Peter McCormack Show

Episode #146 – Izabella Kaminska – The Soviet Collapse of Britain
Date: February 6, 2026
Host: Peter McCormack
Guest: Izabella Kaminska

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Episode Overview

This episode delves deep into the alarming parallels between the UK's current state and the late-era collapse of the Soviet bloc. Through vivid personal recollections and sharp analysis, Izabella Kaminska draws on her Polish background to contrast Poland’s relatively successful post-Communist transition with Britain’s ongoing decline—touching on issues such as economic collapse, institutional decay, loss of trust in political systems, the impact of divides between citizen groups, and the urgent need for grassroots renewal.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Parallels with Soviet Collapse

• Atmosphere of Decay: Izabella recalls the “ambiance” of late communist Eastern Europe and likens it to today’s Britain: “There was this sudden sort of vibe of both the unknown and the known. Everything seemed to happen all at once.” (02:04)
• Loss of Trust: Both discuss how people under the Soviet system woke up to realize “everything we believed is just wrong,” drawing a comparison to public disillusionment in the UK today.
• Collapse Symptoms: Kaminska lists warning signs: shortages, pervasive institutional lying, and a growing sense of “hypernormalization.” (05:00, 91:25)

2. Lessons from Poland’s Transition

• Entrepreneurship vs. Oligarchy: Poland avoided Russia’s chaotic rush to privatization and subsequent rise of oligarchs by delaying and moderating reforms—allowing its people to gradually learn market dynamics. “They didn’t just completely lose that safety blanket.” (07:00)
• Moderate Shock Therapy: “Poland was a little bit different because it didn’t have a … less chaotic collapse.”
• Education and Market Literacy: The slow transition meant Poles “learned about the capitalist system,” unlike Russia, where privatizations led to widespread exploitation. (09:49)
• Crypto’s Role: Kaminska posits that crypto, in recent years, has offered Brits an unintentional crash course in market mechanisms: “Crypto has allowed at least the UK and the West … to have a sort of informal education about how markets work for free.” (11:30)

3. Britain’s Middle-Class Crisis & Housing Meltdown

• Boiling-Frog Economics: Peter notes, “The middle class can’t afford a holiday or school fees and are losing their jobs and can’t replace them.” He sees this as a key activation point for broader societal change. (19:44)
• Housing Crisis: Both discuss the looming subprime-like meltdown in UK real estate, with Kaminska anticipating mass government intervention and grimly joking, “Right to buy … but in reverse—right to rent … from the government. Right to sell to the government. You’ll own nothing and be happy.” (23:44–23:54)
• Artificial Economy: They skewer the UK’s “quota-based mentality” and fake economic activity, likening it to Soviet-style production for targets, not real demand. (24:25)

4. Institutional Decay, Political Distrust & Divides

• Democratic Facade: Both express a loss of faith in British democracy, with Isabella noting, “A lot of people are feeling that democracy was a bit of a mirage, that maybe we never really had it, that maybe everything was gamed and it doesn’t matter how you vote.” (18:10)
• Cronyism in Appointments: Kaminska, drawing on her experience in political journalism, describes government appointments as “horse trading” rather than based on merit: “It’s nothing to do with, you know, the skills or competence … you owe X person somewhere else a favor.” (38:25)
• Divide and Conquer: She observes that both left and right are manipulated, and that radicalization is “being pumped” on both sides to divide society. (15:54)

5. Social Malaise—Economic and Cultural Exhaustion

• Economic Exhaustion: Both cite the exhaustion of the modern middle class—overworked, taxed, and deprived of former leisure and social life. “Everyone’s exhausted.” (56:12)
• Regulatory Overload: Peter laments the bureaucratic “active destruction” of small businesses: “I spend a day to two days a week on bureaucratic stuff the state wants me to do … This is active destruction of our economy.” (35:50)
• Safetyism and Risk Aversion: Kaminska reflects, “I think safety is exactly the same problem actually that we saw in the Soviet Union after collapse is that people were just, you know, they were so used to getting everything from the state, it was very difficult to adapt.” (33:43)

6. Media, Free Speech, and Narratives of Control

• Censorship Concerns: Discussion of efforts to ban VPNs and curtail social media freedom; Peter: “No, what’s actually happening is peasants having a voice and exposing corruption and lies is incompatible with a system that requires control.” (49:37)
• Analogies to Communist Control: Kaminska likens the current push against dissenting voices to Soviet-era efforts to crush independent media: “The analogy … that is how people woke up in the communist system. It was through these samizdats.” (49:57)

7. International Comparisons—China, Ireland, the EU, and the US

• China—Quota Realities: Extensive discussion about China’s command economy, soft budget constraints, and “fake” GDP growth based on quotas, not real productivity or consumer demand. (24:25–29:00)
• Ireland as a Case Study: The episode highlights Ireland’s high GDP and status as “a client state of America”—reaping the benefit of US-domiciled tech giants. (32:07)
• EU vs. American Dynamics: Kaminska argues that Trump’s new US industrial policy is “exactly the same” as the EU’s, a protectionist ring offering internal free trade but demanding adherence to core values (free speech, enterprise) in exchange. (79:23–82:27)

8. What Comes Next & Pathways for Renewal

• Need for New Movement: Both advocate for a new political movement that transcends left-right divides—one rooted in freedom, liberty, and anti-establishment values. Kaminska: “We all want similar things, and if we could just agree, we have to rebalance the system and work on the stuff that we commonly agree on.” (44:57)
• Civic Communities: Kaminska, drawing inspiration from Poland’s Solidarity and small café debates, calls for the establishment of community cafés as grassroots hubs for civic discussion and political renewal. (98:54–99:38)
• Resistance to Collapse: Peter expresses hope and fear: “I am terrified of what's happening. I’m optimistic we’re going … I think the British people are at their wit’s end and I just hope someone steps forward and offers something genuinely revolutionary here.” (94:43)

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• (02:04, Izabella): "Everything seemed to happen all at once... It was literally like a paradigm shift overnight."
• (07:22, Peter): “Poland’s on track to have a bigger economy than the UK, is it by 2030?”
• (23:52, Peter): "You'll own nothing and be happy."
• (24:25, Izabella): "The quota-based mentality has infected everybody. ...If you compete on quotas you never have a reckoning in terms of whether your business model is efficient."
• (18:10, Izabella): "A lot of people are feeling that democracy was a bit of a mirage, that maybe we never really had it."
• (49:37, Peter): "Peasants having a voice and exposing corruption and lies is incompatible with a system that requires control."
• (33:43, Izabella): "If you don't take risk, you don’t get anywhere... the safety is exactly the same problem actually that we saw in the Soviet Union after collapse."
• (56:12, Izabella): "Nobody does that anymore because everyone’s exhausted."
• (38:25, Izabella): "It’s often just horse trading. It’s often to do with ... you owe X person somewhere else a favor."
• (98:54, Izabella): "What we really need is the rise of sort of permanent little cafes where people can come and meet on a regular basis."
• (44:57, Isabella): "We all want similar things, and if we could just agree, we have to rebalance the system and work on the stuff that we commonly agree on."
• (94:43, Peter): "I'm terrified and optimistic at the same time. ...I think the British people are at their wit's end and I just hope someone steps forward and offers something genuinely revolutionary here."

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• 00:09 / 01:54 | Izabella’s firsthand Soviet/Polish memories and the “zero hour” paradigm shift
• 07:22–09:49 | Why Poland’s transition succeeded—delayed privatization, small businesses, no oligarchs
• 13:31–15:54 | Britain’s political divide, loss of institutional trust, Epstein revelations
• 19:44–23:52 | Middle-class collapse, UK housing crisis, “right to rent,” and government intervention
• 24:25–29:00 | Quota-based economic illusions—Soviet, Chinese, and UK analogs
• 32:52–35:50 | “Safetyism” in British society; generational malaise and blocked entrepreneurialism
• 38:25–40:00 | How political appointments work—horse trading, cronyism, lack of merit
• 49:37–50:53 | Media censorship, social media's role in democracy, and analogies to samizdat
• 56:12–57:37 | Cultural exhaustion, lost middle-class lifestyle, need for home-based social renewal
• 79:23–86:06 | “EU mindset” vs. American sphere: global alignments and Brexit’s dilemma
• 91:25–93:10 | Warning signals of collapse: shortages, inflation, stagnation, loss of free speech
• 98:54–99:38 | The need for grassroots café culture—a new Solidarity movement

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Closing Reflections

The episode offers an unflinching diagnosis of the UK’s decline but is ultimately a call to action—echoing the spirit of Solidarity, Kaminska and McCormack challenge listeners to rebuild genuine community, support small business, rekindle civic discussion, and watch for the warning signs of collapse. Their message: it’s time to unite for fundamental renewal before passive collapse becomes permanent.

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Transcript

[Peter Schiff]

You said something that terrified me, that looking at the state of the uk, we are starting to resemble a Soviet style collapse.

[Isabella]

I mean, it certainly feels like it. I mean, I was only a young girl when, when it all happened in, in Poland and the Soviet Union, but I remember the ambiance and, and the sort of atmosphere of that era and it was so similar to now. You know, it was literally like a paradigm shift overnight. You know, before you knew it, the economy was falling apart. You could see, you know, bread queues and, you know, nothing in the shops, nothing was working.

[Peter Schiff]

You would have thought that with people with half a brain would look at everything decaying and getting worse here and then would look at Poland and see how everything's getting better and their economy's growing and their health service works and go, what are they doing right and what are we getting wrong?

[Isabella]

But this is, this is how it happened in Communism. It was like suddenly it was as if you were left with nothing. There was no structure, there was no institutions. You couldn't trust anything. And they have to kind of realize, geez, everything we believed is just wrong.

[Peter Schiff]

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[Isabella]

Hello.

[Peter Schiff]

We were exchanging texts last week and you said something that terrified me, that looking at the state of the uk, we are starting to resemble a Soviet style collapse.

[Isabella]

Yeah, I think so.

[Peter Schiff]

Are we in? I don't know, are we watching the regime collapse in real time?

[Isabella]

I mean, it certainly feels like it. I mean, I was only a young girl when it all happened in Poland and the Soviet Union, but I remember the ambiance and the sort of atmosphere of that era and it was so similar to now. There was this sudden sort of vibe of both the unknown and the known. Everything seemed to happen all at once. There were rumors, there were, you know, people continuously kind of like trying to figure out if this piece of information was right about ex official. Was he really that corrupt? And it was, it was everything at once. You know, it was literally like a paradigm shift overnight. And I think the nearest thing you can, you know, equate it to is, is the idea of zero hour, which is the moment like the Nazis lose and they realize they were the bad guys, right? And they have to kind of realize, geez, everything we believed is just wrong. And it was similar for a lot of people under the Soviet Union. If you were not opposed to the regime, many people were defending it until the, you know, till the bitter end. And then finally, you know, started very slowly with glasnost and revelations about Stalin and the terrible things he had done. And then, you know, before you knew it, the economy was falling apart. You could see, you know, bread queues and, you know, nothing in the shops, nothing was working. You know, Adam Curtis, I think, beautifully articulated that entire mood in Hypernormalization and later in Trauma Zone, which I really recommend, everyone watches. And suddenly it was as if you were left with nothing. There was no structure, there was no institutions. You couldn't trust anything totally. You went from like complete a totalitarian system that controlled everything to an environment where really people were at a loss without those support structures that they had become so used to. And for a lot of people, that was incredibly disorientating. I mean, you couldn't possibly imagine if you've lived your life with the security of, of a sort of a job for life in some industrial outlet and suddenly you have no job, you have no income, you have no political party to represent you. Everything is gone. And of course, what we know now is that really that chaos was exploited by, I would say, external interests, which is where the oligarchs came from. And, you know, Western capital flooded in, but it didn't really cultivate a stable environment in many of these post Soviet countries. Poland was a little bit different because it didn't have a. It was a less chaotic collapse over there, but. But largely because they integrated the former regime into the new structure. So it was far more civil in some ways. They had this big roundtable discussion with the other side, with the communists. They realized there were too many of them to purge. So you had to kind of find a way to find a kind of parlay. You come to a new agreement about how the system is gonna work. And the idea was that you have a two party system now, or at least a democracy, and you would invite capitalist forces and the market mechanism. And everybody agreed. But there was also a really tough decision that had to be made, which was, you know, everyone was facing this economic crisis and these countries needed capital. Many of these, I mean, believe it or not, many of these former Soviet and communist bloc countries had a lot of external debt. And the choice was, do you default on the external creditors or do you basically go shock therapy and deprive Your local population from all the sorts of sort of welfare they. They've been accustomed to for all this, for all this time. And different countries took different pathways. In Poland, Poland was different. And I think in the long run, what it did was probably a good thing. It kind of settled on an equilibrium between the two. It said, no, we're not prepared to just default on our local responsibilities in favor of external investors. And I think that was the right decision. So people weren't. They didn't just completely lose that safety blanket, whereas in Russia it really was shock therapy.

[Peter Schiff]

And Poland's on track to have a bigger economy than the UK, is it by 2030?

[Isabella]

Yes. I think there are a lot of lessons in how Poland handled the transition, actually. And obviously I'm Polish, so I'm biased, but.

[Peter Schiff]

But the figures speak for themselves. What has Poland got so right that we've got so wrong here.

[Isabella]

In the last 10 years? I would say, you know, polls are very entrepreneurial. And I think unlike the other, you know, in Russia, when communism collapsed, there was no heritage of entrepreneurialism. Where there was entrepreneurialism, it was in the black market, which is how the oligarchs kind of gained power and all the kind of mafia groups because they were used to working in the underworld. Poland also had an underworld and a secret police and all that sort of stuff. But there was more tolerance for small businesses even under communism. And I think Poland had a very pro American, Western attitude amongst the dissident community. And many pivoted very quickly to being entrepreneurial. But on a small business level, unlike men like Russia, Poland only really had one oligarch. Well, had a few, but, like, there was only one. You wouldn't be able to name a Polish Polish oligarch. Right. So we avoided that massive concentration of wealth in the hands of potentially quite dodgy figures. And we did that because we delayed privatization. We didn't do snap privatization. We waited and we did it in a very slow and kind of moderate way to avoid, you know, people had to learn about the market mechanism. They had been brainwashed effectively for years and years about how economics worked. Like, my mother went to Eskaha, which is the LSC of Poland, and she, when she came to the UK in the 70s, always said, you know, she was embarrassed to tell people here that she had a degree from Eskaha because she was. It was communist economics. It was a joke. And besides, like, I didn't even do any work because to get a grade back in those days, you just, you just bribed people to get the grade.

[Peter Schiff]

But hold on, what kind of economics do you get from the lse? Is socialist economics. Keynesian?

[Isabella]

Yeah. And actually like, quite, from my understanding it's, it's, it's quite a Fabian based mentality over there. Exactly. But even so, she was kind of embarrassed, so she never used that qualification here. She thought it was, was redundant. And yet I think a lot of Polish, a lot of people who ascended the sort of hierarchy, the new elite in Poland never acknowledged the fact that their old credentials were maybe not 100%. Some of them maybe then went to kind of top up their degrees abroad, but many of them didn't and still gained a lot of power. And I think that speaks to the polarization still today in Poland, which is that there is still a sort of, I would say contingent of quite powerful people who were educated under the old regime and never really learned the fundamentals. I mean, they may have learned them over time, like since then, but not in a, in a sort of necessarily in a formal way. But anyway, the point I was trying to make about my mother is that she was, she was embarrassed to kind of even, you know, she thought the British would just think badly about it. And in Poland, The pivot to the market transition as a result was, I think, kind of, I mean, I've kind of forgotten what the point I was trying to make, but I think it was much more moderate and as a result less chaotic. And that was the key thing because that was the point I wanted to make. People learnt about the capitalist system. They weren't just thrust into these privatizations overnight, not understanding the value of, of these privatizations. They watched what happened in Russia, they, they started to learn about, you know, the power of, of a shareholder community, of a shareholder economy. You've got to remember in Russia the, these people didn't understand, they were all given these vouchers and they didn't know the value of those vouchers. So they were very easily deprived of that wealth. And I've always said in a weird way, crypto has allowed at least the UK and the west and a lot of emerging markets to have a sort of informal education about how markets work for free. So I've always found that quite an interesting. Well, I've always thought it was a interesting positive side effect of crypto. Whether you love crypto or hate crypto, you've got to admit it has helped educate a lot of people about how markets work.

[Peter Schiff]

Well, it's a rampant free market.

[Isabella]

Exactly. And, and so it's made, I think maybe people A little bit more resilient. So if we do pivot in a hard way more to a market economy, there will be, I think, some segment of the younger population that has learned those skills in large part because of either the crypto market or this kind of Wall street bets, Robinhood stock trading mentality that has been exported here by the Americans.

[Peter Schiff]

But our conversation was specifically about the uk which is the bit that terrifies me. I also think we've got people in this country living in parallel reality. There is a group of people who are terrified about what is happening to our country, our civil liberties, our democracy. And there's other people who think everything's great and rosy in this future and there's hope. What's your diagnosis?

[Isabella]

Well, I think this is the week that we're having all these Epstein revelations. And if, you know, my normie friends who usually don't pay attention to any of this stuff, they're like, what is going on? I think people are bewildered. They're confused. Everything they. They've thought was true for so many years seems to be wrong. All these, you know, because the thing about Epstein is that everyone is implicated across the pol. Political spectrum. It doesn't matter if you're left or right or, you know, he's. He seems to have been connected everywhere. It was a power network that was focused on just developing informants on a completely apolitical basis. And, you know, we've only seen, I think, a fraction of the emails and the content. So God knows what's still to come. It's like a slow drip. Like maybe. Maybe the slow drip is necessary because it would create a sort of panic, epistemic shock if people realized just how far reaching that network was. But it really feels like. I don't know about you, but it feels to me like it's like almost like a mafia network. Like everything that you saw in the Godfather seems to be true.

[Peter Schiff]

Well, I'm pretty much a libertarian now, and I see the state itself as nothing more than a gang. And I see democracy is nothing more than two gangs, three gangs fighting for control of the state, the ability to create money, steal from us. Well, yes, put us in cages for things they don't like. I do not see political systems now where the electorate comes first. I think the federalist won, and it's lucrative to be in charge of the levers of power.

[Isabella]

So I would have definitely agreed with you on that, like before these Epstein revelations. But I'm now wondering if we've all been played, because I think there's a false dichotomy. I think actually, you know, we're being steered into this idea that the left is bad. If you're a reasonable person who watches the markets, I think you are being steered into exactly that perspective, that the kind of totalitarian technocratic overreach is just, you know, stifling the whole system. But I do wonder now if maybe it's also the case that the radicalization is being pumped on the right as well, because the real strategy is divide and conquer. And so I wonder if. And that's very hard for people to grasp because. Because if it's. If, you know, people want a hero, they want to know if these guys are the bad guys, then these other guys must be the good guys. So what happens if actually there are bad guys across the board?

[Peter Schiff]

Oh, no, I think there are bad guys above the board. And I think above the political layer is the money layers, the asset managers. We had Simon Dixon in here and Chamath talked about it recently. The 150 people run the world. And I think it's very obvious, not necessarily that it's like a table of lizard people deciding, but the asset managers decide where money can be made, where can they influence power, where can they influence regime change so they can make as much money as possible. But when I look at the political system, I think they're now all left. So I think conservatives are left, I think reform are left, I think green are far left. But the reason I think they're all left because none of them is coming with a message of dismantling the state, returning power to the electorate, supporting our, you know, having a decent bill of rights which protects citizens, freedom for speech and free association, free markets. So until somebody dismantles this huge state, this huge surface area state that. All left wing to me now.

[Isabella]

Yeah, I mean, I would agree with that. I think the revelation is. I think a lot of people are feeling that democracy was a bit of a mirage, that maybe we never really had it, that maybe everything was gamed and it doesn't matter how you vote. You know this. And that's what I mean.

[Peter Schiff]

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[Isabella]

I completely agree with that and I think it has been boiling frog and then now suddenly people are waking up to it. I've not, I just. Every day I hear someone's losing a job. A friend of mine who's usually the demographic, someone in the mid-40s, 50s, professional, you know, city professional, tech professional, some.

[Peter Schiff]

Sort of, you know, creative industry.

[Isabella]

Creative industry. These people being laid off, they all have mortgages, mortgages, liabilities, kids, private schools. That way of life is suddenly, you know, being stripped from the middle class. And you're right, they, and it shouldn't. It's sad because really this has been happening to the working classes for a very long time now. It's forced them to become dependent on welfare without. I don't think it's their fault. I think, you know, we have outsourced so much of industry that it left people with basic sort of working class skills and whether it's in agriculture or building or manufacturing, they were left with nothing. They had no choice but to adopt welfare because how else are you going to live? And now suddenly it's coming for the middle Classes, but the middle classes are so much more expensive to maintain. So you, you know, it has to lead to liquidations, it has to lead to in. The housing market is clearly in crisis and the banks are in denial about it. And this is shocking to me because you look at the sort of stress tests from the central banks and everything is coming out okay. And the banks are resilient. And I just, I just that, that doesn't square with reality. It's only resilient because you've got middle class people literally drawing down on their life savings to avoid defaulting on their mortgages. To get to the point that you're talking about, which is a system where nobody has any capital or assets.

[Peter Schiff]

Well, and you've got a group of people who have a sunk cost in. They bought a property maybe three years ago in London, it might even just be a flat and they've paid 600,000 for it. And when they've had it repriced to go on the market, they're being told 400,000 or 450,000, 500,000 and they're like, well, I can't sell this, I can't afford that loss.

[Isabella]

And, and I think when, when it becomes very clear that these properties are going to default, it's going to be like subprime, but it's going to be, I mean there's no way the government can't intervene. So the question is how would the government intervene? It would have to stage some sort of mass buyout of these properties. And I, I would imagine that's what would happen is that the government would effectively guarantee all these mortgages and then create a mass restructuring plan. But you as a house owner would, then it would go back to, it would be like Thatcher's. What was it called? This is a fact check moment. You know, when she, she privatized all the social housing, they had a special name.

[Peter Schiff]

I forgot. Oh yes, I. Right to buy.

[Isabella]

Right to buy. Right, yeah, it'll be Right to buy, but in reverse.

[Peter Schiff]

Right to rent.

[Isabella]

Right to rent.

[Peter Schiff]

Right to rent from the government.

[Isabella]

Right to sell to the government.

[Peter Schiff]

You'll own nothing and be happy.

[Isabella]

Yeah, you're right to sell. I mean, I can't imagine how else the financial system could handle that amount of defaults.

[Peter Schiff]

Well, it wouldn't, it would be a money creation event and somebody else will end up owning those assets. The debt will move and we will see more inflation and it will be more of the rich getting richer and the poor guy and Bora. And the big concern here is it's like it's probably similar to what happened in Soviet Russia where they were making fake things for quotas. So much of our economy now seems fake.

[Isabella]

Yes. And I think actually the quota based mentality has infected everybody. And I wrote a piece actually on the blind spot a few about a couple of months ago, sort of questioning. I mean it was a bit of an epiphany for me because as a poll it's just common knowledge that soft budget constraints led to the mismanagement of the economy in Soviet system. And I, and I was thinking to myself could it possibly be that conventional economists have completely forgotten this? There is a great book called the Economics of Shortage who's. By a Polish guy. I think it's a Polish guy. This is, this is the moment I need, we need Connor. It's called the Economics of Shortage. It begins with I think the guy who wrote it.

[Peter Schiff]

It's with a Konai Janos.

[Isabella]

That's. That sounds right. Yeah, yeah, Yanos Corny. And, and in that book he basically explains how, how one of the key drivers of, of the economic mismanagement was this quota based mentality. So they weren't competing on price based competition, they were competing on quotas. And if you compete on quotas you never have a reckoning in terms of whether your business model is efficient because the state, it's like an industrial policy which continuously bails out effectively any enterprise because it doesn't matter if you're loss leading the. The point is to meet your quota. And this is, this is how China has been operating for decades. It's most apparent in my mind in the solar industry over there or in the EV business where you know, the western economists will say oh these cars are great and these companies are making money, but they're not really. And this is why in the, in the last plenum she has finally. Because the chickens are coming to home to roost in China now. They can't afford to continuously just push for quota based GDP which is effectively what it, what what it is. Michael Pettis says this very clearly all the time. He's a great economist. Everyone should check him out. He who specializes, specializes in China and his whole, his whole thesis is that like when you look at GDP from China they always meet the target because you're going to meet the target if you have a quota based system because you will repress the domestic consumer no matter what to achieve your target. And so everything is kind of fake and you will print enough money to ensure that that happens. But it's not really indicative of whether you're adding value to your society because you're creating all these goods to meet a quota, not to meet domestic demand. And demand should be the driver of business activity, not sort of command economy directives from on high. So in the EV industry now finally they've realized that these quota based systems which continuously bail out EV and solar manufacturers, effectively bailout, I mean soft bailout, it's not an official bailout. What it means is that they always will get more loans from the state owned banks to ensure they can meet their quotas. And now because of the tariffs that were introduced by Trump, suddenly it's costing China to do that. And without an open door to just dumping all this stuff on western markets, economics suddenly matter. Which is why in the plenum she has said we're going to have to roll that back. And so finally, after years of kind of trying to avoid this reckoning, she has allowed for a little bit more market activity. And they're promoting stock ownership for the first time because as you repress the domestic consumer, any, any money they make, they don't know where to, where to put it. And you can't even invest in a lot of these companies because the way it works is if you look at sort of the, any performance of Chinese markets, it's been kind of flat. But that's by design because Xi doesn't believe in bubbles. The bubble is for public distribution. So he basically steals the equity value and distributes it so no one can make money at the, at the consumer level. Which is why the Chinese are so concerned about currency debasement. And, and I think the gold rally that we've seen and the silver rally we've seen over the last six months, I think there's other elements probably on the sidelines as well. But so much of that is to do with the Chinese chasing, well, looking for any opportunity to, to save in a reliable store of value, to capture value. Yeah, because you know, the yuan, you just feel instinctively the yuan will, will not hold like it's been appreciating because under the tariff regime they came to a deal that the yuan has to be valued much higher to stop the sort of export dumping. But they can't sustain it because when you actually, they pretend that they can and, and as the, you know, they have to maintain face, it's very important in China to maintain face. So they, they've been saying that their, you know, their economy is, is, is, is, is perfect and, and well balanced and, and if you, if, you know, of course we could appreciate the currency if we wanted to, but in reality, appreciating currency really, really hurts them and forces them to liberalize their system. And if they liberalize their system, they lose control. They lose control, which is very frightening. And the people of China know this, which is why they're all buying gold and, and they're so poor in relative terms, on a per, you know, you hear about this amazing GDP of China, but, but actually when you look at it on a per capita head, I mean, again, probably something to fact check, but I believe like the average GDP per capita in America is around $80,000, give or take. In China, it's about 15, 20, maybe less, less than 20. So they're on completely different level per capita. And if they get locked in now that, you know, level, it's a big problem because they have to compete on that level and it shows the relative strength of the, of, of the US in, in, in comparison. So they're panic.

[Peter Schiff]

It's 6,000. China's 13 to 14. What's the, what's the UK? I think we're below Mississippi now.

[Isabella]

I think we're like 45 or something, maybe. 45, 40.

[Peter Schiff]

Have you seen islands?

[Isabella]

No, I haven't.

[Peter Schiff]

Huge.

[Isabella]

Oh, really?

[Peter Schiff]

53, the UK.

[Isabella]

53.

[Peter Schiff]

What's Ireland? I'm pretty sure Ireland's huge.

[Isabella]

I wouldn't be surprised because 107. Whoa.

[Peter Schiff]

Yeah, because they brought in all the tech companies. But the problem is, is all their parties are pretty much socialist, so they just spread it around.

[Isabella]

But also I kind of think of Ireland and sorry if this is, this might be a bit controversial, but it's like a client state of America.

[Peter Schiff]

Yes. It's technology outsourcer.

[Isabella]

It's basically. They're throwing. I think there's a lot of influence in American politics on the Irish side and they see Ireland as. Even though they're in the eu, they kind of throw them a bone with all these tech companies that come and take advantage of their tax regime, which is effectively a type of subsidy from America.

[Peter Schiff]

Yeah, well, they broke EU rules, didn't they, on the attack. So, yeah, yeah, look, I think it's very, very concerning. There's a pattern, I'm seeing, Isabella, of this kind of safetyism that has bled through everything, not just our economy, where we don't allow recessions, we try and prevent recessions, to the way we raise our children, to the way we teach our children. We're trying to insulate everything from harm, but we also should know instinctively that progress comes from facing Adversity, whether that's economic, whether that's in your social circles. And now we've got an economy that's falling apart, a democracy that doesn't work, and a generation of Gen Zs who are either angry or depressed or both.

[Isabella]

100%. You have to take risk. If you don't take risk, you don't get anywhere. I think the safety is exactly the same problem actually that we saw in the Soviet Union after collapse is that people were just, you know, they were so used to getting everything from the state, it was very difficult to adapt. So we are going to have to adapt people. And now nowadays I think if you're losing your job, you should be looking to find a way to make money for yourself. And by the way, that became the norm in Poland which is why there were so many entrepreneurs and that's why the polls are so entrepreneurial. They all had to look after themselves. And, and it is because in Poland the communist system there did allow a bit of small business. And, and I think the main, my dad always says that during that shortage period it was if you were, if you were prepared to take risk, if you had any entrepreneurial spirit at all, it's very easy to make money.

[Peter Schiff]

And it's the exact opposite now in the uk, everywhere I look, people are closing down their small businesses, shops, bars, cafes. But also people aren't creating them because they're like, this is too expensive, there's too many regulations and if I, if I just manage to make some money, the government's going to take it all off me anyway.

[Isabella]

Well that's the irony is that in Poland in that time people period, I understand that the plus side was that because everything was kind of state owned, the little businesses didn't really have to pay much tax. So there wasn't, there wasn't really that the state ownership kind of compensated for that. I mean there were downslides to it too. But as a, if you were entrepreneur, you got to keep most of your money. And, and you're right, I don't know how small businesses are coping. Like the, the, the business rates. I mean you're a small business owner. I mean how can you, how can you survive with that regime? Like, I don't, I don't know how you can do it.

[Peter Schiff]

I mean it's very hard. Small business now is very, very hard. There has been this bureaucratic creep trying to manage the accounting side and the HR side of a small business. Look, if you're Starbucks, it's great you can scale that. You can have departments that run it. You probably like it. But if you are, it's impossible to run a small cafe with 10 staff and have every single HR policy in place. Get your accounting. It's just impossible. And I would say I spend a day to two days a week on bureaucratic stuff the state wants me to do. And I could be spending that in my businesses, growing them and creating jobs. They are. This to me, is active destruction of our economy. And some will say it's, you know, this is all by design. It doesn't matter whether it's by design or it's just the consequences of having very unimpressive people in government. The output is the same is that we have killed our high streets, we've killed our town centers, we've killed entrepreneurial spirit. Good young people are leaving, Good rich people are leaving. And I am terrified for the future of this country. I mean, you wrote about the institutional level of lying that we have now. There's nothing. I just. I am just shocked because there's nothing I believe that comes out of any politician's mouth anyway. I think they're all corrupt. I think they're all liars. I don't believe anything anymore.

[Isabella]

I mean, I kind of feel the same.

[Peter Schiff]

But how do we get enough people to not realize? Because, like, sometimes you must. Do you get it sometimes with some of your friends, you know, Normie friends, and they look at you like you're a nutter.

[Isabella]

Yeah. And always.

[Peter Schiff]

And occasionally you have a win where somebody comes to you and says, oh, that shit you said to me. I like, kind of feels like it's. Yeah, it's real.

[Isabella]

Maybe you didn't know what you were talking about. Look, I myself have. Have been on a learning curve because I was, you know, mostly focused on finance for most of my career. And the last three years I had the opportunity to work at Politico and get to see how political reporting works, which was really a massive revelation for me. And I don't know, I'm sure you probably know, I mean, when I tell you this, this is probably obvious to most people, but I kind of shied away from it because I didn't like politics. I didn't like the bickering, I didn't like the deal making. But I only realized through that process how, how appointments are made and how people, you know, how political parties determine who to point to what so, you know, ministry or department.

[Peter Schiff]

It's random sometimes it's not right.

[Isabella]

It's often just horse trading.

[Peter Schiff]

Yes.

[Isabella]

It's often to do with. It's nothing to do with, you know, the skills or competence or, or even if you, if you're very ideological and you have a mission, you can't necessarily appoint the right person because you have. You owe X person somewhere else a favor and, you know, you won't get that. You know, so everything is, especially in Brussels, where everything is, you know, everyone's agenda is so variable, you end up compromising across the board. And people like normies look at the government, they go, why did this government, which promised this, appoint this person who has absolutely nothing to do with this? It makes no sense to me. But of course, you don't know what deal has been made in the background. And there's no transparency over that.

[Peter Schiff]

Well, that's how you end up with Ed Miliband in charge of energy.

[Isabella]

Yes.

[Peter Schiff]

That's how you end up with Rachel Reeves as our chancellor. But you look at these people and I say, you have the most unimpressive people this country produces in charge of the most important decisions that affect the lives of everybody. And I really think people need to understand how this works, because what we're doing is we're putting morons in charge of. There's a really good book Ian Dunt wrote called How Westminster Works and why It Doesn't. He talks about ministerial appointments, he talks about the incentives of MPs, and it becomes very clear that they are playing a power game. And that power game leads to these morons making these really important decisions that are literally destroying our country.

[Isabella]

Yeah. And so the question is, what deals have they made and with whom to orientate our economy and our society in that direction. And I think a lot of those deals are actually in Davos. And my big epiphany is, know I've said this for many years, but I think Davos is where we go to negotiate what concessions we make to the rest of the world. Largely because neoliberalism had so many flaws and develop, you know, created other externalities in many of the countries that these multinationals, you know, behaved in quite not nice ways. And, and as, as, as the global elite saw, you know, continents like Latin America skew politically towards socialism, they panicked and they realized, well, we'll have to make some concessions because otherwise we'll lose access. They're going to just do what Putin did and confiscate all our assets. So they start to kind of parlay in Davos and decide, well, you know, we'll make you this accommodation and that accommodation, because they're, you know, effectively shit scared that There'll be a revolution. All their money will be confiscated from by the socialists in those countries. But they don't really inform the domestic population about that. So instead we get ESG and we get this whole kind of climate friendly policy. And there's a sort of quid. I feel like there's a quid pro quo where we'll allow more of your, more of the kind of global south to come into the elite ranks. So we'll be more inclusive. We'll let your elites come and join our boards. And in exchange, you know, you have to, you have to accommodate our kind of governance and supply chain standards a little bit more. And that's kind of the concession. That's the trade, certainly. That's how it feels. And that's why it was so interesting this year when Davos became front and center of. You know, I think that deal making was very much exposed by Trump this year.

[Peter Schiff]

Well, there seems to be two sides to Davos this year. Yeah, previously it was just like how the elites are going to govern the peasants. And, you know, we just sit back and accept it and watch them fly their private jets and make the same jokes and then just accept it. This. There seems to be two sides. And the e, like the European countries seem to be in that old world and there's kind of like this new world that Trump's leading. It's like we're here to do business.

[Isabella]

Yes. Transactional. He's transactional. And he came and descended on, on Davos and he was, you know, they call it Taco. Really annoys me. I'll tell you why. The whole Taco, I mean, I'm not, I'm not. I don't want to defend Trump. Trump is all over the upstream files. There's all sorts of problems with him. But I have an issue with Taco because Taco is just out of the deal. I mean, he says it explicitly in his books. He said it a million times. You always start high and you walk it back. It's so explicit. And yet time and time again, everyone falls for his, like, ridiculous, like, opening gambits.

[Peter Schiff]

It's, I'm gonna, I'm gonna. We're gonna invade and take over Greenland. Oh, now we've got your minerals.

[Isabella]

I mean, but it's, it's, it's, it's such an obvious formula. And yet the media, on cue, reacts with hysteria. And, you know, there's gonna be, you know, it's like that scene in Monty Python in the Life of Brian, you know, that scene in Marraket in the market say, oh, no, you got a haggle. Yeah, you can't just. Whereas I feel like. And he's making that haggle explicit. And you start with something really. Oh, you can't just start that. You've got to start at 10,000 shekels. For what? I can't remember a gourd, but, yeah, So I think this Davos that was very much made obvious. There was a negotiation and there was a trade. We're not still sure what trades happened in the background, but they definitely involved, I believe, the appointment of Kevin Walsh as Fed chairman, I think some sort of concession on Ukraine and possibly some stuff in Iran. And I think that was. That was part of the trading, you know, so I'll go easy on Greenland if you give me these other things. Again, it's the stuff that happens in the background that is really the story.

[Peter Schiff]

It's really interesting to watch, though, because I. I see that and I speak to my American friends who run businesses, and they're like, look, at least we're open for business. And then they laugh at our country. They look at us and they're like, what is going on there? What, You. You're not fucking mental. You're not. You're not doing business. You're arresting people for tweets like, what are you doing in your country? And I feel like there is a collapse in the faith of the British system. But. But are we gonna have decades of this collapse in faith, like Argentina or something? Something gonna have to change. I mean, something has to change, but.

[Isabella]

Like, I would like to think that the Brits are waking up to the problem. And, you know, we have a shopkeeper mentality. Like, we were a nation of shopkeepers, AKA small on, you know, small little businesses where we got to keep a little bit of margin. And that margin allowed us to have a nice life on our own terms, not as necessary corporate employees. I think there has to be a new elite, like, number one. So it's about creating a political movement. Movement that. As. I don't want to. I don't want to preach politics because I'm not an expert, but, like, I do feel like we need some sort of party that includes everyone from all sides. Like, it has to. We have to just. We have to realize that this whole them and us thing, like, we just have to born. We have to come together. We have to come together and recognize that, you know, your enemy is not necessarily your enemy. We all want similar things, and if we could just agree, we have to rebalance the system and work on the stuff that we commonly agree on.

[Peter Schiff]

If you read some of the writings now of the libertarian types in the UK and the Marxists, they're saying very similar things. I read an article by Grace Blakely, she's a total Marxist but she was complaining about the wealth divide and how the rich get richer and the poor get poorer and we have a poverty class. And it's very similar to my complaints in that in a deficit based system, debt based system with deficit spending, that essentially we are making the rich richer and the poor poorer. We're both seeing the same problem, the solution's totally different. Grace would want more socialism and I want more freedom. And I'm right and she's wrong because every time we've tried what she wants, it's failed. I think we've had one kind of obvious go at free markets which is happening in Argentina at the moment. And I don't want to have the debate about Millay's intentions. It's working. What he's doing is working. It's objectively working. And so I agree with you. My thought on this is that what we need is something which is based on freedom and liberty, something which is anti establishment, something which is anti federalist, which is yes, government is a natural monopoly and we will always have government, but can we have one that's small, gets the fuck out of the way and stops printing money that's an anti, a real anti. Because reform is meant to be our anti establishment option. And look what have we got? We've got the oldest. The architects of failure is what they are.

[Isabella]

But again nowadays I just think what have they got on him? That's my default bone now is like whenever people start off with grand sort of public policy ideals and then they u turn inexplicably. I just wonder, well what have they got? What did they find? Who hacked who and what like compromising stuff have they got on him? I mean that is the sad reality of this Epstein stuff is that you realize, you know, the real everyone's in it. The real currency that rules the world is not Bitcoin, it's not gold, it's Kompromat.

[Peter Schiff]

Well and then when you realize like Israel's bought up, was it 13 VPNs really?

[Isabella]

Oh God, I have no idea about that.

[Peter Schiff]

So we're all fucked.

[Isabella]

I mean the VPN thing, I mean I, I, I'm not an expert but it's, I'm told that VPNs will work but I've, I, I think, I believe I Heard some talk about trying to ban vpn.

[Peter Schiff]

Well, they want to ban them here because they tried to obviously ban child, children accessing pornography, which by the way, I'm not totally opposed to. I don't think 12 year old with an iPhone should be watching hardcore porn in his bedroom. Yeah, me too, but, but at the same time they now censoring replies on Substack under the same rules. But, but all the kids now to get around this, they've just got granddad access in porn.

[Isabella]

Yeah. And I, I think it's just a smokescreen really. I mean the, the whole attack on X and whether you love it or not, I don't think you know that.

[Peter Schiff]

Did you see William Hague's tweet today?

[Isabella]

No, I didn't.

[Peter Schiff]

Let me read this to you. This is wild. And I used to like it.

[Isabella]

It was like about the Grok AI creating some like dodgy images and then they proved that other AIs were doing the same. But they can all do it, but nobody was going after the other ones.

[Peter Schiff]

William Hague tweeted, social media is becoming incompatible with a healthy democratic system. No, what's actually happening is peasants having a voice and exposing corruption and lies is incompatible with a system that requires control.

[Isabella]

Yes, and again the analogy. I hate to keep coming back to communism, but that is how people woke up in the communist system. It was through these samuraisdats. We had to smuggle in press from abroad, Radio Free. I mean, in this case, you know, it was Radio Free Europe and who knows how, you know, nowadays we don't know how, how clean they were, but they had their own agenda. But nonetheless it gave people a different perspective. And whether you believe the American message or whether or not you don't, I thought in a democracy we're supposed to be able to make our own minds up. And so you have to be at least given the spectrum of different perspectives. But nowadays, you know, the idea is you have to comply with a very narrow set of beliefs and if you dare to look outside them, you're a conspiracy theorist or you know, all sorts of bad names that's all collapsing. I mean, I would hope so.

[Peter Schiff]

We watched like, if you watch the Grammys now, what you see is a failing institution of left wing elitism where Billie Eilish comes out and says, oh, you're not legal on stolen land. And everyone just goes to our house and go, okay, so we can come into your gated property in la. All that compliance that comes from the Hollywood or musically, it's just actually. And there's Even Connor. What, what were you saying earlier about Sydney Sweeney? Fairness said being base is hot.

[Isabella]

Yeah, being based. That's what my husband says. But it is, he's like, even like these, I don't know, I don't want.

[Peter Schiff]

To speak from west, but like we feminized everything, right? We went through the process of feminizing everything and there's been a rejection by these young men. It just has been a rejection. And when you see someone like Cindy Sweeney, I know she's been reined in a little bit recently, but when you see someone like her saying I don't give a fuck, that's cool.

[Isabella]

But it's also cool for women. I think women, I mean, I think we've spoken about this before. You know, I think it's just gone too far. Like most women I know in their 40s and 50s are absolutely exhausted. They really want to spend time with their kids. They can't. They have to go to work. Every like have these, you know, power careers which deprive them of any time with their kids. And, and because all their husbands are being laid off because the only people that will be hired are the other women. It's, it feels like a prison. It feels like a total prison frankly. And I don't think it should be that way. I think real women's lib is giving women the choice to be career women if they want, but also stay at home moms. There are lots of women who are not cut out for that kind of career or any career. They just want to be mums. And what's wrong with that? Why should society treat them as second class citizens? And unfortunately at the moment we do because any woman who decides to be a stay at home mom has to basically marry a millionaire to be able to make the economics work.

[Peter Schiff]

Well that's because we inflated the house.

[Isabella]

Prices so much the 2 income norm.

[Peter Schiff]

We looked at the house. So my dad had his first job as a aircraft engineer and had two kids. He bought a four bedroom house in a little town called Kempston near Bedford. And it was a detached house. And my mum didn't work, she raised the kids. She eventually got a little Avon lady job to help supplement things, but she didn't have to work. Now that salary that my dad had then is very similar to what Connor's had. Connor has and sorry to keep using his example and I've told this on the show before, but I always think it's really important. We looked at what the cost of a house, the smallest four bedroom house in that area. Now is £385,000. So essentially you need 100,000 pound of salary with a deposit to be able to buy that. So you really need to an average of 50,000 salary per person to be able to afford the house. This isn't a lovely little village, this is a suburb of Bedford. Bedford isn't the best place in the world.

[Isabella]

And also if you have a single salary you get taxed more.

[Peter Schiff]

Yes, but, and also have you seen all this stuff about people who basically approach 100,000 and there's no point getting a pay rise from 100,000 unless you go to about 160. It's not worth it. And so we've inflated everything so much, not that big. This the 1 to 110, I think. No, the 1 to 110 means you lose your 0 to 10 allowance. But actually you're, you have to. I think it's like, it's much higher than that. I'm sure it's like 140, go look it up. But the point is people are getting off a pay rise. They say don't want it. Can I buy holiday with it, can I put it in my pension? Because we've created these cliffs, these ambitious Ambition Cliffs. 100 to 125, there's no difference. I mean, so you really need a 40 grand pay rise. A 40% pay rise. That's not going to happen.

[Isabella]

No, it's. The economics are so against you as a middle class person at the moment. I mean it's basically we're on a pathway that eliminates the middle class lifestyle. So you're just going to have working class people and very, very rich people for whom it doesn't matter.

[Peter Schiff]

But I mean if you put your conspiracy hat on, what's the use of eliminating the middle class? I get they're intelligent and they will vote against you.

[Isabella]

Ah yes, you can entrench power, you.

[Peter Schiff]

Can entrench power, you can make them more compliant. The compression, the wage compression between minimum wage and lower middle class is insane.

[Isabella]

At the moment, to be honest. I do think there's some truth to that because what I see in the middle class, at least amongst my friends, is that, you know, maybe I have a romantic, you know, view of the past or the 80s. Okay, I love the 80s. But you know, my parents, they had, they were having dinner parties all the time. They had time to do leisure, you know, we, I remember, you know, we were always going out and I mean not, not to restaurants. Like we ate a lot at home, much more so than I would say people do now, but there was. There was a. You know, they entertained, they lived, and nobody does that anymore because everyone's exhausted.

[Peter Schiff]

Yes.

[Isabella]

So despite all these tools, all this technology, nobody has time to really throw parties anymore. I haven't been to a party for age.

[Peter Schiff]

Would you say it's fair to say.

[Isabella]

Let'S have a party. Can we have a party?

[Peter Schiff]

We can have a party.

[Isabella]

Why don't we have a. Why don't you host a nice party?

[Peter Schiff]

I'll have a dinner party. You come. I've started cooking. I've cooked. Would it be fair to say I've cooked dinner every day for the last month? Pretty much.

[Isabella]

I would love to go to a fun dinner party.

[Peter Schiff]

Would you say it's fair to say I've cooked more times in the last month than I had probably in the last four years?

[Isabella]

Yeah.

[Peter Schiff]

Yeah, I just stopped. I just started cooking at home, making meals. I've cooked Sunday roasts. I'm getting competitive with it. I'm trying to improve it. And do you know why I did it? A couple of reasons. One, it meant I stopped looking at my phone or stopped working. I have a couple of hours. I might put on a podcast in the background, but I'm doing something also. As a family, we sometimes come around together, laugh and joke. We eat. When we'd have takeaways, the default was to sit in front of the TV with a takeaway. When you make a meal, I'm like, no, we're sitting fucking table. I'm getting the.

[Isabella]

I invested in this.

[Peter Schiff]

I'm putting the places out. I'm going to put the knives and forks out. Well, Connor does that. And he does it very is poor job. No, he doesn't know Connor. Connor has to have everything lined up perfectly. Does a great job. But then after we've eaten, we spend half an hour, an hour chatting together, have some philosophical chats. And so, yes, I will host it in a party.

[Isabella]

And that's how it should be.

[Peter Schiff]

There's a lot of these videos being shared out on Twitter, which is videos from the 80s and the 90s, like kids out on their bikes and. And I think there's a. Like a romanticism from our childhood going, oh, this is what we've given up for. What for? What have we given all this up for? I think the nation's depressed. I think there's a lack, a real lack of hope. I think you're right. Everyone's exhausted. There's mental health issues everywhere. I just. What have we. What have we gained?

[Isabella]

I Just sit in front of the screen all day long. I hate it. You know, and I would. I just think we all need to set boundaries. We all need to. We should have, like a dinner party movement, like, Come Dine with me.

[Peter Schiff]

But it's all economic, Isabella, because, like.

[Isabella]

God forbid you have dinner parties with people, you know, and then you actually discuss things and learn from each other and realize that maybe you have more in common than you thought.

[Peter Schiff]

So on this podcast, you are definitely hearing me talk about bitcoin a lot. Well, why? We live in a really strange time with governments driving inflation with their reckless spending and endless money printing. There is a way out of this. There is a way to protect your money, and that is by stacking bitcoin. I've made loads of shows about bitcoin. You can go and research this, you can go and read the books, but the truth is, it is the hardest money ever created. If you are interested in protecting your financial future, it's time for you to get on the bitcoin train. I have. I've been stacking bitcoin personally and through my businesses since 2017. It's protected me, it secured my family's future, and it also strengthens all of my businesses. So if you want to start stacking bitcoin, where do you do it? Well, for me, it's with Gemini. They're a fully licensed, full reserve exchange and custodian. So they give you a secure way for you to buy and own your bitcoin. There's no risks and no funny business. So if you're serious about stacking bitcoin the right way, head over to gemini.com, which is g e m I n I dot com. You would have thought that with people with half a brain, would look at everything decaying and getting worse here and then would look at Poland and see how everything's getting better and their economy's growing and their health service works and go, what are they doing right and what are we getting wrong? Look, it's so obvious we're socialist morons, but. But how many times do people want to have this playbook and be proven wrong? Nine pound twenty for a milkshake.

[Isabella]

Oh, my God. Just. Yes, yes. Even now just getting those two coffees is like £10 50 for two coffees. It's just extraordinary. I mean, it's. Where is the margin going? It's going to business rates, presumably. A lot of it. But, I mean, that is not sustainable.

[Peter Schiff]

Sainsbury's last night. Connor, what happened? One bag of shopping, three digits? No, 100 pound. There was probably 20 pound of toiletries in there. Well, it could have been more because I didn't look at the individual prices. But we went to buy a meal. So what went in there was some chicken, a couple of fillets, seven pound fifty. Okay. Some chicken, some Parma ham, some cheese, some vegetables. Bottle of wine, not really expensive. Bottle of wine, Campo Viego, whatever it is, that's good. Seven pound fifty. Bottle of wine, some toiletries, 100 quid.

[Isabella]

It's. It's extraordinary. I, you know, I love Costco. That's where I tend to shop. But I Even there, like, usually that's really, you know, great bargains at Costco. But even I bought a pallet of four ribeye steaks because every now and then you want to have a ribeye steak and they're really good. 20 pounds. 25 pounds for four ribeyes. Yes, but in Costco, that is a. That now you go to Marks and Spencer's, you pay £25 for one. Yeah.

[Peter Schiff]

And I've noticed they're getting smaller.

[Isabella]

Everything's getting smaller. Apples especially, getting smaller. I don't know why, like, who's taking all our big apples?

[Peter Schiff]

They're sending us the ugly fruit as well now.

[Isabella]

Yeah, but this is, this is how it happened in Communism. It was like slowly, you know, I was joking because I was at Waitrose on. On a Sunday and I was talking to. To one of the checkout ladies who was. Who'd noticed that my daughter was wearing. Had a little Polish dragon from Krakow on her on her bag. And we're talking about how we're both Polish and, And reminiscing about the old days and how. How horrible they were in Poland. And then I said, you know, it's weird because it's like test. Like Waitrose on a Sunday night feels a lot like Poland these days. There's nothing there. Like, the shelves are empty. And you know what the extraordinary thing is? I was in Greenland a couple of weeks ago, right? And Greenland. I went to the supermarket there. It was amazing. It had the most amazing produce. Like, all the shelves were full to the brim. Fresh fruit, like, gorgeous, sort of obviously fish and seafood, but also meats, dairy, French cheeses stacked to the brim. I couldn't believe it. It was about 20 times better than the local Waitrose in eating.

[Peter Schiff]

We have the Handmaid's Tale.

[Isabella]

It's quite.

[Peter Schiff]

Have you seen the Handmaid's Towel?

[Isabella]

A little bit, but not try and.

[Peter Schiff]

Find the supermarket in the Handmaid's Tale. Oh, Yeah, I like. No, but we are actually turning to the Handmaid's Tower. Okay. This is the free.

[Isabella]

So that's like this dystopian, like, religious totalitarian system where the women have to give birth to the elite. Yes, but I mean, give birth, like, be. Oh, it sounds a bit Epsteinian.

[Peter Schiff]

Yeah, yeah. Look at the supermarket.

[Isabella]

Oh, yes.

[Peter Schiff]

It'S. Yeah, it's. It's. Yeah. Look at the empty shelves.

[Isabella]

Yeah, that's Waitrose on a Sunday.

[Peter Schiff]

But this is why I think waitress probably dressed like that. But this is why I think people need to know basic economics. Because I think when you look at nine pound, some people look at nine pound, 20 milkshake, they might be like, wow, we're so getting ripped off here. And it's like, no, that is the price they have to charge to be able to make money. That's when you add in the business rates, the minimum wage, the cost of hr, the cost of accounting. Once you add in the cost of business for them to make a market margin, that's what they have to charge. That's just a reality. And I think it's. It is boiling the frog. It's kind of like creeping up on people, but it's pretty real now.

[Isabella]

And I think people are going to be staying at home. And, you know, I think, by the way, I think takeaways are dead. I mean, Deliveroo, you know, Deliveroo got taken over by the American company, the other one, Uber Eats. Is it Doordash?

[Peter Schiff]

Doordash, yeah.

[Isabella]

Better check that. Make sure I haven't, like.

[Peter Schiff]

Yeah. 9.2 billion. 2.9 billion. Sorry, 2.9 billion. Is that all?

[Isabella]

So here's the thing. I'm gonna, like, pat myself on the back. So I always thought the deliverable Deliveroo model was bonkers because it was obviously not going to, like, there was no profit in it. It was mainly taking advantage of very poor, you know, workers who didn't have anything better to do. But actually, the idea that you can make money from taking out, you know, at some point for this to be profitable, it has to be more of an incentive for you to stay at home than go to get up off your ass and pick up the delivery from. From, from. From the restaurant. And most of us, at the point where it would be profitable to do that business, you would just go and pick it up yourself. Like, we used to pick stuff up and used to pay, you know, stuff.

[Peter Schiff]

Or the old model was you would phone up and you would make the order on the phone and they would turn up. But they got 100% of the money, but they got 100% and they got, and the driver got a tip and.

[Isabella]

The driver got the tip and it was all, it was all, you know, and it wasn't as prolific. But at this point, anyway, the, my, my long standing argument was that the, the cost economics of it just did not work. And when Deliveroo went public, it was sort of celebrated, this great British tech story. And I was like, it's never going to work. And if you look at the share price, it just kept falling, falling, falling, because turns out they just couldn't make any money out of it. So now they got acquired by DoorDash. DoorDash has acquired them probably on, I don't know, I can't remember the exact figures, but they will have acquired that business on the dollar. So they are acquired. You know, for them it makes sense. But this business only survives on a mass consolidation basis. There's going to be, you know, like in Highlander, there can be only one and DoorDash looks like the, the winner. But even, even DoorDash, I think eventually will run into trouble. I mean, it's American, so America, the American system is. Maybe there's more middle class demand, but here in Europe, like I would be very surprised in the current economic state. And remember, this isn't just about the uk because the economics of continental Europe are equally crap, which is something I think the UK media constantly forgets. Like you always hear, oh, it's because of Brexit, we've like run ourselves into the ground. But actually like, well, that applies then to France, it applies to Germany, it applies to all sorts of other like, European nations. It's, it's certainly not UK specific. So that's a funny thing, right?

[Peter Schiff]

The, the delivery experience is crap. It's crap.

[Isabella]

It's crap.

[Peter Schiff]

You used to phone the pizza place and if you wanted to pay, you would pay for the delivery, wouldn't you? Sometimes if it was out a certain region, you tip the driver and you'd have your pizza. You sit down and eat your pizza. So many of these guys now coming on bicycles, by the time they get there, you have to reheat it. They get the, they get the orders wrong. So, so often. And you're paying a lot of money for it.

[Isabella]

I mean, increasingly, like the amount of money you pay for a takeaway is absolutely eye watering, which is why we always pick cars up. And also I did that undercover documentary for the FT where I became a delivery driver for a few. Did you know about this?

[Peter Schiff]

What was that, like.

[Isabella]

Well, it was very insightful because, like I say, years ago, I was just sure it was never going to work. And so I thought, I'll try it. And also, I had to, you know, I had to do this transparently. I couldn't be totally undercover. So when I applied, I said, you know, I have a day job writing things on the Internet, but I'm looking for a job where I can do exercise but be paid to do it. And they didn't. They didn't. They didn't think it was suspicious at all. So they gave me the job. And. And it was grueling. It's really hard. And you have all these rules, all these health and safety rules. It's cold, it's raining, you're on a bicycle. People are really ungenerous. Like, when they see you, like, they. You know, I remember, like, trotting up to some, like, executive blog. Like, lots of executives in there, you know, or not like, professional people. I mean, and they're like, you know, whatever, just grabbing it off you, like, you know. No, no. It was horrible. Like, from the worker point of view, it was really horrible work. And as a woman, really terrifying. I was okay. Cause I was with a film crew. They were following me on my bicycle. But it's effectively a man's job. You're not gonna be on a bicycle going around East London by yourself. As a woman, I would be frightened to do that by myself.

[Peter Schiff]

But we've also created almost this class structure around it. Cause you see him now in Bedford, at the top of this road called Silver Street. There'll be a group of them sat there on their bikes waiting for the next order.

[Isabella]

Yes, that's how it works.

[Peter Schiff]

And they're all. They're all, I'm guessing, like Indian fellows.

[Isabella]

They're scavenging for orders. And at the time. I think they probably changed it by now. But at the time when I did it, you had, you know, two different types of compensation. One where you were put per order. Or you could have, like, a. A flat rate. And if you were per order, you were literally like, you know, sitting on the sidelines waiting for that order. It was. It was. It was dehumanizing. I think in many ways the last.

[Peter Schiff]

I think a large majority of that gig economy needs to die. And I think it probably will. Horrible.

[Isabella]

Yeah. I mean, I think. Have you read Alex Karp's book? You know, I think it's like the technological state or something technocratic. I can't remember.

[Peter Schiff]

No, I haven't.

[Isabella]

You're going to have to look that one up as well. I read it on audiobook and because I have a photographic memory, I, I can't remember things if I can't remember names when I hear them through, I can't remember names. Something like the tech Texan.

[Peter Schiff]

Technological Republic.

[Isabella]

Technological. I was close. Right. And I thought you made a good point there, which is that you can't really blame Silicon Valley for having created all these dystopian apps because people were just inventing and they were responding to the same incentives that everyone else has, which in, in the current structure of the global economy are biased towards sort of, well, you're never going to own a house, you're never going to have a lot of capital. You're never going, you know, so what are the sort of things that, you know, I can invent to make life a little bit easier for people who have none of those things going for them. You're probably not going to have a family, you know, all this stuff. Well, okay, I'll create an app that at least makes it easier for me to get food. So they're just responding to the incentives they see as they're living their lives. Now. That is a function of the global imbalances, generally. Global imbalances in the world economy where because of, I mean, very succinctly. And people will disagree with me. I'm sure there's a lot of China bulls who will disagree with me. But I think this is the right diagnosis, which is that China's industrial policy, because it's a closed economy with capital controls, it inevitably skewed and influenced the open economies in such a way that they had no choice but to only invest in financialization or in digital services. Anything immaterial because China as well, China had the monopoly on material production. Right. So what are you going to do? You're going to have to focus on services, technology and digital. And unless that imbalance is evened out, there's not much you can do. And so it's no surprise that America leads in technology, finance and services because it was, it was kind of pushed that way through the industrial policy that China led.

[Peter Schiff]

It was a subsidy for us.

[Isabella]

Yeah.

[Peter Schiff]

Like Russian energy.

[Isabella]

Well, it's, I think of it more as like, you know, in a, all balance sheets, like the global, the global trade situation has to balance, balance of payments. I mean, that's why they call it a balance. So if you've got one side of the balance sheet doing industrial policy focused on manufacturing, then by definition you have to export financial products. Or services. It's just. It's just how it matches up.

[Peter Schiff]

But is that period now over?

[Isabella]

Well, with. With Trump, yes. So with the whole tariff regime, the idea is that we are going to stop, you know, being, you know, we had our own industrial policy, which was basically focused on finance and tech, and I think now it's about balancing and, and. And sort of equilibrating the equ. Equi. Cut that, please. You know, just generally making it a more level playing field for all different sectors. And you hear this from the likes of Scott Besson all the time, like, it's Main Street's turn. Finance has had its time, Wall street has had its time. We've got to make it work for the average people. And that means manufacturing has to be onshored again. And a lot of people have laughed at that. And you'll remember, like, when the tariffs first came out, people were joking, sharing memes about, oh, look at all these fat Americans making shoes, as if they're going to be able to compete with Chinese workers who are slaving away in factories. And I think that was missing the point because in, like, technology and AI changes everything. And these days it makes no sense, really, to outsource all manufacturing all the way to China because you want to, really, especially given global supply chains. If you care about the environment, why would you be shipping stuff all over the shop just for the sake of efficiencies? You want the system to be more distributed. And really it makes sense to bring manufacturing either to the point of demand or to the point of, like, resource creation. So that's either, you know, having little sort of hubs where on a very automated basis, you can create almost anything on a regional basis, very bespoke. But the kind of core underlying input material, whether it's steel or whether it's more, not necessarily complex, but sort of industrial parts can be manufactured closer to the source of energy. And that makes a lot more sense.

[Peter Schiff]

But that's going to mean a great global realignment. It's going to be painful for many. Probably a repricing of a lot of things and probably pricing down of a lot of assets.

[Isabella]

It will. And that's why people have been. I mean, it's going to be bad for China because China will now have to compete not on, like, how cheap their labor is, but on how well they make things and how technological they are. And that's not to say they're not. I mean, they've made huge advances on that front. And I think a huge portion of Chinese, you Know, businesses really want to move up the value chain. Like they really, they don't want to just be stuck making low level goods. So it's not just to the benefit of the West. I think it's to the benefit of the Chinese to diversify their economy and allow for a bit more welfare action in China because there's not much welfare there. You know, that's one of the funny things. Like she is very, he thinks it's a decadent thing to have welfare.

[Peter Schiff]

I mean, it's a, it's a privilege to have welfare, I think. Is it 60% of global welfare in Europe and we're 25% of the global economy. Yeah, I think I heard Constantine kissing say this. And we're 12% of the population.

[Isabella]

Sure. But if you're not going to have welfare and you're not going to allow people to keep the returns from their capital, you know, investments as well, then what are people going to do?

[Peter Schiff]

I'm not opposed to welfare. I'm not.

[Isabella]

You even have one or the other, like. Yeah, but fine, if you have, you know, small welfare, but you allow people to, you know, keep their wealth, I'm.

[Peter Schiff]

Okay with welfare, but not as a, not as a creating a special interest group who is economically trapped. And I'm not, I don't think you can have welfare and mass immigration because it just gets exposed.

[Isabella]

No, I agree, but I think, I think most people don't realize how little welfare China has. I mean, even basic, basic, you know, hospital stuff, they don't have any public health really. They don't have any pensions or any security net, which is why, that's why they have that sort of frenzy. That's why there's such, there's such demand for gold and anything that can sort of maintain you in your, in your older life. That's why the real estate boom happened there because people were hoping that that would be their nest egg for when they get old. And remember it's, it's a rapidly aging society because of the one child, one child policy, which is now really blown back on them. It's, their demographics are collapsing much more quickly than I think in Europe and Europe's collapsing pretty quickly.

[Peter Schiff]

What does this realignment look like for the uk? Because I think about in two ways. I've already said you, I'm terrified by what's happening, but I also, I'm quite excited by what kind of political and economic revolution could happen if someone could be found to create a movement and a party that, that is genuinely interested in reducing the Size of the state and reducing the burden of the state and restoring liberties. But to have that realignment, does it mean we're going to have to have a period of pain like this, cut in living standards, all gonna have to be entered together?

[Isabella]

I mean, I dare say, I think Britain has to lean into its natural advantages. Those are the fact that most of the world still speaks English. That's a huge advantage. We have the fact that we still have high caliber universities, even if they have slightly, you know, been captured. Been captured. But there's still, you know, that is still a great export we have. But also, I think, you know, there is an argument that we become a kind of museum for the world where people come to see our, our culture, the tourist industry, et cetera. But there's only so much that, you know, that doesn't necessarily create a great, you know, imperial power. I mean, I think generally we have to come to terms with the fact that we aren't going to be an imperial power unless you have more of a kind of EU mindset, which could happen.

[Peter Schiff]

An EU mindset?

[Isabella]

Yes. Right. So this is quite interesting. This is, this is so what everyone is complaining about. America being expansionist again, in terms of taking Greenland, going into Canada and, you know, potentially like, you know, operating, you know, Don Row doctrine, as they call it, being more aggressive in their immediate sphere of influence whilst pulling out from being overextended in places like Afghanistan and further afield. But actually, what I would contend is that what Donald Trump is doing, with the caveat that I don't condone him on everything, but I do think this is the right diagnosis, it emulates the eu. He's basically doing everything the EU has done. He's created a sort of protectionist ring for the American economy with tariffs, which is exactly the same policy that the EU has always run. He's prioritizing national security. Remember, the EU started as a steel and coal community. For the reasons of national security, mainly, you had to have steel, because that's how, you know, without steel, you have no military or any kind of infrastructure or whatever, and coal for energy. So that's, that's, that's happening in America too. And then internally, he's kind of like saying, well, if you're in our system, if you're in the America zone, then you get to benefit from free trade, free movement, but you have to ascend to our values. So the idea is that over the last 30, 40 years, America has kind of been policing the world, but not without the capacity to enforce its rules. In those countries because of sovereignty issues. Right. So it's ended up as a sort of subsidy to the rest, American subsidies, the rest of the world in the form of NATO protection, whatever, you, you know, all sorts of other things. But in reality, America has given that, that's, that security away for free. And so the American taxpayer has effectively been paying for it. And when those countries take that dividend, but they don't enforce the American standard, which in the UK would be an example of that, is free speech. Right. What is America supposed to do? It has no control because in theory, in practice, you have sovereignty. So why not do what the EU has done, which is just say to countries, look, we won't protect you or give you access to our free market unless you come and openly allow us to dictate rule of law at the highest level. We allow you autonomy in a federated way. So, you know, so you can still be in charge of your local, you know, rule book, but on the big macro scale, you have to comply with our big ideas.

[Peter Schiff]

Right, but haven't we tried that? And it, we've had, most of Europe has had a stagnant economy because we're not.

[Isabella]

But the point is, I think that the Europeans did try that, but their, their flavor of like their rule book flavor was very different to America's. So they would say they're neoliberal and that they were free market and, you know, pro free speech. But in practice, the exact opposite. They were the exact opposite. Whereas I think what Trump is, or at least the Trump administration is trying to do is reset what the EU was supposed to be when it started domestically in America, prioritize free speech, prioritize free enterprise, but only within the kind of protectionist ring that has been established. And then you basically make it very alluring for other countries to join you. And what does joining mean? It means, well, dollarizing. It means you come in and you get to use our dollar system, you get to whatever that might be. I mean, it might even go to Bitcoin, who knows? And you get the advantages of our legal system, you get the advantage of being effectively under our security blanket, all these other nice things. And that to me is exactly the same as the way EU enlargement, or what you could call EU imperialism looks like. It's imperialism, which allows for economies of scale in theory, and allows you to get richer. But it isn't enforced on nations. It's opt in. Right. So the idea is like, okay, you can, you can, you can say Trump's been sort of threatening Canada and threatening Greenland. But the idea really is encourage secessions in all these countries, get them to join in on a sporadic basis. Like you see in Canada, there are lots of sort of independence movements now, like Alberta is trying to break free. Free of, you know, the body of Canada. More specific. Yeah. Excuse me.

[Peter Schiff]

It's fascinating to watch.

[Isabella]

Getting a bit tired, but, yeah, it's trying to break free from the big Canada block. And you've got. Where else are there independence movements, all sorts of independence movements popping up. And if they're in the influence or sphere of influence of America, the idea is, well, why not just formally come and join? Join us and we'll have more states. And that improves the economics of America and it deepens the capital markets there. There's all sorts of good stuff. And it effectively, as far as I can see, is. Is very much the same approach as the eu. You would hate that, though. They would hate that, that comparison, because they don't see themselves like that at all.

[Peter Schiff]

It's an optimistic take, which requires a certain kind of leadership, which we don't seem to have at the moment. And so are you.

[Isabella]

Sorry to interrupt, but because I think the whole point of what I was saying I forgot to make, which was that the uk, because of Brexit, now sits between these two worlds because you have to have economies of scale. So. So the remainders are right about that. There's no doubt, like, the UK can't survive as an independent nation. And the whole, you know, romanticized idea of Brexit is that we could then develop closer trading partnerships and relationships of the old empire. Right. But you have to have a network. Like, when you think about the Commonwealth, it was effectively a type of trading club as well. So, you know, but reviving the Commonwealth system is a bit difficult. So we've really only got two options, which is go back to the EU or join into the kind of American sphere of influence.

[Peter Schiff]

I disagree, I do, I disagree.

[Isabella]

You think we can make it by ourselves?

[Peter Schiff]

Yes, but we have to approach this with a much deeper focus on freedom and liberty. Speech should be free in this country. Our market should be free as possible. We should be enticing investors to come here and invest their money because there is opportunity. We should be taking politics out of as much as possible. We should be taking it out of school, we should be inspiring kids. We should be running the Milei project here.

[Isabella]

But you don't think. You see, I think Argentina is very much part of that American net. He's part of the Donro Doctrine.

[Peter Schiff]

Yeah. And you can have friendships and relationships and people who want to trade with you. But the reason I think it would be good is if we did it and we proved it then other parts, because I think the EU is crumbling. I think there are so many kind of right wing movements because people are sick of this collectivism that has failed. And I think the UK has a chance to prove that EU countries don't have to be socialist.

[Isabella]

No, look, I completely agree. I think the cost of EU welfare is now so high it's becoming untenable. And America's made it very clear that it's not going to pay for its military anymore. So they're going to have to transfer a lot of that spending to military or else be invaded by somebody. Because we can have an argument about whether Russia will invade or not. But the point is it's very, you know, you can't have a bloc like the EU without any viable defense. It's just not, it's not feasible because you will get, you know, my uncontrolled migration and all sorts. So, so I agree with you. The EU is not looking very good. But I don't think the UK can survive the only, like as an independent system. It can only be like offshore model. Like there aren't that many models for a small independent, you know, island state. You've got financialization, which we've already done. You know, that's, that's always been our thing. But we, we're actually failing on that front at the moment. The UK has like abandoned its commitment to I think the like the old idea of, of capital formation or of being a center for capital formation. The LSE is losing listings to America all the time. In fact, it's become a bit of a joke. Nobody wants to list here really. So if you're going to be a big sort of capital market, you have to unfortunately comply with the rules of whatever regime you want to attract capital from. Now you could go Kazakhstan. Kazakhstan is like building its own Dubai style independent financial center now and luring crypto capital in theory, setting its own regulatory standards and hoping to be the new London in some ways. But for crypto capital, I don't think the UK would ever do that because I think it sees too many downsides and being completely open to hot money.

[Peter Schiff]

Same.

[Isabella]

I mean, what would you. Where, where do you think? I mean DeFi itself is fascinating because it's kind of like lives in, across cross border, on a cross border basis. It's sort of everywhere, but nowhere.

[Peter Schiff]

Look, I like two things in the Crypto world Bitcoin because it's a sound money standard and I like the things that stablecoins are allow such as polymarket. And I know some people say you could do poly market with bitcoin but sometimes you want a stable price. The majority of crypto is just bullshit. It's just a very quick, fast scam to for originators to make money. But I do think the UK should firmly place itself as the bitcoin capital of Europe and it should completely open itself up. It should remove inheritance. Sorry, it should remove capital gains tax on bitcoin. It should not allow the banks to penalize you for wanting to buy and hold bitcoin. It should not over regulate all the bitcoin companies. I would make it, I would make it the center because what would happen is bitcoin capital would come to this country. Bitcoiners are always looking for a place to go and live where there are good property rights around their bitcoin and the UK should be the home for that. But we've done the exact opposite.

[Isabella]

I don't think they want that because I think it would destabilize the pound.

[Peter Schiff]

I mean the pound's already destabilized. It's losing value rapidly and it's. Yeah, well, listen, look, I got, I got a good closing question for you. If, if it does feel like 1989, if it does feel like this is the UK is starting to feel a little bit like the collapse of the Soviet Republic, what should people be looking for? What are the signals out there where people should be really concerned about what is happening in this country? Because a collapse would decimate the lives of so many people.

[Isabella]

So I think the signals are obviously shortages in supermarkets, so prices might still stay low. But if you're noticing that there's just not as much availability, you know, suddenly, you know, restaurants aren't able to deliver full menus. Reduction of stock in general, that's a good symptom. Then obviously price inflation, continuing price inflation, a completely stagnant, you know, housing market. I think that's a good, a very good sign. Any policy that tries to kind of intervene on the housing market and involves property redistribution I think is probably a sign actually that we're going, that moment is going towards more of a, even more towards a command economy instead of like a perestroika market liberalization. So that's another critical moment because you have to remember that in the 10 years of preceding the collapse there were like a number of reform attempts and some of them just tried to Double down on the old system. So beware which reform you go for everyone. I mean, back in the day, I just remember everyone was a taxi driver. Suddenly there were so many taxi drivers. Every other person was a taxi driver. But because that was like literally the only viable job there was. And I think, I think more encroachment on free speech because as the regime loses power, it doesn't want to hear about it.

[Peter Schiff]

Nope.

[Isabella]

And for me that's very concerning. And I worry about being throttled on Twitter, on X or whatever you call it. I worry about, about having access to. I mean, who even knows what deals are being made in the background in terms of what you are seeing. I always like when I meet people, I always like to see if my feed is the same as somebody else's feed. I know it's all very bespoke, but you're supposed to have some sort of commonality. And when your feed is very different to what somebody else's feed is, I mean, I know ads do a lot of that, but it seems like, you know, you want. There's some sort of targeted throttling is very worrying. And any sort of pushback against external capital that is trying to improve things on the ground because that is usually seen as a. As sovereign as foreign intervention. So I do worry about, I mean, whether you like Elon or not. I thought it was quite interesting that he has now started advertising very specifically starLink for the UK market. And I would get a Starlink because you just never know. At least that way. Although apparently in Iran they still managed to kind of cut people off, even during the revolutions. But you know, having. Having a little backpack with a satellite dish is probably a good idea. It's the new Sam as that, isn't it?

[Peter Schiff]

I'm terrified and optimistic at the same time. I am. I'm terrified of what's happening. I'm optimistic we're going. I think the British people are at their wit's end and I just hope someone steps forward and offers something genuinely revolutionary here. And I, I'm optimistic it will come.

[Isabella]

I think, I think it. We will rise to the challenge. I would, I would hope so. I mean that. You've interviewed the LFG guy, haven't you? I forgot his name right now.

[Peter Schiff]

Lawrence Newport.

[Isabella]

That's it. Lawrence Newport.

[Peter Schiff]

Yeah, they're looking for, I call them the let's Go group rather than looking for growth. Yeah, look, those guys are great. I just think they are followed by quite a niche group of people. This, this will have to come from this will have to come from business leaders and people with a political backbone who care more about restoring the country than their own ego. And there's not many of those, but there are some. I think the public is ready for this. They're ready to vote for anti establishment because we've tried establishment for three, four decades and it's utterly failed us. And so I'm waiting for that.

[Isabella]

But do you, I mean, sorry to turn the questions on you, but like, do you think that the common people will rise to that challenge politically? Because I still see a sort of. I see people as very atomized and reluctant to sort of turn out en masse to any kind of political, you know, movement or society type meeting, which is very different to what happened in Latin America. Like when, whenever you went to Latin America during this sort of decay period, people were very politicized. They were always like meeting up. There were all sorts of kind of community events. You saw it like, I just feel that's not happening in the uk.

[Peter Schiff]

I. I do actually. I think the, the existential collapse of conservatives and labor is a reflection that people are unhappy. The rise of reform and Green is a reflection that people want something new. I just don't think they know what they need or what they want. So they're going for a narrative at the moment. I think the establishment uniparty which I put reform and Green Party in has maximum one more election. If reform were to win and they fail to deliver meaningful change, I think we will have to get something which is revolutionary, which is anti establishment, because I think you'll just get protests on the streets.

[Isabella]

And my last question is, what about on the local level? Because you're obviously very active in Bedford.

[Peter Schiff]

Yeah, but I stopped that.

[Isabella]

Really?

[Peter Schiff]

Yeah, because local politicians have essentially been neutered. There's no money in local councils, They've all been ransacked by central government. The quality of person in there is very low. And I tried to make some changes locally and I just realized, you know, everything has to come from central government. You have to change the machine. I was, if you think of it like an octopus, I was working on the tentacles matter. Like, you have to change the machine, the machine has to change. We need a course correction for the machine. And everything locally was just a waste of time. I just wasted money trying to do things where the state could. The state could intervene and put up barriers that made it impossible for me to make change. So I'm fully focused centrally now. I'm actually cutting off most of the things I do locally to Focus nationally. That's very interesting because it was just. You can have localism if you have support from the central government. So localism works in Switzerland because 40% of budget goes for the cantons. We have like 6% and they take more and more with like the business rate resets and such. So it's impossible. Like that's why every, every council, so many councils are going bust. So yeah, we, I think I'm, you know, not shy for saying this. We need a revol. Revolutionary change in this country, a complete re. Engineering in the mechanics of the state or, or for me it will collapse. There's no other option.

[Isabella]

So my closing point, my hopeful closing point is that I really think with media sort of not really fulfilling its democratic role and censorship becoming an issue and this lack of political dialogue everywhere and the lack of dynamism and no bottom up political sort of movements at all, I feel like what we really need is the rise of sort of permanent little cafes where people can come and meet on a regular basis.

[Peter Schiff]

Solidarity movement.

[Isabella]

Yes.

[Peter Schiff]

What happened with the solidarity movement? It started in the cafes.

[Isabella]

Yeah, exactly.

[Peter Schiff]

No, I completely agree. I mean I put up a website called inolongerconsent.com where I just started to try and get people behind the idea. And we've had a couple of thousand people sign up now. And one of the points I was going to on in the next phase is say you need to build local movements in your cafes where you demand the change you want in your country. And so I think it will come, I think that will happen. But it's. People need to be directed. You've got to have somebody, whether it's whoever, it might have to be me, I might have to be that person who goes and said, you've got a cafe, I've got a cafe. But I've also, you know, I read history and I understand what works, what doesn't. I'm not keen on violent revolutions. I want peaceful revolutions. But like it might have to just, I might have to say this is my role in the world now that I have to try and drive something that creates change. I have no faith in the political system at all. I see the emails that come in, the comments on our YouTube. There's a lot of people who are frustrated and feel kind of impotent because government is so impotent and we have to force change. As a group of people say, we won't accept this anymore, but how do you build that? And I, like I said, I think in the next three years will be Very hard. But I think the UNI Party has one more chance and obviously they will fail. You know, whatever reform tries to do. They might be able to hold taxes back a bit, but then they'll just borrow more. I think they're really going to struggle because I don't think ideologically they are libertarian at all. I think ideologically they are their status and so they just think they can twist the levers a little bit. Nothing's going to change. And so yeah, I think a movement's required and it requires people who have a big enough voice. I don't have a big enough voice at the moment. But you know, there are other people with a big enough voice who can maybe get this message across to enough people. That's why I'm hopeful. But I just think it sadly might come from the period of 2030. Like Reformer in for a year, fuck all's change. And then people go and it's like now, okay, now we need to prepare for change. But like I'm a firm believer in consent comes from us going about our daily lives every day. It doesn't come from an election that is just, that is picking. That's a personalities contest. If we go to work every day and we go to the coffee shops and we pay our taxes, that is the consent at the moment. We all say we're not doing this. Like millions of people across the country say I'm not going to work tomorrow and I'm not paying this mortgage this month. That's where you can really effect change. So yeah, might be me, might be you, might be someone else.

[Isabella]

But I'd like to have a coffee shop. That's my new journalism plan.

[Peter Schiff]

You should, I mean you don't, you won't make any money.

[Isabella]

But I know the purpose of the like a. But also for capital discussion. To talk about investing in a proper open forum so it's not just one sided. That's my, that's my dream. I want to have a little coffee shop like a sports cafe but for finance and for discussing all the stuff that we've been talking about.

[Peter Schiff]

It's basically what mine is. So yeah, thank you, Isabella, lots of those. We didn't chat enough about Greenland, but we'll talk again.

[Isabella]

To be honest, everyone's over Greenland.

[Peter Schiff]

Yeah, chill out, Greenland. Thank you everyone for listening. We will see you all soon.

[Isabella]

Thank you.