Okay you good? Yeah

I'm gonna do this one to you alright

Alright so I wanna do one called ‘Forget About Money’

Really the idea behind this is people

when they think about the economy

they very often tend to think about it in terms of

money and it stops them from

really understanding how the economy works

and understanding that really

the economy is about real things

real resources, real people doing real work

and I call this

like money obsession, or money centrism and

you see this everywhere

and it's not just from ordinary people

you also see this from economists

so a good example of this is

when we had the 2008 financial crisis

that led to a massive upward redistribution of wealth

and how did we deal with it?

Slashing interest rates to zero

which is monetary policy doing something with money

printing money and quantitative easing, again

monetary policy, printing money.

Covid, massive economic crisis

massive upward redistribution of wealth

what did we do?

Slash rates to zero, quantitative easing

print money, so really... and you know

these are the economists that run our our countries

they run our economies when there are crises

even crises

that involve massive redistribution of real resources

they focus on money centric solutions

and they totally ignore what has happened

with real resources

and then you know

we can obviously see now that the way that

those two crises were managed

has led to falling living standards

and I've been aware of this for a long time

and I've been critical of this for a long time

and I've been arguing about

this for a long time

but when I argue with people about this

very often, regardless of whether they are on the right

or the left

or the centre of the political economic spectrum

whatever you like, they tend to say: ‘No

the problem is not real resources

the problem is money’

so I always remember

I did this Masters at Oxford 2017 to 2019

and you’re with a lot of like classic

classic economists

you know modern elite trained economists

and you know, I was saying, you know

the problem is massive upward redistribution of wealth

you know wealth is being lost by governments

and the middle class is, same stuff I always say

and this guy said no

no no

the problem is just that

we didn't cut interest rates far enough

this is a nice guy by the way

like I would consider him a friend

you know he's not an idiot

he's a smart guy

classically trained elite economist

and I'm like, ‘dude like we cut interest rates to zero!’

He's like, ‘no

we should have cut interest rates to minus three %’

and it's like

his criticism is we just didn't cut rates

far down enough and I don't know if you ever saw

the interview I did with the IEA

so the IEA for those who don't know is

it's a very right wing economic think tank

and I went and did an interview

on their channel years ago

when I was a lot less well known

it's worth watching to be honest quite funny

and I went on there against, is it Mark Littlewood?

What is his name?

And he was very respectful but

he came out and this is quite funny

when you consider the story I just told

he said the problem is

we shouldn't have cut interest rates to zero

we should have kept them at 3, 4%

so, and you know, at the time I was there

it was quite funny because we could

we could already see at the time

that interest rates were gonna come back up

because it was, this was like

when inflation was starting to come through

and I was like, ‘dude

you're telling me you think if rates go back to 3

4% that's gonna fix the problem?’

and he was like yeah and I was like

‘well you are gonna see very shortly

that that is not gonna fix the problem’, basically

but I think this is really interesting right

that you have this economic context in which

every problem is dealt with

by fiddling around with money, printing money

giving out money

printing out money and that clearly doesn't work

you know in the aftermath of 2008

I talk about this a lot

that cutting rates to zero was considered a super

unusual, extreme, emergency policy

and everybody

thought it would have this really powerful

economic rebound effect, same in Covid

by the way

so everybody thought these massive moves

in money would have these massive real effects

and they just didn't have the effects

that were predicted, right

so even though we are now, we're like 15 years on

more than 15 years on from 2008

the lesson

and in a context of academic economists

basically being fixated on

the way to fix every problem is money

the last 17 years should really have shown us

economists have overestimated

the power of money

specifically and monetary policy

that should be obvious and yet even within that context

the main criticisms of the policy are that

are not that there was an

excessive focus on monetary policy

but on the one side, rates should have been cut further

and on the other side, rates shouldn't have been cut

there's money centrism from the establishment

which is failing

and there is money centrism from the critics

on both sides of the political spectrum

like it's just an absolute inability

to view the f***ing real resources

and all the time that that is happening

that the sense that the establishment

and the left and the right are all fixating on money

that wealth distribution is just going out of control

so you'll see like

money money money money money money money money money

money money money money money

no one is looking at real resources

and at the same time

government wealth is f***ing collapsing

so you're just like losing

you're losing your real resources

and all you're talking about is money

money money

money money

money and

I'm gonna wind in here like

because I'm trying to get more medieval history

into this, let's put like some bits here

so if you wanna skip the medieval history part

there was this...

there was this, so there's this idea in like

Abrahamic religion. Christianity

Judaism, Islam

it's one of the 10 Commandments

you should not worship graven images

and it led to this

which means you shouldn't worship images of god

and it led to this like

big discussion of whether you should

be allowed to make a statue of god

or draw a picture of god

and this is why to this day in Islam

you can't have a picture of god

and there were wars in Greece

in the 8th century and 9th century

people are killing each other

over whether you should have a picture of god

and it was because you know

people worried that if you make a picture of God

people will confuse it for actual God

and I think what you're seeing here is people

have confused money for real resources

and I think I think we live in an age where like

money is kind of the new religion

and people confuse money for real resources

and this is like

this confusion really prevents people from seeing

you know

seeing the forest in front of their eyes basically

because all they think about is money

they don't think about real resources

so you see these amazing things happen

which is monetary policy fails to deal with the crisis

real resource distribution collapses

nobody notices the best example of this is Covid

so Covid, we knew

and obviously I’ve talked about this a million times

we knew

the government was gonna give a trillion pounds out

which it did, trillion pounds, f***ng lot of money right

20 grand per person, US numbers even bigger, and

when that happens, when you know

tons of money is given out

and there's been no change in

what's happened to real resources

you should know distribution is gonna change

probably inflation crisis

probably a big increase in asset prices

it should be obvious right

cause you printed tons of money

you haven't done anything to real resources

but what was the media actually saying

the media was saying, ‘oh my God

people have got so much money now

we're gonna have such an economic boom when we reopen’

like how idiotic is that?

But this is like

it's like, you must have had this conversation

when you were a kid at some point where

where you or somebody says hey

like why don't we just make more money?

Why don't we just print more money?

Give everybody more money

why don't we just do that?

Or there's this US film called

Idiocracy where

is it Terry Crews that like really hench Black actor

you know the guy?

And he tried to become president and he's like

we're gonna be billionaires, and he's just like

we're just gonna give everyone a billion dollars

and it's like

it's basically what we did during Covid right

we print all this money, we give all this money out

nothing could have been more obvious than

that was gonna be an inflation crisis

and a massive increase in asset prices

and I made tons of money betting on these things

and I spoke about these things happening

and yet the media narrative at the time was

we’re just gonna have an economic boom

because everybody's got so much money

and that is again

just like this really idiotic money obsession

and it always reminds me of this

understanding that they had in medieval Europe

which is if you make too many

if you make pictures of God

people are gonna confuse it for actual God, you know

money is not and I've said it before

money is not real resources

money is not real resources

but this confusion between money and real resources

causes so

many problems and

it's connected to the current

I believe

quite naive Labour economic policy of just build build

build, grow grow grow

and this idea is kind of based... and

they're even trying to do things like

they're trying to convince

ordinary people to not hold their savings in cash

but to buy stocks and shares

and they think it's gonna grow the economy, like it's...

I can't explain to you how idiotic this is, right

if you think that the only thing that matters is money

then what you see is oh my God

people that just have money sitting in their accounts

it's just being wasted, like

let's get them to invest the money

and the economy is gonna grow, right

money is just a system, it's a spreadsheet

like, it balances

it has... some people are in credit

some people are in debt

it has to balance out. If people wanna know about that

we can we can put in the description

our videos on money and our videos on debt

so you can understand that, like obviously

when the government printed and gave out money

people would accumulate money

that doesn't mean that you can just

suddenly have a load of investment

because if you want actual investment

what you need is to build more real resources, okay?

it's not just about money

People might have money sitting in their accounts

but there are no unused real resources, okay?

We don't live in a world now where there's like

a million guys who are unemployed

and there’s like a huge like land out there.

Like there are times in history

where you kind of have unused resources

the best example probably is like the US

the European colonization of

of the US okay

so obviously there were Native Americans in the US

but the Native Americans were like basically driven out

they were like, there was a basically a genocide

they were all killed

and then you end up with like almost this empty land

empty land, and then you have

you know a lot of unemployed Europeans

and then it's, okay, we take the unemployed people

we send them to America

they expand into this infinite land

and you can just grow and grow and grow

when you have these unused resources

you can just grow like this

but the truth is we don't have

you know, we don't have like unused resources

we don't have loads of people who

don't have jobs, you know

all of the resources are used, right?

If you want, for example

to have more houses

then you need to take those resources

from somewhere else

we don't just have a ton of builders

and a ton of building materials

just sitting by the side of the road

to build the houses right

you need to deal with the question

of the distribution of real resources

and you see this all the time

we get people in the comments saying

oh ‘Gary Gary

Gary, you're talking about zero sum fallacy

we can always make more resources’. Okay...

how? Because at the moment everything is being used, okay?

If you want to build more resources

that's fine, somebody is going to have to consume

less for you to be able to do that building

because the resources have to come from somewhere

those builders that you need to build the houses

they are currently making f***ing kitchen extensions

and renovations for rich people's houses, okay?

So you need to somehow get the resources from them

you see what I'm saying

the obsession with money

leads to an Assumption that there are...

that we can just do things like building new housing

or growing the economy

without taking anything away from somebody

which you just f***ing can't because, obviously from the...

and it's, it's this

small minded attempt to extend

the economy of the individual

to the country which is

if I am here

and I have half a million pounds or whatever

say I've got £2 million in my account

I can buy a plot of land and all the resources

and I can build a house

and what that is doing is I'm taking resources

I'm outbidding somebody else for those resources

so from the perspective of an individual

I have money I can build

I can create a thing, fine

in a society

where all of the resources are already used

you cannot simply grow that economy

build those houses

without taking those resources from somebody else

and what I am saying is

in an economy where you have this tiny group of people

who increasingly own all of the resources

all of the assets and have unbelievably

enormous amounts of luxury spending

we should be reducing their consumption

so we can grow the economy

and there's no other way to do it

there's no other way to do it, listen

in the short term it is a zero sum economy

you cannot suddenly grow the economy

you need to devote resources to growing the economy

and those resources need to come from somewhere

you do need to deal with the competitive nature

and I think it's this money

centrism that allows people to forget

that the world is being used

there's no, you know, you cannot go into the wild

and f***ing chop down the trees

and build your own f***ing house anymore

like everything is owned, everything is owned

you cannot grow the economy

without getting the resources

from the guys who own the resources

the people who own the resources are the f***ing rich

either you tax the rich, or you don't get the growth

and you have this, you know

these very naive policies which is like

we're just gonna grow, we're gonna grow

we're gonna borrow from the rich

and we're just gonna grow

you know

but the rich are only gonna lend to you at profit

so they are gonna take the growth

you know the growth is all gonna be for them you know

either you deal with this distribution

or you don't get the growth

so, to conclude the video

money centrism gives the illusion

that we can grow at no cost to anybody

it is not true, we exist in a world of real resources

what really matters is the real resources

I would encourage people to go down the street

look at the buildings

look at the high streets, understand real resources

real people doing real jobs

making real things

and the distribution of those things matters

At the moment

real resources are being aggressively transferred

away from the middle class

and the working class

and the government towards the super rich

that will lead to a loss in the consumption

of the middle class

of the working class and of government services

assets are not sitting on the sidelines

assets are not money. What matters is real resources

what matters is real distribution

If you do not focus on

protecting your share of the distribution

I guarantee you

the people who have passive income of 1 million

£2 million a week will increase their share

over time, your share will decrease

money is not the only thing that matters

you need to protect your share of real resources

thank you.