Leighton Smith Podcast #300 - September 3rd 2025 - Oliver Hartwich - The Leighton Smith Podcast

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:09):
You're listening to a podcast from news Talks It b
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It's time for all the attitude, all the opinion, all
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Leyton Smith Podcast powered by news.

Speaker 2 (00:27):
Talks It be Welcome to podcast three hundred for September third,
twenty twenty five. Two years ago, New Zealand has voted
for change, not just a change of government, but a
change of direction. They were promised physical discipline, economic renewal
and the productive economy. The New Zealand government has shown
that it can reform when it wants to. Now it

(00:48):
must also reform what matters most, the unsustainable growth in
public spending. This quote came from The Australian, published on
August twenty eight, but it was written by doctor Oliver Hartvich,
the executive director of the New Zealand Initiative, who provides
us with a very good analysis of the challenge facing

(01:08):
the New Zealand economy. But that's not all. We spend
the second half of this long interview discussing one of
the most extraordinary human beings of all time, Leonardo da Vinci.
Now the reason for that is explained fulsomely, and you'll
understand my enthusiasm as it as it unfolds. I can
only suggest that you don't miss it. But it provides

(01:30):
a greater perspective of the present, and what we need
is a renaissance of the renaissance. Now there is a
very good mail room for Podcast three hundred. We have
quite a backlog of contributions, and thank you. You'll hear
missus producer for the first time in a few weeks,
and we shall convey to you a little bit of

(01:51):
the holiday. Something that, something that put a dent in
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Speaker 3 (03:38):
Layton Smith.

Speaker 2 (03:41):
Doctor Oliver Hartwich is executive director of the New Zealand Initiative.
He has been on the podcast on numerous occasions and
is his opinions are very bandable. Before joining the Initiative,
he was a research fellow at the Center for Independent
studies in Sydney. He was the chief economist at the
Policy Exchange in London and an advisor in the UK

(04:04):
House of Lords, which is something that I wasn't aware of.
He holds a master's degree next to the Business and
Business Administration and a PhD in law from Bochum University
in Germany. How's my German?

Speaker 3 (04:18):
Pretty good?

Speaker 2 (04:20):
Thank goodness for that. I was unaware of your involvement
in the House of Lords. Do you want to spend
a couple of minutes just telling us about that? Sure?

Speaker 4 (04:31):
First of all, great to be with you again, Laton.
Always nice to be on your podcast. Yeah, the House
of Lords, it's got a long prehistory. I lived in
Germany at the time finished my PhD, and my fiancee
was in Australia and we had decided we wanted to
move to London as a compromise, and now I needed
a job.

Speaker 3 (04:52):
I had no idea how I would get a job
in London.

Speaker 4 (04:54):
I wanted to work somewhere in politics, and my old
English teacher from grammar school days, believe it or not,
suggest that I should send a letter to Lord Rph Darndorff.
He was a legend in his mid seventies. At that
time he was a German British sociologist long standing, previously

(05:16):
president of the London London School of Economics and now
a peer in the House of Lords. And my English
teacher said, well, just cinema letter and see whether he's
got anything for you. And I thought, well, Darhandorf of
course would just wait here for me, of course, But
to my great surprise and delight, he responded and asked
me to have tea with him in the House of Lords.

(05:37):
And on that vague prospect of having tea with Lord Darhandorf,
I moved to London and we did meet for tea
a few weeks later, and he helped to help me
get my first job in the Lords with one of
his peers in the Libdems, lordge the Bookshot of Seagrove Bay,
and that opened my way into British politics, and then

(05:58):
I worked for a politics change afterwards.

Speaker 2 (06:01):
And now you find yourself and you have been here
for a number of years, I think about thirteen thirteen.
Are you had with the route that your career has followed.

Speaker 4 (06:12):
Yes, very Because I run a think tank, we have
an impact on policy development in a number of areas
and that's probably all you can hope for.

Speaker 3 (06:23):
As an economist.

Speaker 4 (06:24):
One of my colleagues always jokes that if at the
end of your career as an economist you have delayed
a bad regulation by half a year, then it would
all have been worth it. But actually I think we've
done more than that. We can see that our ideas
are currently being applied and implemented in education policy, in
housing policy, in other areas of policy, so that has

(06:47):
all been very worthwhile, and I'm very happy with that.

Speaker 2 (06:50):
I note that you're right somewhere that working through a
think tank is all about introducing new ideas into public debates.
Do you ever run out of new ideas?

Speaker 4 (06:59):
Not so much running out of ideas. The problem is
actually that often you have great ideas, but then you
have to repeat them publicly for ten years or fifteen
years until somebody actually listens to texting orders and starts
implementing them. It's not as if you're working in things
thinking you have to come up with a new idea
every week. It's often that you have a very good
idea and then you have to battle to get that

(07:20):
idea through Well.

Speaker 2 (07:21):
This interview is going to cover two particular areas the
second one has to do with the Leonardo da vinci
at a speech that you made in Australia just very recently.
And the other reason is the main reason that I
made contact with you last week because there I was
at the end of a five week vacation in Europe,

(07:42):
having paid very little attention to anything that was going
on in the world, including New Zealand, and on that
particular morning, the morning of the twenty seventh of August,
I sat up in the hotel room in Dubai and
got onto the Australian newspaper and there was a column
by you. When the numbers tell a different story to
the government's tale. Let me quote. Last week, New Zealand's

(08:06):
Reserve Bank, the ABBE n Z, cut into straps to
three percent. The government was quick to take the credit.
Quote taking the pressure off inflation has allowed the Reserve
Bank to lower the ocr when it needs to be adjusted.
A media release claimed quote again, the government's responsible economic
management is making a difference now. The RB and Z

(08:27):
saw things a little differently. Its statement pointed to subdued
domestic activity and significant spare capacity. It cut rates because
the economy is struggling and needs help not because it
is doing well. This was not the first time that
there's been a discrepancy between reality and the government's messaging.

(08:47):
Take the August credit rating. Unsurprisingly, ministers celebrated when Fitch
kept the kept New Zealand's double A rating well double
A plus rating, But Fitch also warned that netcore Crown
debt will hit forty six percent of GDP by twenty
seven to twenty eight, a level that would have sparked

(09:08):
an emergency cabinet meetings a generation ago. Now that's just
the beginning. They're your words, and at that point I
realized that you didn't appear to be too happy with
the government's progress.

Speaker 4 (09:23):
Well, I'm not too happy with the government's progress on
fiscal policy, because that's what the column was about. If
you rate on now you would see that. I also
wrote it. I'm very happy with what the government's doing
in education. I think the education reforms we are getting
under Minister Stanford outstanding. I also think that Chris Bishop
is doing a wonderful job when it comes to reforming housing,

(09:46):
the IMA or planning regime, delivering infrastructure much faster. So
I think this is a government that can reform when
it wants to, But there is fiscal policy, and fiscal
policy is perhaps the one area where I think the
government hasn't actually done anything yet. We are in fact
spending more than we used to under Labor, have not

(10:09):
started tackling employment in the public service. In fact, by
some measures it might have even gone up a little bit.
We still have enormous spending on welfare, so our current
welfare numbers are higher than they were under Labor. They
are about twice the number of working age beneficiaries compared

(10:29):
to Australia, So we have currently about twelve percent of
the work in age population on some sort of benefit.
It used to be ten percent when Labor came into
office in twenty seventeen and it's currently about six percent
in Australia. So we haven't really achieved much there. And
I also believe that this government, in fact any government,

(10:51):
should really deal with the reality of an aging population,
and that means urgently tackling the retirement age. And so
when you put all of this together, I think you've
got the recipe for addressing officeal imbalances. But so far,
unfortunately in these areas we haven't seen any action from
the government and that's why I'm disappointed about the fiscal

(11:12):
track record, as much as I'm really happy with how
they're going on planning, housing, and education.

Speaker 2 (11:18):
What it'll be right to say, as far as you're
concerned that if their physical house is not in order
and then everything else is under threat.

Speaker 4 (11:26):
Yes, But what I would say is, of course that
all of these fiscal matters take a long time to materialize.
So we could keep going like this for a few years,
maybe even a couple of decades, but at some stage
the chickens will come home to rust.

Speaker 3 (11:41):
And we've seen it from Treasury.

Speaker 4 (11:42):
Treasury told us that our GDP per capital is on
track of you surpassing one hundred percent of GDP by
the middle of the century if we don't change our
policy settings. So we know that something big is coming
in the future. It's got a lot to do with
demographic change. Because the population gets older, that means the
population will receive more super It also means that the

(12:04):
population will receive and more expensive healthcare, and therefore the
sooner you tackle that the better.

Speaker 2 (12:11):
When you say healthcare also gets more expensive as the
population ages, of course, you're absolutely right. What possibly, though,
can be done about it?

Speaker 4 (12:19):
I'm not entirely sure what can be done about it,
but let's just take that as a given because we
know it's going to be more expensive to take care
of this aging population that requires more healthcare as well,
and then cut the spending from areas where it's much
easier to figure out a way forward. So let's start
with a public service. The public service is currently employing

(12:41):
around sixty three thousand people. That's full time equivalents we
used to have a public service in twenty seventeen or
forty seven thousand. If you brought the public service back
to levels where it used to be, we would save
about one point six billion dollars per year. That's a start.
Then take the retirement age. If we brought it from

(13:03):
sixty five to sixty seven, treasury as the main set
at the end of it, that would probably save about
point seven percent of GDP. That's about three billion dollars
now three billion plus one point six and we have
four point six billion already. And I'll take the beneficiary numbers,
and we currently spend about forty billion dollars on income transfers.

Speaker 3 (13:24):
I already mentioned.

Speaker 4 (13:25):
We currently have twelve percent of the work in age
population on such benefits. We used to have ten, Australia
have six. You do the mass and you can see
how much money you could save there. Once you put
all of this together, you easily get to more than
ten billion dollars of government spending that you could redirect
either towards fixing the budget deficit or actually read direct

(13:46):
towards the extra health expenditure that we will have once
the population gets older. So I can't tell you really
in detail how we can save on health spending. I mean,
there are certainly ways in which you can make the
healthcare system more efficient, but that's not my point. My
point is actually that we should really try to get
the budget in order in order to deal with some
of these challenges that are unavoidable. I mean, it is

(14:07):
unavoidable in an aging population that we will spend more
on health. It is unavoidable that we will have to
mess spend more on super if keep the system roughly
the way it is. But the very least we can
do is to increase the retirement age.

Speaker 2 (14:20):
The retirement age has been under discussion by various governments
for as long as I can remember, and nothing's done.
And the reason nothing's done from My perspective is because
governments and those who make up governments lack the courage
to take it to the market, and even if the
market denies them verbally, then they lack the courage to

(14:40):
go ahead with it anyway. They lack the ability to
take the country and the voters with them. It's a reflection,
I think, on the standard of the quality of politicians
that we have and a reflection on the need for
politicians with greater courage.

Speaker 3 (14:58):
Yeah, I would agree.

Speaker 4 (14:59):
I remember when I started my job here in twenty twelve,
in our first year, we had our first members retreat
and invited the then Prime Minister John and Key, and
I challenged him on the retirement age, which he had
ruled out changing. And I remember that I got something
that looked to me like a bit of a death
stay from John Key. He didn't want to touch that, obviously,

(15:20):
he didn't even want.

Speaker 3 (15:21):
To discuss it.

Speaker 4 (15:22):
We had a change, of course, towards the end of
that national government when Bi l English was Prime Minister,
and he then suggested changing the age. Of course staggered
over a long periods of time, really going into the
twenty thirties, but at least it was a change. And
by the way, previously, when John Key was Prime Minister,
it was the Labor Party that said we should actually
increase the retirement age. So at some stage both major

(15:44):
parties have actually toyed with the idea they should work
together on this because in the end you can only
do this in a bipartisan way because you can't actually
risk this becoming an election issue or actually being an
issue that gets overturned every three years after each change
of government. So at some stage I think both major
parties need to just look into the realities and realize

(16:06):
that sooner or later rather sooner, to deal with that,
and then it's better to do this in a way
that is reliable, that people know where this is going
to go, that gives some certainty for people preparing for retirement,
but that the change has to come at some stage.
I think that's clear.

Speaker 2 (16:20):
So far, the total welfare bill has been learned by
twenty billion dollars in the very short time between twenty
seventeen and now. It's now forty point four billion, and
since you wrote this, it's very likely gone up more.
The previous government's promises have become the current government's liabilities,

(16:42):
and that's the game that gets played election in, election out,
year in year out. In your mind's eye, look at
the people who make up the political parties in the
country at the moment, which is not that different to
the norm, but I think it might be a little
worse across some sectors. And try and explain to all

(17:04):
of us how you could imagine that they would get
together and work on anything little in what we're discussing
when it's the opposition party that wants to change, of course,
but once they get into power it's another matter. So
it's really a game of swap seas depends on who's

(17:24):
in which position at any given time, and all they
do is trade places.

Speaker 4 (17:29):
Yeah, it's much harder to imagine a cross party consensus
on well for reform. What I would say is that
the current Wealth Reform Minister, that's Louis Upson, is extremely
well prepared for her role. She had that portfolio already
under bil English, she kept the portfolio for the six
years in opposition, and she's got the portfolio again in government.

(17:52):
And over that whole time, we engaged a lot with
Louis Ubsin and I know that she is passionate about
the project, but it is really really hard to bring
the numbers back down, because what happened under the previous
labor government was that it became a lot easier to
be on benefits because the conditions were not checked that
much anymore. Of course, also the economy has deteriorted, and

(18:17):
so we have higher numbers of people on unemployment benefits
right now, and therefore the current government is facing an
uphill struggle to change the welfare system in the current circumstances.
And still I think it is vital that we get
this fixed, this problem because it is such a big
fiscal liability. You mentioned the forty billion dollars, a little

(18:39):
bit more now than that, But it's not just that.
It's not just a fiscal liability. I always think of
welfare really as a problem socially and for the human condition,
because people once they're out of the labor market for
long and I'm talking about people for longer than half
a year or a year, they find it really difficult

(19:00):
to ever get back. We know, we've got ridiculous length
really of average times on certain benefits. In some cases,
people on a benefit, once they're on the benefit for
while are there for an average of twenty years. And
this is not a physical problem. It's a social problem.
It's a moral problem, as an ethical problem, because you
basically condemn these people to a life of dependency, and

(19:23):
you don't want that. You want people to live their
own lives, to actually create their lives, to have a
better life, which they will never have if they stay
on benefits. To get them into some sort of work
would be much more fulfilling for them personally, and of
course it would be better for society as a whole,
because we know that a lot of problems, a lot
of social problems, aren't deeply intertwined with benefit recipients.

Speaker 2 (19:47):
There is something that is upcoming in the share We
say the second segment with regard to Leonardo da Vinci,
that I mustn't forget because I think, I think it's
a very important point now if I was to ask
you and I am, when it comes to the workplace,

(20:07):
to the workforce, what is the main deficit that might
exist that province of this country going going ahead?

Speaker 4 (20:15):
The main deficit in the long run is the state
of an education system. We discuss it on a previous podcast.
I'm really concerned about the decline and human capital. We
have an education system that for twenty perhaps thirty years
has been going downhill. And you can see this if
you look at our performance in international education tests like

(20:39):
PIS are like tym's like PURS and when you run
this for a number of years, you create a population
that is no longer as educated as it needs to
be to be productive. So that is my big concern
about our labor force. As I said, I mean, the
government is undertaking reforms right now and it won't come

(21:01):
a day too early, but it will take a long
time until the improvements in an education system will materialize
and materialize in a better qualified workforce. I just heard
an ambassador from a European country say to me that
that ambassador is dealing with a lot of exchange students,

(21:22):
secondary exchange students. They usually come to New Zealand in
year ten and they say that whatever they're doing in
New Zealand schools in year ten reminds them of what
they did in year seven back in Europe. So we've
got a problem there.

Speaker 2 (21:35):
Well, you leapfrog ahead. I was I was thinking more
at this point, and you're not wrong, by the way,
but that'll be upcoming. In the DaVinci factor, I was
thinking more of productivity. It's been something that everybody is through,
every every politician who's been involved in the area, has

(21:56):
thrown around for a long time. We have a big
problem with productivity, and you're right. Productivity has been New
Zealand's Achilles Hill for decades and the decline continues. So
not only have we stuck quivered, but it keeps getting worse.
Why why can't it be addressed?

Speaker 3 (22:14):
Okay.

Speaker 4 (22:15):
Part of the answer is human capital and we just
talked about that. Another part of the answer, I think
it's our low capital intensity. I recently looked this up
for a presentation. I gave it a conference, and when
you go back long periods of time, really into the
late nineteenth century, because that's for how long we've got data,

(22:37):
you can see that New Zealand at the time was
actually in some ways world leading when it came to
capital available. Per our work, I compared New Zealand to
a number of smaller economies like the Netherlands, Switzerland, Denmark
and Ireland, just to see how these smaller economies have
tracked over time. We had among the highest capital intensity

(22:58):
in the late nineteenth century. Now, if you go through
the twentieth century. You can see that New Zealand was
pretty much in the lead or on par at least
until the nineteen sixty or seventies, and then the other
countries deemed ahead and we went backwards. And so today
you look at a country like the Netherlands, for example,
and you can see that they have almost twice the

(23:19):
capital intensity compared to New Zealand. There are also twice
as productive when it comes to labor productivity, so the
amount of GDP produced per our work. And so you
put all of these things together and you can see
that we've got a massive problem in our productivity. There's
another way of looking at it, and as economic complexity.
So if you think about an economy and the menu

(23:42):
of goods and services it can produce that describes its
economic complexity. If you are very under complex economy, what
you produce is basically just the magricultural produce, some simple goods,
simple services. Once the economy gets more complex, it can
us everything from these simple goods to whatever it might be,
fusion reactors. And so unsurprisingly, the more complex and economy becomes,

(24:07):
the richer comes because the menu gets longer and it
can do loads of more things, and it combined factors
in different ways. When you look at the performance of
the New Zealand economy, what you can see is actually
that when it comes to economic complexity, our rank has
actually deteriorated since the nineteen nineties. Other economics have become
more complex and we basically stood still or went backwards.

(24:29):
That again doesn't speak for the New Zealand economy, and
so what we have seen now for decades is a
pattern where we are not very productive, where we're not
increasing our economic complexity, where we're relatively capital poor, where
we are not productive on labor productivity measures. We were
not very productive on something that economists called total factor productivity,

(24:52):
and unsurprisingly we are then trying to make up for
that in some way.

Speaker 3 (24:58):
We're working longer hours. So by some measures we are currently.

Speaker 4 (25:01):
Working between three hundred and four hundred hours more compared
to countries like Britain or the Netherlands. So we are
not very put but we don't want it poor, and
so we just work a lot harder. But that can't
be the answer, and there are limits to that, of course,
because at some stage you realize you can't actually add
another job, you can't work another one hundred hours more
because you're already working a lot. So we have to

(25:23):
desperately become more productive, which means dealing with all of
these various contributing factors. We need a better workforce, a
better educated workforce. We need to be more open to
capital so we can increase our capital intensity. And if
we tackle all of these different problems, then we've got
a chance of actually catching up with these other countries
that have left us behind, where once upon a time,

(25:45):
of course, we were in the lead.

Speaker 2 (25:47):
Okay, fair enough, except for one thing. Can you point
out to me politician or politicians in this country who
have the ability to take that on board and to
install them.

Speaker 4 (26:00):
Well, there are some politicians I know our thinking along
the same lines. There are certainly some former politicians who
are thinking along those lines, thinking of people like rothbrid
Shipson and Bil English who totally understand the problems. I
also know that some of the current serving politicians understand
what is at stake, not least people like Chris Bishop

(26:21):
and Erica Stanford. But yes, I agree with you that
we need more debates in this country on this because
I think the vast majority of waters hasn't quite understood
or predicament.

Speaker 2 (26:31):
Yet somewhere you made comment on the media, and it
wouldn't be the first time. But the comment I'm talking
about is you regretted the fact that in New Zealand
there wasn't any appropriate, decent right of center conservative publication.
That is a very sad thing. As a consequence, more

(26:54):
and more people are are subscribing to the Spectator of
Australia to Quadrant Magazine in Australia, the two best magazines
that exist in our part of the world. The approach
to things that both you and I in the main
would agree we need to do something about. So why

(27:17):
is it do you think that even after there's a
bit of a disruption Now I'm declaring a little ignorance
over this because I or lack of knowledge, shall we say,
because being out of the country for five and a
half weeks or thereabouts and not paying too much attention,
I could I could get this wrong. But even the

(27:39):
company that I that I have worked for and with
for so long and I'm still associated with, doesn't seem
able to address it or doesn't have a desire to
address it.

Speaker 4 (27:51):
What I would say about the company that you're with,
I mean it always strikes me that ends that me
has the country's most successful radio station, and that's news talk,
and the ratings are phenomenal. And at the presenters, and
you look at my Costking on the Breakfast, or you

(28:12):
look at Heather depresil and on the Drive program, and
you previously, of course, they have.

Speaker 3 (28:17):
An audience and people like listening to them.

Speaker 4 (28:21):
And I think it would be fair to say that
all of these problems are probably more right of center,
and yet the same company produces a print publication, The Herald,
which is probably more centrist, maybe center left in some ways.
And so I wonder then why the company itself doesn't

(28:42):
realize that it has a huge part of the market
on radio. So there are people who like listening to
opinions and voices from that side of politics, and yet
it leaves that market market relatively unserved when it comes
to print publications or online publications. They tried this what
a year ago with that B plus of course, trying

(29:03):
to get into digital, but I think it was a
bit of a half hearted attempt. But it just demonstrates
to me that there is a market for these views.
And then you look across all our print publications and
online publications and you wouldn't find any newspaper actually in
that field. And the other thing I would say is
when you look at other countries, it's not quite like that.

(29:26):
So in Australia you have the Australian as a daily newspaper.
I think sometimes the AFR place in that direction as well.
Of course you've got loads of left newspapers in Australia,
but there is a variety of papers and viewpoints.

Speaker 3 (29:41):
You find the same in Germany.

Speaker 4 (29:43):
You have the Frankfurt Algaminor and Developed on the right,
and then you've got the zoodeorgeat side and despite on
the left. You have exactly the same pattern in Britain.
So in practically every other country you have a variety
of newspapers across the whole political spectrum. It's just in
New Zealand where basically all our newspapers are maximum centrist
but mainly center left. And so I find this a

(30:05):
bit odd. Actually, I would have thought from an entrepreneur
your perspective, somebody would have actually spotted that there as
a gap in the market, because obviously this is a
segment of the market that is extremely successful when it's
served by radio. Why is it not being served in
print and digital.

Speaker 2 (30:21):
I'll suggest one reason, and again I think that you
mentioned the figure, what was it, eighty one percent of
journalists in the country are left leaning. I'm surprised it's
not much higher than that, to be honest. But that
then is a result of the education system, probably more

(30:42):
than anything else, wouldn't you say?

Speaker 4 (30:45):
It's the long march through the institutions that started in
the late nineteen sixties and that has certainly turned the
education system around.

Speaker 3 (30:54):
You can also see this internationally.

Speaker 4 (30:55):
You can see it, for example, in the affiliation of
US academics at their universities, where I mean it was
never a center right dominated group on campus, but there
were a few conservatives maybe thirty forty years ago, and
that's completely changed, and in some subjects you would struggle

(31:16):
to find any conservatives on campus anymore. So, Yes, it
is a function of the education system. The education system
produces these journalists that are sometimes behaving a little bit
more like activists, and they dominate our media discussions these days.

Speaker 2 (31:32):
I just might insert this here, and I'm going to
use America as an example. Over a period of time,
there's one aspect of American television that has changed dramatically,
and that is the late night comedy shows. Every main
channel has one, so over a period of time, those
programs have what was his name, Johnny Carson. Carson, Yes,

(31:56):
very clever man. Never threw himself into the depths of politics,
but he was always amusing. He was clever and funny
and entertaining. After he retired, there were a couple of
others that took over, and I'm talking about on different channels,
but the number of shows kept increasing, but the talent didn't,

(32:20):
and the talent swung to the left, or the so
called talent swung to the left, to the point now
that one or two of them have lost their jobs.
They've been they've been sacked is the appropriate word for it.
Others have been uncovered for their corruption one way or
the other. And it seems to be getting an exposure

(32:42):
that is going to help change the attitude, because Fox
probably is the only one that has a program late
at night that is anything but left wing. But there
is a there is a vulgarity to it that has
crept in over a short period of time that would

(33:04):
turn a lot of people in this country off. Even
if they felt that they agreed with what was being said.
So what I was driving at is that we don't
have that sort of aspect of life with television programs
at all. So it comes back again probably where the
country or those in the business cannot support what you

(33:27):
and I are discussing and looking for.

Speaker 3 (33:29):
Maybe true.

Speaker 4 (33:30):
The other thing is, of course, that we also have
a lack of satire in comedy on our problems, which
is something that I really regret. And by the way,
I think that satire in comedy doesn't have to be
always from any center left viewpoint. You can definitely do
comedy from a center right point of view, yep, but
we don't often try that.

Speaker 2 (33:49):
And I'd say that's absolutely correct.

Speaker 3 (33:52):
By the way, do you know what the number one
best selling book in Germany is right now? Yeah? I do.

Speaker 2 (33:58):
It is I'll tell you if you give me a man, Yeah,
I've got it here.

Speaker 3 (34:05):
So but you tell us.

Speaker 4 (34:07):
Well, the author's name is Vince Ebert and the title
of his book I probably couldn't mention on your podcast.

Speaker 3 (34:19):
Have you found it?

Speaker 2 (34:20):
No, that's the one that you write about.

Speaker 3 (34:24):
No, no, no, no, no no, that's a different book.

Speaker 2 (34:27):
The one that I'm talking about is by Rene Vanbloken.

Speaker 4 (34:30):
Yeah, no, no, I'm currently on the Spiegel list of
best selling books. Vince Ebert you should probably have on
your podcast at some stage. And Vince Ebert is a
classical liberal physicist who's been doing comedy from a center right,
classical liberal perspective for twenty five years. Great programs, slaughtering

(34:56):
all sorts of holy cows on stage, you would love it.
And he's just written this book about the state of Germany,
and it's a shot straight to number one on the
Spiegel best selling list.

Speaker 2 (35:08):
So now, why do you think Why do you think
that was?

Speaker 4 (35:12):
Because I think he talks about issues that are very
concerning to many Germans. I mean, Germany is in a
relatively difficult shape right now anyway. The economy is not
doing well. They had a snap election last year earlier
this year actually after the crops of the government last year.
And Germany is dealing with all sorts of different problems

(35:35):
and here comes a physicist comedian actually writing about them
in a way that people can understand it, and actually
writing from a science perspective on many issues like energy policy,
for example, or the whole gender theory. So very good book,
very forth right book. Outspoken and actually quite a funny

(35:59):
book to English. Yet no, unfortunately not. I wonder actually
whether his previous books, because he's published Coldegtry before, are
available in English. Of ever Rtnam in German. And he's funny,
he's and by the way he speaks English. Well, he
lived in New York and performed in New York for
about a year, so you should probably have him at
some stage.

Speaker 2 (36:20):
Make a note, Can I suggest something else based on
what you just said? That Germany has a lot of
problems at the moment that it's dealing with. Would you
say it was in how would you How would you
put it in comparison with the problems that we're that
we have. Oh and I don't mean necessarily comparing the

(36:41):
problems themselves. I'm talking about the the volume.

Speaker 4 (36:45):
Well, Germany and news even both have a lot of problems,
so they have also some things in common. What they
share is m MP, so they have the same electoral
system with the constant need for coalition government and compromise.
They are more similar in many ways than people would realize.

(37:06):
I mean Germany, for example, thought until twenty twenty two
that you probably don't really need to have a military
anymore because we live in peace times and everything is fine,
and we can enjoy your peace evident and basically get
rid of our armed forces.

Speaker 2 (37:24):
At America will always save it exactly.

Speaker 4 (37:27):
And New Zealand did roughly the same, I mean to
an even greater degree, you might say, I mean, at
least the Germans spent maybe one and a half percent
of GDP on defense for a long time. They just
reached two percent. New Zealand. Of course since then maybe
one percent depending on how you counted. So New Zealand
did is even more in a more extreme way. Energy

(37:48):
policy roughly the same. So Germany tried to be extremely virtuous,
going into all sorts of renewable policies, subsidizing them heavily,
switching off nuclear power, trying to switch off a call
as well, and got itself into a position where then
trying to bridge all of these problems and gaps with

(38:09):
Russian energy imports didn't work so well, especially after twenty
twenty two. New Zealand, meanwhile, yep, we are already quite
renewable because of our previous especially the Molojun governments, big
infrastructure projects and building all sorts of dams. But we
haven't actually got a reasonable energy policy in this country anymore,

(38:32):
which we have seen in previous years, where we regularly
run to problems when we don't have enough rain and
in winter, of course that leads to shortages. Or take
another issue. Germany likes to present itself as the kind
of a moral super champion telling the rest of the
world how they should be. So can you please learn
the lessons from our shrinking of the army and our

(38:55):
wonderful energy policy. Except it's free writing on others. I mean,
it's free writing, or used to be free riding on
American defense, and now free writing on other countries' energy policies.
Because whenever there's sun doesn't China and the wind doesn't blow,
Germany imports the energy from its neighbors. New Zealand has
a similar kind of complex when it comes to moral posturing.

(39:16):
I mean, for a long time we've been trying to
explain to Australians how they should deal with China, because
we are doing it so well.

Speaker 3 (39:22):
Apparently we've got.

Speaker 4 (39:23):
A wonderful free trade agreement with China and our trade
is going up and up, and we found it necessary
to let the Australians know that they should learn a
bit or two, a thing or two from us about that.
So these two countries actually have a lot in common
in some ways. And also this economic reliance on just

(39:43):
one particular country in New Zealan's case, obviously China. In
Germany's case, it was the reliance on Russia for energy,
for cheap energy, and on China for exports. So when
I look at the problems, actually there are structural problems
that both countries have, and in some ways they're even linked.

Speaker 2 (40:03):
I had a much simpler approach to the question that
I asked you. Each now has to live with the
result of a previous country leader Angela Merkel and just
Sinda Redern, and both of those both of those individuals
left the country in a state of wreckage, and that itself,

(40:24):
of course didn't found out to all the things that
you just said. But the anchor to the answer was
those two people. Would you argue with me?

Speaker 4 (40:33):
I'm generally not a great fan of personalizing issues too much.
I much prefer to talk about policy then about people.
But it is hard to disagree that the two people
you mentioned had an enormous influence on policy.

Speaker 3 (40:46):
These days.

Speaker 4 (40:47):
It is the tenth anniversary of Angela Marcus's famous statement
during the refugee crisis of twenty fifteen, we shoftened us.
We'll go on with it when it's now clear after
ten years that Germany didn't quite manage to deal with
integrating one and a half million refugees in a proper way,
and Germany is still paying the price for that in

(41:09):
multiple ways. I mean, we can talk about the effect
of that migration wave on crime, the enormous costs associated
with that, and so you're right that her policy, which
was a policy she didn't actually have a parliamentary majority
for she just announced it on her own, is still
costing Germany quite dearly. And when it comes to cinder

(41:32):
A Durn's legacy, well, we can see the second most
clearly in fiscal policy, because we currently have a government
that spends about four or five percent of GDP more
than the government's spent before Cinda Durn became Prime minister.
So yes, she left us a much inflated public service,
a much inflated stay spending problem, and it will take

(41:57):
a long time until we get that back to where
it should be. And there are other policy fields, of
course where we could also go through her legacy and
find that yes, she left us legacy, which will take years,
if not decades to correct.

Speaker 2 (42:12):
You wrote a column called the Drowning electorally Christopher Luckson's
premiership under pressure. So that was only a couple of
weeks back, halfway through this August just gone. So I
wonder whether mister Luxon has it or whether he's trying
his best and being shall we say, curtailed by elements

(42:35):
that he can't really resolve.

Speaker 3 (42:39):
Well.

Speaker 4 (42:39):
When I wrote this column, by the way, it was
one of those cases where you write a column and
you think you have delivered a relatively balanced piece of writing,
and then you see it in print and you get
a bit of a shock because they've chosen a different headline.

Speaker 3 (42:52):
You probably know how that feels.

Speaker 4 (42:55):
My initial headline was when political honeymoons never happened, And
when you read the piece, actually that headline made a
lot of sense because what I did was I tried
to sure that Luckson never really had a chance with
the media because they were always against him. He inherited
an enormous amount of problems from the predecessor government, and

(43:17):
we talked about some of them already, But then of
course he never really helped himself with some of his remarks,
with some of his communications strategy, and that's basically what
the piece was about. And I contrasted his performance and
the Minister of Finance's performance against the more successful members
of their cabinet, and that is, in my view, the

(43:39):
Education Minister Erica Sanford and the Housing Minister christ Bishop.

Speaker 3 (43:43):
And I put this.

Speaker 4 (43:45):
Against the context of our current opinion polling, which shows
that the government, according to some opinion polls, might struggle
to be returned next year in next year's election. And then,
of course I wrote this for an Australian publication, so
I was trying to explain to Australian readers how they
should read all of this, because what would happen in
Australias of course, that the party in government would panic,
immediately swopped the Prime Minister out, installed somebody else and

(44:07):
then tacked to the election. Because that's roughly how Australia
has worked since Kevin Rudd. I mean, we all know
and remember how that happened between Kevin Raht and Julia
Gillard and back to rot and then had happened on
the other side of politics, of course, between Tony Abbott
and Malcolm Turnbull and Scott Morrison, and that Australian prime
ministers actually sit out an entire parliamentary term in office,

(44:29):
as Alberanezi has just done, is not the norm anymore
in Australia, But in New Zealand, I argat we do
things differently and it's extremely rare for sitting prime ministers
to be swapped out. The last time it happened was
in the nineteen nineties, of course, and that was my column,
so it was quite a balanced one. But in the end,
of course, when you put a headline to it like that,

(44:51):
it sounds a bit more extreme than I had intended
it to be. What I would say, though, was this
government is clearly under a lot of pressure because we
all heard last year that we have to survive till
twenty five and everything would be fine, and that economic
recovery hasn't happened yet, and no wonder than that Luxon

(45:12):
is in trouble in the poors because people were actually
promised something else. They were promised by him and others
that we would get a recovery in economic recovery, and
that's what they were banking on. And now the recovery
hasn't happened, and Luxon is hoping that it will materialize
before we go to the ports again next year. But

(45:33):
that's basically his position in the polls right now.

Speaker 3 (45:36):
And that was the piece.

Speaker 2 (45:38):
And I think that was very well explained. I was
going to say that the two countries, Australia and New
Zealand are quite different in their political structure. We're a
uni chamber government. We've got various parties, of course, unfortunately,
but Australia has whether it's a federal system with numerous

(45:58):
how many states are they now, seven or six, I
can't remember, and they have an upper House at federal
level as well as state levels in some cases. So
what I'm driving at here is that in Australia there
are many more angles that politicians can utilize to achieve

(46:21):
what they want. With the battle between different states, between
the Senate and the House, it's much easier to come
up with an alternative to the current leadership that it
is here.

Speaker 4 (46:37):
Yes, that's true. There are simply more politicians involved. Parliament
is also larger in camera they've got one hundred and
fifty mpiece compared to one hundred and twenty here. Normally,
and yet I think Australia is also a country with
two twenty four our TV stations, news stations. They've got

(46:58):
ABC News twenty four and they've got Sky News. They've
got endless talk back radio stations around the country, and
a much bigger and more diverse media scene, as we're
already discussed, and therefore everything is a bit quicker in Australia.
And so if a prime minister is really struggling in
Australia and has the entire media against him or her,

(47:22):
plus a relentless twenty four to seven news cycle, it
is much harder for Australian prime minister to survive in
that sense. New Zealand's a bit tamer and therefore even
for a struggling prime minister sitting on really not to
impressive economic data or opinion pause, it is perhaps a
bit easier to survive that in New Zealand.

Speaker 2 (47:42):
Now, having discussed all that, I want to transfer our
attention to Leonardo da Vinci, and I'm going to ask
you to explain why you gave a speech. It was
the inaugural speech in Australia for the Leonardo da Vinci Lecture,
and I have to say it was an outstanding delivery.

(48:07):
I was, and I'm not trying to bother you up.
I was hooked on it from pretty much the beginning,
and there was so much I think wisdom in it,
so much information in it that I'm going to encourage
everyone to look it up. But we'll deal with that

(48:27):
at the end. So this was the inaugural Give us
a bit of background, Okay.

Speaker 4 (48:34):
In Australia there is a company called Portfolio Construction Forum
that is run by my good old friend Graham Rich,
who's also a member of the New Zealand Nerative. Graham
is a New Zealander, a very proud New Zealander, but
based in Australia and where he has been for I
think twenty five or so years, and he organizes conferences
for investment professionals. So these are fund managers, these are

(48:57):
people working for super funds, chief investment officers, so people
who really move hundreds of millions of dollars or billions
of dollars in some of the cases. And twice a
year he organizes big conferences where they all come together
and where they discuss the state of the world in
financial markets. Graham is also someone who is very committed

(49:20):
to society, not just to finance, but actually to thinking
about the big issues facing society, politics, economics. For him,
that's kind of all linked and all connected. And I've
been speaking at Portfolio Construction Forum conferences for a long time.

(49:40):
I think my first one was probably about thirteen years ago,
actually in Auckland, and usually I'm talking about the bread
and butter issues of economics at these conferences. But Graham
contacted me earlier in the year and he asked, well,
I'm thinking of instituting something slightly different for these conferences.
I want to have something looking a little bit more

(50:03):
like the BBC Reflecture, where we look beyond today and
actually ask the bigger question. And I would like you
to deliver the first such lecture, and it's named after
da Vinci. Would you like to do that? And then,
of course, how could I say no. He's my friend,
and so I agreed on delivering this first Da Vinci lecture.

(50:25):
And then it took me a while until I realized, actually,
this was probably even more challenging than I had initially anticipated,
because it's not going to be yet another conference speech,
the kind of conference speech that I used to give
to his conferences, but this is really something deeper, more intellectual.
And then I had another chat with Graham and I said, well,

(50:46):
what I have in mind is actually something that I
would rather like to write an essay about than to
give a forty minute lecture. But then again, I don't
want to read out an essay as they would have
done at the BBC Reflectures, because I really find this
too stale. I would like to give a presentation to
you with no written menusc but I would like to

(51:09):
write down before and for everybody to read what I
really haven't read.

Speaker 3 (51:13):
So Graham agreed to that.

Speaker 4 (51:15):
I produced an essay of thirteen thousand words and I
delivered a forty minute presentation without a manuscript in Sydney
in front of an audience of two hundred people in
the room, at another thousand online and at venues across
Australia and New Zealand. So I prepared a thirteen thousand
word essay and I delivered it without a manuscript in

(51:37):
Sydney in a lecture of forty minutes, and we had
about two hundred people in the room. We had another
thousand online in Australia, in New Zealand in venues across
both countries, And what I wanted to do was I
wanted to start off with Da Vinci because it's a
named lecture, so I think it's always a good practice

(51:58):
to start off with a person after whom it's named.

Speaker 3 (52:01):
But then I wanted to.

Speaker 4 (52:02):
Develop a broader philosophical view of our current situation where
we start and in the world today.

Speaker 2 (52:11):
So you call it, You've called it Leonardo's legacy. Is
it simple to describe what that legacy is, because I'm
guessing it's not because you've written thirteen thousand words on it.
But take it where you want.

Speaker 4 (52:25):
Okay, Well, let's start with Leonardo. Then explain a bit
about Leonardo. Most people, of course think Leonardo the painter,
the famous painter behind paintings like the Mona Lisa. But
Leonardo is more than that. Leonardo is the ultimate renascence man.
What that means is that he was a person who

(52:46):
was universally curious about life, about art, about engineering, about science,
about everything really, and everything in Leonardo's work connected. I
explain this in the lecture by going back to the
year fourteen eighty two, when Leonardo, a thirty year old
self taught man from Floorlwrence applies to Ludovico's fortsa who

(53:11):
later became the Duke of Milan, and he applies for employment.
And so he points out to Ludovico's sports so that
he can build chariots, he can build catapults, he can
build portable bridges. And then only as a ps he says,
and by the way, I can paint, and he gets
the job. He moves to Milan. He spent seventeen years
in Milan, and the rest is history, and the rest

(53:34):
is art history. But really, what Leonardo gave us apart
from these artworks, apart from his drawings, apart from his
notebook running over thousands of pages, you know, with drawings
of an anatomy, of machines, of mathematical proofs of everything,
really he gave us, effectively a scientific method, or the

(53:55):
scientific method. And that was more than a century before
Francis Bacon. And in that way he introduced reason into
the world. And what I did then in the lecture
was I tried to trace where this took us, where
this new way of thinking actually took us, not just
in art and engineering, but in science. And I argue

(54:18):
that this Renaissance mindset this discovery of reason, this rediscovery
of ancient Greek texts, is really behind what propelled economic
growth and social growth and development in the West since
that time of the Renaissance and then of course through
the Enlightenment. And I tried to then reconstruct actually how

(54:42):
this mindset of the use of reason also created a
set of global institutions, of legal institutions that propelled this
Western development. I start off with the Piece of Austphalia
in sixteen forty eight, the piece that was concluded in
Munster and Osnabruck after the Thirty Year War. I explain

(55:05):
how this links into emerging legal philosophy about trade between nations,
and I mentioned Hugo Grazzios as the great legal theorist
from the Netherlands at the time, and emade Fattal who
later concluded or continued rather this legal philosophy. I then

(55:25):
explain how that created an order in which sovereigns could
trade better with one another. I explained how this then
leads us eventually to the first age of globalization, which
is the concept of concept of Europe, which happened after
the Congress of Vienna in eighteen fifteen. How that lasted
for almost a century really until the beginning of the

(55:47):
First World War nineteen fourteen. How this led to enormous
amounts of prosperity and a stable currency based on the
gold standard. How this also is the driving force really
behind the Industrial Revolution, which really picked up steam quite
literally in the nineteenth century. And then I explained what
happened when order collapses after the First World War, how

(56:14):
it took us ten seventy years to really regain the
kind of globalization that we lost in nineteen fourteen. And
I explained that all of this depends on a guaranteur
of the rules, someone who is willing to stand up
for this rules based order and who provides that security
and stability as a public could. In the first age

(56:35):
of globalization, that was Britain, and obviously it was Brittin
because it was the dominant global empire at the time.
In the second era of globalization, that was the United States.
And then I talk about our crisis that were encountering today,
and I asked the question whether we are in the
process of undermining or losing that order and where that
leaves us today.

Speaker 2 (56:56):
Let me ask a couple of a couple of specific questions.
But Leonardo's true disruption was in how he thought about
knowledge itself. While these contemporaries looked for truth in ancient
texts and religious doctrine, Leonardo pioneered a new radical approach.
My intention is to consult experience first, and then with reasoning,

(57:19):
show why such experience is bound to operate in such
a way. End quote this simple formula. You write experience first,
then reason would eventually reshape science. A few lines further on,
all sciences are vain and full of errors that are

(57:40):
not born of experience, the mother of all knowledge, he declared.
Does that describe beautifully a situation with much science today?

Speaker 3 (57:52):
What it describes?

Speaker 1 (57:53):
This?

Speaker 4 (57:55):
Leonardo took a different path, even from ancient Greece. In
ancient Greece, we didn't have this empiricism, we didn't have experimentation.
Greek philosophy basically is a philosophy of deduction, so you
deduce findings logically from propositions. That's basically the ancient Greek

(58:19):
approach to finding knowledge. What Leonardo invented was really this
empirical observation of experimentation. I mean that there are numerous
examples where Leonardo experimented, where he just threw things into
a river just to see how the river flows, and
how to make these river floors visible to his eye.

(58:40):
Leonardo realized that you have to replicate things. You can't
just assume that because something happened once, it will always
happen again. You have to test this, and you have
to repeat the experiment to find out whether that still holds.
And in that way, Leonardo is a forerunner to modern
science and to the scientific method, which Francis Bacon, of

(59:01):
course came up with one hundred years later. So in
that sense, Leonardo is well a four erunner of the Enlightenment.
And I talk about this later on. I say how
much the Enlightenment has actually shaped us in all sorts
of ways, not just in science, but also in the
way we think about government, how we think about the

(59:23):
legal system, how we think about the court system, how
we think about knowledge itself. And in that sense, Leonardo,
though being as I said, the ultimate venaissance Man, is
actually the ultimate forerunner of the Enlightenment.

Speaker 2 (59:36):
In my view, what would you call his way of
thinking critical thinking.

Speaker 4 (59:43):
Not in the way that we are currently using that
term critical thinking, but yes, in a way certainly critical thinking.
When this was still positive.

Speaker 2 (59:52):
So one of the reasons that this's really got to
be was if we were to take on this approach
to education, what would that do for the What would
that do for the students and for the country.

Speaker 4 (01:00:08):
For the students, it would be much more interesting than
regurgitating dogmas presented to them. It would encourage them to think,
It would encourage them to experiment. It would ideally instill
an idea of knowledge, in a thirst for knowledge into
the students. The other thing that I think it would

(01:00:29):
do is actually it would demonstrate to students that everything
connects to everything else. The one thing that really stands
out for Leonardo is that he didn't make any great
differentiations between the various sciences and between the various knowledge forms.
In Leonardo's world, everything is connected. And you can see

(01:00:52):
this quite clearly when you go through his notebook and
you see drawings of anatomy which he was fascinated by,
next to machines invented, next to mathematical proofs. Everything is connected.
And I have a quote right at the beginning of
their the essay where he talks about the mind as
a mirror. Now, as I said in the lecture, a

(01:01:14):
mieror can only work if the mirror is clean. If
the mirror is somehow blurred, if you have anything obscuring
the view, you wouldn't see the full picture. And American
only work if the mirror is not broken. And unfortunately,
what we do too often these days is we we
break knowledge, we break science, we break observations into all

(01:01:37):
sorts of little aspects, and then we unfortunately missed the
bigger picture because often different areas of knowledge belong together.
And I quote again Hyak for the Jiak, the Austrian
economist in my forward. Hyak once said that you cannot
be a good economist if you own an economist. And

(01:01:57):
Hyak himself had degrees in psychology and economics and in law,
so he did practice what he preached. I think by
the same talking, we could say you cannot be a
good banker if on your banker, or a good portfolio
manager if you're on your portfolio manager, or a good
teacher if you're on your teacher. You need to be
something else. And that is really what Leonardo gave us.

(01:02:19):
So I think if we taught his all encompassing view
of the world, his great curiosity to our young generation,
to students, I think they would find this fascinating.

Speaker 2 (01:02:31):
I recall doing ancient history in high school for a year,
and I wondered why the hell I was there. We
had a teacher who was getting on, who either sat
or stood leaning on his desk and read from a
book monotonously, and you couldn't concentrate on it because you

(01:02:57):
couldn't maintain that concentration. It was dull, it was boring.
It was only years later that I discovered them the
value of education in ancient with ancient history, or in
ancient history, and how much I enjoyed it later on. Now,
if you, if you took the approach that you've been

(01:03:18):
talking about and introduced that you already said this, I
reckon you'd get many more kids who would be able
to concentrate, would become more interested in what was on offer,
and would have a far more successful life.

Speaker 4 (01:03:34):
I would not disagree. But let's not talk about the
kids only. Let's talk about investment professionals. And I wrote
the essay, and when I delivered that lecture, my biggest
fear was that I would just go over people's heads
because they have of course, they thought they would attend
a conference of investment professionals about portfolio management, and instead

(01:03:56):
they get the DA Vincial lecture and they are taught
about the Mona Lisa and the flying machine and the
notebook and anatomy and how everything connects. This is not
what you would typically expect at a business conference, and
so my worry when I prepared all of this was
that they would say, well, what the hell is that?
What is he going on about. What I really wanted

(01:04:19):
to make them realize, and I think it actually worked.
I got good feedback on the lecture afterwards, was that
everything really connects, and especially what they are doing in
their jobs. They might think, actually, what I do putting
together at portfolio, buying shares and bonds and shopping around
the market is just normal. It's just how we do business.

(01:04:39):
That's how we've always done business. And we're having diversified
portfolios to protect ourselves from kind of the uncertainties of life,
and that's how it works. What I try to show
them in my lecture was actually, yes, you may be
dealing in markets and you're putting together your portfolios and
you think this is the most normal thing in the world.

Speaker 3 (01:04:59):
But actually what you don't.

Speaker 4 (01:05:00):
Realize without the underlying foundations, without those foundations created by
da Vinci, Emanuel Kant, John Locke, Wantes Queue. You wouldn't
be there, you wouldn't have a portfolio, you wouldn't be
able to actually put your money together in the way

(01:05:20):
you currently do, because all of this depends on civilizational
foundations that took centuries to build, that took loyal lawyers
like Grotius into Funtele, that took scientists like Leonardo da
Vinci and Francis Bacon, and all of this culminated and
built this very foundation of Western civilization. We take this

(01:05:43):
for granted because yeah, it's always been like that, but actually,
should we take it for granted or should be realized
that we are only able to do whatever we do
in business because of these foundations, because of these underlying philosophies.
And that was my challenge to the audience. That is

(01:06:05):
a challenge in the essay, And I have this recurring
phrase in the essay that nothing feels missing when these
foundations are being uninstalled, because you can still go to
the market, you can still trade, and yes, the goods
that you order are still being delivered, except at some
stage they might no longer be and that is the problem.

(01:06:25):
So nothing feels missing until it's gone, and then it
might be gone quite soon. And we've been there before.
And I have this example of the First World War.
If you had a balanced, mixed portfolio in nineteen fourteen,
say you in Germany, you have some cash which you
invest somewhere in Germany. You might have some Russian railway bonds,

(01:06:45):
you might have some French equities, and you think that
is a wonderful portfolio. By nineteen twenty three, all of
this would have evaporated because the Bolsheviks had basically taken
over the Russian economy, French equities were now hidden behind
capital barriers, and your German savings would have been eradicated
completely by German hyperinflation. So no matter how careful you

(01:07:08):
put together your portfolio before World War One, by nineteen
twenty three in Germany, it would have all been worthless.
And so this is my metaphor really for showing how
much we depend on foundations that we can't control, but
that we have a responsibility for.

Speaker 2 (01:07:26):
Again I'm going to say, is that there is so
much in this that is nothing short of wisdom. What
is the best way to access it?

Speaker 4 (01:07:38):
The essay, The best way is probably to go into
your podcast shore Notes, and you might share a link.
You can find this on my personal website. I've put
it on Oliver Hartbeach dot com and you look for
Leonardo's Legacy and there you will find the essay that's
thirteen thousand words, and you will also be able to

(01:08:00):
watch the Da Vinci lecture I gave in Sydney.

Speaker 2 (01:08:03):
Indulge in both is my response. There's still a couple
of So I want your opinion on the dimension of
a monetary system based on gold standard. Why did that?
Why did that fail or collapse or disintegrate? Whatever happened.

Speaker 4 (01:08:23):
Well, for as long as humanity had money, it was
always based on some metals, usually precious metals, usually silver
and gold. You go back over the millennia and you
find that basically all currencies were always based on that
until nineteen seventy one. So in nineteen seventy one we

(01:08:47):
severed the last links to the old gold standard that
was still remained, of course, in the Breton Woods Agreement,
because the Americans promised to convert US dollars to gold,
when that no longer was possible because of America's fiscal deficits,
and especially because of the Vietnam War, it was President
Nixon who decided to leave gold behind and move towards

(01:09:10):
an entire fiat currency, meaning that the Federal Reserve can
create as much money as they like without any limitations
and without linking it back to gold. So we've had
this experiment now for more than fifty years, and unfortunately
the gold standard is no longer with us. So we
are in a world in which we have to rely

(01:09:30):
entirely on central banks not overdoing it with their ability
to create money out of thin air. But if you
go back into history and you look at how it
used to be, you look at the nineteenth century. The
nineteenth century was a time of price stability and actually
in some cases deflation. There is a wonderful paper from
the Parliamentary Library in Britain and it tracks inflation over

(01:09:55):
the nineteenth century and it details that for most of
the nineteenth century in Britain, deflation was the norm, meaning
that prices were not just stable, but slightly falling, and
probably because of increased productivity. So increases in productivity translated
in goods becoming cheaper and people being able to afford more.
It was only once we deviated from the gold standard

(01:10:18):
and then finally gave it up in nineteen seventy one.
That we ended in a world in which we've become
used to ongoing inflation, sometimes hyperinflation, but certainly not the
kind of price stability that we once took for granted,
and certainly a word now where the thought of deflation
makes us worry that something is wrong, when that was

(01:10:38):
the norm really for most of the nineteenth century.

Speaker 2 (01:10:43):
I read only yesterday the latest piece with regard to
the possibility probability in some people's in some people's minds,
of Trump reintroducing a gold standard for America.

Speaker 4 (01:10:59):
What chance do you think, Well, it's hard to tell
with Trump, because he changes his mind too many times.
I've heard him now on a same day, actually talking
about a strong US dollar he believes in, and any
says a few hours later that a week US dollar
is what he really would like to have.

Speaker 3 (01:11:18):
So not quite sure.

Speaker 4 (01:11:20):
I heard the theory too that he might be interested
in a gold standard eventually, but I think it would
only come after he's completely wrecked the US dollar as
it stands right now, because the policies that Trump wants
to introduce, and you can see this in his fight
with the FED is a loser monetary policy, so lower
interest rates which would deflate some sorry, inflate some of

(01:11:41):
his problems away. And we can see that he's trying
to bring the FED under White House control, so away
from the system that we've had now since the times
of Ronald Reagan and Paul Walker, where the FED was independent,
towards an entirely politicized FED. And we know how entirely
politicized central banks work. Typically, they choose interest rates that

(01:12:03):
are too low, they flood markets with money, and in
that way, yes, you can inflate your problem away, but
for the economy as such, it's a problem. If you
want to have a current example of the policies that
Trump would probably like to implement. You look at Turkey
and they've been fighting with severe inflation of for many
years because their president edwe is doing exactly to his

(01:12:25):
central bank what Trump is trying to do to the FED.

Speaker 2 (01:12:29):
Interesting have I mentioned or have you ever heard of
maxhell Newton?

Speaker 3 (01:12:36):
No, doesn't ring a bell right now.

Speaker 2 (01:12:38):
Maxwell Newton was I've mentioned him on numerous occasions over
the years. In fact, I had him on the pod
not but Podcast on the radio program a few Times
before he died, but I haven't mentioned him for quite
some time. Maxwell Newton was a was an economist Australian.

(01:13:01):
He had a very colorful background, I mean a very
colorful background. He joined forces with Murdoch, and Murdoch took
him to New York and he became the finance writer
for the New York Post. And it was there that
I met him, because a couple of days before that,

(01:13:26):
I walked into a bookshop and there brand new release
on a stand, new release, The Fed by Maxwell Newton,
and I walked up from Times Square, where I was
sleeping in a hotel, not in the street. I walked

(01:13:47):
up to the Brooklyn Bridge where The Times was and
just walked in and introduced myself. So he signed the
book and his comment is down with Central banks and
let's start with the FED good policy or otherwise.

Speaker 3 (01:14:05):
Oh well, I'd have a lot of sympathy for that.

Speaker 4 (01:14:10):
My own. Maxwell Newton was a writer called Roland Barda,
and Barda was a student of Hyax who then became
an entrepreneur after his studies, but retired early and started
writing books on Austrian economics. And one of the first
books by Ronald Barder that I read was called gett

(01:14:30):
Gold on got Spieler, published in German, so money, gold
and people who play God, And it was all about
central banks. It was the Hayakian Austrian school view of
central banking. So you can imagine in what direction that
would have gone. Yes, I think it's a tragedy actually
of modern monetary systems, that we rely too much on

(01:14:52):
central banks, that they have no anchor in the real world,
that there is no linkages, that there are no linkages
back to gold or silver, and that therefore we have
to be extremely careful with how these central banks are managed.
I mean, we can probably deal with the system as
it is, but it really requires a political independence because otherwise,

(01:15:14):
for politicians the temptations would always be there to interfere
and quickly fiddle with the economy. And then also we
need to give them a proper mandate for bi stability
in nothing else, because otherwise, again you encourage these central
bankers to do all sorts of nonsense.

Speaker 3 (01:15:30):
Dangerous nonsense.

Speaker 2 (01:15:32):
Indeed, I had a list of other things too, but
I think we'll park them for the moment, except for
this one. I think I took it from your speech.
No common purpose anymore, society is disintegrating. Does that ring
a bell?

Speaker 3 (01:15:51):
Yeah?

Speaker 4 (01:15:51):
And does I'm not the first one to say that.
Of course, I mentioned Robert Putnam bawling alone in my speech.
The thing that really worries me about our societies is
we have forgotten about our foundations.

Speaker 3 (01:16:06):
The foundations of society. I caught in the.

Speaker 4 (01:16:10):
Lecture and in the essay against the Worth bucking further,
a former judge on Germany's Constitutional Court who said that
the liberal secular state depends on foundations that it itself
cannot guarantee. Now that probably takes a bit of translation
that sentence, but what he says is, actually, if you

(01:16:31):
want to live in a liberal secular state, in a
liberal democracy, that depends on so many things that the
state itself cannot create. It depends on civics knowledge, It
depends on people working together, It depends on an understanding
of an independent judiciary. It depends on all of these prerequisites.

(01:16:51):
And the state cannot legislate for that. The state cannot
make you believe in them. You have to have them yourself. Yet,
there has to be a constitutional spirit in order for
the state to operate in that way. And if you
try to legislate for that. If you try to force
people to hold these views, of course the state would
no longer be liberal. And that's what alspor Berking further

(01:17:13):
said as well. We have come to a point in
society these days where unfortunately we lack the common purpose,
or actually the common understanding of what it means to
live in a liberal, secular state, in a liberal democracy,
in a state under the rule of law, with an
independent judiciary, with a division of powers. And that is

(01:17:35):
a problem, especially a problem in a society that also
fragments and disintegrates, where we don't have that many shared
experiences anymore. Once upon a time we all read the
same newspapers, we watch the same TV programs, and we
listen to the same radio stations. Nowadays we don't do
that because we are all in our own little individual bubbles,

(01:17:56):
and so society is fracturing and is fracturing also then
on the background of a society that has lost its
sense of history, where students no longer know who Stalin
or Mao were, and where now majorities of Australian young
people and American young people say that they have a
certain admiration for socialism and communism, and so this is

(01:18:18):
a problem. It's a civic decay or civics decay that
is plaguing many developed economies and many Western democracies.

Speaker 2 (01:18:30):
And something needs to be done, indeed, Oliver.

Speaker 4 (01:18:34):
And that's why I'm giving speeches like this, and that's
why I'm trying to contribute to public debates because I
think we need more of them.

Speaker 2 (01:18:44):
And you're absolutely one hundred and one percent right, Oliver.
It's been a great pleasure. I appreciate it, and so
will a lot of a lot of people. And I'll
look forward to the to the feedback. But Oliver Haardwitch
dot com, HRT Witch, Oliver Haartwitch dot com, and you'll
find the speech and you'll find the essay and both

(01:19:09):
are gold. Thank you, and it's not too long before
we talk again.

Speaker 3 (01:19:16):
Thank you very much, Laton, and happy to talk to
you anytime now.

Speaker 2 (01:19:40):
This is producer Welcome back, Laton. You've come home just
in time for the male room for podcast three hundred.

Speaker 5 (01:19:46):
Well you mean home from holiday or home from my musings.

Speaker 2 (01:19:50):
Today, Well take it both ways.

Speaker 3 (01:19:52):
Thank you.

Speaker 2 (01:19:53):
Gosh.

Speaker 5 (01:19:53):
I've missed doing this, I must say, and you lovely people.
We've been hearing from you throughout the holiday. But obviously
this is a take on many people's ideas over.

Speaker 2 (01:20:04):
Many Weeksile we'll save some for the next couple of weeks,
but don't stop corresponding because we love it, no please,
And it's the more we get, the greater the variety.

Speaker 5 (01:20:17):
Yeah, and we did think about doing it on holiday,
didn't we.

Speaker 2 (01:20:20):
But it did get a bit crazy, Yeah, crazy holiday.
Maybe we'll tell you a little more about it at
the end of the mailroom Peaks and Troughs. It was
like that, So may I go first? You may it's
your three hundred Thank you. I want to include the
dates on each of these because they come from a
variety of dates covering a variety of issues. So we're

(01:20:43):
looking at the fifth of August from Chris, who says,
if you hadn't heard the news about NCEEA, it's slowly
being scrapped due to its nonexistent credibility. I think C. S.
Lewis said it best quote. We all want progress, but
progress means getting nearer to the place where you want
to be. And if you've taken a wrong turning, then

(01:21:07):
to go forward does not mean you get any nearer.
If you're on the wrong road. Progress means doing an
about turn and walking back to the right road, and
in that case, the man who turns back soonest is
the most progressive man. I'm looking forward to hearing from
you and the family while you're overseas, and trust that
you are making more happy memories. Success is when you

(01:21:29):
look back and the memories make you smile. Well, there's
a bit of smiling, but there's a bit of the.

Speaker 5 (01:21:33):
Other two laden Steve says, I hope your holiday went
well and you enjoyed the world deserved break. I have
to say your podcast two ninety five with Allan was outstanding.
Clearly he's an expert in his field and supported by
qualifications and an honesty that should make all those involved
in the delays for consent feel embarrassed. What has been

(01:21:55):
happening in New Zealand has been nothing short of disgraceful.
The EWE gravy train needs to end prior to Europeans arriving.
I'd like to know when the last Mary dived one
hundred meters to the sea floor to look at the sand.
Allan spoke brilliantly, showing a restraint on criticizing all the
pathetic behaviors on display from legal fraternities, Greenpeace, eco terrorists

(01:22:18):
and mari groups with hands out. The time has come
for our government to take a stand not based on
wanting to hold power, but a gamble that is what
a majority of us would support. We need a developed country,
not influenced by ideology that has proven wrong continuously. I've
said before CO two equals zero point one seven of

(01:22:41):
the atmosphere global warming. I think not better plant growth.
I think so more plants, more oxygen.

Speaker 2 (01:22:48):
Irrefutable. And that's from Steve. Steve Well said that debate
goes on all over the place written where we were,
of course for two separate weeks. Australia is burning itself
to pieces, that stupid government that's in at the moment,
and I've only just started on that. So from somebody,

(01:23:09):
from somebody somewhere, I refer to this New Zealand government
allocates twenty five million for referendum on four year parliamentary term.
New Zealand Herald As I'm sure you're aware, Professor Richard
Mulgan from the Otago Department of Philosophy was reputed to
be in favor of the three year term. As you

(01:23:30):
could kick the bastards out, and then there's a semi
headline where the quote comes from. The ARNZ Morning Report,
October nineteen ninety, a pre referendum interview. During the run
up to the twenty seven October nineteen ninety referendum on
whether to move New Zealand from a three to four
year parliamentary term, Morning Report host Jeff Robinson interviewed Professor

(01:23:55):
Richard Mulgan, then at Otago ask why he backed keeping
the shorter cycle. Mulgan replied that the great virtue of
a three year term was if a government turns bad,
you can pick the barstards out before they do too
much damage. The audio is cataloged by Narteonga Sound and
Vision under the nineteen ninety Term Length Referendum collection. If

(01:24:19):
that makes sense to you, Natejonga dot Org dot NZ
his textbook Politics in New Zealand. In the chapter on Parliament,
Mulgan reiterates the accountability argument, noting that short terms quote
keep ministers on a tight electoral leash and lets voters
dismiss an unpopular government with minimal delay. While the book

(01:24:41):
does not use the exact colorful phrase, it makes the
same point about the ease of voting governments out under
a triennial cycle. Mulgan was part of the Official Vote
three Years Committee in nineteen ninety. Their case, repeated in pamphlets,
adverts and interviews, was straightforward. On twenty seven October nineteen ninety,

(01:25:01):
voters rejected the four year option by sixteen nine percent
to thirty one, keeping the three year term. Interestingly, his
oldest son, Tim is a professor in philosophy, and I
was friends with his other son, Nick, while I was
at the Tago Physics department. Nick was doing a PhD
in laser physics and was probably the smartest person I

(01:25:23):
have ever met. Cheers Rice from Brisneyland. I was arguing
in favor of the three year term two on the basis,
if nothing else, that we only have one house, we
don't have a Senate, we have no other checks and balances,
and I don't believe that MMP is working or would work.

Speaker 5 (01:25:40):
At the time, Laden Peter says, I greatly appreciated hearing
the tale of an application from Alan Eggers appreciated, while
dismayed that we have sunk so low as a country
to slow down or perhaps stop such a positive matter
so crucial to ongoing productivity and prosperity. Our international integrity rating,
along with waiting our political common sense is at risk

(01:26:03):
by the disgraceful lack of performance over years in progressing
the TTR offshore mining application to positive conclusion. This despite
the various ecological queries being answered. That we are enabling
an applicant to be harassed and oppressed by what is
described as international eco terrorists committing economic vandalism and operating

(01:26:26):
under the guise of a charity is galling. I'm somewhat embarrassed,
yet no longer surprised by the description of Ewei and
Marie Party involvement in stifling an opportunity for communities and people.
I hope you airing the matter eases the way for
Alan Eggers and his company. He was a worthy contributor
to your podcast series. Beautifully written, Peter, and that was

(01:26:49):
from the first of Walkers Layton.

Speaker 2 (01:26:50):
By the way, very good. Appreciate it. From Adam on
the twenty eighth of August other end of the month.
Your son has a more millennial view of the world,
for sure, But that being said, I was disappointed that
you didn't bring up the Islamification of a US where
some cities have been overrun by Middle Eastern and Islamic cultures.

(01:27:14):
The UK has lost its identity, and surely people can
see that the huge influx of non assimilating cultures has
badly hurt the UK. I heard from somewhere where Mohammad
is the most common boy's name. Oh, that was published
everywhere England, and I think it wasn't for the first time.

Speaker 5 (01:27:31):
It's been for quite a few years.

Speaker 2 (01:27:34):
England, for the West has always been the motherland, but now, frankly,
it's become a failed multicultural experiment and the place that
I am pleased to say that I will never live.
Keep up the good fight, Layton, stay on the right
side of the worldview from Adam. There's a book that
actually had out because I was going to look up

(01:27:55):
a couple of things in it. I've mentioned this before,
Delectable Lie by Salem Mansur, a liberal repudiation of multiculturalism.
Now with a name like Salem Mansur it well, and
he's Canadian, and I think from memory he's an academic somewhere. Yes,
he's a professor of political science at the University of

(01:28:17):
Western Ontario, or at least he was when he wrote
the book, and he mounts a very good case. Now
there's ane another letter that will follow on automatically from
the one I just read from Adam, but.

Speaker 5 (01:28:29):
Too Layton, Sue says, yet another interesting podcast with a
very well informed articulate man. She wrote this on the
seventh of August. By the way, a point to mention
about immigration etc. In New Zealand is the large number
of nurses who come from overseas work here while they
get their New Zealand citizenship that then allows them easy

(01:28:50):
entry into Australia and off they go. I work in
health and this has been a well worn path for
the last twenty years, and successive governments seem to be
unaware or disinclined to change it. With all the politics
about health and the news currently, I would have thought
that disincentivizing this path he would have been more cost
effective than paying overseas nurses to come here for who

(01:29:12):
knows how long until they disappear off to Australia, and
rewarding those who do stay here just my two cents worth,
says Sue.

Speaker 2 (01:29:19):
Sue, your two senses more valuable than that. So this
is the one that's from twenty six August that follows
on by Trish Late And this is not about making
any comment on recent podcasts. I am reading on democracies
and death cults, Israel, Hamas and the Future of the
West author Douglas Murray. Several months ago you read a

(01:29:41):
passage about the Israelis fighting to save themselves and a
synagogue a piece of history not many of us knew.
Of course, that was the that was fighting the Romans.
This book was just what I needed with the current
situation and news reports not being at all accurate. The
millions that has been sent by different countries, although Israel

(01:30:04):
has told them not to, has gone to Hamas. The
men are billionaires and live in luxury while the gars
and starve. They are doing very nicely, thank you, and
the actions taken by different protest groups around the world
are playing right into their hands. Hamas has more tunnels
than the length of the entire London Underground. I balked

(01:30:27):
at that when I read it, because having written The
Underground for a fair while, but probably I'm getting a
little mixed up with the trains as well. Maybe You've
got a good point. I must dig into it. It
is a book that will open people's eyes that's the
Douglas Murray book. He's very active at the moment, and
good for him.

Speaker 5 (01:30:47):
Leyden Chris, who wrote on the twenty first of August, says,
for episode three hundred, why not do the best of mailroom?
It turns out I know one of your regular mail
room contributors, as we both home educate our kids. It
is so encouraging to hear mailroom letters because I no
longer feel isolated or think I'm the only one at

(01:31:07):
the end of his which mail room. I always leave
with a higher opinion of my fellow humans and believe
the world is in a better place.

Speaker 2 (01:31:14):
That's from Chris. Chris. When I read that, I actually
gave it a bit of thought, because I certainly could
have done it. But then again, keeping things mixed a
little bit on this occasion and fresh in the main,
I decided that there was too much to cover. So
from Vincent, I hope you're enjoying your time away. You

(01:31:36):
write this on the twenty fifth of August. I believe
at that time we were twenty five five. We just arrived,
actually we did, We arrived month. It was Monday. We
arrived in Dubai for three nights. I've just seen the
story in the Herald the link below, and I think
it's great. Not sure what it means in terms of

(01:31:58):
flow on effects, but so many people in Auckland, I'm sure,
are sick of these ridiculous speed bumps. Mungery Bridge is
a suburb by Auckland Airport which is riddled with dozens
of the speed bumps and raised crossings. I understand that
emergency services are not too pleased about the impact they
have on their ability to act quickly to call outs.

(01:32:19):
We look forward to your return to New Zealand. Well,
I hope so far you're not disappointed by the way
speed bumps are everywhere all over the world, everywhere Laton.

Speaker 5 (01:32:29):
This one's from David and it's dated August twenty eighth.
He says, with regard to your interview with Christian, It's
not often I disagree with the majority of the content,
but in this instance, I feel Christian's view of the
UK is totally at odds, with the majority of working
class people having to live in these towns being overrun
by foreign people not wanting to integrate or assimilate with

(01:32:52):
the British culture, but take over and destroy it. The
majority of both people by fary young males, and the
statistics are there for everyone to read. They are illegally
entering the UK. Therefore they are criminals and now almost
daily we hear of crimes perpetrated by these people. These
illegal people are being housed and fed whilst the British
people are waiting on longer housing lists and struggling in general.

(01:33:15):
As many have said, the government can find endless amounts
of money for these people, yet cannot when winter payments
for the elderly are slashed. The British people have simply
had enough of thirty years of government who have completely
ignored their wishes. Just wait until the thirteenth of September
twenty twenty five. We left in two thousand and four
to legally emigrate from the UK to New Zealand. My

(01:33:36):
wife and nurses contributed and I myself set up a
successful company and looking forward to retiring next year. From
Christians comments and view of the UK, I assume he
has a well paid job, lives in a nice leafy
part of the country and only listens to the BBC.
I myself are from the north of the country and
seen small towns completely changed, so that when you went

(01:33:58):
into them, you would feel as if you were in
another part of the world. I have been a longtime
fan and was devastated when you left radio, but now
love your podcasts.

Speaker 2 (01:34:07):
Keep up the great work. That's from David.

Speaker 5 (01:34:11):
David. I do understand your commentary if you've come from
the North decades ago. The North I think saw the changes,
didn't it, rather than the South. This has been going
on for generations and generations. Obviously the boat people scenario
as new, but you know, we stayed in the Brixton

(01:34:36):
area actually, which is not Knightsbridge, I can tell you.
And of course there have been decades and decades and
decades of assimilation there from mostly the Caribbean.

Speaker 2 (01:34:50):
Can I just throw in. It took a while to adjust,
and the first week was a little a little difficult
because you walk down the main street and we were
on it, and there was some such a mix of races,
but they were all basically of the same color.

Speaker 5 (01:35:09):
But that's been like that for fifty years.

Speaker 2 (01:35:12):
But this was the first time for me. Yeah, no,
hang on, I just want to say, I just want
to say by the second week, which was at the
end of the holiday. The first week was the first week,
and then we did other things and came back for
the last week. By then, I'd learned that they were
not dangerous, although they looked it. They didn't all look

(01:35:35):
at well some well, some did, but some white people
do too. I'll stop it. I adopted the approach that
this could have almost been New Orleans, where there was
a very big black community, massive black community. As you
walk through the streets of New Orleans, especially in the

(01:35:56):
French Quarter, and they're.

Speaker 5 (01:35:57):
Everywhere, I think it's only natural to feel out of
your comfort zone. I mean, it's not where we live,
is it.

Speaker 2 (01:36:02):
But you're making excuses again. No, No, I'm just you know,
I'm just And by the way, I think I think
mentioned with in the podcast was Christian, the store robber
who got chased by one of the staff but got
away and laughed his head off. He was white, as

(01:36:25):
I would have liked to see him get his butt
kicked good and hard. So from August twenty five, oh,
I just realized that something I didn't add, didn't say
was the article that Vincent sent and referred to was
the university student who took on, who took the Auckland

(01:36:46):
transport to court and won. And he says something like
what did he say? Not sure what it means in
terms of flow on effects that so many people in Auckland,
et cetera. Well, there should be more people who had
the courage and the ability to challenge like that, because
that was that was a victory, and I just would

(01:37:06):
like to see more of them late and I see
the problems created by the overreaching a proportional representation correction
of women in business, government officers and judicial positions. Who
wrote this, Hugh I have been labeled a misogynist. But
another example is that of HERA or hera Hra Heavy

(01:37:27):
Engineering Research Association, where I felt that we should belong
and participate to raise the standard in engineering education and
quality within New Zealand. I visited the website. Everything was
duplicated in MARII. The CEO was a woman. The money
could have been better spent visiting engineering companies and finding
what is actually required. I rest my case. I did

(01:37:50):
not go any further. The country has no hope. I
heard a famous saying in the US Chicago was made
by men with balls and women who believed in them.
I believe the same exists with a podcaster. I have
a second son who left the country due to his
treatment on vaccination, which he refused to have during COVID.
He is bright edits books in Brackets, the book editor

(01:38:14):
and has now written a book on sleep. He is
a conspiracy theorist, won't have anything to do with his
father and now living in Peru. The basic cause was
COVID led by a deerm. I also have a daughter
who is an acclaimed industrial designer, now a mother and
living in Toweranner, A very wise and talented young woman. Again,

(01:38:36):
she was made to study maridom or at University in Wellington,
where the woman walked into the lecture theater and pronounced,
I am here to correct your pronunciation of Terrea Mary.
Forced verification in education is a shocking abuse imposed on
our young people. This is supported by Elizabeth Rater, who
I had the pleasure of meeting at an ACT luncheon

(01:38:59):
two or three years ago. I hope that you have
read to this point and would love to talk further,
but accept it will never happen. Keep your podcast going
to every one of them, Hugh, good for you and
I appreciate it. And that's it for this week.

Speaker 5 (01:39:14):
So late in congratulations, three hundred.

Speaker 2 (01:39:17):
Podcasts we deserve congratulations too. It's a pairing job.

Speaker 5 (01:39:20):
I've only been watching you, that's all, watching you do
it yourself. But at least we had at least we
had a break, and the word break. It was part
of the holiday. Unfortunately.

Speaker 2 (01:39:33):
You want to tell the story, you tell it.

Speaker 3 (01:39:36):
Well.

Speaker 2 (01:39:37):
After that first week in London, we went on a
cruise with our friends from Sydney and that had its downside.
My friend's partner's mother, who lives in Budapest because that's
where they come from, was taken. She's ninety something or other,
was taken seriously ill and rushed to hospital and he

(01:39:58):
her order had notification that she should come home immediately
if you want to see her mother again. So she
jumped ship in Istanbul three days before the end of
the cruise, and god after the cruise we joined all
the kids, well all three of them, there were five
of us, and we'd rented a place on an island
called Zachonthos, yes which say is it sometimes called? Which

(01:40:22):
I always forget anyway, this stunning little villa. It was
brand new. We were only about the second people to
utilize it was parked up the hill from the beach,
and it had its own pool and was it was paradise,
wasn't it? It was sensational. We all when we got there.
We walked in the door and walked around and uttered,

(01:40:42):
how did we get so lucky? Because we had a
bummer the last time we were in London got raughted. Anyway,
on the second day, the afore mentioned son in law
came off his scootero when a car came around the
bend the wrong side and he came off the off
the bike and snapped his leg in half's tibia snapped

(01:41:06):
it in half, No frack, just completely snapped in. His
leg was slapping, his foot was slap clapping around and anyway,
the ambulance turned up. People stopped and helped, and the
ambulance turned up within fifteen minutes. And he made a
call to us back at the house while he was
being put into the ambulance, to our daughter, to my daughter,

(01:41:27):
who's he's what he is here? And I didn't hear
any of that, but they came bursting into the bedroom
where I was lying on the bed and said he's
done his leg.

Speaker 5 (01:41:41):
So then we had about seventy two hours of hell,
but mostly hell for my son in law. I suppose
The moral of the story is, don't do anything to
yourself when you're on a small Greek island or any
island anywhere. To be honest with you, it was a
big culture shock for all of us, most of all

(01:42:03):
for my son in law. But in those little places,
they don't care for you like we get cared for
in our hospitals. So you were expected to nurse your
patient yourself, do everything for them. The nurse that appeared
every four hours to give him some pain relief was
there for that only, and that was rare.

Speaker 2 (01:42:26):
The pain relief. You better tell a little bit about them.

Speaker 5 (01:42:29):
I think the thing that I will always remember is
my daughter being on the phone to me that evening.
She had gone down first, and she was hyperventilating and
crying on the phone to me at the sound of
my son in law screaming because he was having his
leg put back into place before they put a cast

(01:42:52):
on it, and any other part of the world they
would have given a general anesthetic apparently, but they were
just doing it manually, and he had no pain relief
at all.

Speaker 3 (01:43:03):
Yeh.

Speaker 5 (01:43:04):
So he is really shaken still by and you know,
upset by that and having little flashbacks.

Speaker 2 (01:43:11):
I heard that phone call and it was it was ugly,
it was horrendous, and he was there for two more
days and the care was almost non existent. And the
funny part is that in the bed in the room
that he was in, it was a four four bedroom

(01:43:32):
and opposite him there was a pretty good looking Greek
guy who would have been in his fifties, probably early fifties,
and he was a broadcaster.

Speaker 5 (01:43:43):
He was a TV host from Athens who had a yeah,
he had a holiday home there, and he said, you
know that this is how the Greek medical services work,
and it's just the way it is. I mean, the
good news was in the end, I have to shout
out to the aforementioned Christian that darling man spent two

(01:44:07):
days and two nights to two days and three nights
really on the phone to the insurance people. And eventually
it was thanks to Christian, that lovely man who got
Oscar and Madeline airlifted out by private plane to Athens
where he had.

Speaker 2 (01:44:27):
An operation and at a private hospital, was.

Speaker 5 (01:44:30):
Luckily back a week later, in time for us to
give them a hug before we got on the plane home.
But I think it's going to be a long recovery
for him. He's broken that leg I find out now
three times before, the last time he broke it was
two years ago in New Zealand. Three times later, three

(01:44:53):
times before the last.

Speaker 2 (01:44:54):
Time missing one. Yeah, okay, the last time was in
New Zealand. It was in Auckland, going down joboys right
on a scooter, a self propelled scooter on the footpath,
took his eyes off the footpath, hit a a tree
route and did a triple tumble or something.

Speaker 5 (01:45:13):
But well, our thoughts and prayers are with our family,
and luckily he was. He's safe and well now. But gosh,
we love those kids, don't we was.

Speaker 2 (01:45:25):
A few quite fond of them, and what and what
Karen has said about Christian was understated. He is not
a practicing lawyer, but he is qualified and he's had
he's had a few years experience. But he's not a
practicing lawyer. But it showed up in his dealings with
authorities and he had to battle his way through quite

(01:45:49):
a few situations verbally. All right, that's number three hundred,
missus producer, Thanks Layton. Pleased to be home, your release
back to the beach now, that just about takes us

(01:46:14):
out for podcasts number three hundred. But before we go
what you might call a late breaking story. Yes, you
can have a late breaking story on a podcast. You
will know that I have been interested in all sorts
of things over the years and continue to be so.
For instance, CBDC Central Bank Digital currencies. This is the

(01:46:35):
latest from this morning. It is from zero Hedge dystopian
rollout of digital IDs and cbdc's is happening. Whitney Webb
breaks down the coordinated global push for a new dystopian
system of control marrying digital ID with CBDCs. Well, that
was always going to be the case, but to see

(01:46:56):
it come out in writing, and you'll see more of
it if you're looking, and some of it if you're
not even looking. But this isn't a conspiracy. It's all
in their own documentation, and that's why you can be
so certain that it's going to happen unless something untoward
comes to our rescue. They're building a full spectrum digital

(01:47:16):
cage and its two locked doors, digital identity and central
bank digital currencies. You cannot highlighted. You cannot have one
without the other. The plan is to replace your government
issued ID with a digital ID. But it's not just
a card in your phone. It is fundamentally built on
your immutable biometrics, your fingerprints, the precise structure of your face,

(01:47:41):
the unique pattern of your iris. Now I saw more
of that on this trip than I ever had before,
with having picture done in various circumstances, and it bothered me.
But what do you do here? You are in a
position as we were, where you have to comply or

(01:48:02):
it all comes to an end. This biometric data is
the key. It is the hardly that ties your physical
body directly to your digital identity credential. Your very body
becomes your password. The reason this is so critical for
them is the financial system. Un and Bank for International
Settlements DOCKS overtly state documents, that is, overtly state that

(01:48:27):
digital ID and CBDCs are designed to be integrated. The
system cannot exist without this biometric digital ID. Why for
this new digital financial system to function, they must absolutely
know every single participant, your digital wallet will be tied

(01:48:48):
to your digital ID, which is mapped to your biometrics.
Total financial biological linkage. We see the prototypes being rolled
out right now. Sam Altman's world Coin lures people to
scan their irises for a unique identifier at a digital wallet.
This is the exact model. The UN's Building Blocks program

(01:49:11):
forces refugees to scan their iris at checkout to receive
food rations. The value is deducted from a wallet tied
to that biometric ID. Now they justify this total surveillance
under the guise of closing the identity gap, claiming the
world's poor need digital IDs to access essential services like
banking and healthcare. The reality. This short article concludes the reality.

(01:49:36):
This is the ultimate onboarding mechanism into a system of
programmable control, where your access to society and your own
money is permissioned and revocable based on your compliance. This
is the bedrock of the new global financial system. It
is not about convenience, it is about control. And it

(01:49:58):
concludes with enlarge print. A digital ID will hand them
the keys to your LUFH. A cashless society will lock
the door behind you. Our body is the new currency
and they're forcing you to hand over the keys. It's
been in the making for some time, and we spoke
with John Elcock. When was it last year or was

(01:50:22):
it earlier this year? Anyway, relatively recently, but a little
while back. At the same time, see how confusing it
can be. We must get him back on and discuss
this in the very near future. Anyway, with that delightful
thought in your mind, thank you for listening. If you'd
like to write to us, Laton at news Talks AB
dot co dot and said, and Carolyn at Newstalks AB

(01:50:43):
dot co dot en said again, thank you for listening,
and we'll be back with podcast three hundred and one
next week.

Speaker 1 (01:50:59):
Thank you for more from News Talks at b Listen
live on air or online, and keep our shows with
you wherever you go with our podcast on iHeartRadio

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Leighton Smith Podcast #300 - September 3rd 2025 - Oliver Hartwich

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.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}Leighton Smith Podcast #300 - September 3rd 2025 - Oliver Hartwich