Diary Of A CEO: w/ Professor Steve Keen (Transcript)

I just think Israel wanted to destroy Iran. They thought they could do it and they thought they had an American president who had helped them do it. And they drastically underestimated how prepared Iran was for that conflict.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Why would Israel want to destroy Iran? What’s the context there?

STEVE KEEN: This goes back to religious elements. The Zionist state had the right to that whole region. And there’s an expansionist element to Israel’s behavior for the last 40 years. And the major rival they saw themselves as having in that sense was Iran. They can invade Jordan, they could attack Lebanon, they could do all these things.

Of course, the ’67 War, they wiped out the invading Arabian armies in 6 days. They have this past history of being militarily dominant in the area, and they knew that Iran was too big for them to take on on their own. They thought they could get the Americans in there, and I think they drastically underestimated how prepared Iran was for this situation.

Iran’s Military Preparedness

STEVEN BARTLETT: When you say Iran were prepared for this situation and it somewhat surprised Israel and the US, what is that preparedness you’re speaking about?

STEVE KEEN: Well, for a start, the fact that Iran witnessed that there were decapitation attacks on other countries in the region going way, way back, not just the last 10 years, but the last 40 or 50 years.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Decapitation attacks?

STEVE KEEN: You take off the leader, you kill the leaders, and then with the leaders killed, the army’s in disarray and you can come in and invade and take over. So getting rid of Saddam Hussein, that sort of thing, you know, wipe out Saddam Hussein’s power base and then the whole system collapses. That was the Iraq story.

But the Iranians observed that and they have broken their military into 31 divisions. There are 31 provinces, like 31 states in that sense inside Iran. Their military is broken into those 31 units. They’ve got their own failsafe system running in the background. They’ve got their own resources, their own missiles, production systems, all that sort of stuff. So you’ve got to take out the whole 31 and then they’d have that, sub-areas. So the only way you can beat the country is by literally bombing it back to the Stone Age.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Which appears to be what they’ve been trying to do.

STEVE KEEN: Trying to do. But the thing is, it’s a huge country. Look at the scale of Iran. The maps always distort how large. That is larger. That’s more than half the size of Western Europe. It’s got a population of 90 million, about 1/3 or 1/4 of the population of Europe, far more than Iraq.

STEVEN BARTLETT: I mean, it looks like it’s double the size of the UK.

STEVE KEEN: Or more. Or more than double. You know one thing about the Mercator projection?

STEVEN BARTLETT: No, what’s that?

STEVE KEEN: It’s that it makes the northern hemispheres twice as large as the southern. And Iran’s in the northern hemisphere, but not as far north as England. So the distortion gets amplified the further north you go. So it’s bigger than France and Germany and Italy and Spain and possibly Poland in terms of area. And then if you even see, just looking on the map itself, you can see the corrugations there.

STEVEN BARTLETT: What’s the corrugation?

STEVE KEEN: What’s representing mountains.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Okay, yeah.

STEVE KEEN: There’s more mountains inside there. It’s a horrendous terrain to fight a war on.

Trump’s Pump and Dump Scheme?

STEVE KEEN: I think what Trump is doing at the moment is a pump and dump scheme. He’s trying to drive up the oil price, tell friends beforehand that he’s about to make an announcement which will cause the price to fall. And he’s just oscillating this way up and down and exploiting it for his friends and for his own wealth in the process.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Do you actually think that’s the case?

STEVE KEEN: Yeah, I do.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Because this must be hard to —

STEVE KEEN: How else can you make sense of this stuff?

STEVEN BARTLETT: This must be hurting his friends economically because the stock market’s going to take a dip if he’s not careful. And his friends are all shareholders in different big companies. So, and also when we think about energy —

STEVE KEEN: But if you know, like one of Keynes’ great lines was that there’s no point in buying a stock which you think is going to increase in value over time if you think it’s going to slump in the immediate future. So he’s making an announcement which causes oil markets to panic. So the price goes up. We’ve given him control of the most powerful country on the planet. He knows if he makes an announcement, it moves markets. He has no compunction whatsoever in exploiting that to cause rises and falls in prices and try to exploit them himself and with his friends.

STEVEN BARTLETT: I did see that. I’ve got the data here on the floor showing those graphs. I generally looked at that and thought, yeah, maybe, but it’s also conceivable that Trump is quite a predictable character and he tweets at the same time every day. And it’s also, I think me and you both know that before the markets open on a Monday morning, he’s going to want to say something really positive. He has a track record of doing that.

So is it conceivable that they knew he was flying because it was tracked that he was going to be on this plane journey? There’s going to be a press gaggle. We know he’s going to give an interview. I actually think that was quite predictable. If I was a betting man, I would’ve gone Sunday night, Monday morning, I would’ve put a bet on oil prices coming down, the stock market going up.

STEVE KEEN: Yeah, and like for example, one of the things he said most recently, he talked about getting a present from Iran. And then he finally let slip what the present was, and it was letting 8 ships through the Strait of Hormuz.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Oh, I got you.

STEVE KEEN: Those 8 ships were not American, they were other allies. I think what he’s thinking is that’s going to mean the oil market gets calmed down. That means the price is going to fall so I can then do another pump and dump.

The Strait of Hormuz: Why It Matters

STEVEN BARTLETT: Let’s explain the Strait of Hormuz.

STEVE KEEN: Oh God.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Yeah, okay. As if we had to explain it for 16-year-olds, because there’s been lots of coverage on it and I think some people have kind of skipped past the importance of the region. What is the Strait of Hormuz and why does it matter?

STEVE KEEN: Well, it’s the choke point in the Persian Gulf. To get through, you’ve got like 21 kilometers. That’s an incredibly narrow gap for ships to pass through. And that means that all the countries that pump not just oil, but fertilizer, helium, all these critical elements for the production system, all have to pass through this point. And obviously that’s well within reach of any weapons from Iran. So they can say you do or do not pass depending on whether we approve or don’t approve of your country’s attitude towards our country.

STEVEN BARTLETT: You said fertilizer?

STEVE KEEN: Yeah.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Oil and helium?

STEVE KEEN: Yeah, helium.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Where are they coming from?

STEVE KEEN: They’re mainly coming from the Saudi Arabian side. Saudi Arabia is the main source of gases and oils which are refined. And as byproducts, we get sulfur dioxide, and we get helium.

STEVEN BARTLETT: This is the helium?

STEVE KEEN: Okay. That’s, you know, a couple of kilos of helium. But helium, it’s an element which there’s no substitute. So helium is inert.

STEVEN BARTLETT: What does that mean?

STEVE KEEN: It means it doesn’t interact with other chemicals. You want to give it a try? I’ve never done it.

STEVEN BARTLETT: I don’t think there’s any in here.

The Helium Crisis and Its Impact on Semiconductors

STEVE KEEN: Oh, what a pity. Okay, I would’ve given it a try. You got any real helium? Oh, bloody hell, helium balloon. Does it change your voice? I don’t know. Has my voice changed? A bit. I’ll give my voice a try. Okay. Okay. I’ve never done this before. I’ve heard it at parties. Okay. Now, I think my voice has changed somewhat from— The fact you can do it. Oh, my God. —then there’s a riot.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Okay, where is helium coming from?

STEVE KEEN: It’s coming from a gas field. So about 30% of the world’s helium comes from a gas field which spans both Saudi Arabia and Iran. If you don’t trap helium physically somehow, it goes to outer space. That’s the ultimate destination of the stuff. So it’s trapped in the same things that trap oil. And then when you drill for oil, you also get helium coming out. And then helium is absolutely critical for the semiconductor industry. It didn’t matter 100 years ago. And semiconductors are important for what?

STEVEN BARTLETT: Everything.

STEVE KEEN: I mean, you take the semiconductors out of that, you’ve got a brick, okay? The processors, the CPUs, the memory chips, they’re all made — helium is an essential element to make them.

STEVEN BARTLETT: For our iPhones, our tablets, our PCs?

STEVE KEEN: Everything, everything electronic. If you need semiconductors, you need helium. So if you cut off 30% of the world’s helium supply, you cut off the capacity to produce 30% of the world’s electronics. Semiconductors. And Iran have blocked that gap. And that means that we’ve suddenly lost 30% of the world’s helium.

STEVEN BARTLETT: I’ve got a quote from March 2026 from leading helium expert Phil Kornblutch. He said, “We’re looking at a minimum 2 to 3 months shutdown of helium production with up to 6 months before supply gets back to normal.” And he explained you can’t stockpile helium because it leaks through containers. So once supply is cut off, semiconductor production will stop entirely. South Korea gets 65% of its helium from Qatar in that region and makes two-thirds of the world’s memory chips. Their government has launched an emergency investigation into the shortage. Nobody’s talking about this.

STEVE KEEN: I know, and this is one reason that it’s quite terrifying about the scale of what we’re going through, because people are just thinking it’s going to be oil’s going to be more expensive. That’s the sort of mindset we have. But in fact, critical elements of the production system are being terminated by this conflict. You can’t produce chips anymore and you can’t — well, you’ve got — hang on, you can’t produce these chips either because the fertilizer’s disappearing.

The Fertilizer Crisis and the Threat of Global Famine

STEVEN BARTLETT: So you’re holding a potato in your hand. Yeah. How are potato chips going to be impacted by the war?

STEVE KEEN: Because of fertilizer. If we don’t have the fertilizer, we can’t grow the potatoes. And it’s not just potatoes, it’s a whole range of crops. We eat food, okay? We eat this green stuff. It actually starts as brown stuff because the fertilizer is an essential part of growing all the food we eat.

And the fertilizer is produced by a process called the Haber-Bosch process, which takes petroleum and nitrogen and fixes them in such a way that you can put this on the field and your plants will grow courtesy of the fertilizer. If we didn’t have fertilizer at all, guess how many billion people the planet could actually support? I don’t know. Between 1 and 2. And fertilizer comes from this region? Again, 20 to 30% of our fertilizer comes through that region.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Through the Strait of Hormuz.

STEVE KEEN: Through the Strait of Hormuz. Where’s it coming from? It’s coming again from the same gas field that’s producing the helium, produces a side effect of fertilizer. And I’m not a chemist, okay? So I can get these things wrong, but you need sulfuric acid as well as part of these production processes. 20% of the world’s fertilizer, helium, sulfuric acid all pass through that strait.

And if you take them away, then you can’t make microchips, which is what Korea’s suffering from. You can’t make fertilizer, which everybody will suffer from. If we lost 20% of the world’s fertilizer, we’d lose roughly 20% of the world’s food and it’d cause a global famine. We’ve never had this experience before. We’ve had localized famines. Countries like India have had famines and parts of Africa and so on. But if this is not available, the globe has a famine.

STEVEN BARTLETT: And what’s the last tanker you’ve got down there?

STEVE KEEN: There’s one more on the floor. Oh my God, okay. Hey, that’s pretty good. It was accidental, but that’s petroleum, okay? A petroleum tank, obviously empty, 20 liters. So that’s oil? That’s oil. Oil, okay. And so that’s what we’re losing right now. And people are focusing upon the price of this, but the really important point — and I can bring up one of my own charts here — is the role of energy in production. Because if we don’t have energy, we can’t produce goods and services. And the link is incredibly tight. This is looking at change in energy and change in gross world products over the last 40 years.

STEVEN BARTLETT: I’ll throw this graph on the screen for people that are watching.

STEVE KEEN: So what you’ve got here is the annual percentage change in gross world product and the annual percentage change in gross energy consumption. And they’re virtually lockstep and they’re the same magnitude.

STEVEN BARTLETT: So when energy goes up, GDP goes up.

STEVE KEEN: And when energy goes down, GDP goes down. Now we’re losing 20% of the world’s liquefied natural gas, a substantial proportion of its oil as well. We could see a 5 or 10% fall in energy, we will certainly see a 5 or 10% fall in global gross world product.

The Geography of Oil and the Fragility of Global Supply

STEVEN BARTLETT: So explain that to me. So where is the oil in this region?

STEVE KEEN: Oh, it’s everywhere. I mean, this is one of the accidents of history that the oil is — a large part is concentrated here and a large part over here and a bit in Russia.

STEVEN BARTLETT: So over here, for people that can’t see, you are pointing at Iran, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, and then there’s a lot in the United States and there’s a lot in Russia.

STEVE KEEN: You’ve got some in Russia as well. And there was a small amount — the North Sea had a substantial amount of oil as well at one stage.

STEVEN BARTLETT: And the type of oil in this region I hear is quite important.

STEVE KEEN: It’s very — I mean, oil, there’s no such thing as a homogenous product. What does homogenous mean? Homogenous means everything is the same everywhere. If you don’t get it here, you can substitute from something over here. That’s a myth that economists actually unfortunately believe. They basically could persuade people to think that everything is homogenous.

In fact, oil from Venezuela is almost like tar. Oil from here flows like water comparatively. You need different processing systems to extract that oil than you need over here. If we lose this, we can’t replace it with something from over here. So once that goes, then the production system of the planet is damaged.

STEVEN BARTLETT: This has been the shocking thing for me as a citizen — the fact that a war with one country could decapitate what, 20 to 30% of global production? Of global production of oil. Yeah. And food. That’s a vulnerability if I’ve ever heard one.

STEVE KEEN: I know. And this is one reason I’m a critic of mainstream economics — they trivialize all this stuff. They don’t teach their students how critical this is. So most people are like you, even people who’ve done a PhD in economics, even worse in that sense than other people. They don’t understand how critical and how fragile our production systems are. So people can talk about a war in Iraq and think, “Oh, that’s a war in Iran and that’s going to cut off our oil supply.” No, it’s going to cut off your food supply.

In 3 Months, We’ll Enter a Famine

STEVEN BARTLETT: And for the average person listening now, what will they start to experience if this war doesn’t immediately end?

STEVE KEEN: 2 or 3 months, India’s going to run out of fertilizer. And so there’ll be a famine in India. Food production on the planet could fall 10, 25%. And therefore there simply won’t be enough food for everyone on the planet. And then it’s a question of who’s going to starve.

Now you’d think the wealthy countries are going to be safe. They’ve lucked — for Australia, my old home country, has about 30 days oil supply. When it runs out, it can’t get food from the farm to the city anymore. So Australia is incredibly vulnerable. We’re all far more vulnerable than we realize. And this war is threatening everybody on the planet.

The Human Cost of the Cost of Living Crisis

STEVEN BARTLETT: I got in an Uber yesterday and I was with a wonderful guy who was actually — weirdly, I sat into the Uber at 2:00 AM and I looked up on the screen and he was listening to The Diary of a CEO. And then he clocked me in the back of the car. So we had a great chat. And he was saying to me, “Listen, this isn’t actually my main job, it’s my third job. I do this because of the cost of living.” And it really stayed with me.

STEVE KEEN: He’s doing 3 jobs to stay alive.

STEVEN BARTLETT: 3 jobs. And he picked me up at 2:00 AM. He’s got a family.

STEVE KEEN: And he’s working his butt off to keep the family alive.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Yeah. And I’m going to say something which I probably don’t say a lot, which came to mind, which is in the position I’m in now, I think it was a real reminder of my own personal privilege that I think is really important for someone like me that doesn’t have an interview show, because you’ve got to be intellectually honest with yourself, or just honest with yourself generally, that as someone in my position who has been fortunate enough to be able to make significant money, I can understand from having that conversation how detached you are.

STEVE KEEN: I am. From the world around you.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Yes. And that’s an incredible thing to see.

STEVE KEEN: You’re a very unique soul because you’ve — I know I’ve read a bit of your history of course, and you’ve had that terrible period where you were unemployed and what the hell do I do?

STEVEN BARTLETT: I was shoplifting food and stuff and—

STEVE KEEN: You were ambitious, but you were — okay. If you don’t experience poverty, you don’t know what it’s like.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Yeah. But even if you have, you can forget it. You can forget it.

STEVE KEEN: But you haven’t yet.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Well, this is why it’s so important for me to have those conversations because him saying “I’m working 3 jobs” and picking me up at 2:00 AM in his Uber and him telling me he’s doing that because of cost of living because he needs to pay the bills — immediately made me think of ahead of this conversation today, like, oh my God, if the prices go up 20% for people.

STEVE KEEN: He’s out. He can’t work 24 hours a day.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Can’t work any more hours than there are in the day. And it was just one of those moments where you go, “F*in’ hell, Steve.” Like, man, you need to stay close to the plight of people that are on the breadline.

STEVE KEEN: The breadline, yeah. And so many people are these days. So many people are. In advanced countries, not just third world countries, but certainly in America and the UK, there are huge numbers of people who are basically living from hand to mouth at the current system. So if we have a breakdown, they can’t afford it. In that situation, you can no longer use money as your way of deciding whether you can eat food or not.

Do Wars Make Inequality Worse?

STEVEN BARTLETT: I wonder if politicians know this, because part of the reason I say this is because Trump is a very wealthy man, multi-billionaire reportedly. And if the prices go up 20% at the pump?

STEVE KEEN: He makes profit. I mean, when he said — he said in favor of the rising oil price, “We’ll make a lot of money out of it.” There’s immediate association — rising price of something that I’m indirectly selling, that’s good. He doesn’t say, what about people buying it? The people who buy it can no longer afford it.

STEVEN BARTLETT: You’ve got some food there on the table which shows how these conflicts and the pressure they put on some of these scarce resources can impact our ability to go and buy food. I think you’ve got 2 bowls of potatoes.

STEVE KEEN: Well, let’s actually make it fairer right now. Let’s get the actual distribution correct initially. So you are talking about someone who in your situation, you’ve got that, Logan Uber’s got this, and now you’ve taken away the oil price. That’s going to make Trump better off, but he’s down to the stage where he’s not too far from that happening. And that’s what we’ve pushed ourselves into with this war.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Do wars typically make inequality worse?

The Causes of War and Inequality

STEVE KEEN: Very good question. I think wars are created when inequality is bad. If you go back to the Great Depression and see what caused World War II, it was largely the collapse of the German economy when they repaid their debt, their private debt to America or private government debt to America. That led to the rise of Hitler. Everybody thinks Hitler rose because of the Weimar inflation. That’s what people normally think.

In fact, when Hitler came to power in Germany, the rate of inflation was -10%. It was deflation, prices were falling. Unemployment rose from very low to 25% of the population. In that situation, people supported Hitler. He revived the economy. I’m happy to talk about how he did that later.

But inequality leads to people being willing to elect demagogues who say, “We can save you.” And then you get war coming out of it. What happened after World War II is, politicians realized that people had been through the Great Depression, which was horrific, and they’d been through World War II, which was horrific. And in that period, people in America were talking about either a fascist world or a communist world. So the Americans realized they had to improve the living standards of the average American substantially to get away from that.

And if you look at the 1950s and ’60s, that’s what is called the golden age of capitalism. Because at that stage you could be a single male supporting a wife and 4 kids and have a comfortable lifestyle at the time. That was where we started from. So the war itself led to a focus upon equality, a focus upon fairness and getting as much as you can to the poorest in society. And then we’ve forgotten that over the last 80 years. And we’ve now got back to massive inequality once more.

So I think inequality causes wars. Wars in the aftermath make people focus on equality, not to allow that horror to happen once more. And then we forget and do the whole damn thing again.

Oil Reserves and Geopolitical Motivations

STEVEN BARTLETT: One of the surprising things I learned the other day was that the country that is estimated to have the biggest reserve of oil is Venezuela. Yep. The third country on this list that is estimated to have the biggest reserve of oil is Iran. Yeah. Now, it doesn’t take a genius.

STEVE KEEN: Funnily enough, two countries have added. Yeah. The second country being America. Well, it says Saudi Arabia. Saudi Arabia. Well, that’s already an American vassal.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Yeah, that’s already basically— they’re basically partners with America already. And funnily enough, the fourth one is Canada. And if you’re listening a lot to Trump’s rhetoric, he said he was going to take Canada and make it the 51st state or something.

It just doesn’t feel to me to be a coincidence that the countries that the US are invading and decapitating their leaders are the countries that have the biggest oil supplies. And Trump has already said, immediately after taking out Maduro in Venezuela, pulling him out of his bed with his wife and flying him back to the US, he already said that the oil’s on the way back to America. One might assume that much of the motivation here with Iran is when they were in negotiations with them, maybe they weren’t playing ball with the oil. Maybe they were threatening something with the oil and maybe it’s such an economic risk.

STEVE KEEN: Well, maybe most of Trump’s friends, if he has them, are oil executives and they can see the benefit for them in controlling global oil. And the one part they can’t control is Iran.

STEVEN BARTLETT: But I mean, it’s backfired pretty horrifically.

STEVE KEEN: I think one of the great sayings in humanity is it looked like a good idea at the time, then you do it. And you realize you underestimated your opponent. You don’t realize how difficult it is. Like you mentioned, talking about how being wealthy can make you dissociate from the problems that ordinary people have. It can also make you dissociate from reality in general. You don’t realize how difficult it is to do something you want to have done.

So all these oil executives and people who Trump socializes with could have thought, take out Iran, America dominates the global oil thing, we’re all going to be rich. Okay, but they don’t realize that Iran’s been aware of this possibility for 40 years and they’re prepared. They’re far better prepared than the Americans and the Israelis thought.

The Five Scenarios: What Happens Next

STEVEN BARTLETT: So you’ve got 5 scenarios laid out on these cards in front of you here that you think could happen next. I’m going to ask you to explain to me what the 5 scenarios are and then tell me which one you think is most likely to occur.

STEVE KEEN: So scenario 1, which is the one that I think Trump— I think Israel wants this one. Iran is destroyed. Okay. If that happens, we’re all gone. Because to destroy Iran, you’re going to have to use nuclear weapons. Okay? You can’t destroy it without obliterating it as nuclear weapons can do. And that’s the scariest. I don’t think it’s going to happen. My main hope here is that Iran realizes that possibility and they’ve got a way to neutralize not America’s nuclear weapons, but Israel’s.

STEVEN BARTLETT: You think it’s a possibility?

STEVE KEEN: It’s a possibility. And it’s what scares the s* out of me because if this happens, then we’re all dead. Obviously a nuclear bomb doesn’t just blow up an individual target, everything within reach gets exploded into the atmosphere. That’s what led people to realize that you couldn’t have a nuclear war back in the days when we had mutually assured destruction as the policy. If you attack a country, then you will also die.

STEVEN BARTLETT: But can’t they use narrow nuclear weapons? Is that not a thing? Well— Smaller nuclear weapons?

STEVE KEEN: Well, again, if the country is smaller, you’re talking about destroying Europe. The weapons you’d need to make sure you’ve got every last potential element of Iran neutralized. You’re talking about bombing something which is virtually the size of Western Europe. The amount of weapons you’ve got to drop to do that. And you’ve got to— if you don’t get it right, then they’re going to come at you with what they’ve got left.

STEVEN BARTLETT: The world has dropped nuclear weapons before and people survived. Other neighboring countries survived.

STEVE KEEN: Only twice and only small weapons. The weapons we’re talking about in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, they’re about equivalent to 20,000 tons of TNT. We’re now talking weapons that are 20 million tons of TNT, the biggest nuclear weapons. And if you wanted to hit a country the size of Iran and know you’ve neutralized it so you destroy the whole thing, you are talking hundreds of those weapons.

STEVEN BARTLETT: If you had to give a percentage probability of that outcome occurring, would it be less than 1%?

STEVE KEEN: If we didn’t have a madman in Washington, yes, it’d be less than 1%. If we didn’t have madmen in Israel, less than 1%. I think probably 5%.

STEVEN BARTLETT: 5% probability that— That’s a possibility.

STEVE KEEN: I mean, again, this is trying to make sense of the senseless. Okay. But I’d put it at about less than 10%, but still scary. As a possibility? If we end up there, we’re all gone.

STEVEN BARTLETT: I mean, I know very little about all these things, so that’s the disclaimer. I’d say that I don’t think Israel would intentionally wipe out the rest of the world or cause a nuclear winter because that would obviously impact them as well. But I am quite scared of precedent setting. And what I mean by that is if we establish it being okay to drop nuclear weapons on people you don’t like, the sort of domino effect of that for people in Ukraine and other parts of the world where there’s conflict might then lead to mutually assured destruction.

STEVE KEEN: Yeah, it’s the last possibility you want to have happen. The fact that it’s even possible to contemplate it is a terrifying prospect. Let us hope. Yeah.

Scenario 2: Iran Destroys Gulf Power Infrastructure

STEVE KEEN: So scenario 2 is Iran destroys the Gulf power infrastructure. I think that’s highly likely. Iran destroys Gulf power infrastructure.

STEVEN BARTLETT: What does that mean?

STEVE KEEN: What it means is that Iran and all the Gulf states have got their own power systems, mainly based on burning oil for obvious reasons. If you take out their power structure systems, then those countries become uninhabitable.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Is that what’s happening already? Because I know Iran have attacked a few sort of power facilities in the region.

STEVE KEEN: There’ve been a couple, well, there was one attack on Saudi Arabian power systems and that took out two of the 14 units that are critical for creating liquefied natural gas. And apparently it’ll take 5 years to rebuild them. And there are only 5 companies on the planet that can actually do that rebuilding. One quarter of the world’s liquefied natural gas comes through the Strait of Hormuz. One tenth of that has been destroyed. It’s like 2.5% of the world’s energy supply is gone for the next 5 years until those are rebuilt. If Iran destroys the Gulf power infrastructure, then Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Dubai, they all become uninhabitable. And we’re seeing that happen in parts.

STEVEN BARTLETT: I mean, it sounds like these attacks have slowed down a little bit, but it was interesting that Iran’s strategy was to attack their neighboring sort of partners and specifically targeting a lot of their energy infrastructure. Is that in part to apply pressure? If I attack Dubai, the leaders of Dubai are going to call Trump and say, listen, cut this out.

STEVE KEEN: Oh yeah. I mean, the pressure coming back from the Arabian states on America, I imagine is quite immense right now saying, “Don’t do it.” It’s quite possible Israel could do it, like attack Iran and then Iran does a retribution attack. Trump, if you would’ve seen his tweet this morning, I think he’s put it off to April 6th before he says he starts attacking power infrastructure. If he attacks power infrastructure in Iran, Iran has said, “We will attack power infrastructure in the Gulf states.” So we’ve got till, what, 8 days. I think he’s bluffing. I hope he’s bluffing. But if he does do the attack, then Iran will respond by destroying either an equivalent component of the Gulf states or the whole infrastructure.

STEVEN BARTLETT: I don’t think people quite realize how costly it is for regions like Dubai when Iran attacked them. I was looking at some of the data. And according to current estimates and a historical risk assessment by Dubai officials, they lose a million per minute, which is 60 million per hour or 1.4 billion a day when there’s an unplanned emergency shutdown just of their airport.

STEVE KEEN: Their airports, let alone their power systems.

STEVEN BARTLETT: As we probably saw on the news, Iran had flown a couple of drones into Dubai’s airport, which meant that it had to shut down. If they’re losing a billion a day because that airport is closed, I think it’s the biggest airport in the world. It is economic pressure for Dubai, which will then trickle down to Trump and sort of force his hand. So they’ve got a clear incentive to cause chaos.

STEVE KEEN: Yeah. And that’s partly what Iran is saying. It’s like a game of bluff. You don’t want to do this bluff. If that bluff happens, then the Saudi Arabian Peninsula becomes uninhabitable. And therefore all the— I mean, if people are forced out of there, and most of the residents in those countries are not Saudis, they’re third world workers from India and Pakistan and the Philippines and so on. They’re being paid lousy wages to work on all these systems. If they leave because the power’s not there to support them anymore, if they try to leave, then we lose the entire energy contribution that region makes to the global economy.

STEVEN BARTLETT: And we’re screwed. And that figure I cited includes not just lost airport revenue, but then the immediate impact on airlines’ cargo logistics and the missed opportunity cost of thousands and thousands of high-value business travelers attending the region. Dubai’s GDP is roughly 30% dependent on the aviation and tourism sectors. So when the airport closes, it impacts tourism, hospitality, real estate investing, global supply chains, and everything.

So it’s quite remarkable, specifically with Dubai, because Dubai— I think Dubai’s a lovely place. I’ve been multiple times. I love going there, but it felt really safe. And so a lot of people—

STEVE KEEN: No, it’s not safe.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Yeah. It’s not safe. Yeah. I mean, a lot of people had chosen to uproot their lives and move there and you’d almost kind of forgotten you were in the Middle East to some degree. But I think this is going to be a pretty traumatic reminder for a lot of people there. How fragile.

STEVE KEEN: How fragile this area is. And that’s the lesson we’re learning. It’s the fragility of the society we take for granted.

STEVEN BARTLETT: So that was scenario number 2.

The Samson Doctrine and Nuclear Threat

STEVE KEEN: Okay, scenario 3. That’s the one that really scares me because that is the Samson Doctrine. You know the story of Samson? No. Okay, Samson is an enormously strong individual who’s strong because of his hair. And then he gets conned. This is an ancient story from the Bible. And the woman who’s conned him shaves his hair so he’s weakened. And then they put him in a temple where he’s standing between two pillars and his hair is gone, he’s bald, he can’t do a thing. They forget the fact that his hair’s starting to grow. His hair gets to the stage where he’s now got his strength back. He pushes those pillars and the whole thing collapses and everybody dies.

That’s the Samson Doctrine, and that involves Israel’s nuclear weapons. If they realize that they are going to lose this war and it becomes existential for them, then one of the things they have claimed that they do is unleash destruction on the rest of the world, like Samson pushing the towers and the whole thing comes collapsing down.

Iran, Israel, and the Nuclear Balance

STEVEN BARTLETT: This is, I mean, going back to the situation with Iran and Israel, one of the things I was thinking a lot about from some commentary that I’d seen is Israel really have a motive to get rid of Iran because Iran have repeatedly threatened Israel?

STEVE KEEN: It’s also because, I mean, Israel’s trying to get rid of the Palestinians. And in that sense, Iran has been probably the major bulwark supporting the Palestinians to say, let the Palestinians survive, let the Palestinian people continue existing. And the Israelis have been pushing and pushing and pushing the Palestinians out. You know, it’s a hornet’s nest. We’ve provoked a hornet’s nest. Iran is responding right now, I think, in a very judicious way. But if the Israelis realize they’re facing an existential defeat, that scenario, it would again mean civilization potentially gets destroyed.

STEVEN BARTLETT: And just looking at some of the things that Iran have said about Israel. Yeah. Historically, the Supreme Leader of Iran stated in 2015, that Israel would not see the next 25 years. Other officials said things like, the end is near. And in March 2026, Iran’s tone shifted from ideological to purely retaliatory, with the Speaker of the Iranian Parliament, Mohammad, stating that Iran has officially declared that it considers all Israel energy, water, and IT infrastructure legitimate targets for irreversible destruction. With zero restraint.

If we think about this from a psychology perspective, you’ve got two neighbors. They’re both either implying implicitly or explicitly that they want to wipe the other one out. Yeah. Trump is sort of this third party in the arrangement who’s not in the region, so he might be a little bit safer. Those two parties that are against each other, one of them has nuclear weapons and the other appears to be trying to make one. The neighbor that is Israel presumably cannot let that happen. Because if it gets to a point where they both have nuclear weapons and they both want to wipe each other out, I think—

STEVE KEEN: No, I actually think that the old days of mutually assured destruction were a more stable time than what we’re in now. Because if you realize that if you attack, you also die, you don’t attack.

STEVEN BARTLETT: But what if you think of death as being a better thing than life?

STEVE KEEN: You have to have a society continuing after you die. If you’re going to be a martyr, there has to be people who are going to mourn your death. If you believe being a martyr means everybody else also dies, you don’t do it.

STEVEN BARTLETT: So do you think if Iran had nuclear weapons, it would be a safer world?

STEVE KEEN: I think it’d be safer because it would tell the Israelis, stop attacking your neighbors.

Sole Authority and the Nuclear Football

STEVEN BARTLETT: I sat with a few nuclear experts, and one of the things that was shocking that I learned is if the United States wanted to launch a nuclear weapon today, yeah, it is one person’s decision. I heard that.

STEVE KEEN: And that’s why Trump can actually just make that decision.

STEVEN BARTLETT: He can make the decision on his own. He doesn’t need to consult Congress or anybody else. He has someone who walks around with a briefcase that has the nuclear codes in at any moment. Yeah. And when I think about the same in this region, actually you don’t need a whole state to decide that they don’t like their neighbor. All you need is one supreme leader or Netanyahu to say, do you know what? I’m near the end of my life. “And these people have really pissed me off.” Yeah, that’s right.

STEVE KEEN: And that’s, I mean, I thought there was at least some control. I saw that segment. With Annie Jacobson, yeah. I thought there was at least some control. He had to consult someone. That if, well, they had to have circumstances would justify not consulting someone. If he’s got that right, then it comes down to what’s the behavior of the person who carries the nuclear football? Does he let Trump get hold of it?

And like there was another incident way, way back, I think in the ’70s or ’80s, that the Russian early warning system reported that there was a nuclear attack on the way to Russia. And there was one submarine commander, or one element of a submarine command system, and they had to have 3 people in the submarine who agreed to launch an attack. And this particular person refused. Now if that hadn’t happened, if he’d agreed with the other 2, there would’ve been a nuclear war at that stage. And it wasn’t real, it was a false alarm from the system. So even the Russian submarine had 3 people that had to make that decision. So we didn’t have a nuclear war. Now we’ve got one maniac in this White House who could do it.

STEVEN BARTLETT: I’ll play Annie Jacobson’s clip now where she talks about the idea of sole authority, which I think is an important thing for people to understand because when we think about who we’re electing to lead our nuclear capable countries, you have to think about who you want to give sole authority.

VIDEO CLIP BEGINS:

ANNIE JACOBSON: The United States president has sole presidential authority to launch a nuclear war. What does that mean? It’s exactly like it sounds. What’s so interesting is a lot of this stuff, this nomenclature that gets thrown at you, if you just break it down, it’s sole, solo, presidential— he’s the POTUS— authority. He doesn’t have to ask anyone for permission. Not the SecDef, not the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, not the Congress.

I love the worried look on your face in this moment because it is once you know that, you say, well, first you might Google, is it really true? And you will get, for example, on Reddit, like, that’s not really true. You’ll get like hundreds of thousands of people coming in with their opinions about how that’s not really true. Well, it is really true. It’s absolutely true. And in fact, during the former President Trump administration, Congress became so sort of— and I want to say motivated or alarmed by this issue, meaning they were being asked questions by the powers that be. Is this actually true that they released a report stating specifically, and I quote it in the book, yes, it is true. As Commander-in-Chief, the president has this sole authority. He doesn’t need to ask anyone.

VIDEO CLIP ENDS:

Scenario 4: Iran Disabling Israel’s Nuclear Weapons

STEVEN BARTLETT: So what is scenario 4 in your envelopes there?

STEVE KEEN: Iran disables Israel’s nukes. Nobody can know, but I do believe that Iran has not developed nuclear weapons.

STEVEN BARTLETT: So you’re hoping Iran disables Israel’s nuclear weapons? I am.

STEVE KEEN: I hope that happens because that takes out the nuclear option. Okay. We won’t see nuclear war as a result of this if the only nuclear weapons that we know exist in the Middle East are destroyed.

STEVEN BARTLETT: But if Iran starts disabling Israel’s nukes and attacking Israel that effectively, there’s going to be an even bigger problem.

STEVE KEEN: Well, not if we’re talking conventional weapons. If it’s conventional weapons and ground troops, then you don’t end up with a nuclear winter and the death of everybody on the planet.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Wait, so you’re saying you hope Iran invades Israel and takes out their nuclear weapons?

STEVE KEEN: Oh, that’s not necessarily invasion. It could be the missiles they’ve got left. Again, we don’t know how capable their missiles are. The level of planning that Iran has done in this war, I had no idea of how much of the fact they had those 31 regions, for example, until the war began. My specialty is economics, not global military politics. But once I learned that, I thought they have really thought this through. They have war-gamed what happens if they get attacked by America and they’ve war-gamed it comprehensively. Now I hope they’ve also war-gamed if we start defeating Israel and Israel realizes they’re going to be wiped out, then the possibility for the Samson Doctrine comes in. We have to disable that before it happens.

STEVEN BARTLETT: How could they possibly, they don’t have a functioning military left in any sort of typical sense.

STEVE KEEN: In Iran?

STEVEN BARTLETT: They don’t have ships left, they don’t have planes left.

STEVE KEEN: They don’t have ships, they don’t have planes, but they have got missiles. And we don’t know how many missiles they’ve got. We don’t know where the missiles are. Certainly the Americans would have some intelligence. I think the word’s got to be used with inverted commas these days, but some intelligence over where they are located in Iran.

But if you listen to the Iranians talking about it, they say they’ve got hundreds of these facilities buried hundreds of meters below the ground. If the weapons they’ve developed, the advanced rocketry they’ve developed, they can evade Israel’s Iron Dome, maybe they can also get into and destroy Israel’s relaunch capabilities. And if that happens, I think that would be the best possible outcome. Because we have a rogue state in the Middle East which has nuclear weapons, which will neither admit that it has nor sign the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. They won’t sign that treaty. We should never have allowed that to happen. And if Iran gets rid of them, I think the world’s a safer place.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Israel are just going to make more nuclear weapons. They have the resources.

STEVE KEEN: You need a hell of a lot of technology and a hell of a lot of intelligent people to do that. They have— You’ve already lost the war.

STEVEN BARTLETT: How could Israel lose the war?

STEVE KEEN: You’ve got a population of 90 million in Iran and a population of less than 10 million in Israel.

STEVEN BARTLETT: But they’ve got, it’s a sort of technological gulf.

STEVE KEEN: It’s not as big as we thought it was. We’re only realizing now the level of technology that Iran has. I mean, the things which Iran are doing in this war so far have surprised everybody who hasn’t got the background of intelligence to tell them what’s going on. It’s an educated, sophisticated culture, far more so than the caricature we’ve got from the West has been about it in the past.

STEVEN BARTLETT: So they don’t have nearly the same level of resources and technology and I would say maybe sort of sophisticated, yeah, advanced systems from a war perspective that Israel do.

STEVE KEEN: We think, we don’t know, we’re assuming.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Even the intelligence services, even they’re like, their planes and their missiles and their defense systems are like profoundly more advanced than Iran’s.

STEVE KEEN: If that was the case, we wouldn’t be having this conversation. It’s 3 weeks after the war began or 4 weeks. You know, the original belief that Trump has would be over in one day. That’s proved false.

STEVEN BARTLETT: I think that’s in part because of what you said, because they’ve prepared for decapitation. If I was the Supreme Leader of Iran, yeah, that’s the sort of approach I would have taken, which is you take me out and actually you’ve got a bigger problem because now you’ve got to negotiate with 41 or 31 different sort of sub-militaries. And that’s an impossible task. Yeah.

STEVE KEEN: Yeah. And that’s the Iranians were aware of that. And they’ve got a huge army. They’ve got they can conscript far more people than Israel has. It’s, to me, if it gets down to a conventional military, then it’s possible that Israel could lose that as well.

Trump’s Negotiations and Market Manipulation

STEVEN BARTLETT: On March 21st, Trump threatened to obliterate Iran’s power plants if they did not fully reopen the Strait of Hormuz within 48 hours. He then came out and said that he was pausing that because Iran were negotiating, and he says he thinks he’s negotiating with the right person. As of yesterday, Trump has announced a 10-day pause until April 6th on destroying energy plants, claiming that indirect talks are going very well. And that Iran is begging to make a deal, according to The Guardian. So what’s going on there in your view?

STEVE KEEN: I think he’s gaming the markets. I really think he’s using it to cause the oil price to go up and down and gaming it either side. And somebody in his circle, people are making a fortune playing.

STEVEN BARTLETT: You really think that’s the case?

STEVE KEEN: Yeah, I do.

STEVEN BARTLETT: I mean, because there’s lots of ways to make money that don’t involve crashing the global economy, losing the midterms.

Trump’s Pattern of Behavior and the Iran Conflict

STEVE KEEN: Yeah, you’d think of that. You’ve got ethics, you’ve got empathy, you’ve got morals. Trump has none of those things.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Do you not think it’s just, again, if we look at Trump’s pattern of behavior over time, even with the tariffs, the same pattern of behavior occurred there where he would come out and say, “Every leader is calling me, they can’t stop calling me, they don’t want to make a deal. I’m going to do a tariff on you, 10%. Wait, no, I’m not. Pause, call me.”

Yeah, it’s the same pattern of behavior. It’s you. It’s manipulating the system. You then blackmail the person to try and negotiate with you. When they don’t, you hit them with the thing hard. And eventually, in the end of the day, you don’t really do any of the stuff you threatened to do because you’ve sort of manipulated a person into getting your way.

It’s the same pattern of behavior. “We’re going to smash you if you don’t call me.” They do or don’t call. He announces to the world that they called. They’re begging. “Look, it says here they’re begging me for a deal. I’m going to give them 10 more days.” To me, it sounds like he’s trying to build his golden bridge to get the f* out of there.

STEVE KEEN: What he’s imagining is he’s dealing with somebody like himself in Iran. He’s projecting how he would react to these things. He’s obviously projecting his own behavior onto the system and it’s projection rather than understanding. So if you decapitate, if you took out Trump, the fear of being assassinated, yes, well, bargain, what do you want me to do? He thinks that works in Iran. Iran, it doesn’t.

STEVEN BARTLETT: You can look at his behaviour and sort of understand what he wants. He wants to win this war. And you know he wants to win the war and get out of there because that’s what he’s been saying. “We’ve won, we’ve won, we’ve won every day. We’ve won. More missiles going, we’ve won.” So that’s clearly what he wants to happen. The problem is winning here doesn’t seem like a straightforward thing.

STEVE KEEN: No, it’s not going to happen.

Trump’s Legacy and the Risk of Ground Troops

STEVEN BARTLETT: No pun intended with the straight up mosey, but it really doesn’t seem like a straightforward thing. So it’s my opinion now that they are a little bit stuck because if you leave now, you lose. Iran start firing at Israel. Israel don’t stop even though you tell them to. They start firing at each other. The whole thing blows up. Or they keep the Strait of Hormuz closed. Oil prices go up. It looks terrible, terrible, terrible for Trump.

We might get — he might find himself in a Bush situation where his legacy — and I think that’s such an important word for a man that can’t be elected for a third term — his legacy is tarnished in the same way that Bush’s legacy was tarnished by going to war in the Middle East.

I think his greatest fear, Trump’s greatest fear, you’d think back through all of these moments over the last couple of years where he talks about the Nobel Prize. I think he’s trying to put himself on the Mount Rushmore of presidents in history’s mind. And I think how this situation plays out now, the sole thing he’s thinking about is his legacy. And right now, being stuck in a war and contemplating putting ground troops in is arguably the worst thing for one’s legacy.

STEVE KEEN: Yeah, and lots of Americans dead.

STEVEN BARTLETT: These wars are like, you think about Vietnam, these wars are never really won.

STEVE KEEN: Well, they did. America hasn’t won a war since World War II, and even World War II was won by the Russians more so than the Americans. So we have this picture of America as being this invincible military power, but it lost in Vietnam, it lost in Iraq, it lost in Afghanistan. America’s failed in all of these. This is another American failure, but on a scale far beyond what happened in Afghanistan and Vietnam.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Do you think he will send ground troops in?

STEVE KEEN: Yes, I do. And I’ve seen people talking about where the troops might land and the only part of the day they can land is right towards this edge here with Pakistan where they might land between 2,000 and 10,000 troops. I’d hate to be one of those troops because it’s a suicide mission.

Again, with those 31 provinces, the separated military commands they’ve got, the weapons they’ve got hidden underground, the troops themselves who, if you know that there are Americans landing, you’re Iranian and a soldier, you are going to attack them like nobody’s business and not be afraid of your own death because you do think if you get martyred, it’s the remaining people that you are defending. There will be people who recognize you as a martyr. It’s horrific.

STEVEN BARTLETT: If you had to give a sort of percentage probability of them putting ground troops in?

STEVE KEEN: I’d say more than 50%. We’re going to find out in the next couple of weeks.

The Best Case Scenario: A Muslim-Dominated Middle East

STEVEN BARTLETT: What is the best case scenario?

STEVE KEEN: The Americans have to realize they’ve lost. They’re not going to negotiate the terms of reparation. And what Iran has proposed, when you look at Iran’s terms, they’re extremely reasonable. They’re saying America leaves the whole region. America no longer comes back in this region. No military bases, no agreements. This becomes an Iranian protectorate, that becomes an Iranian empire — ’cause they’re not Arabs, they’re Persians. So this becomes like a Muslim part of the world. You can actually take the whole region out to here, it’s all Muslim.

And what’s been happening, and this is part of the weird religious elements here, you’ve got the Sunni sect and the Shiite sect, which is a bit like the Protestants versus Catholics. Go back 500 years and what we’re seeing here is like the Hundred Years’ War that occurred in Europe back in the days when it was Protestant versus Catholic was a serious thing. So we’re seeing a religious war being fought here.

And the Sunni majority, about 90% of Muslims are Sunni, they have focused on their rivalry with the Shiites. And so what they’ve done is they’ve sided with this mob to enable — the states to side. So they’ve sided with the Christians to strengthen their own Muslim sect, which is the Sunni sect, against the Shiite sect, which is Iran is predominantly Shiite.

Now, what’s happening here is as soon as the war started — the reason the Arabs agreed to bases here, military bases, is they thought it would protect them from Iran. As soon as the war starts, those bases are obliterated. The Americans leave and they realize that hasn’t worked at all. So the deal the Sunnis made to side with the Christians has proved to be an extremely bad deal. You’re going to have to have change in who rules these countries to enable it to happen. But I think the persuasive case coming out of this within the Muslim areas is Muslims stick together, don’t cooperate with the Christians.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Don’t cooperate with the United States.

STEVE KEEN: And I think that’s what’s going to happen. I hope so because that at least gives us something which is relatively stable. This becomes a region that is Muslim dominated.

STEVEN BARTLETT: When you say this, you mean the Middle East?

STEVE KEEN: I mean the whole Middle East, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Iraq, Pakistan as well because it’s a Muslim country, Afghanistan. This region becomes Muslim dominated. Shiites and Sunnis start to — I mean, the whole idea of Catholics fighting Protestants, that’s completely dissipated. There’s no level in the West anymore of large-scale military-type animosity between Catholics and Protestants. That’s what’s happening over here. The conflicts, those religious conflicts within the Catholics, within the Christians disappeared, largely speaking. They’re still happening within the Muslim religion. This could persuade them that that’s got to end.

The Five Scenarios: Which Is Most Probable?

STEVEN BARTLETT: So we’ve got one more scenario, scenario 5.

STEVE KEEN: Iran develops nuclear weapons. I’d rather 4 happen than 5.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Which of these 5 outcomes do you think is most probable to happen?

STEVE KEEN: I think the most likely outcome is Iran disables Israel’s nuclear weapons because Iran has been so prepared for this conflict in a way that America has not, in a way that Israel was not. I hope they’re also prepared for the eventuality of having to neutralize Israel’s nuclear weapons.

STEVEN BARTLETT: You think the highest probability is Iran disabling Israel’s nukes?

STEVE KEEN: Yeah, I hope I’m right. I mean, if Iran gets destroyed, then this leads not to Iran developing nuclear weapons, but every potential rival for America on the planet developing nuclear weapons. We go into a nuclear war-dominated world.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Do you not think it’s more likely that Trump is going to find himself a golden bridge to get out of this situation? He’s going to call Netanyahu in Israel and say, “Stand down, please. I’m going to announce that we’ve won this war. I’m going to announce that we’ve done a deal. It’s all over.”

STEVE KEEN: Well, without doubt, whatever happens, Trump is going to say he won. That’s again, the narcissistic personality disorder thing. He simply couldn’t bring himself to stand on a stage and say, “I lost.” I mean, think about the biggest insult that Trump ever made in his apprenticeship show, “You’re a loser.” Being a loser is the absolute worst possible thing than anybody can be in his mind. If he has to say I’m a loser, then his life is over in that sense. His self-image is over. So whatever deal comes out, he’s going to say he won.

Protecting Yourself Economically: Energy Independence

STEVEN BARTLETT: For the average person that’s listening now, when they hear all this conflict going on in the world, from an economic perspective, is there anything they can be doing to protect themselves against some of these downstream consequences?

STEVE KEEN: Well, I think one thing is people — we’ve now got to the stage where you can buy your own solar systems for your house. You need something which means you are not dependent upon oil anymore. I think we’ve trivialized the dangers of climate change for the last half century. We’ve done very little about it to reverse it. This is telling people that if you’re reliant upon oil, you’ve got a fragile existence.

Even if it costs you more to build solar, you’ve got to build solar as your own alternative energy system. Because without energy, there’s no civilization. And that’s what we’re learning the hard way from this conflict. So I think individual responses is going to be get some way to have your own power source. And for most people that means having solar.

STEVEN BARTLETT: One man that has done a lot for both solar and sustainable energy is Elon Musk.

Elon Musk, Politics, and Engineering

STEVE KEEN: He has. He’s also helped get bloody Trump elected. So I think you’ve got to score that against him as well. But yeah, his work on solar and power and rocketry, I’ve absolutely admired that. And I see that as a critical positive contribution. But getting Trump elected, he played a major role in that. He should learn from that mistake and get the f* out of politics.

STEVEN BARTLETT: He has backed off politics now, which is—

STEVE KEEN: I think he’s realized how poisonous it is.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Yeah. Yeah, it sounds like he’s realized you can’t really change the beast. No. He tried. Yeah.

STEVE KEEN: He should stick with the area where he’s mature, which is what he does with energy systems and what he does with rocketry. He’s really, I mean, in terms of legacy, he’s tainted his legacy by getting involved in politics. Go back to engineering.

Self-Sufficiency and Preparing for Economic Uncertainty

STEVEN BARTLETT: So you say that you think people should invest in solar for their homes. Yes. To get their own energy sources so that they’re a little bit insulated from these sort of macroeconomics. Yep. Is there anything else they should be thinking about? The average person, the cost of living crisis, what happens next? What should they be doing now?

STEVE KEEN: The thing that I’m most worried about, this is the impact upon food. I’m the last person to talk about growing your own food. I’ve never done it. I’ve got brown thumbs, not green ones. But I think if you can have any way to produce your own food, you’ve got a bit of insulation against what’s happening at the global level.

The lesson that comes out of this is self-sufficiency. If we don’t have self-sufficiency, then these sorts of global chaotic things can destroy you completely with you having no recompense. If you have some degree of self-sufficiency, you can survive.

STEVEN BARTLETT: And how does one create self-sufficiency? Growing your own food is quite expensive and slow, isn’t it? Yeah, extremely. So how does one develop self-sufficiency in these sort of economic climates? Is it saving money or is it—

STEVE KEEN: Well, I think so, having your own physical resources close to you that enable you to— Money doesn’t matter if you can’t buy the product in the first instance, the product doesn’t exist anymore. So one thing that happened during World War II is a large amount of food was grown in the UK by people turning their gardens into market gardens.

The AI Boom and Bust Cycle

STEVEN BARTLETT: I’ve heard you make a few predictions about the future of the economic markets. You know, you’re famous for predicting 2008 and the financial crash that occurred then. I’ve heard you saying that you think because of AI, there’s going to be another financial crash around the corner within 1 or 2 years.

STEVE KEEN: Yeah. What’s happening with AI is a classic economic boom and bust cycle overlaid over the fact that AI can also eliminate a huge amount of employment, which we’ve never seen that possibility in the past on that scale.

But a common pattern in capitalism is that some new technology will be developed, like railways, for example. Some people see the potential profitability of railways. Everybody pours in creating railways. You get too many railways built. 90% of the companies that create the railways go bust. But then we all have these rail systems that we benefit from afterwards.

So that’s the classic pattern that Joseph Schumpeter was the person who best described that, Austrian economist from the early 20th century. So he said, you’ll get the banks will finance a new investment area, that investment produces a new technology which causes a boom while you’re building the technology. But when the technology comes online, it undercuts existing businesses and causes a slump.

So the boom and slump cycle, and AI is a natural example of that. And what you get is massive overinvestment in the first instance, because everybody who invests in AI has the ambition of being the only AI provider on the planet. Therefore, you get too many companies investing, there’s too much money going into it. That’s what causes a boom. But then when the technology comes online, because it undercuts existing technologies, you have a slump.

STEVEN BARTLETT: And when you look at the investment taking place at the moment, the big tech companies— Meta, Amazon, Microsoft, Alphabet, Google, Oracle— is on track to spend $720 billion on AI infrastructure in 2026 alone, which is less than 20% of the revenue that they’re making. We are seeing a 5-to-1 ratio of money being spent versus money coming in. Yeah, which is historically unsustainable.

STEVE KEEN: Yeah, and I think there has to be a slump coming out of this. And in a sense, that’s part of the natural cyclical behavior of capitalism. Because if you want to make a profit, you’ve got to bring in technology that undercuts everybody you’re currently rivals with. So that’s, the railways are a classic example there. You know, you had to get around by carriage. Instead, you undermine the carriage companies by bringing in the railways. But the ultimate benefit, society benefits because now you’ve got the railways for transportation. So that’s the same sort of thing that AI is doing this time around. But companies, 90% of those companies are going to fail.

AI Startup Valuations and the Coming Contraction

STEVEN BARTLETT: I mean, this is kind of what we’re seeing already. So the failure rate of AI-specific startups has hit 90% in 2026. Wow, that’s luck. Yeah, you predicted that one correctly. Significantly higher than the 70% average for general technology. Roughly 95% of enterprise AI pilots fail to move into production when they incur massive costs.

The other thing I think a lot about is, a lot of startups now are raising a lot of money at crazy, crazy valuations. I can think of one particular startup I know. They’re making like a couple of million dollars a year. They’ve raised at a billion-dollar valuation. Whoa. Yeah. And because they’ve got the word AI on them. And the thing is, because everyone’s so such in a frenzy at the moment about AI, they’re probably going to raise at a $2 billion valuation 6 months from now. Yeah. When you think about what’s going on there, someone somewhere is putting their money in.

STEVE KEEN: And they’re going to lose it all.

STEVEN BARTLETT: And they’re going to lose it all. And when everybody starts losing all their money very, very quickly, you see this contraction where everybody realizes that their paper gains, the gains they thought they had on paper because of valuation went up, have just evaporated. And when you see that, you have to quickly count your pennies and get frugal.

STEVE KEEN: And pull back in again.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Pull back in again, lay people off, and so on and so forth. So I actually do personally believe that we’re probably within 24 months of a pretty severe contraction. And that won’t just impact these tech oligarchs, it’ll impact all of us in different ways.

STEVE KEEN: Yeah, it’s a boom and bust cycle. I mean, the only thing which we’ve experienced in our own lives which is similar would be the telecommunications bubble and then the internet bubble between 1990 and 2001, 2002. We don’t get bubbles in the internet anymore because that’s now a stable technology in that sense. But it wasn’t a big one. This is much bigger. Yeah.

What Entrepreneurs and Workers Should Do Now

STEVEN BARTLETT: What do we do as entrepreneurs, as team members in companies? What do we do at this moment if what you’re saying is correct, that there will be a— A boom and bust. A boom and bust. Which I think, every smart person that I’ve spoken to agrees that there will be a bust soon. Yeah. Their timelines vary. Yeah. But what does one do right now in March, April 2026 to prepare for this?

STEVE KEEN: Well, you put money aside if you can, you buy other assets you think are going to survive the boom and bust. Like what? That’s the trouble. I mean, gold’s been driven up, gold’s now been driven down. People are buying Bitcoin, but Bitcoin is collapsing as well. In some ways you really, you can’t, it’s like saying, what do I do during an earthquake to not fall over? In terms of insulating yourself, I really can’t see a way of insulating yourself from the downturn.

But I don’t, I’m not as worried about that as long-term consequences of AI because this is the first technology which implies you can actually virtually eliminate labor as necessary for reducing output because you can use AI rather than clerks. You can use, I know this is a long way from being feasible, but robots could replace process workers. And then suddenly something which employs 70% of the global population is no longer necessary. And then what do you do in that situation?

What I’ve seen, which I respect coming out of the tech bros in America is they’re talking in terms of universal basic income.

The Case for Universal Basic Income

STEVEN BARTLETT: You think a universal basic income’s a good idea? I do. We should probably explain what that is.

STEVE KEEN: Yeah, well, it’s the state provides everybody with enough money to stay alive. That’s the basic idea. Rather than having to work for a living, at the minimum, you get paid an amount of money that means you can buy the goods and services that are necessary to stay alive. You don’t necessarily prosper, but you get enough to survive. And so that’s the idea of UBI.

Now at the moment to survive, you’ve got to have a job. And like that guy you mentioned is working at 3 jobs right now. If he got a UBI, he wouldn’t have to work at those 3 jobs. He might work at 1 or he might actually consider his own business possibilities in that situation. So I think universal basic income is a necessity given what robotics and AI can do to employment.

AI, Job Displacement, and the Speed of Change

STEVEN BARTLETT: And you think up to 50% of working-class jobs could be wiped out because of AI and robotics? Yeah. I mean, that’s been a prediction from the leaders of some of the biggest companies in AI. I heard the leader of Anthropic recently say the same thing, that he thinks 50% of jobs could be wiped out.

I think the shocking thing that we’ve talked a lot about on the show is just, there’s been other sort of economic or industrial revolutions in the past that have caused for job displacement. Yeah. But none, I would argue, at this speed.

The Reality of AI Job Displacement

STEVE KEEN: No, and none that can replace virtually everything. Let’s see, there’s a classic story I read back when I was young. I was talking about the global financial crisis, came out of the New York Times article where they went to interview workers in an air conditioning factory. And there was one woman they found there whose job it was to place a thermocouple inside the air conditioning units as they went past. So there’s 3,000 of these going past her a day. She’s just placing one of these thermocouples where it needs to go inside the circuitry of the air conditioning unit.

And she said, “You don’t have to love your job as long as it pays you money.” It was a totally boring job. That’s all she’s doing. The thing is, the reason she got that job was you couldn’t make a machine to replace her because the air conditioning units don’t necessarily end up precisely at the same point. To make a machine that would do that is really difficult. Now, if you train a robot on it, the robot perception can ultimately get to the point where the robot can place that piece inside there. That particular unskilled job disappears. So people who work in jobs like that no longer have a possibility of getting a job.

STEVEN BARTLETT: I think even Anthropic released a report. Anthropic are the makers of Claude. They released a report saying that entry-level positions, they’re seeing a 13% decline already in people getting those entry-level jobs. And actually as an employer, someone that spends literally all last night, I was looking through our inbox, our recruitment inboxes at candidates and talent. I have noticed myself changing. I’ve noticed that people that I would’ve given roles to maybe 6 months ago, I now have to think long and hard about whether there’s going to be technology that can do those exact roles instead.

And it was a really shocking thing. I was saying to the team last night at like 1:00 AM in the office, I was like, this is a prime example of a candidate. I was looking at this particular candidate that 6 months ago I would’ve bitten their hand off, but now, I have to pause because my innovation team in the corner of the office, they’re able to do that now with these AI agents instead. And so I am, you know, you hear a lot about the theoretical impact of AI.

STEVE KEEN: But you’re actually making the decision yourself.

STEVEN BARTLETT: And then it’s theory, it’s theory. It’s this thing on my Twitter feed, like blah, blah, blah, whatever. You hear it on a podcast, you go blah, blah, blah, whatever. And then you find yourself actually behaving that way. Your behaviour is changing and you’re going, oh, it’s very hard to know the types of people to hire into our company. And I’ve kind of almost segmented them into these two groups where you’ve got people that have very deep expertise. I’d say it’s three groups. People that have very, very deep expertise on a particular thing, you know, like my CFO.

STEVE KEEN: Group number two, I’d say, are people that are AI proficient who can actually handle this stuff and be the people who manage the agents.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Yes, and they can redesign our workflow across every department in the company to be agentic. The word is about AI agents. That’s kind of like the word used. So agentic workflows. And then the third group of people are people who have skills that are highly beneficial human to human and in real life. So like human to human salespeople that deal with relationships. And are very good at it. And are very good at it because there are still a certain type of sale where people want to meet the person, shake their hand, and say, okay, you’re responsible for this deal. We’re still in a situation where people don’t want agents to do that. Yeah, there’s like the 3 groups.

What I didn’t say is young people who have just come out of university, maybe don’t know anything about agents, they don’t have the deep expertise yet. And when you look at the data, we’ll throw some of the data up on the screen, it appears that these sort of entry-level white-collar jobs are the ones that are right now suffering. Some of these investment companies would hire like 300 or 400 analysts to look at companies and make decisions. That is one example of a role that’s very at risk now. We’ve got an investment fund. We need one analyst, Molly. 6 months ago, we were interviewing more analysts. We now realize that we just need Molly and we need to give Molly AI. And she can set up, I think Molly said to me yesterday when I left the office, when she left the office at midnight, she’s now set up 3 agents, these AI agents as her team. Those would’ve been 3 people. Well, look, I saw a demo of that.

AI Replacing Programmers and the Jevons’ Paradox

STEVE KEEN: Like I’ve developed a software package called Ravel, which I’ve got one programmer for. And I teach an online course as well. And I give Ravel as part of that online course. And one of the members of the course said he’s using an AI to build Ravel models. And he’s also using an AI to write the code behind Ravel. And he gave a demo of this a couple of days ago. And I watched it happen on screen as he built a model, a simulation system. And it was messy on one stage, but it produced the correct mathematics. So he’s showing you can actually, he’s trying to tell me that we should get my main programmer to learn to drive agents to do the whole thing.

Now my main programmer has said, look, there’s things that I can do that an AI cannot do. He’s one of your highly gifted people. And he said it wouldn’t be worth my while to have me telling an AI what to do because what I lose in terms of my own initiative, I can’t, I just sort of balance out. It’s really, okay. If you hire a junior programmer, then the junior programmer would be one who’s trained to drive the AI.

STEVEN BARTLETT: I do think programmers are fine, actually. There was some stats that I saw the other day that showed there’s been this huge demand in people trying to hire programmers. It’s interesting because you hear stats from Spotify. Spotify saying, “We haven’t written a human line of code since December.” And I’m very good friends with the guys at Spotify. I was actually with the CEO the other day, a couple of weeks ago in Austin. And you hear that, and I did check that with them, that’s true. So you assume that that means we don’t need programmers anymore. But if you think about Jevons’ paradox, when something becomes, you know, Jevons’ paradox is the old analogy.

STEVE KEEN: It gets cheaper, you use more of it.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Yeah. So like when coal became cheaper, people were worried that maybe the coal industry was out of business or trains, whatever. But actually what ended up happening is people just drove more trains and they used them for other things like transport. And the same applies, I think, for AI. When creating technology becomes easier, every company starts using more technology. So media companies, lawyers, you name the company, executive assistants, they all become coders. And actually the demand for highly, really anyone who knows how to code or program, we’re seeing it, it’s exploding. But I just think the job disruption in the near term for most people is going to be pretty massive.

Star Trek vs. Hunger Games: Two Possible Futures

STEVE KEEN: Yeah, I mean, there’s ways in which AI and robotics should be welcomed because it means the possibility exists, and it’s only a possibility, that we can no longer have to be exploited to get an income. Because if you look at the Marxist attitude towards capitalism as the workers, capitalists exploit the workers, okay? The real world is we’ve been exploiting energy mutually. Both labor and capital exploits energy. We could have a future where we don’t have to work for a living and therefore you could do what you want to do for a living. That’s a Star Trek future. That’s the possibility that it promises.

But at the same time, it could actually eliminate the jobs that people currently rely upon. And what I fear is we have two possibilities. We have a future where, Star Trek type future where you have replicators that make the goods and we consume and we all live with an energy abundant life, or the Hunger Games where there’s one little elite that gets, has all the robots and lives extremely well and we tolerate and oppress the vast majority and they end up, you know, Hunger Games entertainment. Those are the two possibilities we face.

STEVEN BARTLETT: I do think the cost of goods and services will come down, which is great. I think robotics, you know, if Elon is right, and I often say with Elon, like his timelines are not always accurate, but he does tend to deliver magic.

STEVE KEEN: He ultimately delivers, but it, you know, he always overpromises and delivers later than he plans.

STEVEN BARTLETT: And if he’s right about when he says there’s going to be more humanoid robots, his Optimus robot, robots than humans. And he says also in his predictions that there’s going to be no need to study to be a surgeon because the robots are going to be so much more advanced and better than any living surgeon. That would imply that surgery and other sort of medical diagnoses and procedures are going to be incredibly cheap, incredibly quick.

STEVE KEEN: Great. How do you pay for them?

STEVEN BARTLETT: That’s the next question. Yeah, so yeah, how do you pay for them?

STEVE KEEN: And do people want to, you know, there’s always. It’s also the physical requirements. I mean, the amount of copper inside a robot, you’re talking, you know, several kilos per robot. Do we have enough to produce 8 billion of them?

STEVEN BARTLETT: And maybe, you know, surgeons do much more than just operate. There’s a human element to the medical profession which I think is sometimes unappreciated. Like I would, I don’t know if I’m quite ready to go talk to a robot about my health yet. Maybe I’ll adjust.

Why Steve Keen Thinks Bitcoin Is Going to Zero

I wanted to come back to something you actually said earlier. You talked about Bitcoin briefly. I’ve heard you say that you think Bitcoin’s going to zero. Okay, this is worrying. I think I have some Bitcoin. You’re an economist. You’re saying that Bitcoin is going to zero. Why?

STEVE KEEN: Because ultimately because of its reliance upon energy. I mean, you know, you know Max Keiser and Stacy Herbert? Have you met them at all? No. They were sort of the original proselytizers for Bitcoin and they’re now living in, I think El Salvador, which has adopted Bitcoin as a form of currency. When they told me about Bitcoin, I could have bought it for a pound of Bitcoin, which would have been— I would have been a bloody— maybe wealthier than you if I’d done that.

The reason I didn’t was they explained that the way that the public ledger is kept safe is that it takes too much energy to break it. So each transaction requires 10 minutes of computer processing time globally, by the looks of it, to actually create an extra Bitcoin. And that means it’s too expensive for somebody to try to break the ledger. That means it’s got a huge requirement for energy use. And I believe, knowing what I know from climate scientists, that at some point we’re going to realize we’re using far too much energy on the planet. We’ve got to cut the energy consumption. And the two easiest things to cut out to reduce energy consumption are cryptocurrencies and international travel.

STEVEN BARTLETT: But aren’t you saying that, you know, nuclear energy is becoming vogue again and they’re talking a lot, you know, about—

STEVE KEEN: It’s the amount of time it takes to build that stuff. I mean, China’s building nuclear power stations at a hell of a rate and much, much more cheaply than America is doing.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Solar’s become a big topic of conversation.

The Mineral Crisis Threatening the Green Energy Transition

STEVE KEEN: Yeah, again, there’s a guy called Simon Michaux whom I recommend you get in touch with as well. And Simon is an engineer who claims that we simply don’t have the physical minerals necessary to support a completely solar and wind-based energy system. He’s got people who criticise his analysis, definitely. But we still are using far more physical resources than we’re aware of at the moment on the planet. And the availability of various critical elements that we need for the system we have right now, it’s much less abundant than we would like it to be.

So a lot of these things about, you know, robotics taking over, do we have the minerals for it? Solar power, do we have the minerals? The answer is not yes, okay? Sometimes the answer is no, other times it’s dubious. But I think that energy requirement alone is a problem.

STEVEN BARTLETT: You’re saying that we’re going to have to cut back on our energy consumption. But I mean, the direction of travel has been we’ve been able to produce more and more and more energy.

The Fragility of Our System and the Path Forward

STEVE KEEN: And we’re dumping it into the environment. The problem about the use of energy is it’s happening on a planet, okay? Can the biosphere cope with the waste that we dump into it as a result of using that energy? And that is something which economists are completely stupid on, beyond stupid. They’ve trivialized the dangers of the amount of resources we use and the amount of energy we use.

So I don’t think that energy future is possible on this biosphere at the moment. It’s possible in the future if we get off the biosphere. So in that sense, I’m even more of a space cadet than Elon Musk is. I think we have to plan to take production off planet. But while we’re constrained on the biosphere, the biosphere’s constraints will stop us using as much energy as we wish to use.

STEVEN BARTLETT: What are your closing statements on this whole situation with the war and Iran and everything that’s going on from a geopolitical perspective?

STEVE KEEN: The basic thing is our system is far more fragile than we’ve convinced ourselves that it is. And we can make observations about potential futures which presume a robustness we don’t have. And if that robustness is destroyed, either by military conflicts or by overextending what we put into the biosphere, then we can fall off what’s called the Seneca Cliff. We can go from an abundant future to a collapse.

What Can We Do?

STEVEN BARTLETT: And what would you say the people at home should be doing to course correct the path that you think we’re on?

STEVE KEEN: Stop electing fools. Electing Trump was an enormous mistake. We’ve got politicians who follow what’s called neoliberal political philosophies. They’re what put us in this problem. It hasn’t worked. We need to reverse back to having a human-oriented and physically realistic view of how the economy should be managed and how the biosphere should be managed.

We have to take care of our home. And in an essential sense, we’re destroying our home and thinking we can keep on doing that indefinitely. We can’t. Our home is planet Earth. Planet Earth has got physical restraints. We haven’t respected them. Planet Earth will tell us what it thinks of that this century.

STEVEN BARTLETT: And which leaders do you think we should be electing?

STEVE KEEN: I think even electing leaders itself is a mistake because what we then do is end up getting, we pander to narcissists. We pander to people who believe they can solve all our problems. We end up with megalomaniacs making decisions.

If you look back at where Athenian democracy came from, Athenian democracy didn’t use elections. It used a process of like random number generators to select intelligent people to fulfill essential roles in those societies. And they weren’t even people you got to know by name in that sense. We know Trump here, we know Starmer here, we have Albanese over here. We end up getting narcissists and megalomaniacs directing us, and they’re the last people you need to make decisions.

Personal Finance and Protecting Your Savings

STEVEN BARTLETT: When you’re thinking about your own money as an economist, what are you doing to protect your savings?

STEVE KEEN: I’m not doing much. I mean, I’ve been a crusader for reforming economic theory for my whole life. I’ve sort of neglected this side of things, to my detriment, I’ve got to say. But I really am focused on what’s sustainable for everybody rather than what I can make as my own cut. And I don’t think we’ve got a sustainable economy at the moment. We have a philosophy of economics which leads to breakdowns.

STEVEN BARTLETT: I’m asking that because I’ve got so many friends and listeners that ask me often, like, should I be buying a house right now? Do you think I should be investing in gold? Do you think I should be saving my money? Should I be, I don’t know, investing in technology companies? And I’m wondering if you had a perspective for them.

STEVE KEEN: Not on that, no. I’ve really left that area alone. I’m actually looking at the overall system and saying, how do we make the system sustainable so that people can live within it? And what we’ve got is an unsustainable system. And you’re asking me how do people survive within an unsustainable system? Answer is they don’t.

We always think we can do something at the individual level to cope with what’s happening in the system around us. That only works if the system around us is stable. What is a better system then? I think what China has done is a better, in a better direction. They have a collective focus as well as an individual focus. What’s their system called? It’s called communist.

Capitalism vs. Socialism: Finding the Balance

STEVEN BARTLETT: So you think communism is better than capitalism?

STEVE KEEN: I think a system which reflects the need for a cohesive society as well as individual gain is needed. And the system in China is closer to that than the system in America.

STEVEN BARTLETT: In China, listen, I don’t know a ton about this, but they have a leader who stays in power and—

STEVE KEEN: That’s one, that’s the potential weakness.

STEVEN BARTLETT: And suppresses the people’s decision-making, entrepreneurialism.

STEVE KEEN: Equally, you’ve got a system to get into the Communist Party. You’ve got to have highly, you’ve got to be educated to get in and you have to perform to some extent in the region in which you begin your role.

STEVEN BARTLETT: But you’re not saying you think the West should adopt communism, are you?

STEVE KEEN: No, I’m saying the West should adopt a system which reflects the need for a cohesive society. Is that socialism? Socialism is closer to it. I mean, the words are all tainted. Okay, if you go back, you know, do you eat Cadbury’s chocolate?

STEVEN BARTLETT: I try not to.

STEVE KEEN: You have, I’m sure. Okay. Cadbury’s was a socialist enterprise, okay? It was formed as a belief we have to want to give the workers the best possible situation while also selling a profitable product. Mondragon in Spain is another cooperative started by a Catholic priest of all things. We tend to be very binary in the West. We say you either have competition or you have cooperation. Okay? We need to be more like the East in the sense of the idea of yin and yang. You have to have both, okay? Cooperation and competition.

STEVEN BARTLETT: And so that for you is the closest thing — is socialism.

STEVE KEEN: The closest to socialism. And what China has done that better than Russia. So you go back to the USSR, that was, they were disastrous in terms of product development. China’s been extremely successful on that front. They’ve learned from the mistakes of being too centralized and too top-down in Russia to have both the top-down and the bottom-up dynamic going on.

STEVEN BARTLETT: What’s wrong with capitalism? And capitalism is what the UK and the US have adopted as their sort of economic model.

STEVE KEEN: Yeah, it’s seeing competition absolutely ruling and ignoring cooperation. Now the real, the successful society combines both. You have cooperation, you also have competition. And we’ve pushed it far too far in the competitive end and not enough in the cooperative end.

And what comes out of that as well is this — competitive tends to be short-term focused. What can I make a profit out of in the time that the money that I’ve borrowed is — I’m going to be able to make more of a profit than the interest I’m paying on the money I’ve created. And if the interest — if the longer it takes to get the repayment, the less likely you are to make the investment. So what you get is a focus upon short-term with just a market system. Whereas with the long term, you say what’s going to last for 100 years? And what that means is you build the infrastructure for the long term while you allow competition to occur in the short term. It’s getting the balance right. We’ve got the balance extremely wrong.

Closing Remarks and Birthday Surprise

STEVEN BARTLETT: Professor Steve, thank you. Thank you. I highly recommend people go check out your YouTube channel where you make videos all the time about what’s going on in the world. You give your opinion on economic issues, political issues, the Iran war. So if people are listening and they want to learn more from Professor Steve, then look down below and you should see his YouTube channel linked next to our name because we’re going to try and collaborate on this post. And I’ll put the link to your channel in the description below for anyone that wants to check you out and subscribe.

It’s so fascinating, especially the stuff about around the raw materials coming out the Strait of Hormuz. Because I really had no idea. It’s quite staggering to me that we’re so dependent on one region of the world. And I think from watching videos over the last couple of weeks, it’s really made me understand the unintended consequences of war generally. But specifically this war in Iran. So thank you for turning the lights on for me. I really, really appreciate this, and I hope we can meet again soon and have a conversation. And hopefully this all resolves itself in a way that’s good for everyone.

STEVE KEEN: I hope so. I’m having my 73rd birthday tomorrow. I hope I have a 74th as well, but I think there’s a question mark over that now.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Well, I did hear it was your birthday tomorrow. I think the team have gotten you a little something. Okay. Happy birthday to you.

STEVE KEEN: I’m embarrassed. Happy birthday.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Oh my God. Happy birthday to Steve.

STEVE KEEN: My God, thank you. Happy birthday to you. Holy hell. I’m missing— Thank you. Can I blow the candles out? Yes, you should.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Okay, you get a wish. You blew them all out, so you get a wish.

STEVE KEEN: Well, I wish for peace in the Middle East. Okay, that’s probably the main thing to say about right now.

STEVEN BARTLETT: That is a gorgeous cake, I have to say.

STEVE KEEN: It’s a marvellous cake, yeah.

STEVEN BARTLETT: That’s mocking our own homework, but it is a beautiful cake.

STEVE KEEN: This better be eaten by the crew, because I’m not going to eat all this myself, okay? Anybody get out a knife and start slicing up? My God. Thank you so much.

STEVEN BARTLETT: We’re done. Thank you.

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