I LIVESTREAMED THE CORNER OF MY HEAD

Hi everyone,

In this week’s newsletter, I share my struggles with livestreaming that I endured when setting up my second round table with Blaine Holt, EM Burlingame, Steven Kuhn, Tom Luongo and Mark Attwood. Tom joins me back from his vacation. As we were discussing why Tom thinks France will be the first EU nation to fail financially, we got news of the US’s diesel deal with Russia. Finally, in my conversation with Burning Bright, I created a metaphor for what makes for great political analysis.

Bessent Warned Carney & London: They’re Not Ready

with Burning Bright of Badlands Media
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A0dYU-q7NrQ

Imagine a scenario where you are watching me in my kitchen as I place the following items on the countertop: flour, butter, eggs, milk and sugar. With these ingredients, it would seem reasonable to conclude that I am about to make a cake. Imagine that you couldn’t see the vanilla essence because you didn’t bother to look closer, thinking that you had seen it all. Perhaps you didn’t see the vanilla essence because I had deliberately placed it where you wouldn’t see it. Although you could rightly conclude that I am about to make a cake, you couldn’t, on this information alone, accurately determine the flavour of the cake.

Brig. Gen. (Retd) Blaine Holt,
EM Burlingame,
Steven E Kuhn,
Mark Attwood,
Alex Krainer

with a special guest appearance:

Tom Luongo

There will be presentations, and a live panel Q and A with all of them together!

Tickets to the live event are sold out!

Watch the livestream and access the whole day’s recording!

Livestream / Video Recording

This is going to be a blast!
If you are able to make it work to be there in person, I would love to meet you there!

Imagine that there is another observer to this process; however, due to their position, they can only see the butter and the eggs. Based on this, they conclude that I am about to fry the eggs in butter. The two of you have a conversation that ends in an argument, each convinced of the righteousness of your own perspective.

You are both wrong. Neither of you sees the vanilla essence or the arsenic that I am also going to add.

Would you like a sponge cake laced with arsenic?

I think not.

This metaphor for political analysis occurred to me during my conversation with Burning Bright. Our picture, my picture, of what is happening, of who the major players are, the actions they are taking, the outcomes they are committed to, as well as the outcomes they produce, is forever incomplete. I can develop a fuller picture, but there will always be factors and elements that I cannot see, as there is more to learn and discover; there is always more that is hidden from my view. This is why I think it’s critical to remain curious, to keep looking, to keep questioning, to keep searching. This is something that most analysts don’t do.

Most mainstream pundits don’t understand who Bessent is, his skills, his experience, and what he is creating and causing as Trump’s Treasury Secretary. Burning Bright (BB) from Badlands Media gave some background on Bessent and what it is about him that makes him so dangerous to the globalists.

BB explained that in 1992, working for George Soros, Bessent had studied the Bank of England’s balance sheet so closely that he had begun to see patterns in the BoE’s trades. He then placed an enormous bet that the value of the pound would go down. This started a sell-off in the pound. As the value of the pound went down, more and more holders rushed to sell. This led to a cascade of selling. The Bank of England used up its reserves buying the pound to try to reverse its fall. However, there were many more sellers than buyers, and so the value of the pound continued to plunge. In the space of a few days, the pound lost 15% of its value against the German Deutsche Mark and 25% against the US dollar.

George Soros is often referred to as the man who broke the Bank of England, when in fact it was Bessent who placed the trade.

Bessent is now the US Treasury Secretary and is responsible for monetary decisions that impact the US–Canada relationship. Canada’s current Prime Minister, Mark Carney, a former Governor of the Bank of England, is now up against Scott Bessent.

I have said it before and will say it again: many pundits misunderstand and underestimate Trump. They also misread his messaging, mistaking it for incoherence, confusion and folly on Trump’s part. For example, most analysts consider that Trump is waging a war against Iran on behalf of Israel. Since these analysts don’t factor in Trump’s commitment to reinstituting the American System of Political Economy, or the conflict in the shadows between the City of London imperialists and the American revolutionaries, they misread his actions. This is not helped by the curveballs and misdirections that Trump and his team themselves deliver.

In early September, Scott Bessent stood at a podium flanked by military personnel and announced that Operation Economic Fury was becoming Operation Economic Outcast. The official target was the Iranian regime. Yet that same day, Trump announced new financial measures against Canada after trade talks collapsed, which, Canada has since admitted, happened because it walked away. It could easily be that Operation Economic Outcast is really about defeating Canada and its globalist masters, who all spring from the City of London.

We are all familiar with the maxim “follow the money”, but few follow it at the macro scale, where the large pools of money flow. Bessent follows the big bucks. He has pointed to the offshore havens that the City of London built around the Eurodollar system, where US dollars held abroad are multiplied by foreign banks. BB called them proxy money printers. The net effect of Bessent’s moves, from Canada to the UK, is to bring those dollars home.

BB commented on Trump’s restraint. Trump could collapse the Canadian or European economy overnight, but to do so would destabilise these nations and hurt ordinary people. Instead, Trump, with Bessent, is boiling the frog, raising the pressure until allies onshore their production, energy and currency, just as America is doing. In 2024, Bessent said that he foresaw a global economic reordering and wanted to be part of it. That reordering appears to be under way.

Burning Bright’s links
https://x.com/reBurningBright
https://badlandsmedia.tv
x.com/BadlandsMedia_
https://burningbright.substack.com

Bessent Can Blow Up France’s Bonds Whenever He Wants, and Davos Knows It

with Tom Luongo
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bFICVr2OWTw

Sometimes a news item breaks during a recording. This happened when I recorded with Tom. I was thus able to witness how Tom pieces his analysis together, drawing on the many factors that he includes in his commentary.

Tom and I were discussing France. He has been saying for months that France is the weakest leg of the European tripod of France, Italy and Germany. If one of those countries’ bond markets breaks, the EU is done for. France’s bonds are selling off on weak fundamentals: the highest marginal tax rates in the EU, the most generous pensions, and the loss of the Sahel as a cheap source of uranium. Last week, a major Japanese bank dumped all its French sovereign debt.

While Tom and I were discussing the parlous state of the EU’s finances, Tom read out Trump’s latest Truth Social post. This changed the whole conversation.

Following a call with Vladimir Putin, Trump announced that Russia would supply over 300,000 tonnes of diesel immediately, 500,000 tonnes in November and a million tonnes after that, with three million more to follow. In response, the US suspended sanctions on Russian diesel until April 2027.

Tom said that this had been planned weeks ago. This assertion turned out to be accurate as, two days later, a tanker carrying diesel from St Petersburg reached the east coast of the US. A few days prior to this, Trump had told Europe to release the diesel it had stockpiled to fight Russia, or he would stop selling Europe any more diesel. European governments had let prices hit $11 a gallon while blaming Trump for the rise. With Russian diesel flooding the market, the City of London is cut out, Iran’s leverage over the Strait of Hormuz weakens, and Europe cannot use its diesel reserves to fight a war with Russia. Tom and I both agreed that battery-powered tanks and solar-powered helicopters wouldn’t cut it in a conflict with Russia.

Tom pointed out that European leaders had cast themselves as the heroes protecting their citizens from Trump and Putin. Now the roles have flipped. Trump and Putin have become the reasonable ones bringing prices down. European leaders have become the villains hoarding fuel. Ordinary Europeans remain the victims of their own governments.

Back to France, and the riots and protests that have broken out. With elections due in 2027, Davos will not allow a populist outcome. Tom does not trust Marine Le Pen; he considers her controlled opposition. Perhaps Christine Lagarde will leave the ECB to run as a presidential candidate, swapping places with Macron, who would move over to run the ECB.

In the background lurks the powerful figure of Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent. Bessent could very easily blow up French bonds, and German ones by extension, whenever he chooses. What would the EU do then? It has no money and no collateral, and every gambit has failed. It’s gonna get bumpy for Britons and Europeans.

Tom Luongo’s Links
https://tomluongo.me
https://x.com/TFL1728
https://www.youtube.com/@ThomasLuongo

The War Room Round Table 2

with Steven Kuhn, EM Burlingame, Mark Attwood, Brigadier General Blaine Holt (Ret.) and Tom Luongo
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VApv4npG0bc

This was the 2nd Round Table I had organised, as a prelude to the Rich Does Live event on 7th November 2026. This time, all the Live Event speakers were at the Round Table, bar Alex Krainer, who could not make it. That left me, Mark, Blaine, EM, Steven and Tom. It was a great conversation. I asked the viewers what I could use to help me manage the live event, when the panel will be all seven of us. One suggestion was a cattle prod, another was a ruler across the knuckles, and my favourite was that every time somebody mentioned the City of London, that person, or perhaps the whole panel, should take a sip of Irish whiskey.

There is a back story to this Round Table, which turned out to be a rather entertaining and embarrassing episode – not my proudest moment in over nine years of posting videos on YT.

Mark had suggested that for this 2nd Round Table we go live. I said OK, but warned him that I did not have much experience of doing lives.

The day before I was due to livestream the Round Table, I thought I would get some practice in and make sure I was well set up for the actual livestream. This meant scheduling the live and then connecting my Zoom account to the livestream using a particular URL and stream key. I couldn’t quite work this out. I got instructions from Grok and applied them, but wasn’t satisfied that I knew how to do it. I shut my computer down and decided that I would log on extra early before the live to make sure that I could connect it then.

A few hours later, I checked my YouTube account, as I do a couple of times a day, to read and reply to the comments. It was then that I discovered there was a 2-minute-49-second video in my playlist that was public. This was peculiar, as my videos tend to average about 45 minutes. When I played this video, all it showed was a corner of my head, with me at the computer tapping away. Unbeknownst to me, I had gone live whilst I was trying to work out how to go live. This video of the corner of my head, doing and saying nothing, had already garnered 800+ views. A few minutes later, that rose to over 900.

I went to the lounge, where my wife and daughter were. I told them what had happened, and as I read aloud the hilarious comments on the video, all three of us doubled up with laughter at my folly. When I was 21, I sustained a back injury on a parachute jump. Over time, through swimming, the Alexander Technique and sleeping on the floor or on very firm mattresses, this back injury has largely healed, except when I laugh too much. My wife has a video that shows me lying on my back, laughing uproariously at my dorkiness and ineptitude, coupled with the fact that people were actually watching a video of the corner of my head and then commenting on it.

Too much laughter revives my back injury, and so I had to stop laughing as my back began to hurt, but then I would read another comment and roll back on the floor laughing, only to stop as my back started hurting again, and so this cycle carried on. My wife was filming all this through her peals of laughter, and my daughter was laughing at the ineptitude of her father, who, despite nine years of vlogging experience, had managed to livestream the corner of his head, completely ignorant of how he had accomplished that feat.

My favourite comment was: “Let him know in the comments if you’re thrilled by this vid!” This was itself the most liked comment.

I left the video available to the public as I was curious to see what would happen. I messaged my sons*, who were asleep in a different time zone, about what I had done. When I awoke the following morning and checked in, my son had made the video private, but not before it had been viewed over 4,000 times and had gained me a new subscriber.

Some other comments on 2 minutes 49 seconds of the corner of my head:

The farce did not end there. I scheduled the livestream on Rich Does Politics (RDP) at the appointed time and tweeted it out.

So there we were: me, Blaine, Mark Attwood, EM, Steven and Tom, on screen over Zoom, and I couldn’t work out how to go live on RDP. I kept going live on my old, original Crypto Rich (CR) channel, where I no longer post. It took 27 minutes before I decided that we should message the people waiting on the RDP livestream to come over to the CR channel. What I hadn’t known was that I had been livestreaming the last 18 of those 27 minutes, so viewers witnessed me trying to work out how to connect to the RDP livestream with the assistance of Tom and Grok. We failed. I failed.

Once the livestream was over, I made it private. We did discuss geopolitics, the forthcoming midterms, the bond markets and the risk of civil protests, as well as the actual live event. My sons tidied it up, edited it, added several minutes of bloopers at the end, and uploaded it to the Rich Does Politics channel. My two favourite comments on the upload:

We did discuss some geopolitics in that video, but for that, I recommend you watch the video. This piece is a behind-the-scenes exposé of what really happened with this livestream. Fortunately, Mark Attwood has a professional set-up for the Rich Does Live event on 7th November 2026. You can watch it live as it happens, or get a recording and watch it at your leisure.

Thank you for subscribing to this newsletter, and for supporting my work at https://YouTube.com/@richdoespolitics.