AMERICA’S FINAL GASP: Full interview with Dmitry Orlov, acclaimed author of The Five Stages of Collapse
The following is a full transcript of the recent interview with Dmitry Orlov, available for viewing at this link on Brighteon.com.
Mike Adams: Welcome to today’s interview on Brighteon.com. I’m Mike Adams, the founder of Brighteon, and today I’ve got to tell you, I have anticipated this interview with just a sense of actual excitement because our guest today is a first-time guest here on the show. His name is Dmitry Orlov. He is a very well-informed individual. He lives in Russia right now. He previously lived in the United States at various times and he is the author of numerous books probably the best-known is about The Five Stages of Collapse. But this isn’t just about his book. This is about his analysis of what’s happening geopolitically, economically, and industrially in Western nations versus what’s happening with Russia. And he’s here today to speak to us about the collapse that is actually underway of the West, what that’s going to look like, what are some of the signs that you can notice along the way, and where this ends up. And also, why the West is uniquely more susceptible and more fragile to collapse compared to, let’s say, the former Soviet Union. So welcome to the show, Mr. Orlov. It’s an honor to have you on today.
Dmitry Orlov: Great to be with you. Thank you for inviting me on your show.
Mike Adams: Well, thank you for joining us and for working your schedule so that we could do this because you are living in Russia right now. May I ask where in Russia do you live? Is it rural or urban? What’s your setup?
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Dmitry Orlov: It’s urban. I’m in St. Petersburg, which is second largest city in Russia, 5 million people. And I live right in the center of it.
Mike Adams: Wow, okay. So, just to establish a little bit of your background for our audience, I hope I got everything right in the little intro there, but could you give us a little bit about your time in America? What’s your area of study and expertise? And just a little bit about your history, please.
Dmitry Orlov: I came to the United States with my parents. I was 12 at the time. I went through high school and college and university and graduate school in the United States. I worked in a lot of different industries, just a wide range of experiences, and then pretty much decided to give up on the corporate career right after I turned 40 or so. And ever since then, I’ve been writing books and blogging and appearing in various places. I used to get invited to conferences. Now, back when the idea of the United States collapsing, just like the Soviet Union did, was funny, I was sort of a guest speaker at various venues. But then when it became serious, it became less of a joke. And I guess my message stopped being funny, and they didn’t invite me anymore. But I keep with the blogging. And now that things are not going very well in the United States, and I have a family, etc., I decided to move back to Russia where things are happy and stable and prosperous.
Mike Adams: You don’t have violent criminals and drug needles littering the underpasses under the roads there in St. Petersburg? Because we love that in America. That’s part of the American culture.
Dmitry Orlov: Yes, it is. And right in the center of a city of five million, I have a 15-year-old niece who is very pretty, who comes to visit us about once a week in the evenings and walks home after that by herself. And that’s considered perfectly normal, a perfectly safe place.
Mike Adams: Yeah, that would not be safe in any city in America. And actually, in most blue cities in America, she would have to step over human feces on the sidewalks in order to make it back home. But again, that’s what America has become. Let me mention your blog. It’s at boosty.to, that’s B-O-O-S-T-Y, boosty.to/ClubOrlov and Orlov is O-R-L-O-V, Club Orlov. So, you can check out Mr. Orlov’s content there. And I love the fact, may I call you Dmitry for the rest of the interview? Is that okay?
Dmitry Orlov: Absolutely.
Mike Adams: Okay. I noticed you’re very prolific also with online interviews over the years. And I caught one of your interviews recently with, I think his name is, is it Nima? Is that his name?
Dmitry Orlov: Yes, Nima.
Mike Adams: Nima, yeah. He’s got a great channel as well and rarely do I listen to an interview twice, but I listened to yours twice. And it just struck me as so insightful what you were saying about how the West, the culture of the West has become a culture of materialism and convenience. And as such, the culture is not prepared for collapse or hardship of any kind. Can you expand on that topic and comparing the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 to the collapse of the West that is underway now? And what are the cultural differences? What does that mean for the populations?
Dmitry Orlov: Well, Russia is all about survival Russians live in a climate that most other nations would not even consider inhabiting. In many Russian regions, the average January temperature is around minus 20, minus 40 degrees Fahrenheit. And that’s much too cold for a lot of people. The agriculture in Russia is sometimes good and sometimes terrible. There are failed harvests that occur relatively regularly. And in general, it is a place that has a lot of resources, but they’re rather diffuse and the distances are absolutely huge. So given all of that, it is not a place where humans can survive without helping each other. And in Russia, help is mandatory, you cannot turn down somebody who needs help. You can’t leave people on the street. You cannot disregard people who are hungry or who have been hurt or anything like that. That is just not part of the makeup. Whereas the United States is really a place where people went to make money. And they still go there to make money. If there was no possibility of making money in the United States, a lot of people would leave. And in fact, some of that is happening already. A lot of the university graduates that used to find jobs in the United States after graduation are now heading back to wherever, mostly to China, Korea, Taiwan, where it’s home where there is better employment, better possibilities. So, the United States is really fragile in the sense of it needs a prosperous economy just to survive. Whereas Russia will survive no matter what happens, even if there is no economy, people will still find a way to sustain each other.
Mike Adams: That’s extraordinary because in a collapse scenario, centralized supply chains no longer function efficiently or sometimes at all. And I think part of what you’re saying is that in Russia, the culture is one of being able to have a network, a redundant network through which you can source necessary goods or services that you need in order to survive. Whereas in America, the model of hyper-commercialization of big box stores like Home Depot and Best Buy and what have you has obliterated local small businesses that used to provide that local network of redundant systems. Is that a fair statement of part of what you’re saying?
Dmitry Orlov: Well, yes, well, the other thing is that the Russian government is actually pretty good at supporting the people. And one of the things that it does, one of the typical patterns is if private business does not serve a public good, it gets nationalized. And that has been happening historically in various bad situations that the country has found itself in. And to some extent, it’s happening now where foreign companies have been found to not serve the public good of the Russian people and are being nationalized. So that there is this fallback of public administration taking over for private enterprise and making sure that people are fed and clothed and housed and educated and all of the rest. And most of that is managed by the government in any case. And you know a lot of people over the years have asked me, well, do you really want the government to do all of these things because the government is so bad at it? And my answer is, well, not the American government, God forbid. But the Russian government, well, it muddles through somehow. No government is perfect, but the Russian government actually gets the job done much of the time.
Mike Adams: You know, it’s so many areas that are interesting to pursue with you here, but one of them is the fact that in the West, this big lie that we’ve all been taught for generations is that the West is superior because it’s engaged in free market capitalism, free market innovation and ideas. Whereas we were always taught that the former Soviet Union, oh, that’s essentially planned, essentially controlled economies that don’t work and that’s why it failed and that’s why it’s failing today. Well, but now here as a Texan myself, I look around and number one, the free market is not allowed to function in this country because of incompetent, corrupt government regulation and punitive actions that selectively target businesses that, for example, speak out against the current regime in power. So, there is no free market, there are winners and losers that are picked by the federal government. So, the big lie also is exposed by the fact that if you look around society in America today, like we just talked about the cities, cities are collapsing, homelessness, tent cities, shanty towns cropping up everywhere, massive inflation, violence on the streets, people being thrown onto the trains and subway systems in New York and other cities. So right now, Dimitri, and this is why your message is so pivotal. The big lie is crumbling to our own eyes here in America. What do you say to that?
Dmitry Orlov: Well, it’s not the first time. I mean, if you ask the Native Americans, they’ve been pretty much decimated, there’s been a continuous campaign to pretty much kill them off. If you look at what happened during the Great Depression and before that in the aftermath of the Civil War, there was no pretense of keeping people alive. After the Great Depression, even as wheat was being burnt and milk was being poured into rivers, people were starving with no effort being made to sustain them or keep them alive. Basically, America is not a place that takes care of people. America is a place that takes care of property, and the property is of the right kind of person, let’s say. It has inherited the structure of the class society of the old world. So basically, the aristocracy, instead of having various coat of arms and insignia specifying its rank, just has dollar signs next to their name now, millionaires and billionaires, etc. But it’s the same thing. It’s basically, it’s a country, it’s not a country, it’s a country club. It exists for the benefit of its owners, not the people who inhabit it.
Mike Adams: Absolutely, well stated. Now, you’re well-known for your book, The Five Stages of Collapse. And I’m showing it here on Amazon. This is the Survivor’s Toolkit of The Five Stages of Collapse. And you have some other books here, like Reinventing Collapse and so on, and I purchased these books. I haven’t read them yet, like I said. But can you just briefly tell us, where do you think that the United States of America is in the five stages of collapse? And what are those five stages, briefly?
Dmitry Orlov: Well, very briefly, the five stages are Financial Collapse, Commercial, Political, Cultural, Social, and Cultural. And in that order, I thought, but in the United States, they are occurring out of order. So that financial collapse will actually happen last, because of the use of the US dollar, more or less, as a weapon against other nations. The United States has been able to persist in a bankrupt state for a really long time. And nobody can predict when it will come to a calamitous end. So, it can actually hollow out its industry. Its political system can be a complete shambles, a corrupt scheme headed by a person whose brain doesn’t work. And socially and culturally, the collapse has pretty much run its course. If you want to look at social collapse, visit your nearby shantytown. And cultural collapse, well, all you have to do is turn on the television set, watch it for a while, and realize that there is really a culture except commercial culture. So, if you don’t want to buy it, there is no culture at all. Culture is supposed to be something that sustains people, that they generate themselves. And here, it’s just a packaged product.
Mike Adams: Yes, well stated and we see in TikTok videos or even on Twitter X, you always see these video snapshots of what’s happening across America. And it’s this bizarre combination of violent rampages among the people, combined with this gross incompetence and historical ignorance of the ruling class. And this is what disturbs me so much as an American. I mean, I love the concept upon which America was founded. I honor the founding fathers of America, and I believe in liberty and freedom. I mean, I’m gullible enough to actually still believe in the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. I still believe in it. But nobody else does who’s in power, right? And they’re stupid. On top of that, the level of incompetence is stunning when I hear, for example, a member of Congress representing Houston, Texas, says that the reason we haven’t colonized the moon is because the moon is made of gases. And she says the surface of the sun is almost too hot to live on, and things like that. And then there’s another congressman who was worried that if we put too many troops on the island of Guam, that it might capsize and tip over. And these are people who represent us, and they’re idiots. They couldn’t pass fifth grade science or fifth grade anything. You’re with you looking at this as a Russian, what is your perspective? I mean, do you have idiots like this in Russian government too, or is it just us? I mean, what do you think of this?
Dmitry Orlov: No, they get tossed out of office in Russia pretty quickly. There’s a Russian formula, which is a loss of confidence, and that’s all it takes for somebody to get jettisoned out of office. So, if some regional governor loses Putin’s confidence, he’s gone and there’s a new appointee in his chair the next day, who then gets to stand for election the next time the election rolls around. He doesn’t get elected, too bad, gets replaced. So, it is not a place where people can pretty much be from some bailiwick and stick around in that bailiwick driving everyone crazy, because they have a political machine that gets them reelected. That just is not possible in Russia. It just doesn’t happen. So, it’s a very different system. There’s also a tradition in Russia where you have to actually do something before you go into politics. You actually have to be good at something. Traditionally, engineering, because it’s a culture that is very technical. And so technical professionals rise to the top much more easily than lawyers and financial types and other do-nothing symbol manipulators. You actually have to know how to get stuff to work before you get to tell people what to do, that’s a fairly typical thing.
Mike Adams: I mean, I’m really glad to hear that. And I was talking about, we have one member of Congress who is very intelligent. His name is Representative Thomas Massie. I believe he’s of Kentucky. And he’s an inventor. He’s got patents, he’s an engineer. And he’s sharp, right? But that’s the exception to the rule. But let’s talk about the result of the Russian people being very technically capable and looking at the military technology. So, I’ve pointed out many times how Russia is leading the way on hypersonic weapons development and actually deploying them effectively. Russia has innovated drone technology and also working on autonomous AI-controlled land combat vehicles that have been at least demonstrated a little bit. And also, electromagnetic warfare capabilities and anti-air defense systems. I think in all those areas, Russia is leading the world. And yet, in the West, what we have is this woke culture where you get the job for being woke. So, if you have purple hair and a nose ring and you’re a transgender, you get the job where the guy who can actually do the engineering is passed over for the job. And that’s why we have bridges falling down and hypersonic missiles that don’t work and everything’s falling apart in America. Is this, do you see that the way I see it? Or do you have different comments or different views on that?
Dmitry Orlov: Well, actually, it’s a little bit more nuanced in America. So, the lunch cheaters, the managerial class, they have to have the nose rings and the dyed hair and the surgically removed or attached genitals and whatever else. That’s now a requirement, I guess having an interesting sexual life is a requirement of some sort for any sort of a position like that. There’s a quota for that sort of people. But when it comes to people who actually are supposed to get the job done, it’s actually okay to hire white guys, but they don’t know how to manage these white guys. There’s no understanding of the fact that if somebody’s job is to know all about some very crazy widget that only has one application but without which you can’t get a weapons system to work, then you have to guarantee these people lifetime employment because they will not invest tens of years of their life in studying this widget. And that used to happen in the United States. There used to be people who were basically lifers in an industrial or engineering job. But now what they do is they approve some weapons program, and then lo and behold, they expect competent engineers to pop into existence spontaneously. They have to be young, and they have to have at least 10 years of experience, and they can’t be any older than 40 because at that age, health insurance gets too expensive for them and their families, and they don’t work as much because they’re older. And so, the whole thing falls apart because nobody knows what’s going on. So, you know, the United States tried to work up some sort of hypersonic weapons system. I don’t remember its code name or anything. But first time it flew on an airplane, and it didn’t come off. It just, they landed with it attached the second time it attached, and the engine didn’t start and it dropped. And then it just goes on like that. So, what they’re good at is PowerPoint presentations, 3D models of things, catered lunches, get togethers where you fly people from across the country to hobnob with each other and discuss weapons programs. But not so much when it comes to the development of the actual weapon. That is somehow overlooked. And then when it comes time to develop the said weapon, it turns out that even if they do come up with something, it’s going to be at least 10 times more expensive than if the Russians or the Chinese make it. Much more fragile, much more maintenance intensive, and much harder to operate. All of those things are generally the case.
Mike Adams: And those are some critical points when you talk about the industrial output capabilities of nations and where Russia can manufacture a, I think a 152- or 155-millimeter artillery piece for about $600, but the West spends about $6,000. And the West just can’t output very much for all the reasons that you just mentioned. That’s key but I love what you said about how in the West, they love to fly people together and have meetings and have food catered in. I’ve been invited to a lot of such things. People like to get together and talk about big ideas. t’s always a waste of time. And pardon my language, but I was thinking of doing a podcast called U.S. The Empire of Bulls**t, because everything’s just bulls**t. And I’m tired of it. I’m a guy who gets things done. I’m actually building an AI large language model project. We’ve got banks of computer servers. We wrote all our own Python code. We’re building free speech language models that we’re giving them away for free on our website, Brighteon.ai for anybody who wants to check it out. But you know, Dmitry, the only reason that that’s getting done is because I’m the only one making the decisions. There’s no investors. There’s no consensus. There’s no group. It’s me getting s**t done. And you, like, I’m an alien in this country because there’s just a culture of bulls**t everywhere. Everybody just wants to talk and have brochures and do marketing and brainstorming, and nobody’s doing any work anymore. And you can tell I’m frustrated about that, but that’s what I see. Nobody wants to work in this country. Are you surprised to hear that?
Dmitry Orlov: Well, what they call work is actually some kind of a social activity. And if there is no social activity, then they don’t feel secure. They don’t feel good, they get anxiety attacks. And they’re just generally, they become useless and unpleasant to deal with. So, you have to coddle Americans in order to get them to do anything at all. I used to work for a corporation where I ran a team of developers, mostly writing database code for big applications. And I found that around the turn of the century, it became impossible to make people feel responsible for anything. So, you couldn’t really say, well, if you signed up to do X and you screwed up, then you failed and you don’t get to try again. You get to do something completely different for a change. That’s just impossible because this person that you just said is a failure is now hurt. It’ll require very expensive counseling to get that person back online and etc., and that was happening for a while. So, there isn’t really any sort of feedback or discipline going on with regard to failure and the quality of the work and things like that but people started getting away with failure, basically.
Mike Adams: Well, well stated. People started getting away with failure. And I would say that in the two decades since then, the time period that you just mentioned, it has become so much worse. There’s a culture of a neurological fragility in America. And I’m really interested in your comments on this and especially contrasting that to, do you see this in Russia at all? Because see, I have, my wife is from Taiwan, for example, and I lived in Taiwan before I speak a fair amount of Mandarin Chinese. And when I was in Taiwan in the 1980s, Taiwan was a very rigorous, studious country of industrialists and they were willing to work and they were innovative. I mean, I love the Taiwan people for that reason. But today sort of the Western woke culture has been exported to Taiwan. And then Taiwan is increasingly like America, where now there’s this hyper-privileged attitude. Oh, we shouldn’t have to work, we’re consumers, not producers. And there’s all kinds of LGBT themes and, you know, groomers and transgenders all over Taiwan now. So, it’s going in the same direction as America, but is that just an infectious cultural virus of the West or is that happening in Russia at all?
Dmitry Orlov: It’s an infectious cultural virus of the West that has been blocked in Russia to some extent. Not fully, I would say, but the LGBT, I wouldn’t call it a movement. It’s more of an organization, non-government organization, international. That’s been blocked in Russia rather successfully. Various types of efforts to corrupt the youth through the use of the internet mostly have been blocked to some extent, but not fully. Some inroads are still being made. For instance, YouTube is still active in Russia because the Russians, I guess, are, you know, they have more important things to do than YouTube. But there are people on YouTube who get paid by these transnational entities that corrupt history, that basically present in a pseudo-educational context corrupt version of world and Russian history with a certain agenda in mind. And that is quite insidious and that has not been dealt with yet. There’s also the problem that a lot of Russian educational materials have been corrupted by various Western grants and with the idea of basically dumbing down the Russian population so that they all, basically, people who could work on a gas or an oil pump for export and then be consumers of imported products. That was the plan. That plan has failed, but we still have this legacy of really, really bad textbooks all over the place and educational materials, and all of that stuff still has to be purged, and it’s just a lot of work. It’s like cleaning out stables. You have to carefully take apart absolute crap to figure out where the crap is and cut it out and leave maybe some useful stuff, and it’s down to where even mathematics texts have been polluted with all kinds of nonsense and garbage.
Mike Adams: That’s interesting to hear, because of course that situation is extreme in the West, where also children’s libraries and schools are contaminated with gay sex guides for fifth graders and things like that. We have that problem in the liberal cities, but of course there’s this mass dumbing down of the population at large, and we now have this movement in America, and this is at universities as well, where simply being graded on performance is now considered a triggering event, and so not only are grade guidelines being watered down substantially, where if you get 50% of the questions wrong, you get a C now in many universities in America instead of an F. In some places, they’re just dropping grading altogether, and the result is that coming out of the universities and schools in America is a class of people who by at large are unemployable by those of us like myself, who my companies employ a lot of people, and I can hardly find anyone who can do basic math, much less logic or reason or anything like that. I mean, the American education system has been utterly decimated, unrecoverable, unless something dramatic changes. That’s how bad it is here, Dmitry. I don’t know if you knew that, but it’s bad.
Dmitry Orlov: There was a period of time in Russia where similar things were going on, and a lot of people went and got degrees in economics and finance and law, and they’re now selling cheap imported Chinese junk at open-air markets in provincial cities because that’s how useful that education is, and that whole educational paradigm was very much inspired by Western influences and Western grants paid for those educational materials, and its sort of a bit of a lost generation. These people, if they have kids, then what can they impart to their kids if their own education was that bad and the result was that bad? So, there might be even a lost generation and a half there, but it’s being fixed it’s being remedied.
Mike Adams: Wow, let me shift gears and ask you a different question, and I’m sorry if this sounds blunt, but hey, we’re not holding back here this is not a censorship channel. I’d like to ask you, in your view, are the Russian people aware of the real aims of the West and how the goal of the West was to economically isolate and weaken Russia, to use nefarious means to try to have an uprising to overthrow Putin and to install a Western puppet to rule Russia so that the West could then extract Russia’s natural resources because that’s a model that the West has done to many other countries all over the world? Is that common knowledge in Russia that that’s what the West is trying to do?
Dmitry Orlov: It’s the message in Russia. It’s something that is being discussed in great detail, dissected and analyzed on national television every day.
Mike Adams: Wow. Okay.
Dmitry Orlov: And on popular and less popular blogs, etc. You can find all kinds of very intelligent analysis of the situation. The problem is that it’s very easy to corrupt the minds of the young who are not really equipped to dispute messages that are forcefully imposed upon them by people in authority, figures of authority. And what happened during the 1990s is that a lot of effort went into completely discrediting the Soviet system. Some of that was deserved and some completely undeserved. For instance, the Soviet space program was and remains excellent. The nuclear power program was and remains excellent. I could go down a long list of excellent Soviet things that are now Russian things that are still excellent. But there was a period of time when all of that was being discredited and people were told that everything about the West is good and everything about Russia is bad and Russia should become like the West and just give up making its own stuff and import everything and just export oil and gas and nickel and a few other things and survive that way. And a lot of people’s minds have been polluted with this ideology and there’s really no way to quickly and efficiently un-pollute them. It’s sort of like you have a cup of tea or something and you put a teaspoon of horse manure in it and stir it in. Well, how do you get that horse manure back out? Because you want to drink the tea. There’s no way, you know. You have to start over. So, the younger generation is much more of the people who are in school now or in grade school now are much more capable of taking on board the message of Russia having friends around the world, lots of them. The majority of the world is on Russia’s side or at least neutral and then Russia having enemies. And these are not enemies of just Russia. These are enemies of most of the planet. The entire world is sick of America, you know. It’s not just Russia. And so that message is sinking in and its sort of drifting down in terms of generation. So, the older people who grew up during the Soviet Union and they actually now understand what’s going on and perhaps understood it all along. So, they’re easy. They’re easy. And the young people, the school kids are also easy. But then there is this gray mass of mentally deficient people in the middle who have somehow absorbed this Western liberal dogma and there’s no way to get it out.
Mike Adams: Well, I think, I would imagine that situation is going to change dramatically as the collapse of the West really accelerates because it’s going to be increasingly difficult to argue that the Western model is working when the cities are in a state of collapse. Crime is everywhere. I mean, California, every producer who can flee California has, is in the process of fleeing or has already fled and California is facing a massive budget deficit because of that. And this is happening everywhere. Americans are moving out of the blue states and into the red states and so we’re going to see a collapse of the cities. But also, I mean, a collapse of the value of the dollar and globally. So, let’s segue to that. Let’s talk about energy and currency and the BRICS currencies. I know you’ve talked about that, but Russia’s gift to the world and especially Western Europe was Russia’s willingness, one of many gifts, willingness to export affordable energy, clean energy in the form of natural gas to power Germany’s industrial economy. America comes along, blows up Nord Stream, the pipelines, proving that America engages in terrorist acts of destroying civilian infrastructure and proving that America is the enemy of Germany. Not that Russia is the enemy of Germany, but America is the enemy of Germany. Germany is suffering today because America blew up its energy source, which was Gazprom, right? And along with that, then America weaponizes the dollar, as you said, cuts off Russia from the SWIFT system. But as a result, America is isolating its own currency globally as other nations are seeing the theft of 300 billion dollars of Russian assets held by mostly European banks now, seized, stolen from Russia. All the other countries around the world are looking at this and saying, why would we ever want to buy dollars or euros? Why would we want to do business with American banks or Western banks at all? So, energy and currency. Can you speak to those two things, Dmitry?
Dmitry Orlov: Well, yes, that was a gigantic miscalculation made by the United States. The idea was that if the United States took over the Ukraine and made the Ukrainians behave so badly that Russia had to intervene to basically protect the lives and safety of its citizens living in the Ukraine, which number in the millions, then that would be the excuse to impose sanctions on Russia, which would devastate the Russian economy, bring Russia to heal, and cause the Russian citizenry to rebel and overthrow Vladimir Putin, allowing the Americans to install a more pliable dictator in place of the elected president, who would then basically do America’s bidding from then on and hopefully make it possible to dismember Russia into lots of little insignificant helpless countries. That plan failed miserably because the Americans misunderstood this basic thing, which is that Russia kept the global economy growing by doing two things. First, by exporting lots and lots of energy to the West at reasonable prices. And second, by exporting much of the money that it made in the process to the West and investing it in the West.
Mike Adams: That’s right. That’s right.
Dmitry Orlov: And so, when those two things stopped, there was this complete incomprehension of, oh my God, what have we just done? We just cut ourselves off from our source of cheap energy, so now we’re industrially non-competitive, and now we’re short of money. Because even with Russia being this lifeline of both energy and money, energy and wealth, exporting its wealth, the West was barely taking over economically, maybe producing a return on investment of one or two percent, whereas in Russian industry, a typical return on investment of 20 or 30 percent is not unheard of. So basically, the West has completely cut off itself from the country that was feeding and sustaining it. And lo and behold, the Russian economy is growing faster than the world average and doing really well, and some parts of the Russian economy are just growing by leaps and bounds. Russia is no longer exporting too much of the raw materials because it has found that it can process these into products and export the products for a lot more money, and that in turn shuts down a lot of German business and American business because it’s no longer necessary. So, it was a gigantic miscalculation, staggeringly huge miscalculation, basically handing to Russia a major victory and lots of territory and lots of citizens who speak Russian. So that’s really, in a nutshell, what has happened over the past decade or so.
Mike Adams: This, the weaponization of the dollar and the attempts to isolate Russia from Western financial systems, as you just stated, it caused Russia to then take its wealth generated from energy sales and to invest that more domestically, to turn that money inward. And from that domestic investment, even in just the last two years, Russia has been able to grow its domestic industrial output significantly, especially military output, in a way that is dwarfing the aggregate output of all Western European nations combined, and in some cases, even the United States combined. Whereas the United States has chosen to outsource, the United States was relying on globalism and its Navy to protect global sea routes in order to get cheap goods moved efficiently and quickly from point to point across the oceans. That model is now collapsing. In fact, as we’re doing this interview, Dmitry, Joe Biden just announced, I think, tens of billions of dollars of new tariffs on China. Accusing China of, what do they call it, excessive output or excessive production. This is the new Western term. You’re making too much stuff, China. How dare you? How dare you manufacture goods? See, Dmitry, this is what I’m talking about. This is what drives me bonkers. As an American, and I’m sorry to take up so much time. I’ll get to my question, but as an American, I just want to compete on a level playing field with the world. I want to produce, I want to have innovation, ideas, creativity, patents. I can coexist in a world on a level playing field with Russians or Chinese or Koreans or Iranians or anybody. If we just have peaceful trade and ideas, we can all benefit. But I live in a country run by warmongering, psychopathic lunatics who don’t believe in a level playing field. They want to bully the world. And as a result, they’re cutting off their own necks in the process and bleeding this country out. That’s what I see happening. I guess, I didn’t have a direct question in that, but what are your comments?
Dmitry Orlov: Well, I see that happening as well. And I think that you know, the horse has long left the barn and there’s no way of catching it and chasing it back in. Basically, the United States has gone all in with financialization and this model of making stuff anywhere in the world where it can be made cheaply, not realizing that these effects, these economies are false economies and they’re temporary. Basically, fundamentally, you have to have your own productive population, educated, productive industrial workers, or you will not have an industrialized country. You will have tent cities. You will have collapsing infrastructure. You will find yourself incapable of maintaining the infrastructure that isn’t collapsing, so it will collapse as well. And so, the Americans are now finding themselves in a position where a bridge you know, in Baltimore that would probably take the Chinese, what, three weeks to replace, or else. They’re pretty much just talking about doing something about it and finding somebody who might do it. The Army Corps of Engineers said that they can’t. So now, they’re at a loss and they can’t find a contractor who will handle that job of that level of complexity. Again, the Chinese would get it done in three weeks to a month. So that is happening in the United States and because there was this idea that other little people will do all of the dirty work for us and we’ll just manage the money and we’ll just have Wall Street and we’ll just have big investment banks and all the rest. Manage it kind of top down. That has stopped working because you do have to have an educated and productive population or you don’t have an industrialized country.
Mike Adams: That’s right. That’s right. And you don’t have a sustainable economy if you’re just printing money, exporting inflation, and consuming the goods of the world. That can work for a little while, not for long. A couple more questions.
Dmitry Orlov: The other thing is that the political class is very much addicted at this point to pretending for the sake of their electoral politics, of their electoral posturing, you might say, of being abusive towards the rest of the world with unilateral sanctions which are illegal according to the UN. Only the UN Security Council has the right to impose sanctions and various tariffs that violate the agreements that the US has entered into, World Trade Organization agreements. The US basically is a very bad player, very bad boy in terms of how it deals with the rest of the world. And all of this, and especially the fact that the federal debt of the United States, the national debt, is unrepayable and is heading towards a cliff where the country will have to borrow money just to pay the interest on the outstanding debt, and will not be able to even spend the money that it is required to spend by law on things like social security. So, it’s heading in that direction. But most importantly, a lot of people are seeing that the United States dollar and treasuries as an investment are toxic. And the faster that countries get rid of them, and instead pile up gold, you know, the better it will be for them when the final crash comes. I’ve been saying this for a while now that, you know, a moment will come when offering somebody a million dollars will just get you punched in the mouth. And that moment is coming.
Mike Adams: Well stated. Let me remind our readers of your books. The Five Stages of Collapse is what you’re perhaps best known for. You’ve got other books, Reinventing Collapse, The Soviet Experience and American Prospects, and so on. And your website is at Boosty.to/ClubOrlov if people want to check you out there. And we’re almost out of time to meet you. I apologize for venting so much here. But it’s funny because you being on my show is so refreshing to me to be able to have a point of view outside of the muck of what we see domestically, where most of the people that I interact with are so brainwashed by American propaganda that they can’t see. It’s like they’re deep-sea diving in a muddy pond and they can’t see anything that’s happening geopolitically. So having you on is refreshing. Let me ask you this one question. Are the other Russian people, in your view, do they understand that by at large, the American people, not the ruling class, but the people, they don’t want a war with Russia. They don’t harbor any hatred towards Russians. They just want to engage in in trade and business with Russians and even sharing cultural experiences with many nations around the world. Is that understood in Russia or do the Russian people think that all Americans hate them and want to kill them all or something like that?
Dmitry Orlov: Well, it’s a little of each. I think a lot of the Russian population is apolitical to some extent. So, yeah, they vote for Putin because that’s a thing to do. Everybody loves Putin. Everybody votes for Putin, that sort of thing. But in terms of delving deeper into international politics, a lot of people just don’t do it at all. For a lot of people, America is so exotic and so far away. You know, Russia is a country surrounded by lots and lots of neighboring countries. And a lot of them are, you know, I don’t mean to insult anyone, but more interesting than the United States. And the Russians are very attuned to a lot of things going around in their gigantic neighborhood that spans half the planet, you know, about 12 time zones worth of planet. So, a lot of them just don’t really pay attention to the United States. What they’re seeing of the United States, the tent cities and what they hear about the fentanyl addicts and all of that footage is something that makes them cringe. And I can sort of understand that because now I’m living in Russia for quite a few years now. Very comfortable environment here. Safe, prosperous, comfortable. And then looking at what’s going on in the United States is really cringeworthy. And I would go a step further and say that the United States is becoming, too much of the world, something of a mental health hazard. Something that you don’t need to look at too much because you might not be able to unsee it.
Mike Adams: That’s a really great observation there. And I agree with you on that. I mean, here I am in Texas, you know, I’m armed all the time. I have a security dog here in my studio, a trained military attack dog, simply because of how crazy the world is, even in Texas. I can’t, even as an armed man with a security dog, I still have to be very much alert and aware because crazy, violent, insane people could come up at any time and try to carjack you, for example. Now, they would get shot obviously, but I don’t want to harm my hearing by discharging a firearm in my vehicle. So, I would rather that not happen. But that’s reality of what America has become. It’s very sad. And in conclusion, Dimitri, what do you think the American people are going to see in the next two years?
Dmitry Orlov: I’m not absolutely 100% sure, but I have a very strong hunch that the US federal government will become non-functional and that it’ll be every state for itself.
Mike Adams: So, accelerated secession, perhaps, or just anarchy?
Dmitry Orlov: Chaos.
Mike Adams: Chaos.
Dmitry Orlov: The moment the federal government loses the ability to spend money the way it is doing now, it becomes a defunct state and the United States becomes just states.
Mike Adams: Right. Yeah, that’s probably coming. Anything else you want to state here as we wrap this up? And I really appreciate your time and I apologize for asking such long commentary questions. I won’t do that again if we have you back, but anything you want to add here at the end?
Dmitry Orlov: Well, I just want to thank you for the job you’re doing. You know, I really do want to be, to remain helpful to inform people to the best of my ability about what’s really going on in the world because the US media is not doing its job at all. And so, voices like yours are very important.
Mike Adams: Yes. Thank you for saying that. And let me state for the deep state agents watching this program, I don’t want to see America destroyed. I want to see America saved. But we must become aware. We must be honest about the problems. And that’s why you, Dimitri, are so beneficial to this program to help point out from a fresh third-party perspective as a Russian, you can see more clearly what a lot of the American people can see because this *** becomes normalized in this country. The stuff we’re dealing with every day becomes normalized and it’s not normal. It’s not normal to have pedophiles walking around the streets, kidnapping children and raping them. And it’s not normal to have carjackings all over town and 60,000 Americans a year dying from fentanyl overdose. That is not normal, but it’s become normal. We’ve got to stop it. Otherwise, I mean, well, like you say, America probably falls into the individual states. That’s probably where this is headed. So, thank you, Dimitri, for your analysis.
Dmitry Orlov: Thank you.
Mike Adams: And by the way, you have great bandwidth too, because I mean, you’re joining us from Russia and this is actually only very few glitches. And by the way, you’re the third guest that I’ve interviewed from Russia who has said how peaceful, how tranquil it is in Russia and how affordable the land is there. It must be true.
Dmitry Orlov: It is. It is. Yeah. Lots of Russians are just spending a bit of their savings and getting a huge chunk of land. That’s a popular thing.
Mike Adams: Wow. That’s unobtainable in America today. In any case, Dimitri, it’s been a pleasure speaking to you. Thank you for your analysis. We wish you peace, and please, please help spread the word among your contacts in Russia that many of us in America, we seek no war, no conflict, no hatred. We seek peace and trade with Russia and other countries around the world. That’s the way I would like to see it happen. But we’ll see. See where it goes.
Dmitry Orlov: Thank you.
Mike Adams: All right. Thank you so much, Dimitri. All right, folks. Again, Dimitri Orlov has been our guest today. And his books are incredibly insightful. I encourage you check out his books on Amazon, Barnes and Noble and other booksellers. Check out his blog and his other interviews online. And feel free to share this interview. And again, the reason I have him on here, and again, I have to thank him for staying up late in Russia to join us, is because he can help point out the problems that we need to fix here in America. Do we want to have a constitutional republic that still is alive? We’re going to have to change course, because right now where things are headed with not just America, but all of the Western nations, it is a suicide cult run by incompetent maniac lunatics like the leaders of Germany, for example, the leaders of France, the leaders of the UK, are so incompetent that you know, they can’t even make their aircraft carriers work. By the way in the UK, the propellers don’t turn. I mean, come on. It’s a clown show. We’ve got to fix this. And it’s going to mean putting competent people in positions of authority and power, people who can make good decisions and get things done. That’s what I support. So, God bless America, but let’s fix America. Thank you for watching today. I’m Mike Adams, the founder of Brighteon.com. Take care.
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