Britain is under attack by the world’s two worst entities - rape gangs and bond market speculators. As Starmer mounts a last stand, we’re reporting from the tattered remnants of old blighty. Is Musk just messing with Starmer’s tiny mind - or are the Americans serious about sinking HMS Britannia. 

Meanwhile, just as the world is thirsting for AI, the Biden regime has decided it will titrate the market for the specialised NVIDIA graphic chips that are vital to building AI systems. 

It’s like sanctions - but for everyone else in the world. So will this make America more friends?

Finally, we’re revisiting a Multipolarity tin foil hat classic: Trussification – the process of targeted financially dynamiting of a political regime. As Biden squeezes the oil market, is he looking to leave a tightly coiled inflation turd on the desk of his successor? 

***

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Welcome to 2025.

How bright is the future?

Andrew and Philip share their predictions.

😎😎😎

Ian Proud was once Britain's man in Moscow.

A career diplomat of 24 years, he got to look in directly upon the withering relationship between the United Kingdom and Russia, in the crucial period from 2014 until 2019.

In fact, he rebuilt embassy staffing structures following the mass expulsion after the March 2018 Salisbury nerve agent attack.

Since then, Proud has been outspokenly critical on questions of UK-Russia relations.

This week, Philip and Andrew are trying to get into the British diplomat mindset as relations approach a crucial juncture.

***

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Trumpism 2.0 offers both danger and opportunity. 

Trumpism 1.0 was built around being tough with China. 

And while that is no longer a rhetorical priority for the big man, much of what was started in 2016 has since become the accepted wisdom in DC. 

Today, Trumpism 2.0 is as much about American competitiveness – in an international market that has slipped further away from its hegemon across the last eight years. 

It’s about deregulation, DOGE, and developing strategic dominance in the emerging fields of AI, weapons tech, and genetics.  

We’re in for four years of great power competition with China - against a background of a new focus on US competitiveness. 

Almost no one spans these subjects as elegantly as Steve Hsu. 

A professor of theoretical physics, startup founder and one of the most prominent members of the new counter-elite that has recently emerged from the high tech world of America's west coast to challenge the status quo in Washington DC 

Steve's research has included black holes and quantum information, dark energy, quantum gravity, and quark matter. He has also contributed to the field of genetics, especially on the construction of genomic predictors of complex human traits.

Steve has founded several startups, including Othram, a company that uses DNA sequencing to help solve hot and cold criminal and missing persons cases, Genomic Prediction, which pioneered polygenic screening for embryos in IVF, and most recently Superfocus, an enterprise GPT that uses Large Language Models for language capability. 

Somehow, he finds time to host Manifold, one of the world's most interesting podcasts and a must-listen for all those who wish to keep abreast of the ideas and knowledge of the Silicon Valley and VC world.

***

Don’t call it a comeback! Four years after the last embers appeared to have been snuffed out, this week, the Syrian Civil War shocked fans by announcing it’s getting the band back together. Is the world’s most confusing conflict about to get explicable? Not entirely. We’ll be explaining why the situation in Aleppo is not something you’ll brush up on soon.

Meanwhile… The fireworks guns have been a great special effects innovation. Madam President is certainly giving a hammy turn of character acting. But the script is stale. The dialogue is dreary. Frankly, the franchise is dying. Is this the last of the colour revolutions? 

Finally, The French can’t pass a budget. The Prime Minister is about to resign. The President himself is running around the middle east gladhanding potential bond buyers. Two and a half months on from his bold gambit, things are looking positively pre-revolutionary in the Elysee Palace. Macron has kicked the can down the road – now the can is kicking back. 

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As the first every intermediate range ballistic missile to be fired in anger lands on Ukraine, it is more than just a world historic event in the evolution of arms. It’s a shot across the bows for the broader West. 

How do we style this one out? 

Right now, our leaders are a gorilla holding a ming vase. 

Given their overall skill levels, will we make it through the present crisis without losing our eyebrows in the white heat of a nuclear blast? 

In part one of this week’s special edition we’ll be considering the US-Ukrainian Missile attacks that kicked off the present round of tit for tat. 

In part two, we’ll be considering the retaliatory threat of the Russian Oreshniks. 

And in part three, we’ll be considering the overall playbook for World War Three.

***

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In a very special episode, we’re celebrating our hundred with a walk back along the yesteryears of Multipolarity. 

Two yesteryears in particular - 2023 and 2024. 

That’s right: we’re old enough to remember the Multipolar world back when it was a glint in Xi Jingping’s extreme-UV lithography factories. 

Back when American decline was just a gobbet of drool on Joe Biden’s chin.  

Back when the Middle East wasn’t entirely on fire, and Germany hadn’t yet totally fallen off a cliff. 

Before the Houthi rockets, the BRICS bank notes, and Tucker Carlson’s Moscow hamburger.  

Back then, on January 10, 2023, there was a brand new podcast, but one sophisticated enough to have registered its own web domain. 

Now, after 100 episodes, we’re taking some time, letting our belts out, pouring a glass of Macallan Lalique, putting some of our own classic grooves on the record player, and getting a bit wisftul. 

We’ll be going on an audio tour of Multipolarity world. 

You’ll hear a clip from an original show - then you’ll hear us, reviewing it. 

What it meant then, what it means now. Where our predictions were off base - and where we were bang on target. 

We’ve charted the rise of a new multipolar world order. Now, we’re charting the charting…

***

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From Marco Polo to Marco Rubio – the West keeps rediscovering that China is a big Asian landmass with a mind of its own. So is Trump’s hawkish new Secretary of State about to get himself tangled in a Chinese finger trap of tariffs? 

Meanwhile, back on the Europe thing, Multipolarity’s pet punching bag Ursula von der Leyen is about to be put through four years of BDSM, as the Trumpists resile from the European frontier even while picking fights with its leadership. Is Ursula’s post-election pledge to buy more US natural gas just the first of many times she will be called upon to kiss the Don’s rings?

Finally, we’ll be raising a glass to the death of the polling industry, long predicted on Multipolarity. Far from dining out on their prowess, the Nate Silvers and Anne Seltzers of this world will have to figure out whether they can eat excuses. Is there a grift still to be had in a world where the alleged experts can’t just +4 for the Shy Trump Effect?

***

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At the centre of the Global American empire, a storm is coming. But it’s in the European periphery that the effects will be the most acute. 

Can anyone steer a path through the rocks? 

We’ll be looking at chaos in the German auto industry - as Volkswagen overruns its cost budget by 20 per cent.  

At chaos in the European Union - as a heavily dug-in Von der Leyen regime goes full bunker mentality. 

And chaos in merrie ol’ England, as the wet wobbler Keir Starmer brings down the final curtain on the Special Relationship. 

Between one world and the next, between a rock and a hard place, it is America that decides, but it is Europe that is going to have to choose a new future. 

After the BRICS meeting in Kazan, a picture of a bundle of fake BRICS banknotes began to circulate online. Right up to a picture of Putin holding one, like a mobster holds a cigar. 

The intent was mocking. But while the end goal of the kind of paper that rappers shove into g-strings is still a long way off - in the background, the bureaucratic elves of BRICS were chipping away at the dense, dull, paperwork of a new payments system. 

This was never going to be a big bang. More like popping the world’s biggest roll of bubble wrap. 

After all, like the nuclear secrets themselves, the mechanism for making a new international method for the settlement of accounts is an obscure and technical thing. And it is eighty years since anyone tried to do it from scratch. 

Few people are better placed to be the Robert Oppenheimer to this kind of project than Warwick Powell. 

Powell is Adjunct Professor at Queensland University of Technology and the author of "China, Trust and Digital Supply Chains”, and "Dynamics of a Zero Trust World".

At his Substack, he blogs about China, trade, and the dense subterranean plumbing network that underlies the global payments system. 

This week, he joins us…  to explain how to make a new global currency. 

***

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Get us on Twitter. 

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