DEBATE: Does The Entire World Face A "Bronze Age Type" Collapse? | Brent Johnson vs Craig Tindale

**SPEAKER_1** (0:00)
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**SPEAKER_2** (0:02)
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**SPEAKER_3** (0:05)
How much did we save?

**SPEAKER_1** (0:07)
Enough.

**Craig Tindale** (0:08)
Enough to get lost?

**SPEAKER_2** (0:10)
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**Craig Tindale** (1:00)
I think the current cycle is ending. I think we're facing a much more fundamental Bronze Age type collapse where the things that we want to do aren't sustainable.

**Adam Taggart** (1:23)
Welcome to Thoughtful Money. I'm Thoughtful Money Founder and your host, Adam Taggart. And today, we have a very special debate for you. We will be talking with Craig Tindale and Brent Johnson. And most of you are probably familiar with Brent because I interview Brent on this channel quite often. Brent is the CEO and portfolio manager at Santiago Capital, but probably even better known as the developer of the dollar milkshake theory.
Brent, in his travels, talks to lots of smart people. And one of them is Craig Tindale, who is publisher of a popular financial substack, and he manages investments for a private family office out there in Australia. And they oftentimes get engaged on sharing ideas back and forth, batting them back and forth. They were doing so on X recently. And the audience that was sort of watching the debate said, you know what, you guys should get together and actually hash this out on camera. And somebody was crazy enough to say, you should do it on Adam Taggart's program on Thoughtful Money.
And everybody agreed to that. So we're making it happen here right now. And gentlemen, I'll let you get started in just a second. I'm positioning this as a debate. My strong sense is you gentlemen probably agree on more things than you disagree on. But let's flesh all that out.
And obviously where you disagree, let's try to understand why. Folks, this is going to probably be somewhat wide-ranging, but we're going to cover topics like the increasing instability of our economic and financial systems, how competition for scarce resources will define the future, which countries will fare better in this process, and which ones will fare worse, and the future of fiat currency. So with all said and do, gentlemen, let's kick right in. First off, Brent and Craig, thanks so much for joining me.

**Craig Tindale** (3:17)
Thanks for having us.

**Brent Johnson** (3:18)
Thanks for doing this. This will be fun.

**Adam Taggart** (3:20)
This should be a lot of fun.
Well, there's, like I said, there's a lot of different directions we could go. Craig, why don't I give you the baton here at the start? You write a lot on your sub stack. It's your prodigious producer of insights. One of your frameworks for looking at the world is what you call the Tindale Trap. I'm wondering if you can sort of succinctly describe that for us, and then let us know how you think that is going to shape events going forward.

**Craig Tindale** (3:52)
I guess at its simplest level, it's a bifurcation between a financial economy and a material economy. Financial economy, we all know what that is. That's paper on paper. That's the economy that we've lived in for the last 40 or 50 years. And gradually, we've dematerialized or deindustrialized the economy from that financial economy. And we've reached a critical point. We've reached an endpoint, which is the material economy is no longer responding to the financial economy as it did. It's a gradual process.
It doesn't happen all at once, but it happens gradually. And we've come into a situation where we've got a rival, the West has a rival who is doing a material job on the economy, who is providing most of our substances. And so we've gone from a point where, you know, China provides 50 to 98 percent of the metals and, you know, just about everything else in the economy. And the West buys it off them. And that has some consequences for the various different currencies, you know, for the Australian economy, you know, we're selling raw materials, we're not selling the end state product. That's refined in China, for the American economy.