Watch the full video of our conversation on the Spread Great Ideas YouTube channel.

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Full Transcript of Our Conversation

Kicking Off with Schalk Dormehl

00:32 – Brian David Crane

 Please welcome my thoughtful and thought-provoking friend, Schalk Dormehl. Schalk is an aspiring polymath and a fellow lover of liberty and action-based philosophy. Today, we’ll be jamming on South Africa, personal sovereignty, one of my favorites, and if we have time, software development, entrepreneurship, and perhaps even some crypto.

00:51 – Schalk Dormehl

I’ll thank you very much for having me, Brian.

00:57 – Brian David Crane

 I always love that South African accent. Okay. Some context for those who are listening. You grew up in Pretoria, Elon Musk grew up in Pretoria. Pretoria’s a big city. Doesn’t mean you two knew each other.

The comment you had made to me before this show was you find it fascinating that a kid from Pretoria has decided to effectively hack the, uh, US government and hack being a loving term.

So, what has gone on in the past couple of months since Trump’s election? Uh, in particular, with the US relationship with South Africa. What is happening, and what has happened?

The ANC’s Grip on South Africa: Politics Since 1995

01:40 – Schalk Dormehl

Okay, so it’s hard for me to know whether or not to start in the present to work my way back or start in the past to work my way forward. But basically, like from my perspective in the present, what has basically happened is, the ANC has been running South Africa for a considerable amount of time, right?

So they were in de facto, well, they’ve been in full control since about 1995 when Nelson Mandela got sworn in. And unfortunately, they are like a very classical, they’re a combination of a classical communist organization and just a pure extractionist organization. And this wasn’t always the case.

It wasn’t quite the case under Nelson Mandela. It wasn’t the case under Thabo Mbeki. It began to become the case under like his replacement. I’ll remember his name now. But basically Jacob Zuma had him replaced with an interim president for a while. Kgalema Motlanthe, if I’m not mispronouncing that, and then it was Jacob Zuma.

After Jacob Zuma, essentially, we came to our current president and South Africa has this interesting thing about leaders where we’re mostly, I would say a lot of the country really hate the leader, and a very, very significant amount, but by some miracle, they keep giving us new leaders who we hate even more to the point where we actively miss the previous guys.

So that, that unfortunately has been the case now for multiple decades. So the thing is, we’ll get into more details basically, but the ANC government has been an exceptionally negligent and poor steward of South Africa. The results have been massive amounts of unemployment and essentially the type of scenery that one would imagine when you read Atlas Shrugged.

Johannesburg’s Fall from Glory: Economic Decline and De-Industrialization

03:44 – Schalk Dormehl

Right. There is a Twitter account that the followers can follow called Josie versus Josie. And all it does is it compares Johannesburg to previous Johannesburg. And we’re not even talking the previous, like, government here. We’re just talking like 15 years difference. And it is legitimately shocking to see.

Like, especially after the lockdown, one of my major concerns is just of how thing has, which is kind of like the main economic hub has actually actively begun to de-industrialize, right? We’re talking about looting, where the physical metal and walls are stolen out of things. So basically, that situation has been accelerating and my take on it at least is that, I’m up to Thomas Sowell school of how these things work.

I would say that the ANC is not a failed government because Africans or black people run it. It’s a failed government largely because it’s run by communists.

Blame Game Politics: How the ANC Uses Scapegoating to Stay in Power

04:38 – Brian David Crane

Yeah.

04:41 – Schalk Dormehl

So the thing is what they’ve done with their failures essentially is they’ve failed as failing governments do, they’ve increasingly started to rely on demagoguery where essentially they blame foreigners, they blame Indians, they blame white people.

They blame basically whoever is, is easy at hand, to blame for the failures. And they essentially like start to make promises, which serves two purposes. The one purpose is basically like, it allows them to put their hands into pockets that they were not previously able to access.

I’d say that’s probably a good 80 percent of the explanation, and about 15 percent of the explanation is that their existing support base, even though they chisel away at their existing support base with these obvious, like with this obvious corruption, and just these, like even if they weren’t corrupt, just obviously bad plans, they use that to try and galvanize like the core of their base against these minorities.

And this is not unique to South Africa, right? Like, I mean, it’s not the first time it’s happened. It’s obviously the thing that always jumps to mind is the amount of times the Jewish people have been persecuted in the world, but a similar pattern, like for instance, followed the Chinese people in Asia.

Race, Policy, and Power: South Africa’s Complex Political Landscape

06:02 – Schalk Dormehl

Ironically, the Germans, like German-speaking people in Eastern Europe, we’re very entrepreneurial, very central to the building of Eastern Europe, and they got repeatedly kicked out of places, as ironic as that is. And the similar thing is sort of like playing out here, basically.

South Africa. Yeah, that’s kind of like the state that South Africa was when, Donald Trump sort of got elected. One of the other things is that, yeah.

06:33 – Brian David Crane

So when he got elected the second time, right?

06:35 – Schalk Dormehl

Yeah. So I mean, that was theoretically the case when he got elected the first time as well. But we are now eight years on and the damage is that much harder to ignore. So basically what the ANC is also like quite famous for is, they hit the lottery of goodwill with Nelson Mandela, right. So Nelson Mandela is a very complicated character, and I believe he really deserves admiration, but for almost none of the reasons that people admire him for.

Right. He was a massively avowed communist. He, at one point decided that civil terrorism was a good idea. He was jailed politically, was kept in jail for a very long time. Eventually, his exit requirements were relaxed to the point where if he just disavowed the violence, they would have at least had let him out of jail, which he didn’t do.

07:33 – Schalk Dormehl

Now the miracle part about Nelson Mandela, in my opinion, and again, like, I just want to preface this all. I’m just a dog behind the keyboard, but I would say the real miracle there happened when someone who was trained by the communists because large amounts of their funding and their training and, a lot of their structure and even like their guiding documents came from the old USSR.

When somebody that into communism almost on a dime decided, wait a minute, this is not going to work. And at the same time decided that even though we could sort of like try to schism the country on racial lines, we’re going to let it go. And I would say, that he and the previous leaders, like by some miracle, took South Africa from a place that was sort of like a hot zone, between the West and the USSR.

And massively deflated a lot of that negativity. So the ANC inherited all of Nelson Mandela’s goodwill and they’ve squandered it. They’ve just squandered it in just like consecutive horrible fumbles of things and massive, massive amounts of corruption. Right. And they’ve sort of gotten a pass the whole time.

08:50 – Schalk Dormehl

Now they’ve always been very much aligned with communist regimes. They’ve been very sympathetic to Cuba. They’ve been very sympathetic to Venezuela. They’ve been, they’ve basically been very sympathetic to everyone who’s not the West very, very frequently. One of the things that seems to have really triggered the United States was last year when some subsection of the South African government essentially took Israel to, I believe it was the human rights commission or the human rights court.

Sorry. We have a human rights commission here, which is another misnomer, and as far as people, yeah.

09:30 – Brian David Crane

The ICC  of the International Criminal Court, I think. Yeah.

09:33 – Schalk Dormehl

So they took Israel there, I believe, on claims of genocide. And as far as at least the local papers are reporting, I again, I don’t know how much evidence or non evidence there is for this.

Every time I read something, every time I try to find fact-check something, it’s also becoming kind of tricky to get to the core of stuff. But that seems to have obviously angered the wrong kind of people in the United States, right? So the thing is, between their repeated mismanagement of the situation and their continuous support of things that the United States, I would say, both blue and red tribes like find pretty abhorrent.

They have now finally hit the point where if they gain any attention, especially from Donald Trump, it’s almost guaranteed to be negative. And so what happened off what has also been happening in the meanwhile, basically, is that lots of civil rights organizations from South Africa have, they’ve been lobbying various people in Washington, D.C.

And as far as I could tell, more Republicans, just because they’re more amenable to our, I guess, the “white plight.” If you want to call it, they’ve been lobbying them now for the better part of a decade. Going on 15 years where they’ve repeatedly traveled there and chatted to them and made their case of the argument and stuff.

Land Seizures and Economic Fallout: The Truth About Expropriation Without Compensation

10:54 – Schalk Dormehl

And basically like informed on the back of lots of the malfeasance of which the newest part of the malfeasance, even though this has been talked about for years and it’s gotten acted in like different stages. One of the worst parts basically now is a thing called Expropriation without Compensation.

Right. So it’s sort of like a zone. Let’s call it a Zombie Law, but it’s the kind of law that couldn’t quite get through and has now like recently for some reason, been pushed through and signed off by the president. And essentially what it allows the government to do is it can delegate to bureaucrats the right to essentially seize anything and put the burden of proof on the person who tries to resist the seizure.

Right, so that’s kind of like..

11:50 – Brian David Crane

Well, and it’s done under the auspices of, correcting supposedly, racial inequality or economic inequality. That’s what it’s sold as, right?

12:03 – Schalk Dormehl

Well, yeah, so part of the argument is basically, I check the numbers and then I have to go recheck the numbers. What I would encourage people who are listening to this is like, I would not believe the first thing I come across. On YouTube or Twitter or a news article for that matter, like it is quite complex to, to unravel.

Right? And I also wanna say that the process of unraveling the past, right? So what the ANC is, what they have presented this as is sort of like, the reason why everyone in South Africa is unemployed, like half the people are unemployed and poor is because there is land ownership inequality.

Right. And then now they’ll reference a lot of like very selective statistics about why this is the case. And they’ll refer to an even more selective set of things that happened in the past.

What I do want to say very clearly though, is that the unraveling of the past, like I would say two things.

13:02 – Schalk Dormehl

The first thing is, even if you are very involved, the unraveling of the history of what happened in South Africa is a hell of a task, right? Like it’s not even just one country. And I’ll get to that in a bit. And the second thing, like that’s incredibly complicated. And the second thing is essentially that we are now living in 2025.

It’s no longer an agricultural economy, right? Like that is not the majority of people don’t live on farms. The majority of people live in cities. The majority of wealth, I believe, at least that’s going to be created in the future in South Africa is, is not going to be agricultural, right? It might be industrial.

13:40 – Schalk Dormehl

It might be information related. It might be a whole bunch of different things. But what the ANC wants, right, and when I say wants, it’s also an extremely incompetent organization, right? This is not like a, I would say like you might have like tier one, oligarchies where they really know what they’re doing and they’re really like extracting it with almost surgical precision.

They’re not even like that competent, right? But what they have noticed basically is that they can constantly throw out misleading flares, essentially, and then they chase people down rabbit holes, or they have people chased down rabbit holes where they essentially go try to figure out what happened in the past.

They try to do things that me as a libertarian and an individualist just find completely abhorrent, which is try to decode collective guilt. Like collective guilt for things in the present is ridiculous, in my opinion, and collective guilt for things done by people who looked like you to people who are now making the claims is doubly ridiculous.

And the biggest problem is just essentially that it allows the ANC to run another course on the game, right? That, in my opinion, is what they want and that’s what they’re achieving, right? So..

14:55 – Brian David Crane

 And to never be held accountable for their past actions or past promises. And the failure to deliver on those promises.

15:03 – Schalk Dormehl

Yeah. So they want to kick the can, they sort of like want to kick the can down the road. So let me just ask, does that kind of like color in how we got to this point because essentially what happened? Yeah, so maybe we should just touch on. Yeah, okay..

15:17 – Brian David Crane

 I want to point out something important that you said about the history of South Africa and as I understand it. Is also the shared understanding of what happened in the past and why it’s so difficult to even agree around those things, which then makes it difficult to agree around upper, like difficult to agree about what should happen in the present because you’re starting from a place of you.

If you’re sitting across the table from someone who has a different understanding of the past  you can’t even really get to the present moment because you can’t. There’s no shared experience in a way. There’s no shared reference points.

16:03 – Schalk Dormehl

Yeah, I would say in that regard, like my experience of South Africa, I’m very glad to have this conversation because like my experience of South Africa has been that people of different races in South Africa, 9,999 times out of 10,000 times, whenever they encounter one another, it’s to mutual benefit.

And it was a pleasant experience for both people, right? One out of 10,000 times, the South African government somehow accomplishes the nearly impossible to sort of like turn us against each other. And I would basically say that is a large part of what I personally, like I’ve got a lot of friends who disagree with this, ironically on both sides, right?

They go, that’s too nice, or that’s too mean. But the fact of the matter is just that what the government accomplishes is. It accomplishes pulling us out of the present moment. Because most of the other South Africans that I’m going to run into tomorrow are going to be in this present moment, right?

So I’m going to walk into his store and it’s not going to be. Some situation of he was wrong 40 years ago. And now like, because I’m white, I’ve got to be charged. Like, there’s going to be none of that. I’m going to say “Hi Faisal.” He’s going to say, “Hi Schalk.” I’m going to buy my energy drink.

We’re going to laugh at some nonsense, and we’re going to walk out, right? Like that’s the most like that, that is the natural outcome. And I would say that the problem that I sort of see that the government does is.. What they do is they sort of like they invoke this thing, right?

And they can invoke it because most of the population’s attention is available to them and their attention is available because most of the population is unemployed and not doing well economically. Like there’s not only no growth, there’s degrowth. We’re now seeing stuff getting de-industrialized.

And if the guy was positively employed, he was moving forward. Right. I would say moving forward in the present, like moving forward in the near past and the near future, I would say the primary inoculation against demagoguery, right? Because now you can go, “Oh, okay, cool. Like we can work together.”

We can sort of go forward. I’m not going to, if I’m one race and you’re another race, I’ve got to come install an air conditioner at your house. Like I am not going to dig up the ancient past. If I have 5,000 different people to go install an air conditioner for, and by the same measure, I’m not going to tolerate your racism.

If I have 5,000 other clients who are not going to be racist towards me, and that’s kind of like the dangerous situation that South Africa sits in. Now, on the backdrop of that, and it’s very hard for me to tell whether or not Trump is always, I definitely don’t think he’s always earnest, but he’s often earnest.

Elon Musk vs. South African Bureaucracy: How BEE Laws Have Impacted Starlink

19:01 – Schalk Dormehl

But I don’t know about what exactly is earnest, right? So a bunch of his top advisors are ex South Africans, most notably Elon Musk, who’s from Pretoria, where I’m from. Elon Musk clearly has an issue with, with certain forms of injustice. He has repeatedly suffered one specific slight from the South African government, which is they’ve constantly insisted that he have BEE law, like he complied to BBEE laws for stalling, right?

So every country around us has stalling. We don’t have stalling. The primary reason for that.

19:32 – Brian David Crane

Explain what BEE laws are for the audience?

19:36 – Schalk Dormehl

Okay. So there have been several really bad things that, that the ANC government has, has done, right? So they’ve massively mismanaged a lot of funds. They’ve mismanaged certain towns down to the point where those towns are in complete states of decay and are now bankrupt.

Right. But one of the ways that they, and they’ve, they’ve tried these national level, broad sweeping legal actions to try and like make certain things work. So one of them is a thing called Black Economic Empowerment, or Broad Based Black Economic Empowerment. And, if you guys want to see more about that, like there’s a place called Sakelecha.

I’ll send you a link for them as well. And they talk like quite eloquently about exactly like how BEE is evolved over time. But the idea was to enable, uh, black businesses. You sort of like catch up with white content, with the white economy, essentially, like obviously after apartheid, makes a lot of sense on, on various levels why the economy was concentrated where it was concentrated.

So the idea was initially like enable black, like black run businesses to get a leg up. Eventually, it became sort of like, well, you get extra bonuses and opportunities. If you give away a part of your company to black ownership, right? And essentially, like in its newest incarnation, what they’ve started doing is they essentially want to license people who don’t implement BEE out of the economy, right?

And they want to do this for both large and small entities.

21:13 – Brian David Crane

What do you mean they want to license them?

21:15 – Schalk Dormehl

Okay, so I’m just getting the headlines here, but the idea with BEE basically was that initially it was like benefits to black-owned businesses, and then essentially like it was benefits to companies who gave away part of their ownership to get known historically disadvantaged people.

And right now, like it’s sort of like they’re now jacking it up to the point where if you don’t do that, we are going to exclude you from the economy. So in other words, like certain licenses, certain things will not be handed out and so forth, right?

21:46 – Brian David Crane

Pure extortion.

21:47 – Schalk Dormehl

Yeah it’s complete extortion basically. I would say if there’s one thing that maybe would hire left-leaning people that I will say plainly is that BEE has been the most, one of the most, if not the most destructive thing for South Africa.

Because what it is, I mean, like all government programs, accomplishes the exact opposite of what it says on the label. Because instead of having efficient businesses, with sensible ownership structures that would produce cheap goods for poor people, we now have very inefficient ah structures, we have a very small class of of people who very, like black people who essentially like extract all the value from normal businesses,

22:27 – Brian David Crane

Very, very wealthy black owner. Yeah.

Like black people, who essentially like to extract all the value from normal businesses, without necessarily adding much, making products and services much more expensive, but ultimately, like, if you make anything more expensive, the first people you hit are the worst, we’re still like black people, you know?

So, yeah, just to get back to the thing about Elon Musk. So one of the slights that Elon Musk must be feeling was that, like, specifically the country of his birth does not allow Starlink because he just hasn’t budged on…

Figuring out this BEE thing. Now, I suspect that he probably could have had that wrapped up in a month. But I suspect maybe he just doesn’t feel good about it. It just strikes me as the kind of thing that would irk him.

Yeah, and essentially the South African government have also kind of like kicked in their heels there, despite the fact that, they can’t cover the entire country with proper internet.

I mean, Starlink – it would be a massive boon in many, many dimensions to South Africa. Right? But yeah, so basically, like I would say they’re both sort of like maybe kicking the wheels there.

And then the other thing is that South Africa is on a very important trade path. If you go look at basically the I saw a map the other day of everywhere where Trump has basically tried to yeah normal successfully enacted his threats of tariffs and of it yeah all of them are either on..

The Death of Civic Responsibility: Why South Africa and Many Other Countries Struggle with Accountability

24:05 – Brian David Crane

Tariffs.

24:07 – Schalk Dormehl

All of them are either on major shipping routes or on major shipping routes that might be thawing out. And I don’t think that’s an accident either. So yeah, so what they did initially was the like the White House set up

24:21 – Brian David Crane

But look let me stop you just a second there. get Hold on. Let me stop you just for a second, because I think that to for people to understand what you meant by that, Trump has whether it was the Panama Canal, Greenland, I think is what you were referring to.

South Africa would be on a trade route. It is on the trade route if the Suez Canal is blocked or inaccessible for whatever reason between Europe and Asia. I don’t know how many ships pass through South African waters, but I do know that Simonstown, the port that is near Cape Town, is considered to be very strategic and it’s something that both, well, any Blue Water Navy, any Navy that seeks to dominate the Southern Atlantic or the Southern Ocean would be keen on having Simonstown in there as a place to dock their ships. Is that right?

25:16 – Schalk Dormehl

That’s how I understand it, right?

25:19 – Brian David Crane

Yep.

25:20 – Schalk Dormehl

Like I’m not an expert in a lot of things and unfortunately, like fortunately for me, I guess geopolitics isn’t really one of them either. But as I understand it, by blocking the Suez Canal and by controlling the Simonstown maybe, naval facility, you you could block off a lot of trade in the world.

25:38 – Brian David Crane

Mm-hmm.

25:40 – Schalk Dormehl

You could really like basically split the East and the West if you control both of those places. So yeah on the backdrop of all of that stuff they essentially came out with an offer of sanctuary to all Afrikaners they’ve since sort of refined the language. If I’m not mistaken but essentially like Africaners or at least in the terms that they meant it were like African speaking white people like me I guess right.

Yeah, it was probably like quite sloppy language in the first version, because on the one hand, I guess what they meant to say was oppressed white South Africans, which were mainly like English speaking Afrikaans speaking.

And also like another complexity there is you also have, this is what they call themselves, not my term, the colored people in South Africa.

26:33 – Brian David Crane

Yep.

26:35 – Schalk Dormehl

And they are majority Afrikaans speaking as well. And they also consider themselves persecuted by the ANC government.

26:41 – Brian David Crane

Mm-hmm.

26:43 – Schalk Dormehl

So, yeah, so it’s quite a quite a complicated, strange way to throw us, like a live vest.

But a lot of people have, like gone and applied. Now, as far as I understand the technicalities of it, It’ll grant us asylum status if we accept it, which, as far as I understand, does not necessarily mean that we just get to live and do whatever we want in the United States.

So that’s also another complicating factor to the whole thing is it’s not like they basically went, well, listen, guys, we’re going to give you this one town in in California. And we know you’re all to vote Republican for the rest of your lives. So we’re going to take you all. We’re going to transplant you to California. We’ll hit two birds with one star, basically.

So it wasn’t like they quite made that kind of offer to us. Now, the part of it that somewhat concerns me is one of the things is that Trump has the main thing. He has an active strategy of the main thing is enemies.

He wants them in a state of confusion and being upset. Right.

27:56 – Brian David Crane

There’s a clinical name for that. Trump Derangement Syndrome, but I don’t know if that’s TDS.

28:01 – Schalk Dormehl

TDS. Yeah.

28:03 – Brian David Crane

Yeah.

28:04 – Schalk Dormehl

TDS, yeah, like he actively, he is the primary cause of Trump derangement syndrome.

28:09 – Brian David Crane

Yeah.

28:10 – Schalk Dormehl

He wants the people who aren’t going to work with him to be in a state of insanity.

28:12 – Brian David Crane

Yeah.

28:13 – Schalk Dormehl

He wants them to be on an extreme. And I think lots of what we experienced over the last 8 years, lots of that was sort of like worldwide government’s response to this. It’s like, it was like an allergic response to it. So my concern is just like, I would say in the West and in the United States, like you guys keep thinking that the world’s going to end tomorrow, right? I can tell you now, having lived in a country that went over every red line that you guys talk about, it’ll take 30 years at least, right?

Like it’ll take 30 years before the trains really stop working and the food really doesn’t start showing up and the roads really decay to complete ditches. It’s going to take a long time. But my concern is like if he… And again, I think we’re already like falling out of the news cycle. right But if he were if they were to really double down on this kind of thing, and they were to induce that same type of, like

What’s the nice word for it, Schism, Schismatic split here, but I can’t imagine that would be that would be healthy for us. Like it’s not going to be a good thing. Like it doesn’t help. It doesn’t help you inflame the already like serious problems without giving us like, like a real answer to this stuff. So that’s roughly like, I think I just talked for like 30 minutes about just quickly update us on where South Africa is in the last three months.

29:43 – Brian David Crane

Well, there’s a lot of threads there.

Yeah. For people who, let’s say, either been to South Africa or are familiar in general with the outline of the Cold War, there’s a lot to be learned in the lesson or the lessons of South Africa. And because it’s so complex, you can kind of pick and choose what those lessons would be.

But I think it’s hard to argue with one of the stats that you told me when we were leading up to the show was about that South Africans who leave and emigrate to the States, they economically do better than any other immigrant group by a pretty large margin. Is that right?

30:35 – Schalk Dormehl

Yeah, so I’ve since got to fact check that, right? So basically, like of all African immigration, like of everyone who is possibly of African, who came from Africa, like South Africans typically like do the best.

30:46 – Brian David Crane

Yeah.

When Communities Take Charge: Grassroots Resistance Against Riots

30:47 – Schalk Dormehl

South Africans typically like to do the base, I tried to fact check it against census data as well. We’re definitely like, we’re pretty darn far up there as far as I could tell. Again, like I, once I go diving now, it’s kind of hard for me to always like pick up the true place where the cable is plugged in It feels like lost. It’s like, just what the hell? Like it plays into a rock, it’s that kind of thing. But yeah, so white South Africans are pretty, they’re mostly like the ones who do immigrate typically.

They don’t immigrate to places where they have almost any political say whatsoever. And typically, like if you’re that kind of like immigrant or immigrant, and depending on which way you’re going, I guess, lots of those people are outside of just being white South Africans, it’s typically like much harder working people.

And I think the thing about South Africa is if you’re a South African business person, right? Like the first thing is everything is a problem, right? Like you wake up in the mornings and Like the power, will literally not be working, right?

You will have problems like a guy is sick today because his reservoir ran out of water and you’re not supposed to drink the bottom part of the reservoir. And now like everybody as some sort of a rare bacteria in that area. Now a bunch of your people are sick.

And, it’s basically like problem after problem like this. And in South Africa, like if your attitude is not, well, I must take, like, what do the alcoholics say? Like, we must face life on life’s terms.

32:23 – Brian David Crane

Mm-hmm.

32:24 – Schalk Dormehl

If you don’t face life on life’s terms, you just don’t move forward. And the side effect of this is basically like, now you have like a really high performing entrepreneurial class because they just internalize every problem. Every problem is just theirs to solve. It’s just part of of waking up in the morning. And if you take those.

The Mystery of the Power Grid: How South Africa’s Electricity Crisis Stabilized

32:41 – Brian David Crane

And there’s no reliance on the state. Yeah, sorry.

32:43 – Schalk Dormehl

Yeah, no, there’s utterly no reliance on the state, like to the point where, like, you cannot reliably call the police and reliably know that you’ve spoken to someone else on the other side who will send help.

But like even the link of getting to the police, just picking up the phone and calling, even that part is seriously shaking. So there’s no guarantees of safety. There’s very limited guarantees of infrastructure. I don’t want to be too harsh on the infrastructure, because the national infrastructure and the metro infrastructure at least in 2 of the 3 metros is still pretty good. But I mean it’s decaying like it’s clearly on aggregate it’s going backwards so typically if you take people who have that attitude and you put them in America, it’s like taking a small koi fish out of a bowl and putting him in an enormous pond, like this thing just keeps growing because the opportunities are more and the negative energy spend is less.

33:45 – Brian David Crane

Yep. They laugh at the problems that the average American would fall into a tizzy over, let’s say. Right.

33:56 – Schalk Dormehl

Yeah. It’s complete chock and cheese, like in terms of the types of problems.

I would say South Africa is one thing it’s we’ve got going for us. We’ve got de facto anarchy, right? Like in the one hand, it’s a really bad thing. At some point in our conversation, just want to like tie it together. Like what I think is really going on here?

34:20 – Brian David Crane

Yeah.

34:21 – Schalk Dormehl

Because after you asked me, what would I say is really going on here? So South Africa has de facto anarchy. And on the one hand, that’s pretty great because you can do a lot of stuff here, but you can’t do anywhere else on the planet. If somebody ran an AI facility here, got their own power up and running, ran the things, didn’t tell anybody what they were doing, they would be able to do it and literally no one would know.

34:48 – Brian David Crane

Uh hmm

34:49 – Schalk Dormehl

So that’s like one part of the opportunity. Obviously, part of the cost of that is basically certain things that you would take for granted, like socialized. What I mean by socialized security is not social security. I mean like physical security that has been socialized.

Like society carries that cost for everyone. That kind of thing doesn’t exist here. Like you literally have to pay for your own security. And if you can’t, you live a dangerous life in this place. so yeah

35:19 – Brian David Crane

And I think it’s important for those listening to define some terms on that, because what do you mean by anarchy? You mean the absence of the state entirely, or what does the term anarchy mean as you use it?

35:32 – Schalk Dormehl

Okay so I would say I’m somewhere between a libertarian and an Anarcho-Capitalist and a Crypto-Anarchist. So on the one hand, like in that sense, anarchy, the lack of leaders. Right? Like the lack of rulers, basically, like we have very few rulers. South Africa.

I would say, spoilers if you haven’t watched V for Vendetta yet. But like in the V for Vendetta thing, there’s this one part where the character like the EV character gets kidnapped, by the state. And then she gets tortured to within an inch of her life. And then eventually she realizes that she wasn’t kidnapped. She’s still in V’s house. And that the guards that she thought she saw were just like cardboard cutouts.

And I would say that’s a pretty apt metaphor for South Africa is that the guards have long ago abandoned their posts. They’re not on guard. What you have in South Africa in terms of rules is you have self-compliance from corporates. We’re all afraid that they will lose a license or get a bank account frozen somewhere.

And you have random pockets within the state that occasionally still get to make an example of someone. Right.

36:49 – Brian David Crane

You mean, make a bad example, where they basically, the corporates comply also because they’re worried about being turned into a whipping post or being turned into an example by which the political leaders pointed at certain corporate actor and say, we’re gonna hold these people to task order to make the in order to make political hay.

37:12 – Schalk Dormehl

So what they’ll typically do, right, is that they’ll, they largely threaten them, they threaten, okay, so South Africa is a very complicated place, right? It’s actually something like 11 different countries that were thrown together in a thing called the Union of South Africa Act in 1918. I don’t know if you want to run this, like that map at the beginning or the end of our chat, just so that people can see how the place actually evolved.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Africa

37:40 – Brian David Crane

Yeah, I will include it in the show notes.

37:42 – Schalk Dormehl

And the only like real native people to Southern Africa are at least in the last 1,000 years are pretty much the coin, right? There’s one or two exceptions, you can go look at how the migration patterns work. But by the time the United like the British Empire like got to the place, basically, they unified the Western Cape, which was like white Afrikaans people colored Afrikaans people, they you unified two, like, were republics, which were African-speaking white people.

They unified the Kosa people, they unified the Lesotho kingdom, they unified the Zulu kingdom, they did it to the Tsuanas, they did it to the Vendas, they did it to, I think it’s about 11 major people groups, right, at once. The problem is these people see the world very, very differently, right? And if you go and look at, like, almost all your middle class South Africans, right?

They have a certain system that they inherited from the Dutch and from the English where they’re like rule compliant, right? And this is, applicable now to black South Africans as well, because a lot of people have like, they’ve been brought up.

38:45 – Brian David Crane

Mm-hmm..

38:46 – Schalk Dormehl

And this is applicable now to black South Africans as well, because a lot of people have like, they’ve been brought up.

And the idea is basically like, we’re in sort of a rules based order, and you have to follow the rules and the rules are good and the rules are there for your protection. But the bottom line is in South Africa, like, honestly, the rules are only there for the people who self comply to most of the rules, right? We have like a astronomically high rape rate. We have an astronomically high murder rate.

Like we have a murder rate that compares to the death rate in active war zones. So it’s ludicrous. It’s absolutely ludicrous. People are literally getting away with murder. So, but what ends up happening is because I don’t think that society is a system that wants to collapse. It’s a system that wants to organize itself and move towards greater order.

It wants spontaneous order in a positive direction for itself. And the thing is just essentially like we have a lot of people in South Africa who will comply with the rule purely because the rule was mandated, right?

39:43 – Brian David Crane

Mm-hmm..

39:44 – Schalk Dormehl

So people will comply with the rule and they sort of like a game theoretical setup where if somebody were to go massively against the rule, it’s still probably unlikely, but it’s possible for the state to go after them. If they did what the state does, which is literally just to frustrate everyone into compliance, the state would probably not know what to do, right?

So what I mean with anarchy is essentially that well I’ll take one example. Like the biggest cigarette producer in South Africa is a guy called Adriano Masotti. I’m speaking under correction about what his whole situation is. I haven’t read up on him in a while. I hope he’s not dead yet.

So it’s going to sound stupid, but like Up until the lockdown, like he was South Africa’s number one cigarette producer. He was doing so without paying any of the taxes or any of the sin taxes. He was able to do it because he was just doing it legally.

And he was avoiding the 50%, the effective 50% syntax on top of all of other cigarettes. So he was just pushing it through that way. And people knew about him for a decade.

They knew about him for a decade. And like, to my knowledge, like his operation is still in operation today. He actually like even funds political parties. So the thing is, I mean, I’m not saying that people just willy-nilly become, like business vigilantes in every way, shape or form.

But the fact of the matter is just that the South African government has bad rules, but they also are so incompetent that they don’t enforce the vast majority of them. They trust society to actually go and enforce those things for them.

41:22 – Brian David Crane

Okay if you’re at the upper echelon of South African society, What then are you doing? It’s the majority of the like, what, how are they?

You have this middle class that has, let’s call it a a belief in the rule of law because it provides a modicum of safety, let’s say, not for all of them, but for the majority of And then you have anarchy at the bottom and you arguably have anarchy at the top as well, because there is no ruler or no clear defined rulers. Is that right?

42:04 – Schalk Dormehl

So I would okay so in my notes here I wrote that the one way that I want to sub subscribe like that I want to describe south africa is it’s the orphan empire child of the British Empire right the British Empire like had a child it was called South Africa, right South Africa is an enormous place it involves 11 different major ethnic groups. It had very little business being forced together into one organization with one another. right

42:32 – Brian David Crane

Yeah.

42:33 – Schalk Dormehl

These people probably should have figured out borders amongst themselves, figured out their own rulership structures, figured out all of their own stuff, and been left to settle for hundreds of years. But that’s not what happened, right. So the British conquered all of those peoples basically, chucked them all together in a melting pot, handed them over to one subgroup.

And the one subgroup thought that, like Afrikaaners, this and this is a great way to run things. So And it ran for a while, but when they handed it over to the ANC, which was a communist entity, the communist entity was not able to maintain it. And that’s why I say it like it eventually became orphaned. Essentially the responsibility in the upper parts of the government and in the organizational structures that’s supposed to keep law and order have just been abandoned.

Right. And that to me describes South Africa far, far better is that South Africa has essentially just been abandoned. All the serious responsibility. People don’t even know that they need to maintain this stuff. As I said to you, like previously as well, I mean in the United States, you guys have this concept of like civics. And I believe you guys have a class in school called civics, if I’m not mistaken.

43:47 – Brian David Crane

We used to. I don’t, it’s not required.

I think we’re going to go somewhere with this, but just to say that it’s one of these, again, arguing over the past, if people don’t understand civics, and you can tell them civics is whatever it is, and you don’t have a shared sense of history. So in the US, civics is now an elective. It’s an optional class and not a mandatory one for the majority of students.

44:18 – Schalk Dormehl

Yeah so at least you guys still have that as a concept right like in South Africa, as a concept like it doesn’t exist and I’m not just talking about like like lower class poor South Africans. I’m talking about business people like business, people don’t… There is really very little concept of freedom of speech.

What we know about freedom of speech is because you guys keep going on about it, right? We have several hate speech laws. People are in jail for saying bad words to one group, but if that group says bad words back to the other group..

44:50 – Brian David Crane

Not applicable.

44:51 – Schalk Dormehl

Those individuals don’t go to jail, right? So on the one hand, it’s kind of like a serious joke. And the thing is just like, nobody knows that, listen, for us to maintain some semblance of like order, we need some basic things we believe and some basic things we’re gonna maintain. Like one of those things in my opinion is like just the concept of liberty.

Like you own yourself, you own the things that you make, you own the things that you trade the things you make with other people are not allowed to just randomly harm you, you aren’t allowed to just randomly harm other people, and then if you interact with people, it should be on informed consent.

Both of you should know what you’re getting into. One shouldn’t lie to the other one or mislead them or something or force them or coerce them in any way. And just those basic concepts. Obviously, like people, luckily I have a sort of an intuitive understanding of it to some degree. But very few people think like, holy crap, we really need to like install that in our children, like install that in our communities, like install that in people.

There’s very little of that. And the result is basically like it’s just no one’s taking responsibility for it. like It’s like living in a house with a bunch of people. And there used to be one guy like one girl who was extremely bossy. Everybody thought she was a bitch.

But she cleaned the bathroom. And she had like a schedule up there about who’s supposed to clean the bathroom. And she knew the bathroom had to be clean. And now people are walking around with random infections. And they’re kind of confused as to what’s going to go on. And they blame each other for what’s going on.

And a bunch of the people who have to share the bathroom are angry at the guy who happened to have an ensuite bathroom. And it’s sort of like that decay. Like you had this role and now this role’s kind of gone. Nobody took up the role and things are just going backwards.

So that’s kind of like what I mean by it being orphan. And two things happen in that environment. The one thing is you get opportunists, right? So you get a guy basically who exploits this fight to get things that he wants.

right? Because the guys aren’t necessarily paying the type of attention they would be paying if it wasn’t for these glaring problems. But on the other hand, I also want to say it like, and this is part of why I’m fairly positive about South Africa, terms and conditions applying, right?

Is that number one, it’s not like we’re facing, in my opinion, a massively organized enemy. We’re basically facing like an opportunity

47:18 – Brian David Crane

Well thought out.. Yeah.

47:20 – Schalk Dormehl

Yeah, it’s not like, I mean, the ANC are not the Nazis, right? Like, they’re not, they’re not methodical, they’re not sitting there. Some of them are deeply spiteful,it’s a combination of spite and what I guess you could call whatever the spike version of the long game is. And I would say that there’s some of them that you have to be actively careful for.

But most of them are just opportunists who just want free things. They just want to keep on extracting stuff. So they’re sort of like, imagine you had like a pastor who’s also a rampant alcoholic.

Like on the one hand, he believes in this document, but on the other hand, he’s doing something completely contradictory to this document. And the ANC is like that. They believe in this thing called the NDR, which is the National Democratic Revolution.

It’s a document they basically got from the USSR. And it says what they’re supposed to do about South Africa and the farmers and the white people, amongst other things. But at the same time, they’re just now kleptomaniacs. They just keep stealing. They almost can’t help themselves.

So that’s kind of like the rough situation that I think is going to is playing out there. But I think at the same time, like there’s a massive opportunity in South Africa. right Jordan Peterson has this line where he says, like opportunity lies where responsibility has been abdicated.

And I really feel that, like, there is no place on earth almost where there is, there is more responsibility that has been advocated, and there are fewer people, basically, who kind of, like, take it up.

48:47 – Brian David Crane

Uh hmm.

48:48 – Schalk Dormehl

So, I’ve got a bunch of friends who are, like, prepared supporting everything from like off the corner home states to like seceding the Western Cape to, running business organizations.

And I support them all, I wish them all well. I hope it all goes well. I think it’s good to have a multi-pronged attack on the problem. But I think the opportunities are even more of right.

Like I think the opportunities of somebody actually going like this is a complex situation, but there might be some underlying order here.

There might actually be some way to go, holy crap, we can actually turn this place around and turn it into a real benefit, like a beneficial forward moving type of place.

But it seems to me that what is successfully keeps on happening is just this, this demented of the, we got to unwind the past, these guys are just going to come after us, like it’s, it’s a combination of that stuff that I feel sort of like waste energy in a circle.

So that’s kind of roughly my view on where we are, just to say some positive stuff on that, right? By the way, stop me if I’m rambling too much here.

The Brain Drain: The Cost of Losing Skilled Professionals

50:06 – Brian David Crane

Yeah. Well, I think it’s also important to share why you’ve decided to continue to live in South Africa, which might also tie in with some of the positives.

50:13 – Schalk Dormehl

Okay, it’s one part it’s one part not having too many other options. That’s one part of it. It is kind of hard to pick up and move somewhere else unless you have sort of a certain escape velocity of resources. And that’s even if you don’t care about not seeing the people you care for. That I’ve seen to be the hardest thing, right? is You can keep people in a bad situation very long if the people they care for are also in that bad situation. You can’t pick everyone up at once and move them all to the same place on the other side.

So that’s part of the reason. But part of the reason why I’m not desperately trying to get out of the country anymore, which I was in that place like four five years ago, so there were a couple of factors in South Africa that were quite worrisome to me, right? The one thing was that the ANC had massive support the whole time. But that massive electoral support in most of the elections. The second thing was that the power was literally going off, right? So beyond a certain amount of power provision, it just becomes too uncomfortable to live here.

And the third thing was, essentially like, what really concerned me was the safety aspect of South Africa. And that what I was unsure about was, are we are we a mixed group where some of those subgroupings are literally pro-theft pro safe prone like just extortion just pro-murder right and.. yeah, so just to address all three of those, like, let’s let’s take them in reverse order. In 2021, we had serious riots in the one province here called KwaZulu-Natal, and there were a bunch of riots all over the place.

But one of the primary things that happened was almost to the last community, almost everyone stood up against the looters. There’s this awesome photo, if you can find it online, of these seven guys who are pushing back a mob from a mall, and they have… And the mob must be like in excess of 100 people. And it’s seven guys. it’s ah It’s like at least one white guy, one Indian guy, a couple of black guys. Like it’s a mix. There’s only seven guys. And they’re all armed. And they’re pushing this whole group back from a mall.

And as far as I can tell, they’re all volunteers as well. And that to me is like one of the most hopeful images to ever come out of South Africa. At the same time, people in Soweto organized, they literally, like, when the shit really hit the fan, it’s phenomenal what kind of weapons they showed up with. They found automatic weapons, found bulletproof vests, and they showed up to places, and they go, like, yeah, we don’t want to see this order. This is not what our community is about.

And that was very helpful, that so many of the communities decided, F this noise, right? Like, this is just completely unacceptable. So at least from that, I deduced that there are enough people who have a line where they go, like, not over this line, right? Like, this is too far, and we’re not going to participate. The second thing, yeah, that sort of, I don’t know if you have any questions on that event.

53:28 – Brian David Crane

No, go ahead..

53:30 – Schalk Dormehl

So the second thing kind of like that had me very worried was the power kept going off, right? Typically, like you and I are both into crypto, and it’s almost like almost always when you decide to sell, that’s when it recovers. And almost always when you decide to buy, that’s when that’s when it popped, right?

And that’s kind of like what seems to have happened with the power thing. I was very convinced that in 2023, in the middle of the year, we were going to have like 8 to 18 hours worth of power outages because I just mapped per day.

54:02 – Brian David Crane

Per day? Let’s be clear. Yeah.

54:03 – Schalk Dormehl

Yeah, per day. So this is another thing that’s just phenomenal to me, right? You have this like Western belief that the real problem is corruption, right? And the irony is if you go look at the African countries, right? The corrupt countries that had communism did better than the non-corrupt kind countries that had communism.

And makes a sort of sense if you think about it, because you can buy your way out of the ridiculous rules in one system, but you can’t buy your way out of the ridiculous rules in the other system. So we had this guy, the writer, which he was basically like, he ran the South African power utility, and he was the only guy who wanted the job, right? Like literally they could find no one except this one white guy who wanted to run this thing, right? Nobody wanted to touch it with a 10-foot pole.

54:54 – Brian David Crane

Well, and what was his name? Yeah.

54:57 – Schalk Dormehl

Andrej de Ruyter.

So I’m going to say some unpopular things about him, which I think should be a reflection on all left-leaning people in the Anglosphere, if I could put it that way.

So the thing was, on the one hand, like he was probably a very good manager. He’s probably a very good corporate leader. The problem was that he was trying to run, he was trying to run a gang like a corporation.

The power provider at that stage was already deeply entrenched into kickbacks. They were deeply entrenched into certain things only working through corrupt channels. And another just technical thing is they’re coal, they’re a predominantly coal-run entity, right? And this guy had dreams of stopping the corruption and essentially dreams of getting us all onto renewable power, right?

Neither of which proved feasible. And the extreme irony was the moment he left, the power came back on. And it has stayed on with, I think, they literally have one exception. I think we had load shedding once for like two, two-hour periods in the last month, somewhere.

I think it’s been going on almost solidly now for 18 solid months. So literally where I thought.

56:20 – Brian David Crane

Let me ask you, why from the outside looking in heaven, not lived through this, but read his book, followed his trajectory in terms of that he was poisoned.

He left, I think he’s now left South Africa and is teaching in the US at Princeton, or he was last time I checked on him. But the book was so hard to believe, like it was a true story. it was so hard to believe in terms of the corruption that he talked about, in terms of the theft that was happening.

The mismanagement that when you read it, like, again, maybe the idealist in me looks at this and goes, okay, this book actually helped turn the tide and illustrate that this is such a bad problem that whoever is left decided that they’re going to actually make something happen here.

I don’t think that’s how you’re going to frame it. Why is the power stayed on since this guy left? That’s the question.

57:14 – Schalk Dormehl

Okay, well, first of all, I want to say unequivocally that I don’t know. like I want to say unequivocally I don’t know. But what I do want to point out right is that it is entirely possible to get yourself into a situation with, like, and we all have had situations like this in our personal lives, right? Where you have conflict with someone else and you believe that you yourself have integrity. And the problem with the other guy. He doesn’t have integrity. Right. Now that in and of itself might be perfectly true.

The problem is just that the moment you adopt that belief, you now basically view the other guy as being character flawed and yourself as being righteous. And the only way for that dynamic to ever play out is in conflict. So my take is not that he was dishonest or that he was a bad manager. Right. My take is basically like he got into a situation that he was trying to manage in a way that organization had already completely turned against.

That would be my rough take on it. And his conflicts within that situation kept escalating, right? And because he’s always on the right side, and again, I don’t know the guy from a bar of soap, so I’m not trying to like disparage him in this sense. The one thing that I do feel that he was, as far as I can tell, he was wrong on is the renewable powers thing. But I like..

Eskom has far larger problems than its carbon footprint. If you try to also withhold carbon from literally what used to be the world’s most efficient carbon power generator. yeah Like, I can’t imagine that’s going to pan out well.
So I would say that he was, maybe, let me not rather like to comment on it, right? Like I would say it is most likely that he was correct in how crazy the events with his ex were, right?

I would say that, right? Like he’s got the facts of what happened right but I don’t think he has the person.

59:31 – Brian David Crane

His ex being Eskom in this story, though. His ex being the power generation company.

59:34 – Schalk Dormehl

Yeah.

59:35 – Brian David Crane

Yeah. Okay, go ahead.

59:36 – Schalk Dormehl

Yeah. So his ex being the power generation company, right? like people have to ask themselves this question, like why is it they could be in a relationship with someone that’s completely dysfunctional and they throw our scissors at each other and it’s completely bonkers. Yet when they go, they can get someone else, like suddenly it resolves. I would say like from a thorough scientifically standpoint, the thing is essentially, something in that relationship caused endless conflict.

And I believe that it’s the completely, like, diametrically opposed views of how the thing was supposed to work. But that’s my rough take on it. What I can say for a fact is that I don’t think he left leaving it incapable hands and wishing his disciples and his last few brothers the best that he just couldn’t stand to be poisoned anymore. I think he gave up and it’s like listen this thing’s gonna go to shit now and it didn’t.

The opposite happened the power came back on stayed on pretty much so yeah so I would say he’s probably right that a lot of corruption is involved in keeping the power on but it’s better than not having power in my opinion anyway. So that was that was my one thing and the other thing as well is that these intermittent power outages, right? Like have, it’s been the type of romantic stress that we needed to get a critical chunk of the power grid offline.

1:01:03 – Brian David Crane

Voters, the electorate. Sorry. Yeah, go ahead.

1:01:06 – Schalk Dormehl

That’s the other thing, yeah. So that’s the other thing, right? So that’ll be my third point, right? But having power that stays on for a while and then goes off and then stays on for a while and then goes off, instead of like having all the power go off at once. And this is another thing I want to encourage Westerners with. Guys, it won’t go to crap at once. Right?

There’ll be a lot of warnings over decades before it gets really, really bad. So, yeah, so basically, like, a lot of the country has been able to install, like, their own solar capacity, excess battery capacity, like gas capacity, all kinds of stuff like this. And I feel like that is part of where the anarchy part works out well for us.

It’s like we still have, because the government’s so bad at enforcing these rules, even when they come up with stupid rules to stop us from fixing things, we still, in the majority of cases, get to fix this. So that sort of leads into the third thing.

1:02:04 – Brian David Crane

And you fix it in a decentralized manner, right? This is individuals taking action and doing things on their own to insulate themselves from the grid in this case.

1:02:11 – Schalk Dormehl

Yeah.

1:02:13 – Brian David Crane

Go ahead..

1:02:14 – Schalk Dormehl

Yeah, that’s literally like, it’s almost all family-based or small, like in the power situation, it would be, sorry, I just see I got disconnected there for a second, but in the power situation, it would be, like eithersmall-scale producers or literally individual producers who get to do the thing.

1:02:31 – Brian David Crane

Like small scale producers. Sorry. Yeah.

1:02:33 – Schalk Dormehl

Like small-scale producers or literally individual producers who get to do the thing. Then it becomes like a super robust system. Like if you put it through that kind of like right strays and it’s sort of like oscillating strays, the thing can really become strong underneath the hood. And I think this is another thing, right? Like people, I think people underestimate how strong certain aspects of South Africa is, right? Another great thing about this place is no one controls it.

Right? The ANC doesn’t control it, right? They exploit and they’re opportunistic and they interfere with things, and you have criminal organizations and you have lesser Afro-socialist parties and they definitely mess with stuff. But the thing is, it’s 11 different people groups who have very different views on the world, who are distributed in very, like, strange arrangements, who have…

Interlocking business concerns, who have interlocking political concerns, such that it’s sort of like if there were a gun on the table, if any one person tried to grab the gun, their response is so immediate that literally everyone fumbles it. It’s like no one can get to the point. And that’s like that’s one positive thing. I think those very negative things have started happening.

1:03:59 – Brian David Crane

But let me ask you something on that, because isn’t the net outcome that yes, everyone’s at this table, one person reaches for the weapon, one person’s reaches for the gun, and then everyone reaches for it. And it’s so immediate and chaotic that no one actually gets the weapon is able to threaten the others. But what about in this example, if one group or one of the people at the table, they just get up and leave, right? Like that’s, and, and they decide, okay, cool, we’re going to leave South Africa.

We’re going to pull up stakes and go. And that’s, isn’t that also partially what’s happening in the sense that maybe the most productive or the most educated or the wealthiest and I don’t know if that’s actually true, but is that group leaving en masse, and that the ones that are left that are still fighting over the weapon are… well, they’re not in that cohort, let’s say.

1:04:54 – Schalk Dormehl

Yeah, so that has definitely happened, right? We literally lost the world’s richest man. Like, I mean, the world’s richest man had South Africa gone the direction of Dubai or Singapore or something to that effect in 1994. He might have very well returned and literally been, launching, I don’t know, launching rockets from the North of Mozambique, basically, via the South African government.

1:05:19 – Brian David Crane

Yeah. SpaceX could be a South African company instead of an American company.

1:05:24 – Schalk Dormehl

He’s also like inspired a whole cohort of South Africans to follow him. Like if you if you look carefully at some of the SpaceX, like launch videos, you’ll see those group zooms, go look like the Springbok Tish, like the Springbok rugby shirts that the guys are wearing.

Right. So I doubt they like their boss that much. We’ve lost a bunch of like South Africans. Another major export of South Africa. This is not another thing people don’t know. It’s like just like the Nazis exported, when the Nazis felt like you had a lot of rocket scientists go over.

Basically, like over the last 30 years, you. have had an enormous cohort of nuclear physicists go over to America. So a lot of like the nuclear facilities, a lot of like the nuclear businesses, like either are run by South Africans or have a lot of South Africans in their top structure and in their engineering structures.

So yes, we’ve…

1:06:18 – Brian David Crane

Well, I think it’s and but it’s important to tell people on that because South Africa had a covert nuclear weapons program in the during the Cold War. Is that part of the reason?

1:06:28 – Schalk Dormehl

Yeah, so what happened? what happened basically like after the cold war was again like South Africa was sort of like an orphaned empire right it was one of the most militarized zones in the world like there was there was a crap ton of like military stuff here like it has so polar shift like I remember when I was six and my dad parked at the wrong place at the ranch show ah which is like a I don’t know what you call that in the US but…

Basically, like, I remember him getting arrested. I was six. And the and the cops were, like, pulling him away, parking in the wrong, and he, like, looked back at me and kept yelling, this is what a police state looks like.

For somebody to remember that when they were six, like, it had to have made, like, quite an impression. And that’s kind of like to flip from that to literally like not have the police show up for almost any, well, I don’t want to say that. That’s also not fair, right? But to have the police be very, very unreliable, it’s a hell of a shift.

Now, the thing was that the South African government, I believe that they were, if I can count correctly here, it was the United States, it was the Soviet Union, it was, I think it was Britain, and then it was France.

Who became nuclear powers. And to my knowledge, the fifth joint nuclear power in the world was South Africa and Israel. So we had a covert nuclear weapons program and nuclear power program with the Israelis.

Yeah, so in terms that…

1:07:54 – Brian David Crane

Two of the pariah states who were like, cool, we’re not necessarily welcome in either groups or the different groups represented and on the world stage. So we’re gonna arm ourselves. It’s a natural outcome.

As a South African, we can’t rely on security guarantees from the Western countries because they oppose us due to Apartheid or due to whatever. So we miss that we need a means of defending ourselves.

A Silver Lining for South Africa? How Government Fractures Could Lead to Change

1:08:24 – Schalk Dormehl

Yeah. So what you can also do is like if you go look up the various large-scale infrastructure projects that the South African government, that the previous the Apartheid government did, there’s some really impressive stuff. It is some epic level. In 2,000 years, people are going to discover some of these things. and if we didn’t go forward and we went backwards like we did in the dark ages, they’ll be like, how the hell do people do this? This is insane.

Like they connected various riverways to other riverways, like through massive dams and like digging tunnels through enormous like, mountain systems, all kinds of crazy stuff like that. So it was quite advanced. So obviously we’ve lost a lot of that advancement and a lot of the people have left. But it’s kind of hard to tell where the critical mass tipping point is. Like your point now, one of the things that concerns me is there are tipping points, right?

And to everyone who’s going like, yeah, nothing’s wrong in South Africa, like and this massively annoys me about liberal white South Africans is like, first of all, it is entirely possible to be the richer of two people in a disagreement and be the victim. It is possible for both those things to be true, right? The second thing is like, if you lose too much of like what makes of the people who make your economy work, right? You don’t negatively affect them, you annoy them, you frustrate them, you make them temporarily poor and you make them upset because they’ve got to go adapt in another place now.

But the people who permanently harm is everyone who they gave everyone at the bottom they gave jobs to they gave cheap services to you they gave cheap cheap goods to you and i don’t know where that tipping point is. That is also something that I’m concerned about, right? So I’d have to really look at where that was. Now, my three lines, like I said, was, is it such that the other communities are just really a problem? And I don’t really think that’s foundationally the issue, right? The second thing is, will the power stay on? So the power has been on for 18 months, give or take.

And then the third thing was, like, will the ANC really lose support? And this is one thing where I think the sheer incompetence of the ANC, really starts to shine forth. It’s like these guys, like we have an economist here called David, right? And he said this thing of like, they steal everything. So I wouldn’t put stealing an election past them. And the thing is, in the previous election, if there was an opportunity for them to steal the election, and if there was a point in time where they had to steal it, they had to steal it last time.

But they’re literally so incompetent that they’ll just accept defeat. So in the previous election, if you go look at the top line numbers, right? So of all the qualified voters in South Africa, 66% of everyone who would have been allowed to register to vote, right? didn’t vote. So a bunch of the people registered, but didn’t vote. But almost an equally large group, didn’t even bother registering. The top three…

1:11:39 – Brian David Crane

That was eligible to register. The 66% is the.. eligible and either didn’t register or did or were registered and didn’t vote.

1:11:42 – Schalk Dormehl

Eligible voters.

1:11:45 – Brian David Crane

Eligible and either didn’t register or did or were registered and didn’t vote.

1:11:49 – Schalk Dormehl

Yeah, so give or take about 33, 34% of eligible voters voted.

1:11:54 – Brian David Crane

Actually voted, yeah.

1:11:55 – Schalk Dormehl

Yeah, I forget the registration versus voting numbers now. But if you go look at the voting numbers, right? So literally like, in South Africa all now as an anarchist, I want to see what I want to see here. So I want to say that 66% of us have decided that no one should be in charge. And I have no idea why you bastards don’t listen to us. Right?

Because we’re clearly the majority. We want no one in charge. Yet you continue to impose rulers on us. Now, that’s obviously like a facetious statement, but I think the reason that the people stopped voting is because on the one hand, they know it’s a farce.

They know it’s ridiculous. And again, it’s 11 different people.

1:12:39 – Brian David Crane

Disillusioned. Yeah.

1:12:40 – Schalk Dormehl

They’re disillusioned. And If you look at the dominant black groups in South Africa, there they’re either not in the they’re either not in a black group or they’re not a dominant black group. So for them to feel represented is very far off. So that’s the one thing. And the thing is like the group who said that they were going to represent everyone is clearly just doing a poor job now.

And the thing is, every one of the major parties lost votes. The ANC lost votes, the DA lost votes, and the EFF lost votes. And like part of the reason why the DA, and this is another tragedy for me, unfortunately, but like part of the reason why the DA did well in this election was they didn’t lose, they lost votes, but they didn’t lose as many votes as the ANC.

And the thing is basically like what I was hoping for, right? And it’s maybe panning out now also like thanks to the Trump thing, that what we would have in South Africa was what places like Brazil had, which was you like the place kept going backwards. And I encourage anyone again who thinks that the end will come tomorrow, right? Anyone who’s worried about Trump rounding you all up and like throwing you in the gulag or whatever version of the thing is the camps or the train, like whatever it is.

You know, go read the history of Brazil, like things go backwards for sometimes a very long time. And then the crazy part is sometimes they bounce back. People love pointing to places like Venezuela and Zimbabwe and Flippen everywhere where, in Cuba and places like in North Korea, where the thing went backwards and then fell off a cliff.

But they don’t like pointing to the places where things went backwards and the people eventually like went, this nonsense, can’t keep going backwards. We’re gonna do something. and some things take different forms. So my hope for South Africa…

1:14:37 – Brian David Crane

Well, so let me also add some because I think that and it’s probably the case as well, Brazil and South Africa being analogous in that it’s a large, geographically very large country. Also, let’s call it a weak central government that isn’t able to effectively govern or control..

I think Venezuela, there’s a term from political science and it’s going to escape me here, but basically like they just could, they can’t, like it’s too big, it’s too big to govern effectively. Let’s put it that way. Right. And so North Korea is not that way, Venezuela is not that way, Cuba is certainly not that way, and maybe Brazil benefits from the fact that it’s so chaotic to begin with and that it’s so diverse and geographically so big.

Go ahead.

1:15:39 – Schalk Dormehl

Yeah, I mean, it’s also interesting to see what kind of role force and force projection plays in these things. Like with Zimbabwe, you had a very functional government, like you had a very functional military who just won a war, against a pretty hardy group, right?

1:15:59 – Brian David Crane

You mean Rhodesia?

1:16:01 – Schalk Dormehl

Yeah, so after Rhodesia was defeated and basically like became Zimbabwe, the Zimbabweans still had, like to this day, they still have like security forces. They still have the police. They still have a military, right?

Now, even that situation keeps decaying because eventually you run out of money to pay those people. But in South Africa, there is none of that. Like the police don’t show up.

You know, like one of the things I was also seriously worried about in South Africa was that the government would literally like to turn on the minorities in a military fashion. And the thing is, during the lockdown, we saw one show of military force for one day.

As the government sent military vehicles to a white neighborhood, actually the white neighborhood, I’m from Pretoria, right? But that was literally it. That was the one thing.

And the other thing was where they were basically shipping military vehicles, I think to Cape Town, like to the port. And people thought that it was like a military deployment, but there was nothing.

If you go look up South Africa’s military today, it’s beyond a joke. If you see the images, it seems like it’s an AI generated parody from Atlas Shrug. That’s how bad it is.

So the thing is like, we don’t really have a military. It’s very hard for any single place to control this thing. Now, that doesn’t mean that there isn’t like decay and things aren’t going backwards.

So my hope with the GNU basically was that if the DA got like critical and mass of things, that they would be a real thorn in the ANC side. And then what they would do is the two groups would fight each other tooth and nail day and night.

Right. And they would throw physical feces at each other in parliament and they would call each other names and everyone would just push everything too far and everyone would think the end is tomorrow.

Right, but unfortunately, what ended up happening was it seems like the DA. for those who don’t know, is the Democratic Alliance and it’s like the opposition party in South Africa. Right. So I always joke and say basically that the ANC basically like have a terrible plan and terrible management of the plan.

Right. The DA have the same terrible plan, but they claim that they will manage it better. They will implement the terrible plan better.

1:18:29 – Brian David Crane

Uh hmm

1:18:30 – Schalk Dormehl

So, yes, I mean…

1:18:32 – Brian David Crane

Yeah, but you believe that? You think that like both parties have a similar plan on paper?

1:18:40 – Schalk Dormehl

Well, it’s okay. So, some nuance, like I’m going to massively gloss over the nuance of this thing. Right. So roughly this is the idea. They are two flavors of statism. Right.

The one the one like I would describe the DA as further left than the Democrats in the United States.

Right. The Democrats in the United States are probably a pretty darn right leaning entity, even in its current incarnation compared to the DA, right? Like, I would say that the people who have, whenever I think of the DA, I think of New Zealand, right? New Zealand came to a point where they wanted to,I believe they’ve implemented this, where they’ve now started waiting for the elections in favor of Maori people, right?

1:19:39 – Brian David Crane

Yeah, I read something about this or heard something about this.

1:19:42 – Schalk Dormehl

Yeah, so it’s that kind of like just, rick I don’t know how else to put it, right? But it’s the cookie cutter World Economic Forum plan, right?

Like we’re going to have solar everywhere and the cars are going to fly, and the AI is going to manage the city and everything’s going to be like a smart city. That’s kind of like the dream.

1:20:05 – Brian David Crane

No pollution. Yeah.

1:20:07 – Schalk Dormehl

Say again?

1:20:08 – Brian David Crane

No pollution, trash is magically picked up and everything’s recycled. Yeah.

1:20:14 – Schalk Dormehl

Yeah, so and I must say, like here’s my here’s my concern, right? So I’m not saying that they’re poor managers, right? They’re clearly very good middle management, right? But the direction they want to take the country, in my opinion, is not where the country wants to go, right? Like, it’s not where, if you take the average of where the 11 groupings want to go, they don’t want to go into, a super lefty European direction, right?

Right, that’s just not where they want to go. And I don’t think the DA can drag them there. And the problem is that I get the idea that if the DA really gains control, they’ll try to do it kicking and screaming. Like, and they’ll silence us and they’ll do things to us that we don’t want done to us, right, to get us in that direction.

Okay, so I only ever got to meet Helen Zilla once. And I feel I was super optimistic about the meeting. I feel I was very open-minded about it. And to be honest, I didn’t enjoy the meeting. In that meeting, she told me that she believes in and like the libertarian ideal of leaving people alone, and I’m being deathly serious, why she thinks it’s the right thing to do to charge people in Fresno, that’s a very rich neighborhood in Cape Town, 32,000 grand a month. That’s give or take about $1,500 I guess..

For rates and taxes so like very limited service delivery, like it’s not $15,000 worth of service delivery, and to then just go re-spend that money in an informal settlement where there’s like no immigration control, there’s like very little services, there’s like absolutely rampant crime, it’s not a thing of like, we’re going to re-establish law and order and safety for those people, and we’re going to make sure there’s water. I’m just like, that is, that to me is like..

1:22:03 – Brian David Crane

Redistribution of wealth under a different name.

1:22:06 – Schalk Dormehl

Yeah, basically under a different name, right? So that’s not the only thing. The other problem as well is that they seem to be sort of like, they seem to be very stuck in like a European idea from 20 years ago about what happened in South Africa, right? So you literally, like if you want to incapacitate them, you just say, “Hey, you racist.” And they immediately go into an epileptic fit and they lie on the floor and phone at the mouth. And like when they got elected, they appointed three people, who I was aware of peripherally, right? So I’ve only voted once in the last 15 years, right? And that was for the capitalist party.

The rest of the time, I just decided, like, I remember walking to the ballot box one day and thinking to myself, like, my one friend told me these words of, what kind of person runs for public office? I remember walking to that ballot box thinking, what kind of person does run for public office? I just concluded that nobody I want to vote for. So basically, like in the last election, they almost got me at the point where I went, maybe I was wrong. Right. And the reason for that was they appointed these three guys. The one is a guy I know called Roman Kavanagh. Or for Ramon Cabanac, right? So you can look him up online. He is a very interesting character. The other one is a guy called Ronaldo House. I believe he’s South Africa’s number one YouTuber.

And the third guy is a guy called Ian Cameron. Also, like really, I would say Ian Cameron is arguing my opinion. Like it’s kudos to the DA for still having him. And kudos for everything he does. Like I feel is the most boots on the ground guy pretty much of everyone that I’m aware of in government. So basically, like within the first like a week or two weeks, the press had dug up some out-of-context stuff where Ronaldo had said a racial slur in a video. and was first of all, the video was out of context. If you watch the whole thing, it makes sense.

And the second thing is basically like the, then essentially the DA kind of like kicked him out. So they say they followed the internal view process, etc., but it’s like a two or three vote essentially. and so they decided to rather take someone who has supported them for a decade, who served with them in one municipality for a decade and just summarily kick this guy out. A massive, like, positive ally, a guy with an enormous online following, right? What they could have done is they could have gone, ish, it’s such a shame. What he said, ish, it’s horrible. We will disappear.

And just done nothing. Because what? The next election is in two and a half years and the news cycle, people can’t maintain it. They could have totally done that, right? That would have been, first of all, the politically smart thing to do. Secondly, it would have been the ethical thing to do to somebody who’s given you that amount of support. Instead of literally saying, what, somebody else, it’s like those experiments with ants, where they like to paint the one ant with the pheromones that a dead ant like excretes.

And then the other ants, like rip the living ant apart. That’s literally what’s happening.

1:25:22 – Brian David Crane

Okay.. I don’t know about that experiment, but yeah go ahead..

1:25:27 – Schalk Dormehl

Well, yeah, so it’s one of those, voiceover by, anyway, the guy does all the voiceovers. But so the thing is, the DA did that to him, right? And then the second thing that they basically did was they found far more flimsy evidence against Mr. Kavanagh.

I would definitely suggest people go check out what happened there. But Roman basically, he got appointed to the Department of Agriculture as the Chief of Staff of John Spianese, right, who’s the leader of the DA and is now the Minister of Agriculture.

And then they tried to, like, fire him as well. But he very wisely just said, well, guys, I have read the South African labor law. So good luck to you.

And he just basically, like, has still been in that position as far as I know. So the thing is, but they tried to throw him under the bus as well. I’m just very happy that, they didn’t, I guess the only thing is they didn’t have anything against Ian.

Otherwise, Ian would also be, despite all of Ian’s good work, like trying to keep South Africa secure, would have also been under the bus. And Ian, if you ever listen to this, I just want you to know that’s probably what your friends will do to you, if you get painted with anything remotely smelling like the term racism. So yeah..

1:26:43 – Brian David Crane

Political friends at least.

1:26:44 – Schalk Dormehl

Yeah, the political friends. Correction, Ian, you obviously, like, you have real friends out there, but, like, my point is just that the political stance on the thing is just stupid. It just has so little even self-interest, right? Like, it is so pathologically empathetic that it doesn’t even know who the claim of racism against this one guy would have really offended and hurt in the here and now, but they’re completely willing to harm themselves and him in the process. So the thing is, like, under them as well, two acts have been, actually three acts of, like, I believe, its three acts have now been signed in, which is basically, like, the billable, the one that’s coming through now is the National Health Insurance thing and then the expropriation without compensation.

Now, the thing is, the DA is part of the reason why Cyril got re-elected as president. They have a lot of power. They have a lot of influence. They could have gone, what, bro? The other communists have clearly conspired to stab you in the back. You can go take your chances with them, or you can align with us. That’s what they could have and should have done. But instead of doing that, they just became this compliant middle management group. Like, okay cool, that’s good.

When all of this Trump stuff came out, like many of them literally came out like, no, Trump’s mistaken. Trump is mistaken, because they also have severe Trump derangement syndrome. But like they don’t think straight about the guy. And it took them a few days. I’m sure their backers are calling them and basically going, listen, guys, we’ve changed our mind about Trump and you guys better get on the train. So where it seems like earlier last week, they had a concerted like press effort to go, we denounce EWC and it’s horrible and we must end at this moment, yada, yada, yada…

But that’s kind of like what I was hoping from them. What once they formed a large enough block to actually pull the ANC in one direction. My hope was, wow! The middle managers are going to pull the ANC in the right direction. Instead, all that happened was it seems like the middle management have just slotted into the ANC. They’re like, no, we’ve got to work together.

Yeah, sure. We’re going to take, the machine is like it makes sausage and it does. Yes, you’re right. Like we do, put babies in the one side and sausage comes out the other side. We’re going to do it in a non-cropped way. We’re going to put the babies in there in the most efficient possible way. It’s just like it’s ridiculous, guys.

Like snap out of it. So as I was saying, like the three things that sort of gave me hope about South Africa was the communities are clearly against the nonsense. The power came back on and has stayed on most of the time. And then the third thing is we now have a government too And hopefully now with the Trump thing, we actually have a government that’s going to start fighting itself.

Because in my opinion, that’s one of the best things that can happen to us. If the national government can fight itself, and people on the ground can sort out their own stuff. If there can be enough distractions so that the government can’t enact stupid nonsense on us, right? We can actually buy time to go, hey, wait a minute.

Let’s kind of see how we can reorganize stuff. And at the same time, there’s a whole bunch of like civil organizations. I want to shout out to two of them that are really exceptionally good. One is the Free Market Foundation that I would strongly recommend if you’re an international viewer.

Please go to the Free Market Foundation’s website and support them. And the other guys are, I’ll send you the link in case the word is hard to spell, is Sakeliga, which is like S-A-K-E-L-I-G-A, which is another civil rights organization who specifically fight for business rights in South Africa, right?

And are like constantly taking the government to court and buying us more time. So the idea is like the more time civil society has to kind of build up stuff, My hope is that we can get that hormetic stresses, at the right kind of cadence so that it doesn’t kill us.

And we can sort of like start to rebuild these enclaves of order and then hopefully advance from there again

1:30:55 – Brian David Crane

And what about some prior to this call, you had sent me a video about informal settlements and the growth of them in South Africa, Western Cape and other provinces. Yeah, what if you’re a landowner in Hermanus, somewhere in the Western Cape, doesn’t really matter.

Hermanus is an example because the name just comes to mind, not because I know much about it. But like, what do you do about that? Do you do anything about it?

1:31:28 – Schalk Dormehl

Yeah, and so my family has some first-hand experience of how that can pan out, right? So I think maybe like if you can put that right in the show notes, like it’d be quite productive as well. So people can actually see what’s going on, right? So I would say the first thing as far as I can tell, right? That’s a two-pronged thing that’s happening here, right? The one thing is that many of the small towns are in a state of severe decay now. So people are moving from there into the cities.

But a lot of those people are like super poor and South Africa, has a border as bad as the Republicans thought their border was. So we have, I think we actually like, I’m speaking under correction, but like less than 50% of Zimbabweans live in Zimbabwe. And the largest group who left for somewhere else is still in South Africa.

Right? I have no specific qualms with Zimbabweans. They’ve been massively like, all my interactions with them have been very productive and positive. But that’s the kind of headwinds that we face. So what seems to be happening…

1:32:31 – Brian David Crane

Sorry. This in a country where already you have official unemployment statistics at 50%, right? And then you introduce this amount of yeah undocumented or illegal migrants, and that number goes even higher probably.

1:32:50 – Schalk Dormehl

Yeah if you want to have an interesting interview I can actually connect you with my one friend who walked across from Zimbabwe and he walked across the border at age 16. Right like and I mean just that whole story is endlessly amusing to hear and it gives you a good idea of what It’s like the whole Zimbabwean experience not a whole like crazy story.

But so just back to the informal settlements thing. So we have a hell of a lot of people who obviously like moving closer to places that have economic activity. So that’s the one, what I would say, natural part of it.

1:33:22 – Brian David Crane

Yeah.

1:33:23 – Schalk Dormehl

The unnatural parts of it is basically that what is happening is that the government is applying the same type of thing that it seems like they’re doing in Los Angeles and San Francisco. Right so they have a Narco Tyranny. The anarchy is for the criminals and tyranny is for the law-abiding citizens. So the idea is essentially like if these people come squat on your land like it’s quite a process to get them removed like it doesn’t just happen automatically.

If you do it yourself with too much force you end up on Youtube, and then you get targeted for societal justice and stochastic justice and the government that barely ever takes anyone to justice like, will come after you because you did something in the wrong way.

So we have these large informal settlements basically now growing around many of the towns and cities and stuff. And obviously, towns and cities that do better are going to eventually attract more of them. The problem at one point as well is some of it seems to be driven. And I mean, I don’t have direct first-hand experience of this, but some of it seems to be driven by members of the ANC and members of the EFF.

So they actually like to encourage people to go to these places. They make it very hard to get people removed. They ship in more people because that directly translates to more support for them in the next election. Right, so yeah.

1:34:46 – Brian David Crane

Yep.

1:34:47 – Schalk Dormehl

There’s a lot like that kind of thing. And then in terms of the type of threat that poses to property ownership is what I think people don’t quite understand about the Zimbabwean situation to my knowledge at least was it wasn’t necessarily that the military showed up at your farm and took it.

It’s that mobs showed up at your place, basically, and tried to take it. Right now,

1:35:11 – Brian David Crane

And you couldn’t get them off. If they did take it, you couldn’t get them off. If you were physically fought back, then the weight of the law or social justice, let’s say, came after you.

1:35:21 – Schalk Dormehl

Yeah. I’m not sure if they’re still in jail, but they were in jail like well over 10 years after the events. But like people who escaped their farms as they were being taken over and who drove over people in the attempt to escape and kill them were eventually put in jail.

And we’re still in jail like more than 10 years after the event that happened.

1:35:41 – Brian David Crane

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

1:35:42 – Schalk Dormehl

So that’s kind of like the problem with Anarcho-Tyrany. Now, my dad had a piece of commercial property in a place called Butatswana, which was like one of the home states. If people look at the little video of the borders of South Africa, they’ll like to see the little home states, I believe, at one point as well. And essentially, like in 1994, the ANC overthrew the government of Botswana. And my dad lost the ability to get the people who were like on his property to basically leave his property if they weren’t paying rent.

And unfortunately, my dad then spent the last decade of his life trying to get this piece of property back. So he threw a lot of good time after that, unfortunately. But all that had really occurred was it wasn’t that the ANC came and took his piece of property. Somebody else came there and they just didn’t enforce the white guy’s property rights. That’s just kind of like how it panned out. Yeah, so in terms of the informal settlements, that’s also like part of the serious concern is that the other parties like to keep shipping in people into places where these people are not native groups from. Again, its 11 different groups in a very, very large geographical area.

And they keep shipping them into different places where they don’t currently have control. And then eventually they get electoral control and they sort of get mob control. Because the thing is they can then become selective about who they help when you have a bunch of squatters on your land and who you don’t help when you have a bunch of squatters on your land. So yeah, so that is ah that is a very real feasible problem, like a very real world problem. And it’s also one of those things where I sort of view it as like there are collapsing points. If you go look at the white populations up in, like historic white populations up in Africa, right?

There were points where they massively suddenly drained out, like in a question of five years, 75% of their populations. And some of these populations were ancient, like the angular white Angolans were in Angola longer than Americans were in America. Right. And they only got kicked out.

1:37:51 – Brian David Crane

Or some of the whites of Mozambique as well, right? That was settled by the Portuguese in 19 or 15? I don’t know,15 or 1600? Please go on about Angola..

1:38:05 – Schalk Dormehl

So yeah the thing is like on the one hand I mean, it’s not like they’re shuffling white people into concentration camps down here right like that’s very clearly not the reality of the matter. Most of the white people who are still here have found a way to live quite comfortably, but that doesn’t mean that their property rights have not been disrespected. Their business rights have not been disrespected like a really criminal degree.

The fact that you are abusing a person and they’re doing well in spite of it sort of like doesn’t really absolve you from the initial abuse.

1:38:46 – Brian David Crane

Abuse. Yeah..

1:38:47 – Schalk Dormehl

And at the same measure, the problem is like for the poor South Africans and for the poor black South Africans, the less of an economy you have to run off, the worse life is for them. The worse the differential becomes. So we definitely like that we face those like some serious, serious headwinds. Personally, I would say the primary thing that needs to happen in South Africa, right?

And there’s a guy you might want to look up called Gaten McKenzie, like he’s probably the closest thing we have to maybe the type of leader that South Africa would need. Like a really brusque guy who doesn’t mind being wrong, who doesn’t mind saying the wrong thing, who doesn’t like, who doesn’t mind being ludicrously offensive to a whole bunch of different groupings of people and who, in his case, he’s colored, so..

But somebody who’s immune to the accusation of you’re a racist, right? If you had people like that, who basically like thought, hey, wait a minute, this is all just a manipulation game. And if I allow the manipulation game to happen, I will cause far more suffering in the world than if I stand up against it. And that’s kind of like my take on it. Like South Africa needs a bunch of people who are inoculated to all the empathy acts, right?

To being called a bigot, to being called a racist, to being called, like a capitalist, whatever that the slur is, right? We need a sufficient group of people you sort of like aggressively go, what? Like, you’re literally like costing people their lives, their livelihood. You’re making them like toil away from bugger all to live in a shack.

This is bullshit. This is not how we’re going to run things. And to not care about what other liberal people think about them. That’s sort of like what I really feel South Africa needs is you need someone. I think sooner or later, we’re going to get someone like that.

So I guess if you have a… if you have an ethnic preference and you should try to get to that point before the other guys, I guess, but sooner or later, we’re going to get somebody, I believe like that. Who’s going to go, what, like this is, this has reached a point of ridiculousness now.

And we’re going to start pushing back and we don’t care what you call us. We’re going to keep going until, the other guys are defeated is the wrong word, but let’s say, until the rot is extracted.

1:41:13 – Brian David Crane

Yeah

1:41:14 – Schalk Dormehl

We have reestablished order.

1:41:19 – Brian David Crane

Rob Hursoff, he often talks about Gaten McKenzie. He’s a fan of his. What do you think of Rob and his opinion about Gaten? It sounds like you’re a fan of Gaten, or at least you think that he would be the type of leader that South Africa needs.

From what I understood in the 2024 election, Gaten got quite a bit of support from people like Rob. He didn’t do very well though politically in the polls.

1:41:46 – Schalk Dormehl

As I understand, like my political interest is sort of like just to put my head above the parapet, sort of like this to see which way the corpse is decaying most of the time.

So I was hoping the last time I did it that there would be the positive effect of like the DA would actually fight the ANC, etc., I’d say the two massively like upsetting things that, or upsets that happened was Jacob Zuma, that libertarian hero, he broke the back of the ANC.

Like that man, he’s gotten rid of all the prosecutorial authority in South Africa. He got at the government. He is really a libertarian. He is the libertarian Batman. So basically, like, I think he’s an Anarcho-Monarchist, right?

1:42:29 – Brian David Crane

Well, he’s an Anarcho-Tyrannist. I would say, I don’t know if he’s a libertarian. Yeah.

1:42:35 – Schalk Dormehl

I think he’s an Anarcho-Monarchist, right? So I guess, as a sort of like either the Zulu Lord Protector or the Zulu, the real Zulu king. But anyway, but be that as it may, as I understand the numbers, like, Gaten did a lot better than anyone was expecting, even though it doesn’t necessarily like not like he reached critical mass and escape velocity. In terms of what he says and believes, I’ve honestly only looked into him in a very peripheral kind of a sense. He’s definitely said a lot of things where I could not roll my eyes hard enough at it.

And he’s definitely said a lot of stuff where I was like, this is exceptionally sensible, which is if somebody induces that effect in me, he’s probably the right guy to run for office. Right? Because he is going to be savvy and tough enough to kind of break through the different layers of nonsense over time. So how he might accomplish that in ah in the longer arc and how how difficult the South African political system is and again like the 11 different groupings like he is very clearly of one grouping and he has a lot of support amongst his grouping whether or not that translates,

I’ve got no idea, but yeah like, that’s kind of all I really, really like I have to say about him at this point. I hope he makes it more than one cycle. And I hope that lots of these newer parties kind of like, sort of make it more than one cycle.

1:44:11 – Brian David Crane

Yeah, more than just a flash in the pan, let’s say, yeah. Let’s start wrapping up. Are there any thoughts – When you look at 2025, how you think it’s going to play out, what are you excited about? What do you want from people, like if somebody comes to South Africa, what do you want them to see, generally speaking?

1:44:38 – Schalk Dormehl

Well, I would say definitely. Everybody has to come visit South Africa. like You have to come visit the place. You have to come experience the place. There is definitely, if you’re into liberty and anarchy and that kind of stuff, like there is a unique beauty to this place. The only other place I’ve even heard of that might be like this is sort of like Argentina. So I would say everybody needs to come check it out. Like it’s super complicated.

Like it’s way more complicated than it sounds. Like it’s… Yeah, come check it out, come to Cape Town, go check out the Kruger National Park, definitely go to the big cities, look up the photos of what they used to look like. So that would be like my appeal to people, like really come here.

And I would also say, like if you’re liberty-minded, please support the Free Market Foundation and Saakalikha. Honesty guys, the call to action there, please support those two places. They are, in my opinion, probably the two who have the best chance of reprogramming people’s minds into a thing that will cause growth.

So that’s it in terms of like 2025 I want to say this about South Africa right so we we didn’t touch on my global views, but this is what I would say right, so there’s this joke of these two blonde white South Africans, they move to they move to Canada and basically like these two blonde-like complete stereotypical girls are walking through the forest. And they’ve never been in the Canadian forest. They come across a set of tracks.

And the one guy, the one goes, “Listen, these are rhinoceros tracks.” The other one goes, “Are you insane? Like we’re not in South Africa. There are no rhinoceroses here, right?” The other one, she goes like, “These are obviously moose tracks.” And the other one goes, “How would you know? Like you’ve never seen a moose.” Anyway, they were still arguing when the train hit them.

1:46:26 – Brian David Crane

Oh…

1:46:31 – Schalk Dormehl

And that’s kind of like what I think is going on globally is I think every day, like I use AI on a daily basis to write code. I see it evolve all the time. I see all the crazy stuff that’s possible. I see the video stuff. I see like the literally like live generated virtual worlds in some of these models. My take is that by the time most of our political concerns really come to fruition, I suspect that the train’s going to get but maybe it’s going to be like a super super massive like ultra-abundance train and everything’s great.

And maybe it’s something not quite that positive. But I suspect that if we look back at it like if we look back at this part in history, right in 100 years, I doubt people will remember that Trump won. I think they’ll remember like, wait a minute, that was like a year or two after ChatGPT came out.

I think that’ll be like the major inflection point. So that’s kind of like what I suspect is going to probably dominate 2025 as well, is like more and more crazy AI stuff will continue to come out. And it’ll really like, I think it’ll continue to disrupt life and make life like way more interesting, and hopefully help us, yeah.

1:47:55 – Brian David Crane

Well I was going to say, and you’ll see this continued bifurcation between those who are comfortable using technology and those who aren’t or those who are comfortable, was comfortable in English, comfortable with.

Yeah, I think taking ownership over their own problems in life, let’s say, right? Like, I think that’s also,

1:48:20 – Schalk Dormehl

Yeah.

1:48:21 – Brian David Crane

ChatGPT, try to make this succinct, as a means of, if you use it and use it well, and well as being subjective, but if you use it well, you can learn a lot, you can use it to do incredible things. It also has its own biases, it has its own flaws. And the reason I say that about the biases and flaws is because in that you wind up with, again, like it’s another tool that can help you achieve and go to where it is that you want to go.

1:48:53 – Schalk Dormehl

Yeah, it’ll amplify everyone who has, it’ll basically amplify everyone who has agency. Like if you can, I sort of view it as if you have any desire and the sense of self-responsibility to go from point A to point B, even if you don’t know what the road looks like, this will enormously amplify you.

I think that intelligence, training, like networks, like even an ability to communicate, will become so secondary, literally just to, I’m here, I want to end up there, and I’ve got this crazy thing that can help you.

And I think that your ability to just move this is going to be like the absolute overwhelming factor, as to whether or not you are ultra wealthy or, I don’t know, hiding somewhere because you’re afraid it’s going to get you.

1:49:47 – Brian David Crane

Cool. Skog on that note, let’s end. If you have people, for those listening that want to follow you, or I will link to the free market foundation. I will link to the other organization. The name in Afrikaans escapes me.

You can say it again for those who, who, and take up the, ah take up the cause of Liberty in South Africa and elsewhere in the Western world.

1:50:03 – Schalk Dormehl

Sa-ke-li-ga

1:50:05 – Brian David Crane

Sa-ke-li-ga, and take up the cause of Liberty in South Africa and elsewhere in the Western world.

1:50:16 – Schalk Dormehl

Yeah, thank you very much for having me. It was a major pleasure. Thanks for letting me talk, man. It was very therapeutic.