Vanessa her usual sterling self; Matthew someone I’ve been watching lately, with increasing positive assessment. In this ninety-minute conversation - mostly Matthew - there’s considerable further enlightenment about what’s going on with Russia and China around the WEFoid’s attempt at their idea of a reset; and how the Sino-Rus idea is considerably different, and by no means in cahoots with the WEFs - as so many dissident commentators just now are imagining (in that tempting misty zone between real, credible conspiracies and the loony-fantasy discardable-fairy-story cospithirries).
In keeping with my rule of thumb that literally no-one ever escapes completely from the Curse of the Blind Spot… I should just point out that from my watching of Matthew so far, it’s become clear to me that his blind spot is what Jim Kunstler calls ‘techno-narcissism’. That’s to say, the eegabeeva blind faith that human intelligence and its creations of science and technology set us apart from and - in some mystical way - above the constraints of the natural world, and indeed of the natural universe. We can - according to this faith - take our fate into our own hands completely, and manage it in a self-created growthforever destiny, like gods-beyond-Fate, simply by our never-ceasing techie-techie brilliance. (Yeah right, little farties; bound to be true! 
)
Obviously, being a defender of the idea of the Long Descent, compelled on us by the steady depletion of the non-self-renewing, non-substitutable, and absolutely essential natural resources that enable the current brief, once-only era of industrialism, I don’t buy this daydream. But it leads Matthew to have a big blind spot on The Limits To Growth, and on just how many humans (in our current population-overshoot episode) can and should be accommodated on Planet Earth, and on just how high and ever-rising should be the hyper-prosperity of us all, through the technological thaumaturgy we continue to develop (forever!) as we do so.
Apparently, Russia is never going to run out of resources, is therefore exempt from the Long Descent, and should therefore spread ‘development’ over the whole of Siberia… 
I think Matt has his head up his fantasies on that score, of course. But I remain impressed by the depth of his scholarship and reading, and so recommend him as one to hear whenever you can. His take on the alternative world political arrangements, in opposition to the WEFoid dystopia-fantasy, and seen as possible by the Sino-Rus duopoly, is encouraging. It also tallies with my hunch that the WEFoids haven’t captured the Russian and Chinese ruling establishments, have in fact been rebuffed by them, and won’t be able to manipulate them.
Knowing something about China and its intelligence assessment of Anglozionist-empire shenanigans with racially-targetted pandemic bio-weapons in its hundreds of overseas bio-labs (ringing Russia and China), Matthew is also illuminating on just why China goes so draconian at the first sign of any infectious outbreak within its borders: on the precautionary principle, they treat them all as possible US bio-weapon attacks. And in that, they’re quite probably right: