All right, I am thrilled to be joined on Bad Fathom podcast once again by Ben Norton, who

is editor of Geopolitical Economy Report, which you can find at geopoliticaleconometreport.com.

Welcome back, Ben.

It's a pleasure.

Thanks for having me.

So, there are a number of topics I want to address with you today.

First and foremost, I reached out because there is a really interesting conversation ongoing

about Tucker's departure from Fox News and whether or not he is being overly credited as an

anti-war voice on a major network and whether his departure from that network is a loss.

I want to come back to that at some point, but I also have seen you really offering some of

the clearest explanations, first and foremost, of what's going on with de-dollarization,

with the growing influence of bricks and how all of that has been sparked in some ways by the

conflict in Ukraine, making a really interesting kind of netting of geopolitical stories that do

tie in with what's going on with Tucker and whether or not his anti-Ukraine rhetoric is really

just a cover for a pro-China war rhetoric, which of course is all part of this new economic

alliances that are happening right now in the world.

So, I know that's a lot, so I figured we could just start with bricks.

And I wouldn't to start from the very, very beginning because I am relatively naive in this

space, shall I say. So, first, can you just define what brick stands for when it was founded and

then we'll start from there? Well, bricks has its origins in their 2000s.

There were discussions first in 2006 and it was created in 2009, originally as the brick

block and then South Africa was added, which is the S. So, it stands for Brazil, Russia,

...