Ask Dr. Drew - Zombie Economy: Can We Avoid A Digital Dystopia? w/ Peter St Onge & Dr. Kelly Victory – Ask Dr. Drew – Ep 287

Episode Date: November 20, 2023

“As bad as things are, we haven’t even hit the full recession yet,” warns Peter St Onge. “And when it comes, Washington’s playbook could deliver a Japan-style zombie economy for decades to c...ome.” The former professor joins Dr. Kelly Victory and Dr. Drew to discuss the psychology of crowds that command economic markets, parallel economies, and the signs that a full-on recession is coming. Peter St. Onge, Ph.D. is the Mark A. Kolokotrones Fellow in Economic Freedom at the Heritage Foundation, a Fellow at the Mises Institute, and a former professor at Taiwan’s Feng Chia University. Before academia, he worked in corporate strategy in Latin America and Asia, and bartended at a dive bar in Osaka. He makes daily videos on economics and freedom at https://youtube.com/@profstonge. Follow him at https://twitter.com/profstonge 「 SPONSORED BY 」 Find out more about the companies that make this show possible and get special discounts on amazing products at https://drdrew.com/sponsors • GENUCEL - Using a proprietary base formulated by a pharmacist, Genucel has created skincare that can dramatically improve the appearance of facial redness and under-eye puffiness. Genucel uses clinical levels of botanical extracts in their cruelty-free, natural, made-in-the-USA line of products. Get an extra discount with promo code DREW at https://genucel.com/drew • COZY EARTH - Trying to think of the right present for someone special? Susan and Drew love Cozy Earth's sheets & clothing made with super-soft viscose from bamboo! Use code DREW to save up to 40% at https://drdrew.com/cozy • THE WELLNESS COMPANY - Counteract harmful spike proteins with TWC's Signature Series Spike Support Formula containing nattokinase and selenium. Learn more about TWC's supplements at https://twc.health/drew • PALEOVALLEY - "Paleovalley has a wide variety of extraordinary products that are both healthful and delicious,” says Dr. Drew. "I am a huge fan of this brand and know you'll love it too!” Get a discount on your first order at https://drdrew.com/paleovalley 「 MEDICAL NOTE 」 The CDC states that COVID-19 vaccines are safe, effective, and reduce your risk of severe illness. You should always consult your personal physician before making any decisions about your health.  「 ABOUT THE SHOW 」 Ask Dr. Drew is produced by Kaleb Nation (https://kalebnation.com) and Susan Pinsky (https://twitter.com/firstladyoflove). This show is for entertainment and/or informational purposes only, and is not a substitute for medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. 「 ABOUT DR. DREW 」 Dr. Drew is a board-certified physician with over 35 years of national radio, NYT bestselling books, and countless TV shows bearing his name. He's known for Celebrity Rehab (VH1), Teen Mom OG (MTV), Dr. Drew After Dark (YMH), The Masked Singer (FOX), multiple hit podcasts, and the iconic Loveline radio show. Dr. Drew Pinsky received his undergraduate degree from Amherst College and his M.D. from the University of Southern California, School of Medicine. Read more at https://drdrew.com/about Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Starting point is 00:00:00 Today I'll be speaking to Dr. Peter St. Onge. He is the Marke Kolokotronis Fellow at the Economic Freedom at the Heritage Foundation. Also a fellow at the Mises Institute. You're going to hear all about the Austrian school. Former professor at a Taiwan University. I believe it's pronounced Fengjia. And before in academia, he worked in corporate strategy in Latin America. You can follow him on Twitter at Prof, P-R-O-F-S-T-O-N-G-E,
Starting point is 00:00:29 Prof St. Onge, P-R-O-F-S-T-O-N-G-E. Same thing, Twitter, it's at Prof St. Onge. And PeterStOnge.com is the website. You can find all his stuff there. He's got some really interesting material he wants to review with us today. Dr. Kelly Victory is with us here as well. And, of course, I'll be watching on the Restreams and the Rumble Rants. And, Susan, do you think we'll have time for calls?
Starting point is 00:00:52 We might. I'll be watching. We'll be on the Twitter spaces as well. So we'll try to create room for some calls later on after this. Our laws as it pertains to substances are draconian and bizarre. The psychopaths start this. Before you kill people. I am a clinician. I observe things about these chemicals. Let's just deal with what's real. We used to get these calls on Loveline all the time. Educate adolescents and to prevent and to treat. If you have trouble, you can't stop and you want to help stop it, I can help.
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Starting point is 00:02:26 is included for free. Plus, if you go to GenuCell.com slash Drew now, you'll get a free upgrade to priority shipping. That is GenuCell.com slash Drew, G-E-N-U-C-E-L.com slash Drew. And welcome. Let's get right to it. I want to get to this conversation uh dr peter st ange peter welcome to the program thank you for having me on so uh it's interesting i was listening to some of your podcasts and you were alluding to the fact that the austrian school did not seem to be something that people were aware of, which just that surprised me. I understand that academia has been captured by Keynesianism, but I always thought that the Mises Institute and Austrian economics
Starting point is 00:03:14 at least deserved a footnote. You'd have to know it. You'd have to be aware of that point of view. But A, I'll ask you, is it really that obscure to people? Oh, it is. Okay. And B, talk to us for a minute about the Austrian school and liberty and freedom. Yeah, I think among people who sort of think the way that we do, I think Austrian is really well known.
Starting point is 00:03:42 So Bitcoiners, of course, know it. It's probably the dominant version known. So Bitcoiners, of course, know it. It's probably the dominant version of economics for Bitcoiners. Gold bugs, anybody who understands gold and appreciates why gold has value. People who are skeptical of the government line tend to understand Austrian, those who believe in freedom. But I think for the vast majority of people, they've never heard of it, especially older people, right? Younger people have a lot more access to information nowadays. They often run across it on YouTube or Reddit or something like this. But really, you know, people in their 50s, 60s, 70s, they've generally never heard of Austrian. I went through a undergrad econ program at McGill up in Canada in the 90s. Never once was any Rothbard, Mises, Hayek was only mentioned for his mainstream points of view.
Starting point is 00:04:35 I did not know there was an Austrian school majoring in econ. I stumbled across it in a bookstore somewhere in 1999, a book by Mark Skousen where he was comparing different schools of economics. And I said, wow, what is this thing? This thing is pretty wild. And that led me down the rabbit hole. And fundamentally, the difference, I think the easiest way to understand the difference between Austrian and sort of mainstream Keynesian is where it got its name, which is that the German-speaking world dominated economics in the 1800s. Prussia. The Prussians, yeah, exactly.
Starting point is 00:05:09 The Prussian government sort of co-opted the field of economics. So they appreciated the propaganda value of economists, that they can sell government policies, they can help government figure out how to seize more resources, how to print more money. So the Prussians put their economists on the payroll. The Austrian government did not do that. And so the Austrians were perennially underfunded.
Starting point is 00:05:33 Okay, they were poverty stricken. They didn't have those cushy government contracts. So, whereas the Prussians, they were sort of the intellectual bodyguard of the regime, money just rained down on them. I mean, it looks like modern American universities, just this torrent of money coming down from government. So that's really what distinguishes the two.
Starting point is 00:05:53 So Prussian was imported into the US the form of Keynesian economics, which really isn't a field of science anymore. It's fundamentally just giving justification for government control, whether it's of spending, of money, of regulation. The punchline to modern mainstream economics is always the government has to make it better. The market is failing, companies are failing, individuals are failing, people are too stupid, and so the government has to take over your life and treat you as if you're a pet.
Starting point is 00:06:21 The Austrian view, on the other hand, that's the uncorrupted economics. That's the economics that goes back to the scholastics in the 1600s, 500-year tradition. And what's interesting about that tradition is that it doesn't use these reams of statistics. You don't actually need calculus to understand economics. It simply uses realistic models of human behavior. So there are three key points. One of them is that people do things for reason, like action has purpose. The second is that people differ from each other. This is why we bother trading and hiring each other.
Starting point is 00:06:56 And the third one is just that leisure is a good. In other words, you will not get out of bed, you will not get up and do something unless it is in your interests. So, for example, you don't have Marxist exploitation of labor because the worker only took the job because they're benefiting from it, just as the company only offered the job because they're benefiting from it. So the point is everybody benefits from every economic transaction. But note what follows from that, which is that there's nothing for governments to perfect. Because people know what they want. They know what's the best strategy in life. They know what
Starting point is 00:07:29 things are important to them. And so in that traditional classical or Austrian model, there is no role for government. In fact, government is in the way. Government has nothing to add but making people poorer, taking away opportunities, taking away freedoms. So fundamentally, Austrian, it doesn't start with freedom. It starts with models of human behavior, but the punchline comes out the freedom. And so I think that's another big reason why governments don't want to fund it. They're not particularly interested in promoting the idea of freedom. They want to promote the idea of control.
Starting point is 00:08:03 And libertarians have always found this appealing, I guess. They come at it from a different angle, but end up in your sort of thing. I do believe there is sort of a hybrid sort of thing out there potentially, but let me just ask a couple. I want to get some other stuff first before we get into what's good and what's not good. Most of my friends that work in finance and economy have a real sense about mob behavior, like the behavior of large groups of people. I mean, that's what markets are, right? You guys have a sense of that. I, of late, have been extremely upset about the mob action. I kind of predicted it about 15 years ago. My personal theory is that mobs become particularly intense when the general population has a lot of unregulated rage and they
Starting point is 00:08:56 take it and they gather in these very gratifying groups where they can focus that rage on a scapegoat, a person, a group, something. And now I did not imagine when I came up with these theories about where that came from in terms of personality construct and whatnot, I did not foresee social media and cancel culture. I did not know that that would be a thing. But our modern-day guillotine is the cancel culture, really. That's what it is.
Starting point is 00:09:21 And so all this mob behavior and this gratification of of aggressive impulses in mobs is deeply disturbing to me does it bother you as someone who has watched economics and sort of seen the general you know hysterias that you know i i mean i'm sure in your readings you know uh extraordinary popular delusions and madness of crowds is, you know, sort of, you have to read that. And, and, uh, also I forget the guy's name, the Frenchman Lebon's book about, uh, about mobs because he became obsessed because of the French revolution, which I've lately been obsessed with lately, lately, because I'm trying to understand, oh, there's Lebon, uh,
Starting point is 00:10:02 you know, what is going on now and what to expect from it. So I'm wondering if you have any thoughts. Yeah, I think you're absolutely right to be interested in the French Revolution. That's probably one of the closest parallels to what we're living at the moment, unfortunately. And I think that a lot of market behavior, I think, to a certain degree, it unfairly gets labeled as sort of mass insanity. I think a lot of it is just driven by central banks. So central banks, they make rates too cheap.
Starting point is 00:10:33 They make them too high. That very predictably leads to this boom-bice. I think to a certain degree, central banks are scapegoating markets for what they themselves have caused. But at the same time, I think that, you know, there is this very strong human instinct to be influenced by those around you. We have strong preferences for sort of tribal identity. There's a concept I'm sure you're familiar with, an altruistic punishment where people punish, they see themselves as good people because
Starting point is 00:11:04 they are harming somebody else. And I actually did a study of this during my, it was actually a big chunk of my dissertation. If you look at political speeches, okay, there's this sort of standard model of democracy where it's, you know, sort of trying to buy votes, okay? It's trying to give people good goodies, and if those people like it, then they win the election. But if you actually look at political... Exactly. What's interesting is that if you actually look at political communication,
Starting point is 00:11:33 so speeches, you know, the way that politicians frame things, they don't actually frame it as, vote for me and you'll get the good thing. In fact, often they'll frame it as, vote for me and I will hurt you for a noble reason. You will be saintly because you have suffered. In other words, they are selling sacrifice. A famous Austrian corporal in the 1930s did this, of course, very widely. His
Starting point is 00:11:59 speeches were all full of all of the horrible things that will happen to you, the audience. It will be difficult. You will bleed. You will starve. And they lapped it up. They loved it because of that altruistic punishment. They could experience this moment of almost saintly hood because of all that they were going to sacrifice. An iconic version of this is affirmative action. So that is sold to white audiences. They do not hide what's happening here, right? What's happening here is that you, the white audience, will lose things and that will be given to some other group. There is no attempt made to hide it. In fact, they are very, very proud of it. And the audience enjoys the fact, right? They see themselves as moral people because they will suffer for it. That, for me, is extremely concerning. Humans absolutely have that instinct. If we look at the evil of the world even today, the people who are committing that evil, they do not see themselves as evil.
Starting point is 00:13:00 If they're ideological movements, they don't even see themselves as, you know, sort of, ha ha, we're going to get these goodies. They don't. They celebrate the sacrifice. That's part of the package. And unfortunately, voters lap it up. And so my conclusion is that, you know, sort of my takeaway from it is this is why rule of law, specifically the American Constitution, are so incredibly important because voters are not motivated by pure altruism. They're not motivated by love. They're not even
Starting point is 00:13:30 motivated primarily by self-interest. They are motivated by punishing the evildoers. Yeah, I sort of see some of that, the so-called lapping it up from a psychological perspective of relieving guilt. Guilt is a very unpleasant feeling, so it relieves them of their guilt. And for those that don't have guilt, it ends up just being a plain old traumatic reenactment. So I want to ask so many different questions. And I want to get into the parallel economies
Starting point is 00:14:03 and the zombie economy, where you think that's coming but before I do want to ask sort of a general question Adam Smith is he an author from the Austrian school does he represent the Austrian school at all he is not an Austrian he's got a couple of major flaws one of them is he basically had a Marxist theory of value that, you know, if you put a lot of work into something, then it should be worth more. He's generally, I think, seen more as a standard free marketer. I think broadly speaking, you can split the main modern schools into Austrian, Chicago, and then Keynesian.
Starting point is 00:14:44 And Chicago, you then Keynesian. And Chicago tends to be a relatively free market. That would be Milton Friedman. The main point of difference with Austrian tends to be about money. So Chicago thinks that we should just have a Fed who does better, whereas Austrians think that government screws up money always and everywhere. But yeah, I think Smith is more of an icon of the Chicago school. And then for Austrians, it'd probably be either Mises or Rothbard who's really the central figure.
Starting point is 00:15:13 And then my last question before I bring Dr. Victory in here, what's the problem? I mean, what will we do? Well, I know what you're going to say, but isn't it, isn't there a middle ground where we can still have a lender of last resort? You certainly can. The question is why you would want to, right? So what's the benefit? The main reason for having a lender of resort, the main reason cited by people who champion it is that banks can get bigger, they can lend more, you can have more money circulating in the
Starting point is 00:15:48 economy and they allege that this makes the economy grow faster. The thing is that empirically it does not. If you suddenly increase the amount of money in existence tenfold, you haven't changed the number of real things in existence, okay? You're just bidding up the price of them. The money itself doesn't actually create anything useful. And so if money creation has no purpose, if it's just sort of pretty words laid on top of handing out money to cronies, then there's no point in having those risky banks that need bailouts. So Austrians know, Austrians would generally argue the alternative is that banks should actually be sound.
Starting point is 00:16:28 In other words, your money should either be in the vault or it should be like with a certificate of deposit where it's not available on demand. That means you cannot have a bank run, right? So if we had sound banks, you would have the same amount of lending. You would not have inflation. And you know, this, we can look back to the last period where we had constrained money growth. We still had, unfortunately, fractional reserve banking. But the last period of sort of sound money was the late 19th century, and that was really the golden age. It was a
Starting point is 00:16:57 golden age for America. It was really the golden age for the entirety of human population. Everything that we call modern was invented from a stretch from about 1870 to 1900, including computers, space flight, pneumatic tubes, in other words, Elon Musk's Hyperloop, electric cars, all of it, magnetism, you name it, all of it invented in this tiny little period where we did have sound money. Ever since then, we've been running on fumes. And since we've really pumped up the money printers and inflated the banking system, so the 1970s, things have actually gotten, I think a lot, well, they have empirically gotten a lot worse.
Starting point is 00:17:36 We've had much slower growth. Of course, we have these financial crises now, one after the other. So you could have a lender of last resort that has sort of a permanent bailout function, but I have no idea why you would. So last thing for me is you mentioned where the French Revolution is something that is similar. Is it really to the present moment? And I'm sort of looking, I'm worrying about mobs. It seems to me when I look at 1790 and I look at early 20th century Russia, the circumstances were so much more severe in terms of the distance between the aristocrats and the people and the problems the countries were getting into, France in terms of defending
Starting point is 00:18:18 the American Revolution and Russia in terms of the First World War. I mean, there was really serious stuff going on. Do you imagine we're going to get into trouble like that? Or is this just a milder version that is sort of reminiscent? And in either case, what do we do about it? Yeah, I think that's sort of the first point there is, I agree. I mean, things were obviously much, much worse preceding the Russian Revolution and the French Revolution. I think what's a little bit concerning is that people don't become violent necessarily because things are bad.
Starting point is 00:18:53 Empirically, they tend to become violent when things were good and then suddenly turn south. OK, this was Che Guevara's error. Right. So they tried to promote revolution in Bolivia and they figured, well, Bolivia is much poorer. So, of course, we'll find more fertile ground. No, it turns out Cuba, which was the richest country in Latin America at the time, that was where to go. That people are most fertile when things have been going pretty well for a long time and then suddenly they turn south. So in that sense I think that we are very much in fertile ground. At the same time I think
Starting point is 00:19:23 what sort of saves us is that there's about 500 million guns in America in private hands. God bless those patriots. If things get rough, there are a whole lot of good guys who are going to put a stop to it. So I do not think we'll have the kind of bloodshed that we had in the French Revolution.
Starting point is 00:19:41 I think people will stop it before it gets too bad. And I've always thought that having independent states, 50 independent states, is really our strength that way. But you say that's the 10th Amendment. But I'm going to tease that and say that I'll let Dr. Victory get into the 10th Amendment when we get back. Again, we were with Peter St. Onge. You can follow him at prof, S-T-O-N-G-E, P-R-O-F, S-T-O-N-G-E. The YouTube is there as well. And then the website is Peter St. Onge, S-T-O-N-G-E.com. We'll be right back after this.
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Starting point is 00:22:49 calculation. It is the mandate of public health to consider the impact of any particular mitigation scheme on the entire population. This is uncharted territory, Drew. And Dr. Kelly Victory with us again today. I hope I haven't stepped on your opening thunder by asking him to speak about the 10th Amendment and how that is the key ingredient in solving all problems. So shall we have him answer that? You can go ahead and start with that. I was going to start with something else.
Starting point is 00:23:22 So if you want to get to the 10th Amendment first, we can do that. Peter, your thoughts about that? Yeah, I had a July 4th video where I talked in glowing terms about the 10th Amendment. The 10th Amendment, of course, emphasizes that the federal government has delegated powers, that it can only do the things that are literally spelled out in the Constitution. They have driven a truck through that by using a couple of clauses like the General Welfare Clause. And so at this point, the Tenth Amendment is essentially moot, but it's very clear in writing. I think it says, the powers not delegated are reserved for the states, comma, or for the people.
Starting point is 00:24:06 It is written in plain English. When eventually we get a Supreme Court with a spine, and, you know, if they actually sit down and enforce that 10th Amendment, almost the entirety of the federal government would disappear overnight. I mean, you're down to, like, post offices, the Department of Defense, and an embassy or two. There's almost nothing left. So, you know, Health and Human Services, Department of Labor, Social Security for that matter, you would have to compensate, of course, the people who paid into it. So you would have an enormous debt that the federal government would have to pay out. Almost the entire thing is unconstitutional. And by the
Starting point is 00:24:40 way, one of the powers that is not delegated to the federal government is money. So they're certainly not allowed to print little scraps of paper or to give a private organization like the Federal Reserve dictatorial control over our economy. In fact, in the Constitution, the power of controlling money, first of all, it's limited to gold and silver. Secondly, it is delegated to these states, not to the federal government. I don't think we're going to have a Supreme Court with that kind of spine. It would obviously be very disruptive. And unfortunately, historically, judges have sat down and asked not what the constitution says, but what's going to be most disruptive. But if we actually did at some point, either have a Supreme Court who was willing to read
Starting point is 00:25:25 the Constitution as written, or if we had some kind of crisis that focused their minds, then it would be thrilling to try to get back to that original vision, in which point a lot of those things would still be done. There's political pressure for things like Department of Labor, possibly even education. But at least they would be at the state level. And once they're at the state level, it is a lot easier for people to change them. That means that, you know, people don't feel so beaten down by the, you know, by the system. They're actually, they get more involved in reforming or in oversight of those. And then, of course, also each state competes. So the states can look to each other and say, okay, who did this?
Starting point is 00:26:07 You know, we see that in school choice, for example, where a number of states are just going full bore and allowing parents to choose where they want to send their kids. And that then becomes the laboratory of democracy. Other states can see how that works out, as opposed to trying to do that at the federal level, which is exceedingly difficult. Really, you need a ton of money
Starting point is 00:26:24 and you've got to be part of the uniparty if you're going to get a hold of that kind of money. And to be clear, it's the 10th Amendment is fundamentally the rationale for overturning Roe v. Wade. Again, it was not an attempt to outlaw or make illegal abortion. It was simply saying this is not something that belongs at the federal level. This is something that was not enumerated in the constitution and therefore belongs at the state level. And as you rightly point out, people make decisions to move for all kinds of reasons. They don't like the tax basis or they don't like the school system or they don't like the state's position on abortion, whatever it is. People can then choose to live where they want. But the 10th Amendment is indeed, I think, has been trampled on in many, many ways. I want to start and talk lots and lots about the
Starting point is 00:27:13 mob mentality thing. Take a little different bite at that apple. But one thing that struck me when you were talking about this concept of altruistic punishment sounded very similar, and I'd like your thoughts on this, to what Klaus Schwab said recently from the WEF, where he's saying, you know, you will own nothing, you will not be able to travel, you will not eat, you know, you will not choose what you eat, but you will be happy. It sounds very much kind of smacks of that altruistic punishment concept that you will fundamentally suffer mercilessly, but somehow be happy for it. So thoughts on that? Oh, absolutely. And the environmental movement is big on horsehair. They're very proud of the suffering. The fact that products cost more, that they're lower quality.
Starting point is 00:28:07 This is a badge of honor. They wear it with pride. And, you know, all of those, I mean, I think it's almost a pattern for totalitarian movements to really celebrate that. Because totalitarian movements, they tend to destroy. They take a, say, a prosperous, happy society and they crush it. And to turn that into almost a fetish, you know, if you sit down with environmentalists,
Starting point is 00:28:33 for example, and you explain what the economy would look like if you actually got rid of fossil fuels, you know, had these little toy windmills and whatnot to try to run things, you explain to them that, you know, we would substantially return to the Stone Age and they seemed to like that. I guess they imagined it's gonna look like Lord of the Rings with the hobbits and everything will be copacetic.
Starting point is 00:28:53 And you sort of sit down and explain, if you sort of look at the Lord of the Rings realistically, like probably one out of five hobbits are dying of starvation. You don't have any sterilization of medical equipment. And I mean, life is really bad. And indeed, we can see it today because there are parts of the world that are somewhat along that continuum towards the Stone Age. And life is not pleasant. You are choosing which child is going to live. It's not, you know, it's not glamping out in the forest over the weekend. So, you know,
Starting point is 00:29:27 but still, when you try to explain to these people what kind of sacrifices are involved with their utopias, I really think it's almost a point of pride how much it's going to hurt. They are thrilled, of course, that it's going to hurt you, but the fact that it hurts them is like bragging rights. No, exactly. I've always been interested in this concept of altruistic punishment. If you think about what was emblazoned as the motto over the concentration camps, work will set you free. It's the suffering that somehow you will be better for the element of suffering you are about to experience. Anyway, let me move on to I want to talk about the mob thing. And you were talking about it on a relatively as an economist on a relatively a lofty level market behavior and how mob behavior impacts markets. I want to get down to a little bit more granular level, given what Drew was
Starting point is 00:30:25 getting at in terms of, are we looking at potentially violent outbursts and rioting and those sorts of things? I was a psychologist before I was a physician. So I think I have a particular interest in mob mentality and in human behavior. In my experience, people act in mobs. Mobs are the most terrifying of all things because the anonymity of the mob allows people to behave in ways that they otherwise wouldn't. That said, is there a way that we can leverage that mob? People are frustrated right now. People are really frustrated. And if we are looking down the barrel of, you know, masking, mask mandates again, or lockdowns, God forbid, or, you know, if we are on the eve of yet another,
Starting point is 00:31:12 quote, pandemic or emergency, you know, how do you see the current frustration level, which is a huge driver of violent outbursts, is frustration more than anger, more than anything else. It's just pure frustration. You put rats in a box and you keep making them more and more crowded, they will become violent.
Starting point is 00:31:37 That's the nature of existence. So how do you see the current level of frustration and mob mentality acting with regard to, say, specifically around the pandemic guidelines and what we're facing in that regard? Yeah, I think the most danger, well, it's the most dangerous, but it's also the greatest opportunity, is that framing, I think, is really key to this, right? What we saw during COVID was that governments were, I mean, they were really behaving in totalitarian ways that we hadn't seen in centuries. Like, we have not shut down churches, for example, since the 1600s, right? In 2019, if somebody suggested that, yeah, we're going to ban all church services, you would have thought they were absolutely out of their mind. In a country that's, what, 80% Christian?
Starting point is 00:32:27 That's no way. What are you smoking? People went to a place I think none of us expected them to go. And I think a big part of that was the success that media had reinforced by censorship at framing exactly who's doing what, right? So rather than the truth, which was that governments were imposing these totalitarian restrictions on all of us, it was the unvaccinated doing it. See, the unvaccinated were forcing us, you know, because they were extending the pandemic,
Starting point is 00:32:57 we had to keep these draconian things in. So we don't want to do all these horrible totalitarian things. Trust me, we want nothing, but we have to. And that sort of framing, I think, is just extraordinarily dangerous. It's very, very important from a psychological point of view to understand that because people are angry, they're angry on both sides, and whether that turns into a force for good or evil, I think 100% depends on whether we're able to frame it. Now, I think the bad guys know that. I think that's exactly why they went directly for the jugular of censorship. If you can frame things, you can control that mob. In fact, you can do it on a micro level. We saw it during the Rent the Mobs with BLM. I mean, it's amazing the surgical precision. It's almost like a laser pointer. Okay, we're going to need you to go there and do this. It's amazing how you can control them if you control the framing, which is why I think people like, I mean, all of us here agree that free speech is arguably the single most
Starting point is 00:33:55 important issue. If we lose that, we lose the entire thing because they will turn even our allies against us. Yeah. If you look at the theory of mass formation psychosis, which we've talked about quite a bit, it really begins with identifying and elevating a common enemy. In this case, first it was the virus, and then it became the unvaccinated. Same thing happened during Nazi Germany. They elevated a common enemy, the Jews. They are responsible for all of your bad feelings.
Starting point is 00:34:30 But remember, they emphasized in Germany the dirtiness. So it really is, the entire paradigm is that of infectivity. It's an infectious, it's triggering fear and disgust, which are extremely powerful emotions. Right. So you elevate a common focus for your dissatisfaction in life, your unhappiness, whether it's the virus or the unmasked or the unvaccinated or the Jews or whatever it is, and that that is how you rally. And the only way you can do that is by controlling the narrative entirely by propaganda, and in this case now in 2022, 23, is about censorship and being able to shut down anybody
Starting point is 00:35:16 who would dare to say, no, no, no, that's actually not true because you need that common enemy for people to focus on. So go from there. So I agree with you. They did that very successfully, the scapegoat. Yeah, yeah and then I think that the most effective way to counter that, you know, it's a message I promote, a message Tucker often promotes, is that we don't have problems between us, the people, right, left. We all want the same things. We want safe streets.
Starting point is 00:35:48 We want kids who have bright futures, want prosperity, want happiness. We actually want the same things, right? So highlighting that this is an elite, this is a power versus the people thing. So we are trying to unite the people, ideally to take power away from the elite, to try to back them off, to try to hog up more space to give to the people because I think that message is effective. I think it's actually true. If you go into small towns, you might have people who vote Democrat or Republican.
Starting point is 00:36:19 If they're not talking politics, they're joking around, giving each other a hard time, teasing each other. They're having a good old time. It is really not one group over the other. So, right, you know, sort of naming exactly what the strategy is and trying to arm people to be aware of how they're trying to manipulate us to fight each other. I'd love to hear your thoughts on. Go ahead, Drew. I was just saying, I think that's a, we all would, it's interesting to me that I don't understand how anybody could disagree with that, that this whole phenomenon. And, you know, I was reading a book recently, I forget the name of it, but he was making the case that, you know, a top heavy elite is the, one of the most serious threats to any society.
Starting point is 00:37:07 Yeah, absolutely. And once they get past a certain scale, it seems like they actually accelerate in their growth. We're seeing that now. We see it in, let's say, individual states. So the larger the state, the more intrusive tends to be the government. There's a certain critical mass where the elite just, like they start reproducing like bunnies. I mean, they just, and you know,
Starting point is 00:37:32 the key there again is framing. So like getting people to understand what are these people taking from you? Now, a lot of that can be hidden, right? It can be hidden by deficit spending, which is itself funded by central banks. As part of the reasons that I'm so interested in central banks is that, in a sense, Jerome Powell's money printers are a battery that fuels this entire thing.
Starting point is 00:37:57 It keeps Leviathan running. It allows Leviathan to grow while hiding the costs to the people who are losing their power or their money. I've likened it to a venture capitalist. So basically the Fed funds the government over the period where it needs to grow. So let's take COVID for example. They pumped out about six trillion dollars and nobody had to pay that in taxes. They didn't go to billionaires and tell them, you know, we're going to seize half your money, I'm sorry, you know, the pandemic made us do it.
Starting point is 00:38:30 No, it was completely invisible to voters. And in fact, in voters, a lot of voters got a raise, right? They got paid more money to go sit on the couch, which is very appealing to a certain category of voters. And that got support for the lockdowns over 51%. But the point of it is that the Fed effectively acts as this venture capitalist where it hides all the costs. It basically floats all those startup costs
Starting point is 00:38:50 until the growth in government can metastasize, generate its own little crony industry. And at that point, whether it's the military industrial complex or the vaccine industrial complex, those cronies are then able to sustain it and keep that sucker going so um you know you end up where as obscure as it might seem uh to be uh you know talking about the fed when we're talking about the growth of government fundamentally that funds the whole thing all right i had something i was i i interrupted yeah and i'm trying to think of no no that's okay well think about it i've got i've got something else while you're where you're thinking if you
Starting point is 00:39:34 want i just want a quick question which is um you met you you seem to have intentionally used the word leviathan and so my i just have just a sort of a sidebar question, which is, is, was Hobbes onto something? Uh, well, so my understanding of Hobbes is that, uh, the Leviathan is supposed to stop us from fighting from each other. And one of the, one of the things, you know, I think, right. And, you know, I think historically the Leviathan has been far, far more dangerous. My sort of standard, I think, frame on this kind of thing is the one that I use for the Second Amendment, which is that there are many, many more good guys than there are bad guys. And so I like a decentralized society. For example, when people talk about the prospect of government collapsing and people sort of
Starting point is 00:40:28 having to self-organize, in that kind of context, I can guarantee you there will be no crime whatsoever, because there are so many good guys. When you watch it in the Hollywood movies, which are of course written by left-wingers, you always have the criminals getting their pickup truck or whatever. They go out in a convoy and they victimize all the people. That's not how it works in the real world. In the real world, once the government is out of the picture, the good guys clean house. Generally, it is common knowledge who are the bad guys. So they clean them up and the vast majority of people do not live by criminality and society gets real quick in a jiff. This has been happening in El Salvador, for example.
Starting point is 00:41:10 So they, you know, it was common knowledge who the bad guys are. In fact, often they helpfully cover themselves in head-to-toe tattoos. They cleaned it up and El Salvador went from one of the most dangerous countries in the world to one of the least. Now, in that case, it was El Salvador, but fortunately we in the US, because of this beautiful second amendment, we actually have the ability to, I think, run society certainly much more peacefully and much safer than even how it's run today with all of the resources
Starting point is 00:41:41 that government puts on it. A couple of years ago, I was in West Virginia and we were in sort of a country store and we're kind of guys, a couple of guys who drove in and they had the music playing real loud and kind of created the impression that, you know, they were sort of strutting in their normal life and sort of tough guys.
Starting point is 00:42:01 And when they came in here though, they turned the music down, they very politely, they were walking through the store. Excuse me, sir. Why? Because an armed society is a polite society. So I appreciate that, you know, if you're in the middle of a civil war already, which I think generally happens because the government lets it fester. In that context, yes, there may be a place for government to go through and tamp things down. But in terms of how would society run without the straying hand of government, I think empirically, we would actually have a much safer society. We saw that in the Wild West where murder was almost unheard of. If you had, you know,
Starting point is 00:42:45 you've got all these famous cases of murders from the 1800s where, I don't know, you'll have like maybe a teenager who killed their parents or something. And this was sensational all across the country because it almost never happened. Today, it's inconceivable that some teenager who killed their parents
Starting point is 00:43:01 would be nationwide news for years on end. They would sing songs about it. It was so incredibly rare. I'm going to submit to you at least my impression. You can tell me if you think I'm naive, and perhaps I am. I'm a huge Second Amendment person, and I think it's absolutely what has kept us out of harm's way so far, and it separates us from places like Australia, where the government
Starting point is 00:43:27 can absolutely run roughshod over the people. But I also think that the other thing that's very important that keeps societies under control is faith, is religion. And the attempts to eradicate that from our society, I think has had profound effects. When people do not have a strong connection to a church of any sort, whatever that church is, this is agnostic to what particular religion. But without that, without a sort of the presence of a sense of God or of religion and that sense of morality, societies fall apart. And I think it is really, people tend to behave well because they have that sense of godliness around them. Am I a fool? Am I naive that it's only guns and that religion doesn't play a role?
Starting point is 00:44:27 No, I think you're absolutely right. And governments, you know, from the beginning of the growth of government, they've sought to really replace two things, which are faith and family. You could argue community as well. You know, they go directly for the cement that holds everything together. And they do that because these are such important functions. They want to make themselves necessary. They want to take sort of the commanding heights of society. But without a doubt, you know, if you look at progressivism, for example, I mean, its origins are actually literally religious.
Starting point is 00:45:02 It's essentially the millenarial eschaton, but they've pulled out Jesus Christ and said they put in like your face here for whatever random dictator. It is literally a religious movement. And then, you know, if you look at things like environmentalists, I mean, it's very much, you know, we have the original sin.
Starting point is 00:45:23 Privilege is the same thing. So, you know, we have the original sin. Privilege is the same thing. So, you know, we are all sinners. We must repent for our, make up for that. Really, you know, modern ideology explicitly takes over the function of religion. Unfortunately, it turns into very, you know, often evil ends. Religions tend to be pro-social. They tend to promote community and harmony, living in peace. Whereas modern, these ideologies, I think, are overly built on that
Starting point is 00:45:53 altruistic punishment, on that going after the enemies. They're sort of very aggressive religions. And then, of course, they're going after families. So I think that's a big part of this whole gender game that we're playing here, where we're essentially trying to race woman as a concept so that everybody can become a comrade. And I think the end game on that is fundamentally to demote parents, to demote the concept of a family. The idea is to leave people sort of in this atomistic society where they're all alone and only government can come and save them. And, you know, it really, it looks like a mass formation of a cult, right, where you're trying to isolate people from everything they believe in, everybody who's close to them, and then you
Starting point is 00:46:36 bring them into the cult as these completely dependent automatons. So I think that's very much wherever they're going with this. And, you know, indeed, I mean, I'm sure you guys are familiar with the numbers about the degree of mental illness among young people. The percent, especially of young women who are depressed is, I mean, they're at ridiculous numbers. Given how wealthy our society is and how relatively comfortable our lives are, it's absurd to be dealing with that level of depression and people who feel like there's no purpose in life that looking to others for leadership like sheep. Yeah. Well, I can tell you as a physician, the three classes of drugs most commonly prescribed in the United States are statin drugs for high cholesterol followed very closely by
Starting point is 00:47:25 antidepressants and sleep aids and for a country that is as wealthy and successful as we are the idea there were a bunch of depressed insomniacs is somewhat concerned you know who eat fast food and therefore have high cholesterol is really somewhat concerning I wanted to ask you about what I perceive as a cultural phenomenon to the United States. I've traveled much of the world and I haven't seen this elsewhere, which is our reliance on the idea of celebrities, people who have no knowledge base in the industry or the subject matter in which they are opining, holding huge sway and really
Starting point is 00:48:06 impacting human behavior. I don't know if this happens elsewhere or if it happens in economic markets, which you watch as an economist. But I give you, for example, today, we've got Martha Stewart and Pink opining about the need for you to get your latest COVID booster. Now, I turn to Martha Stewart a lot, generally for a pecan pie recipe, not for her advice on what vaccine I want, you know, should take. What is that? And is that something that, you know, culturally, we rely on sports figures and, and, you know, these social media influencers, wherever the hell that is, I should have signed up for that job instead of going to medical school. But, you know, these, we rely on people who's, who's, you know, experience
Starting point is 00:48:57 and education has nothing to do with the thing in which they are opining. Is that something you've seen in the economic side? Yeah, unfortunately, I think that is universal. I grew up partly in Japan and certainly people do that there. If somebody is eating a particular diet, for example, it has a huge amount of influence. Of course, these are not nutritionists. These are not people who are trained whatsoever. I think it is. I think that the sort of bright side to it is that media in the US was very monopolized for the past century, right? So ever since really the beginning of the radio, you had sort of this winner-take-all where you had just a couple of celebrities. And that meant that it gave a lot of power fundamentally to a very small cabal, generally a very well-funded cabal of big companies to influence through marketing and whatnot how people behave.
Starting point is 00:49:57 Of course, it gave a huge amount of influence to governments who controlled the licenses of those companies to broadcast. So in a sense, I think that we've actually seen the worst of it already. Uh, I think the internet massively democratized that. Social media influences are goofy, but our side has, uh, we can sort of fight on an evil or on an even footing, um, in that space, okay, like there are a lot of influences on our side. You've got, oh I don't know, you've got the guy out in Australia who builds his own house out of, you know, he just digs out stuff out of the ground. You've got a
Starting point is 00:50:35 lot of raw food people who, you know, they might do like a YouTube channel about about their diets or unschoolers who, again, do YouTube and they influence people. So yes, on the one hand, it's sort of embarrassing that humans do do that. On the other hand, I think that things are getting better. We've actually got an alternative now. It's not just one point of view, but yeah, we've got many. Is that also the source for the so-called parallel economies that you've mentioned in the past?
Starting point is 00:51:05 Is that where that's coming from? Or that's where the opportunity is? Yeah. Yeah, I think for sure it is. A lot of people, since big business sort of tore off the mask over the past couple of years and sort of turned on their customers, there are a lot of people now who I think are very willing, they're eager to give their money to somebody who does not hate them. So we've seen a lot of, generally our side doesn't have the kind of financing or necessarily the kind of business background. So a lot of people on our side who've gotten into that have
Starting point is 00:51:37 sort of started small. But the customer reaction from what I've heard has been exceptional. I think there's a massive untapped market there that people are just starting to get into. I see the clock is winding down and I want to ask you about something. You posted some time ago about some things related to the WHO. I talk a lot about the WHO, which I reference as the long arm of the Chinese Communist Party. Clearly, we've tried to highlight the relationship between the WEF and the WHO, which WHO, in my mind, has amendments to existing, you know, to existing constructs within the WHO and what we may be looking at if they actually take over the, you know, this, what people are referencing is the pandemic treaty. It's not a treaty at all, but it would essentially cede control of our own constitution or to the WHO in times of something that they deem to be a public health crisis. You know, give me some thoughts of yours on the WHO,
Starting point is 00:52:53 what you think about them, where this is going. Yeah, I think your take is absolutely correct. The entire galaxy of international organizations from the UN, World Bank, IMF, BIS, you've got this whole alphabet soup. And all of these things, they are working against us. The Chinese Communist Party has immense influences in these organizations. I post on TikTok. I repost my videos over there, and the only videos that get censored are either where I'm criticizing the Chinese government, which I do often,
Starting point is 00:53:30 or if I'm criticizing the IMF and the UN, which is weird. Why would that be? Right? I think without a doubt, these organizations, China views them as an opportunity to spread their influence and to get control over the West, particularly the United States, who they
Starting point is 00:53:50 see as their greatest competitor. And you know I struggle to think of anything useful the UN has ever done for the United States. I suppose the closest you could come is it gave us cover for wars that I wish we had never started. And other than that, it's you know know, they, they come out with socialist, uh, proposals, these treaties to try to lock us into, you know, attacking the second amendment, attacking of course, our medical freedoms. So without a doubt, it would be wonderful if we got out of them. Uh, speaking as an economist, there is no benefit.
Starting point is 00:54:21 They are siphons from the American taxpayer. Generally they go to either bailout dictators or to try to bribe countries to get on the U.S. side when there's some U.N. vote, generally about some other war. They're essentially turning Americans into sort of, you can just squeeze us, or I guess vending machines would be it for wars. And I mean, I'd say there's absolutely no benefit to even being in these organizations. Well, speaking of giving us cover, you know, the UN giving us cover, as you put it, for wars that we should never have started in the first place. That's how I see the WHO. They're
Starting point is 00:55:02 providing culpable deniability to our Congress and everybody else for saying, oh, we didn't mandate the vaccines. It was the WHO, or we didn't mandate the lockdown. We didn't mandate this thing that was a complete and total debacle. It was the WHO. And so we are essentially ceding control to an unelected, unaccountable NGO that is pulling the strings. It's horrifying. And do you think that we are likely – where do you think this is going to go with the WHO? I think the question is whether we get a real maverick in at some point as president and whether they can get Congress to go along with defunding them or pulling
Starting point is 00:55:51 out of them. I was very pleasantly surprised with Trump's hostility towards the international organizations. I was also surprised with his hostility towards the never-ending wars of the Uniparty. I didn't expect to see a president saying those kinds of things in my lifetime. So if we can either get Mr. Trump back in office or somebody who is similarly hostile to these organizations, then I dream that someday perhaps we can pull out of them. But as you say, these things are staffed. They're staffed by socialists. They're staffed by essentially crony appointees
Starting point is 00:56:25 from the many dictatorships who dominate the United Nations. These are hostile organizations. There is nothing good that can come out of these people. When you watch, you know, something else that I'm very aware of is the amount physically of the United States that is owned by places like China. And when I mean that I'm saying actual real estate land, uh, the acres of this country, um, the, you know, the number of sports teams, for example, the number of NBA teams
Starting point is 00:57:00 or foot, you know, national football league teams that are owned in part or in whole by the Chinese government. As an economist, touch on some of that. I think your average American, I hate to say it, has no idea the tentacles, how far already the tentacles of the CCP go into the very fabric of the United States. Yeah, so we had a similar situation with Japan in the 1980s where they were accumulating a lot more dollars than they were using to buy products from us. And so they plowed a lot of that into buying up US assets. Now, generally, the Japanese got their butts handed to them.
Starting point is 00:57:45 So from an American perspective, that was good fun. They basically bought things at three times what they were worth, lost their shirts, and then went home with lighter wallets. I think some of that is doubtless going to happen with the Chinese. But at the same time, I think that, as you point out, there's a certain tactical aspect to some of these Chinese investments, where they will buy points of leverage. You know, so for example, buying a sports team, if a Japanese company is buying a sports team,
Starting point is 00:58:14 I think it's safe to say, they probably don't know what they're doing, they're gonna lose their shirts. If a Chinese company are doing that, I think you have to be a lot more sort of careful there. Because the CCP has been very smart about converting its investments into actual leverage you know so controlling for example what what the NBA can say about different Chinese topics potentially about other US topics by the way I just want to say that we on the Twitter spaces if people want to ask questions of Dr. St. Onge,
Starting point is 00:58:48 you just raise your hand there and I'll bring you up to the podium. And a reminder for those of you interested in the World Health Organization topic, we're going to get an update tomorrow at 3 o'clock Pacific from Michelle Bachman, who has been the only person I'm aware of raising alarm with the congressional leaders. And last time she was telling us she was having a hard time getting any attention. I think, I'm hoping that has changed a little bit because people seem more aware of this these days.
Starting point is 00:59:15 Are you taking calls? Well, I'm just telling people to raise their hand if they're interested. But you keep going. I'm just saying we'll just queue them up if there are anybody interested in asking questions. Go ahead. Yeah, well, I'm watching the Clockwise Night. I just want to make sure that I give you, Peter, what other things, you know, you covered a broad range of topics. What else would you like to get out there? I do. For better or worse, the clowns
Starting point is 00:59:40 keep coming up with new topics. So it is very, very easy finding new things to talk about. One thing that I did want to make sure that we talked about a little bit is CBDCs and banking. Right. So, you know, the world that we live in, we saw that certainly with the Canadian truckers, that the banking system is already part of the surveillance and control state. Your money is fundamentally under their control. If the government doesn't want you to have the money, if they want you to send it somewhere else, they're just going to go ahead and take it. They're going to block it.
Starting point is 01:00:16 They're going to do what they want. CBDCs would extend that kind of Canadian trucker type control over all of the money. I think those are extraordinarily dangerous. They're very likely to come in. If I had to guess, they're going to pair it with the universal basic income, sort of the bread and the bread and circuses. If you put that in as a combo and you say, yeah, we need the CBDC so that we can automatically deposit your UBI. That is going to be a winning combination. We already saw that platform work during COVID with the stimulus checks to stay home. So I am very concerned that we're going to see that kind of thing. There are a lot of people who are going to say, well, I'm not going to use the CBDC. I'm just going to use cash. Of course, they will force you. I was just talking to an Israeli journalist today. They're rolling out a
Starting point is 01:01:06 CBDC. The Israeli people do not want it, but of course these things keep coming out despite what the people want. So in Israel, they're going to pay government workers with the CBDC, and that's about half the population. And then they're also going to put all government benefits online. So if you want to collect your free government money, then of course you have to download the CBDC. You have to learn how to use it. And then they can use a thousand little sort of nudges. So in this country, for example, if your business takes too much cash, then the IRS will regard that as suspicious and then they'll start doing audits on you. So what happens?
Starting point is 01:01:39 Well, a lot of businesses say, well, no thanks. Okay, no, no, people got to use credit cards. Now, this may be a fill up to the credit card industry. No doubt the IRS loves being able to track where all the money goes, but think how easy it would be if they want to push the CBDC and people are holding out. They have an enormous amount of power to just kind of use these little nudges to push people into a CBDC. Once you have that, effectively, it's like the government can just sit there with a giant spreadsheet and decide who has what money. I mean, they can literally just sit there and pass amounts around at will. It is no longer your money.
Starting point is 01:02:18 It's more like you've got, you're on a giant spreadsheet that the government owns. Right. And I go back now, I put back on my disaster preparedness and response hat. That's my specialty. I've done some modeling with the military on what would happen, for example, if there were a strike on the electrical grid. And I look at this as a very similar thing. If they were, the powers that be, were to change the way that we can use cash, for example, overnight, when you do the modeling of how long it takes for the wheels to fall off the proverbial bus socially, if we were to have a strike on the electrical grid, or a lockdown of the banks, or a massing,ing you know we will no longer accept cash it's about 16 to 18 hours hours before society falls apart and people who can't
Starting point is 01:03:16 get something start coming to your house to get it so the question is the the concept the risk of real social unrest. So I want you to react to that. I think you're absolutely right. And we've seen that in Hurricane Katrina, for example. Very very quickly things fall apart. You had police officers who they just walked away from the job and they went and looted stores instead so that they could bring food home to their family. Things collapse breathtakingly fast.
Starting point is 01:03:47 I think there was a time in this country that we could have coped with that kind of thing because people knew each other. Things would keep functioning essentially on credit. For people who live in a city or a large suburb, which is the majority of Americans, that is not how the world works. You try going down to the store and doing things on credit, you just say, I'll pay you back next week. It's not going to work. So yeah, I think absolutely we are, we're sort of being too clever here. We're being too fancy and we're putting too many essential
Starting point is 01:04:20 things on, we're making them reliant on very complicated systems such as the internet. And certainly when you're talking about money, that's the kind of thing, it doesn't need to be completely online. There's no reason except for wanting the government to have more control why you would want to get rid of physical cash. Physical cash has been around for a very, very long time, millennia, and it's worked perfectly. And government getting rid of it is, once again,
Starting point is 01:04:47 government whose alleged job is to stop crises and to fix crises when they occur. But here, like in so many other areas, it seems like the government is actually the one creating the crisis. I think Peter wants to bring back the days of George Bailey. George Bailey? It's a wonderful life. Oh my gosh. I do. I absolutely do.
Starting point is 01:05:13 Yes. Look, banks are fine. You know, as long as everybody understands what the score is. And yeah, but yes, I have a strong preference for cash over credit. I like that kind of society. Things worked.
Starting point is 01:05:30 You know, we had economic growth. We had all the good things and we didn't have a lot of the problems we have today. Well, and one of the longstanding, you know, tips for telling people how to prepare for a crisis of any sort is generally they are recommended to have some amount of cash on hand. Make sure that because if, for example, there was a strike on the electrical grid, all the ATMs will not function because all of the gas pumps will not function. They are all powered by... So I tell people, don't let your car get below a half gallon of gas because you are going to be in a heap of trouble if you can't fill it up at the station. Keep some cash on hand because the ATMs may stop functioning.
Starting point is 01:06:15 IOCD is going to kick in for real now. But I'm telling you, but if cash no longer, if you can no longer use cash, then that doesn't work. And that means that the government holds all of the control. And that is not where we want to be. Absolutely. Right. On the individual level, you know, you have those sort of crisis scenarios where people are left out in the cold.
Starting point is 01:06:38 And then sort of on the meta level, you know, like what are they centralizing it for? Right. So once they can see everything you're spending and control everything you're spending, well, if we look at what they did with control of speech, you look at how they do IRS audits of right-wing organizations, even organizations fighting for life, for example. Once you give them a power, they absolutely will abuse it. So the prospect that the government is going to get this ability to look right into your wallet to see every single thing you spent. If you bought a gun, perhaps they'll want to visit you and just make sure everything's okay. This will absolutely be abused.
Starting point is 01:07:21 Absolutely. Last thoughts, Drew? We're up against the yeah we are we are against the clock and uh dr st. ong had been very kind to uh to give us the time he has so far and kelly thank you for driving the ship here it's been a really interesting conversation these are topics that fascinate me uh you know and i'm glad kelly you were here to discuss it with your psychological background. We are in something here. And as always, history is very difficult to interpret until it's looked at in the past. Really, some would say until we've all died off and somebody who wasn't actually here
Starting point is 01:07:56 is looking at all this objectively to understand what happened. But the idea, we rarely get to talk about solution. And the idea that the elite is really the problem and that the rest of us really want to get along. That's a very powerful message. And I think it's kind of shifting a little bit in that in that direction. Peter, you seem to want to say something. I was going to say, yes, I absolutely agree with what you're saying. And I think that a key point here is that people get
Starting point is 01:08:26 sort of down on our prospects. And I think honestly, we are in a very, very good situation. We are going to win. By we, I mean the regular people. If you compare to these kinds of challenges in the past, we have so many assets we didn't have. Uh, you know, we have the U S constitution, which is an absolute roadmap to Liberty. Uh, we have hundreds of millions of Americans who believe in freedom, who, you know, passionately, um, uh, are willing to fight for it. Uh, and we have the internet, which I know it's censored. I know it's imperfect.
Starting point is 01:09:00 They put their finger on the scale all the time, but you know, Murray Rothbard talks about the 1970s, you can get the entire liberty movement in America into a single living room in New York. Okay, that was it. You talk about it today. I mean, we have hundreds of millions of people in America in Europe all over the world, who are interested in liberty who want, you know, to, to shrink the government to expand the scope for the people who are, you liberty, who want to shrink the government, to expand the scope for the people,
Starting point is 01:09:30 who want to learn about these topics, want to understand what they can do. The human population is activated like it has never been before. And because of the internet, we can communicate, spread the message, coordinate. I think we're going to have a very difficult five or 10 years here. I think there's no doubt.
Starting point is 01:09:45 But in the long run, I am very optimistic that we are going to win. Let's leave it at that. From your lips to God's ears. That's awesome. Thank you so much. And thank you, Kelly. And I will let you both go. Thank you so much.
Starting point is 01:10:00 And let's, Caleb, throw up the schedule coming up. I know we have Michelle Bachman coming in tomorrow, Joe Allen on the 20th with Dr. Victory back with us, Erin Cariotti coming in here on the 21st. She'll be very interesting. Dr. Victory's going to join us for that as well. And I'm just hearing we're going to have Jennifer Say. I believe she was from Levi.
Starting point is 01:10:18 Is that where she got famous? And ahead of that, Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, which should be interesting. So stay with us. Keep watching for what sign up at Dr. TV. Caleb, anything before I sign out, anything you would like to announce or share with people? I have not been on camera this week because I've gotten almost no sleep thanks to the new baby. So you can hear my voice, but you cannot see me right now.
Starting point is 01:10:50 She's getting better. Oh better oh yeah she's good and i think we've got some and is there are there other than going to dr.com dr.tv is there anywhere else we should be sending people to we have a new channel at it's a new channel at kick.com slash dr drew they uh helped us get the channel so if they want to go to if anyone you know watches shows on kick they can go there but everything else is at drdrew.com all the podcasts, all the shows they're up right now. And we do in terms of these parallel economy ideas, please do support the people that support us. They are wonderful. We have wonderful partners. They have great products.
Starting point is 01:11:18 Watch for no new, new kits coming from TWC. I'm organizing things that with them that I think could make a big difference. Keep an eye out for all the things that support us here. Please do. And we'll see you tomorrow at 3 o'clock with Michelle Bachman. Ask Dr. Drew is produced by Caleb Nation
Starting point is 01:11:38 and Susan Pinsky. As a reminder, the discussions here are not a substitute for medical care, diagnosis, or treatment. This show is intended for educational and informational purposes only. I am a licensed physician, but I am not a replacement for your personal doctor, and I am not practicing medicine here. Always remember that our understanding of medicine and science is constantly evolving. Though my opinion is based on the information that is available to me today, some of the contents of this show could be outdated in the future. Be sure to check with trusted resources in case any of the information
Starting point is 01:12:08 has been updated since this was published. If you or someone you know is in immediate danger, don't call me. Call 911. If you're feeling hopeless or suicidal, call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 800-273-8255. You can find more of my recommended organizations and helpful resources at drdrew.com slash help.

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