Asmongold TV - He's Right | Asmongold TV

Episode Date: January 22, 2026

He's RightAsmongold podcast for all of his stream highlights, competitions, reactions & more. ----------------------------- -------------- Keywords: streaming highlights, streamer podcast, gaming hot takes, mmo gaming, gaming drama, gaming community Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Greed is destroying the world. You know what's funny? I bet there was a guy that said this 3,000 years ago. I do really think it's true, though, it is. I think the root of all evil is scarcity. And scarcity and greed are very tied together. I feel like for the past three years, I've heard over and over again that a recession is about to hit. The stock market is going to crash.

The housing prices are going to come back down to earth any day now. And yet somehow all of these things keep not happening. And for most people, it doesn't make... I think the stock market in practice. practice has crashed for the average person because the average person is so disconnected from the gains in the stock market. But that's like more of a complex thing to say. Sense, what do you mean the economy's good? My dentist just tried to get me to sign up for a credit card. Since the pandemic, the cost of living is skyrocketed. Inflation is out of control.

Groceries have never been worse. These are all the graphs I show you guys. See this? See? Offensive layoffs are happening at an alarming rate. At this point, a college degree might be more likely to get you into crippling debt than it is to help you find a job. And even if you have savings, you're more than likely one stroke of bad luck away from losing it all to medical. Damn. And yet some people will look you right in the eyes and tell you, I don't know what you're talking about. The numbers are green. This is the same shit I have, yes, exactly, because it's not representative of the average person. Is this guy stupid? The problem is each of these people are kind of correct in their own way. This is the best the economy has ever been. If you already have money.

If you bought a house five years ago, there's a chance it's already doubled in value. If you invested in the S&P 500 in 2021, you could be up as much as 80%. And that's not like saying, yeah, I've made a lot of money. It's good. You know, you'd be rich if you just bought Bitcoin in 1973. That's just the regular stock market. You didn't need to have some genius level of foresight to be able to do that. You just needed to already have a bunch of cash sitting around. And obviously for the overwhelming majority of people, that is not the case. If you're living paycheck to paycheck, you're not thinking about the stock market. Well, this is the problem is that poor people can't take advantage of and enjoy the fruits of their labor whenever it's like, it's basically only

realized in terms of stock value. Like, because they don't even, they don't have enough money to even enjoy that benefit. It doesn't even happen. In your 20s, you haven't even been working long enough to save any money to invest. Not to mention you have no idea how to do it because school doesn't teach you how to do it. Benefit from rising home equity if you don't own a house. The only thing this graph represents to you is how much further away that dream is getting. Right now the average age of- Yeah, that graph represents how much you like communism.

Homebuyers is 59 years old. What a depressing statistic. This is the problem with an economy that disproportionately benefits asset holders instead of the people. still trying to earn them. Wealth grows exponentially, but wages aren't even outpacing inflation, which means if your salary hasn't been going up every year, you're effectively making less money. Meanwhile, the fastest way to make... That's one of the things that people don't understand is that even sometimes when you get a wage, if you get a 10% wage, but the cost of everything goes up by 20%, well, you just lost 10% of your

fucking money. This is a thing a lot of people don't get. And I think that it's intentional that people don't understand this. This is maybe a conspiracy, Andy, from me. But I've always thought that people in America were intentionally miseducated, so they were never able to identify and have problems with the actual like systems like this that are effectively oppressing the fuck out of them. A million dollars is to just already have 10 million. Leave it in an investment account for a year. And congratulations. You now have $11 million. What? At a larger scale, this is why it feels like there's two different economies happening and they're both moving in opposite directions.

Exactly. Exactly. I've been saying this before. Like this, I'm so, I'm so fucking validated right now. I'm so happy. The percent of the stock market is owned by the top 1%. This is, yes. Only 1% is owned by the bottom 50%. Don't let somebody tell you that these numbers going up should discredit your own lived experience.

Because it's not true. And you ask anybody, it's obviously not fucking true. This is the problem. Like everybody says, oh, but look at the study. Look at the graph. Look at this. That is like Reddit tier intelligence. If you can't understand what that statistic means, how the numbers were arrived at, and then synthesize it with like the way that your life is, you're just a fucking idiot.

You're a fucking idiot. You're being taken advantage of. And by the way, that's the reason why they all want you to trust the science. Oh, trust the science. Trust the experts. Yeah, because the experts are going to feed you a bunch of lies while you live in your mom's house because you can't afford. to fuck an apartment, even though you're working full-time. And then all your money goes to paying off your student debt that the interest is accruing

faster than your payments are. You're just fucked. Somebody who's benefited from untaxed inheritance or years of compound interest granting them passive income tell you that your problem is you're just not working hard at that. The real answer is, sorry, you should have been born sooner. Yep, you should have. And the other thing, too, that like, this is one of the other. issues that I do have with some of these videos is that there's like an element of it that's like a

defeatism. There are people that in 10 years, you know, they're 20 now and in 10 years, they'll be 30 and be millionaires. If you work hard, there is a chance that you will be successful. And whatever the chance of you being successful not working hard is, it will be higher than that. So it doesn't matter whether, oh, but it's rigged, it's not fair, or anything else, it's luck. I think that there's a lot of things. Like, luck is a factor, but people that work hard get lucky more often. Not anymore. Here's a good example, right?

Can you guys name a streamer that we know them now and we didn't know them a year ago? Like, it was like very well known right now. Nina? Okay, bad example. Next, peanut? Yeah, I think peanut's a great example. That's what I'm talking about. is that you will know somebody who does and everybody says oh streaming you can't get into streaming

anymore there will be somebody who you know their name next year who didn't believe you and the truth is that working hard is your best chance of being successful but it's also not a guarantee but it's certainly a much higher chance than if you don't work hard not about that maybe instead of wasting all that time farting around kindergarten class you should have been investing in real estate that's right not my fault you're lazy your parents They're still are getting squeezed in every direction while also being gaslit into thinking that it's somehow our fault. There's CEOs in earnings calls bragging about how they get to make customers pay for inflation so they don't have to. The economy is-

And that they will understand it. I'm bad right now. I'm about to segue into an extremely ill-timed brand deal in a video about greed. You think I like looking like a hypocrite? Of course not. But my avocado toast isn't going to pay for itself. I'm upside out. And I'm going to tell you about today's sponsored NordVPN.

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It's because the fake number is going up. Yeah. Up. But the only reason the GDP is still going up is because of the AI industry. That's right. But the only reason that even looks as good as it does is because a handful of companies are just like... Are they're human centipating themselves? Yes. Like passing money back and forth? But there's no recession.

Yes. You're hallucinating that. Because the AI industry is now single-handedly propping up the entire global economy, there's really only two paths forward. Worst case scenario, turns out it is all bullshit. The bubble pops in spectacular fashion. Trillions of dollars of investments cannot get paid out. And everything goes up in flames.

Or best-case scenario, a few billionaires get even richer. I need to be a billionaire. I think this is what I've learned from the video is that I need to become a billionaire. It seems like they have a lot of, there's a lot of good things that happen to them. Yeah, same. Yeah.

Is that what we're hoping for? All right, you're going to have to bear with me while I go on another AI rant here. I know I do this like every six months, but it's not going away. It doesn't count as beating the dead horse if the horse is still alive. We've got to kill that horse first.

People largely do not. You're not going to kill. kill AI. It's not going to happen. AI is inevitable. The entire, like, this premise that you can kill AI if there's enough YouTube videos about it. Do you think that fucking whoever Rockefeller gives a shit about your YouTube video? Fuck no. Do you think that Jensen and Nvidia cares that there's a tweet that says AI is bad? Fuck no. Elon Musk, I was going to do AI, but I see there's a cat girl on Twitter that says it's bad. It's going to happen. It's going to happen. The only thing that you can do is to prevent

AI from take, like this is the best case scenario is that AI takes everybody's jobs and then the companies that incorporate and use AI are taxed at a higher rate and that money is then redistributed to the people whose jobs were displaced by AI. And this is obviously done because obviously all of their data and information and everything. Like the AI would never be, and I think this is fair, by the way. This is very fair. And here's the reason why it's fair. Is that without all of the data and resources and technology that the previous people who were working built and created, the AI would have never had the tools in order to take advantage of their job. So the AI was trained by their job. And I think that because of that, they deserve a fruit, you know,

part of the fruits of that labor. Because they, they, was based off of them. I think that's very fair. Like AI. We're not going to have that happen. Everybody's going to be a slave. You're going to turn people into batteries and maybe we'll have a new plague.

But in a perfect world, that's what I would say. Not the plague part, but everybody getting money. And are worried about the future it imposes. It's currently being used to make a bunch of promises that almost no... Thank God we can digitally necromancer grandma. Let's digitally necromancer grandma back to life so she can tell us to buy NordVPN. Thank God. The main appeal of it comes from corporations who see advancements in AI as a way to further

reduce their dependence on human labor. The only thing cheaper than outsourcing jobs is just eliminating them altogether. The wet dream that soils the sheets of every CEO is a company that somehow run entirely on its own. That's right. And they can just sit back and collect all the profits for themselves. No more dealing with pesky labor laws or health insurance or Flippy is not even programmed to have the word union in its training data. It does not know what unions are. It doesn't know what PTO is. It doesn't know workers comp. It has no fucking idea what overtime is. Overtime is all the time. Can I have Saturday off? Yeah, that's right. My family died. No. No. Shut up. That's the eventual goal.

why they're all pouring billions of dollars into invidia chips and data centers and this is inevitable it's inevitable you can't stop it it's for Mark Zuckerberg and in the meantime we're stuck with chatchipT a humanized Google search designed to affirm whatever belief

you share with it even if it's incredibly dangerous or generative video apps that are already being used to trick Oh my god this fatty is trying to steal oh I bet there's food in the box caught red handed Look at this. You guys can't see it here.

172,000 likes. Now, what website is this on? You know it. I know it. Everybody knows it. It's fucking Facebook. Of course. Into thinking something happened. She probably thought it was, oh, hey, he called her fat too.

You can't say what I... The thing is that I don't know if they're being racist or they're being negative about her being fat. I don't know. Yeah, and that's the thing. It's like, yeah, what am I thinking? I don't know what you're thinking. It'd be one of two things. That didn't actually happen.

Awesome technology. I'm so glad this exists. And I think the best thing we can do to fight back against AI is to simply not engage with it. The problem is, even if you don't use these tools... You can't stop it. And every single website and company will now use user interactions and user data as a valuable, quantifiable resource that's then sold as a... data package.

So you're going to effectively have to stop using the entire internet. Like using YouTube, for an example, here's a great example of it right here, is that if I pull this up and I look at, let's see, do we have captions here? Is there captions?

Yeah, so you, in a lot of cases, these captions are generated automatically through, show transcript. I don't know if this is exactly like written by him or not, but I can guarantee you that you can probably go and do a translation into like 10 other languages that he didn't do. And so the truth is that even by making videos on YouTube, you are indirectly contributing to this problem. There is no way that you can interact with people on the internet that does not indirectly feed Roku's basilisk.

If you live in certain parts of the country, you might be paying for them. There's been a lot of really good investigative journalism done on all these new data centers that are popping up around the country. who's funding them and who's getting screwed over in the process. For example, some residents in New Jersey who noticed that their power bill kept going up, even though they were actually using less electricity than usual. Well, it turns out it's due to an overall supply cost. Basically, when the total amount of electricity usage in an area goes up, power companies tend to pass those higher costs onto their customers.

And for the past several years, electricity usage has been skyrocketing with over half of that increase coming solely from data centers. That's right. That's right. And I need to buy some of these data centers myself. I see you can make a lot of money on them. I talked to somebody about this recently. Utility bill is going up because Elon Musk wants to pretend to have a girlfriend. You see, AI doesn't...

That's right. Because if he pretends to have a girlfriend, he doesn't have another baby mama who's making tweets about him all the time complaining. If Annie does that, he just turns the bitch off. Just exist in some theoretical space. It has to be trained on billions of gigabytes of data. And that data has to be stored in a physical location. To power this, it requires an absurd amount of electricity, which generates an absurd amount of heat, which then requires an absurd amount of water to cool off. Most of these buildings use over a million gallons per day, roughly the equivalent of 10,000 people.

This would be even more problematic. They were being built in areas where water is extremely scarce. So we should be good as long as we don't build a bunch of them in like the middle of the desert. But to be fair, they are extremely efficient about it. They don't just use the water. water, they also poison it. Every part of this process is wasteful and destructive, and this is only the beginning. AI is still a relatively new phenomenon, so we're only just starting to see the effects of this.

That's right. The Department of Energy projects that the percentage of electricity used by data centers could nearly triple in just the next three years. Surely it's not going to go up more after that. And who gets to pay for it? We do. It's hard for me to accurately express how infuriating this is. The giant buildings that power these stupid fucking tech.

That's right. That's it. Technology are being subsidized by people who just happen to live near them. Oh, but hold on. Yeah, and also they're paying for it with their power bills too. Absolutely. Did you see, what's this here? Do you say they were pumping out toxic gases to a town one mile away near Memphis?

Oh, I don't know. I haven't seen that at all. data centers reuse and recycle their water i build them for a living i'm sure there's probably like i don't know whether data centers are like poisoning water or not i mean i i really just don't know enough about it um i just don't like i i don't want you guys to tell me either because i'm not going to believe anything that somebody says depends i think that's the only thing that i will probably believe is that there's probably some of them that do some of them that don't The better built ones don't.

The bad built ones probably do. So, yeah, maybe I don't know. Because they're technically contributing to the operating costs. So does that mean that they get to share in the eventual profits? No, of course not. Of course not. They're more like involuntary investors doing it for free. Or really worse than.

Slaves. Because a lot of them are being kept awake at night by the deafening hum, endlessly emitting from the factory shoved into the backyard of their homes that have now surely plummeted in value. as a result. But hey, I do think that like, I mean, this is one of the things like I, for example, like, I think it's really annoying. If you have like a dog that's like barking and it's really loud in like a house or a neighborhood or apartment building. And I think that really, whenever you're making so much noise at a regular basis, like everybody knows like somebody has a block party. It's like, okay, you're not going to call the cops about that. But the problem is

that if this is, if your block party is going on 24 seven and your block party is, basically the heartbeat of a computer and you could just hear it all day every day you're going to get people that are living around it that are going to start vibrating and they're going to be fucking mad is they're doing all of this

NC just passed a bill to make residents pay for more electricity to fund the building operation of new plants for data centers yep it's happening it's happening there's nothing you can do to stop it to make a product that hopes to replace 80% of humanity it's not

Probably 90. That these people already own everything that could ever want. They could so easily afford to pay for these things without even noticing that that money is gone. But why would they do that when they could simply have poor people pay for it instead? Because nothing will ever be enough for them. You know, when a rich person makes some shady deal to screw over the working class, people... Give me a second. I've got to refresh this.

My thing is fucked up. And I want to make sure my internet's okay. the okay this is good I apologize let me see if I can get this to work because my chat stopped working and I want to make sure that my stream didn't die for some reason let me go back and double check okay am I good I'm good right yes okay that's good I don't know why it's just like a weird pop-up and it just wasn't working I'll try to open it up again in a minute and see if I can get it to start sorry about this we just had a weird weird little hiccup, but things seem to be improved.

All right, now we're back. It must be the fucking data centers. That's what it is. Yeah, I'm watching the video. People will joke that they just need that money to buy them and make some shady deal to screw over the working class. People will joke that they just need that money to buy their fourth yacht. And like, I don't even think it's that.

They could buy a thousand yachts and still not run out of money. They don't want to spend their wealth. They just want it to get bigger. It's the same obsession with seeing number go. up that keeps me addicted to old school runescape, except the only life that's ruining is my own. What they have is a disease. They have been scourged with the blight of insatiable greed, cursed to an endless pursuit of wealth that will never bring them true happiness. I would almost feel bad for them. I think there's a bit of a, this is a bit of an exaggeration. I think that a lot

of them, like, in some cases, it's not necessarily this like massive existential emotional problem. they just like building the business and they just want to make it bigger for no reason other than to make it bigger, right? I don't think it really has to. There doesn't always have to be like a psychological component to it. They could just like building businesses. But in a general sense, yeah, there's a point where enough is enough. They weren't actively destroying the world in the process. Yeah, it's the most frustrating things about this problem is it if you even try to suggest that maybe these guys should just have a little bit less money.

Like you guys can still be rich, whatever. Just turn it down a notch because you're kind of making shit terrible for everybody else. You're treated like you're crazy. No, this is the American way. If you don't like it, then lean. And yet these ideas aren't radical. They're not even new. Most people who advocate for a more progressive tax system are only calling for a return to something that used to exist in this country.

We just forgot about it. So I think it's important to do with a little. This is true, by the way. All of this is accurate. history lesson here. If you can believe it, there was a time where the working class in this country actually had it really good. And it was mostly because things got so bad during the Great Depression that the government was worried about the country collapsing. Thousands of banks and closed, millions of people lost their entire life savings. Unemployment peaked to 25%. So in fear of a

revolution happening, the government was like, all right, fine, we'll give you livable wages. Just please put that musket down. I don't like the way you're looking at me. So the new deal was born. It came Social Security, better labor standards, the right to unionize, a national minimum wage, an eight-hour work day. Wow. Over the next two to three decades. It's crazy how much work he did. It really is. It's nuts.

That became the most prosperous. In my opinion, he's one of the best presidents. Productivity skyrocketed and wages rose with them. Extra profits weren't just redistributed to employees, but their employers were proud to do it. They would brag about how lucrative it was to work for them. Look, 37% of profits went to our employees. last year. Yep, there you go. This is a team effort. Isn't that crazy? Like, can you imagine them doing that nowadays? This is like super rare. We win. In 1943, Johnson and Johnson puts out this mission

statement that's like, here's our list of priorities in order. Customers number one, we got to make good products. Employees number two, everyone who works here needs to feel valued and respect. Sure. Our community, number three, we all want to live in a better world. And as a company of our size, we feel like it's our responsibility to contribute to that however we can. And finally, all the way at the bottom. Because any of these companies that do this shit, like, they say that they're going to help, but that only matters enough. I think the video is alarmist. You want to produce anything in the United States.

You have to sacrifice something. Otherwise, China will produce everything. I think that I would rather sabotage almost anything than lose the AI race. I think that it's worth almost sabotaging nearly anything in order to win that. Because I think that it will be a like generate, it will be like a like a next, like a like a like a like a. or something like that, right? So, like, I do agree. Like, the thing is that, like, yeah, and I think that his video, like, you're right, that it all does fall flat whenever you have a rival competitor that is doing and pulling out all the stops and willing to take any risk and

sacrifice anything is that if you want to beat that person, you either have to innovate in a way that they haven't thought of in order to make up the difference or you have to meet them where they're at. And so I think that really, I mean, we're trying to do both very obviously. But yeah, and if you don't do that, then you're going to lose even more than if you sacrifice the things in order to win. And I think that's very clearly like that's the logic. I even agree with the logic. But there's ways you can do it that are better, right? It's not not everything in the world is binary.

Can just have whatever's allowed. Of course, we need to make a profit to survive and grow. But that should just come naturally as a byproduct of focusing on these. three tenants. Compared to modern corporate standards, this is all... This is one of the things that, like, people that understand with making videos, too, is that you shouldn't try to make money with your videos necessarily. You should just try to make very good videos. And then if you make very good videos, you'll make money. Like, I really mean this. I haven't checked the amount of money that, like, I make on most platforms in, like, a year. I don't even know how much money I make. Because I think

that thinking about it is like a brain poison. I don't ever like thinking about money. It's a, it, because then it's a quality, right? It's what I do and it's, it's the focus. It's why I stream every day. That's my main focus. Such a foreign concept that it almost sounds like it's coming from a fictional universe. But this actually happened. This was just America 70 years ago.

Now, during this time, what do you think the tax rate was on the wealthiest American? For reference, in 2025, the highest income tax bracket is supposed to be around 24%. But because of how many ways there are to circumvent the rules, it often ends up. being as little as 3%. For someone like Elon Musk, who doesn't take a salary. Well, the reason why it's so low also is that the majority of the wealth increments that they gain is through capital gains and stock gains. It's not really like they have a big pile of like billions of dollars in their house. Like they don't have a bank account with a billion dollars in it. Like it's abstracted through stocks and other types of asset investments.

That's the reason why. That's the reason why. if it's stock. As long as he doesn't sell any of that stock, then technically there's no income to tax it on. Now, we can still leverage the value of those stocks to make purchases. That's right. How money works, but it's still not taxable. Of course not. The rules. This is how people like him and Jeff Bezos can be in terms of net worth, two of the richest people on the planet and in some years pay zero dollars in tax. In the middle of the 20s, the tax rate on the ultra wealth. 70% or 30% or even $5.000. 50% it was between 70 and 94%. It honestly, it's insane. Crazy, crazy high tax rate. Yeah, exactly.

It's just crazy it was. And this is what's so nuts to me about this is that like all the people to advocate for this kind of stuff and like the higher taxes. Like I like, you know, like, and I think it really puts it into perspective like this, Renn Mandami. Like, oh yeah, we're going to increase it by like 2% or 5% or something like this. This is nothing. It's really. nothing. It sounds crazy, but even a lot of the people being taxed understood that it was necessary for society to continue to exist. And having a strong middle class was a crucial investment into the future of the country. Because if you have the middle class, then you can have people that are buying your stuff

regularly. It's like the idea of having the golden goose and then regularly collecting eggs instead of killing the goose. I don't know, man. I just think it's kind of interesting that during what's referred to as the golden goose. age of capitalism, the government did a bunch of socialism. During the period of time that birthed... In order to have proper capitalism, you need to have regulations and forms of socialism. It's like a yin-yang, right? Like, you can't have it all one way or all another way.

You can't have all capitalism. You can't have all socialism. Both of these extremes will lead to like a fucking, like a dystopia. The idea of the American... American dream, the government was taxing the absolute shit out of the richest Americans and using that money to provide jobs and welfare programs for everybody else. A single income household working a regular-ass job could afford to start a family, buy a house. Remember this? Yeah, me either. Send their kids to college and retire at a reasonable age.

No wonder people who grew up then gush about capitalism. No? Yeah. Same. For them, it was great. But at this point, it is disingenuous to use that time period as the example for why capitalism works. I think that he's right about this. And I think that using this time period and then not contextualizing it around the way that, you know, wealth was regulated is like, it's like saying that you lost weight, but not mentioning that you lost weight by cutting off your arm. It's just, it's totally dishonest.

That version of it stopped existing. a long time ago. The generation of people who started as beneficiaries of a more equitable system changed the rules once the roles were reversed and they had the power. So what the hell? This will always happen, by the way. It will always happen and it will never be different. Because the greed that people like Elon Musk are accused of having is the same greed that poor people aren't able to act on. The idea that, you know, there's some sort of like latent virtue in the working class and poor people that if they were given these opportunities that they wouldn't do the same thing is completely naive. They would go and do the exact same stuff.

And some of them would probably be even worse. Oh, happened. Everything was going great. What changed? Well, there were a lot of things, obviously, but one of the first big dominoes was the U.S.'s involvement in the Vietnam War, which was expensive and deadly. But to be fair, also accomplished nothing. And this had long-term ramifications. America had been diverting so much money away from manufacturing and towards defense that it opened the door for other growing industrialized countries to surpass them. More and more products were becoming cheaper to import than they were to produce. This led to factories getting shut down, unemployment starting to creep back out. I still think that it's crazy that Japan got

nuked twice and they managed to rebuild their entire country and then beat us in the auto race like fucking decades later. But meanwhile, you have other countries that have looked like they've been getting nuked every single day since like the year 100. Isn't it crazy? Germany, yeah. ...we're facing a pivotal fork in the road in the late 70s. Either we could go back to what worked in the past, prioritize the working...

Surely that's the only reason. ...our own infrastructure, try to help lift people out of poverty they've fallen into through no fault of their own. Yes. Or... Or we say, fuck the government. We don't owe you shit. That's right.

We're stupid. Isn't that right? I don't even know my name. Exactly. All right. You pay taxes and we don't do anything. That's right. That's right.

Sounds good to me. The prevailing philosophy throughout the 80s became trickle-down economics. The logic being, oh man, these rich people are really hand-cog. Well, there is trickle-down economics. It's when they piss on you. And also there's another form trickle-down economics where, you know, one guy makes a million dollars and then he pays, this is the trickle-down economics in effect. He pays for DoorDash and he gives a $3 tip.

to the DoorDash delivery driver. That's it. Do you know, I bet if we lower the corporate tax rate from 70, all the way to eventually 28%, then companies will use all that extra money to pay their employees more. I mean, if there's one thing we know about rich people is that they're always looking out for the little guy. Yeah. For some reason, this hasn't worked out yet, but it's only been 55 years.

Well, you can never expect anybody to act in good faith. You can never do that because, ultimately, even if the people who create the system acted in good faith, you will always have systems like that that will eventually become perverted by people who don't. So you have to have systems of regulation and accountability. Because even if you think that you're going to do it the right way, the fourth guy after you won't. And also like another like parallel to this is like the idea that wealth will only last for three generations, that it doesn't matter how wealthy a person is, that, you know, two or three generations later on down the line, that, you know, they're going to

lose all of that money. And I think that you can really just apply that thinking to, like, a lot of regulation in general. And just human psychology, how people behave. So, the jury still out. See, I would argue that part of the reason why companies in the 40s and 50s were so generous with their extra profits was because the tax rate was so high. I mean, think about it. If you're faced with the decision between giving a huge chunk of money to the government or redistributing it back to the employees who helped you earn it in the first place, you would be much more likely to do the latter. Because it's an investment in your own company. It's a mutually beneficial exchange. Well compensated workers are proven to be more loyal and more productive.

This is the way I felt at the IRS. Whenever I worked with the IRS, like I was getting paid whenever I was on like a fucking like because you have like different multipliers in the government. And so like I was getting paid like and this is back in like 2013. I was getting like $20 an hour or like $18 an hour, which was like fucking insane at the time, especially for me, like, because I didn't really have like any other like really great jobs before then. So that was nuts, right? I was bawling. And so like for me, I thought to myself, like, I'm going to show up early every day to this

job. I'm going to do my work as well as I possibly can be because I'm getting paid all this fucking money. And, you know, I don't want to get fired, right? I don't want to get kicked out or anything like that. And I think that's the way a lot of people do, right? It's like if you give people more money, a lot of them will perform better. Now, obviously, this is not a guarantee, but there's clearly a trend here.

There is a trend. It's an incentive, yes. Two things that you want. Now, there were other factors as well, loosening a lot of anti-monopoly regulations. That's the big one. That's the really big one, is the anti-monopoly regulations. Look at phones right now. If you want to get an app to market on a smartphone with any sort of a phone, you have to either

or go through Google or Apple. They have a complete duopoly on all types of fucking apps. It is complete bullshit. They behave the same. They have the same rules and they have the same regulations. They should be completely regulated. Totally regulated. And the fact that they aren't is a disgrace.

Meanwhile, they're trying to micromanage Microsoft buying Blizzard. Suck my fucking dick. Are you kidding me? But this dramatically lower tax rate is a big reason why the 80s serves as the dividing line on just about every economic graph you could look at. This was the beginning of a long and continuous transfer of wealth from the working class to the top 1%. That's right.

While it would be very easy to just blame all of this on then-president Reagan, that would only be- Reagan also did that amnesty bullshit. I thought Reagan, like, there's a way I like Reagan, but he fucked up a lot of stuff. I think conservatives look at him with way too much rose-tinted glasses. I think he's, things that he has done. have set us up for problems like 30 and 40 years down the road. Mostly true.

Sure, this new approach opened the door for more exploitation. The actor with a, wasn't it? A few scumbags willing to go through that door. A fucking monkey, right? The evolution to be complete. And nobody sprinted through it faster than one man. Who? Who?

Who? Who? Who? Who? Designed the blueprint that most modern CEOs are still following to this day. His name was Jack Welch. Bald. He's often referred to as the man who broke capitalism.

During his tenure as CEO of General Electric, he turned the once quintessential American company that reshaped people's lives and supplied hundreds of thousands of high-paying jobs all across a country into a worthless carcass and a joke of a corporation, all while he became one of the richest people on the planet. In the century before Jack Welch took the reins, GE invented things like x-ray machines, jet engines, TVs, radios, just about any kitchen appliance you can think of. It's pretty good. In the 1980s, Jack invented laying people off.

Well, hey, I mean, at least everybody uses that invention a lot now, right? So you can't say it didn't get popular. It really caught on. That was his big idea. He's a visionary, yeah. What if we just fire a bunch of people? And then we don't have to spend as much money. It seems so simple and obviously very commonplace today.

But before Jack, companies were not doing this. It was almost seen as un-American to fire somebody unless you absolutely had to. And this is even something that's, it's always hard for me to be certain about this because there's so much like fucking noise. But there are people that say that in Japan, there are guys that are like 45, 50, 55 that aren't really quite at retirement age. But the company doesn't have the heart to fire them. And so like out of a matter of respect, these are just, these guys just show up to work and don't fucking do anything. all day until they hit retirement age. And like, yeah, those men, yeah, exactly.

Yeah, real Milton's, exactly, yeah. And, yeah, salary meant, no, no, that's just that, that's just the term that's used. There is a term for it, but it's not that term. That's just somebody who works that way. What a job. What a job. Yeah. He was a pioneer.

He bravely instituted the rank and yank system where every year the bottom 10% of employees will get laid off no matter what. Not because they all deserve to be fired, but just because they, fell on the wrong side of a spreadsheet. What's that? You were three years away from a time. Mandatory quotas like that are really destructive. And the reason why they're destructive is because whenever you gamify a job or a profession, people stop doing the job and they start playing the game. This is one of the reasons also. There's a second order effect of this that's happening in the federal government. So for example, everybody who works at the federal government is rated for

performance, or at least they used to be, on a one to five scale. Three is good, two is retarded, one is fuck you, four is I'll suck your dick, and five is you're going to be the president. That's basically the way it works. But you want to get a three. The three is what you want. And so in order to evaluate fraud claims and any sort of inaccuracies or problematic, you know, any sort of like problematic data inside of a form, a document, a submission, usually the way that the systems and the algorithms are set up, it's not actually calculated into your performance. So the performance assumes that you're not going to have any of these, you know, like 1% situations. But everybody knows if you're processing a thousand documents a day,

you're on average going to have 10 of these every single day. But because it's not amortized into the, like the unit value of the amount of things that you're going over every day, what ends up happening is that people are then trained to skip and to do bad work because they're trying to meet the quotas for their job rather than trying to do their job. That's the main problem and the big issue that a lot of these like systematic process analyses or analyzed like systems work. And so and like that's and so now you guys see that happen. And so there's the incentive for it. Now can you see why there's so many like let's say people in Minnesota. many of them are Somalian, but this happens everywhere, that are scamming the government.

The reason why they're scamming the government is, well, maybe they're pieces of shit, maybe they're retards, sure, but another reason why it goes through is because the government has a system that encourages the employees to allow scams to go through. And once you see and you take a step back and you look at how all these pieces fit together, you will see that we have engineered the most bad faith version of an economic system that we could possibly have. And I think that really that's the term that I want to use the most, is it's bad faith economics. And that's what happens. Ironman and now you no longer qualify for pension.

Okay. Then die. And to be clear, the layoffs were also not because the company wasn't profitable. It very much was. But it just wasn't profitable enough. See, when you routinely shut down and. entire facilities, you uproot thousands of lives, you create a toxic and selfish work environment where loyalty is replaced with fear. And if you're a company with the size and influence that

GE had at the time, you can almost single-handedly destroy any semblance of a middle class across all of America. But this number gets a little bit bigger. That's right. So it's kind of a fair trade. Well, I mean, and this is also, it's inevitable that this was going to happen because of fiduciary responsibility through each company. It was, this was inevitable. forefront of this countrywide philosophical transition from an economy that cared about making things and rewarding the labor it took to do so to an economy that only cared about shareholder value and would prioritize anything it could to make that number go up but the thing about the stock market is it's mostly just about perception as long as something seems to be growing in value then people will be

The best example of this, if you ever think that the stock market isn't vibes, I think that obviously there's more to it than vibes. But the best way that I can show you that the stock market is vibes based is the stock price changes after Elon Musk and Donald Trump won the presidency. Like Tesla's stock prices went up by like 30% or something like that because, you know, he was very instrumental in Trump winning the presidency. even though it never manifested in any sort of increase in the value of the company. So the company gains 30 so percent value based off of a projection, perception, or some sort of promise or hope. That's it. More likely to invest in it, which will in turn cause it to be more valuable,

even if it shouldn't be. A lot of what Jack did during his time as CEO did not make the company better, but it did make it bigger. And in the eyes of Wall Street... Guys, who knows a lot about accounting? The amount of bullshittery, especially whenever you're dealing with like so many different industries and enterprises,

the way that you have the interplay, holy fuck. Like, it's so... Again, bad faith economics. I'm an accountant? Yeah. That was all that. Yeah.

Genuinely is hilarious. Yes. Genuinely accepted accounting principles. a.k.a. the legal exploits. I mean, come on. A business that relies on something boring, like selling products can only grow so much. But a company that's constantly acquiring other companies simply has no ceiling. I mean, they could be worth infinity dollars when you think about it. That's right. All the dollars.

Over the next few decades, GE bought and sold hundreds of companies. And Jack was lauded for his brilliance because from the outside, everything seemed to be working. I mean, sure, they were becoming a bloated, nonsensical hodgepodge of unrelated businesses eroding the company's infrastructure and priority. Well, this is also, I think this is just bad business development. Like, you can go as far back as to J.D. Rockefeller or to as recent as Elon Musk, where you have people that build vertical integration in different businesses that they own and operate.

And that's the way that, for example, that's the reason why Apple is such a massive company, right? is that they have all of the vertical integration inside of the development of their systems and their products completely in-house. So there are very few times where there's a middleman that's taking a shave off of the top of it, basically, right? Netflix, like the cosplay girl? Yeah, kind of in a way. But, like, basically, vertical integration is the way that if you look at the success story behind almost every single, like, extremely wealthy person, except for people that are capitalizing on new technology,

vertical integration is at the forefront of their business model. As in constant quarterly gains over any long-term sustainability, but no one gives it shit because the stock... By the way, this is the reason why whenever we had OTK, I thought it would be a good idea to do StarForge, because then you could use the people that are streaming in order to promote the fucking computers, right? And then you could also have Mythic

that could get more people to promote the computers as well. It's vertical integration. That's, I mean, it's pretty fucking simple, right? It's, oh, wow, look at the thing that everybody else did. Let's just do the thing that everybody else does. Oh, wow, it worked. Holy shit, I can't believe it. It's never been high.

They've stumbled upon an infinite money glitch. They're just alchemizing value out of thin air. It gets to a point where the company founded by Thomas Edison doesn't even make their own light bulbs anymore. Well, Thomas Edison didn't invent his own light bulb if some of the, you know, accusations are true. So maybe it's just more a return to form. All they care about now is their ballooning financial division. They're issuing high interest loans. They become a massive holder of subprime mortgages, a famously good investment to make in the early 2000.

Literally whatever it took to juice the numbers, that's what they would do. After about 30 years of short-term decisions that received instant gratification. from shareholders, but were gradually making things worse for the company and its dwindling number of employees. GE had become severely overvalued. And it wasn't until right after Jack retired with his $400 million severance package. The thing that's crazy about this is like y'all saw the pictures of this guy, right? Like these are pictures that were taken in like 1985. You can tell just by the lighting. This is like fucking, like this guy makes Bobby Coda look like a like a broke bitch. But think about how much money that is nowadays.

Where his successors stepped in and were like, this doesn't make any sense. The time bomb jack planted explodes in their faces, and GE spends the next 20 years slowly bleeding out. And at this point, they couldn't fall back on just like selling microwaves because they'd been cutting corners on production so long that nobody wanted to buy any of their shitty garbage anymore. And of course, they had fallen away too far behind on innovation

because they spent all their money on acquisitions instead of research. By 2021, the company that helped bring electricity to America was mercil... A lot of very big conglomerates Roman Empire themselves, where they spread themselves too thin, and then their competency is displaced among too many different products and all of the products fail. It's very common, actually. ...tively laid to rest, split into three separate institutions, none of which have come close to the dominance or influence that GED once had over the American economy. But here's the thing. You know who isn't? defected at all by the cataclysmic downfall of General Electric?

One percenters. Jack Welch. Because he's dead. He already got to live his entire life of luxury and adoration without ever having And here's that, no, no, here's another component. Imagine if he only got $40 million. He would still be living a life of absolute luxury and entertainment. The entire idea that like at a certain point money, the number becomes cosmetic.

it doesn't even matter at this point. It's kind of like whenever you're playing a video game, if you're already hitting a damage cap, like let's say you're fighting monsters that have 100 health, it doesn't really matter to you if you go from 100 damage to 200 damage, does it? Doesn't make a difference because you're going to kill them in one hit anyway.

And this is the thing that a lot of these people don't understand is that you're going to hit a cap and there's like massive fucking DRs here. Yeah, Exhibition 33. Yeah, exactly. You're hitting 9-999s like fucking in the first act sometimes if you're using roulette, right? And so you don't even need to worry about like, okay, at that point, are you going to keep using your big hits or are you going to instead use something that does smaller hits over time, right? And I think that's really what these companies do, right? Is that they never think about that. They never focus on that. And they just kind of accumulate more and more money that does basically nothing. It doesn't improve your life at all. He'll deal with the fallout caused by his action. He took control of a building with a rock solid foundation and just kept scrapping it for parts until the only thing left for it to do was collapse under its own weight. But by that point, he was long gone.

I believe that this is the goal of those who now follow in his footsteps. They don't need to care about whether or not what they're doing is harmful or unsustainable. As long as the facade can be maintained long enough. for them to reap the rewards, it doesn't matter that the ship is sinking behind them because they have a lifeboat. It doesn't matter. It's also, like, it's important, too,

that you don't have to do it for your whole life. There's plenty of people who run companies into the ground and they're alive to see it happen. And it doesn't matter because they just make the money back anyway. They get a golden parachute exit deal and they get paid $5 million and they have a non-compete clause so they just don't even work for a year or multiple years. And they just sit,

around and that money collects interest. It's crazy. It's better that America spent the past 60 years exporting all its jobs and decimating the economies of small towns all across the country because a few hundred people responsible for those things already got to live long. That's right. They don't give a shit. Even if they stopped making money immediately, it wouldn't matter. Throat corporate culture that Jack pioneered is still seen all around us today. And through the magic I don't agree with blaming him. I don't. I think that it's, this was an inevitability based off of fiduciary responsibility and greed of the consumers and

investors reaching its logical obvious conclusion. This is something that would have happened anyway. Maybe he speed ran it, but we'd probably still be in roughly the same position we're in now. He is bald. He is. He is. CEOs make a thousand dollars every second while their employees have to piss in water bottles so they don't fall behind. Routine layoffs, regardless of if a company is even struggling are so normalized it, it's just something we've come to expect. The stock... I think that we should expect it. I think that asking and expecting companies to provide welfare is ridiculous. I think that we should expect this from the government. A company's job is to create a product at a price. A government's job, in my opinion, is to protect and take care of

its people. I think that this displacement on unaccountable third-party corporations that are international that have, in a lot of cases, no real ties or, you know, obligation to the United States. I think this is a, it's a siren song, right? I think that the more that you listen to it and you go in that direction, the more it will be a bad thing. Now, I'm not saying that we shouldn't have any accountability on companies, but I don't think that's really where the solution is going to come from. Market rules the world. Every major decision is dictated by this inherently volatile and short-sighted metric. And look at where that's gotten us. Millions without jobs, an inshittification epidemic, and a concentration of wealth that should be seen as a threat to humanity.

If you can rent Venice for your wedding, you can pay more tax. I wonder how many of these people are still alive. Even while owning everything, billionaires live in fear of losing it. So they weasel their way into politics. They influence elections. They buy policy changes. They use their wealth to... There were political cartoons of J.D. Rockefeller doing this over 100 years ago.

This is not new. Crassus did it in Rome, didn't he? Always has been, always will be. Reshape the world to benefit them even further. They try to control narratives by buying up news outlets. They can dictate what's on our social media feeds. They spend an enormous amount of resources on hitting us all against each other. So we're too distrape.

I mean, I think that basically you have to look at, so if you look at, if you think that something is a manifestation of core human behavior and psychology, you should never expect that the problem will solve itself without dramatic and extreme regulation and controls. And I think that some of these videos, I think that it's very popular to be hateful and hostile to people like Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos. And you can do that as much as you want, but it will never be productive because even if these people retire or they die, they'll just be replaced by somebody else that will do the same thing. It's kind of like the metaphor that I use all the time where these people are effectively the cookies and you don't want to go after the cookies. You want to go after the cookie factory.

Because the cookie factory will just keep making more cookies. So even if you throw away a dozen cookies, there's just going to be more cookies that replace them. So that's my focus. It's attracted to see that the real problem is them. It's like another great example of this is that you know, whenever Luigi shot that United Healthcare person, it's not like, like insurance in America just suddenly went away and it got good again. It's all against each other, so we're too distracted to see that the real problem is them. Should the human race survive? I love this guy, by the way.

He's absolutely fucking schizo. All of the stuff about the fucking, what do you call it? The Antichrist and everything else, I think he's great. Everything kind of sucks right now. And as a result, most people are justifiably pretty angry. But for media outlets and politicians, that anger is their single most powerful tool because they can tell you where to direct it. They don't even really care who it is so long as it's not them. That's why it changes all the time.

Sometimes it's trans people. Sometimes it's immigrants. Most recently, it's been poor people. Important to keep in mind that the immigrants are being, the only people who are the real beneficiaries of mass migration and mass immigration are billionaires and business owners. because they're the ones that are able to utilize, take advantage of, and abuse and exploit the labor of people who are illegal in the country or migrants in the country. Those are the people that actually benefit. The working class doesn't benefit. The middle class generally doesn't benefit. The upper middle class probably benefits because they're using, they're getting like basically cheaper like lawnmowers, right? And cheaper maids. But otherwise, the main people that are really getting all the money are, the big corporations, right? They're the ones and the business owners. Modern slavery. Well, modern slavery. I would say it's more like indentured servitude. I think slavery is too harsh of a word,

but yes. This whole war going on over food stamps, because when the government shut down, 42 million Americans lost access to SNAP benefits. Now, that's an objective piece of information and inarguable statistics, but depending on how it's presented to you, it may lead you to draw a drastically different conclusion. Well, you saw on Twitter, right, I mean, you see like there's a black person that's bad with money that's spending all their food stamps on talkies and Dr. Pepper. And so now we should just let poor people starve. The problem is that the people are retarded. And it's so easy to just totally manipulate people's perception.

And it's getting worse every single year. For some, it might put into perspective how dire the situation has gotten. Like surely there's underlying. issues with a system that's allowed 12% of its population to be unable to afford food. Alternatively, you might do that and think, wait a minute, my tax dollars are paying for these. Well, the problem also is that, like, it's more than 12% that can't afford food. It's only 12% that officially qualify for not being able to afford food. Breedy freeloaders, I'm busting my ass over here to barely make ends meet.

And these leeches are using my money to buy cookies. Yeah, basically like the $60,000 a year people hate the $20,000 a year people. And all it takes is highlighting a story or two of someone taking advantage of the system to make you think there's this rampant issue that you're expected to feed. I think it is. I think there is actually a rampant issue of people that are taking advantage of the system. It's definitely true. But that's inevitable.

Every system that gives away stuff is going to have people that are taking advantage of it. In the same way that, you know, whenever they're doing the ice-de-eat, deportations, there are people who get detained unfairly. When there are laws that are made for, I don't know, speeding, there are people that get pulled over unfairly. There are also going to be people that are paid out unfairly whenever you have a payout program. This is inevitable. This is an inevitable reality that the only way to avoid it is to do nothing. All of these people with money you barely have enough of to feed yourself. This narrative has been used since the 70s because it's very effective. You work hard, they're lazy, this program is bad. It's easier than ever now to push this

narrative because you can just AI generate a video of a fat lady. I mean, but she is really fat though, right? And do we really need to be feed? And the thing is that I think that most people, whenever they see a fat person that's on food stamps, that's just gratuitously buying a bunch of food. Because by the way, I know that fat lady buying a bunch of food gratuitously that she doesn't need. It was my mom. And I was right there behind her in front of her, putting it all in the cart because I was buying it too, because we got food stamps. It was fucking amazing. So, uh, yes, I know that they're real because I used to be one. He's screaming in the Walmart and get everyone pissed off. But in order to properly analyze this, let's take a look at the data. First of all,

Snap only makes up about one and a half percent of the overall federal budget. Less than an eighth of what we spend on defense and an eighth of what we spend just on, interest on the debt that we owe. By my math, cutting this program would only save the average taxpayer a couple hundred dollars a year. And of course, that's assuming that if they were to cut it, they would send you a refund in the mail. No, I'm pretty sure they would still take the same amount. It would go to Israel, actually. Instead of reinvesting it into the economy, which is what SNAP ultimately does, they would just buy some more missiles or send a pile of cash to Argentina. I thought of all, by definition, the majority of SNAP recipients fall under the umbrella of elderly, disabled, veterans, full-kids. and caretakers or just temporarily unemployed. Remember, not everybody who isn't working does so because they don't want to. It is very hard to find and keep a job right now.

The fact that Snap spending ebbs and flows so closely with the overall state of the economy should be proof that this program is primarily used for temporary relief, even still. That's actually a really good argument. I like that. I've never heard that before. I've never seen that graph. That's a good graph. I like that graph. Many of the people on Snap do work in about 70.

I actually, but to be fair, I also think that this graph is a bit problematic, because if you see here, this is really what the issue is. Let me just go ahead. I can pull it up and show you guys. So if you look at the actual graph here, you can see that the baseline of COVID is still higher than the baseline afterwards. And I think this really also goes to show that a lot of the economy, I guess like the best way I say a lot of the economic recovery is artificial because if it wasn't artificial

you would see this number go back down even more but it's not how is it the economy keeps getting better but at the same time all these people are still stuck on food stamps there you go is this adjusted for inflation

total spending I don't know actually if it is or not that's a good question percent of the ones that do work full-time. That doesn't seem like a laziness problem. That seems like a wage problem. They need supplemental income to survive because of how little they're being paid. Of those full-time employees, their two most common employers were McDonald's and Walmart, who combined to earn $23 billion in profits last year. Not that much. $23 billion. And you're telling me they can't afford to pay

their employees enough so that they don't need government assistance. See, what that means is you wouldn't have to help pay for these people's food. This was a scandal in like, 2009 or 2010 that, it might have been 2008, I don't remember exactly, but Walmart was caught teaching people who were working at Walmart how to supplement their income from working at Walmart by applying for government assistance. So like basically they're offloading the burden of taxes onto the actual fucking person. Your employer, a nearly trillion dollar corporation just paid them a livable way. You're more upset at the people using the program than the companies who have put them in a position where they even need it in the first place.

Well, they, they, the companies want them to use the program. Walmart double dips here. The majority of food stamps are redeemed at Walmart. So not only do they save money by underpaying their staff, but their revenue then gets subsidized by this program because that's where. Keep in mind, one of the people that was an heiress to Walmart was a massive funder of the no king's protest for Donald Trump who, ended up locking food stamps out because of the government shutdown. Isn't that interesting? People tend to use it. Final statistic, about a third of SNAP recipients, over 12 million of them, are children.

What's the argument there? Classic. Working hard enough? Who knew? Who know? Vertical integration. Yeah, bro. We're integrating the White House, not Soros?

I think that it was funded by a lot of different people. Just because you're seven. Like, can we stop for one second to think about what you're saying here? You have let somebody convince you that in this situation, the only way to make your life better is if 12 million children starve. So I want to ask who is more to blame here, a bunch of kids who got born into poverty or CEOs with more men. Bad spawn RNG, guys. I guess you have to die. Then anybody could spend in a thousand lifetimes who expect you to solve the problem that they helped create. For some people, it doesn't matter what you say about capitalism.

will still go to war for it. Well, they'll also go to war against it. I don't think this is completely, I think this is slightly reductive. In my opinion, I think that people are so indoctrinated by what their ideologies are. Like, this is even a bigger thing where I think that people have replaced religion with political dogma and social ideologies. So in the same way that people would blindly follow, you know, Islam or blindly follow Christianity. Well, now that we're in more of a secular culture, the, mind of the people that would follow these religions blindly for thousands of years hasn't really

changed as fast as the society has. And so instead of following that, they're following the idea of Marxism or socialism or, you know, the capitalism or something like that. And there's, or like LGBT issues. And this is, this is their, this is their frame of reference that derives their political system, their morality system, their economic system, and the way that they see the world and also even interact with other people. Not working for them. Statistically speaking, it's probably not. You'll try to criticize a multi-billionaire who's not paying us taxes and people will defend

them like, hey, it's not their fault. They're just taking advantage of loopholes like any smart business person. Well, they were the ones that made the loopholes. Like, okay, so then we agree there's a problem with the rules, right? They're just exploiting the city. Yeah, if the rules are bad, then what use of the rules? If the rules put you out of disadvantage, then fuck the rules. the rules.

System, then maybe the system shouldn't be so easy to exploit? We've reached a point where a lot of the core principles of a free market no longer apply. Like the idea that you can vote with your dollar. I get to pick which businesses I support, therefore the best ones will succeed and the worst ones will fail. Yeah, except when one company. I think that's generally true.

Like, it's not always true, but it's generally true. He is allowed to corner the market and price out all their competition. Suddenly, there isn't any. And we would have small business systems. tell us if they walked into a Walmart or a Costco, the retail price at those stores, the price on the shelves at those stores is lower than the wholesale price a small business is getting. And so there are huge disparities here. And that's now feeding into itself, right? I mean, I think that's normal, right? I mean, buying things wholesale, like buying something at Sam's

Club is cheaper than buying it at Walmart. It would make sense logically that a larger sale would be even cheaper than that. Like, I don't really, I don't understand that. that point. More dire, the economy is for everyone, the less freedom they have when they're deciding what to pay for. Amazon is certainly not the only place. Volume saves money on logistics. Yeah.

To buy things, but historically speaking, it's almost always the cheapest and most convenient. So how do you convince somebody who's also been forced to pinch? They were saying the opposite. Wait, let me listen to it again. They walked into all their competition. Suddenly, there isn't any. And we would have small businesses tell us if they walked into a Walmart or a small business. Small businesses. Okay. Let me lock in and think for a second here. Because usually I'm thinking about like five different things I'm talking about. So let me think about it again.

Costco, the retail price at those stores, the price on the shelves at those stores is lower than the wholesale price a small business is getting. And so there are huge disparities here. And that's now what she's saying. Wholesale is more perspective. I don't even what is she even, I don't even understand this. She's saying Walmart's undercutting her. Yeah, of course. course feeding into itself right the more dire the economy is for everyone the less freedom they have when they're deciding what to pay for yeah amazon is certainly not the only place to buy things but historically speaking it's almost always the cheapest and most convenient so how do you convince somebody that's true yeah i buy almost everything on amazon absolutely also been forced to pinch pennies due to their own circumstances that they need to spend more time and money buying that same thing from a local mom and pop shop when they could just click three buttons

and have it magically appear at their door in three hours. Exactly. Yeah. I mean, like, it's, the thing is that these other companies can just outcompete like these smaller companies because they operate on such massive scale that they can afford to work at lower margins. It's really fair to impose that because that person is also struggling. But then the cycle continues.

The small business closes Amazon and Walmart extend their reach even further. That's right. And once all competition is defeated, then you raise the price. the prices to be whatever they want. They can train an... I did this in World Warcraft. Absolutely. Yeah, if you control the market,

you also control the price. Algorithm to charge you the maximum price they think you'll pay at any given moment. Now, one of the most common... So you should have brought that up with a VPN. Counter arguments you'll hear if you bring up the idea of raising taxes on the ultra wealthy is that, well, if you do that,

they're just going to leave. First of all, no, they're not. That's a bluff they've been using for years, perpetuated by media networks owned by, you guessed it, rich people who don't want their taxes to... Wow, what a surprise. Sure, a few of them might leave, but the kinds of people who are willing to go to the trouble of moving their entire business

from New York City to like Casimmy Ford. This is another thing that's also good about having tariffs, right? Is that it makes leaving because of higher taxes harder to do. Are probably already doing everything they can to avoid paying any taxes at all. It doesn't seem like a very productive mindset to cater to this parasitic minority at the expense of everybody else. Second of all, oh my God, can we grow some fucking balls here? You don't understand. They're not going to like it if we raise their tax. Do you hear yourself? Do you hear how pathetic?

No, that's not the reason why. I don't agree with this. I think the reason why they do it is because they want to be in that position in the future. One of the things that's unique about America is that there is the ability for class mobility that is almost unheard of in many other places in the world. world. Like in America, you can become, you can be homeless and then you become, you can become a billionaire. That's not very common in the world. And I understand that it's not as common now, but it's still possible. And so people have this fantasy in their mind and inside of this fantasy, they're the person that's the winner. So yeah, of course that's why. So they, they imagine themselves being taxed at this higher rate. Q-Sound. Okay, so what? We can't do anything then? That's it. It's over. They won.

Your plan is that we should just give up and let the billionaires have whatever they want. That's what's going to happen. I can guarantee you because there is no way that you can convince stupid people to work in their own best interest. And there are too many stupid people out there. They are too easily manipulated and it will never work. Because it never has worked. Buddy, we've already tried that and that's not working either. Third of all, this criticism is predicated on an idea that taxation essentially has a bell curve to it, where after a certain rate, your overall revenue actually decreases because people will lose the incentive to work. I've never heard of like you're saying, move away. With this in mind, there have been studies done by economists who believe that every country has its own ideal rate for maximum efficiency.

However, the implication that raising taxes would cause the overall revenue to go down would only be true if we were on the tail end of this bell curve. And we are nowhere close to that. So if your main concern is to maximize total... I think this obviously makes sense. I mean, very clearly, people won't work as hard if they're not getting any money out of it. Sure. In the revenue, it's pretty clear which direction we should be moving. Otherwise, the very metric your point is referencing contradicts the argument you're trying to make.

Now, even having said all of that, I'm not going to sit here and act like just raising taxes is an immediate fix to all of our problems. we'd still have to rely on elected officials to actually use that money in a sensible way. I'd be happy to contribute more if I knew it was going to better health care or nicer parks or... I think this is true for a lot of people. I think that a lot of the animosity and hostility towards paying taxes is hand in hand with the tax money being allocated in ways that are stupid. I think that people wouldn't have a problem paying more taxes if they saw a new library being built in like their local town.

but whenever they see a new library being blown up in the Middle East, that doesn't really seem as appealing. And somehow it's more expensive than building one. But if my money's just going to be used to blow up a hospital on the other side of the world, then... Hey, what can I say? Yeah, maybe I'd rather just give it to a food bank. I don't know all the answers because at the end of the day, no matter how hard I try to expand my legacy beyond...

I mean, it's so obvious, right? I mean, you don't need to pre-watch that. It's fucking basic psychology. I'm still just the road work ahead guy, but I do know that this amount of wealth and equality that's showing zero signs of slowing down anytime soon. It's going to get worse, actually. It'll get a lot worse. It's not sustainable. Turns out that actually every single thing in the world becomes... It's only not sustainable if you assume that the current economic and social system is going to stay the same, which it won't.

It's going to get a lot worse. It's going to get a lot worse. It's just a way to enrich a few. people at the cost of many. And I have to wonder if we've finally reached a point now where the greed has gone too far. It never has gone too far. And even in the instances historically of, you know, the supposed rising up of the working class, you generally have, for example, the military and merchant class fighting the royalty class in, for example, the French Revolution. And it's also not like in any of these previous revolutions in history, it's very rarely, oh, the point.

poor people really fight the rich people and then the poor people win, it's usually that half of the rich people pay half of the poor people to kill the other half of the rich people, and then they're paying their poor people, and then somehow people, you know, like, you know, one side wins, and it's seen as a, you know, class victory, but really it's just a reinforcement of the existing hegemony. It is. And this is really the truth. And it's a very black pill way of looking at it. But I think that if you look into it, you'll find out that this is true. Now so impossible to ignore that no amount of gaslighting about how the economy is good, actually, will convince people who are dying because they can't afford to go to the doctor,

that this is just how life should be. History shows that, unfortunately, sometimes things have to get worse before they can get better. And if this is what it takes for a I think that there is accelerationism in mind. I think that things can improve. I hope that they do. My expectation is that I don't really know whether they were or not. I don't think there's enough to like, I can't say, but it's very unlikely. I'll say that. I'll say that.

I'll say that. It's never going to happen. We're closer to that than we've been in a long time. We just need to put down our phones, set aside our differences for a little bit, and unite on this one issue. They want us divided because they're afraid of how strong we would be if we step together. Which is why they never will. Now if you'll excuse me, I need to go argue on Reddit about how Ghost of Yote is woke because they didn't make the main character hot enough for me. Thank you for why.

That's right. That's right. And you're going to be thinking about my video and I was fucking right. And you want to talk about capitalism. I'll tell you something. If they had made that character with bigger tits, they would have sold even more copies than they did. That's fucking right. You're goddamn right. Yep, there you go.

And anyway, great video. Yeah, I think it was a really good video. And overall, I think that, and overall, I think that. sort of discussion of revolution or anything inside of that scope at all is very, very pie in the sky, fantasy, theoretical. I think it's bullshit, really. It's bullshit. And it's not going to happen. Great insight. Great video. Yeah. I mean, he's talking about a lot of, and I think this is the prime evil that is transcending everything. Like, everything is downstream of this. For example, like identity politics are introduced into the media in order to distract from this.

I think that also, and I think this is also done by the mainstream media. And then you also have very, very clearly the amount of like just random distractions there are people are distracted from it. So yeah, three at 10 video, reductive socialist argumentations. I mean, again, like it sounds like the beginning of a great Reddit comment. How are you contributing to what he's talking about? Trump can spam hate at Somalis and now we're doing that. Well, because the, and let me explain the reason why, the Somalians that are being brought into the country are being brought into the country with the abstract goal of them being able to be an underclass of laborers for rich people. So mass migration and these immigration allowances and these introductions of massive groups of foreign people that aren't assimilating into the culture, the reason why that's happening is because these large businesses want to utilize their labor and take advantage of them,

systematically. That's the reason why. So if you, like basically mass migration is a symptom of this disease. That's it. And by the way, do you know who agrees with me on this? Is Bernie Sanders. That's it. Finally somebody noticed it. Yeah, exactly. They're the ones that are creating the carrot that's causing all these people to illegally migrate to the country. Can we get a link? Yeah, give the video a like. I think this was really, really good. I like the video a lot. I didn't agree on every point that he made. I think it's probably impossible for. somebody to. But overall, I think that he made a lot of really good points. And I think it's great. It's also, it's also great for the left because it displaces the cured white majority.

I mean, like, you can talk, like, all that is kind of, that's secondary to this. But yeah, of course, you have identity politics, right? Bernie's hypocritical diction. I mean, like, you're thinking about, like, so, okay, that's fine. But you have to agree that, like, I think he was right on that, wasn't he? And so, like, that's my point. Like, you can go and talk about, oh, what's this, that, and the other thing. I don't give a shit about any. of that. Like, oh, he said this, he said that. I don't care. Is he right about this thing? I think this thing he is right about.