Behind the Bastards - It Could Happen Here Weekly 13

Episode Date: December 11, 2021

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Alphabet Boys is a new podcast series that goes inside undercover investigations. In the first season, we're diving into an FBI investigation of the 2020 protests. It involves a cigar-smoking mystery man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse look like a lot of guns. But are federal agents catching bad guys or creating them? He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science?

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And yes, I despise every minute of it. I mean, she made mistakes too. That's true. She did kill everyone at her wedding. But hell is real. We're all trapped here. And there's nothing any of us can do about it. So join me, won't you? Listen to The Doctor Sex Reese Show every Tuesday on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. Hey, everybody. Robert Evans here.

And I wanted to let you know this is a compilation episode. So every episode of the week that just happened is here in one convenient and with somewhat less ads package for you to listen to in a long stretch if you want. If you've been listening to the episodes every day this week, there's got to be nothing new here for you. But you can make your own decisions. Robert, do you want to grunt so we can start the podcast? I think we should just start the podcast with you asking Robert, do you want to grunt so we can start the podcast? That seems avant-garde. I don't know what avant-garde means. But this is it could happen here, a podcast about how things are falling apart and how maybe they don't always need to be falling apart.

Maybe we could do better. Speaking of doing better, you know, one thing that sometimes helps us do better. Getting in the face of people fucking shit up and being like, hey, that's not cool. Don't be doing that. Garrison, that's your lead in. Take it from here. Yeah, hi. I've been trying to keep a better job of following ecological defense movements happening both in the states and in other countries. I know there was a big one up in Canada recently. There was a huge one in Germany, too, just the other day. I know the one in Canada. I forget what the actual indigenous group is called. Maybe someone else.

Oh, the house in the south? The people who took back their land and blocked the road off. The unistotan and the wetsuit in. There we go. Yeah, they're basically taking their land back and blocking off the road and now our CMP is getting called in and we'll see how that develops. And in Guatemala, there's protests against Canadian mining in my indigenous community that have gotten pretty heavily militarized at this point. There's a lot of stuff on the ecological defense side of things, including in the Pacific Northwest here with all of the forests and the such in this area. And part of this kind of exploration into ecological defense, I wanted to talk with some people who are a little bit more well-versed in this type of thing than I am.

Two people have agreed to talk with us. Sam and Kat, both people who work on this kind of thing from an activism standpoint. Yeah, say hi. Hello. Hey, y'all. So very, very thankful that they are going to be talking with us today. So I thought we could probably just start by kind of discussing what forest defense is and how it kind of has a history, specifically in this area, but kind of more broadly. If people listened to the Earth First episodes, that covered anti-pipeline stuff, but we didn't really get much into forest defense and the traditional tree sits and that kind of thing. So yeah, what's up with defending the forest? What's going on with that?

Yeah, thanks for that great intro. I mean, forest defense is, I think, probably the most characteristic type of direct action in this bioregion and we're talking from Cascadia right now. I actually moved out here from the East Coast 10 years ago specifically to get involved with forest defense because this place has an incredibly rich history of people basically just throwing down risking life and limb to stop chainsaws from taking down some of the oldest and most special forests out here. And so I'd say, you know, forest defense direct action is in a lot of ways rooted right here in this bioregion. And obviously, like all kinds of movements, things have changed over the course of time. Back in the 80s and 70s when forest defense was really, really kicking up and stopping old growth logging specifically out here when it was kind of like rampant, old growth, clear cutting. It really took the shape of trying to focusing on ecology, focusing on the integrity of these ecosystems and basically like doing everything possible to stop the chainsaws.

And now obviously a lot has changed. We have the Northwest Forest Plan and some policies which are doing better to kind of like protect old places and old forests, but at the same time, the same shit is happening. You know, the timber industry is great at using euphemisms to kind of cover up its clear cutting anyways and finding policy loopholes to target some incredible places. And now I think where we're at with like the direct action movement is we're in the context of climate change so we're not just defending forests for the sake of these like incredible ecological strongholds but we're also defending them because we recognize that forest defense is climate defense. This is a like environmental justice issue. It's a human issue. It's a community issue. And so now direct action I think is, you know, happening not just the name of our forest but in the name of our communities and our future. But it's just as rich now as it has ever been and especially right now and especially since the 2020 fires which I know we'll get into people have been throwing down all over this fire region to protect what's left of our forests. Yeah, and I think it's good to get into kind of why how the fires have impacted this because one of the shady things that has been done is we had, I think most people in the country are where Oregon had unprecedented wildfires this year and we had unprecedented wildfires last year and we were going to have unprecedented wildfires every year for a while. And whenever these fires run through they don't like destroy every tree in their wake but they char them and logging companies then come in under the guise of like well we have to make this area safe so that like the fires don't burn here next year so we got to cut down all of these trees and clear cut this part of area of public forest so like as you're driving around in forests that you used to be able to do stuff in you'll find areas that are just like blocked off because mining companies are coming or logging companies are coming through and clear cutting all of these trees that could very easily recover from the fire

or that weren't even burned by it but we're just like in this area that they said okay well we have to clear this out in order to make it safe and it's kind of this way to like backdoor in the guise of fire protection like expand logging. Yeah and just to add to that too the logging companies love to say that the reasons we have increased wildfires because there's an overgrowth in the forest because of the northwest forest plant because there's more protections for the forest fires are happening worse because we're not getting there bogging the forest and removing all the fuel. So you have like this two part thing that like Kat just mentioned where like on the one hand companies are like we need to log more to prevent wildfire which is bullshit and we can talk about why and on the other hand after fires burn through an area they're like we need to log because we need to help the forest recover ecologically also we need to salvage all of the timber before it rots and goes bad and like all of these reasons and so basically it's just like fire has become the excuse to just like log preemptively and log after the fact and yeah it's a total shit show. Yeah I mean I think this kind of falls into capitalists trying to use climate change is just another way to find things to extract and things to grow on right it's there they're going to try to find their own way to sneak in when all of this ecological disaster is happening to you know sell you whatever green safe product is going to help against the collapse or you know package things in a way that makes it seem like it's solving this you know problem but it's actually it's part of it's part of the same thing or so you ethically logged wood from the yeah yeah yeah right it's it's you see it's in every single industry and it's always it's going to be like this because this is the only way that capitalism knows how to address this issue is by just turning it into another turning it into another thing to consume and another thing to sell and package pretty pretty grim. Yeah and there's I mean there's cascading effects to because they they cut down these trees and under the guise of making it safe for the next fire season.

But which also makes a big chunk of land, a lot more vulnerable to like mudslides and the torrential raining that we're having right now. And that's also going to get more common because that's how fucking climate change works it's it's just like the comprehensive fuckery comprehensive fuckery and let us be clear to that. Logging doesn't actually work to prevent wildfire, you know, even it, you know, they say that it does but the kind of logging that they do in the name of wildfire prevention just looks like clear cuts and we have a pretty robust body of science now showing that those kinds of activities actually make fire hazard more severe for local communities so that's like one of the things they're doing and we've been calling it just gaslighting like they're gaslighting all of us by saying you know there's nothing to see here there's nothing to see here. We're taking care of you all, you know, we're barely logging at all and then we've got community members on the ground, despite the closure orders who are like, actually, there's a lot to see here and you all are like completely devastating the landscape and further harming our communities. So yeah, it's total gaslighting. Yeah, and Oregon has both in terms of like watching fires and watching logging some like rules that are not in place in other areas, especially for like even for for press and the like like it's it's actually hard to get into look at this stuff. Without, you know, breaking some sort of law technically, which is not at all shady.

Yeah. Yeah, I feel like that's another important thing and maybe cat can jump on to is just basically, I mean I think what people are understanding is that after the fires, the, these federal forest managers closed gates and essentially are converting public land into private land by, you know, using the threat of violence to kick people out if they go on to their public land. And since 2020 and they say until 2023 at least, the only folks allowed behind these gates are cops and loggers. And so this is like literally, you know, the enclosure of our public lands and like the privatization of our public lands so that cops and loggers can do whatever the hell they want. Yep. And it's the kind of thing. I mean, it's the kind of thing that people, if you're if you're if the if the Bundy's and that group actually meant the stuff they were saying, like the rhetoric they were putting out it's the kind of thing they would be pissed off about to because you're right is the enclosure of public land by the government and corporations without any kind of consent from the people who are supposed to be the collective owners of that land it's it's again something that a lot of people should be angry about who aren't angry about because there's been this huge propaganda campaign in the Northwest about timber unity and the like and like supporting the timber industry by destroying like the single greatest gift this entire part of the world has. It's it's pretty frustrating.

Yeah, straightening. Anyway, I have to we have to actually have a quick break so I can go watch my soccer game at the timber stadium completely unrelated. So I'll be right back. I'm going to drive out to Wheeler, Oregon myself, but we all have different things to do during the break. But also in the break, I guess we can probably do an ad break here because why not. All right. Yeah, everybody loves ads. And we're back still talking about force defense. I want to there's something that people should probably know before we go further about the way that that Oregon works. So for a while, Oregon is a place where you can't get elected in a lot of parts of a lot of populated parts of Oregon if you're a Republican. So the Republicans just play nice and and pretend and like throw out some some social just as he language while while still doing all of the extractive stuff they were going to do anyway. And that's the story with like Ted Wheeler and his family. So Ted Ted Wheeler, the mayor of Portland comes from timber money. His father was a major Republican donor. Not that the Democrats don't have a lot of extractive history behind them, but like it's very obvious what's happening with the wheelers where they were huge Republican donors and huge backers of the right.

And then Oregon had this kind of switch politically. And so Ted Wheeler just started throwing out nice social justice language. But the whole, you know, he's he's I'm sure going to make a run for governor at some point in the near future. And you've got this like this dressed up very extractive logging industry and politicians that always find a way to kind of make it seem palatable to the liberal majority. And they've gotten pretty good at that because it doesn't. I don't know, I think maybe we're coming to the end of this period but like I haven't I haven't seen up until this last year, a lot of widespread kind of outrage about the clear cutting. And they also hide it pretty well like if you're driving through these beautiful public forests in Oregon, the areas that are right along the road will generally be pristine and you'll see old growth and everything. But sometimes you can see as you like turn a corner or something like, oh, that old growth only goes back a couple of couple of dozen yards and then it's a clear cut. And they'll they'll they'll hide it so that it's it's not as obvious because they know it upsets people.

So there's this there's this kind of surprisingly surprisingly thorough campaign to do as much of this as possible without upsetting people, which which means there's a potential to upset people, which means there's a potential to actually stop this if enough people get upset. But it's, you know, you're going against folks who have thought a lot about how to do this in a way that isn't going to upset the apple cart. So how do you upset the apple cart, I guess is what I'm asking. Well, I think one way that we upset the apple cart is by bringing people out to these places. And, you know, in the action that happened on Tuesday, that looked like disrupting and disobeying a federal closure order in order to bring people out to these places. You know, basically metaphorically walking behind what you were describing the beauty strip along the highway and seeing what's behind it. And, you know, as we were saying earlier, unfortunately, because of all these federal closure orders after the fire, that looks like risking, you know, repercussions, state repression,

arrest even in order to just lay eyes on it. But that is the way that we tip the apple cart we get people to see these places so that it cuts through the gaslighting that the industry is doing and people can literally viscerally feel and see the damage. And there's no way to convince them that that's okay once they see it. And how do you go about like finding people to bring into this convincing people to come like what is kind of that effort look like? You want to answer this one cat you did a ton of recruitment. Yeah, totally. I think a big part of it is getting them while they're young. I think that like young people right now are already pretty radicalized, compared to 10 years or so, probably because of I think George Floyd and Black Lives Matter and social the use of social media and those movements. So I am a college student, and we're seeing like so many people coming in and ready to throw down like they just cannot wait to get involved, and we'll kind of just show up to anything.

So I think that that's like a major tactic for sure. And then also making sure that when you have like an action that you're recruiting people for that it's very easy to plug in. It's like very accessible. And kind of just like having it organized very well so it's not daunting to come in. Do you want to add to that Sam? I want to like share a little more about like how we did that with this particular action that happened on Tuesday. Basically, you know, we, it was a Tuesday, rainy, freezing middle of the forest. Planning this action did not think in and behind a federal closure order so everyone on site risking arrest and planning this action, it felt like we would be lucky as shit if we got 10 people out there. But I will say, it was easy as shit to get 50 people out there. And that's because people care. And, you know, I think we did in terms of organizing strategy we use the affinity group model. And so we had a core, you know, there was a core group of organizers and those organizers recruited through affinity groups and their affinity groups and that helped to keep kind of information secure.

And, you know, everything tightly organized but people want people were really desiring to get together and do something especially at the past couple years of COVID people are just like eager to do something. And on top of that, you know, we promised that this isn't just an opportunity to potentially get arrested but this is an educational opportunity and a movement building opportunity so while the road was blocked with a slash pile and a fire truck. There were workshops going on there were hikes going on in the forest that's supposed to be cut. There was discussions about know your rights trainings and affinity groups we had a band playing on top of a fire truck and there was a dance party and basically, you know we're like built in community and solidarity in a positive way, while fucking shit up. I think that's the key. And I mean where do you. How do you have like what is the way to phrase this. What is kind of the next step here because they they they haven't started logging this area yet but they're kind of doing like the pre prep work.

So what do you think actually can be done to to halt it like is it is it a pro like because it seems to me that it's there's got to be like a mix of tactics there to actually get them to stop and you're dealing with a number of different threats including not just at the state level but these federal closure orders like what is I don't know what it what is the path forward look like to you. So there's a preliminary injunction being forth by some nonprofits, and so this is a really good example of different tactics coming in. And so the preliminary injunction is basically to state that what they're doing the Forest Service is doing is illegal. But before that that can be passed they can come in at any point and log the area and so that's where direct action comes in to slow them down and halt them as much as possible until the courts can process that injunction. And that feels really huge to like Kat just said is like, where is the place of direct action in Forest Defense. This is like the golden moment for direct action while there's like an open legal case that we're waiting on a judge to settle. And the timber industry is like coming in ready to moot out the case by logging before it can even be decided. And like to just add a little bit more backstory to on like another reason why people are so pissed about this is that you know this watershed has been. I think like beloved and also embattled since the 80s like the infamous Easter massacre logging event happened in the same watershed where could you explain. Yeah, sorry.

Yeah, no, totally. It in 1989. A timber company was planning to clear cut log old growth forest out there and started moving on it on Easter in the snow, and a bunch of badass direct action activists set up a five tiered blockade on a logging road to hold off the logging and successfully did for days and days until a bunch of them I think over a dozen folks got arrested thrown in jail, and the forest was clear cut. And so, hence, you know, the Easter massacre name, but a ton of folks who, you know, still work in Forest Defense in the spy region were there and remember that story, and we're with us. When we were out there this week, telling that story and you know since then between 1989 and now, people have been showing up again and again and again in this watershed because it is so special to try and fight off logging and myself and cat have been a part of efforts for the last handful of years to fight off a number of logging projects out there we were successful in doing that we actually like smacked the Forest Services grubby hands off of a bunch of old growth because our scrappy friends spent days exploring this watershed and documenting doing like site specific science citizen science documentation and giving it to the Forest Service and we fought them and one and protected a bunch of the forest, and then the fires came through, and they closed the gates, and they secretly changed all of these contracts to include clear cut logging. And so that is why there is an open lawsuit because we believe it's illegal what they're doing. It's sketchy and illegal. Yeah, but it does it does illustrate like kind of the depth of the fight that is necessary, not just in Forest Defense but at all efforts of kind of resisting the extractive industries that are driving a lot of climate change it's it's not enough. It's never enough to win the first victory they're going to find some way to to to swoop around of the flanks and try to take it away from you like they're doing right now, which is exhausting. It seems exhausting, but doesn't mean it. You can ignore it.

It's fucking exhausting. Yeah, I always say is like our forest our federal management agencies they like suffer from this powerful amnesia where they just like keep coming back with the same bullshit proposals. But like our movement does not suffer from that and we are just like building power and getting stronger and getting more successful so like when people left on Tuesday. There was a promise that people will be back if logging happens and we're very sure that that will be the case. And if if people are in the Cascadian bio region and are like well this sounds pretty sweet. I want to I want to I want to keeps keeps some trees where they are as opposed to putting them on the back of a truck to drive somewhere else. How could they get involved where where might they reach out to Well there's a few different groups who were a part of this definitely the Portland Rising tide Cascadia forest defenders cat can talk about climate justice league and maybe the action that you all put on yesterday as a follow up and like how folks can get involved with that. But basically, you can follow us on Twitter and Instagram and and please, you know, keep a lookout because we will be, we'll be getting it out far and wide if there is a call for folks to get out there again. Yeah, and climate justice league is an org at the University of Oregon, and people are free to just join the organization community members are also involved.

But we did put on an event yesterday where Tyler Ferris of Ferris logging or first timber, who is actually the company that bought the rights to Brighton Bush, which was the area where we did the action on Tuesday. He was giving a speech at the University of Oregon to talk about postfire logging, which was just like crazy timing they kind of just like put it in our lap. And so we recruited from that action or like let's disrupt the hell out of this talk. And so we like showed up and kind of tried to sneak in. They were having zoom issues which like luckily distracted them from the fact that there was like 40 or 50, like pretty punk and he looking kids in the room. But we like let him go on for a little bit. And then we started to ask him questions that he obviously didn't know the answer to. And he kept like asking questions about, you know, the science says this but you're stating this where you getting your science from.

And he kept saying things like, well, that's more of a political question. And the statistics don't really back up what you're saying. And then yeah, we just chanted and made him really nervous. Yeah, and as a heads up if you're if you're looking to win an argument on a zoom call, you can just say the statistics don't back you up without citing statistics. It's really the easiest way to do that. And I'm kind of curious for like, you guys said you've you've prevented, you know, some of the stuff in the past by doing stuff like documentation. And, you know, when when when that kind of thing becomes not enough, you know that this this area does have a rich history of kind of direct action stuff to protect forests with again also like a mixed success like my note means that direct action always always work to do anything right now we still have the line three pipeline we still have all of these things that direct action has tried to prevent.

But it turns out a lot of the kind of direct action that's associated with these type of like ecological things is is is kind of more performative than anything else you know like it is kind of like a tree set is about gaining media media like publicity because it's going to get you down right like eventually and it's and it's going to be painful because like you're not going to be sitting up there for years to prevent the tree from being logged. So how close do you think we are into to like reaching that kind of territory like it was in like the 90s and 80s, where it is like a lot of a lot of people like blocking off roads and doing and doing that kind of thing. So more like, you know, what was it crosses into that it's more like autonomous it's not it's not like led by a single organization by any means it's more it's more decentralized but do you see that kind of happening soon. And you know how how do you think we can balance out direct action with like other like thoughtful means of trying to draw attention to these things and maybe actually and other things like actually physically physically preventing the logging of certain areas. That's such a good question and I'm really thankful that we're talking about strategy because kind of like I mentioned I moved out here, like 10 years ago to do forest defense work and have seen so many instances and where people are trying to do direct action in a time and space where it doesn't make sense, where it's like basically slated to it's going to lose because it's just impossible to as you said, you know, hold this blockade for weeks and weeks and weeks and the snow indefinitely, you know, as we, you know, as they continue to try to log indefinitely and so there's definitely a sweet spot for where the sort of kind of the sort of direct action that we're talking about, like blockading, where that is most useful. And that sweet spot is definitely when there is another decisive move like another like legal victory

in the wings or, you know, we won one in Washington without a legal victory because we shamed the shit out of the Department of Natural Resources in the Seattle Times, and they were like, whoa, we're sorry. And so direct action held off something until we were able to sufficiently shame them and deter them but typically they don't shame well. And so typically, you know, we need a legal, there needs to be a legal element, backing it up so direct action is a time buyer. But that said, like, obviously blockading things is not the only type of direct action and part of the rich history of violence in this fire region is other kinds of more necessarily, you know, discrete kinds of direct action that obviously, you know, I'm not a part of speaking on this radio show but what would publicly, you know, say like those things probably need to happen. And I hope they fucking have what I could say is that I've I've seen these things happening in other places like in like in the Atlanta defending forest movement right now, I have I have seen evidence that individuals not associated with any group are putting trees. And that is that is that is something that is happening, right. And all that takes is one person right it's that's not like a group of 20 people going into the forest to do that that's the one person in an afternoon right. So those are the types of like single person direct actions which again, yeah, any type of direct action is going to be scary right you're you're once you start doing that. That is, you know that introduces certain things that will is is kind of is kind of more frightening to you as a person. But but it is something that is happening in other places. And it has shown to at the very least upset the people who are wanting logging to happen generally they're not thrilled when they when they find when they find these things. Yeah, yeah, it's like it's like it's I mean I think like when it comes down to it it's like about knowing what your goal is with this tactic like on, you know, in in the action that happened this past week.

There was an understanding that the goal was to, you know, shine a light on this thing that's happening in secrecy, shame the Forest Service, and build movement movement building so that we're ready. When people need to throw down for real and that might happen soon. We weren't trying to hold the space for weeks and weeks and weeks. That wasn't the goal so like going in being like, what kind of an action are we trying to do what are we trying to accomplish are we trying to be decisive. Are we trying to like shape the conditions necessary for success and like culture build, are we trying like what are we actually trying to do and then like coming away with that. Having having that having a clear sense of that beforehand I think really really is crucial because I've definitely observed direct actions where that is not the case and people have not thought those things through. And it becomes the kind of unfun version of chaos, where you know things things don't really get done and you're just kind of sitting around and everyone's kind of slightly miserable because again you're in a freezing forest. And no one really knows what the hell they're doing. So definitely having those kind of things thought through beforehand is. What would you do if a secret cabal of the most powerful folks in the United States told you hey, let's start a coup. Back in the 1930s, a Marine named Smedley Butler was all that stood between the US and fascism.

I'm Ben Bullock. And I'm Alex French. In our newest show, we take a darkly comedic. And occasionally ridiculous. Deep dive into a story that has been buried for nearly a century. We've tracked down exclusive historical records. We've interviewed the world's foremost experts. We're also bringing you cinematic historical recreations of moments left out of your history books. I'm Smedley Butler and I got a lot to say.

For one, my personal history is raw, inspiring and mind blowing. And for another, do we get the mattresses after we do the ads or do we just have to do the ads? From iHeart Podcast and School of Humans, this is Let's Start a Coup. Listen to Let's Start a Coup on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you find your favorite shows. I'm Lance Bass and you may know me from a little band called NSYNC. What you may not know is that when I was 23, I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person to go to space. And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories. But there was this one that really stuck with me about a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down.

It's 1991 and that man, Sergei Krekalev, is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on Earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart. And now he's left defending the Union's last outpost. This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space, 313 days that changed the world. Listen to The Last Soviet on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science? The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science. And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences in a life without parole.

My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. I'm Molly Herman. Join me as we put forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a match isn't a match and when there's no science in CSI. How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all bogus? It's all made up. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Extremely useful when you're deciding to trudge your way into some cold, dark woods. Yeah, we're going for chaotic good, not chaotic evil. Yeah, well, a little bit of chaotic. Well, it depends what we mean by evil. Evil to some people.

Yeah, anyway, and any other kind of historical notes on forest defense or any other kind of random random tidbits like to mention before before we close out. The one thing that I feel like it's super important to say to people is that forest defense is not just about protecting forests. It's about protecting all of us. We know now forest defense is climate defense. Our forests are our best natural tool for fighting climate change. And also, we need them here. Most of Oregonians, 80% get their drinking water from forests of watersheds. They literally are sustaining all of us. And so yeah, we hope folks join not just for the sake of being hippie tree huggers, even though some of us are, but also because we need to survive as a people and as a planet. And for us, our best way to do that.

It's the cheapest, most advanced form of carbon capture we have yet. So yeah, seems kind of an asinine to chop that all down to build some shitty sheds. All right. Well, that's a sowed. Hi, I'm Robert Lamb. I'm Joe McCormick, and we're the hosts of the Science Podcast, Stuff to Blow Your Mind, where every week we get to explore some of the weirdest questions in the universe. Like, if sci-fi teleportation was possible, how would it square with the multitudes of organisms that inhabit our human bodies? Can we find evidence of emotions in animals like bees, ants, and crayfish? How would an interplanetary civilization function?

Disfree will exist. Stuff to Blow Your Mind examines neurological quandaries, cosmic mysteries, evolutionary marvels, and the wonders of techno history. Basically, this show is the altar where we worship the weirdness of reality. If anybody ever told you, you ask the weirdest questions. It is time to come join us in the place where you belong, the Stuff to Blow Your Mind podcast. New episodes publish every Tuesday and Thursday with bonus episodes on Saturdays. Listen to Stuff to Blow Your Mind on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. All the good stuff that happened off camera.

Get all the juicy details of every episode that you've been wondering about for decades. As 90210 superfan and radio host, Sisani, sits in with Jenny and Tori to reminisce, reflect, and relive each moment from Brandon and Kelly's first kiss to shouting, Donna Martin graduates! You have an amazing memory. You remember everything about the entire 10 years that we filmed that show. And you remember absolutely nothing of the 10 years that we filmed that show. Listen to 90210MG on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Jake Halbert, host of Deep Cover.

Our new season is about a lawyer who helped the mob run Chicago. We control the courts. We control absolutely everything. He bribed judges and even helped a hitman walk free until one day when he started talking with the FBI and promised that he could take the mob down. I've spent the past year trying to figure out why he flipped and what he was really after. From my perspective, Bob was too good to be true. There's got to be something wrong with this. I wouldn't trust that guy. He looks like a little scumbag liar, stool pigeon. He looked like what he was or at. I can say with all certainty, I think he's a hero because he didn't have to do what he did and he did it anyway.

The moment I put the wire on the first time, my life was over. If it ever got out, they would kill me in a heartbeat. Listen to Deep Cover on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. It could happen here. The podcast that occasionally has ads from Washington State Highway Patrol on a completely unrelated note. Garrison, you want to talk about the Washington State Highway Patrol today? I sure would love to talk about our good friends at the Washington State Patrol. They've come up on my radar in an unrelated matter. And now we're going to talk about them.

This is the show about things falling apart and part of societal and political stuff crumbling. Usually, that gets related to some type of law enforcement agency more often than not. Tensions rising and stuff has a lot of force gets exerted via law enforcement. One such law enforcement agency that does this is called the Washington State Patrol. I've heard of them before. I don't know. I just discovered them recently. So they were founded exactly 100 years ago and they were originally called the Washington State Highway Patrol. Now they're just the Washington State Patrol. They removed highway, but they still do the same thing.

They're basically the glorified traffic cops who operate all around Washington State. And we're going to talk about some of the ways that they've been making things worse within the past decade. Since they have a 100-year history, I'm sure we can find lots of historical examples. But we're going to do stuff that is more recent because this is generally trying to keep things around the current crumbling. And because we're going to talk about police, the first thing we're going to be discussing oddly enough is racism. Oh my God. I know. When you think of Washington State Patrol, it's kind of shocking that they might have a race issue. 12 years ago, researchers working with Washington State Patrol found that troopers were searching drivers from minority communities,

particularly local Native American tribes, at a much higher rate than white people. And they recommended an additional study, which the Washington State Patrol declined to investigate further. They were like, no, no more studies. So meanwhile, since then, the troopers have continued to search Native Americans at a rate much higher, more than five times than that of white people in the area. Oh, cool. Yeah. But there are five times as many Indigenous people in Washington as white people, right?

There's not. Oh. Yeah. So an analysis by Investigate West showed that the patrol continued to do searches at much elevated rates for black people, Latino, Pacific Islanders, and Natives within Washington State. And yet, when troopers did decide to search white motorists, they were more likely to find drugs in contraband, which is something the Washington State Patrol actually acknowledges,

is that when they search people of minority communities, they are less likely to find illegal things. Yeah. I mean, that's nationwide and very robust data. So government records obtained via information requests and various other public records searches also show that there is a state law that Washington State Patrol is supposed to collect and report semi-annually to the Criminal Justice Training Commission in Washington about race and ethnicity data of motorists stopped by troopers. So this is supposed to happen semi-annually. But the agency reported those findings only three times in the past 15 years.

Oh, that sounds kind of like the Portland police not doing the things that federally they're supposed to do because they're so violent. Yeah. Being out of compliance with a bunch of federal regs. Three times in 15 years is not semi-annually based on what I know the term semi-annually to me. No, that's semi-decade-ly. Yeah. Based on responses for over 30 public records requests from three different agencies looking at Washington State Patrol and more than 50 interviews with current and former law enforcement officials and people with experience interacting with Washington State Patrol

and also data from millions of traffic stops. All this was looked at. In total examined about 8 million traffic stops from 2009 to 2015. That's what Investigate West was doing, which was the most recent data available. And the analysis found that it focused on 20,000, 22,000 incidents of what researchers called like high discretion searches. That's when troopers had the most like personal leeway to decide whether or not to pull over and search a vehicle. Black drivers were twice as likely to be searched as white drivers and Latino Pacific Islanders were 80% more likely to be searched of these incidents where officers had discretion and like they could choose whether or not to pull someone over. So it wasn't like they were like obviously speeding or doing like regular like actually observable traffic violations.

This is when people could choose. When the Investigate West thing got published, they contacted Washington State Patrol and the spokesperson said that here's the quote, that race was not the only factor when troopers decided whom to search. And that's partially because blacks, Native Americans and Latinos are more likely to be searched regardless of how much discretion troopers have. Which that doesn't really make very much sense. I don't know what they mean by that. Get a new spokesperson. I don't know what they mean.

They're more likely to be searched regardless. Brutal. Who was that bad at checking the copy? Which is weird because later on the spokesperson said that we're in a same person. Same guy. We're in a basic agreement that minorities are searched at higher rates, but we find less contraband. So. He also noted that complaints about like a racial bias accounted for little more than 10% of all complaints of the State Patrol filed last year.

So I guess he thinks that's a good stat. Yeah, I'm sure he's proud of that. Yeah. And another kind of not great thing is that the analysis found that not only are Native Americans more likely to be searched, but the most of those searches happen always at like the edges of reservations. The analysis found that the two highest concentration of searches of Native Americans by state troopers are on the US 97 where it encounters a reservation at Olmack. About a mile from its intersection at State Road 155, and more than 130 miles south of the same when the same highway enters another reservation. So nearly one third of high discretion of high discretion searches so when troopers can decide whether or not to pull someone over.

Like they have more discretion whether they can. So one third of those happen on these two stretches of highway right on the edges of these reservations. So like they're patrolling outside these reservations to specifically do this. I saw an interview on this topic that talked to Native Americans in this area and they're like, yeah, every time we leave the reservation we get pulled over, but then we watch tons of white motorists go by and no one cares. And they're just speeding by, it doesn't matter. So yeah, that is that is the first first, you know, unsurprising tidbit about some an organization who started as a highway patrols. Yeah, they're going to pull people over who are not white more often. Yep.

That's pretty not not super shocked to do that. Yeah. And then make a public statement like lol. Yup. Yeah, that that does that does sound a lot like what the Washington State Patrol sounds like. So that was that was the first obvious thing. This next part's a little bit more fun. So in 2009, the Washington State Patrol made made the decision to fire eight troopers, which is, you know, pretty, pretty rare. And the reason why they got fired is because they used fake diplomas to claim pay raises.

Yeah. So there was there was this whole scheme about getting fake diplomas to get the troopers more money. Like like like individual people, there's this whole this whole operation going on. It resulted in innate innate people getting fired. So troopers can can boost their pay about 2% by earning a two to a two year degree or 4% with a four year degree. And there was this group of troopers who just started just forging diplomas. See, Garrison, this is a separate conversation, but they didn't need to forge diplomas. They could have just become doctors of magic.

That is what I've tried to do. They could have just gotten that religious PhD. Yeah. So there's all sorts of fake diploma mills. Come on, Washington State Highway Patrol. This is pretty funny. So the investigation began after federal agents shut down a diploma mill in Spokane. Criminal charges were not filed, but the patrol did decide to fire these eight troopers.

Yeah. So that is one of the more funny things we'll be talking about today. And I think it's time for an ad break. Oh, yeah. Speaking of funny, here's these ads that may or may not be the people we're talking about. Rob. No, unrelated. Unrelated.

Ah, we're back, which is also unrelated. Yeah. Another thing that's pretty common around police is that the past few years, they generally don't think COVID is really real. Or they hate that it is the past few years now. Yeah. I don't love that. I don't love that.

Robert, we're less than a month away from 2022. Yeah. I hate that it's like, I mean, fuck, it's like what? It's almost two years. Almost 10% of your entire life has been COVID. I'm not going to think about math. Yeah. So generally, they don't think COVID is real.

And also they think vaccines are the mark of Satan or something. Yeah. Well, obviously they are. Yeah. So in mid-October, this past October, Washington State Patrol announced that 127 of its employees lost their job after the state's COVID-19 vaccine mandate deadline of October 18th. So unlike the Portland Police Bureau and many other cities where city officials caved to the demands of the police that vaccine mandates not be extended towards police, this did not

happen in Washington and they actually got it enforced. So over 100 patrol employees quit their job, including 64 commissioned officers. Cool. Like 67 troopers, six sergeants, and one captain. Great. Yeah. So, you know, Washington State Patrol has about 2,000 personnel between like eight districts. So losing like 127 of them is not an insignificant loss.

No. And it's been trying to hire a lot more people in the past like a few months because of this. They've been trying to do a lot more recruitment, which is why they are... I've heard from other people that they are putting advertisements out on the internet to become a Washington State Trooper. That makes sense. This is something I've heard from people online when I've been doing all of this deep, extensive research.

So, yeah, they are recruiting. So if you want to be a Washington State Patrol officer, don't. Don't actually. That's a bad idea. Don't do that. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, unless you want to like really fuck with people who live on a reservation, if

that's your goal, it seems like Washington State Highway Patrol is your dream career. Or I have another option for you. You could also just get COVID and die. Well, yeah, that is an option. That's an option too. That is something I think might be... Freedom is what makes this nation great. So I think, you know, a choice.

Anyway, continue. I'm going to send a picture inside our group chat first because we're going to be talking about one specific evil dude next. I'm sending a picture in the group chat that I want you to look at first just so you get a sense of who we're talking about. Oh, based. Okay. I'm excited.

Yeah. All right. Hit me. Oh, no. Oh, no. The bow tie really brings it all together. Oh, no. You said bow tie, which does not make me optimistic.

Robert, it's fine. Oh, no. Oh, no. What is wrong with it? Who... Yeah. Yeah. Who puts a bow tie on a uniform like that?

Oh, guys, I found a better quality image. Good God. Here we go. Same image, better quality. He looks like Tucker Carlson in the Starship Troopers universe when he gets drafted. So, this is the next guy we're talking about. Somehow it feels like a hate crime towards the Weasley family. Yeah.

So, yeah. It feels like a hate crime towards the guy based off Tucker Carlson in Starship Troopers. Who happens to be a big fan of Ron Weasley's family? Probably, yeah. Probably, yeah. This is Sean Carr, a former Washington state patrol sergeant who resigned for reasons we will discuss. Fun.

That's exciting. Yeah. Oh, no. Yeah. Anyway, so in 2015, an associated press investigation uncovered about 1,000 officers in the United States who lost their badges over a six-year period for sex crimes or misconduct, such as like, this is a quote here, which I disagree with framing here, but this is a quote, propositioning citizens or having consensual but prohibited on-duty intercourse, which is a pretty bullshit

way to frame that because basically it's police-riping people. And police officers being accused of using their power over people to rape them is extremely common. Yeah. And this person said okay, and it's like, well, they said okay to a person with a gun and the legal power to murder anyone they want. Or put them in jail. Yeah.

Like, there's a lot of stuff. It's not consent. Yeah. I would argue you can't consent to sex with a police officer who's on duty and in uniform because they have the power to murder anybody they want to murder. Or who just arrest you. Yeah. Like, there's a lot of stuff.

There was a study released a few years ago that analyzed data of like 550 arrest cases from the years of 2005 to 2007, so this is just two years, and 400 officers employed by like 320 non-federal law enforcement agencies located throughout 43 states. And findings indicated that police sexual misconduct includes serious forms of sex related crimes, and the victims of sex related crimes by police are typically younger than 18 years old. So it happens a lot with minors. So there's a lot, like a ridiculously common, like if you Google this, which I honestly

don't recommend, but you can find like dozens of stories coming out, like basically, you'll find at least one new story every month of a kid getting raped by police. It happens pretty commonly. So over the past 10 years in the Washington State Patrol, they've investigated and confirmed four cases of what they call sex on duty according to the agency, and this is including Sean Carr. Now, Sean Carr's case is particularly sensitive for the agency because he was married to the daughter of the Washington State Patrol chief, and Sean Carr was also himself a sergeant.

So he was connected to like the big leagues at the Washington State Patrol. So Carr met a civilian woman who also works at Washington State Patrol, but has like an office job, so isn't a trooper. They met in 2012 and struck up an online friendship, and a few months later, both of them told investigators that the relationship did turn sexual. Carr admitted to six sexual encounters for the next like five years with the woman, five of which happened when he was on duty and like on state property or driving a vehicle or while in uniform.

But the woman recalled as many as 20, and all but one of them were when he was on duty. And well, and so the woman said that most of their encounters were what she would describe as consensual, but she described three incidents where Carr did push the boundary and she has described being raped by him multiple times. So there was an incident, I think the first one happened at the beginning of 2017, inside his patrol car in a church parking lot. The woman had recently started dating another man, and Carr wanted to know who it was when she wouldn't say so.

He grabbed her arm hard enough to leave bruises. And the woman said that Carr made her pick from two options, give up the name of the man or give Carr oral sex. Oh, God. Cool. Great guy. So Carr later told investigators that he said this in a quote, joking context. Oh, that's that.

You know, I was thinking because that's almost exactly my tight five for my stand-up set. Some comedians for some reason do like making jokes like that and not not not great usually, not great to normalize that kind of thing. So the woman said that she did like, like see to his his like commands, and she's what she said where we're like, very much not a gun and was a cop. Yeah. And she said it was very much not consensual. She told investigators that he raped me on the side of the road.

Right. And if it was anyone else besides Carr, she she said she would have called 911. So the second time happened when a car backed her into a corner of a highway, a way station and forced her to have sex with them. She called it a coerced. Carr said that consent was mutual. So despite the sexual assaults and like, you know, and like assault, you know, like, you know, grabbing someone's arm hard enough to leave a bruise, she said the woman said she

kept in touch with Carr because she was going through a difficult time in her life and she needed somebody to talk to. Yeah, sure. It's complicated. Yeah. That's yeah. That this is also not like people who are abusive can also be emotionally supportive sometimes.

Like that's one of the things about abuse that's real, real motherfucker. It's not simple. Yeah. Yeah. Car may not have gotten in trouble had the woman not confided in another patrol employee after she left her job, then the other other patrol employee mentioned the situation to someone higher up triggering an investigation and then in 2019, the woman formally reported Carr to like the patrol office of professional standards.

So records show that the patrol pretty quickly confiscated Carr's badge and gun and placed him on home assignment where he remained until he and he resigned voluntarily. The patrol gave gave the case to the sheriff's office to investigate because of the criminal nature of the allegations. So Carr's personal file includes other on job violations, including using a taser on a drunk driving suspect who was handcuffed. Cool. And records show that in February of 2013, Carr was accused of frequenting a coffee stand

and making unwanted advances on an employee by waiting near her car until her shift ended and making derogatory comments about her boyfriend. So she was also stalking this barista is what it sounds like. Yeah. Yeah. That's that is what that sounds like pretty terrifying. So yeah, so Carr, after the woman told investigators that she was raped after 2019, the county sheriff's recommended charges be filed, but she wasn't willing to.

She wasn't willing to testify. She did not want to. She did not want to do that. But she did tell prosecutors that she did have one wish that that car again, the son-in-law of the state patrol chief be not not allowed to police again. Yeah. That's a pretty reasonable request. Carr obviously denied all the accusations of non-consensual sex and assault.

But you know, it did admit to a to a consensual sexual relationship on duty as well as other, you know, like patrol regulation violations. He resigned in July of 2020 before the patrol could decide whether or not to fire him. And then the state went about trying to strip him of his law enforcement certification, a requirement to carry a gun and badge and be hired as law enforcement in Washington. Getting decertified for misconduct by the criminal justice training center in Washington is very hard. Very few people have actually been decertified.

Yeah. And to be certified, the panel must be convinced that on-duty behavior rose to the level of official misconduct and constituted a crime committed under the color of authority as a peace officer. That's the... Under the color of authority is an interesting way to phrase that. Carr's attorneys argued that the state failed to meet this high bar and there was quote no legal basis to decertify Carr.

Meanwhile, the CJTC, the criminal justice training center, alleged his behavior did constitute official misconduct and failure of duty, but without... They didn't actually include the sexual assault allegations. Instead, it contended that he used state resources for his own benefit or neglected to do his duties when he was engaged in sexual activity on duty. So they didn't actually include sexual assault or anything in this. They just said, you were basically... Because you were having sexual activity on duty, you weren't doing your job.

And that's the reason that we want to decertify you. The state of Washington has about 11,000 certified officers at any given time. And since 2003, they have decertified 230, at least four of them for on-duty sex. And one of those cases was overturned on appeal. But in 2021, around mid-May, the CJTC... What would you do if a secret cabal of the most powerful folks in the United States told you, hey, let's start a coup? Back in the 1930s, a Marine named Smedley Butler was all that stood between the U.S. and fascism.

I'm Ben Bullitt. And I'm Alex French. In our newest show, we take a darkly comedic... And occasionally ridiculous... Deep dive into a story that has been buried for nearly a century. We've tracked down exclusive historical records. We've interviewed the world's foremost experts. We're also bringing you cinematic, historical recreations of moments left out of your history

books. I'm Smedley Butler, and I got a lot to say. For one, my personal history is raw, inspiring, and mind-blowing. And for another, do we get the mattresses after we do the ads, or do we just have to do the ads? From iHeart Podcast and School of Humans, this is... Let's Start a Coup. Listen to Let's Start a Coup on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you

find your favorite shows. I'm Lance Bass, and you may know me from a little band called NSYNC. What you may not know is that when I was 23, I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person to go to space. And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories. But there was this one that really stuck with me, about a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. It's 1991, and that man, Sergei Krekalev, is floating in orbit when he gets a message

that down on Earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart. And now he's left defending the Union's last outpost. This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space, 313 days that changed the world. Listen to The Last Soviet on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science?

The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science. And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. I'm Molly Herman. Join me as we put forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a match isn't a match and when there's no science in CSI.

How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all bogus? It's all made up. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. The in its final order said that cars constituted crimes of failure of duty and official misconduct by among other things, quote, intentionally choosing to pursue his own sexual gratification rather than using his on duty time to perform his lawful responsibilities as a peace officer.

So he did get decertified, but again, not actually discussing the actual like assaults and rapes. So the Sheriff's County prosecutor's office declined to pursue charges on the case last year when the woman was unwilling to testify. But the deputy prosecuting attorney did say that she believed they just happened. She believes this stuff happened, but because of the lack of evidence due to time passing and the woman not wanting to testify, it's hard to prove guilt in court. So they're not going to pursue these charges at the moment.

Yeah, that scans. So that is Sean Carr. So yeah, he is not allowed to police as of May of 2021. That is the accursory glance at stuff in the Washington State Patrol. Oh, I guess one other thing I found out today is that Washington State Patrol has a psychologist for recruiting basically for if you want to join the patrol, you have to go like through like a psychological screening. Sure, that makes sense.

And he just just resigned because he was he was he was probably going to get fired. This was after Seattle Times and Public Radio Northwest News Network published a piece showing that since 2017, the psychological screenings rejected 20% of white candidates over the past four years. But the psychologists that they hired rejected 33% of black candidates, 35% of Hispanic candidates and 41% of Asian candidates. So again, I'm not pro people being police in general, but there is a clear disparity on who they are wanting to become police, like who like who are they are they're letting

in a lot more white candidates than they are letting in candidates of color. So this this this psychologist screener is no longer on the job as of like a few days ago. Yeah, so just another another level of stuff because yeah, you know, there's they want there to be more white officers than anything else. So yeah, that is that is the Washington State Patrol. I guess the one other thing I want to do is I'm going to again send in the group chat. Their current logo, their current logo, current, you're smirking, you're smirking.

I hate it when you do this. I'm afraid. I don't know, Sophie. Maybe it'll be fine. I mean, it's actually it's it's kind of fun. That's their logo. That is their current logo. They design it in like paint.

Yes, they probably they probably did design it in MS paint. Oh, man. Yeah, that that looks like it belongs in an Angel Fire website. Garrison, you know what Angel Fire was? I do not. Oh my god, you fucking teenagers. Yeah, that looks like it belongs in an angel. I will I will let all of the other people who feel very old right now know that it looks

like something you'd see in an Angel Fire website, like shittily animated blinking across the screen. Yeah, no, it looks like something from a 1990s website. All right. Well, now I'm both angry about the police and I feel a thousand years old. So this is good. That is what a good what a good what a good feeling. Well, that that wraps that that wraps it up for today.

And hey, again, I have heard that they are recruiting and they should have a new psychological screener soon. So great. There we go. And I'm imagining the primary psychological screening is you're white, right? That's that's that is what it used to be. I mean, I'm imagining that's what it's going to be still. But probably not, Garrison.

Maybe not. Who knows? All right. Well, this has been a great time. I'm sure everybody's feeling good. Goodbye. Bye. Get out of my house.

Adoption of teens from foster care is a topic not enough people know about, and we're here to change that. I'm April Dinwoody, host of the new podcast, Navigating Adoption, presented by AdoptUS Kids. Each episode brings you compelling real life adoption stories told by the families that live them with commentary from experts. Visit adoptuskids.org slash podcast or subscribe to Navigating Adoption presented by AdoptUS Kids brought to you by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Administration

for Children and Families and the Ad Council. Here's to the great American settlers. The millions of you have settled for unsatisfying jobs because they pay the bills and you just kind of fell into it. And you know, it's like totally fine. Just another few decades or so, and then you can enjoy yourself. Of course, there is something else you could do if you got something to say. You could, oh, I don't know, start a podcast with Spreaker from iHeart and unleash your

creative freedom and spend all day researching and talking about stuff you love and maybe even earn enough money to one day tell your irritating boss as you quit and walk off into the sunset. Hey, I'm no settler. I'm an explorer. Spreaker.com. That's a SBR, E-A-K-E-R. Hustle on over today.

I'm Colleen Witt. Join me, the host of Eating While Broke podcast, while I eat a meal created by self-made entrepreneurs, influencers, and celebrities over a meal they once ate when they were broke. Today, I have the lovely AJ Crimson, the official princess of Compton, Asia, Kid Ink, and Ossia. This is the professor. We're here on Eating While Broke, and today I'm going to break down my meal that got me through a time when I was broke. Listen to Eating While Broke on the iHeart radio app, on Apple Podcasts, or wherever

you get your podcasts. Welcome to the Chudcast. This is a crypto podcast where we talk about the best NFT investments and how you can get rich too, bro, if you just accept the wave of the future and decentralize your finance and invest in a bank that can take all of your money overnight and disappear because it was really just being run by a guy in Macedonia, and it was just a rug pull the entire time and you lose your life savings and you have no recourse. That's the fucking future of investments, bro.

Hey, bro, you're fired. Yeah, that's fair. This is it could happen here, podcast about how things are bad, sometimes a podcast about how to make them less bad. Today we're talking about the former, how things are bad, and we're talking about financialization and specifically the financialization of human beings in the endeavor to create art. Which is a broad, broad term. I mean, I said the endeavor too.

I'm sure they all want to be creating art. Well, this won't make any sense to people yet, so I'm going to give a brief overview. There's an article in the Atlantic that dropped on November 29th called What Happens When You're the Investment. It's by Rex Woodbury, who I hate. So as a note, okay, let me just get the, the nut of the article is, and there have been a couple of other articles on this guy. His name is Alex Masmej, and he is a French kid, I think, who decided to tokenize himself.

And what that means is, so like, you've got the Ethereum blockchain, right? Basically he's putting, he's carving up aspects of his like potential future earnings, and he's putting those on the Ethereum blockchain as like tokens that people can buy. And the idea is that this kid had wanted to like start a business and be an entrepreneur, but he didn't have any money. So using like on the Ether blockchain, he turned himself into tokens basically, like his potential future earnings, and his time. And basically people are able to buy up coins effectively, I mean, not coins, but tokens.

Shares of the token. Yeah, yeah. Dollar sign Alex is like the name of the token. Which he basically shares. They're buying, he's turned himself essentially into a publicly traded company, kind of. And holders of his coins are like, he's splitting up 15% of his income for the next three years. Basically among people who like hold his coins. And he raised like 20 grand this way.

And it's not just like, it's not just his future earnings that are being kind of tokenized. You can also use tokens to like buy retweets from him or one-on-one conversations. Or, and here's a line I love, an introduction to someone in his network. And it's the overall idea, because there's, you can find some other good articles, good is an interesting word to use. You can find other interesting, fascinating articles about this idea, which is like human beings tokenizing their future earning potential in order to raise money. And it's, the way this is usually sold is a good thing.

In fact, I should probably just read a quote from this Atlantic article to give you an idea of how Massmej is, or of how the author of the article, Rex Woodbury, is trying to sell this shit. We all have the slightly annoying friend who insists that she knew about so-and-so before they were even famous. When it comes to Taylor Swift, I'm that friend. And I'm more than slightly annoying about it. I was a Taylor fan in her pre-fearless, full-on country days, years before Conway interrupted

her on stage at the VMAs. But in our current construct of fandom, I'm treated no differently than a fan who discovered Swift on SNL a few weeks back. This would be different, though, if Taylor had done what Massmej did and turned herself into an investment. She could have issued a social token. Whereas non-fungible tokens, or NFTs, are so-called because of the uniqueness of a digital asset, social tokens are fungible.

In other words, each Alex token is interchangeable with every other Alex token, just like a dollar bill can be traded for any other dollar bill. Say Taylor had issued her own token. Let's call it dollar sign Swift. And say she had sold dollar sign Swift to her biggest fans. Let's not, first of all. Yeah, say I was one such fan. Over time, as Taylor's popularity grew, the value of the Swift token would have appreciated.

As an early believer, I would have shared in the financial upside of her growing fame. The Swift token I had brought for $100 in 2007 might be worth $100,000 today. The Taylor Swift mini-economy would serve both the singer and early fans like me. As an artist, Taylor could have funded her work by selling dollar signs or Swift tokens. She might not have needed to sell ownership of her masters, and she might not have been forced to re-record her albums to take back control over her art. Taylor's fans, for their part, would have been rewarded for a decade of patronage. We're all evangelists for our favorite artists, yet we capture little of the value that we

help create. And there's a lot that I find unsettling there. One of them is the idea that, yeah, the fact that I was a fan of someone earlier means I should get some sort of reward for it. I should be treated differently because I liked it earlier. You might recognize the thing that everybody has been shitting on for fandoms for years now. It's been a huge thing.

Yeah, you're being an asshole if you're talking about, if you think you have some additional ownership of Star Wars because you watched it 10 years before the fans today, and so you like different stuff in it. We all recognize that as toxic, but the whole argument of this article is that, no, this is how the entire future of creativity should work, which I find unsettling deeply. It also ties into a really concerning development in parasocial relationships of being able to invest in someone to buy a conversation with them in this really weird way. And the fact that young artists are going to be pressured into this kind of thing is

really scary. Yeah, because one of the things MassMesh did as an experiment was allow people who had bought his tokens to make life decisions for him, tell him when to wake up in the morning and whether or not to eat red meat and stuff like that. And he stated that, well, none of this is binding. I might do what they say, but I'm not going to do anything crazy or whatever. But also, this is the first iteration of this, and this Atlantic article, which I think is unhinged for reasons we'll get into, but it's purely talking about, look at this incredibly

successful person. I imagine if they'd gotten to be incredibly successful using this method instead, and it might have spared them this thing. But what I keep thinking about is, okay, well, the vast majority of people, there's no reason to invest in them. Maybe if you come out with a great song or a great video, like, yeah, you could get investments and I'm sure that could work out. I'm sure, like Taylor Swift is a successful enough person, I'm sure she could have found

a way to succeed under that system too. But what I think will be much more common, because there's no real reason to anticipate that the average person will have an earnings potential if you give them 20 grand, that's greater than 20 grand. The most likely thing is that people just buy shares and poor people to make them do fucked up shit. How would that not be where it goes? That's the only way that this is going to get used on a large scale is these young people

just selling themselves in this weird way. People are going to use the Ether blockchain to crowdfund and crowdcast a new jackass basically. It's not going to be like a thousand Taylor Swift's all tokenizing themselves, it's going to be like millions of people in the global south issuing tokens to vote on whether they roll down the hill in a barrel or in a fucking porta-potty. It's a nightmare to be to contemplate people actually adopting this. You know, there's a lot of really... The thing I think is the most incredible part about this is that, okay, so it basically doesn't matter what economic theories you

use to look at it, it's like every single one of them tells you something just absolutely fucked about it and there's some extent to which I look at this and it's like this isn't that much different than the fact... It's like, okay, so you're paying someone to do whatever you want, but that's not that much different than just a job, right? It's not inherently that much different than the fact that everyone is forced to just do wage labor, but also there's... One of the most interesting things to me that I thought about this when I was reading this was... Do you guys know what capitalization is? Yeah.

Yeah, so this is just capitalizing a person, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. This is what capitalization is. Yeah. It's literally, yeah. It's taking a person public effectively. Yeah, yeah. It's putting them into a tradable share that's like an investment, yeah.

Yeah, I mean, this is all one of the things that like a Forbes article I found pointed out is that this is another kind of unregulated securities trading. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But what's interesting to me about it is that like, okay, so this is also already how accounting-wise every corporation sees a person, right? Every person in the asset book is... A wage is just capitalization, right? So how much will you pay now for this much money later? You could...

But it's like people are doing it to themselves now? Yeah. Like this... Yeah, you could argue that like elements of this are how like banks treat you when you get a mortgage, right? But also, that's much more rigorous and limited. The limit is that- It has like regulations and it has rules for how those things work. It's not some like 12-year-old getting like going on to Coinbase and buying part of you as a joke with like his dad's money, right?

Yeah. Because it's like, yeah, because what if it's like, there's no law against a 17-year-old, I guess if maybe their parents may need to consent, but there's no law against a 17-year-old getting a facial tattoo of like the doors of a concentration camp on their face. But what if some kid tokenizes himself for 40 grand so he can drop an EP and that's what like a bunch of four-channers who buy up his shares want him to do? And maybe the fucking kid does that because he knows it's gonna get him because his brain's not done and he knows it's gonna get him a bunch of fucking social media clouds and

like it's... There's a lot of... And there's no way to regulate that, like it's just an inherently toxic proposition that I don't think the government would... I don't know what side of this the government would even step in on. What is the regulation of people deciding, I'm letting random strangers who pay me money vote on what I do with my life? The other thing it reminds me of a lot is like the micro lending stuff from the 90s where it was like, oh, we'll like empower these people but we'll go in and we're gonna give them like a small amount of money and they have to pay it back and it was like... All

of the same stuff that you were reading, all the arguments about why this is a good thing are exactly the same as the micro lending ones and that stuff, there were two ways it turned out. One was basically, you get the scenario where both sides are scamming each other where all the people who are getting these micro loans are just taking the money and walking, right? Like that's... Their thing is, oh, this is... I can just get money like this and we can just keep... I can just keep not paying it back and so this is... I'm scamming them. But then on the other side, you have these people who are like, oh cool, I can give this

person this loan and turn them into a debt peon and the really depressing side about it is that the people who couldn't get away... We're literally reduced to debt peons and there's a huge wave of suicides in... India's probably the most famous example is the wave of suicides, people drinking pesticide because they couldn't pay off these loans. The thing that's different about this is that like... A, you're doing it to yourself but then B, again, there's no regulation but that also means there isn't any way to force someone to do what you say you're going to do yet. It's unclear how it's going to be enforced and the other thing that's unclear is like,

what does losses look like? What happens when someone cannot make back on an investment but if the investment is a person, how does that work? And if someone's like contractually obligated to give a certain share of their income, what happens when there's not enough income for that? Those types of things. Yeah, I mean there's no answer to that and nobody... The money that's going to be whatever made in this is going to be made before anyone steps in to try to answer that.

If anyone ever does, it's going to be the next... Because I think we're heading for a crash with NFTs. There was just an article today about how, what is it, 97% of NFT trading is done by 10% of people, which further back, because the allegations of NFTs is that most of what's happening isn't people actually buying them. It's people like the same person using multiple wallets, basically trying to jack up the perceived value by throwing a bunch of other internet money that they already have. So it's these whales who have like a bunch of crypto gaming the system.

And we've seen some of it and the biggest NFT sale ever was like half a billion dollars and it was a guy selling it to himself and then transferring it back into another wallet to try to make it look like it was worth half a billion dollars, even though no one had actually really paid that for it. I think that and kind of what we've seen with the regulations, the government's finance for NFTs, I think that's a problem for them in the near future and I wouldn't be surprised to see this take off next, especially given like the creator economy that we're seeing on like the kind of that tick tock, specifically, yeah, tick tock, like I wouldn't be surprised

if you saw a rash of big tick tock stars tokenizing themselves and like, I'm not even sure I'm sure it would be a mix of the person making the tokens, being the one doing the scam and the person receiving or the people buying the tokens, being the one doing like I'm sure it would be a mix of different kinds of exploitation, but it's not going to be good. I mean, and just like NFTs, it's going to make like, I don't know, 50 people super rich when they when they first start trying it, right? Like that is that is like when this happens, like when a tick tock star with 25 million followers, when they do this, they will make boatloads of money.

It's just unclear what happens after that. Yeah. Well, fleet of Mexico. Yeah, I mean, that would be the smart thing to do. And this Forbes article I found, which is a thousand times better than the Atlantic article, like even though it's written by someone, I think who's also into crypto, it's just it actually, it asks some of these questions we've been talking about, and it cites David Hoffman, who's the COO of a tokenized real estate platform on what he sees as some of

the problems, like what he as a guy who's supports aspects of this kind of thing, seizes the problems with this, and it's, yeah, one sec, Hoffman, returning to his core problem with the personal token model, model, Hoffman reemphasize that the assurances and utility that come with some of these tokens don't exist for, with certain kinds of tokens don't exist for like these personal tokens, how risky this investment is is completely defined by the individual in his disclaimer, he's and he's talking about one of the guys who's token himself, this guy named Kerman, in his disclaimer, he says, this is a highly risky investment in that you could lose all your money, which is a terrible thing to say because

with personal tokens, the issuer is in complete control over exactly how risky the investment actually is. It's largely up to them whether there are risks or not, which is like a kind of illegal securities trading that I don't think we've ever, anyone's ever done, like it's this, it's this fascinating new con where you're literally, you're doing securities trading, but instead of it being over a company, it's just you, and technically there's no consequences if you just take the money and run. Like I don't know what kind of contract, like you couldn't have a contract that says, like

you could say that you're obligated to pay out your future earnings, but you couldn't have to work, like that's not enforceable. You can't like contractually obligate someone to like work, like you're allowed to quit a job. I mean, I guess you could put penalties in it, but I've done, like none of the current ones have any. I mean, or they could go to jail for, the other option is that they could go to jail for fraud if they try to not, if they try to not follow through on the investment.

If you say like, yeah, I invested in you and you said that you would do these things, you didn't do them, now you can go to prison. That is the other thing. And I think that'll, at some point, like there will be scams and some of that will come in, but like none of these current ones, none of them are saying, here's my specific, I'm going to make this, it's not like, like if you, like with a Patreon, right, you're paying a little bit at a time on an ongoing basis for a very clear product generally. This is, so far, these aren't that, they're just like, I'm going to try to do something

that makes money. And if it does, you get a cut of it. And that's, it's so much, like there's nothing that's stopping MassMesh from saying like, hey, my attempt didn't work. So we're done, no money for anybody like that. And I, you're not, there's no accounting requirements, there's no, there's a bunch of ways in which it's fucked up from a financial side. Except it's not, it's not his, it's not, it's not, you're not investing in his business,

you're investing in him. So even, even if he takes another job, there still, it seems to be contractually obligated to still get that 15% of his income. Yes. And I think that's, that's the area in which I think it would be abusive for the person being tokenized because most people aren't going to, like most people don't make that much money. So they raise, someone manages to like raise five or 10 grand and then just winds up for

years giving a cut of their income that winds up being more than they got initially to a bunch of, like it's almost like a, like a payday loan that you've got on the blockchain. Yeah. Like it's, you know, okay. So this is the thing, this is the thing I'm thinking about because so there's, I don't know if I've talked about this on the show, but there's a thing in China where they've been kind of cracking down at now for, starting like 2019, like literally every single app like had a, like had a payday loan thing in it.

So like, like your flashlight app would have, would offer you a payday loan. And it was basically, it was, yeah, they were, they were, they were originally tied in with like people who buy, you know, it was originally tied in with like, like the, the, the services that like, like their version of Amazon, for example, would like, oh, hey, we'll give you a loan so you can buy this, you can order fried chicken. And I was always wondering when this would come to the US. And I think it might never hope, I mean, hopefully it never does. And I think it might not just because of how like powerful our payday loan industry is,

but it's like, we've, we've now invented, it seems like it's going to happen, but like dumber. Like our, our version of it is like this thing, which is just, you know, it's a, what, what, what if payday loans, but on the blockchain, except, you know, I guess this is the everything, you know, that we've been getting at is that the difference between this being a payday loan and this being you scammed a bunch of people is what the enforcement mechanism looks like. And you know, this, this, this comes back to some other things I think are interesting

about this. One is that, you know, so the whole, the whole NFT grift, right, is, is, is based on convincing people that there's value in ownership, right? They're like ownership itself has inherently has value. Yeah. And yeah, but, but this, this is not that this is, this is, you know, this is going back to, no, your value, value is built on labor, right? Well, yeah, it's like sort of labor and like, like personhood, like you as a personal brand

is the thing that they're trying to get at. But the thing, the thing that's missing here though is that in order for, like, you know, in order for like labor to produce value, right? In this way, there has to be like, there has to be a way for you to force them to pay you, like you need, you need coercion for it. And if there's no coercion, then, you know, you just take a bunch of money and leave. And that, that I think is like, this, this is going to be the battle over, like, if this becomes a thing, it's going to be, you know, the, the, the people who buy these things are

going to wind up like trying to, you know, I think they're going to be the ones who try to push a regulation because they're going to, you know, they're going to go in, they're going to be, I want to get my money back. And that could end really, really, really badly, right? Yeah. Like if, you know, I mean, it probably will. I, I, like, I don't know how popular I think this will be. Because I think that.

Yeah, I hope it dies. This is a, maybe if there'd never been like Patreon or something, but the actual use case of this seems to already be well served by the existing capitalist infrastructure. Like people, I think more people wanted back a creator's Patreon than they want to like own pieces of a person's time and earning potential. Like that, that seems like a more niche and weird desire to people than just like, oh yeah, these guys make a video I like every week. So I'll throw them $3.

Well I think, I think the difference though is that Patreon money gets you money from normal people. This gets you money from like tech bros and that, yeah, that, that's always, that is the end of teaser. Yeah. It's, it's a grift designed to. Yeah. And that's, I want to dive back to this Atlantic article because it's so bad in such a comprehensive

way that I think it deserves analysis. That's what, what, put a pin in what you said. But I want to start with like how the person writing this, this Rex motherfucker, like his, his concept of the, the history of the internet, um, because it's completely wrong quote, we're on the precipice of the third era of the web. The web's first era was about information flowing freely. Think Google giving you access to the world's knowledge. Most of us were passive consumers in this era.

The second era was the social web, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter. People began to create their own content and that content became the lifeblood of the big platforms. We became active participants, but the platforms devoured all the profits. The promise of the internet was to erase the gatekeepers. Instead of waiting for a record label to sign you, you could share your music on Spotify. Instead of asking a publication to share your words, you could tweet. Instead of being tapped by a studio exec, you could become a YouTuber.

But what happened is that these platforms became the new gatekeepers. The third era of the web is about writing the ship. Social capital becomes economic capital. Google no longer accumulates to brokers and intermediaries. That's number one completely wrong, but one thing. The first era of the internet, I would say, was about the idea that information should flow freely and Google came in like a decade or more into that period. I had been on the internet five years before Google hopped into that shit and Google was

actually the start of the end of that period. The idea that the social web was people creating their own content, most of the social web's initial capital and all of its initial money came from taking content that people were being paid to make on legacy platforms that had existed before social media, taking that content, putting it on social media, and then monetizing that without paying money back to the people who had made the content. The money in social media did not initially come from people making their own content in the way that they mean it.

Yeah, you at college humor or whatever were making your own content and sharing it on social media, but you'd been doing that before social media. Social media just actually made it less profitable eventually. The way he summarizes this is so wrong, because what the social web actually did, and the other thing I'd argue is that the first era of the internet, the early days when things were happening on forums and weird little angel fire websites and even MySpace, which I think MySpace kind of straddles the first and second eras, that was fundamentally much more an era of people creating their own content, because the lifeblood of social media today

isn't people really making their own content, it's people reacting to content that other people made. And again, it just shows the fact that he's summarizing it this way in a way that I think is so wrong and inaccurate to how things actually developed is characteristic of his attitude towards this stuff, where he's kind of seeing the only real meaningful evolutions in the internet through the corporations that monetized it, which is just telling of like how this guy actually sees the way the internet has developed. And you will not be surprised to know this motherfucker is an investor at index ventures.

Yeah. Like he's a guy whose business is capitalizing things. And so that's the only way he sees the development of the internet, even though that's not the accurate way of looking at how the internet evolved. And I think that there's one more really important thing that he leaves out here, which is that, because, you know, we're talking about, oh, is it the third age of the internet? Like, no, the third day of the internet started like, I don't know, the early mid-2010s when... I would say when Gamergate hit is when I would, I would, I mean, it's gonna be a little off

either way. It depends what you mean by age. So one of my friends works in advertising. And he was talking about this where, you know, we can talk about like Gamergate and the sort of fascist mobs, but there was something else happening back end, which was the internet of things stuff. Like, you know, like nobody, it's kind of a, I don't know, like, I think we mostly think about it as like, it's kind of a joke or it's like, it just sucks.

But really what it was was that that was the period in which people figured out that the thing, the actual money to be made on the internet was from selling people's personal information. Yeah. And that, and the internet of things like just dramatic, like just indescribably increased the amount of data that you could extract from people. And that was, that's the actual, that was the actual change of like, like, that's, that's the 30th of the internet.

And that, that era of the internet will last basically forever until we destroy it. Which is that, you know, the, the, the, the commodity is just all of, all of the information about who you are, where you go, like what you buy, who you talk to, that just being sold off to advertisers is, you know, the thing that he's very, very carefully not talking about and instead focusing on, oh, it was users creating content. It's like, no, they, the internet's like, just, they, they, they sold spying on the entire world. Yeah.

And I think there's, there's two good ways to, to divide the internet into ages and the ages would be slightly different each way. One is kind of how you're doing it is the way in which it was monetized, right? That's, that's, that's one way to, and then if that's the case, it's going to start with, it was not at all. It was an entirely public project and everybody on it was on it through like a university and like people did not pay to access it other than that you had to be at an institution or a university.

And then like we get to the kind of the, the era before the dot com boom and of the dot com boom. And then like the early pre-social internet stuff, like something awful and like having stumbled upon and whatnot and like those sending traffic to sites like where I used to work cracked and, and then kind of the social media, which is the start of, as you said, like the data being monitored, monetized, like individuals data being the thing, either that's being directly monetized or it's being used to deliver like targeted ads to you. And then there's like, if you think about it in terms of content, it's, it starts like

for the first era wouldn't even involve Google because it would be like the start of usenet up to eternal September in 1993 and then, you know, on from there. But either way, this guy doesn't like everything he says about the history of the internet is, is dumb. It's just a very simplified version and you don't actually look at like the interlocking systems. Cause I mean, yeah, I don't know why he describes it this way because it is, it is like it's accurate if you squint and don't think about it.

Yeah. But it's weird cause like this article is like, it's for tech bros. So I don't know why he describes it this way because I feel like he could describe it a lot more accurately if he, if he wanted to. Well, it's something I'm going to, I'm going to get into, I'm going to say this point like twice this episode. I'm going to get into the neoliberalism episodes that I'm writing, but the one, one of the key features of neoliberalism is that they lie, is that the, the neoliberals have to

have two versions of what they believe. They have the version that they tell everyone else, which is completely a lie and is not what they believe at all. And then it has, they have the version that they tell to each other, which is what they actually believe. And they're completely, they contradict each other completely. They mostly believe things, everything that they say in public is just a complete lie. And that, I think that's what he's doing here, which is that this, that like that history

of the internet is the one you sell to public consumption. Because yeah, that's, that's, that's the lie you tell people to take money from them. And then he has a thing that he believes, but, but he will not ever tell you because, you know, if, if, if he tells you what like he actually wanted to do, you would run screaming from the room. And I think you can, you can read between what he wants you to believe, I think is made very clear by how he divides by the fact that when he starts like dividing up the ages of the internet, he says the first one is the time in which people wanted information to

be free. And what he's kind of saying by doing that is saying like, that was an infant stage of the internet. And obviously the natural evolution of the internet is for every single thing on it to become monetized. And because I also believe the internet should be every aspect of our lives, like this is a megaverse guy or a metaverse guy, like I think the internet should, should be involved in every aspect of life.

That means every aspect of life should be financialized. And that's extremely radical, but it does not sound that way when you describe it that way. People's heads go over it, but like what he's saying is deeply radical. And I think also like, again, you want to talk about like the first the, and not just the early age, like, because the first people who kind of built the backbone of the internet were mostly like very radically anti capitalizing on like there was this idea that like it absolutely should be as free as possible.

Like Steve Wozniak, the guy who functionally invented the personal computer, had a background like as a phone freaker, like literally robbing phone companies to get like free phone calls and stuff. Like these, like most of the early internet pioneers were like some kind of criminal. And the early ages of like internet content being monetized mostly started with people doing shit for free. Like that was how the people who made money on it. That's how all of my bosses, and that's how fucking I got started was like, you would

just start making shit and you would put it out for free. And eventually, like that would get enough traffic that you'd, you'd, you'd draw ads to you and whatnot, and you'd make money. But it was always like all of the content that, that made the internet and all of the content creators who were huge now mostly started doing, like even it was just like throwing up videos on YouTube, right, or like going on. And that's, that's less the case with the zoomers now, because a lot of them got started on things like, like Twitch, where the idea is to from the beginning be trying to monetize

yourself. And while you're like building a brand, you're constantly monetized. But that's a really recent change. And I actually, I find it kind of unsettling because that was, I don't know, it's a mix because I'm certainly not of the, I'm not of the, of the mind that like if someone is asking you to do work, you should be getting paid for it. But if you are trying to, if you are trying to like build a life as a creator, the best way to do that creatively is to just make the things that you think are cool.

And then make like, if, if other people like it, you make money, like better things get made than that. Yeah. Like that, that is the way the best art gets made. I think there's a few things going on here, because like the way, I think, like, I think actually the reason why he frames it this way is because he's trying to get back to his idea of freedom, right? He describes like the golden age of the internet being information flowing freely.

He thinks that the blockchain is the new version of that. So that's why he's framing it in this way. The second thing is in terms of like artists and creators. If you think about like, yeah, like when the early age of what, what he calls like this, of what we've, we kind of all been referring to as like the second area when like era of like when social media and like content creation, like sites are a thing. Let's like just use YouTube as an example. Because there was a low saturation in content, it was easier for someone to rise up and gain

a platform. Let's say someone like Bo Burnham, right, who started as just a kid and now is like a very popular comedian. Yeah. But then YouTube, instead of backing creators like that, which they did a little bit, but they did not as much. They instead started a, like the thing that happened was like YouTube really incentivizing sharing like late night content and sharing like, like TV, like clips of TV shows and

like using, like doing, using legacy media on their platform. And that's the things they really backed. That's the things they really pushed into your feed is like tonight show clips. So a lot of those original, original content creators kind of got left behind and now are now like just their own, are running on their own personal brands. Some of them use Patreon for example. But it's also, it's impossible to do this now because there's an oversaturation of content. The only thing that's done this recently is TikTok because it was a brand new platform.

There was again a new, a new opportunity for a lot of kids to gain, to gain a lot of audiences really quickly. I mean, I just, I just, based on what you're saying, I think that like TikTok is the closest to how cool shit happened on the internet before everything got, because it is like, you're not starting from a, like everyone starts, I guess, knowing you could make money, but that was the same way the old, you start because you're like, you're doing a thing. And if that thing takes off, then there's ways to monetize and like that, yeah, I think that's probably why it's so popular.

Generally growth on TikTok is pretty, it's pretty organic. It's not, it's not, it's not boosted by big brands the same way stuff like YouTube is. And now it's probably going to be edging in that direction, but it's, it's, it's not, it's not there yet. So, and his argument in this is to get back to just being like a small content creator, getting your stuff seen. His solution to this problem of like YouTube and stuff backing like these large, like light night shows and backing like these large, like corporately funded things.

His solution is that if you're a small, if you're a small content creator, you should sell yourself as an asset to other people on the internet, right? So like his, his whole idea is that he wants to get rid of the gatekeepers of the internet and go back to how the internet was. But his solution for doing that is just by selling you as a person brand to other people on the internet who are like tech bro investors. So that's why it's framed this specific way. So I think when we're all talking about like, why does he describe it this way?

What's all this weird stuff going on? It's because that's how he's rationalized it in his brain is for how what he thinks being a free artist is, and he thinks this is going to be the new method to get there. There's another important sort of macro thing to think about this year, which is that the underlying basis of all of this, right, is the assumption that everyone is an entrepreneur. Is that, you know, like everyone is doing all of their stuff at all times because they want, you know, in order to be a business owner. And this has been like, you know, this, this has been the great ideological victory of

the right in the last 50 years is that they convinced everyone that like every single person is, you know, like you're, I mean, it's not even temporary embarrassed millionaire syndrome. It's like even people who like are working jobs, right? Like working wage labor jobs, think of themselves as, you know, content creators and a content creator, you know, is, is, is a small business owner. And this has an immensely coercive, well, of course or two, but corrosive effect on, you know, anyone working together to do something because, you know, oh, you're not, you're

not a worker, you're just like, you're a content creator, you're, you know, you're a small business owner, you're like, you know, what, and, and that's, you know, this, this is a very long running thing that a bunch of incredibly powerful people have been trying to do really since like, I mean, arguably like what would you do if a secret cabal of the most powerful folks in the United States told you, Hey, let's start a coup. Back in the 1930s, a Marine named Smedley Butler was all that stood between the U.S. and fascism. I'm Ben Bullock. And I'm Alex French.

In our newest show, we take a darkly comedic, and occasionally ridiculous, deep dive into a story that has been buried for nearly a century. We've tracked down exclusive historical records. We've interviewed the world's foremost experts. We're also bringing you cinematic, historical recreations of moments left out of your history books. I'm Smedley Butler and I got a lot to say. For one, my personal history is raw, inspiring and mind blowing.

And for another, do we get the mattresses after we do the ads or do we just have to do the ads? From iHeart podcast and School of Humans, this is Let's Start a Coup. Listen to Let's Start a Coup on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you find your favorite shows. I'm Lance Bass and you may know me from a little band called NSYNC. What you may not know is that when I was 23, I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person to go to space.

And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories. But there was this one that really stuck with me about a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. It's 1991 and that man, Sergei Krekalev, is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on Earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart. And now he's left defending the Union's last outpost. This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space, 313 days that changed the world.

Listen to The Last Soviet on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science? The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science. The wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences and a life without parole.

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podcasts. 30s, but the complete success of that and the way that, you know, they're selling exactly the same thing that they were selling in like the 80s. But now it's this like, you know, you try to get people to do it to themselves and also they throw all of this like sort of nonsense tech jargon at you to get you to sort of like stop looking at the fact that this is just sort of, you know, this is just the new even worse version of everyone being a worker who thinks that they're like, you know, also going to be a small business owner someday.

Yeah. I don't have anything else really to say about it other than this, but like, I mean, this was a good amount to say, I just think this is so I think it's such an example of kind of the way in which the worst people in the world are trying to steer the Internet and by steering the Internet steer the soul of like the human race. Like this is a vision of the future this guy's sharing in this article that isn't isn't positioning itself as radical, but includes some like deeply radical ideas about how the world should go and by the way, I should also note that he's also just like blatantly wrong every

time he brings up a number. Like he taught he points out in this article that 46 million Americans own cryptocurrency. The real number is more likely about 21 million kind of it at most like by every credible I have no idea where he's getting 46 million Americans own cryptocurrency. And again, the stat just came out and that's part of his argument is that like, obviously people love the blockchain and these tokens and like this is this is inevitably going to get more and more popular. And when again, the reality is that every real thing that's happening on the on the

blockchain is pretty much versions of a security scam that the government has just announced they're going to finally start regulating. But yeah, I want to so the the stat the study that just came out today was that analysis of 6.1 million trades of like 4.7 million NFTs. It shows that the top 10% of traders were responsible for 97% of trading, which again is more evidence that all that's happening is people boosting prices. Also the average, the vast majority like more than 90% of NFT sales are for less than $200. Some of them are for just pennies.

Like what the stuff that you're hearing about is all ridiculous outliers and it's outliers specifically because people are pumping stuff up in order to try to con someone. And that's the whole basis of this guy's the structural argument, the reason that he's attempting to argue that like, there's actually desire here and that this is in fact the future of the internet is based entirely upon like numbers that are either bad or he's or he's deliberately using he's deliberately lying about the numbers because there is no credible number evidence I've ever heard that 46 million Americans currently own cryptocurrency or even have ever owned cryptocurrency.

Yeah. And I think the other kind of nail in the coffin for this idea and why I don't think it's going to catch on the same way these guys think it think it does. And this is something he acknowledges in the article is like, not a lot of people know how the stock exchange works like very like he says I think it's like, I don't know, like I forget the what number he says, but but he says like not not tons of people actually use or know what the stock stock exchange is. And the reason why Patreon was so successful and why it's so useful for content creators

is because it's a very intuitive system. It's very clear how it works. It's clear what you're doing. There's no really questions about where your money is going or what's happening. This I don't think this is ever I don't think this whole personal investment thing is ever going to actually go off because people don't understand what the blockchain is and it's too much work to explain it to them. And just because of how much work it is to wrap your mind around like, so where is my

money going? What do I have to set up? How does that work? That's way too much of a headache because in order for this to actually work, you need to this to break out of the tech bro bubble or else this is just going to be this small tech bro thing of people handing over the same $100 to all their friends in a circle, which is what it is currently. And in order to break out of that circle, they need to get, you know, your grandmother to learn what crypto is and how blockchains work. And that's not going to happen.

So I think that is the one other nail in the coffin for this type of idea is like, Patreon is easy, Patreon makes sense. This thing, it is not nearly as intuitive for supporting a YouTuber you like. Yeah. Oh, okay, cool. I actually found evidence on where that 46 million Americans number comes from. Yeah. So basically, number one, I found like a fucking crypto news source pointing out that like when people started tweeting that 46 million Americans is based on a study, which we'll

talk about in a second, but like when people started tweeting about this, like the immediate response in the Bitcoin subreddit was like, well, that's not fucking possible. Like one of the people in the Bitcoin subreddit said, sounds very high. I don't know a single person who owns it. And this says one in six or seven people own it. Yeah. And it comes from a study conducted in January by the New York digital investment group, surveying a thousand participants with incomes over $50,000.

So that seems valid. Wait, they just said it's over 50, this, okay, this method, yeah. You'll get a few like Pew released a study suggesting that like 16% of Americans have used cryptocurrency at some point. And like all of what's coming out is kind of sketchy. All of the data, there's like reasons to be kind of unsettled about it. But also like one of the things that Pew study showed is that the vast majority of Americans have heard of cryptocurrency and most haven't used it, like the vast majority have not chosen

to get involved. Like however accurate you think this is, like there's another article coming out that came out in I guess May of this year that said based on a Gemini study, which is Gemini is a crypto exchange that over 50 million Americans are likely to buy crypto in the next year, which doesn't seem to have happened. Like I just don't see, there's all sorts of like weird little studies commissioned by weird little groups, but it really doesn't, it seems like it's, again, kind of part of the grift.

Like I'm not seeing a lot of rigor in any of this. Anyway, whatever, we've talked enough about this shit. I just, I think we all, as soon as we read the article, we're so like appalled by it that well, we should probably talk about this for 45 minutes. I'm Eve Rodzky, author of the New York Times bestseller Fair Play and Find Your Unicorn Space. Activist on the Gender Division of Labor, Attorney and Family Mediator. And I'm Dr. Aditi Narukar, a Harvard physician and medical correspondent with an expertise

in the science of stress, resilience, mental health, and burnout. We're so excited to share our podcast, Time Out, a production of iHeart Podcasts and Hello Sunshine. We're uncovering why society makes it so hard for women to treat their time with the value it deserves. So take this time out with us. Listen to Time Out, a Fair Play podcast on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Rafi is the voice of some of the happiest songs of our generation. So who is the man behind Baby Beluga? Every human being wants to feel respected. When we start with young children, all good things can grow from there. I'm Chris Garcia, comedian, new dad, and host of Finding Rafi, a new podcast from iHeart Radio and Fatherly. Listen every Tuesday on the iHeart Radio app or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, I'm Robert Sex Reese, host of the Dr. Sex Reese Show, and every episode I listen

to people talk about their sex and intimacy issues, and yes, I despise every minute of it. I mean, she made mistakes too. That's true. She did kill everyone at her wedding. But hell is real, we're all trapped here, and there's nothing any of us can do about it. So join me, won't you?

Listen to the Dr. Sex Reese Show every Tuesday on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to It Could Happen Here, a podcast about how society is falling apart, and about how to put it back together again. I'm your host Christopher Wong, and today, and for the next few days, we're doing something a bit different. We're going to take a deep dive into some of the people who got us into the mess we're in today.

Now, when we've talked about our enemies and it could happen here, we've mostly focused on fascism, and for good reason. But for the next few days, we're focusing on a different enemy, though don't worry, the Nazis will show up. That enemy is neoliberalism. Neoliberalism is the single most successful political movement of the 20th and 21st centuries. No other political movement in human history is directly controlled so much of the globe. It has outmaneuvered, outlasted, or simply destroyed every ideology that's sought to

oppose it, and has reigned virtually unchallenged for 50 years. After it exploded on the political scene in Chile, their victory has been so total that even the erstwhile opponents have adopted its core principles. Margaret Thatcher famously bragged that her proudest accomplishment was creating Tony Blair basking in the irony that neoliberalism would be implemented across the globe in large part by labor and socialist parties. Today, even erstwhile communist countries maintain so-called special economic zones. With the laws of neoliberalism are allowed to run rampant in exchange for GDP increases,

and their communist supporters in the west have come to believe that capitalism is a far more powerful engine of economic development than the state planning advocated by their forebearers, thus internalizing the greatest principle of neoliberalism even as they claim to oppose it. All of this, of course, raises two questions. What actually is neoliberalism, and how did it come to rule the world? Today, we're going to try to answer the first question by looking back at the original neoliberals and examining what they believed, because it's not what you think.

There are many places you can begin the story of neoliberalism. I'm choosing to start in France in 1938. Now, the 1930s are a bad time to be a free trade market liberal, and just to clear this up early, liberal in the European context, which is where a lot of the beginning of the story takes place, does not mean the same thing as it does in the American context. European liberalism, up to this point, is about free trade, markets, individual liberty, and rights, et cetera, et cetera, but it's anti-state interference. To be somewhat reductive, it's kind of closer to what conservatism is in the U.S., but it's

not identical, so bear that in mind as the story goes on. 1930s saw the rise of fascism, social democracy, and communism, each with its own form of government spending and economic planning, which liberals absolutely detested. Now, the 1920s and 30s have been full of liberals gathering to try to figure out what to do next. In 1937, Walter Lippmann, an American writer who would become most famous for inventing the term Cold War, wrote a book called An Inquiry into the Principles of the Good Society, which argued that totalitarianism is a product of not having individual private property

and that the state needs to be limited to administering justice and not giving people things that they need. And so a lot of liberals read this and go, oh, cool, we should organize a conference to talk about this book and our ideas, and the product is a 1938 Lippmann colloquium. Now, a bunch of extremely important neoliberals show up at this conference, including one Friedrich August von Hayek, Ludwig von Mises, Wilhelm Roepke, and Alexander Rusto. And they start talking about the need for a new kind of liberalism to oppose communism, Keynesianism, fascism, and what they call Manchester or Lausse Faire liberalism, in which

the state didn't intervene at all in political life and let the economy run on autopilot. Now, the German sociologist Alexander Rusto, who we're going to talk about more in a second, comes up with the term neoliberalism to define the new set of principles that they're trying to develop. And they think the neoliberalism should prioritize the price mechanism, free enterprise, the system of competition, and importantly, a strong and impartial state. Now, this is the origin of neoliberalism as a term. And it's important to understand two things from the outset, because the neoliberals are

actually going to spend the next 50 years lying about this. One, neoliberalism favors a strong state to make the market work. And two, neoliberalism is not the same thing as classical liberalism. Now, neoliberals essentially invented the whole I make classical liberal thing in the 50s. But if you read the original stuff that they wrote, if you go back to 1940s, if you go back to 1930s, and you read what they write, the neoliberals are extremely clear that they are not classical liberals.

And that, in fact, their political project is different from the 20th century and 19th century liberal project in which the state is supposed to be a night watchman and not actually interfere in the markets at all. The neoliberals originally, before they start lying about their actual origins, reject this principle and come to believe that, in fact, a strong state is necessary to ensure that markets work. So now you have neoliberalism as a thing, but nothing really happens much until after World War II, because during World War II, almost everyone is just doing state economic

planning. And so, you know, all of these people rambling off to the side about how, oh, the market is the most efficient way to plan a system. Nobody listens to them because they're fighting a war and the way you fight wars is doing state planning. And after World War II, the situation for neoliberalism is even worse because having, you know, gone through the experience of entire societies turning their entire economies and systems into planning agencies in order to, you know, mobilize a total war effort,

people after the war come back and go, oh, hey, we can do this to other parts of the economy. So this means that everyone, and this is not just the communist states, this is, you know, this is Britain is doing Keynesianism, they're doing planning, they're doing state welfare programs, and the New Deal is spreading also across the globe. Now in response to all of this, Hayek and his allies do two things. The first is found the Chicago School of Economics. And the second is to assemble the Avengers of Taking Food from Children, the Montpellion

Society. The Montpellion Society is the central neoliberal institution, which is a weird thing because in a lot of ways it's essentially just a closeted debate society intended to allow neolurbals to work out their political principles behind closed doors. At this first meeting in 1947, a lot of the people from the Lippmann Colloquium are there, but unfortunately some of the French members of the colloquium and some of the people from Germany had collaborated with the Nazis, so they were out. And this meant that Hayek had to find new people to bring in.

And the Montpellion Society's first meeting is the first time you actually have all three major schools of neoliberal thought in the same place at the same time arguing with each other. And they can't agree on shit. The only thing they can actually agree on is to look into more stuff. And to get a sense of how far away from modern neoliberalism the arguments that are being had at the Montpellion Society are, the Montpellion Society has only ever once actually released a single statement stating its principles.

And this statement was the only thing that could be agreed on at the first meeting of the Montpellion Society, and I'm just going to read it. This is what they agreed to research. 1. The analysis and explanation of the present crisis so as to reflect its essential moral and economic origins. 2. The redefinition of the state's functions so as to distinguish more clearly between

the totalitarian and liberal order. 3. Methods of re-establishing the rule of law and assuring its development so that individuals in groups are not in a position to encroach upon the freedom of others and private property rights are not allowed to become a basis of predatory power. 4. The possibility of establishing minimum standards by means not inimical to initiative and the functioning of the market.

5. Methods of combating the misuse of history for the furtherance of Creed's hostile liberty. 6. The problem of creating an international order conductive to safeguarding of peace and liberty and permitting the establishment of harmonious international economic relations. Just by looking at this, you can immediately see signs of how far things are going to move. One of the things that they're talking about is, again, they're trying to research whether or not it's possible to just give people things without the markets, and it's not just the

sort of left, quote-unquote, wing of the neoliberals who are arguing about this, Hayek, in probably his most famous book, The Road to Serfdom, I mean, explicitly says, yeah, you should just give people food and housing and stuff outside of the market, and today, if literally anyone who says this will be accused of socialism, this is a large part of the neoliberal position in 1947. Now, I've mentioned briefly that there are three schools of neoliberalism, and we're going to spend some time looking at them because people have a tendency to look at neoliberalism and assume that, oh, it's just the Chicago School of Economics, which is the neoclassical

school. It's the most famous member. It's Milton Friedman. It's true that the Chicago School are neoliberals, and this is critical. There's other intellectual schools involved in here, and it's not just economists. Neoliberalism, from the beginning, is a multidisciplinary international project. You have lawyers, you have political scientists, you have journalists, you have philosophers, you have anthropologists, and the product of this is something, is an ideology and a

philosophy that is much deeper, much richer, and much more dangerous than just Chicago School alone. The second of the major schools is the Austrian School, which is led by Ludwig von Mises and Hayek, and maybe most importantly, but least well-known, the third school that we're actually going to be talking about today is the German Autoliberals, led by Alexander Rustow, who again, invented and determined neoliberalism, and Wilhelm Roebke, who almost no one has ever heard of, but are incredibly important, and I'm going to insert a disclaimer here before I yell at by nerds, yes, I'm aware of the public choice theorists at the Virginia

School. I am also aware of a group of the neoliberalists called the Geneva School, even though they're just regular liberals, and there's also the rump of the neo-institutionalists. I don't care about them because they're not relevant to this story. Please do not yell at me on Twitter. Now, these people have wildly divergent beliefs, and so I'm going to do my best to do one-sentence summaries of what these people believe, so the Chicago School of Neoclassical Economics. Humans are all knowing, calculating gods, rationally optimizing their behavior to get

the most out of every single interaction they engage in, to maximize the utility, the product of this infinite freedom to choose economic equilibrium. The Austrian School, humans are pig-ignorant fucks who know literally nothing and therefore must be made to bow down to the ever-changing disequilibrium of the market, which is the only thing that can actually process information. Order liberalism. The markets won't create or balance itself because these uncultured proletarians swine keep asking for raises instead of focusing on the magic of the family, so we have to

use the state and laws to force people and companies to do competition. And these are obviously somewhat comical summaries of it, but these are very, very different conceptions of what it is to be a human, of whether the market occurs naturally or not, of what the market actually is. Is it a product? Is it an object in and of itself? Is it a product? Is it just an inevitable product of humans doing whatever humans do?

And this is part of the reason why it's almost impossible to get the original neoliberal schools to grant anything, but this is actually one of the strengths of the neoliberal project. The project only works because it uses the products of all three branches. You have neoclassical attacks on the welfare state, Austrian attacks on central planning, and order liberal theories of the state and sort of culture on the non-economic nature of markets, and you know, when one school essentially fails as an explanation for something, they can jump to another school, and this gives them a very wide range of abilities and move between crises and move between people attacking any of the individual schools because

they can simply pull out another set of theories. So I'm going to talk a little bit more about each of the schools, and we're going to start with the Chicago School because, again, it's the most famous, and because I think there's another very interesting story here into how the Chicago School changed from its origins. So one of the people who was supposed to be a founding member of the Chicago School was a manor in Henry Simmons, and Simmons is unlike the rest of the Chicago School because he actually believes in things, so I'm going to read a couple of quotes from him. Thus, the great enemy of democracy is monopoly in all its forms.

Gigantic corporate trade associations and other agencies of price control, trade unions or in general, organization and concentration of power within functional classes. Here's another one. A monopolist is an implicit thief because his possession of market power leads to the exchange of commodities at prices that do not reflect underlying social scarcities. And you can see this sort of one of the classic Nieler bull arguments, which is that you have the market, the market is efficient, and trade unions get in the way of the market because they're monopoly, but Simmons has what kind of looks like, from our perspective, a left

wink retic of monopolies, which is, yeah, okay, giant corporate monopolies are thieves because they use their market power to rob people by charging higher prices. And I genuinely can't say how differently things would have gone if Simmons had actually been around to see the Chicago School through because he commits suicide in 1946. And unlike every single other person who was going to be involved with the Chicago School from the beginning until now, Simmons had a genuine commitment to democracy and anti-monopoly principles. But unfortunately, he dies in 1946, and by the, by the Chicago School is really up and

running in the 50s. Almost everyone involved in it is overtly pro-monopoly, pro-cooperation, and are, you know, they set up an anti-trust school, but the thing that the anti-trust school is arguing is that monopolies are actually essentially impossible because competition will just take care of everything. And if you try to stop monopolies from happening, it will interfere in the economy. Now, this is the line that Milton Friedman takes. And it's also the line of the Volcker Fund, who are a sort of, I guess you could call

them a charitable organization, but it's basically a billionaire slush funds that funds the school. And they'd had real fights with Simmons because Simmons is like, well, okay, monopolies are bad and Volcker is like, well, we're a monopoly. So you guys need to actually work for us. And by the time Friedman essentially takes over the Chicago School and night take it over. The intellectual mercenaries, they're extremely proud of the fact that they are in fact pure intellectual mercenary hacks with absolutely dog shit economics.

If you've ever read just a, you know, if you've ever been forced to take an economics class, you took microeconomics. That's basically just what the Chicago School believes. It's everyone's a rational actor. Every human being spends all of their time trying to calculate the maximum utility of anything that they do. Everything is a market. Everything functions by supply and demand.

Neoliberals are perfectly efficient if you just let them alone and don't interfere with them. Everything the state does interfere with the markets, et cetera, et cetera. This is, this is the thing that is sort of classically understood to be neoliberalism core content, but it's extremely important to understand that these are not the only neoliberals. And in fact, not only are these not the only neoliberals, this set of political principles, to a large extent is not what the neoliberals actually believe.

This kind of stuff is essentially what they feed the rubes. Small states, taxes bad, regulation bad, everything is a market and has always been a market and all human interactions will never produce markets. But to understand what neoliberals actually believe, we need to talk about the order liberals. Now the two most important order liberals are Wilhelm Roepke and W.W.Rusto, who were both exiled from the Nazi regime. Now a lot of the other order liberals who stayed in Nazi Germany collaborated with the Nazi regime, which is something that's kind of just overlooked and brushed to the

side when people were right about them. But Roepke and W.Rusto's status as people who, you know, fled the Nazis gives them a kind of social cache that their colleagues don't have and they become extremely important. Now in some ways, the order liberals could be considered the left wing of the neoliberals. They are significantly less harsh on the welfare state than other forms of neoliberalism. And this is in large part because the order liberals are the first neoliberals to ever actually hold any power. And I think people, most people tend to think that the first time the neoliberalism was

ever implemented was Chile, but that's not really true. The order liberals are actually very powerful in 1950s Germany. Now the problem they face is that the left is powerful enough in 1950s Germany that they cannot actually just completely eliminate the welfare state. So their solution is to create this thing called the social market. And the order liberals get accused of like being crypto socialists by a lot of the other neoliberals, but that's not really what's going on. The very important thing about the order liberals is that unlike the Chicago school, they're

not economists, both Roepke and W.Rusto are social scientists, W.Rusto is a sociologist. And they argue that the state and the market alone cannot maintain market society because market society produces dislocation, it produces atomization, it destroys social cohesion. And this means that you need a social political and sort of cultural framework to maintain it. And their major focus is on providing stability and security for the working class and a new sense of sort of identity and cultural cohesion. Because I think if the working class is essentially left to itself, it will create massification,

it will decay and eventually the working class will turn into the proletariat and that will give either communism or fascism. The order liberals believe that there's a kind of natural hierarchical order that they're trying to preserve and that this is essentially what order means. It means literally order, which, according to the essence of humans, this means an order in which proportioned measure and balance exist. Now, they have a few ways that they're going to do this. Roepke is obsessed with something called structural policy.

And structural policy is basically the argument that the conditions for markets have to be specifically created. And again, they're not just economic positions or social conditions. And this is fused with Ristow's vital politic, which is essentially about the power of anthropological and human aspects of culture and politics sort of beyond the forces of production that they think are vital to the functioning of society. And part of what they're doing here is that they want to give some people a cultural thing to focus on so they stop talking about wages and welfare and who owns production.

But the combination of vital politic and structural policy gets you order liberalism. So nominally, they focus on individuals, but really what they're focusing on as the family, as this quote unquote, decentralized engine of economic capitalism, with small businesses and hopefully small family farms as a sort of apolitical social support base for capitalism, which they're going to promote and set against the radicalism of the sort of industrial proletariat. And this sort of middle class that they're aspiring to build is extremely important for a number of reasons. Partially is a way to diffuse working class tension, partially as a way to sort of work

or something to aspire to, and partly as a way to fuse the sort of traditional natural hierarchy with conceptions and meritocracy. Now, ROPEK in particular also begins to look for systems outside of just the democratic state to sort of create this legal apparatus that the neoliberals want to use to impose markets. And this is extremely important because a lot of where neoliberalism winds up coming from is not from national governments, it's from the sort of international bureaucracy, it's from the IMF, it's from the World Bank, it's from the World Trade Organization.

And those groups are controlled by neoliberal lawyers, and ROPEK is the person who essentially first has this idea. Now, the goal of using these international legal institutions as a way of creating the laws to sort of enforce neoliberalism is using it as a way to sort of get around democracy. And I'm going to read this quote from ROPEK because, oh boy, does he absolutely not believe in freedom and democracy in the way that he and everyone else talks about publicly. It is possible that in my opinion of the strong state, I am even more fascist, fascist-er, than you yourself.

Because I would indeed like to see all economic policy decisions concentrated in the hand of a fully independent and vigorous state weakened by no pluralist authorities of a corporateist kind. I see the strength of the state in the intensity, not extensiveness, of its economic policies. How the constitutional legal structure of such a state should be designed is a question in and of itself for which I have no patent receipt to offer. I share your opinion that the old formulas of parliamentary democracy have proven themselves useless.

People must get used to the fact that there is also a presidential authoritarian, even yes, horrible thing to say, dictatorial democracy. So what he's saying there is that he's sending a letter to one of his friends, and he's going, yeah, I'm even more fascist than you are. I think that democracy is actually a threat to the market and that in order to avoid authoritarian democracy, we should in fact concentrate all economic decision-making power in the hands of a narrow elite in a strong state, which is the opposite of everything that neoliberals opened the claim to be supporting.

But behind closed doors, and we will get into more of this in a second, this is what they actually believe. Now, Ropke is somewhat unique among neoliberals in that he is racist by neoliberal standards. He's just enormously, incredibly racist. So for example, he's a massive apartheid dude. And again, I need to point this out, Ropke is one of the most important neoliberals. He's one of the founding members of the Montpelioan society, although he gets kicked out for, well, he eventually leaves because of some disputes he has with Hayek, but I'm going

to read some of the things that he says about South Africa because they're horrible. Quote, the South African Negro is not only a man of an utterly different race, but at the same time stems from a completely different type and level of civilization. He also calls ending apartheid, quote, national suicide. And so he starts saying this stuff. And the other neoliberals are like, dude, what the fuck? So the neoliberal he needs newspaper like he wrote for for 30 years was just like, what? And publish a bunch of students going, stop this.

This is you cannot seriously be supporting apartheid like this. And his response in these papers called the NZZ and his response is, quote, these NZZ neoliberal intellectuals will not be satisfied until they let a real cannibal speak. Now Ropke is one of his friends, another MPS member named Honnold. So Hayek looks at Ropke's support for apartheid and is like, what the fuck? Like no, absolutely not. Like this is horrible. Why are you doing this?

You know, to Hayek's credit that this is the extent of the credit I will give Hayek in this episode is that he looks at just the open overt racism of Ropke and is like, no. And when when he does this, Ropke's friends, Honnold says that Hayek, quote, now advocates one man, one vote in race mixing. Now you can see a lot of things here about Ropke that are extremely scary. And one of those things is that the language that he's speaking, this, the West is committing national suicide, the clash of civilizations, race war stuff. You know, this is this is essentially the, I mean, literally the national suicide thing

is what white nationalists say today. And Ropke is, in a lot of ways, a right nationalist, he's just sort of a German one. But what's what's really scary about Ropke is that he's not sort of bound by, by the sort of strictures of a neoclassical, a neoclassical economy. So for example, he won't propose that like the dating market, like like dating should be on markets and that rich like men should be able to like, I go on an app and like, like every, every, every single time a person gets into a relationship, it should just be entirely based on market exchange and stuff like that.

Because you know, he doesn't think like an economist, he thinks about cultural factors, he thinks about sort of social factors. But he also he's cracked the code for how neoliberalism is going to be implemented. The way you do neoliberalism is neoliberalism plus racism. And he realizes that you need it, you know, neoliberalism's actual sort of policies, right, will cause atomization, will cause social dislocation, will cause the existing social structures of society to sort of implode. And he realizes that in order to get this to work, you need, you need a spiritual base,

you need some kind of new thing that you can use to sort of bring all these people together. And he picks Catholicism, which doesn't work because I mean, there's a number of reasons for this, but you know, partially it's too early, partially it's because he picks Catholicism not evangelicalism. But this is how the neolibals are eventually going to take power by, you know, aligning themselves with the evangelicals who promise to solve the atomization they're creating with, you know, religion and family and the patriarchy. And he figures this out in like the 60s.

But it was just, you know, like 20 years before the rest of the neolibals figured out. Now there's the he also has like a bunch of very similar stuff that he thinks about this about Rhodesia, but interestingly, he has more support for his positions on Rhodesia than he does for his positions on South Africa. And now I'm going to, we're going to jump back to Chicago school, we're going to read some Milton Friedman stuff about Rhodesia because dear God, quote, majority rule for Rhodesia today is a euphemism for a black minority government, which would almost surely mean both the eviction or exodus of most of the whites and also a drastically lower living

level and opportunity for the black masses of Rhodesia. Here's another one where he's describing the system of one person, one vote quote, a system of highly weighted voting in which special interests have far greater role to play than does the general interest. You know, so that's a description of what democracy is. In contrast, he thinks the market economy is quote, a system of effective, proportional representation. Now Friedman also thinks that, you know, so there's a blockade, like an economic blockade

of Rhodesia going on because they're Rhodesia and they are maybe the worst people ever. That's probably, only only a mild exaggeration. Yeah. It's just, you know, absolutely fanatical, like what's the premise of this government. And Friedman also calls the isolation of Rhodesia quote, the suicide of the West. And you know, he's doing this on racial lines, but he's also doing this along the lines of this argument that democracy itself is actually bad and this is the place that he can express it because, you know, he can leverage racism to get away with it.

And I'm going to read another Friedman quote because I think it's important to understand what the neoliberals actually think about democracy quote. This was sometimes emitted by members of Mount Pellion in public, but only when they felt that their program was in the essence. Let's be clear. I don't believe in democracy in one sense. You don't believe in democracy. Nobody believes in democracy.

What would you do if a secret cabal of the most powerful folks in the United States told you, Hey, let's start a coup. Back in the 1930s, a Marine named Smedley Butler was all that stood between the U.S. and fascism. I'm Ben Bullock. And I'm Alex French. In our newest show, we take a darkly comedic and occasionally ridiculous deep dive into a story that has been buried for nearly a century.

We've tracked down exclusive historical records. We've interviewed the world's foremost experts. We're also bringing you cinematic, historical recreations of moments left out of your history books. I'm Smedley Butler and I got a lot to say. For one, my personal history is raw, inspiring and mind blowing. And for another, do we get the mattresses after we do the ads or do we just have to do the ads?

From iHeart Podcast and School of Humans, this is Let's Start a Coup. Listen to Let's Start a Coup on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you find your favorite shows. I'm Lance Bass and you may know me from a little band called NSYNC. What you may not know is that when I was 23, I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person to go to space. And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories. But there was this one that really stuck with me about a Soviet astronaut who found himself

stuck in space with no country to bring him down. It's 1991 and that man, Sergei Krekalev, is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on Earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart. And now he's left defending the Union's last outpost. This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space, 313 days that changed the world. Listen to The Last Soviet on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.

What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science? The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science. And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. I'm Molly Herman.

Join me as we put forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a match isn't a match and when there's no science in CSI. How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all bogus? It's all made up. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Find it hard to find anybody who will say that if democracy is interpreted as majority

rule, you will find it hard to find anybody who will say that 55% of the people believe the other 45% of the people should be shot. That's an appropriate exercise of democracy. But I believe it's not a democracy, but an individual freedom in a society in which individuals cooperate with one another. So he's making a sort of, what's in some ways a kind of anarchist argument against democracy, which is that like, yeah, okay, so if you interpret democracy as pre-majority rule that a majority can just do a terrible thing, the minority.

But what the neoliberalists actually mean by this is that 55% of the population could, for example, I don't know, take money from the rich, small part of the population and distribute it around, and they think that is totalitarianism. And in order to stop that from happening, they are in fact absolutely imperfectly willing to just back dictatorships. And that's, in essence, what they actually want is a state, the sole function of which essentially is to ensure that nobody ever does this. Because, you know, if you could do this inside of a democratic framework, fine.

But if you can't, well, I don't know. It's time for a coup. We're going to turn to Hayek and the Austrians, because Hayek also is known as the sort of like, as a libertarian, as this person who sort of believes in spontaneous order and like thinks that you should only have sort of small, decentralized political institutions. And so we're going to watch Hayek quote a bunch of stuff from, and agree with a bunch of stuff from Karl Schmidt, which is again incredible because Hayek elsewhere described Schmidt as quote, the Nazis chief jurist, which is true.

But here are some other things that Hayek has said about Karl Schmidt, quote, the weakness of the government of an omnipotent democracy was very clearly seen by the extraordinary German student of politics, Karl Schmidt, who in the 1920s probably understood the character of the developing form of government better than most people. And you know, Hayek believes a lot of the same things that Schmidt does. So, you know, one of them, the things that Schmidt is like big on is that liberalism and democracy are opposite things, and Hayek also believes this. And okay, so I'm going to read, I'm going to read some Schmidt and I'm going to read

some Hayek and they're going to be saying the same thing. So here's Schmidt, only a strong state can preserve and enhance a free market. Only a strong state can generate genuine decentralization and bring about free and autonomous domains. Here's Hayek. If we proceed on the assumption that only the exercises of freedom that the majority will are important, we would be certain to create a stagnant society with all the characteristics of unfreedom. So what Hayek, yeah, Schmidt is saying that only a strong state can support a free market

and due decentralization. Hayek is saying if you let a democracy exist that has majority rule, it will create unfreedom. Now we will get into this more when we talk about like Chile, because oh boy, is there some other shit that Hayek has to do with that. But most neoliberals hate democracy no matter what they say in public. And this is the other important thing here, neoliberals lie. They lie constantly. They lie to the point where sorting out their actual beliefs becomes almost impossible and

even their intellectual enemies believe the lies that they tell. What most people think the neoliberals believe is that they want a small government and liberty in an unregulated market that will occur naturally through spontaneous order because it's human nature to want to truck and barter and rationally calculate things. And the neoliberals don't believe any of this. This is just what they tell to the rubes. What they actually want is a large and powerful surveillance in legal state and a massive bureaucracy to enforce essentially pro-corporate policies at gunpoint.

I'm going to read close out this episode by reading a list of things that Philip Morowski is an economic historian who studies neoliberalism whose work I've used a lot for these episodes wrote about the sort of eleven principles of what neoliberals actually believe. One, free markets do not occur naturally. They must be actively constructed through political organizing. Two, the market is an information processor and the most efficient one possible. More efficient than any government or any single human being could be. Truth can only be validated by the market.

Three, market society is, and therefore should be, the natural and inexorable state of humankind. The political goal of neoliberals is not to destroy the state but to take control of it and to redefine its structure and function in order to create and maintain the market-friendly culture. Five, there is no contradiction between public, politics, citizen, and private market entrepreneur consumer because the latter does and should eclipse the former. Six, the most important virtue, more important than justice or anything else, is freedom. Defined negatively as freedom to choose.

Most importantly, defined as the freedom to acquiesce to the imperatives of the market. Seven, capital has a natural right to flow freely across national borders. Eight, inequality of resources, income, wealth, and even political rights is a good thing. It promotes productivity because people envy the rich and emulate them. People who complain about inequality are either sore looters or old foggies who need to get it hip to the way things work nowadays. Nine, corporations can do no wrong. By definition, competition will take care of all problems, including any tendency monopoly.

Ten, the markets, engineered and promoted by neoliberal experts, can always provide a solution to the problems seemingly endlessly caused by the market in the first place. There's always an app for that. Eleven, there's no difference between is and should be. Free markets both should be normatively and are positively the most efficient economic system and the most just way of doing politics and the most empirically true description of human behavior and the most ethical and moral way to live. Which in turn explains and justifies why there are versions of free markets should be and,

as neoliberals build more and more power, increasingly are universal. Yeah, we've read a long list of things, but essentially the point of this is that neoliberals want to transform everything into the market because they think the market is a more efficient way of doing things and a better and more moral and more just way of doing things than anything else you could possibly imagine, including things like democracy. Any problem the system produces will be solved by the system. This is an incredibly radical political program in a lot of ways. You can argue whether it's a radical or a reactionary program.

I think it's a deep reactionary one in some ways, but it is a program that is vastly different than anything else that has come before it. The challenge, of course, was getting anyone else to agree to this. The answer is that it's really hard to. It is extremely hard to convince people that everyone should bow down to the market, etc. So the only way they can actually do this is by lying. As Morowski describes, the neoliberals operate an incredibly sophisticated intellectual and political network that forms a sort of a choice-cadal with Montpeleron, Saidia, etc., and an ever-expanding

group of more and less specialized think tanks to the shell layers. So in this way, they mirror the vanguard structure and sort of front-coup networks to their communist opponents, but they have significantly better financial backing. This means that they can run the American Enterprise Institute with copious amounts of Coke money. They can run this entire enormous network of think tanks that allows them to sort of act as a government in waiting. And the other thing that they're going to attempt to do is take over the global regulatory

bureaucracy, the IMF, the World Bank, eventually the World Trade Organization, and force people to do this at gunpoint by using those organizations. Now, all they needed was a crisis that they could use to implement their policies. And next week, we're going to look at the crisis that gave them exactly what they wanted. This has been Naked Happen Here. Find us on Instagram and on Twitter at HappenHerePod. Find the rest of our stuff at CoolZone, and goodbye. The Gangster Chronicles podcast is a weekly conversation that revolves around the underworld.

From criminals and entertainers to victims of crime and law enforcement, we cover all facets of the game. Gangster Chronicles podcast doesn't glorify promote illicit activities. We just discussed the ramifications and repercussions of these activities, because after all, if you play Gangster games, you are ultimately rewarded with gangster prizes. Our Heart Radio is number one for podcasts, but don't take our word for it. Find the Gangster Chronicles podcast on the I Heart Radio app or wherever you get your podcasts, make sure to check out Drink Champs, your number one music podcast on the Black

Effect podcast network. Hosts N-O-R-E and DJ E-F-N sat down with artist and icon, Yay, which Vulture called one of 2021's most significant interviews. I literally had to go like Thanos, and I don't want to have to be the villain. But when I went and did the Donda thing, Yay returned, and everybody had to sit back and watch the real leader. Check out Drink Champ's conversation with Yay and many more legendary artists each and every Friday on the I Heart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite

shows. What? I mean, that's that's all I got today. Who's who's taking over? Come on. I did my part. I guess it's me. I guess it's me.

All right. Well, then what show is this and what do we do? This is it could happen here. We talk about things being bad and also what you can do about them. But this is a this is a things are bad episode and not a what you can do about the episode. Specifically this is part two of what I guess you could call our mini series on neoliberalism. And so, you know, yesterday we talked a lot about who the original Neoliberal's are. They have a bit of power in Germany in the 50s, but for the 50s and 60s up to the 70s,

they're kind of nobodies. They're you know, they're they're they have a couple of think tanks, but they're kind of they're kind of just siloed off in the corner and they yell at people and people kind of ignore them. And what they're waiting for essentially is the right crisis. And in the 1970s, they finally find that crisis. Now I think it's kind of hard to remember in a lot of ways because of how the 80s went. But in the early 1970s, things are not looking good for capitalism.

I mean, you have so, you know, I end a win's election 1970. We'll talk about what happened there in another episode. But you know, it's it's not just that in 1940, 1974, well, so to the early 1970s, Emile Calcarbriel is just absolutely annihilating the Portuguese army. And he, you know, he wins, he finds one of like one of history's greatest guerrilla wars. And this basically destroys the entire Portuguese state and causes the Carnation Revolution. The Portuguese colonies get free. The DERG takes power in Ethiopia and then 1975, the North Vietnam just wins the like

the war in Vietnam. And now, you know, the product of this is that Cambodia falls, Laos falls. There's now there's five social estates in East and East Asia and Southeast Asia. And also Mongolia, but nobody really cares about them and as all of this is happening, as these sort of as the anti-colonial armies are sort of marching their way through the world, there's an enormous economic crisis. And you know, I mean, there's a lot of things happening at the same time. One of the ones I think is probably the thing that people remember the most is there's just

unbelievable inflation. And you know, and economic growth starts to slow down, although something I think that we do need to keep in mind is that when I say economic growth slows. So economic growth from like, from 1967, 1969 to 1979 is 3.2 percent. From 2000 to 2007, it was 2.3 percent in the U.S. And so, you know, when I say there's an economic crisis going on here, like economic growth in the seventies is better than any decade since, but it's still considered the crisis decade because there's much inflation and, you know, everyone has their own theory as to why this is happening because the sort

of Keynesians who've been in power, whose thing is, oh, well, we can, you know, if there's ever an economic crisis, we can sort of, we can spend money in that, you know, the government spending money will drag everyone out of the crisis. But in Keynesian theory, like there's not supposed to be inflation. If like, if unemployment is increasing and there's an economic crisis, there's not supposed to be inflation. And suddenly there's both. So the Keynesians have nothing and they're sort of just running around, like, just like

basically like chickens with their head cut off going, oh, God, we have no idea what's happening. We don't know what's happening. And so into this gap steps a bunch of weirdos. And so I'm just going to, I'm going to go through a few of the theories as to why this crisis happened because I don't know. And I think there's elements of truth in most of the stories-ish kind of. But you know, it's, this is extremely complicated and there's still no consensus on it.

So I'm going to start with the most crank, which is, so the Ron Paul people, the whole thing is, yeah, everything went to shit and has been shit ever since because the US abandoned the gold standard and like, they're right into the extent that this happens. So basically Nixon's been trying to pay for the Vietnam War and he can't. And you know, the US dollar has been pegged to a certain amount of gold, right? And you can do this thing where if you get it, you have an American dollar, you can exchange it for that amount of gold. And so Charles de Gaulle just is like, okay, we're just going, we're going to take all

of this gold. And so if he does and the US starts running out of gold. And so by, by, by in the early 70s, Nixon is like, fuck this, you can't actually exchange dollars for gold anymore. And now every single libertarian starts every rant with fiat currency. But you know, this, this, this does have an effect on the economy, which we'll talk about more in a bit. There's, you know, there's, there's, there's a lot of other explanations for this.

The modern monetary three people, if you listen to them and also Peter Thiel weirdly will argue, oh, it's all because of the oil shock because oil prices increased. Neoliberals will spend, neoliberals essentially, they blame too much government spending will fail for programs and then like wages being too high and also bad monetary policy. There's like an entire, there's, there's like 17 different Marxist explanations for it, some of which are, I'll, I'll talk about like one and a half of them that are more plausible. What one of the explanations has to do with how essentially, so the everything that's

happening in the 1670s is that minorities and women are entering the workplace and they're, you know, actually demanding to be paid the wages that white men have been being paid and corporations essentially just can't afford this. And so, you know, they have two choices. It's either we pay these people actual wages or we just murder everyone. And they took the second one. So it's something that, that has also been happening through this whole period is that profit rates and manufacturing just keep collapsing and there, there's, there's a whole thing

here about some Marxist theory stuff. But the thing that's important is that, and this, this has to happen in the 70s, eventually you hit a point where manufacturing growth becomes zero sum. And you know, so you can have manufacturing growth in one country, but you can't have it in another because at a certain point you're producing too much stuff and people start getting kicked out of the labor process. And this has a bunch of effects. One is it has, it means you get a bunch of people who are unemployed and two, it means

that there's just a bunch of money floating around that nobody can actually invest in places. And this is, you know, like all of the weird stuff the Saudis do is just, is basically from this, this money, there's all these whole piles of oil money that are just sitting around that nobody can invest in anything. And that's going to cause, you know, that, that, that, that, that, that's going to cause a lot of stuff down the road. But for now, yeah, we'll talk about the debt crisis has caused this sort of next episode.

But for now, I'm going to try to pull all of these together and like have something, have a coherent thing that makes sense, which is essentially by the end of the 70s, profit rates are declining and then Nixon pulls, you know, Nixon pulls the dollar off the gold standard and this causes the value of the dollars is plunge. And this, this is the thing that sets off the 1970s oil crisis. So the 1970s oil crisis is weird because it's not an oil crisis. Everyone looks at the global crisis and it goes, oh, what's it oil crisis is a crisis because there wasn't enough oil and it's, it's not, it's nothing to do with that is

literally nothing to do with supply of oil at all. What actually happens is that, so you have OPEC, right? OPEC is the sort of, is the Alliance of Oil Producing Cartels. And they have this extremely complicated system where they, they sell oil to oil companies and then the oil companies sell that oil, they refine it and sell it to you. And they have this incredibly convoluted tax structure on it. And eventually, so the oil companies are having like the price of oil starts to rise and the oil companies are basically just taking it all off the profit from this.

And so OPEC goes, okay, you guys are going to pay taxes and the oil companies just refuse. And so OPEC just unilaterally just, you know, OPEC just unilaterally is like, okay, you guys are going to pay taxes and we're going to make you pay taxes by, by just increasing the price that we sell you oil at. And this gets remembered as like OPEC increasing the price of oil, even though it was literally just them saying you're going to pay taxes. Now, this is the part that's very weird, which is that, okay, so if you do, if you do heard of the oil crisis, like the story, yeah, yeah, yeah, I mean, I, the way it's always gone

in textbooks as you talk about like the stagflation of the 70s and the fucking, you know, lines of, of cars at gas stations going back blocks because OPEC fuckery and yeah, that's how it's always framed is that like, there's this big political crisis over OPEC that led the, the gas supply getting throttled and it came at a time when the economy had already slowed down and everything got terrible. And then a few years later, we got Robocop. Yeah. Well, we did get Robopop, but the important thing about the story is that every single

thing about that story is wrong. Every part of it. Well, I mean, there were lines at gas stations. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, there are lines at gas stations, but the lines at the gas stations have literally nothing to do with OPEC, which is nothing. So on October 16th, 1973, the Arab members of OPEC are like, fuck it, we're going to

make the oil companies pay more for oil. And then the rest of the rest of OPEC follows them. Now, two days later, was it, yeah, the next day, there is a completely unrelated thing to all of this, which is that while, while this is going on, the Yom Kippur war starts. And so Egypt and Syria attack Israel, like the basic attack, the Israel occupation forces in their country. And the war is going really badly for them. They're, I mean, it's not going, it's not going as badly as like the previous wars had

gone for the air powers, but it's not going great. And so on October 17th, six Arab oil producing countries declare that they're cutting the amount of oil they export by 5% per month until Israel returns as territories that they'd occupied since 1967, and they have an embargo on the U.S. But and this is the very important part. This has nothing to do with OPEC. This is not OPEC at all. It's not, this is, this is, this is just a couple of random Arab countries are like,

we're going to do this. And you know, and I think what I think is interesting about Robert, what you were talking about is, is OPEC fuckery, you know, is how this gets remembered. And this, this is one of the things that, that neoliberals use to sort of push their model of the world, right? Which is that everything functions off supply and demands and, oh, look, hey, the Arabs cut the supply of oil and that's why the prices rose. But it's just, it's just wrong.

It's empirically wrong. The price cut happens, I mean, the price increases happened the day before the, the, the oil, the, the, the, the price increases the day before the embargo and the embargo and the oil price people are different groups. They have nothing to do with each other. But you know, this, this gets sort of system and like this, this is, this is how it's, it's remembered. And any, you know, it's not even just how it's remembered like, like the encyclopedia

Britannica has the date in which all of this stuff happens wrong. They have the sequence of events wrong, like all of the, like most of the people who write about this remember this whole thing wrong. And this is, this is part of the sort of an enormous propaganda effort that the neoliberals are able to do at this moment, which is they convince everyone that, oh yeah, the price increases and the gas, typically the gas shortages are, are, are about OPEC. But again, also like the U.S. only imports like 7% of its oil from, from the countries who are doing the embargo at this point.

So the actual thing that's going on has to do with price. It's a weird thing has to do with price controls and gas companies are hoarding gas because they don't want to sell it at price control levels and stuff like that. But you know, the oil price increases, you know, they, yeah, like it is bad, like the price of oil does go up and there are shortages, but it has nothing to do with like, it has nothing to do with the embargo. It has nothing to do with, you know, like the supply of oil going down. It's just companies didn't want to pay taxes.

And so they started hoarding the oil instead of selling it and they passed the price, the tax increase on to the consumers instead of just paying it. And as we talked about before, once this sort of like tax increase goes in, that OPEC, well, some of the OPEC countries want to do goes into place, like the price of oil does increase. And this does fuck the economy even more, but the economy had already been sort of a mess before this. And it has one other very important effect. And you know, this is, you know, I guess, I guess the, the theme of this episode is that

the oil embargo matters, but the oil embargo matters because people think it matters, not because they did anything. And the other group, so it matters in the US because everyone thinks that, oh, the scary Arab nations are coming for us. But it matters in the rest of the world because everyone else looks at this and goes, wait, hold on, you can actually use commodities, essentially you can use commodity prices and like countries that like have raw, you know, commodities can use this control to actually go fight, you know, to like, to go fight the West and go fight the capitalists

and go like, you know, get money for themselves. And this leads us into something, Robert Garrison, have you ever heard of the G77? Is that like the 77 countries that have the most money? Well, that, that's the, that's the G7. Well, yeah, I was, I was assuming the 77 might be just a longer list. No. So, yeah, so, so this is, this is the other thing from this period that just is completely lost, that's almost completely lost to history and the G77 is actually still around.

But what they are was, so in the 60s, you know, you have all of these countries that have recently gained independence and 60s and 70s, all these countries that have gained independence from their sort of colonial overlords, and they start to band together into basically a voting block in the UN. And also, this is the other, the other weird part about the story is that, so in the 1970s and 60s, 70s in particular, the UN actually matters. Like it's, it's, it's a thing that people actually believe 20 years after World War II, where people were maybe, I mean, a good example of the degree to which the UN actually

used to be meaningful is watch the first Street Fighter movie, because the good guys in that are clearly based off the UN and nobody thinks it's ridiculous that the United Nations are actually doing something. It's fine to have Jean-Claude Van Damme be the leader of the United Nations fist-fighting a guy. That, that makes total sense in the early 1990s. And you know, and so, and part of, we'll talk about this in the next episode, but basically, the reason the UN is a joke right now is because of what the US was doing to stop the G77 from

doing anything. I mean, I would argue that massive failures in Rwanda and Bosnia had a huge impact on that too. That too. Yeah, I think a couple of genocides go down and people are like, well, what are these guys doing? But yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Well, this is, this is, this is how they got dysfunctional to the point where you can get that. Yeah. Which is so, so, okay. So, you have, you know, you have a bunch of countries that call themselves, you know, the term they use for themselves is the third world. And they come together to form this group and it's, it's a really weird ideological

mixed bag. Like, I mean, you have, you know, you have, you have like actual socialists like Tanzania's Julius Nereire and Michael Morley and Jamaica. You've also got like Gaddafi and the Bathists. And like both. Gaddafi was a socialist. Come on. Yeah.

The leftist paradise, Gaddafi's Libya. You know, okay, my, my, my, my, my most contrarian hot take is that Salah Jadid was like actually kind of an ML who was, he was, he was briefly the, the, the Bathists in charge of Syria and then he got overthrown by Hafez al-Saud. But both of them are part of this. Well, I mean, there's, there's definite like actual like Marxist, you know, Lenin, there's some, like, especially in the old school Bathists, like there were aspects of that. There was socialism kind of within it.

It just, it would be nonsense to like, for example, call Saddam Hussein's Bath as a socialist government. Yeah, no. Yeah. And, you know, and you can already see like this is, this is, this is a real grab back and you have, there's also just a bunch of random Latin American countries, like none of whom you can call a socialist. And then there's also Saudi Arabia and Thailand are in this group to get a sense of how fractious

this is. And Pakistan are also both part of this and they fight two full scale wars while they're both in the G77. Actually, that's not even true. There's two full scale wars and then there's like another half war they fight in the 90s. Yeah. So this, yeah, like all, all the people in this thing are fighting, are literally fighting wars against each other.

It's kind of a mess. And you know, it's found, it's found in, in, in the mid 60s. And until 1974, it's kind of their, their whole thing is we have moral authority, like we're, yeah, like we're, you know, we're, we're, we have the authority of all of these nations have colonized us for a long time and we're going to use that. But in the 70s, you know, the oil embargo happens and a lot, like most, I think all most of the OPEC states are, are, are, are in, are, are in the G77 and they look at, they look at the oil embargo and they look at OPEC raising prices and they go, wait,

we can do this too. And the OPEC states are like, oh, hey, we can use this to push the whole, you know, we can use it to like push the whole power of like, of the third world. And they, they, their plan to do this is something called the new international economic order, which is also something that no one has ever heard of that is extremely important that has just, the spoiler alert is that this, this movement gets crushed. So thoroughly that nobody knows what the new economic order is. And the third world is now slur.

But you know, the thing that they're trying to do is create a new, I remember it calls the new international economic order, a trade union of the poor. And so it's, it's this thing they're trying to get passed through the UN that would, you know, just designed to sort of ensure the economic sovereignty of these developing nations. And I'm going to read a list of the stuff that's in here. So A, an absolute right of states to control the extraction and marketing of their domestic natural resources. B, the establishment and recognition of state managed resource cartels to stabilize and

raise commodity prices. C, the regulation of transnational corporations. D, no strings attached technology transfers from north to south. E, the granting of preferential trade preferences to countries in the south. And F, forgiveness for, for certain debts that states in the south owed to the north. So this is like the act, this thing, if the international economic order had ever been implemented at all, it would have completely reversed the basic, basically completely reversed the balance of economic power, shifting it basically from countries like the US like,

you know, Western Europe like Japan that are these giant manufacturing powerhouses to countries that produce, you know, raw materials. And there would have, you know, and the other thing that would have happened from this is you have these, the no strings, you have a debt relief for the global south and also these, these technology transfers. And the plan is basically to create a bunch of mini OPEX for just, or not even mini OPEX, create OPEX basically for every commodity. So you know, you'd have like an OPEC, but it's for like box site or like copper.

And you know, they would use, they would, you know, you have all these OPEX and each one of them uses their power and they all cooperate to make sure that there's a stable price for all of these commodities. And another part of this is that it's supposed to basically enshrine the right of countries to be able to just like nationalize resource companies. So you know, you have like a British oil company, I was like, well, we just take it out, now it's ours. And the threat of this is great enough that if you read conservatives in the era, they

will say things like the Soviet Union is no longer a threat, the greatest danger to the West today is the G77. Yeah. Yeah. And this is this. Yeah. It's, it's these, these people are enormous. Right past that.

Yeah. No, no one even remembers this anymore. And it's, it's because largely it's because of how just unbelievably badly these guys got stopped. Um, you know, and one of the other things that happens out of the product of this is this is where the G7 comes from. And it's originally, and I think this is another thing. Oh.

Yeah. Yeah. It's originally a secret alliance like through this whole, through the whole seventies, nobody knows G7 exists. It's basically, it starts as this like secret meeting of a bunch of finance ministers and eventually they, they add Canada and I think Japan to it and it goes up to seven members. And you know, they have a couple of things they're trying to deal with. They're trying to deal with the economic collapse, but one of the big thing, like one of the

biggest things they're dealing with is the G77 and OPEC. And this, this, the result of this is this, these enormous series of fights in, uh, implausibly the United Nations conference on trade and development, which is, I think this, this is, this is the last time ever that the fate of the entire world would be decided in a battle in like a subcommittee of the UN. And there's, there's years and years and years of negotiations between, well, the G7 hasn't like openly declared itself as G7. It's sort of just, it's basically the, the, the, the rich European countries.

So it's Canada, France, Germany, Italy, the UK, the US and Japan, like form this alliance and are like locked in together in order to stop the G7 from, G77 from doing anything. And this is, this is the, this is the other crisis that the neoliberal are responding to is it's, it's not just, and in many ways this is the one that scares them more because you know, it's not just that there's an economic crisis. It's not just that like capitalists are afraid because they're losing money. It's, if this stuff goes through the entire balance of power in the entire global economy is going to change.

And it's going to swing into the favor of a bunch of non-Western countries and probably more and most importantly for neoliberals, they're going to enshrine the right of states to take things away from corporations and regulate them. And this is just absolutely, completely unacceptable to both the neoliberals and just every single other organization that's even tangentially involved with sort of the Western nations. So the neoliberals, I talked about this a bit in the last episode, which is that they've been working on a strategy in order to take power that doesn't rely on states. And so what they've been doing for about 20 years is essentially infiltrating and working

their way up through, like basically taking over the international monetary fund and the World Bank, who in this period, and this is never a thing I think is very weird and hard to remember, which is that the IMF and the World Bank, like there was a time when they weren't completely evil, like the IMF was basically set up to make sure that countries wouldn't just run out of money, right? It was supposed to give people like, yeah, then the World Bank was supposed to be developed. And it's turned into sort of this like international debt system for poorer countries where they're always in a lot and being forced into austerity measures and the like.

Yeah. Yeah. But that didn't used to be true. It used to be, the IMF had a bunch of Keynesians in it and same with the World Bank. And both the IMF and the World Bank's leadership for a lot of this period wanted to negotiate and, you know, and I think this is where we're going to leave it here with basically the entire world is in an epochal crisis. All the economies are collapsing, the sort of the armies of the anti-colonial like world

are moving and the G77 looks like it's literally on the verge of, you know, completely restructuring the economic system in a way that actually would have been slightly more fair and jest than what the system that existed then, which was also infinitely more just and fair than the system that exists now. And next episode, we're going to talk about how this all fell apart and how there was a choice in the 70s between either corporations can make money or people can have things. And the product of what the neoliberal are going to do in the next episode is that they're going to, their solution to this problem is to tell the entire relative of the earth to

each and die. And yeah, that's that's that's the episode. It's, yeah. Yeah. History. Yeah. It's, it's fine. Um, okay.

Uh, well, we got any, uh, we got any, any pluggables? What do we, what do we do at the end of episodes? Sophie? Where are we? Thank you. Who are we? Thank you for listening. We'll be back on a day at a time, maybe.

We're not hearing you. Sophie. I think you're muted. I'm not muted. I'm not muted. Oh, what? There we go. I'm not muted.

I haven't been muted the whole time. We didn't hear you. Yeah. I just randomly halfway through. That's so weird. Uh, I said we'll be back on a day or a time and yeah, at some point we'll be back. Find us then. Yeah.

Uh, and find us tomorrow unless this comes out on Friday, in which cases, go be with your family. Be with the ones you love. This is dropping on Friday. Adopt a cat. Adopt two cats. Maybe four. Adopt three cats.

Four. Adopt four cats. Yeah. Get a number of cats greater than the number you have. Put them in your house. We'll see you on Monday. Hey, we'll be back Monday with more episodes every week from now until the heat death of the universe.

It could happen here as a production of Cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can find sources for it could happen here, updated monthly at coolzonemedia.com slash sources. Thanks for listening. We'll see you on Monday with more episodes every week from now until the heat death of the universe.

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