Grubstakers - Episode 151: Senator Insider Trading, Trillion Dollar Coins, and Wealthy Fleeing the Rones

Episode Date: March 24, 2020

In another grab-bag episode on the Coronavirus response, we discuss the senate insider trading scandal, Rashida Talib's trillion dollar coin proposal, and how the wealthy are taking themselves and their COVID-19 up the Long Island Railroad to party it up in the Hamptons.

It's the kind of thing that makes the average citizen puke. I look at this system and say, yeah, you know, what's going on? I don't know anything about this man except I've read bad stuff about him. And I don't like, you know, I don't like what I read about him. We have more than just one coin. We create the world around this coin. Cop. Invention. Cop. Cop. In 5, 4, 3, 2...

The evil has gone. Hello, everyone. Welcome to Grubst 2, the evil has gone. Hello everyone, welcome to Grubstakers, the podcast about billionaires. I am your host, Yogi Poliwal, and I'm joined today with my fellow host via your favorite late night segment remote. Joining me is... Sean P. McCarthy. Steve Jeffers. Andy Palmer. And today we have a very, very interesting episode. We are all under

corona quarantine and we will be discussing the politicians that have recently subvert laws to dump stock because of this crisis, catching up on the rich and how they're dealing with coronamania, as well as dishing about what does this all mean for all of us, especially the people that aren't the elite who are going to be benefiting from this the most? So to open this up, I think that I'd like to mention I haven't gotten a divorce yet, and honestly, in these trying times,

if you can survive corona, I think you can survive most marital arguments. Yeah, I got diarrhea today, and I'm filling out my last will and testament now. I've been keeping a little diary of what life is like under coronavirus, because I'm pretty sure it's about to get crazy, so I think it would be nice to have a day-to-day thing. And then yesterday evening and then morning, I woke up with a very slight sore throat, and i just meticulously wrote out my symptoms like it was my own eulogy it would be great if uh andy becomes the victor klemperer of the coronavirus and subsequent u.s military holocaust so what what have you guys is like uh coronavirus routines

been like or what have your quarantine routines been? Anything new? Anything getting weird? What's getting weird, guys? I mean, honestly, you know, coronamania being what it is, I've had more sex in the last few months

than I had in the first 27 years of my life. So honestly, I mean, coronavirus being as terrible as it is, it's done great for my sex life. You guys wearing masks? Yeah. We've been getting into role play gorilla masks eyes wide shut masks that's where all the masks went

yogi has like seven closets full of masks you use like use the uh surgical grade in 95 masks every single time the the now look this is really the scientists the scientists discover that the only surefire mask that keeps you from getting coronavirus is a sexual role play gorilla mask and yogi's just got 80 of them in his closet listen the military surplus on bdsm goods involved a gorilla mask sale that i couldn't pass up yes sure most of my rooms have us a box full of gorilla max but honestly the sex hasn't even begin to come great i'm just imagining yogi using the the n95s and then just immediately after being like all right now we got to throw these out. This is the most important thing is to burn these so that no one else,

especially not any healthcare professionals can use them. On a much more serious note though, I do have thought immensely about people that have terrible home situations dealing with domestic abuse and rape, and this time must be incredibly fucking stressful. Oh yeah, absolutely. This entire situation is a nightmare all around, especially because Congress is not taking it seriously at all.

I mean, we're recording this March 22nd, Sunday. We just got the news the Senate has rejected what was, I mean, a pretty straightforward corporate bailout bill by the Republicans that would have had a $500 billion corporate bailout slush fund that Steve Mnuchin could use however he likes. But it's worrisome that they should have had something done several weeks ago. Yeah, there was just a statement released by the St. Louis Fed uh billard who said basically in a nutshell if congress does nothing then unemployment could reach 30 percent what that's headline unemployment that's not like uh you know

the one of the other alternative measures that counts more people okay well i didn't i didn't know things were gonna get serious that fast because I was about to say that I'm getting really into deep space nine. It looks like with the unemployment numbers though, I'll probably be able to binge watch it probably three times. Yeah. I think that from our last episode, the most chilling thing was when I was mentioning like, Hey,

you guys been doing new hobbies. And Andy was like, I mean, in a few months, every day is going to be a new nine 11. But right now we're just like, Hey, look, I just learned how to knit. And I was like i mean in a few months every day is going to be a new 9-11 but right now we're just like hey look i just learned how to knit and i was like oh no i'm totally fucking the guy that's excited about like you know working on my bicycle and threading a new tube through the inner uh tubing to make sure that my air sound air horn works when i ride my bike in

2029 you know honestly i think we switched places because also i just uh i i while cleaning my apartment i found the parts to an estes rocket i never finished so i put that together and uh the two-stager it's got e and f engines which are the biggest estes engines you can buy and uh i i'm either going to shoot them off at this remote coney island spot or off of my roof depending on how stripped down law enforcement gets in the next couple months i'm just imagining andy watching deep space nine and then hearing gunshots out the window and opening it up and being like hey could you guys keep it down some of us are trying to catch up on star trek over here guys you're interrupting odo but yeah also with that fed uh the st louis fed president

he also predicted possibly a quarter two gdp collapse of 50 so minus 50 in quarter two gdp this is assuming congress doesn't do anything but it's a horrifying thought and very possible so like just to add some context to that the worst unemployment ever got during the great depression was 29 so if you got 30 i mean that's that's pretty fucking crazy and i think i think what i don't even know how accurate that would really be because that's just a crazy number but i think what the fed what the fed guy was trying to do was to just send a political message to congress that you have to do something or else the shit is going to hit the fan i'm just glad that millennials are finally putting

their money where their mouth is and getting even greater depression i got some uh statistics as well that uh I've been pulling about the disease. As of today, we're recording March 22nd, Sunday in the evening. And the only reason I mentioned that is that these numbers are still growing exponentially. But for us at Grubstakers in New York City, so here's some perspective. The world statistics are 336,000 cases worldwide right now in new york state there are 15,000 cases and in new york city there are approximately 10,000 cases which is about three percent of all cases worldwide

right where we are and that and reference, about 12 days ago, there were 10,000 cases in the entire country of Italy. So yeah, we're about to be big Italy. We finally graduated. I just want to say, I said the deaths were growing exponentially on Twitter and then a bunch of people came in my mentions talking about linear and logarithmic and all these other terms that I have intentionally not understood for 10 years now

I don't want to hear any of this shit like I'm done with college math and I don't have to look at it again I'm going to say exponentially and assume I'm right they are growing exponentially you are actually right if you put them in a logarithmic scale they are linear uh they are growing exponentially you are actually right if you put them in a logarithmic scale they are linear uh they are growing linearly which means they are growing exponentially on a linear scale uh and so that is that is accurate and um so i'm just gonna reply to people with your email address and be like this guy has a physics degree. He says I'm right when I say exponentially. Contact him. Yeah, anyone who says that it's not exponential is a moron. The way that it stops being exponential is once the containment efforts really start to kick into place. But if you go to this, there's this website that's keeping track of all the statistics uh worldometers.info uh or worldometers.info maybe it's irish um and they they have it's a world of meters class you can look at graphs by country or the world over

and you can look at them in either linear or logarithmic scales and um in outside of i think south korea and china everything is continuing almost perfectly uh exponentially like if you go into the logarithmic scale it's uh pretty much a straight line which means uh consistent exponential growth and in some countries, that's starting to bend downward, not in the linear scale. So the rate of increase is not decreasing, but it's being slightly less exponential

in places like Italy. At least it's not growing factorially. Yes, yes, it's not growing factorially. That's the silver lining. Andy minored in math, but he majored in pussy. So I guess before we talk about the senators, we can check in on what our friends the super rich are doing. And so I got a couple articles about that.

The first one that kind of made the rounds um uh about a week and a half ago so i'm just gonna talk about it briefly it's from the guardian uh and it's titled super rich jet off to disaster bunkers amid coronavirus outbreaks and apparently as soon as um the news of the outbreak started making the rounds there was a massive spike in charter flights and private jets. A bunch of people were just taking their personal doctors with them, like, you know, just rounding up their doctors. They also, super rich people just bombarded private health clinics asking for testing, even though there's obviously not enough testing.

But they're willing to pay exorbitant amounts and obviously this explains why all the celebrities are getting testing and such even though just a couple days ago when I had that sore throat I was looking up how do you get tested and the two articles I read gave conflicting information one of them was like get tested immediately and then the CNN article was like, yeah, there's not enough tests, so only get tested if you're on your deathbed.

But of course, the rich are getting tested. And then the best thing is, towards the end of this article, apparently there's a surge in bunker orders. This guy, Robert Vecino, who is the founder and uh chief executive of vivos group a california-based company constructing underground shelters designed to withstand a range of natural disasters and catastrophe said his firm has seen a surge in inquiries and sales since the

crisis took hold so there's the second article that i thought was way more telling um it appeared in the new york post and it was titled we should blow up the bridges coronavirus leads to class warfare in the hamptons uh which it's a really good article i suggest you read it's by uh maureen callahan and uh for those outside of the new york area uh you've probably heard the hamptons it's if you ever look at a map of New York and you see its little Long Island, which is kind of New York's little dick, the Hamptons is at the very tip of that. It's where Montauk

is, which is a big part of the movie Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. This article is very interesting because it's apparently rich people in Manhattan, the ones who cannot afford private jets, or at least some who can afford private jets, but the ones who can't afford island bunkers, have just been flooding the Hamptons as soon as the outbreak started. One of the first quotes from a local in this article is there's not a vegetable to be found in this town right now it's these elitist people who think they don't have to follow the rules

um the article goes on to state that uh there are people who uh according to some nurses who work in manhattan wealthy people who have been tested positive for the virus and then will immediately hop on long Island railroad, which is this, um, it's a public transit system that goes out to the Hamptons. Um, so they'll be, they'll have the virus,

which means they're probably highly contagious and then they'll just jump on public transit and go all the way out to the Hamptons and Montauk, uh, other people. And then they won't tell anyone. There's a case of another guy who hopped on a private jet to East Hampton and then didn't tell anyone until he landed. Wow, what a piece of shit. Now, when the rich people are here, what they're doing is they're ransacking the supermarkets.

Which, if you've been out to this area in the off-season, which I think I mentioned before on this show, because I really like the movie Eternal sunshine, the spotless mind. I like going to Montauk and the off season cause it's empty. And, you just put on a coat and go to the beach and it's really cheap to get a hotel. Um, but it's also there because everything is stocked seasonally because they get

flooded with rich people during the summer. There's not a lot in the grocery stores during the off season. And so with this new flood of rich people in march and by the way the off season is from like september to june the they're just going into these grocery stores and dropping like 8 000 on food there was cleaning them out yeah they're just cleaning out the grocery stores um and then apparently, let's see, PC Richardson and Son, a source there said that they had 700 orders for freezers in the last weekend alone. What? To store all the food that they're hoarding. One local said, I've seen breathtaking acts of selfishness.

I saw one guy walk out of a grocery store with a cart full of carrots, just carrots. Another cart was full of bottles of water and orange antimicrobial dish soap. And other people said that, uh, they'll see old people who will basically risk their lives to leave their house to get food. And they'll just walk around shell shocked in these grocery stores with

empty baskets because everything's been taken. Um, and these are people who are, you know, waiting on their social security checks to be able to buy food right and then they can't buy food and then apparently once the rich get to the hamptons they'll just go out partying apparently uh both soul cycle and flywheel were packed as well well as bars, restaurants, clothing stores, and coffee shops. Apparently, there was this line out the door at this East Hamptons restaurant called Mary's, as well at Starbucks. And then there was another case

where there were a couple of restaurants that were so overcrowded that the police had to come in and thin them out. Wow. Not the way I would have done it, but... I would have used those glock nines they're using surgical masks as napkins yeah also there's a southampton hospital which uh is i think the only hospital that serves the area and only has 125 beds uh only eight are icus and people who work at the hospitals are really afraid that those are just going to get overloaded immediately um that the hamptons have nowhere near the hospital capacity even per capita

that manhattan does which is what everyone fled from it's older also it's older yeah the people there are older yeah the locals are generally older uh in the hamptons you know a lot of uh i mean it it's a lot of people who live there year round they're just working class people whether they're people who run all the restaurants and hotels or just fishermen like you know old old long island fisher people yeah i mean you know these type of towns exist all around the country where it's like a sleepy town where rich people hole up in various seasons um if you're from the pacific northwest sun valley idaho is similar to uh the hampens and that it's a popular ski destination for the rich elite also listen i don't mind if you've

been to sun valley but you if you know people that go there regularly they're pieces of shit there's no real ifs ifs ands or but about this no the only people i know that go to sun valley spend more on dumb shit than any other people that i know and you know we talk about the neuroses of billionaires hoarding wealth this is a perfect example of how when people that maybe not be billionaires, but are certainly a part of the elite, since even the slightest amount of panic, they're ransacking grocery stores and then partying like fucking idiots. Like people that watch,

you know, a fucking, you know, fast food documentary and immediately get all the groceries. And then a week later it ends up going to waste and they're going to subway and stuff. But there was a tweet from Eugene V dabs and she talked about a bunch of rich people from la and seattle flew fled slash flew up to their vacation homes in sun valley idaho now that county has more

confirmed cases than the rest of the state combined despite being the most isolated and rural there's one icu bed in that town. And this was March 20th, 2020. So this was two days ago. But I mean, the rich are acting like the idiots that we've always known them to be. And just because it's a pandemic, it doesn't mean that things have changed. Yeah, yeah.

The last line in this article is, it's kind of a silver lining. And it's that like, at least like, even though the rich are fucking everyone over um there's a quote which is i see the bartenders and the waitresses the people out of work volunteering to feed the elderly we don't really see that from the types of people hoarding supplies but i guess that's to be expected so you know even even in this the horrible situation there's at least community solidarity amongst the working class. One last thing I'll mention about when I was in Salt Lake City for that wedding I went to,

at one point they had a luncheon that was catered by a Mexican restaurant. Or it was a woman that runs a taco truck, I think. But she said she had to go to three different stores for black beans. And me and my wife were talking about it. It's so interesting. She had to go to three different stores for black beans. And'm like yeah well she didn't have to go to that many for pinto beans because the people that can afford to hoard grocery food right now are also the people that are like black beans are healthier than pinto beans so i'm gonna get black beans instead

why does it gotta be black fuck you got me something i wanted to mention that we don't that we don't really we haven't really talked about is that uh with regards to you know the hamptons and florida and all these places is that once you're rich enough you actually don't have to deal with the fact that there is a summer and a winter you just go to the whatever place the weather is best all season. So they actually do only get two seasons. And this is what we see is now the less well-off residents of their vacation towns are the ones paying the price. And it is fucked up because it's like when they are sick

and they get on the LIRR, who is going to be first in line for the ventilators? It'll be the fucking rich you know when they start triaging in u.s hospitals it's not going to be rich people they're putting on their little death panels it's going to be the poor yeah it's like there are reports now of hospitals um at least claiming that you know they're on the verge of going bankrupt from being overloaded by everything and of course course, once financial concerns really get... Once the financial pressure of a privatized health system really starts kicking in,

you're going to see that financial pressure manifest in life or death situations. Something I wanted to mention also today, Andrew Cuomo, of course, famed socialist Stalinist governor of New York, tweeted out and said in a press conference his support for nationalizing the medical supply chains in this country. And the reason he said that is something very horrifying people should be aware of, is that New York State and other states are actually engaged in a bidding price war to get medical supplies right now. Because of our privatized medical supply chain, all these states are, you know, bidding each other up just to get, you know, masks and gloves and whatever for health care providers. And the only solution to that is nationalize the medical supply chains, which is why Andrew Cuomo is supporting it. But, you know, I mean, it's horrifying to think about that the Trump administration might just go all the way down with this thing or just like not care if it kills people in blue states and maybe, you know, belatedly do the thing after it's a month too late.

So we'll see. But, you know, it does just tell you about the fact that people like andrew cuomo are even endorsing this policy now yeah it doesn't change the fact that he's a shit bag that he happens to have like a somewhat coherent answer on a supply chain mismatch for masks and ventilators and stuff right he was also saying that he's going to start asking companies to try and retool so they can make ventilators and pay for those. Yeah, did you see that there were those guys who figured out how to 3D print crucial ventilator attachments? Oh, yeah.

Oh, maybe we already talked about this. I don't know if we brought up on the show you might as well finish my show now oh yeah yeah and the companies were uh who make them who jacked up the price of course were threatening to sell to sue them for about ten thousand dollars um because someone figured out how to easily mass produce a crucial life-saving technology in a way that didn't allow them to reap massive amounts of profit from it. Fucking scum. I might be wrong on this, but I believe that the people

who are patent trolling and trying to sue bought that patent from Theranos out of bankruptcy. So this is just one more blessed legacy our good friend Elizabeth Holmes is leaving with us. Theranos-tainer. I haven't seen her and I haven't seen Biden. Yeah. Also the leading Democratic presidential candidate, as of this recording, is missing and presumed dead. Maybe by the time this comes out, he will actually be dead. We don't know.

I want a dead guy to win. I want us to have a necrocracy like in Warhammer. You're just ruled by a dead emperor. Biden has said, or his team has said, they will be doing an address Monday the 23rd at 1130 a.m., exactly when you do it, when you want all eyes to be on such a thing. But we'll see how that goes. Yeah. It was really funny that all of his defenders were like, actually, he did a press conference uh press conference call with the

media and of course no one has any video of it because they did not take video uh there's no audio because it was a private conference call probably because either they didn't want people to hear all of his senile ass responses to everything or the fact that he was coughing up half a lung every time he spoke they have one of the staffers do their best Biden impression? Did they use deepfake technology to fix it? Yeah. Maybe that's why they're taking so long. It's not that they don't have an internet connection at his house.

It's that they're trying to perfect the deepfake technology. They know all the comedians are out of work, so they just got a desperate LA impressionist who usually just does hacky Biden impressions on the road. And they're like, okay, so first we need you to do this conference call, and second, are you okay with getting plastic surgery? Some people will do anything to work in show business.

They hired a panel of road comic scientists to devise a new to devise a new biden fakery with our impressions combined they have to like workshop it they got the four biden body doubles and then they're like well we had the biden body doubles for protection anyway so they will just become the president where is joe biden where is that man oh here's uh breaking news this is where uh this is a quote of joe biden about a week ago i get corona i get corona at the end of the day i'm not gonna let it stop me from partying you know i've been waiting we've been waiting for miami spring break for a while about two months

we've had this trip planned you've been planning for miami spring break for a while. About two months we've had this trip planned. He'd been planning for Miami spring break for two months. He just didn't want to pass up the opportunity to go. Did you guys go on spring break? Y'all big spring breakers? No. What, as a kid? In college? No, I just sat at home.

My parents were like, we're not taking the time off from work. You're not going anywhere. Clean your room. Wow. So coronavirus is spring break for you all over again yeah yeah i mean this is how i've been spending quarantine is kind of how i used to spend my spring breaks nice yeah but now i'm playing uh left for dead instead of diablo 2 i'm actually still playing diablo 2 it's a good game it holds. So do we want to move on to the senators now?

Oh, wait, wait, wait. Sorry, before, could I just mention the coin? Yeah, yeah, go ahead. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. One other thing that Congress is doing, or has done, is Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib has an innovative proposal to mint two $1 trillion platinum coins and then deposit it at the Treasury's account at the Fed. And that would allow us to do $2 trillion worth of spending without any debt. And she wants to basically use that spending to give everyone a debit card

that is preloaded with two thousand dollars a month and then it will be recharged with a thousand a month each month until this crisis is over now we've talked about this off mic but i i it i think it needs to be addressed uh because i am i'm all down for the two thousand,000 a month and all of that. But I cannot shake the fact that printing $2 trillion coins is very silly. Literally, cartoonishly, it was done on The Simpsons already silly. I understand how silly the coin sounds, but you know what's sillier?

All of, literally all of the Democratic proposals prior to the coin to deal with this problem because they all involve some combination of either it's not enough or it's not enough dollar amount. It's going to the wrong place, such as corporate America. Or it has useless budget balancing means testing things.

I agree with all of that. But I also can't shake the fact that it doesn't seem like there actually need to be coins. Because the coins themselves can never be used as currency like they they they fundamentally fail as a means of exchange because like say someone steals it like they're never going to be able to use no one's going to be able to walk into a bank and be like i'd like to set up a one trillion dollar account with this coin that's not that i uh that i earned well i mean the reason the whole reason it's a coin in in serious in actual seriousness is there's a legal provision that allows the the treasury to tell the mint to mint they can mint current commemorative coins that have whatever face

value you want and so usually that's just made for like 20 like whatever like right uh so actually the infomercials celebrate the bicentennial or something uh but oh those are legal currency yeah it doesn't actually say what the limit is so you can do a one trillion dollar one and then you can just have that in the treasury's general account wait is this the franklin mint that's making these it's the u.s mint okay and so the reason it has to be a coin basically is because it the rule says you can only do coins okay so it's not necessarily the economics that's stupid but the law in the books that. Yeah. The law is stupid, but the situation of asking how to pay for this or that is stupider. Right.

And the coin shows that. Can I just say, like Andy gestured at, there have been some concerns on Twitter that the trillion dollar coin will be stolen. And I just want to promise right now, if they mint the trillion dollar coin, I will defend the trillion dollar coin. I will keep tabs on george clooney at all times he's not getting anywhere near that thing i will protect the trillion dollar coin america just let me do it just admit that damn coin i want the trillion dollar coin and i

you know what i'll um obviously sean you gotta sleep. So I will take the alternating alibi shift for 50% of the, let's say, guarding fee. Somebody has to be watching the vent that's directly above the coin and where it sits on a pedestal in the middle of a laser room. Okay. Now I'm just imagining you bring the trillion dollar coin into Pawn Wars and he's like, yeah, I'll give you 75 bucks for it. It's the best I can do. Yeah, 75.

All right, you know what? If you sign now, I'll give you 100. No one can make change for it. So if someone stole it, obviously they can't use it to buy anything directly. Yeah, I mean, if you look at the estimates, sometimes there will be these infographics on how much, like, a million dollars looks out of printed $100 bills, which is like the highest denomination you can print on a bill. And it's like, and then it's a billion dollars and it's like all these crates. And it's like to get change for a trillion dollar coin, you would probably need multiple shipping containers.

Yeah. Uh, I don't, I don't even think Fort Knox has 1 trillion worth of gold in it. Well, no, cause they, uh,

stole it away at the, at the dead of night, uh, 80 in it. Well, no, because they stole it away at the dead of night 80 years ago. Speaking of, I mean, how about that Rand Paul after his dad said it was a hoax? Oh, yes. Rand Senator Rand. Yes. Senator Rand Paul tested positive for coronavirus or as I like to call it, the coronavirus violated his non-aggression principle he can't even settle territorial disputes one last thing i want to mention

about the trillion dollar coin i'm okay with them producing it but who gets to be on the trillion dollar coin my first thought was see montgomery burns i mean the concept came from the simpsons put him back on it. And then I thought maybe John D. Rockefeller should be on the coin. And I don't know. Steven, what do you think? Ever since Trump got elected, I have always held to the belief

that if the Treasury told Trump that his face would be on it, he would mint it. I'll take that compromise. That's a good one. What if they went with alph though i do think the best thing to put on the trillion dollar coin would be the all-seeing illuminati eye just to fuck with people but wait you mean the one that's already on all of our currency right exactly it should be that just the eye but then yeah just truck nuts just the biggest truck nuts

and then on the left ball is the u.s flag and on the right ball the p-o-w-m-i-a flag so we've got to respect the veterans so illuminati eye with truck nuts hanging from it and we just get all aspects of american society in one coin that's right it's graphic design by committee for you uh but i i did just want to say i i very much support uh the trillion dollar coin idea i think you know essentially uh ubi like you start out with 2000 and a debit card then you get a thousand a month ubi i think that's the only way to to really solve this and i hope rashida talib's proposal is taken seriously by the Democrats and at least passed through the House. I mean, we'll see about that. But I did just want to ask you, Stephen, because I do see people kind of on Twitter, either concern trolling or maybe they just they do believe that this will cause hyperinflation.

So I was wondering if you could assuage people's fears about hyperinflation from the government minting $2 trillion without borrowing it. Well, all right. So when you hear the word inflation, what do you think? When I think of inflation? What do you think it means? Allons. Increases in prices, generally. Okay. A general rise in prices. So it doesn't mean there's more money. It means there's higher prices. So what would minting one coin and then depositing somewhere safe at the treasury, how would that translate into higher prices? that if there's a massive flush of cash in people's pockets, which obviously this would not be

since it's just replacing the cash that is no longer in people's pockets. But I guess the argument is that if suddenly everyone has more money, then the demand is going to go up and that's going to increase inflation. But of course, we've already talked about how inflation is driven by supply and not demand.

Yeah, yeah. So, I mean, I was just, I've already talked about how inflation is driven by supply and not demand. Yeah. So, I mean, I was just, I was starting at what is inflation because I think a lot of people when they hear it, they say like, oh, that's when there's too much money. But actually, the real definition is it's a rise in prices. So, a price is being inflated. So, then the obvious question to ask is like, if we make this coin and then we deposit it, how does literally just that act translate into higher prices? And then you kind of get stuck because there's no... What is the sequence of events that transpires to make prices go up? You can't really think of one, so there probably won't be one. So the key to dealing with uh twitter trolls is to use the

socratic method until they rage quit yeah something like that but like we want uh if they're wondering about inflation as far as like when people have the debit cards and they start spending again prices will rise well i mean we want people to spend more. That's the whole point of this. Yeah, yeah. Because there's a hole that needs to be filled in aggregate demand. And once people have these cards, they can go and spend again. It'll help pay their rent, pay for shelter, food, medicine, stuff like that, that they otherwise wouldn't be able to yeah one one thing that is being like teased but hasn't been actually enacted as of course but is necessary as a rent freeze because you know nothing exposes a more useless like aspect of the economy than a crisis and i mean nothing's more useless than like the astronomical rents that people in cities are paying right now like it's it's clearly just this big money hole in everyone's pockets and um for you know for value it's just going into

a passive income of people who are already extremely wealthy and so it yeah like i'm not i'm not even the biggest fan of ubi, but I agree that having a universal basic, at least temporarily, would be a great response to help people pay their rent and get what they need to hunker down in this quarantine. Well, I'm saying they shouldn't even have to pay their rent once. There should be a national rent freeze. Oh, yeah. Yeah. I mean, that would be even better yeah because if you have the debit cards and you're paying people okay you've increased their inflows but what if

their outflows are the same or greater yeah what if people start trying to gouge them because they have these cards all of a sudden yeah so you have to do things like rent freeze and like uh suspend debt payments at the same time hopefully this is the crisis that pops um the metropolitan uh housing bubble that has been fairly obvious for you know decades now just skyrocketing rent prices in the cities largely because of people sitting on these um uh luxury condos and just the hopes, just on the belief that the rent prices will keep skyrocketing, which they have been,

but hopefully something like this will finally destroy that insanity and maybe get housing prices down to something actually reasonable. Well, if you saw that Airbnb host who posted that video on Twitter

raging against Airbnb for not honoring a cancellation policy, within that thread, it showed a large percentage of homes, I think it was in Denmark maybe, that have now gone up for sale because Airbnb owners that were like, I'm just going to rent this out and make money on it, are like, oh, fuck, I can't do that anymore.

So that bubble that you're talking about is bursting as we speak. Nice. Yeah, Airbnb hosts are fucked. I did see that, yes. I forget where it was, but something like 64% rental properties increased by 64% because all these Airbnb short-term rentals were coming back on the market. Well, it's one of those things where, you know, yeah, there's this idea that somehow Silicon Valley tech has improved our lives so much that they can never be disdainful

to the base that seems to supply their product. And yet it's like, no. No, they're going to turn their back on you immediately, you fucking mook. You don't understand that what they're going for is profit, not fucking customer appreciation. But alas, something we've talked about a lot on this program is who benefits when bad things happen. And we're certainly going to continue looking at

that with regards to the coronavirus. And certainly the people who seem to have benefited the most, at least at the immediate term, are the actual members of Congress. You know, the people we trust to protect us and pass laws in our best interest and keep us safe seem to, a lot of them, be dumping their portfolio and or investing in very prescient investments. And we'll just talk a bit about a few of those cases here because I think it's instructive. And I hope this scandal doesn't go away because it is a scandal where you have, you know, five senators who are making kind of suspicious stock transactions after they were getting these coronavirus briefings. Well, okay, so the seventh rule of acquisition of the Ferengi is keep your ears open.

And I think that certainly rings true to this situation. It's true. You don't want to waste a good crisis. Yes, yes. And, you know, prices for stocks and shit are falling, so. But yes, and, you know, another thing we talk about a lot on this show is the people who make money in the stock market are not necessarily any smarter than you. They just have access to better information. So, you know, kind of the main person in this scandal is Senator Richard Burr of North Carolina.

He's the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee. He gets the briefings by the CIA and every other intelligence agency being like, these are the upcoming threats to America. He gets these classified briefings and the guy dumps between like six hundred thousand and one point seven million dollars worth of stock in the days following a January 24th classified Senate briefing with Trump administration officials on the coronavirus. So this is, again, two months ago now, and Richard Burr dumped stock, but also James Inhofe, Republican Oklahoma Senator, Diane Feinstein, Democratic California Senator, Kelly Loeffler, Republican Georgia Senator, and then lastly, homa senator diane feinstein uh democratic california senator kelly loffler republican georgia senator and then lastly david purdue republican georgia senator he also bought and sold stocks so he's not as as clear but i do like i think his case is more just like everyone else

was fuck this i'm out of the stock market whereas he's like yeah let's see if i can ride this thing let's let's go in and out of some stuff. But those are the five senators. Yes, the 110th rule of acquisition, exploitation begins at home. But so it was ProPublica that broke this original story about Richard Burr, and then other people started going through these kind of Senate stock disclosures. And then there's a Politico article I'll mention that talks about a couple Congress people and some aides to senators, like Mitch McConnell's, one of his aides, got in on this. But basically, under the Stock Act, this bans Congress people from trading on insider information. This was passed under President Obama. Interestingly enough, Senator Richard Burr was one of the few people to vote against it. But so it is illegal. The

Stock Act bans them from trading on insider information. And essentially, all of them are going with the same cover story, which is, we have our assets in a blind trust. We didn't touch this. We have money people who handle our money. And, you know, so I think first we should just kind of explain to people what a blind trust is and then move on from there. I think the best person to explain what a blind trust is would be American Senator from Utah, Mitt Romney. The blind trust is an age old ruse, if you will, which is to say, you can always tell the blind trust what it can and cannot do. You give a blind trust rules.

Wow, that was a surprisingly frank assessment from Mr. Romney. Yeah, so nearly every senator and congressperson is going to say that, well, I have a blind trust. I don't make any trading decisions. I just, all I do is disclose what they do later. Well, the 188th rule of acquisition is not even dishonesty can tarnish the shine of profit. I think there, obviously there are ways to game the blind trust system. So you can have someone that you don't, you can have someone as the trustee

who's making decisions that you later go and talk to off the record. So that's a common way to get around it. You can have what's called a discretionary trust, which I think Trump got kind of called out on as sort of like a half-blind trust, where he had, like like family members running it and stuff i mean when it comes to jim inhofe you know he describes that there was a meeting in late january where uh people were being tipped up if you will but he was not at that meeting

because he was at a pro-life rally and pro-his-life. But, you know, I have followed Senator Inhofe for a few years because there's an organization called SHARK, Showing Animals Respect and Kindness. And in 2017, SHARK was a team that helped ban pigeon shoots in Oklahoma that Jim Inhofe was running at the time. If you look at animal corruption in this country, I mean, arguably around the world, but specifically animal corruption around this world when it comes to abusing animals, you find ties within local authorities and the police and the sheriff to the politicians that are funding the operations

almost every time. So whether it's the dairy industry or the meat industry, it doesn't matter. If animals are being abused, the politicians in power are directly benefiting from the abuse. And so it took Shark about five years, one of the years their drone got shot out of the sky by one of the guys shooting at them. And I mean, the individual at Shark Steve Hindi, and I highly recommend you check out all of their videos on YouTube and all their content, but he basically is like, listen, I don't give a fuck if you want to hunt.

If you want to go out in the woods and stalk something and kill it and eat it, that's fine by me, but these pigeon shoots, they're just throwing pigeons in the air and killing them mercilessly, and they're not even doing anything with the carcasses. They're just letting them there to rot. And in one article I found that I will link on Reddit, it talks about the people at the pigeon shoots were joking, saying that we're going to use the pigeons to feed the homeless population in Tulsa, Oklahoma.

So these are criminal monsters, and Senator Inhofe is a part of this thuggery. Shark really needs to, I mean, I admire their mission, but they really need to work on their tactics. Sending a flying drone to spy on people using shotguns, probably, I don't know what they were expecting to happen. Oh, man. Like, I stumbled upon them because I was watching a whole bunch of First Amendment audit videos for a long time. And, you know, the best First Amendment audit videos are when it's, like, involved with people who are actually trying to stop corruption from happening. So the local police departments would be like, we saw that you were flying a drone up there. Did you get permission from the property?

And they're like, it's not the property that has air permission. It's the faa you can legally fly a drone and like i don't know about that we're gonna use these are proper you know so it's it's that type of video that's on a lot of sharks uh content but i mean they've done great job in stopping abuse against um all animals around the country i mean like and just the dumbest shit like in wisconsin I think in 2016, they had, like, a pig mud wrestling thing that they stopped, because they had videos of, like, kids wrestling with pigs, and the pigs are pooping in the mud, and then people are in the,

it's just, like, idiotic animal abuse that's happening that Shark has stopped, but in those videos, you see the true evil of Senator Jim Inhofe, And although he may claim, oh, I've had nothing to do with this, you know, 700 to a million dollars worth of stock that mysteriously my advisors dumped before this pandemic happened, I'm just an old man. No, you're a fucking piece of shit, Jim. That actually, I remember seeing a news article.

I don't remember very well, but it might have been Wisconsin or Wyoming or somewhere where they actually passed a law that said it was legal to shoot down drones and the at the time i thought oh that's ridiculous you know i i for some reason i thought it was just something like oh i'm protecting myself in case the government gets too big but now i'm realizing oh it's just for these yahoos who were slaughtering pigeons and want to fuck up the animal rights drones of course yeah no and i like that james inhofe's excuse is that he wasn't at this meeting because he was at a pro-life rally like oh yeah you didn't you didn't send an aid to take notes i'm sure you knew what

was said at this meeting you fucking lying asshole oh yeah and it's it's like an excuse that could only exist you know 70 years ago i wasn't i wasn't at that meeting i couldn't have possibly heard what was going on there it's like word you couldn't get a motherfucker to send you an email or a fucking i message audio drop or you couldn't get a cat to take notes for you. But just to follow up on what Steve said about these blind trusts are really, and Mitt Romney said about these blind trusts are not blind at all. They receive instructions all the time. This is just an excuse these people are making.

I think the fairest way to resolve this, and something I think the public should demand, would be subpoena all these senators subpoena all the congressmen and people involved subpoena all the aides involved and subpoena their financial people subpoena the financial people and say why did you make these transactions did you ever talk to the senator or congressperson did you ever receive any information or instructions from them get a timeline get it all on the record and then you know let's find out because until that happens like uh richard burr is you know saying

they're going to do a senate ethics ethics committee investigation like this is a joke like this is mitch mcconnell is just going to like give him a little slap on the wrist and say yeah it was all above board and then that's the end of it so i do think something that it's it's mostly republicans but there are Democrats implicated here. And I hope people will just be like, if these people will not submit to subpoenas in an independent investigation, they should resign. And there's no ifs, ands, or buts about that. This is insider trading and misleading the public while profiting. Yeah, you need to subpoena the trust officers to really know what happened.

And you need to ask them, have you had any type of communication whatsoever with the senator or the congressperson? And then just go from there. On the other hand, the 202nd rule of acquisition, the justification for profit is profit. But just to go through a couple examples of these people misleading the public. So Senator Richard Burr, again, the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, he writes an op-ed on February 7th declaring, quote unquote, the U.S. is better prepared than ever before, unquote, to face the coronavirus epidemic. And then six days later, he unloads all this

stock. So he's, of course, lying through his teeth when he writes this op-ed for the public. And he also has, you know, a private meeting with a business group in North Carolina called the Tar Heel Club, where he says that this is like the 1918 epidemic. Yeah, I'll read his exact quote. There's one thing I can tell you about this. It is much more aggressive in its transition than anything that we have seen in recent history. It is probably more akin to the 1918 pandemic. And these Tar Heel Club membership costs between $500,000 and $10,000. And this group, apparently, companies involved in the Tar Heel Club donated more than $100,000 to Burr's election campaign in 2015 and 2016. So, you know, this is, sorry, according to ProPublica.

But the point here is that he's tipping these business people off. So not only is he selling stock, the business people who invested in him are probably selling stock as well. And this is what we mean when we say these people aren't that, they're not smarter than you. They just have better connections. They know what's going on. They're getting the classified briefings and they're trading on that information. And it's just disgusting that they're misleading the public at the same time and not doing their jobs protecting the public. Well, Sean, you say it's disgusting, but the 101st rule of acquisition, profit trumps emotion. I was going to say, and just one more example of this, Senator Kelly Loeffler, again, the Georgia senator, she sold her position around the same time and then shortly after tweeted out, quote unquote, Democrats have dangerously and intentionally misled the American people on hashtag coronavirus readiness. So this is around the time that coronavirus was a Democratic hoax.

And, you know, Trump was talking about this being a hoax. So they were all just kind of like following the leader while privately dumping their stocks because they knew shit was about to hit the fan. By the way, one last thing I wanted to add was that Theranos Company, Labrador Diagnostics LLC that's suing for the COVID-19 tests, that company is now owned by SoftBank. Masayoshi-san strikes again. Oh, man. Patent troll, come! Fucking Harvey Weinstein got got coronavirus ladies and gentlemen who would have thought that that would happen oh no now who's gonna make the independent movies coronavirus comes into harvey weinstein like so sir first of all i want to say i'm a big fan of

your work uh i love the blind side thank you for trusting Quentin Tarantino. You didn't put strings on him. You said you let the creatives create, and I like that about you. But we could go through a couple of these other Congress people involved as well. There's a Politico article by Katie O'Donnell and Megan Severness about some other people involved who haven't been as extensively reported on yet that I could go through. Before

we go to the Congress, can I do a Feinstein? Sure, yeah. The 94th rule of acquisition, females and finances don't mix. That's actually, it's good you should mention that, because Senator Dianne Feinstein, when she was

confronted about some stock sales around the time of the coronavirus briefing that amounted to between $1.5 and $6 million in stock in a company called Allogene Therapeutics um Feinstein defended herself uh this is from a Fox News article take it for what you will but uh they covered this and uh they said quote Feinstein defended herself in a series of tweets on Friday saying she has quote no control over her assets and the stocks in question were her husband's transactions. She said, quote, During my Senate career, I've held assets, all assets in a blind trust of which I have no control. Reports that I sold any assets are incorrect, as are reports that I was at a January 24th briefing on coronavirus, which I was unable to attend.

Sheila goes on. Under Senate rules, I report my husband's financial transactions. I have no input into his decisions. My husband in January and February sold shares of a cancer therapy company. This company is unrelated to any work on the coronavirus and the sale was unrelated to the situation when questioned by the newspaper a spokes a spokesman for the democrat from san francisco also said feinstein wasn't directly involved in the sale he said quote all of senator feinstein's assets are in a blind trust the spokesman tom mensler told the times she has no involvement in her husband's financial decisions so just like

you have you have a family you can have family members be the trust officer for these things so like you you someone you live with and have you know dinner conversations with you know oh i have no control i have no control over what my spouse does it's actually sexist if you uh say that diane feinstein was insider trading because she is not responsible for the actions of her husband it's so funny like we've already been over this with hillary clinton that's just like freaking stupid they think we're they think we're idiots and we don't see what's happening it's so funny because yeah like her excuse is oh my husband handles the money like okay so i'm in the senate and then i get told that a deadly pandemic is about to wipe out several hundred million people uh i'm gonna

not tell my spouse about that yeah i'm just gonna keep that one to myself. I'm not going to mention the 1918-level pandemic coming our way. Yeah, it's only believable if, and this is plausible, you believe that Dianne Feinstein has such a terrible marriage that they just don't talk. Right, and that actually ties into the other one is Kelly Loeffler, again, the Georgia senator. She was on Tucker Carlson on Friday. He did kind of a he he grilled her enough. So it didn't look like he was going easy on her. But he mostly just accepted what she was saying, whereas Tucker Carlson, it should be noted, has called for Senator Richard Burr to resign. So probably what's going to happen is they're going to have Richard Burr resign.

And then, you know, he'll be the fall guy for this. They don't want to have four Republicans go down. But Kelly Loeffler is kind of a similar situation where her husband is actually the chairman of the New York Stock Exchange. So they have a net worth of about $500 million approximately. And, you know, I saw people on Twitter say something to the effect of, you know, oh, they have all this money. They don't need to trade on inside information. But one thing we've, I think, proven on this podcast is that rich people are psychopathic hoarders of money. And, you know, even if they have $500 million, just that little adrenaline rush of getting that extra two or three million, they'll go for it.

So I absolutely believe that she traded on this. And I think there needs to be a full investigation. And she probably, you know, she made the same blind trust excuse, but, you know, her husband's chairman of the New York Stock Exchange. You have to imagine there was communication about the information she was receiving from these Senate briefings. What rule you got? Well, I was going to conclude this with the 59th rule of acquisition. Free advice is seldom cheap. Which I think these senators are definitely feeling right now.

Of course, even if a few of them do resign, I think you can expect the ones who do resign to be in states with Republican governors who are just going to put another Republican in there. When Romney said that you can give the blind trust rules,

he meant the rules of acquisition. Can I just say the creators of the Ferengi must be really grateful that George Lucas bailed them out from accusations of space antisemitism by just going so over the top with it. There's this episode there's a couple episodes on deep space nine with like the ferengi costumes are bad enough um like the actors are do well with it and the writers work with what they have apparently gene roddenberry came up with a costume but then there's one episode with the grand negus of the ferengi who's like the elder statesman and it looks like an ellie valley cartoon like

it's that it's just like the whole episode you're just tugging at your shirt collar like where he's like i'm not as great as i used to be and if you have if you can get past the overt racism it's that like frang have some of like the best characters. I don't know. In DS9. Yeah. I mean, well-written and very well-performed character. I don't have the name of the actor off the top of my head, but he does it.

He does a great job at like, you know, humanizing a character that's basically an encapsulation of capitalist greed. You just have to get past Gene Roddenberry's costuming choices. I like that episode where the Ferengi all got a call to not be at the space station the morning it blew up. But I wanted to, with the time we have left, just go through a couple other Congress people and aides implicated in this. And, you know, we'll kind of wrap up by summarizing here. But there's a Katie O'Donnell and Megan Savernis article in Politico. And off the top, I wanted to quote from this article, Meredith McGee is the executive director of the Watchdog Group Issue 1. And I'm just going to quote from her.

The reality is that if you work on the Hill or you work in government, you have information, access to information the public doesn't have. Or if they have it, they can't always see the signal through the noise. If you're on the HELP Committee, which is the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions, you're going to grasp threats much faster than the general public. You see through things much more, you see things much more clearly. And I think that's kind of obvious, but it's worth restating. You know, these people who are aides or congresspeople or senators on the right committees, they know what's coming, and it's kind of ridiculous that they're even allowed to own individual stocks. But just from the article, Congresswoman Susan Davis is a Democrat from California. Quoting from the article, she's a member of the House Armed Services and Education and Labor Committees.

Yeah, the three different committees, excuse me. She unloaded stock on February 11th in the airline and cruise industries, two sectors that have since been ground to a halt by the pandemic, nearly two weeks before the market tanked. Davis's spokesman said she has, quote, a third party handling her portfolio and does not play a role in the purchase and or sale of her stocks. Another one is Representative Scott Peters uh also a democrat from california on january 29th he was briefed uh along with others on the coronavirus shortly after that briefing the same day actually he sold between 500 000 and 1 million in municipal bonds he and his wife then moved over 2 million from local government bonds to treasury notes. So, of course, you know, whenever there's a crisis, people flee to treasuries. So this guy dumps out of municipal bonds and flees into treasuries

after right the same day he gets his coronavirus briefing. Man, should have stayed in munis. Now apparently the Fed is supporting municipal bonds, maybe. So, I don't know. That might have been the wrong call. Yeah. You know, sometimes you make all the right moves and you still get burned. And then just two more.

Scott Slothman is a top communications aide for Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell. He purchased stock in a company that would wind up being instrumental in the fight against coronavirus. It's called Moderna Incorporated, which is now testing the first vaccine for the disease in Washington State. So a senior comms aide to Mitch McConnell

bought stock in the company that's testing the vaccine in Washington State now. Well, you know, the 33rd rule of acquisition, it never hurts to suck up to the boss. And then lastly, Sarah Holmes is a New Hampshire-based state director for the New Hampshire Senator, Senator Janine Sheehan. And she sold between 1,000 and 15,000 worth of Delta Airlines stock on January 25th. Oh, my God. Oh, my God.

Hilarious. She also, after she dumped this, she made two purchases. She purchased between 15,000 and 50,000 of stock, each in two companies. The pharmaceutical company Jaleed Incoraleed incorporated which makes a drug that is currently being tested to treat coronavirus and the white manufacturer clorox oh so again lots of prescience i want one of the senators to just have like bought and or sold all of the really obvious ones. So he's like, he sold a million of like Hyatt and Marriott stock and bought into 3M, the maker of one of the masks. And he also sold all of the airline stock that he owned.

Well, actually, funny that you mentioned that, Steve, because the Kelly Loeffler story is pretty similar, where she and her husband dump out of basically all of their positions. They sold up to $3.1 million in stocks after this coronavirus briefing. And then, quoting from Atlanta Journal-Constitution, her and her husband made just two purchases after this dumping, both in companies whose software technology is now in demand, as Americans are forced to work from home to stem the rise of coronavirus. One of them was Citrix, the other was Oracle. And we talked about on the most recent premium episode about Citrix, they are also people

who do these telecommuting softwares. So they dumped $3 million of stock, and the only stuff they bought was telecommuting software companies, basically. What pieces of shit that clearly don't eat their partner's butts and mostly are selfish leeches that have strong-armed the American public into believing that their strength and ingenuity will save us when in reality it's the one thing causing us to remain in the oppressive society we can continue to live in. Well, I think we can all agree that the 162nd rule of acquisition, even in the worst of times, someone turns a profit.

That's pretty good, actually. Sean? I got a couple other things i did just want to mention james inhofe your favorite yogi uh so just an article in the hill by sylvan lane kind of goes through this james inhofe's excuse is that in december 2018 he says quote i instructed my financial advisor to move me out of all stocks and into mutual funds to avoid any appearance of controversy so his excuse is in december 2018 he told his guy to sell all the stocks and then a year later right after the coronavirus uh briefing that's when he decides to sell uh his stocks um yeah that dude's a scumbag seems hard to believe that he would completely get out of stocks there's like one quote from him where he like it's very detailed language but he says something

and the quote itself is like i told them i instructed them and the the weird distinction between told and instructed he needed to make clear in the quote which i found very interesting because if it's like senator inhofe told his advisors it's like oh that man's controlling everything but he's like he instructed them well he's just teaching them how to do things he's just a nice man no yeah that guy's a piece of shit fuck inhofe and fuck uh the rest of these senators that have uh continually fucked us well and we should just mention, you know, approximate net worths of these senators, you know, Inhofe, James Inhofe of Oklahoma is at about $8 million as of, I think, 2015. Dianne Feinstein's pretty richer.

She's at like $58.5 million. Kelly Loeffler, again, $500 million approximate. David Perdue, the other Republican from Georgia, between $15 and $42 million. But actually one of the poorest, quote-unquote poorest, members of the Senate is Richard Burr. So he dumps, again, they just disclose a range of how much they sold, but he dumps between $6 million and $1.6, $1.7 million. So he dumped basically his entire portfolio after this came up. And I guess it is just interesting

where he's insulating himself but he will probably be the fall guy for this but i just can't see him actually going to prison or facing real consequences unless there is actual public uproar which we're we're doing our part with this episode that's. We're the mouse that roared. With our Ferengi laws of power, we are teaching the people to demand better of their elected representatives. Rules of acquisition. And then I

did just want to mention David Perdue's kind of the not as clear cut case because he was buying and selling stocks. But from this Atlanta Journal Constitution article, he invested up to $240,000 in Pfizer, the pharmaceutical company. He also sold about $165,000 in stocks for Caesars Entertainment, the casino company, which, as you know, casinos are just getting totally wiped out.

Yeah, car counting's out of control but oddly enough i guess he points to he bought some shares of delta and disney that haven't been doing so well so i don't know if he was just trying to ride the wave or something but uh what does what does he know what does he know about the bailout uh but look his is not as clear cut but what, you know, all these cases we've gone through, this is just what we know. This is what we know from public disclosure forms. The only way to get to the bottom of this is to have a full independent investigation. So what I do think people should be calling for is every single person involved in this either needs to resign or allow and call for a totally transparent, independent investigation. Because this cannot go on. We cannot have senators and congresspeople and public officials and our employees as the public or whatever you want to call them,

we cannot have them insider trading against a fucking pandemic that is literally killing people. You know, they are getting getting and i can assure you now those senators will not do any of that they will fight this tooth and nail they should be they should be made to testify under oath before the senate banking and finance committee or something but and this i don't know if this is one of my controversial opinions or not, but what I personally believe is that grassroots rank-and-file Republican and Democratic voters, not donors, voters, the grassroots voters of both of these parties, do have common interests. They do have areas of overlap that they could unite on, which their leaders in Congress absolutely, under no circumstances, want them to do. And so something we talked about when we did the episode on Lebanon was the people out there chanting, everybody means everybody. You know, all of their political leaders of every party should resign.

That's what the crowds in Lebanon were chanting. Everybody should resign. Everybody means everybody. So what I would hope, and you know, I don't know if this will come to pass in the United States, but you know, if the fucking bodies are piling up and all the hospitals are overflown, maybe this corruption will finally strike a chord with people and we might get some sort of U.S. movement across parties, just regular people who are not the elites saying everybody means everybody. All of these fucking people have to resign because they're scumbags and they are profiting off misery and death and looking out for themselves not for you by the way in italy it's about a quarter of a 9-11 every day jesus christ you know during this coronavirus period i have become possibly the most insufferable

neighbor in that i've been playing my records all the way through and I learned that my amplifier picks up low frequency radio and because of that I learned that there's a Rage Against the Machine song, Testify, and at the end of that you can hear a K-pop song because it's Tom Morello's amp picking up that

radio signal. So that's what I learned after I listened to some Dunny hathaway that's right i got the good shit wait k-pop was on the radio when testify was being recorded i believe so yeah oh wow i thought that was a relatively recent phenomenon yeah tube amps can pick up radio frequencies i had no idea i could like hear that in the background what the fuck is this all i know is take the power back is pretty awesome. Yeah.

Pretty much any long enough wire can, if a wire is the right length, it'll pick up radio frequencies. Oh yeah. I learned that and I was like, Oh no wonder fucking old TV shows like Gilgan's Island were like, we're going to make a radio out of a coconut. And it's like,

Oh you, I didn't even know this thing was a radio. And it basically is. Yeah. Like, uh, this is is just this is a complete tangent but radio frequency any kind of electromagnetic frequency but like radio it's just moving it's it's like what light does is it kind of moves electrons back and forth or electromagnetic waves will do that and so if you have a long enough wire it'll move the things back and forth on the wire and that uh creates the radio signal please don't yell at me if i got some of the like nuances wrong but that's that's the gist of it i don't know enough to challenge you so yogi you know a useful thing you can do with that now is uh

listen in on police scanners because that will be very relevant in the next month or so sean you don't think my military surplus catalog days didn't involve me buying police scanners fucking cb radios i've got communications up the wazoo son you'll go through a big mash face he's got one of those like giant telephone things everybody everybody you have to stay in shape in your apartment so that you can put on a military uniform and blend in when the crackdown comes just like you're in hitman 2 just put on the dress and don't look too out of shape and they'll let you go through the checkpoint. I'm going to go into my old prop building phase from when I ran a show with Patak and just make the most believable looking M16 I can

to kind of blend in with the military just out of toilet paper tubes and cardboard. You know, when a lot of people were reading Neil Strauss' The Game, How to Pick Up Chicks, I was reading Neil Strauss' Emergency. This book will save your life. I've been preparing for a pandemic since 2009. Yogi, use your ham radio to get stock tips

from Feinstein's husband. All right. Sean, you clean? Steve and Andy, how are you all feeling? Is that everything? Yeah, I think so. Yeah, I think I'm about ready to round this out. All right.

Well, we'll see what the coronavirus does to our stock portfolios and our general well-being. And with that, this has been Grubstakers. I'm Yogi Poliwal. I'm Sean P. McCarthy. One last time, the senators are Diane Feinstein of California, James Inhofe of Oklahoma, Richard Burr of North Carolina, Kelly Loeffler of Georgia, David Perdue of Georgia. All must resign or submit to an independent investigation. I'm Steve Jeffers. I'm Andy Palmer. And remember, remain indoors, keep quarantined, stay healthy.

And if that's not enough, just remember the 15th rule of acquisition. Dead men close no deals. And this is my will and testament. So, Andy, you get my PS4 if this diarrhea takes me. Hell yeah. You can finally play Fortnite. You might have to fight Ross for it. I'll win.

Later. I'm small, but I'm scrappy. All right. Everyone stop your recorders.