It Could Happen Here - It Could Happen Here Weekly 13

Episode Date: December 11, 2021

All of this week's episodes of It Could Happen Here put together in one large file. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

You should probably keep your lights on for Nocturnal Tales from the Shadowbride. Join me, Danny Trejo, and step into the flames of fright. An anthology podcast of modern-day horror stories inspired by the most terrifying legends and lore of Latin America. Listen to Nocturnal on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. 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 going 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 maybe they don't always need to be falling apart maybe we could do better uh speaking of doing better you know one thing that sometimes helps us do better getting getting in the face of people fucking shit up and being like

hey that's not that's not cool don't be doing that garrison that's your lead-in take it from here yeah hi uh so we i've been i've been trying to keep better a better job of like 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. Yeah. I know the one in Canada, there's the – I forget what the actual indigenous group is called. Maybe someone else remembers.

Oh, the House of Saute? Saute? Yeah, the people who took back their land and blocked the road off. The Unist'ot'en. The Unist'ot'en and the Wet'suwet'en. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yes, thank you.

There we go. Yeah, basically taking their land back and blocking off the road, and now RCMP is getting called in, and we'll see how that develops. Yeah, and in Guatemala, there's protests against Canadian mining in a Maya indigenous community that have gotten pretty heavily militarized at this point. That's fun. There's a lot of stuff. 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 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. So 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 uh so very very thankful that they are going to be talking with us today so i thought we could 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 but kind of more broadly like if people listened to the earth first episodes you know that kind of that covered like Like if people listened to the Earth First episodes, you know, that covered like anti-pipeline stuff. We didn't really get much into like forest defense and, you know, like the traditional like 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. 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. 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 in the name of our forests, 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 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 aware, Oregon had unprecedented wildfires this year. And we had unprecedented wildfires last year. And we're 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 um and 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 were 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 Plan, because there's more protections for the forest. Fires are happening worse because we're not getting there, logging 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 total shit show yeah i mean i think this 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 they're they're going to try to find their own way to sneak in when all of this you know 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 yeah right it's it's you see this in every single industry and it's always it's it's gonna 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 too because they they cut down these trees in 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 um and that's also going to

get more common because that's how fucking climate change works. It's just like the comprehensive fuckery. Comprehensive fuckery. And let us be clear, too, that logging doesn't actually work to prevent wildfire. You know, even, 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. 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 and the like like it's it's actually hard to get in to look at this stuff um without you know breaking some sort of law technically which is not at all shady um yeah yeah i feel like that's another important thing and maybe cat can jump on too is just um basically i mean i think what people aren't understanding is that after the fires the these federal forest managers closed gates and essentially um are converting public land into private land by you know using the threat of violence to kick people out if they go onto 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 literally 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 bundies 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, too, because you're right. It in the northwest about timber unity and the like and like supporting the timber industry um by destroying like the single greatest gift this entire part of the world has uh it's it's pretty frustrating yeah frustrating 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 could probably do an ad break here. Because why not? All right. Yeah, everybody loves ads.

And we're back. Still talking about forced defense. I wonder, there's something that people should probably know before we go further about the way that Oregon works. So for a while, Oregon is a place where you can't get elected in a lot of populated parts of Oregon if you're a Republican. So the Republicans just play nice and pretend and like throw out some social justice-y language 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 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 – 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. 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 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. 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 dozen yards and then it's a clear cut. And they'll hide it so that it's not as obvious because they know it upsets people. So there's this kind of surprisingly

thorough campaign to do as much of this as possible without upsetting people, 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 you're going 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 does kind of that effort look like? You want to answer this one, Kat? 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?

Well, just 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, 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 the past couple of 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 were

like building community and solidarity in a positive way while fucking shit up i think that's the key and i mean where do you uh how do you like what is the let me think of a way to phrase this. What is kind of the next step here? Because they haven't started logging this area yet, but they're kind of doing like the pre-prep work. What do you think actually can be done to halt it? Like is it a – because it seems to me that 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 does the path forward look like to you? Yeah, so there's a preliminary injunction being forthed 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 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, too. Like what 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 too on like another reason why people are so pissed about this um 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. 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. So hence, you know, the Easter Massacre name. Um, but a ton of folks who, you know, still work in forest defense in the Spire region were there and remember that story and were with us, um, 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 Kat have been a part of efforts over the past 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 Service's grubby hands off of a bunch of old growth because our scrappy friends spent days exploring this watershed and documenting, doing like site-specific citizen science documentation and giving it to the Forest Service. And we fought them and won 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. it's never enough to win the first victory they're going to find some way to to to swoop around to

the flanks and try to take it away from you like they're doing right now um which is exhausting um it seems exhausting but uh it doesn't mean it you can ignore it it's fucking exhausting yeah what i always say is like our forest our federal management agencies they like suffer from this powerful amnesia where they just keep coming back with the same bullshit proposals. But our movement does not suffer from that. And we are just building power and getting stronger and getting more successful. So 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.

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 keep, keep 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. Kat 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 um but basically yeah you can follow us on twitter um and instagram and and please um 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 um 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 Ferrez of Ferrez Logging, or Ferrez 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 post-fire logging, which was just like crazy timing.

They kind of just like put it in our lap. And so we recruited from that action. We're 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 anarchy looking kids in the room. But we 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. We kept asking questions about, you know, the science says this, but you're

stating this. Where are you getting your science from? 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 um 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 uh the statistics don't back you up without citing statistics it's it's it's really the easiest way to do that. I guess I am kind of curious for like, you guys said you've prevented, you know, some of this stuff in the past by doing stuff like documentation. is not enough. This area does have a rich history of kind of direct action stuff to protect forests with, again, also like a mixed success. Like by no means does direct action always work to do anything, right? Now, we still have the Line 3 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 kind of more performative than anything else. You know, like it is kind of like a tree sit is about gaining media, media, like publicity, because they're going to get you down. Right. Like eventually. And it's 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 to reaching that kind of territory like it was in the 90s and 80s, where it is a lot of people blocking off roads and doing that kind of thing? Once it crosses into that, it's more autonomous. It's not 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 like actually physically physically preventing the logging of certain areas that's such a good question and um i'm really thankful that we're talking about strategy because um like 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 in the snow indefinitely,

you know, as we, you know, as they continue to try to log indefinitely. 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 that's waiting 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. Um, 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.

Um, and so typically, um, you know, we need a legal, there needs to be a legal element, um, 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 forest events in the spire region is other kinds of more, um, necessarily, you know, discrete kinds of direct action that, um, obviously, you know, I'm, um, not a part of speaking on this radio show, but, um, would, would publicly, publicly, you know, say like those things probably need to happen. And I hope they fucking happen. What I could say is that I've seen these things happening in other places, like in the Atlanta defending forest movement right now. I have seen

evidence that individuals not associated with any group are uh putting spikes and 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 like 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 is going to be scary right you're you you start doing that, that introduces certain things that is kind of more frightening to you as a person. 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 find these things. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think when it comes down to it, it's about knowing what your goal is with this tactic. In the action that happened this past week, there was an understanding that the goal was to 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 clear, 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 um 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 um and no one really knows what the hell they're doing um so definitely having those kind of things thought through beforehand is 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. We, yeah. And any other kind of historical notes on forest defense or any other kind of random tidbits you'd like to mention before we close out? The one thing that I feel like is 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 like forest defense is climate defense. Our forests are our best natural tool for fighting climate change. And also like we need them here. Most of Oregonians 80% get their drinking water from forested watersheds. Like they literally are sustaining all of us. And so, yeah, we hope folks join,

like not just for the sake of like being, you know, hippie tree huggers, even though, you know, some of us are, but also because like we need to survive as a people and as a planet. And forests are our best way to do that. It's the cheapest, most advanced form of carbon capture we have yet.

So yeah, it seems kind of asinine to chop that all down to build some shitty sheds. Mm-hmm. Alright. Well, that's a sowed. Welcome. I'm Danny Thrill.

Won't you join me at the fire and dare enter Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows presented by iHeart and Sonora. An anthology of modern day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America. From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters to bone-chilling brushes with supernatural creatures. I know you.

Take a trip and experience the horrors that have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time. that have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time. Listen to Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows as part of my Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. podcast. It's 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.

Because, yeah, they've come up on my radar in an unrelated matter. In a completely unrelated matter, yeah. So now we're going to talk about them. Yeah, so this is the show about things falling apart and kind of part of societal and political stuff kind of crumbling. Usually that gets related to some type of law enforcement agency more often than not.

Oh, yeah. In terms of like tensions rising and stuff. Sure. Because a lot of, you know, force gets exerted via law enforcement. And one such law enforcement. Yeah. And one such agency that does this is called the Washington State Patrol. Oh so they were them before i i don't know i just discovered them recently uh oh cool so they were founded exactly 100 years ago um and they were originally called the washington state

highway patrol um now they're just the was 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. Yay. When you think of Washington State Patrol, it's kind of shocking that they might have a race issue. with the 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 continue to search Native Americans at a rate much higher, more than five times than that of of of white people in the area.

Oh, yeah. So but there are five times as the popular there's five times as many indigenous people in Washington as white people, right? times as many indigenous people in Washington as white people, right? There's not. Oh. Oh. Yeah. Okay. 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 and contraband. Um, which is something the Washington state patrol actually acknowledges is that

when they search people of minority communities, they are less likely to find, to find, uh, illegal things. Yeah. I mean, that's yeah.

Nationwide and very, very robust data. So, um, government records obtained and very, very robust data. So government records obtained via like Freedom of Information requests and various other, you know, public records searches also show that there is a state law that Washington State Patrol is supposed to collect and report semiannually to the Criminal Justice Training Commission in Washington about, you know, race and ethnicity data of motorists stopped by troopers. But 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 mean. No, that's semi-decadely. So, yeah. So, yeah, based on responses for over 30 public records requests from from three different agencies looking looking at Washington State Patrol and more than like 50 interviews with current and former law enforcement officials and people with experience interacting with Washington State Patrol and, examined about 8 million traffic stops from 2009 to 2015. This is what Investigate West was doing, which was the most recent data available. And the analysis found that it focused on 22,000 incidents of what researchers called high discretion searches. That's when troopers had the most 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 Latinos and 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, you know, like, regular, like, actually observable traffic violations. This is when, like, 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 um i don't know what they mean by that spokesperson i don't know what they mean is they're more likely to be searched regardless christ brutal what what yeah who who is that bad at checking the copy which is weird because later on the spokesperson said that same person same guy

we're in a basic agreement that minorities are searched at higher rates but we find less contraband so oh good at least they admit it he also noted that complaints about a racial bias accounted for little more than 10 percent of all complaints of the state patrol filed last year. So I guess he thinks that's a good 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 it encounters a reservation at Olmec, about a mile from its intersection at State Road 155, and more than 130 miles south of when the same highway enters another reservation. So nearly one-third of high-discretion searches, so when troopers can decide whether or not to pull someone over, 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 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 the first unsurprising tidbit about an organization who started as a highway patrol is, yeah, they're going to pull people over who are not white more often. That's pretty not super shocking. They're going to be psyched to do that. Yeah. And then make a public statement like, LOL, yup. Yeah, that does sound a lot like what the Washington State Patrol sounds like.

So that was the first obvious thing. This next part's a little bit more fun. So in 2009, the Washington State Patrol made the decision to fire eight troopers, which is pretty rare. And the reason why they got fired is because they used fake diplomas to claim pay raises. Yeah. So there was this whole scheme about getting fake diplomas to get the troopers more money, like individual people. There's this whole this whole operation going on it resulted in uh in innate innate people getting fired so troopers can can boost

their pay about two percent by earning a two a two-year degree or four percent with a four-year degree and there was this group of uh of troopers who just uh 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, like you're going to become. That is what I've tried to do.

They could have just gotten that religious PhD. There's all sorts of fake diploma mills. Come on, Washington State Highway Patrol. You can do better. this is pretty funny so yeah 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 um oh yeah speaking of funny here's these ads that may or may not be the people we're talking about probably no unrelated

unrelated ah we're back which is also unrelated. Yeah. Another thing that's been pretty common around police is that the past few years, they generally don't think COVID is really real. I hate that it is the past few years now. 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's real. And also they think vaccines are the mark of Satan or something. Yeah, well, obviously they are. Yeah. Obviously, they are. But yeah. So in in in mid-October, this this past October, Washington State Patrol announced that one hundred and twenty seven of its employees lost their job after the state 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, 67 troopers, six six sergeants and one captain um right yeah so you know washington state patrol has about 2 000 personnel within like between like eight districts um so losing like 127 of them is not a is not an insignificant loss um no and it's it's been a it's it has been trying to hire a lot more people in the, in the past, in the past, like a few months because of this, they've been, they've been trying to do a lot more recruitment, which is why they're, um, I I've heard from other people that they are putting, uh, uh, 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, 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. I mean, unless you want to like really fuck with people who live on a reservation. If that's 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. That is something I think might be. Freedom is what makes this nation great. So I think, know uh uh the choice anyway continue garrison i'm gonna send a picture inside our group chat first because we're gonna be talking about one one specific evil uh 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 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, no. What is wrong with it? 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 feels like a hate crime towards the Weasley family. So, yeah, it feels like a hate crime towards the guy based off Tucker Carlson in Starship Troopers.

So this is to be a big fan of Ron Ron Weasley's family. 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 a thousand officers in the United States who lost their badges over a six-year period for sex crimes or misconduct such as like uh this is this is a quote here which i disagree with framing here uh but this is this is a quote propositioning citizens or having consensual but

prohibited on-duty intercourse which is uh a pretty bullshit way to frame that because basically you're it's it's police raping people. And police officers being accused of using their power over people to rape them is extremely common. Yeah, and it's often just like, yeah, well, the 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. There's a lot of consent yeah you i would argue you can't consent uh to sex with a police officer who's on duty and in uniform

because it's or who have the power to murder anybody they want or or who just arrest you like like it's a lot of stuff so like there was a study released a few years ago uh that analyzed data of like 550 arrest cases from the years of 2005 to 2007 so this is just two years and uh and of 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's it happens a lot with minors.

So there's a lot like like more like a ridiculously common like if you if you Google this, which I honestly don't recommend. But you can find like dozens of stories coming out. 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 including Sean Carr. Now, Sean Carr's case is particularly sensitive for the agency because he was married to the 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 chief. And Sean Carr was also himself a sergeant. So he was connected to

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

described three incidents where car did uh uh push the boundary and she she she has described being raped by him multiple times yeah um so there was 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 car oral sex.

Oh God. Cool. Great guy. Car later told investigators that he said this in a quote, joking context. Oh, that's the, you know,

I was thinking, cause that's almost exactly my, uh, my tight five for my standup set. I mean, some, 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 um the woman said that she did like uh like see to his his like commands and she's which he said

were like very much not gun and was a cop yeah and she said it was very much not consensual um she she told investigators that he raped me on the side 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. And if it was anyone else besides Carr, she said she would have called 911. So the second time happened when a car backed her into a corner of a highway station and forced her to have sex with him. She called it a coerced car said that consent was mutual so sure despite the sexual assaults uh and and like and you know and and like assaults you know like you know grabbing someone's arm hard enough to leave a bruise uh she said the woman said she kept in touch with car because she was going through a difficult time in her life and

she needed somebody to talk to yeah 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 such a real, real motherfucker. It's not simple. Yeah. Car may not have gotten in trouble had the woman not confided in another patrol employee after she left her job. had the woman not confided in another patrol employee after she left her job um then the other other patrol employee mentioned the situation to someone higher up triggering an investigation

um and then in 2019 the woman formally reported car to uh to to like the patrol office of professional standards so records show that the patrol pretty quickly confiscated car's badge and gun and placed him on home assignment where he remained until he resigned voluntarily. The patrol 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. including using a taser on a drunk driving suspect who was handcuffed. 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 he was also stalking this barista is what it sounds like. Um, yeah. Yeah, that's that is what that sounds like. Pretty terrifying. So, yeah. So car after the woman told investigators that she was raped after 2019, um, uh, the, uh, the, the county sheriff's recommended charges be filed, but she wasn't

willing to testify. She did not want to do that. But she did tell prosecutors that she did have one wish, that Carr, again, the son-in-law of the state patrol chief, be 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, did admit to a consensual sexual relationship on duty, as well as other, you know, like patrol regulation violations. He resigned in July 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. And to be certified, a 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 quote. Under the color of authority as a peace officer. That's the quote. 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 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 doing... 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've decertified like 230, and 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, 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. Yeah. discussing the actual like assaults and rapes um yeah so the the uh the the sheriff's county prosecutor's office uh designed declined to pursue charges on the case last year when the woman was unwilling to testify but the uh the the deputy prosecuting attorney um uh did say that she she believed they just happened like 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 Shankar. So yeah, he is not allowed to police as of May of 2021. That is a cursory 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, if you want to join the patrol, you have to go through a psychological screening. Sure, that makes sense. And he just resigned because 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, where is it, 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 are they?

They're letting in a lot more white candidates than they are letting in candidates of color. So 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. Yeah. 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, Curb It. Oh, 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 kind of fun. That's their logo? That is their current logo. Did they design it in, like, paint?

Yes. They probably did design it in MS Paint. Oh, man. Yeah, that looks like it belongs on an Angel Fire website. Garrison, do you know what Angel Fire was? I do not. Oh, my God. You fucking teenagers um 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 like it 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. Oh, man, Garrison, you did it. What a good feeling. You did it.

Well, 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. Great. There we go. I'm imagining the primary psychological screening is, you're white, right? That is what it used to be. I mean, I'm imagining that's what it's going to be still,

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

Welcome. I'm Danny Thrill. Won't you join me at the fire and dare enter? Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows, presented by iHeart and Sonora. An anthology of modern-day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America. From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters to bone-chilling brushes with supernatural creatures.

I know it. Take a trip and experience the horrors that have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time. Listen to Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows as part of My Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app, 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. overnight and disappear because it was really just being run by a guy in macedonia and he was just a rug pull the entire time and you lose your life savings and you have no recourse and 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 Here, a 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 and the endeavor to create art. Well, art is a broad, broad term. I mean, I said the endeavor to. 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 nut of the article is, and there have been a couple of other articles on this guy. His name is Alex Masmesh, 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 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 yeah yeah dollar sign alex is like the name

of the token which are basically shares they 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 percent 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 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 use you can find other interesting fascinating

articles about this this idea which is like human beings tokenizing their future earning potential um in order to uh raise money um and and it's uh the way this is usually sold is a good thing in fact i should probably just read a quote from this from this Atlantic article to give you an idea of how Masmesh 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 Masmesh 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. had sold dollar sign Swift to her biggest fans. 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, like, I find unsettling there.

One of them is the idea that, like, yeah, the fact that I was a fan of someone earlier means I should get some sort of reward for it. Like, I should be treated differently because I liked it earlier, which you might recognize,

like, the thing that everybody has been shitting on for, like, fandoms for years now. Like, it's been a huge thing. We're like, yeah, you're being an asshole. If you're,

if you're talking about like, 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. Like that's, we all recognize that as like toxic. But the, the whole argument of this article is that like,

no, this is how the entire future of creativity should work. Yeah. I find unsettling. And it it also it also ties into like a really concerning development in parasocial relationships of like oh god yeah like invest in someone to buy a conversation with them in like this really weird way um and the fact that young artists are going to be pressured into this kind of thing is really uh scary yeah because there's like one of the things mass mesh did as like um uh as an experiment was like allow people who had bought his tokens to make life decisions for him like 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 like well none of this is binding, right? Like I might do what they say, but like I'm not going to do anything crazy or whatever. But also this is like the first iteration of this. And I like this Atlantic article, which I think is unhinged for reasons we'll get into, but it's purely talking about like, look at this incredibly successful person. Imagine if they'd gotten to be incredibly successful using this method instead, and it might have like spared them this thing. But what I keep thinking about is like, okay, well, the vast majority of people, like there's

no reason to invest in them. Like, yeah, 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 like people just buy shares and poor people to make them do fucked up shit yeah it's like how would you not how would that not be where it goes yeah that's that that's the only way that this is going to get like used on a large scale is these young people just selling themselves people are going weird way people are going to use the Ether blockchain to like crowdfund and crowd cast a new jackass, basically. Like it's going it's not going to be like a thousand Taylor Swifts all tokenizing themselves. It's going to be like millions of people in the global south issuing tokens to like vote on whether they roll down the hill in a barrel or in like a a fucking porta potty like i it's just it's a nightmare to me to contemplate people actually adopting this you know there's there's a lot of really like the thing i think is the most incredible part about this is that like okay so like it basically doesn't matter what like economic theory you use to look at it it's like every single one of them tells you something just like absolutely fucked about it and like you know because i mean

there's there's there's some extent to which i look at this and it's like this isn't that much different than the fact you know it's like okay so you're paying someone to do whatever you want but like okay like that's not that much different than just a job right like it's it's not it's not inherently that much different than the fact that everyone is forced to just do wage labor but also like there's i one of the most interesting things to me that i thought about this when i was well i was reading this was so do you guys know what capitalization is yeah yeah so this is this is just capitalizing a person right like yeah yeah it's literally yeah taking a person public effectively putting yeah yeah turning them

into like a tradable share that's like an investment yeah i mean this is all one of the things that like a forbes article i found pointed out is like this is another kind of unregulated securities trading. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But what's interesting to me about it is that like, okay, so, you know, this is also already how accounting wise every corporation sees a person, right? Like every person in the asset book is, you know, like a wage is just capitalization, right? So how much will you pay now for this much money later? But it's like people are doing it to themselves now? Yeah.

Which is like, this... Yeah, you could argue that elements of this are how banks treat you when you get a mortgage, right? But also, that's much more rigorous and limited. It has regulations, and it has rules for how those things work. It's not some 12-year-old going onto Coinbase and buying part of you as a joke with his dad's money, right? Yeah. Because what if it's like there's no law against a 17-year-old. I guess maybe their parents may need to consent. law against a 17 year old i guess if that 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 his shares want him to do um and maybe the fucking kid does that because he knows it's going to get him because his brain's not done and he knows it's going to get him a bunch of fucking social media uh 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 like what is the regulation of people deciding i'm letting random strangers who pay me money vote on what i do with my life what do you ever think it reminds me of a lot is like the the micro lending

stuff from the 90s where it was like oh we'll we'll like empower these people but we'll go in and uh we're gonna give them like a small amount of money and they have to pay it back it was like you know and 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 microlending ones. And that stuff, you know, there were two ways it turned out. One was

basically you get the scenario where both sides are scamming each other. Yeah. Where, you know, all the people who are getting these microloans are just taking the money and walking right like that's you know they're they're the 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 yeah and it and you know and the the the really depressing side about it is so the people who couldn't get away like i mean we're literally reduced to debt peons and you know i mean there's a huge wave of suicides in like india's probably don't say mc apple's wave of suicides people drinking pesticide because they couldn't pay off these loans and so and the thing that's different about this is that like i mean 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 yeah you're gonna do yet it's unclear how it's going to be enforced and the other thing is unclear is like what does losses look like like what what happens when someone like cannot make

back on it like 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 like like you know so those types of things yeah i mean there's no answer to that uh and there's that nobody like the money that's going to be whatever made in this is going to be made before anyone steps in to to try to answer that if anyone ever does like it's it's going to be the next because I think we're I think we're heading for a crash with with NFTs. Like there was just an article today about how, what is it, 97% of NFT trading is done by like 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. So I, and I think, you know, that, and kind of what we've seen with the, the regulations, the government's announced 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 TikTok specifically. Yeah. TikTok. Like, I wouldn't be surprised if you saw a rash of big tiktok stars tokenizing themselves and like i'm not even sure i'm 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 gonna 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 tiktok 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 flee to mexico yeah i mean that would be the the smart thing that would be the smart thing to do yeah in 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 it actually it asks some of these questions we've been talking about um and it cites uh david hoffman who's the coo COO of a tokenized real estate platform

on what he sees as some of the problems, like what he, as a guy who supports aspects of this kind of thing, sees as the problems with this. And it's, yeah, one sec. Hoffman, returning to his core problem with the personal token model, Hoffman reemphasized 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 talking about one of the guys who's tokened himself, this guy named Kerman. And he's talking about one of the guys who's tokened himself, this guy named Kerman. In his disclaimer, he says, this is a highly risky investment and 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 um like it's this it's this fascinating new con where you're literally the the part you're 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 they're 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 to like work like you're allowed to quit a job i mean i guess you could put penalties in it but i i've done like none of the current ones have any i mean or they could go to jail for the other option is is that they could go to jail for fraud if they try to sure if they try to not follow through on the investment if you say like yeah i 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 yeah 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 i here's my specific i'm

going to make this it's not like like if you like like with a patreon right you're you're paying a little bit at a time on an ongoing basis for a very clear product generally yeah this is so far these aren't that they're just like i'm gonna 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 mass meds from saying like hey my my and my attempt didn't work uh so we're done no no money for anybody like that and i i you're not there's no accounting requirements there's no there's a bunch of ways in which it's from a financial 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 even if he takes another job they're still it seems to be contractually obligated to still get that 15% of his income. Yes. And I think 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 yeah yeah

blockchain yeah 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 on it now for but starting like 2019 like literally every single app like had a uh 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 it was they were they was originally tied in with like people who buy um you know it was originally tied in with like like uh the the the services that let you like their version of amazon for example with 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 it seems like it's gonna happen but like dumber like our version of it is like this thing which is just you know it's oh what what if what if payday loans but on the blockchain except you know everyone i guess this is the other thing 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 hotline 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 labor and like like personhood like like you as a personal brand is yeah is the thing that they're trying to get at. But the thing that's missing here, though, is that in order for labor to produce value in this way, there has to be a way for you to force them to pay you. You need coercion for it. And if there's no coercion, then you just take a bunch of money and leave and 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 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 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 i hope it dies this is a maybe if there'd never been like patreon or something but the actual use case of this 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 i 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 three dollars 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's always with that is the nfts are yeah it's a grift designed to get money from those people 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 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 history of the Internet, 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'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 righting the ship. Social capital becomes economic capital. Value 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. Like 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. And it's it's the idea that like the social web was people creating their own content. Most of the social web's initial capital and like 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. Like, 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. Like, 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, like, early days when things are happening on, like, forums and weird little angel fire websites and like even MySpace, which I think is – 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 because the the lifeblood of uh social media today isn't people

really making their own content it's people reacting to content that other people made um and again it just shows the fact that he's he's summarizing it this way in a way that i think is so wrong uh and inaccurate to how things actually developed uh is is characteristic of his attitude towards this stuff where he's kind of seeing the only real meaningful evolutions in, in, in the internet through the corporations that monetized it. Um, 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, uh, this motherfucker is an investor at index ventures. Um, yeah, like he's, he's, he's a guy whose business

is capitalizing things um 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 i think that there's one more really important thing that he leaves out here which is that because you know we're talking oh this is the third age of the internet like no the third day the internet started like i don't know the mid to early mid 2010s when i would say when gamergate hit is when i would i would yeah i mean it's going to be a little off it depends what you 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 we can talk about like like gamergate and sort of fascist models but there was something else happening back end which was the internet of

things stuff 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 that was the period in which people figured out that the thing the 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. Yeah. And that, that was, that's the actual, that was the actual change of like, like that,

that that's, that's, that's the 30 of the internet and that, that area of the internet will last basically forever until we destroy it, which is that, you know, the, the, 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 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 sold spying on the entire world yeah and i 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 and kind of how you're doing it, is the way in which it was monetized, right? 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 dot,

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 then kind of the social media which is the start of as you said like the data being monetized like individuals data being the thing either that's being directly 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 um 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 um 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 um because I mean yeah I 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 because like this article is like it's accurate if you squint and don't think about it yeah but it's weird because 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 um if he if he wanted to well it's something i'm going to get into i'm going to say this probably like twice this episode i'm going to get into in the neoliberalism episodes that i'm writing but the one of the key features of neoliberalism is that they lie is that 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 they completely they contradict each other completely they mostly believe thing everything 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 yes because yeah that 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 which he will not ever tell you because you know if if he tells you what like he actually wanted to do you would run screaming from the room and i think this is the 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 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 um 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 and not just the early age, 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 um 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 you'd draw ads to you and whatnot and you'd make money. But it was always like all of the content 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 less the case with the Zoomers now because a lot of them got started on things like Twitch, where the idea is to, from the beginning, be trying to monetize yourself. And while you're 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 mind that if someone is asking you to do work, you should be getting paid for it. Not 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 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 other people like it, you make money.

Like better things get made than that. Yeah. Like that is the way the best art gets made. I think there's a few things going on here. Because the way... 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 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 artists and creators. If you think about when the early age of what he calls – we've kind of all been referring to it as the second era of when social media and content creation sites are a thing. Let's 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 um but then youtube instead of backing creators like that um which they did a little bit but they did not as much they instead started uh like the thing that happened was like uh youtube really incentivizing sharing like late night content and sharing like the thing that happened was YouTube really incentivizing sharing late night content and sharing clips of TV shows and using

legacy media on their platform. That's the things they really backed. That's the things they really pushed into your feed. It's like tonight show clips. A lot of those original content creators got left behind and are now 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 opportunity for a lot of kids to gain a lot of audiences really quickly. I mean, based on what you're saying, I think that TikTok is the closest to how cool shit happened on the internet before everything got fucked. I agree. Because it is. You're not starting from a – everyone starts, I guess, knowing you could make money, but that was the same way. You start because you're doing a thing. And if that thing takes off, then there's ways to monetize.

And that – yeah, I think that's probably why it's part of 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 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 because like his his whole idea is that he wants to get rid of the gatekeepers of the internet and go back to on the internet, right? So because like 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 pro investors. So that's why it's framed this specific way. So I think when we're all like 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 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 you 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 the 30s but the the complete success of that and the way that you know they're they're selling exactly the same thing that they were selling in like the 80s but now it's this like you know you're trying 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 this is this is just the 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 i don't have anything else really to say about it other than this but like Yeah, I don't know. 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. And this article that 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 points out in this article that 46 million Americans own cryptocurrency. The real number is more likely about 21 million,

kind of at most, like by every credible, I have no idea where he's getting 46 million Americans own cryptocurrency. And again, this, 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 stat the study that just came out today was that analysis of six point one million trades of like four point seven 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. The stuff that you're hearing about is all ridiculous uh outliers and it's outliers specifically because people are pumping stuff up in order to try to con someone um 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 he says i think it's like i don't know like he i forget what number he says but um but he says like not not tons of people actually use or know what the 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. 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 um yep 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 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. It's like Patreon is easy. Patreon makes sense. 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 uh people started tweeting that 46 million americans it's based on a study which we'll talk about in a second but 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.

own it yeah and and it comes from a study conducted in january by the new york digital investment group uh surveying a thousand participants with incomes over fifty thousand dollars so that that seems valid wait they just said it's over 50 this okay this method yeah this this method 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 studies showed is that the vast majority of americans have heard of cryptocurrency uh and most haven't used it like 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 that's 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 it it really doesn't.

It seems like it's 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. Well, we should probably talk about this for 45 minutes. Yeah. Welcome.

I'm Danny Trejo. Won't you join me at the fire and dare enter? Nocturnum, Tales from the Shadows, presented by iHeart and Sonora. An anthology of modern day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America. From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters to bone-chilling brushes with supernatural creatures. I know you. Take a trip and experience the horrors that have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time. Experience the horrors that have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time.

Listen to Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows as part of my Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. 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 has directly controlled so much of the globe. It has outmaneuvered, outlasted, or simply destroyed every ideology that 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, etc. etc. But it's anti-state interference. To be somewhat reductive, it's kind of closer to what conservatism is in the US, which liberals absolutely detested. Now, the 1920s and 30s have been full of liberals gathering to try to figure out what to do next. And 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, you know, 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 the 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 Röpke, and Alexander Rüstow.

And they start talking about the need for a new kind of liberalism to oppose communism, Keynesianism, fascism, and what they call Manchester laissez-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 Roustow, 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 new liberalism 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 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'm a 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 linear liberalism 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. 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 Montpelion Society. The Montpellier 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 neoliberals to work out their political principles behind closed doors.

Now, 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 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 Montpellier 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. 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 Montpellierian Society. And I'm just going to read it. This is what they agreed to research. One, the analysis and explanation of the present crisis so as to reflect its essential moral and economic origins. Two, the redefinition of the state's function 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 reestablishing the rule of law

and assuring its development so that individuals and 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 creeds hostile to 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. You know know just by looking at this you you can immediately see signs of how far things are going to move i mean you know what one of 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 it's not just the sort of left quote-unquote wing of the neoliberals who are arguing about this hayek in in probably his most famous book the road to surf them i mean explicitly says yeah you should just give people food and housing and stuff outside of the market and you know like today if literally anyone who says this

will be accused of socialism this is the neoliberal this is you know a large part of the neoliberal position in 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 it's it's just the chicago school of economics you know which is the neoclassical school. Its most famous member is Milton Friedman. And 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 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 rusto who again invented determinist liberalism and wilhelm ropke who almost no one has ever heard of but are incredibly important and i'm going to i'm going to insert a disclaimer here before i get yelled at by by nerds yes i'm aware of the public choice theories at the virginia school i am also aware of a group of the neoliberalists called the geneva school even though they're just regular or the liberals and there's also the rump of the neo-institutionalists um 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 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. Ordo-liberalism. thing that can actually process information. Ordo-liberalism. The markets won't create or balance itself because these uncultured proletarian 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 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 was almost impossible to get the original neoliberal secret on 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 cultural and 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 man named 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. Here's another one. And, you know, you can see this sort of one of one of the classic kneeler bowl arguments which is that okay so you have 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 a from our perspective a left-wing critique of monopolies which is yeah okay giant corporate monopolies are thieves because they they 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 time the Chicago School was really up and running in the 50s, almost everyone involved in it is overtly pro-monopoly, pro-corporation, and they set up an antitrust school but the thing that the antitrust 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 this is the line that milton friedman takes and it's also the line of the volcker fund who are a sort, I guess you could call them a charitable organization, but it's basically a billionaire slush fund that funds the school. And they'd had real fights with Simmons because Simmons is like, well, okay, monopolies are bad. And Volker's 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 Knight take it over, they're not just 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 or you know if you've ever been forced to take an

economics class you took microeconomics that's basically just what chicago school believes it's everyone's a rational actor every 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. Markets are perfectly efficient if you just let them alone

and don't interfere with them. Everything the state does interferes with the markets, et cetera, et cetera. This is the thing that is sort of classically understood to be neoliberalism's 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 groups small states taxes bad regulation bad

everything is a market and has always been a market and all human interactions will inevitably produce markets but to understand what neoliberals actually believe we need to talk about the order liberals now the the two most important order liberals are wilhelm roebpke and W. W. Rüstow, who were both exiles 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 write about them. But Röpke and Rüstow's status as people who fled the Nazis gives them a kind of social cachet 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 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 neoliberalism was ever implemented was chile but that's not really true the order liberals are actually very powerful in 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 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.

about the older liberals is that unlike the chicago school they're not economists both ropke and rusto are social scientists russo's a sociologist and they argue that the state and the market alone cannot maintain market society because market society produces dislocation you know 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, cultural 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. This is essentially what ordo means. It means literally order, which accords with the essence of humans. This means an order in which proportion, measure, and balance exist. Now, they have a few ways that they're going to do this. Roebke 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, they're social conditions. And this is fused with Rousseau's vitalpolitik, which is essentially about the power of anthropological and human aspects of culture and politics that are 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 about like wages and welfare and who owns production but the combination of 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 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 as a way to diffuse working class tension, partially as a way to sort of offer workers something to aspire to, and partly as a way to fuse the sort of traditional natural

hierarchy with conceptions of meritocracy now ropke 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 this 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 Robke is the person who essentially first has this idea now the goal of using these international legal institutions as a way of creating law 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 roque 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 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 corporatist 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. friends and he's going yeah i'm 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 a in in the hands of a narrow elite in a strong

state which is you know the opposite of everything that neoliberals open 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 a massive apartheid dude and again i want to i need to point this out ropke is one of the sink is one of the most important neoliberals he's one of the founding members of the mompilion society although he gets kicked out for well he eventually leaves because of some disputes he has with hayek but you know

i'm gonna 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 you know so he starts saying this stuff and the other neoliberals are like dude what the fuck so the neoliberal he used newspaper like he wrote for for 30 years was just like what and published a bunch of students going stop this this is you cannot seriously be supporting apartheid like this and his response and the newspaper is called the nzz and his response is quote these nzz

intellectuals will not be satisfied until they let a real cannibal speak now rope k is one of his friends another mps member named hunnold so hayek looks at rope k support for apartheid and is like what the fuck like no absolutely not like this is horrible why why are you doing this you know to 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 he does this, Ropke's friend, 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, the West is committing national suicide, clash of civilizations, race war stuff.

This is essentially the – I mean, literally the national suicide thing is what white nationalists say today. And Röpke is, in a lot of ways, a white nationalist. He's just sort of a German one. is what white nationalists say today. And Roebke is, in a lot of ways, a white nationalist. He's just sort of a German one. But what's really scary about Roebke is that he's not sort of bound by the sort of strictures of a Chicago neoclassical economist.

So, for example, he won't propose that the dating market, like dating should be a market, and that rich men should be able to like i 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 you need it you know neoliberalism's actual sort of policies right will cause atomization will cause social dislocation

will cause the the existing social structures of society to sort of implode. And he realizes that in order to get this to work, 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 partially it's too early. Partially it's because he picks catholicism not evangelicalism but this is how the neoliberals 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 neoliberals figured out And he figures this out in like the 60s. But it was just, you know, like 20 years before the rest of the neoliberal was figured out. Now, 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 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. 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 – 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 a mild exaggeration yeah it just you know absolutely fanatical like white supremacist 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 gonna read another friedman quote because i i think it's it's important to understand what the neoliberals actually think about democracy. Quote,

This was sometimes admitted by members of Mount Pelion in public, but only when they felt that their program was in the sense. Let's be clear. I don't believe in democracy in one sense. You don't believe in democracy. Nobody believes in democracy. You will 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 what i believe is 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 to the minority but you know what the neoliberals actually mean by this is that uh 55 of the population could for example i don't know take money from the rich small part of the 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 and perfectly willing to just back dictatorships and you know that's in essence what they what they what they actually want is a state the sole function of which essentially is

to ensure that nobody ever does this and you know if 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 the to hayek and the austrians because hayek also is known as this sort of like as a libertarian as this person who sort of believes in spontaneous order and like thinks that i i you should you should only have sort of small decentralized political institutions uh and so we're gonna watch hayek quote a bunch of stuff from and agree with a bunch of stuff from carl schmidt which is again incredible because hayek elsewhere describes schmidt as quote uh uh the Nazis chief jurist which is true but here are some other things that Hayek has said about Carl Schmidt quote the weakness of

the government of an omnipotent democracy was very clearly seen by the extraordinary German student of politics Carl 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 do decentralization hayek is saying if you let a democracy exist uh that has majority rule uh 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 and this is the other important thing here neoliberals lie they like 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 and legal state and a massive bureaucracy to enforce essentially pro-corporate policies at gunpoint um i'm gonna read close out this episode by by reading a list of things that philip marowski is an economic historian who studies neoliberalism whose work i've used a lot uh for for these episodes, wrote about the sort of 11 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. efficient than any government or any single human being could be. Truth can only be validated by the market. 3. 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. 5. There is no contradiction between public politics, citizen, and private market entrepreneur-consumer, because the latter does and should eclipse the former.

6. 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. 7. Capital has a natural right to flow freely across national borders. 8. 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 hip to the way things work nowadays. 9. Corporations can do no wrong. By definition, competition will take care of all problems, including any tendency monopoly. 10. The market, engineered and promoted by neoliberal experts, can 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 justifies and justifies why their 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 a better and more moral and more just way of doing things than anything else you could possibly imagine including you know things like democracy and you know, any problem the system produces will be solved by the system.

Now, this is an incredibly radical political program in a lot of ways, in that, well, you know, you can argue whether it's a radical or reactionary program. I mean, I think it's a deeply reactionary one in some ways, but it is a program that is vastly different than anything else that has come before it. Now, the challenge the challenge of course was getting anyone else to agree to this and the answer is that it's really hard to it is extremely hard to convince people that you know everyone should bow down to the market etc etc and so the the only way they can actually do this is by lying

now as as murawski describes the neoliberals operate an incredibly sophisticated intellectual and political network that forms a sort of matryoshka doll with montpelier own society at its center and an ever-expanding group of more and less specialized think tanks the shell layers so in this way that they mirror the vanguard structure and sort of front group networks of their communist opponents but they have significantly better financial backing. And 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 allow them to sort of act as a government in waiting.

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 Organizations, 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 It Could Happen Here. Find us on Instagram and on Twitter at HappenHerePod. Find the rest of our stuff at CoolZone. And goodbye. Welcome. I'm Danny Thrill.

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that have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time. Listen to Nocturnal tales from the shadows as part of my culture podcast network available on the I heart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. What? what's 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 i guess it's me all right well then what 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 things are bad episode and not a what you can do about them 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 neoliberals are. They have a bit of power in Germany in the 50s, but for the 50s and 60s and up to the 70s, they're kind of nobodies. They have a couple of think tanks, but 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 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 and i end a wins this election 1970 uh 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 through the whole early 1970s uh embalmed carbureal is just absolutely annihilating the portuguese army and he you know he wins he fights one of like one of history's greatest guerrilla wars and this basically destroys the entire portuguese state and causes the carnation 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 socialist states in East and East Asia, in Southeast Asia, and also Mongolia, but nobody really cares about them. And as all of this is happening, 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 about 3.2 percent um 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 70s 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 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 then 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 if unemployment is increasing and there's an economic crisis there's not supposed to be inflation and suddenly there's both and so the kantians 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 gonna i'm gonna 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 uh so so the the the the ron paul people whole thing is yeah uh everything went to shit has been shit ever since because the u.s 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 the u.s dollar has been pegged to a certain amount of gold, right? And you can do this thing where if 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 going to take all of this gold. And so he does, and the US starts running out of gold. And so in the early 70s, Nixon is like, fuck this, you can't actually exchange dollars for 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 um there's you know there's there's a lot of other explanations for this um the modern monetary theory people if you listen

to them and also peter thiel weirdly uh will argue oh it's all because of the oil shock because oil prices increased uh neoliberals will spend neoliberal essentially they blame too much government spending welfare 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 um that are more plausible one of the explanations has to do with how essentially so the other thing that's happening in the 60s 70s 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 uh took the second one. So something that has also been happening through this whole period is that profit rates and manufacturing just keep collapsing. And there's a whole thing here about some Marxist theory stuff. But the thing that's important is that – and this does happen in the 70s – is 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 means you get a bunch of people who aren't employed 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 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 anything and that's going to cause you know that that that that's that's going to cause a lot of stuff down the road but for now yeah we'll talk about the debt crisis this causes 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 the dollar off the gold standard. And this causes the value of the dollar to just plunge. And 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 oil crisis and goes, oh, it's an oil crisis. It's a crisis because there wasn't enough is weird because it's not an oil crisis every everyone looks at the global crisis and it goes oh it's an oil crisis the crisis because there wasn't enough

oil and it's it's not it's nothing to do with that it has literally nothing to do with supply of oil at all what actually happens is that so you have opec right opec is this sort of is the alliance of oil producing cartels um 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 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 you do heard of the oil crisis, like the story behind the oil crisis? Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, the way it's always gone in textbooks is you talk about like the stagflation of the 70s and the fucking lines of cars at gas stations going back blocks because of OPEC fuckery. And yeah, that's how it's always framed is that like there was 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 of 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 rest of opec follows them now two days later or is it yeah the 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 um basically attack the israel occupation forces in their country and the war is going really badly for them they're i mean it's i mean it's not going it's not going as badly as like the previous wars gone for the Arab 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 its territories. They had occupied since 1967, and they have an embargo on the US. 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 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're talking about is OPEC fuckery, you know, is how this gets remembered. And this is one of the things that neoliberals use to sort of push their model of the world, right right which is that everything functions off of supply and demand 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 happened i mean the price increases happened the day before the the 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 like this this is this is how it's it's remembered and you know it's not even just how to remember 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, most of the people who write about this remember this whole thing wrong. And 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 specifically the gas shortages are about OPEC. But again, also like the US 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 as 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 the oil price increases you know yeah like it is bad. The price of oil does go up, and there are shortages, but it has nothing to do with the embargo. It has nothing to do with 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 tax increase on to the consumers instead of just paying it.

As we talked about before, 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 that well some of the open 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 know, I guess the theme of this episode is that the oil embargo matters, but the oil embargo matters because people think it matters, not because it did anything. And the other, 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. Countries that have raw commodities can use this control to actually go fight the West, to go fight the capitalists and go like you know get money for themselves and this leads us into something robert garrison do you have you ever

heard of the g77 uh is that like the 77 countries that have the most money well that that's the that's the g7 well yeah i was the 77 might be just a longer list. No, it's not. Yeah, so this is the other thing from this period that just is completely lost, almost completely lost to history. And the G77 is actually still around. But what they are was – so in the 60s, you have all of these countries that have recently gained independence.

In the 60s and 70s, all these countries have gained independence from their sort of colonial overlords. And they start to band together into basically a voting bloc in the UN. And also, this is the other weird part about the story is that – so in the 1970s and 60s, in the 70s in particular, the UN actually matters. Like it's a thing that people actually believe. Yeah, there was that like 20 years after world war two where people were yeah 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 um 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 um it's fine to 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 makes total sense in the early 1990s. And part of, we'll talk about this more next episode, but basically, so the reason the UN is a joke right now is because of what the u.s was doing to stop the g77 from doing anything i mean i would argue that fail massive failures in rwanda and uh bosnia had a huge impact on that 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 and you have a bunch of countries that call themselves you know the 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 nere and michael borley in jamaica you've also got like gaddafi and the bathists and like both gaddafi was a socialist come on yeah leftist paradise gaddafi's libya libya you know okay my my my my most contrarian hot take is that salak jadid was like actually kind of an ML who was that he was he was briefly the the the the Ba'athist in charge of Syria and then he got overthrown by uh Hafez Assad but both of them are part of this there's definite like actual like Marxist you know Lenin there is some like

especially in the old school Ba'athist like there were aspects of that there was socialism kind of within it it just it would be nonsense like for, call Saddam Hussein's Ba'athist government a socialist government. Yeah, no. Yeah. And, you know, and you can already see like this is a real grab bag. And you have, there's also just a bunch of random Latin American countries, like none of whom you can call socialist. And then there's also Saudi Arabia and Thailand are in this group. Okay.

To get a sense of how fractious this is india 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 this yeah like 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 fun it's fun in in the mid-60s and until 1974 it's kind of their whole thing is we have moral authority like we're yeah like we're you know we're we're like we 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 in um 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, 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, I guess the spoiler alert is that this movement gets crushed so thoroughly that nobody knows what the new economic order is

and the third world is now a slur. But the thing that they're trying to do is create... Nareira calls the new international economic order a trade union of the poor. And so it's this thing they're trying to get past through the UN that would... Just designed to sort of ensure the economic sovereignty of these developing nations um and i'm going to read a list of the stuff that's in here um 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 So this is like this thing if the international economic order had ever been implemented at all it would have completely reversed the basically completely reversed the balance of economic power shifting it basically from countries like the u.s 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 not even many of us create opex basically for every commodity so you know you'd have like an opec but it's for like bauxite 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 to 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.

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 enormously 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 yeah the other funny part about this so the g7 is originally a secret alliance like through this through the whole 70s nobody knows g7 exists it's basically it starts as this like secret meeting of

a bunch of uh finance ministers eventually they they add uh canada and i think japan to and it goes up to seven members and you know they have a couple things they're trying to deal with they're trying to deal with the economic collapse but one of the big things 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 openly declared itself the G7.

It's basically the rich European countries, so it's Canada, France, Germany, Italy, the UK, the US, and Japan, form this alliance and are locked in together in order to stop the g7 from g77 from doing anything and this is this is the this is the other the other crisis that the neoliberals 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 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 in the last, which is that they've been working on a strategy in order to take power that doesn't rely on states. over uh the international monetary fund and the world bank who in this period and this is everything i think it is 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 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 and the world bank was okay and it's turned into sort of this like international debt system for poor countries

where they're, yeah, always in hot and being forced into austerity measures and the like. Yeah, but that didn't used to be true. It used to be, you know, 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 I think this is where we're going to leave it here with basically the entire world is in an epochal crisis. There is the, the, all the economies are collapsing. The, the, the sort of the, the, the, the, the armies of the, of the anti-colonial like world are, are moving. And the, the, the G 77 looks like it's, it's literally on the verge of, of, you know,

completely restructuring the economic system in a way that actually would have been slightly more fair and just 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 the the product of what the neoliberals are going to do in the next episode is that they are going to their solution to this problem is to tell the entire rest of the earth to eat shit and die. And yeah, that's,

that's, that's the episode. It's yeah. Yeah. History. Yeah. It's, it's a time.

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 I think you're muted. I'm not muted.

I'm not muted. Oh, 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. I said we'll be back on a day or a time.

Yeah, at some point we'll be back. Find us then. Yeah. And find us tomorrow, unless this comes out on Friday I think this is coming out Friday be with your family this is dropping on Friday adopt a cat

adopt two cats maybe four adopt four cats get a number of cats greater than the number you have and 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 is a production of Cool Zone Media. episodes every week from now until the heat death of the universe. sources. Thanks for listening. You should probably keep your lights on for Nocturnal Tales from the

Shadow. Join me, Danny Trails, and step into the flames of right. An anthology podcast of modern day horror stories inspired by the most terrifying legends and lore of Latin America. Listen to Nocturno on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.