It Could Happen Here - Who The Hell is George Soros, Anyway? Part 1

Episode Date: May 23, 2023

Mia sits down with Robert and Garrison to discuss perennial right-wing boogeyman George Soros, what he actually did and what he didn't do, and why conservatives won't shut up about him.See 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. Curious about queer sexuality, cruising, and expanding your horizons?

Hit play on the sex-positive and deeply entertaining podcast Sniffy's Cruising Confessions. Join hosts Gabe Gonzalez and Chris Patterson Rosso as they explore queer sex, cruising, relationships, and culture in the new iHeart podcast,

Sniffy's Cruising Confessions. Sniffy's Cruising Confessions will broaden minds and help you pursue your true goals. You can listen to Sniffy's Cruising Confessions, sponsored by Gilead, now on the iHeartRadio app

or wherever you get your podcasts. New episodes every Thursday. Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast, and we're kicking off our second season digging into tech's elite and how they've turned Silicon Valley into a playground for billionaires. From the chaotic world of generative AI to the destruction of Google search, Better Offline is your unvarnished and at times unhinged look at the underbelly of tech brought to you by

an industry veteran with nothing to lose. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever else you get your podcasts from. Oh, yeah. It could happen here. A podcast where I just made my colleagues. I can see them through the Zoom, deeply uncomfortable by opening this podcast with a sound that you shouldn't make in the workplace. I'm Robert Evans.

Joining me today is Mia Wong and Garrison Davis. Mia, take it from here. Oh boy. So it's been a, you know, this is, okay okay so this i guess is now like last week's twitter thing but uh okay so this is also not this is this is this is not a twitter thing no well it kind of is it kind of is but like let's not let's not frame this as a twitter thing yeah okay okay so why this is we we are okay we we have been experiencing in the last, you know, like half decade, actually more than that, it's like seven, eight years now, like the sort of incredible rise in casual American antisemitism and the level of antisemitism that you can just do in sort of public indicators of this is the like the the extent to which it's now socially acceptable to just do the most like absolutely like unhinged like anti-semitic

conspiracy theories about george soros and specifically the thing that specifically was like okay i need to do this episode was last week elon musk like compared george soros to magneto and then said quote you assume they are good intentions they are not he wants to erode the fabric the very fabric of civilization soros hates humanity and this is just like the mainstream line of the Republican Party now. Like they just all do this. You can just sort of. I mean, and this is honestly like as bad, like, you know, this is like the stuff that Elon Musk is saying is unbelievably unacceptable. That's not even anywhere near as bad as it goes. Like it's pretty common to just hear these people like talking about the Satan Soros agenda and shit now.

Like it's it has gotten unbelievably, unfathomably out of control. And so today I wanted to take a look at, OK, who George Soros actually is like the real human being and not the sort of like caricature projection that has been created of him on the right and i wanted to also sort of look at why the right hates him so much and you know soros is kind of an interesting figure because he falls like right in the middle of like our two shows about people because he's not he's not really like a cool person he does cool stuff although he does stuff that's cool sometimes but he's not also like a bastard properly so he's done some bastardy stuff too But he's not also like a bastard properly. Although he's done some bastard-y stuff, too. Oh, he has.

We are going to talk about that. He's a, yeah, I mean... Most of what this episode is about. I would say he's like 20% more complicated than the average billionaire on a moral level. I think that's fair. I think like 20 or 30%. Yeah, somewhere in that neighborhood. Yeah. You know, and I think I think like 20 or 30 percent. Yeah, there's somewhere in that neighborhood.

Yeah. You know, and I think there's three George Soros is two of them are real and one of them is fake. There is, you know, George Soros is a billionaire philanthropist. Right. And, you know, so that means that he has a sort of billionaire side and a philanthropist side, and they are often working across purposes sometimes they're not working sometimes they're he aligns them together sometimes he doesn't and so the way i've sort of structured this is like the first episode we're gonna be talking about the sort of billionaire side and how he did that and the second episode is going to be more about the philanthropist side and how both of these basically have been kind of accidentally structured in such a way that

the right was like oh my god this is the perfect guy to do anti-semitic conspiracy theories about and then there's also the the third george soros is like the one who's just literally the devil who the republicans have made up and yeah so george soros uh was born to a Jewish family in Hungary in 1930, which is not not a good time to be born to a Jewish family in Hungary. No, really? There's not a good time to be born to a Jewish family in Hungary until like I'm going to get I'm going to say sometime in the 50s. 50s yeah i you know i i will say it gets way like it it is way worse when he is born than it was in like even like the 1890s which is like not a great time but it's gotten significantly worse he is 14 when the nazis invade hungary in 1944 and this is the point at which we get to our first sorrows conspiracy which is that there's

just there's just a little more complicated than it's not really the nazis and well it's it's a little more complex than yeah i i i when the when the extermination of the hungarian jewish community begins really in in 1944 yeah yeah and so there there's a thing that happens i don't know he and his dad have a kind of complicated like set of things they survive and there there's a part of the story that gets picked up by the right that gets if you've ever heard alex jones talk about soros the like the second or third thing he will say is that like soros is a is a Nazi collaborator, was, like, a willing collaborator with the Nazis. Yeah. Which is not true.

And also, like, he's 14. Like, you know. Yeah, like, I don't really call even, like, 14-year-olds in the Hitler Youth willing collaborators because they're children. Yeah. Like, you have to have a line at some point. Yeah. Even with Nazis, where if they're kids, they're not really morally responsible either way. Yeah. And like, you know, so the specific thing that he does is there's these notices that are signed up by the government.

That's like telling Jewish people to like go like to a place. And if you go to the place, you're going to get routed up and killed. And basically, so the thing that actually happened is that so George Soros dad is told to do this and he gives it to George Rose and is like, go tell these people that they've been called for this and that if they go, they're like they're going to get taken away. And this has been transformed by, you know, this that is this is a nightmarish thing. These people are surviving. thing these people are surviving this has been transformed by a bunch of the worst people who've ever lived into nazi collaboration which is also you know the part of the story that never gets told even even when people sort of like do the like dive into like oh this is fake is that the the thing that like soros's family spends the rest of the war doing is basically getting like

counterfeit papers to jewish families that like says that they're christian and you know they they like they stay legitimately save a bunch of families from dying in the Holocaust. And, you know, the shit that Jones pulls on them is like part of this because of like the job. This guy who's like saving young George Soros has involves like basically like itemizing stuff left behind by Jewish families forced out of their homes. He's like they were profiting off of the Holocaust. No, they were like doing whatever job kept them under the radar while they attempted to help. Like it was the Holocaust.

It was messy. Yeah. It's a little like saying like Oscar Schindler took advantage of slave labor. It's like, well, no, it's actually what Schindler was doing was not that. Like he was using the trappings of this slave labor system in order to rescue people it's quite different from just enslaving people yeah yeah i think the thing that's really disturbing about this though right is like okay like this is like alex jones is alex jones right he's just gonna say the worst shit you've

ever heard but like this is like a thing that mainstream right-wingers just say now yeah and it's just unbelievably horrible and it sucks and it's just like not true but fortunately for george soros like his family makes it through the holocaust um well his immediate family does and they like get out and they end up in the u.s and this is where okay this is something this is something that i think is is very important to the story that isn't told very much so soros is like a finance whiz right he is very very very good at finance and we're going to be talking a bit about like how like the things that he figured out to let him do this because it's interesting but he's also not from the sort of like american or the british financial elite like if i don't like there's like a certain kind

of person right who like goes into finance and you know it's like like like wasp frat bros or like inbred british aristocrats right and doris soros is like a hung is a hungarian immigrant right he he is not sort of from these people he is like and and you know this is this is going to be a really big deal when he like goes up against a british financial elite later on but you know he he threw sort of like he's able to turn like a job doing door-to-door salesman into like a way into a firm and he's able to sort of work his way up to a point where like he has something like has his own hedge fund. And he is really, really good at this. He's, he's one of the sort of early people who does hedge funds. There's a great book called the influence of Soros politics, power, and the struggle for an open society, uh, by Emily

Tamkin, who did a lot of really great work, like interviewed Soros, interviewed an enormous number of people who were around him. And I want to read a passage of this about how he figured out how to sort of beat the market. He's talking about this guy named Karl Popper, who's like a philosopher of science, who also wrote this book called The Open Society

that we'll talk about next episode more. Popper's philosophy made me more sensitive to the role of misconceptions in financial markets, Soros said decades later. People believe that markets don't lie and should be trusted, but that isn't true, Soros knew. Markets react to humans, and humans are fallible. Instead of looking at the money being made, or as Sebastian Malaby put it in More Money Than God, his book on the history of hedge funds, the psychology that drove investors' appetites, Soros looked at how one impacted the other, predicting that each would drive the other forward until the trusts were so completely overvalued that a crash was inevitable.

And this is really smart. Even today if if you even today right you know if if you're able to understand that you know like the the way a lot of hedge fund people tend to think about the market is as like the mark you know especially in this period is this is this sort of dogmatic neoliberal thing of like the market is like a perfect conveyance of price signals and so i was just like no it's made out of people and those people like get greedy they they have emotional stuff they like they they they get into these like FOMO like fear of missing out stuff you know they they like intensely overvalue assets because everyone else sees that the assets like expensive so everyone's like you know rushes to buy it and like this is something like like even now right is, this is like a very smart way to understand finance.

She's figured this out in like the seventies. And if you, if you were able to do this kind of stuff and like use this to understand how the market works in the seventies, you are going to look like a God among men. 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 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. Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast,

and we're kicking off our second season digging into how tech's elite has turned Silicon Valley into a playground for billionaires. From the chaotic world of generative AI to the destruction of Google search, Better Offline is your unvarnished and at times unhinged look at the underbelly of tech from an industry veteran with nothing to lose.

This season, I'm going to be joined by everyone from Nobel winning economists to leading journalists in the field. And I'll be digging into why the products you love keep getting worse and naming and shaming those responsible. Don't get me wrong, though. I love technology. I just hate the people in charge and want them to get back to building things that actually do things to help real people. I swear to God, things can change if we're loud enough. So join me every week to understand what's happening in the tech industry and what could be done to make things better. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app,

Apple Podcasts, or wherever else you get your podcasts. Check out betteroffline.com. On Thanksgiving Day 1999, a five-year-old boy floated alone in the ocean. He had lost his mother trying to reach Florida from Cuba. He looked like a little angel. I mean, he looked so fresh. And his name, Elian Gonzalez, will make headlines everywhere. Elian Gonzalez.

Elian Gonzalez. Elian. Elian. Elian Gonzalez. At the heart of the story is a young boy and the question of who he belongs with. His father in Cuba. Mr. Gonzalez wanted to go home and he wanted to take his son with him. Or his relatives in Miami. Imagine that your mother died trying to get you to freedom.

At the heart of it all is still this painful family separation. Something that as a Cuban, I know all too well. Listen to Chess Peace, the Elian Gonzalez story, as part of the My Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. money but assume it's a lot i'm a hack and a fraud i should have actually figured this out yeah no that's like a billion dollars yeah and like he personally is like has like for himself like a hundred million dollars right and he you know at this point he starts to become sort of very famous in finance circles because you know i mean he's just like absolutely destroying the market

now okay this is where things get you know up until this point he's kind of like he's been doing a lot of sort of finance stuff that's kind of shady but it's mostly just been him like ripping off other finance people which i'm entirely okay with like that's just very funny um but he starts to get into currency speculation and in 1985 he has one of his big breaks which is he predicts the plaza accords now okay the plaza accord is something we've talked about on the show before but i need to talk about it a bit more because unfortunately it's we have to talk about the asian financial collapse this episode and this is a like one of the key moments of the asian financial collapse even though it's like a decade earlier so So in 1985, Ronald Reagan is trying to like revive the U.S.'s domestic manufacturing industry because it's like dying.

And, you know, the reason part of the like a big part of the reason is dying is that they're getting absolutely destroyed by sort of German and like West German and Japanese manufacturers. german and like west german and japanese manufacturers and part of what's happening here is that particularly japan's currencies are worth way currency is worth way less than the dollar this is called having a weak currency and having a weak currency is really good for if you have like an export-based manufacturing economy and so reagan basically like walks into a meeting with like the germans japanese government, the British, like a few other people. And just basically just like not quite in so many words, but basically just says like you are all American military protectorates. And because you're all American military protectorates, like I can I can force you to increase the value of your currency like or else capital O, capital E. And they do.

They comply. This is this becomes a thing called the plaza accords um and this this you know weakens the value of the dollar versus a bunch of other currencies and this like literally single-handedly like restores the profitability of american manufacturing like through the 90s which is really wild but the the the other the important thing for this story is that i i don't know how he did this but but like George Soros predicts that this is going to happen. And he makes an unbelievable amount of money, basically like no, no, like basically doing currency speculation because he knows what like currencies are going to increase in value, which, you know, he knows that like, for example, he knows that like the Japanese yen is going to increase in value. So he makes an enormous amount of money doing this stuff.

And he gets very famous for like, he'll make a bunch of money and then he'll lose it again. And then he'll make it again. And this all culminates in... Okay, so he starts taking truly enormous bets against national currencies. And there's one of these that's just funny, and there's one of these that's really bad. So we're going to do the funny one first. So in 1992, Soros, and this is the other part that Devereux talked about,

it's not just Soros doing this stuff, he has allies. Because as big as Soros is for NBA is the other part that DeVries talked about, is, like, it's not just Soros doing this stuff. He has, like, allies, because, like, as big as Soros' firm is, right, he can't, him and his allies are going to take a $15 billion short position on the pound, and even he doesn't have, like, nobody, like, this is, like, $15 billion of 1990s money, right? Like, you need a bunch of firms working together in order to do this. But he basically takes this massive bet that the pound is going to go down and because of the way that these these bets work like the actual value of the pound like collapses and the british central bank like it like doesn't have enough the reason we're able to do this is they figure out that the british central bank doesn't have

enough money to stop them like they don't have enough money to like maintain they don't have enough reserves to like maintain the value of the pound and so he gets like completely blamed for this even though again there's like other people involved in this right like the front page of the Daily Mail is literally his face in the title I made a billion crashing the pound

based which is I okay so like an anti-british level this is very funny. Um, it's... No, there's a bunch of arguments about, like, what does this mean for, like, the world economy and for national sovereignty. Soros thinks that, like, currency speculation is a necessary evil. And he, he has this sort of... It's easy to think that when you're making that much money...

Yeah, right. You know, it's like... Now, okay. This... This, like, specific thing, which is like a banker comes in and is able to manipulate the value of a currency, this is like...

This is like absolutely like... This is the fodder for, for like the absolute most paranoid fantasies of the anti-Semitic right. Like it's this sort of like a rootless cosmopolitan banker, like attacks the good and righteous, like noble people of Britain thing. And this is how it gets framed in the press who are like, the press is, I mean, it's the British press, right? Like the British are not known for, you know, not being anti-Semitic. And so they just, like, go wild with this. But, you know, like, this particular thing he's doing against the British, part of what's happening here, right, is there's this sort of, there's this kind of, like, national populist equation thing going on here. thing going on here where there's this assumption that like the bank of brit like the bank like the the the british central bank is like an entity that is identifiable with like an ordinary person in britain and like no like the british central bank is run by just unbelievably inbred aristocrats

right and you know hey i think they're pretty believably inbred. That's fair. We're just talking about like like point five, six of a Habsburg unit. You know, the Habsburg is the international unit for measuring how inbred someone is. If you're if you're unaware. Yeah, yeah. That seems like a reasonable amount of inbred for these specific people but you know like but this is what i was talking about like at the very beginning i was talking about sort of like soros not being from this sort of like normal class of of finance people and the

thing is like the normal class of finance people are fucking terrible at their jobs right like these inbred british aristocrats and like the fucking american like cocaine frat boys like like just like doing lines of cocaine off each other's ass cracks. Like these people all suck at their jobs. And George Soros is like smart and is good at his job. And so she just like absolutely goes through these people like a fucking flaming chainsaw. And she just like, you know, the maneuvers that he's doing here,

she just like absolutely humiliates all of the people at the, at the, at the, the British central bank. He's humiliating like, and not just those guys too, he's humiliating the Tories. He's humiliating like all of the people who are seriously important in the real economy, in the, in the sort of real British economy. And he can do this right. Because like his, his opponents are, you know, people who are like, they're, they're, they're know people who are like they're promoting they're like they're okay they take in like their people from college right and they're promoting the base off how good they are at golf and so when she just sort of like like walks in and just makes it like makes like billions of dollars just like destroying these people he makes just a permanent enemy of a very very powerful like faction of the british ruling

class and the british ruling class like i don't know they they it is hard to find people who will beat the british ruling class and an anti-semitism off and this is this is one of the things that sort of you know if you're looking at like why sorrow specifically is the guy who all of these sort of right-wing conspiracies wind up being about like part of it is because he pisses off these specific people yeah these guys who's like dads were all friends with the king of england who was like a close personal buddy with hitler like they're it's it's a bunch of like it's a bunch of guys who are already pretty bigoted and then they get beaten at their own stupid financial game. And so the fact that it's a Jewish dude who does it means that they're going to be even more racist than they already were.

and that George Soros after this starts funding liberal and vaguely progressive causes. Like, yeah, it's not surprising that this is the way things went. Yeah, and, you know, again, I can't underemphasize the extent to which this is also very specifically the reaction to British media class, who, I mean, we know now that those people are psychos. Like, we have seen them see a trans person in a boat race and like like 10 years ago and like like draw a giant thing circling them in a boat and making it a front page news story. Those people in the 90s were like, they are biologic, but biologically better at navigation. That is that is actually been been proven. navigation that is that has actually been been proven yeah but then they're like just as they're they're just as sort of feral and like terrifyingly bigoted then as they are now and this means that like like just if you're a regular british person and you are like walking down the street and

there's a newspaper stand you are seeing like like truly unbelievably terrifying anti-semitic shit like just literally everywhere and this this will have no consequences whatsoever uh yeah it's all good nothing bad ever happens and uh speaking of no consequences i do you know what we can promise about products and services? 23 minutes in. You don't look. You're welcome, Danil. Welcome.

I'm Danny Thrill. Won't you join me as 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.

Listen to Nocturnne Tales from the Shadows as part of my Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast, and we're kicking off our second season digging into how Tex Elite has turned Silicon Valley into a playground playground for billionaires from the chaotic world of generative ai to the destruction of google search better offline is your unvarnished and at times unhinged look at the underbelly of

tech from an industry veteran with nothing to lose this season i'm going to be joined by everyone from nobel winning economists to leading journalists in the field and i'll be digging into why the products you love keep getting worse and naming and shaming those responsible. Don't get me wrong, though. I love technology. I just hate the people in charge and want them to get back to building things

that actually do things to help real people. I swear to God things can change if we're loud enough, so join me every week to understand what's happening in the tech industry and what could be done to make things better. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever else you get your podcasts. Check out betteroffline.com. On Thanksgiving Day, 1999, a five-year-old boy floated alone in the ocean. He had lost his mother trying to reach Florida from Cuba. He looked like a little angel.

I mean, he looked so fresh. And his name, Elian Gonzalez, will make headlines everywhere. Elian Gonzalez. Elian. Elian. Elian. Elian.

Elian. Elian Gonzalez. At the heart of the story is a young boy and the question of who he belongs with. His father in Cuba. Mr. Gonzalez wanted to go home and he wanted to take his son with him.

Or his relatives in Miami. Imagine that your mother died trying to get you to freedom. At the heart of it all is still this painful family separation. Something that as a Cuban, I know all too well. Listen to Chess Peace, the Elian Gonzalez story Separation. Something that as a Cuban, I know all too well. Listen to Chess Peace, the Elian Gonzalez story, as part of the My Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Okay, we're back. We have to talk about okay so doing it to the british economy was mostly just

really funny because the british economy is going to be fine and it the funny part about him doing is the british economy is that this actually unfortunately helps the british economy because it forces uh the british to like abandon some truly spectacularly not very good financial policy they were doing but then he does it to thailand and that is um a lot less justifiable so it in this is five years later this is 1997 soros brings in some economists um arminio fraga like roddy joe's david klowitz uh he brings he's bringing in people who are sort of experts in like developing market uh economics and that's never no one has ever brought in a developing market economist for like a good reason and what they what they realize is that they start doing analysis of southeast asia like

southeast asian markets and they realize very quickly that thailand is fucked um they they figure out that thailand has thailand has its currency pegged to the dollar and this but you know they don't have the reserves to support this like actual Thai currency isn't strong enough to maintain like stay being pegged to the dollar it's not a strong enough currency

and so they do a 2 billion dollars short of of like Thailand's currency and I'm going gonna read from the infodosaurus again about like the process of this it was a debate we had jones told me we'd gone to work in asia and here you are taking large-scale short positions in countries with institutional fragility going for the juggler in the united kingdom was one thing doing the same in thailand was another the bank of of England would surely recover. Thailand was a developing economy,

and it was unclear what impact outside investors could have. Soros has justified speculation with the idea that it could serve as a kind of warning to governments. Look, Thai government, the bot needs to devalue. Change your policy now before a currency collapse is devastating for your people. The trouble is the Thai government didn't do this. Instead, it spent months using Bank of Thailand reserves to buy Thai bot. When it finally ran out in early summer 1997, the value of the bot plunged 32% against the dollar and millions of Thai people lost their livelihoods. The Soros fund made $750 million. lost, Thai people lost their livelihoods.

The Soros Fund made $750 million. Yeah, it's a little bit like me being like, look, yes, I made a lot of money selling heroin to those middle schoolers, but really, when you think about it, it was a warning to those schools that it was too easy for me to bribe the janitor

to sell heroin to kids there. You know? I was actually performing a public service so true robert it is just like that you know to be fair you know i'm not gonna never mind i'm not gonna finish that thought that's probably for the best yeah we need we need one person to remain uncanceled here to keep the lights on oh god does it have to be me? Oh, no. Yeah, no. Legally, it does.

This is really bad. Yeah. No more joking, Mia. We can't suffer any other jokes. Yes. Somebody's got to upload this episode. All right. Here's the next joke.

Soros actually doesn't make money off of his speculating in Southeast Asia because he loses basically the same amount of money taking like a long position in Indonesia yeah the same thing happened to me when I took a long position on doing cocaine in my bathroom with the money that I made selling drugs to all those kids you know

we're a lot alike him and me we're a lot alike well okay to be fair, and this is something, okay, this is something I, the reason I wanted to talk about this specifically is that, like, okay, to this day, if you look under, sort of,

if you, every once in a while, there'll be a tweet that's like, what did George Soros do? And immediately there will be a bunch of people talking about how he like deliberately destroyed all of the economies in Southeast Asia. Yeah. And that's not really what happened. No, that would be, for one thing, too much to put on one guy fucking around with a cup.

Yeah. Yeah. And I wanted to actually kind of walk through this a little bit in depth just because okay there's a really really easy way to think about the economy that is bad it leads you into anti-semitic traps which is like hey here is like one banker who wanted to make money and because he wanted to make money he like destroyed all these economies and like on the one hand yeah like like soros betting against like the thai currency is bad right like this is this is not a thing you should have been doing on the other hand you know okay so that's like the sort

of level one thing but but the thing about it you know this is the sort of this is the sort of like great man anti-semitism theory of collapse and this is the theory that a lot of the sort of regional leaders take um you know because and this and this is sort of a crucial thing right this position very conveniently allows them to just like not think about capitalism in general or like their role in this in this crisis which is not insignificant and so in order to figure out what what actually happened here we need to look at so so soros sort of like tip like tip some dominoes right but the dominoes were already

there, and they were going, like, regardless, even if Soros had never existed, right? Like, they were going to fall. And they were going to fall because, ironically, of the Plaza Accords. So, you know, we talked about the Plaza Accords earlier, the U.S. forces Japan to increase the value of its currency

relative to the dollar. Okay, so this is great for the American economy. nukes the japanese economy i mean the japanese economy you know and we'll talk about this in a bit too it was already kind of doing bad when the u.s does this and its manufacturing economy just like implodes it it guts the japanese economy it has the japanese economy has never recovered from this it It probably will never recover, really, into what it was. And, you know, the effect this has is that now the government of Japan has to figure out how to grow their economy

without having any, like, way to make money that grows your economy. And now they have a stronger currency. And so their solution is, okay, all the central bank people look around each other and they go, what is a stronger currency and so their solution is okay what what did they they all the central bank people look around each other and they go what is a strong currency good for housing speculation and so they they start like they start they start slashing interest rates and they start basically building an entire economy uh based on the assumption that housing

prices will always go up and so you should just take out loans so you can buy houses because the value of the housing will come because you know housing prices will always go up so you can you can have all these assets based on mortgages uh this is this may or may not be sounding familiar to everyone who literally 2008 uh and so you know, in like 1982, the entire Japanese economy implodes sort of again. Because they literally built the 2008 machine. And so this forces the U.S. to do something called the reverse Plaza Accords, where they take the original Plaza Accords and they reverse it. And they increase the value of the American dollar. American manufacturing dies like it's never recovered it's never coming back and this for a this kind of this stabilizes the japanese economy a little bit but it means that

the u.s now no longer has a functional economy and so we do our solution to this is we do 2008 right we build an entire economy also on the japanese model of of currency specula of you know of like housing price speculation speculation like or like the rising prices of like stocks right we build an economy completely made of bullshit but you know okay what does this have to do with the asian market collapse okay the problem is that like all of the countries in east asia and like southeast asia also do this they also do the thing where they're like oh we're gonna we're gonna we're gonna bait we're going to, we're going to, we're going to bait. We're okay.

So our manufacturing economies are declining, right? So we're going to, we're going to base our entire economy on housing prices going up. And, you know, that's, and it's not George Soros. That's the thing that actually destroys like the sort of, that's the thing that like, that like actually destroys all of these economies. And, you know, and I, I, i i i wanted to sort of run through this and you know this is like a lot of like sort of econ shit right but the reason i wanted to run through this is that i think

i think it gets at the the sort of truly the truly horrifying thing about how our economy works that is really difficult to face and is i think it's at least a part of why people really really want there to just be one guy who is running anything everything but that's the cia whether that's soros whether that's like the the new world order yeah right because if there's if there's like a guy who's doing this right you can stop him but the the great horror of this world is that there is no deep state right there is no satanist cabal there's no one pulling the strings at all the only thing that is there is just sort of the cold lifeless and inexorable death logic of capital and that logic is moving all of us right all it's you know the the people who are doing the conspiracies insofar as they exist

are being moved by this. All of the rulers are being moved by capital. All of us, the subjects, are being moved by capital. But that, like, sucks, right? Like, the fact that all of these economies

are destroyed not by, like, the individual actions of people, but by the fact that, like, returns are less good in Thailand than they are in China. And this is just sort of the inactualorable logic of the entire economic system we have this is you know this is absolutely terrifying and faced with this sort of reality right like people who want to protect capitalism because you know they have a bunch of assets in it right retreat into this sort of like they you know they they they they they they use soros as a

smokescreen for like why everything is suddenly going wrong but sort of simultaneous to this right this is also a real problem for george soros because he's like you know when he's not sort of in his role as like capital he's like not a piece of shit he's like a person who wants the world to be better and this you know this causes a sort of there was a contradiction in his ideology right which is that he he wants the world to be a better place and simultaneously he's also a capitalist and these two things are sort of warring with each other even as early as like even as early sort of the 90s he's giving speeches about how like his open society that he wants it's a sort of like this liberal democratic society of like laws and norms and human rights it the greatest danger to it has ceased to be

communism it's now capitalism but he can't do anything about it because he is also a capitalist and next episode we are going to watch soros like through his philanthropic endeavors attempt to solve the problems that his economic system has caused and fail catastrophically and become the sort of boogeyman and the the the anti-semitic specter of every conspiracy theory in the world. Yeah. So check out that next time. Uh, and you know, if you're,

uh, hanging out around Clark middle school, uh, and you have $40, uh, I can hook you up with some, uh, some of that sweet black tar. So,

you know, uh, give me a ring. Uh, my phone numbers posted in the show notes of every episode. Give me a ring. My phone number's posted in the show notes of every episode. It Could Happen Here is a production of Cool Zone Media.

For more podcasts from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can find sources for It Could Happen Here updated monthly at coolzonemedia.com slash sources. Thanks for listening. You should probably keep your lights on for Nocturnal Tales from the Shadow. Join me, Danny Trails, 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. Curious about queer sexuality, cruising, and expanding your horizons? Hit play on the sex-positive and deeply entertaining podcast Sniffy's Cruising Confessions. Join hosts Gabe Gonzalez and Chris Patterson Rosso Welcome to Gracias Come Again, Listen to Sniffy's Cruising Confessions, sponsored by Gilead. Now on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts. New episodes every Thursday. Welcome to Gracias Come Again, a podcast by Honey German, where we get real and dive straight into todo lo actual y viral. We're talking musica, los premios, el chisme, and all things trending in my cultura.

I'm bringing you all the latest happening in our entertainment world and some fun and impactful interviews with your favorite latin artists comedians actors and influencers each week we get deep and raw life stories combos on the issues that matter to us and it's all packed with gems fun straight up and that's a song that only nuestra gente can sprinkle listen to gracias come again on the iheart radio app apple podcast or wherever you get your podcast